On his blog Lum writes the shoking revelation that his highest level character in WoW is in his upper 30s, while Foton is leading his own guild and has been clearing Molten Core out of habit for the last six months. Well, almost always.

The question is: who is legitimated to speak?

The answer is: Who cares?

I’m the best advocate for those who speak without having a clue. I could make a club. I almost always speak about things that I’ve never seen and have negative practical experience about. But I revindicate this right to speak. And make sense. And maybe make more sense than those who have that experience.

This is the same diatribe about the movies. Who the hell says that I cannot discuss a movie if I haven’t watched it? That’s a basic principle. We don’t have to watch every movie, read every book and play every game to have opinions that make sense, preferences and all the rest. Most of what we “know” is derivative anyway and sometime you learn way more about a game by reading a forum than spending hours into it. We explore things till we feel they are worth the attention and when we decide they aren’t anymore, it’s because we have already what we need. It’s the essence of the culture! We have the possibility to learn from the stupidity of someone else. We don’t need to be stupid ourselves.

I mean, it’s like having an expertise in sex because you have seen tons of porn. It totally makes sense, doesn’t it?

So we are all legitimate to speak. We can surely see where things are going without the need to follow along. There’s definitely not enough time available to buy those ‘licences to speak’. And that aren’t even fun to get for the most part. We need to skip and bypass here and there. A little cheating is not all that bad.

But DO NOT REVEAL IT! Lum, you crazy!

On the other side my experience in WoW isn’t *that* bad. I was in the game three days after the launch, which was impressive considering that the box had to cross the ocean to get here. Then I spent way more time writing than playing and, in fact, in February I was still in my upper 30s and then slowed down even more and dinged 60 only in June. A couple of weeks later and my guild kicks me out because I cannot use Ventrilo and I’m slacking again, doing little PvP and a few instance runs. I play just one character and nothing else. I cannot join any guild because of the mandatory voice chat and I do what I can. Then a couple of weeks ago I found one who is moving the first steps into MC and ZG.

On the official forums of the game there’s a thread with someone complaining because an encounter in ZG is too hard. Who writes the rant plays this:

I am the main tank of our guild. My armor is buffed around 9000, I have 395 defense, 5500+ health. And Thekal in Phase 1 hits me with his mortal cleave for ~3500!

Holy Sh*t!

Well, I’m definitely not the main tank of my guild but my warrior isn’t that young either. When I dinged 60 (and I did *all* the quests in *all* the instances up to BRD) my character was barely above 3k of hitpoints. Right now I have 6400 armor, 330 defense (10 due to talents) and 4500 HPs. I should add a fabulous 23 in Fire Resistance. And this is in my tanking asset! I can switch a few pieces but I always finish to gain here and lose there. The blanket is too short! I have gathered plenty of similar items but nothing really standing out.

In the meantime I also managed to reach “honored” in Alterac Valley and “friendly” in Arathi Basin. Next week I’ll also reach “catass rank” 6. Whohoo!

In my career, beside having beaten all the instances in the game with 5-man PUGs at appropriate levels (the hardest were Zul’Farrak, Sunken Temple and BRD), I’ve seen dead Onyxia twice, Azuregos once and I’ve beaten three encounters in Zul’Gurub and Lucifron, Magdamar and Gehennas in Molten Core. (update: we cleared ZG and killed Garr, Shazzrah and Baron Geddon in MC)

Then, going back at that thread on the forums, I find posts like this one:

A good tank will have 9-12k buffed. The most i’ve ever seen is 13240hp but the tank had to pop last stand. You need more hp.

Holy Sh*t!

I think I’ve seen myself reaching 6k with all the buffs in the game stacked up. We have some “character progression” there. It doubles all I am after months at the ‘endgame’ and probably thrice myself in other fields, like resists and defense values.

Now I can see how these guys clear Molten Core, Zul-Gurub and Blackwing Lair easily. Give me and my guild access to those sort of things and we could do the same.

I have to agree with both Tigole and Tseric, the raid game is something unique that would never be possible with 5 or 10 man instances. It’s a unique experience. But then it’s still true even the opposite. These huge and complex encounters are again rather simple in the practice. It’s all about choreography and equipment. In fact the guilds spend weeks and months to progress in the raid instances more because of equipment limitations than actually learning and figuring out proper strategies. They believe they are getting better each time (which is also true, choreography is all about practice), but for the most part is that with each run the loot flows in progressively, “promoting” the whole guild and letting it advance in its path to catassery.

I already commented some of the problems of this approach. The impassable barriers, the need to isolate the guild from new players, the need to shape the guild around those 40-man raids. It’s not a news that at 60 the game shapeshifts into something completely different. Those choice in the design will have stronger effects in the longer term.

It’s surely involving and addicting but there isn’t another type of necessary value. Designing hard raid encounters is *extremely easy*. Really. Every raid mob has just a selection of few skills mingled together and not much else. Want to make Magdamar much harder? Add something in the mix that makes the choreography harder. Killing the players is so exquisitely easy. 95% of the work at Blizzard is probably about fine tuning all these encounters. That surely takes a lot of time and meticulous, boring work, but coming up with fancy, fun ways to kill the players must be like a walk in the park.

So we have an exponential character progression between freshly dinged 60 characters and godlike Lum’s wifes that makes pale the whole level 1->60 game. 40-man raids that require all sort of UI mods, fancy tools and third party programs. Full, dedicated guilds that shape themselves around the uber content like a second skin. To not even consider the lore-gurus who even understand what the hell is going on between Eranikus, the Emerald Dream, Malfurion and all the rest of the mess. And this game is like night and day.

Still, we don’t need anything of this to have an idea of what is going. Lum probably knows more about the game by looking over his wife’s shoulder than by burning hundreds of hours in the game directly. I’ve seen more than Lum and less than Foton, myself. I’m curious to see all the stuff that is still beyond my level (and probably will always be, if not when it will be totally mudflated out of the game. And then again because I’ll never find someone else willingly to do obsolete, worthless stuff. Myself included). I’m also having a satisfying fun when I can have access to that. But this isn’t changing my point of view or telling me something new that I couldn’t expect already. My competence about these games isn’t improving. In fact I still spent most of my time reading stuff between books, blogs and forums. And I do this in the measure I find interesting or useful. And it gives me something because I make these choices and decide what is worth and what isn’t.

We don’t need to be catasses to know the smell of it. And we don’t need any sort of competences if not in the case we feel the need by ourselves. Without having other people dictating us the proper path. Fuck the proper path. I go trekking where I like.

In the last few days I’ve read some discussions about the “MMOFPS”, on Slashdot for example, and I wanted to write down some quick comments.

To begin with, I don’t think there’s much to discover or to expect from this branch or hybrid and I’ve already covered the reasons here, sort of. Which is also the reason why I wanted to continue the discussion.

The basic premise is that a “mmofps” makes sense if it’s PvP. Or the idea would be just plain retarded and not even worth a discussion. So I’ll start from there.

My point of view is rather linear. Being a PvP game this means that the character progression will be awful, in particular because a “first person shooter” imitates the “skill” through gameplay that pivots around the movement, dodging and aiming. All these are direct elements, they aren’t filtered through a RPG. They aren’t abstracted or formalized. So there’s already here a division between what a RPG does (the transfert of the “skill” from the player to the character) and what the FPS does (the “skill” of the character is mirrored by the one of the player). From this perspective the FPS is more immediate and immersive. There is no roleplay because you are already involved as a player. There are less filters, so the potential impact of the game can be more effective.

This means that the primary traits of a FPS are already antithetic to a RPG, exactly as I wrote about the conflict that is coming up in WoW between the PvP and the PvE. A conflict that cannot be solved or mitigated simply because there’s a different nature at the origin. And all the problems are just consequence of that first “mistake” (or misunderstanding).

The point is: the qualities of a FPS are in a type of gameplay that is the exact opposite of a RPG. But when we think to a “mmofps” we still somewhat join some traits of an RPG to those of a FPS. Which simply doesn’t work. It’s a broken model that wouldn’t go anywhere.

If we remove the character progression, what is left? What would add the “MMO” part to those FPS that are already popular today? How it could contribute? On which (solid) premises this could be “The Next Big Thing”?

From my point of view we have two traits that differentiate a current online FPS from a MMO:
1- A greater depth, more roles, vehicles, bases to conquer in a world-like, bigger, more complex environment. Mixing together indoor and outdoor combat.
2- The persistence.

Now the first possibility is already being developed. That’s in fact where the whole genre is moving right now. Look at Battlefield, look at the last Unreal Tournament and the plans for the next one, look at the announce of QuakeWars at the last E3. The direction is set, we are moving past the skeletal experiences of the raw CTF and deatmatches and toward more complex and interactive environments, with more players involved, bigger arenas that make sense and reproduce realistic environments in all their parts more than just functional, abstract level design. Moving from simple, fast skirmishes to a type of broader and more articulated gameplay. The next Unreal Tournament will build on top of the previous chapter and bundle together the “assault” and “onslaught” modes again to do a step further toward this ideal of a world-like environment.

So we are left with the second possibility: the persistence. Even here we have two possibilities: The persistence of your character and the persistence of the environment.

For the persistence to have a meaning, we need different states. So, in the case the persistence is the one of the character, we need support to a “character progression”, while in the case the persistence is the one of the world we need it to transform and the players having an active role in the shaping of the environment (like owenership or conquest).

But there’s to consider another fundamental element. In these online FPS there are no “characters”. There is no roleplay anymore, not even a pretence of it beside some spice about the context. We have, instead, Alter Egos. The difference between a “character” and an “Alter Ego” is that the character can be different from ourselves, it can be roleplayed, it will have its own story and personality. Instead an Alter Ego is similar to a nickname in a chat. It’s a representation or a virtualization (the player can still decide to “lie”, it’s again what we like to be, and not who we really are) but it’s still the player that is transfered into the game. While in a RPG the player is supposed to be invisible within the game (the problem of the “fourth wall”).

If we think some more about this we’ll see how this meta-game of the communities that formed around these games (from the forums to the clans, the mods and all the networks supporting the scene) is already a mmorpg. It doesn’t miss anything. We have already all the persistence needed. The Alter Egos are already persistent. Most of these games track statistics online and I believe in “Battlefield” you can access different ranks and roles, simulating exactly a type of character development that would fit this genre. The fact that pretty much everyone is using voice comms is another confirmation that we do not play anymore characters, but just Alter Egos. And in this abstract world made of Alter Egos and different communities we have already an emergent “world”. A web of relationships. It isn’t “roleplayed”, but it already exists and mirrors exactly the nature of this genre. The players themselves are the characters playing this meta game.

This is also why I would suggest the developers to bring all this right in the game. Instead of fancy cinematics used as presentations, they should go to a LAN Party and film both the players and the games, bringing those players right within the game and without the need to simulate futuristic tournaments. Those tournaments already exist and do not need to be “acted” by the characters of the game. That level is now obsolete.

My belief is that all this is already happening. It’s already here. It’s already a “Big Thing” and I’m not sure how it could benefit from the few distinctive traits that the MMO genre has to offer. And I find rather funny how games like WoW go exactly in the opposite direction. While the FPS try to incorporate elements of a MMO to add complexity, in WoW the PvP is trivialized into simple, instanced BattleGrounds that mimic exactly that type of dull and repetitive gameplay from which the FPS are moving away.

While doubtful about this “mmofps” myth, I’m curious instead about what Valve is planning. “Beyond the FPS” sounds more interesting than all I read about fancy MMOFPS.

“cooperative building games”
Building something like a space ship or a machine with people online instead of shooting and killing each other.

P.S.
PlanetSide wasn’t successful as expected for a very simple reason: that type of game was already available for free and in a better quality. Which is also why the “free” mmorpg that SOE is planning for the next year will fail as well (I’ll have to comment even this myth of the “free” mmorpg, sometime).

EDIT- I posted the same thing on Q23 because I was interested in different opinions from my own. And it went well. Some good points were made.