What defines a RPG?

I’ll have to save the whole discussion later. About ‘reading’, quests, old school RPGs, characters and more. This is just one of the nodes.

Charles:
So what makes something a roleplaying game then?

Imho:
The more RPG, the less “game”.

The transition from a different type of game (strategy, fps, adventure) to a RPG happens when you lose some focus on one game-y mechanic and add more possible interactions. With your character (personalization, dress-up, skills, levels), with the environment (moving objects, manipulate them and so on, till “bake bread”), with the NPCs (dialogues, daily schedules, scripting, questing, etc..).

You can take some “borderline” RPGs (Elite, System Shock) and see exactly what are the elements they incorporate that make them feel closer to a RPG.

You can add characters and dialogues to a FPS to make it feel already closer to a RPG. Add the possibility to manipulate diverse objects, solve puzzles and a fair degree of freedom (of interaction) and you have a very good RPG.

The more the game focuses on just one pattern of interaction, the less it feels like a RPG.

It’s all about the interaction. It’s scope, diversity and impact. Which is also what “freedom” is. The possibility to choose the way you react and manipulate the game.

The “sandboxes”, or “virtual worlds” often become synonyms of RPG.

Silly example to explain my point: In a FPS you can see a chair, but only in a RPG you expect to be able to sit on it.

DDO drops NDA, nothing to report

While I’ve been in a fair amount of betas in the past, I’ve learnt to value and spare my time. As I said a while ago, the only beta I’m currently interested is Vanguard, and mostly because of the scope of the project, those involved in it and how loudly I expect it to collapse. It’s the only game right now in development that I don’t feel completely indifferent about (along with Warhammer, but that’s because I have gripes against it).

As a gamer I’m fairly pleased with Eve, DAoC and WoW. Beside that, I don’t expect anything interesting happening in this genre in the short-mid term. It’s dead and I can see clearly what’s next. And I find it dull.

With the failure of Wish (for me, one year before it was officially announced) I started to select what I care about and what I don’t. I don’t play anymore whatever comes out and I’m rather confident of my early impressions about the projects. What I find valuable and worth my attention, and what isn’t. This is why I never played, even for a minute, most of the recent mmorpgs: Horizons, Lineage 2, City of Heroes, Everquest 2, Matrix Online, the last reiteration of SWG, A Tale in the Desert and many others. And I won’t touch silly, amateurish projects like Dark & Light or Darkfall even with a long pole. Thanks, but no thanks. I’m done hoping for those kinds of things with no solid foundations. And I’m also done with the hype. You won’t convince me anymore with a pretty screenshot of a landscape without a character model or the semblance of a UI.

DDO falls in the “mostly ignore” category for me. I have zero faith on Turbine, overall. They bought licences but they didn’t demonstrate they have a clue about what they are doing or that their work is solid. I have read enough about this game to wrap it up and form my own opinion. I’m not saying it is crap, but I’m saying that I have no interest about it, if not because I follow the market overall and read what other thinks and how the genre changes (for the better, the same or the worst).

The following is about some comments gatherted from random forums. It’s my personal selection and it is supposed to be biased. I’m voicing my opinion through them:

Soulflame:
I think the #hate people lasted a couple of weeks. That’s all I really need to know.

Murgos:
Solo content runs out about the third session.

Kunikos:
This game has less feeling than a Uwe Bowle movie.

Garylian:
There is a significant lack of content. While Turbine expects characters to repeat dungeons to gain XP and gear, it almost borders on the ridiculous. It is so bad that same folks deliberately don’t level up, so they can gain XP at their last trained level, instead of the level they could be. Instead of losing out on groups due to their level, they just make sure they form their own groups. This lack of content means that they will have to have some expansions ready to go within 3 months, to keep customers happy. Not a healthy sign.

Atoner:
I didn’t like it much. I got into the Beta months ago and was quite fired up about it but after a few play sessions I could barely muster the energy to fire up the client. If AC2 and Guild Wars had a love child, this is what it would look like. It would be most accurate to call it Bizzaro-AC1; anything that AC1 was, DNDO isn’t.

The world feels tiny and cramped ( GW )
There’s nothing to really interact with or explore in the world at large ( AC2 )
There’s nothing to do besides missions/quests ( GW )
The graphics are pretty but movement and animation feel rigid ( AC2 )

There’s barrel-smashing aplenty if you didn’t get enough of that in Diablo. Everything requires a group and a moderate-sized block of time, that’s true of many other games but as a husband and father I don’t always have consecutive three hour blocks to play. Sometimes I enjoy the ability to log on for half an hour or an hour and still accomplish something, so I prefer the games that allow for this.

On the other hand, I do like the character creation system, which is true to DnD in that you could spend hours fiddling in there.

All in all, AC2 burned me enough that I am no longer willing to play half-baked Turbine games on faith alone. There’s just not enough gameplay here to warrant any interest on my end, and it disappoints me to say that given this game’s heritage.

Korak:
Who are they marketing this to? Other than the 50-100 hours spent doing the quests it doesn’t seem like there is anything else to it. Would have been a fairly nice single player game if they tacked on a better combat system and a decent storyline.

TheGoodNun:
I’m predominantly a solo-er and I’ve been able to find a fair number of solo-capable modules. The trouble is that it’s difficult to discern from the description whether any given quest is solable. Pretty much if the duration is “short” I’ve got a fair chance.

Arthur_Parker:
When you repeat a dungeon with an alt character everything appears to be exactly the same. I repeated one of the first dungeons with a new thief character, he can pick locks, he could not pick a totally unimportant door, the key for which is in one of 60 odd barrels that my first character had to break. For a game that boosts of having alternative ways to complete a dungeon that’s a bit stupid.

Inn’s are the place characters are forced to go to heal and where they spawn when they die. I was amazed that given how important Inn’s are to the way the game works that characters can not even sit down in a chair.

The game interface is complete junk, really really terrible, they should just scrap it and start over. The whole twitch combat idea didn’t really work for me, maybe it improves at higher levels. The game virtually required me to group at level 2, completely missing one of the reasons why WoW is such a good game.

I don’t like the idea of zoning, I don’t like watching a loading screen, upon death I had to zone 3 times to get back to where I was, I will not be buying it.

It was better than I expected though, given the design of the game it’s going to be interesting to see what happens a couple of months after release, I really can’t see Turbine creating enough content to maintain subscription numbers.

Hoax:
1. This game is not worth a monthly fee, it would do much better then GuildWars has with this community if it was free though since the gameplay screams for organized short runs then logging off. Where GW’s pvp endgame (while awesome) is very time consuming as it is with all competitive pvp.

2. This game will annoy those who do not suffer from the disease known as altitus or whatever we call it these days. Unless there are literally SOO many newbie quests you have no hope to complete all of them, but then it will still suck. Because most players will not want to take on an inferior xp/time grind just to see new content even if that would be more fun. People are broken and stuff.

3. The game doesn’t look nice (in the way so many have gotten used to WoW’s visuals) and it doesn’t look like it is ready to release, it reminds me much more of the EQ “style” which is to say almost no style at all. Broken group chat, attacking npc’s with no response, arrows gfx sitting in mid air and invincible boxes? mmmm beta (note: nothing has ever been fixed in a MMO beta, ever)

4. The combat while decent systemically (wonder if that was a real word) -talking melee here- looks stupid. This is a mistake people like for the thing they will spend 90% of their game time doing to not look stupid. Also without trying it myself I couldn’t tell if there was any improvement over WoW’s melee combat, just even faster and more mouse clicks!

Kuro:
I found it rather meh, but I of course couldn’t get to level 10 in 10 days, so who knows if there is OMGAWESOMEJESUS content at level 10. It was getting rather annoying and repetitive even by level 3, and with the idiots who couldn’t tell their right hand from their left that I had to group with, I basically wanted to slit my wrists after playing it for more than 2 hours in a row.

Haemish:
But telling me I need to research all the stats, the builds and pick the one true template (or one of a set of templates) is going to be a problem for a game. The majority of MMOG players don’t read message boards, they don’t visit spoiler sites and they don’t stay with a game that makes their character a gimp. It’s all well and good to say “They aren’t looking for the typical MMOG player” but I have yet to see how they are going to capture the non-MMOG player and get them to pay a subscription fee when the game is content-light and has classes that don’t cut it outside of a group. It’s ok if it’s a forced grouping game, but that will probably mean I won’t play it.

Jubee:
The controls and the constant warping turned me off the game by the time I hit level 2. The combat system really felt like Morrowind: Online, without the assbeat Daedric weapons. And just like in every RPG ever, clerics were impossible to find.

And all the choices you have to make at the char select screen really overwhelmed me. I’ve never played DnD before, so tossing “Choose yo feats!” screen at me with as little info as possible on what they actually do just ensures you will create a gimp nobody will group with.

“Before you ever saw what the game was like you picked Improved Hide over Improved Detect Trap? GTFO nub!”

Mazuli:
Now that the NDA is lifted: The game sucks. I was in alpha, played it for about a half hour, then stopped playing it for about 2-3 weeks. Tried it again, it looked a little different, and it still sucked. Then I uninstalled it. It’s like city of heroes with worse controls and less customization.

Dahlrek:
I played it off and on, though not during the xp boost period. I liked some aspects of it; the nice touches in some dungeons, the customization of character abilities, the loot, the sorta-no-xp-for-monsters.

I disliked the interface, the ridiculous triviality of jousting some critters (maybe the entire combat system), the over-instanced feel (like GW except with tiny combat areas), the lack of non-combat solutions for almost every progress block, and the wild disparity in mission difficulty from one mission to the next.

On top of that, this will surely be a game of gods and gimps, as someone else already mentioned. A huge assortment of feats, skills and whatever the little bonus points were called, but little to no indication of the relative power or long-term viability of any of your decisions. I always thought CoH was bad in that respect, but at least it has a limited respec system; this game will be far worse.

Itzena:
One description I heard of D&DO was ‘Guild Wars, but with a monthly fee’

Gaunt:
Guild Wars without the PVP and with a monthly fee.

Go to a player hub (inn), spam LFG, go to instance entrace and do mission.
There is no shared hunting grounds. There is no soloing past level 2 or so.

Basically what Mahrinskel said long ago:

Turbine got some major VC money (over $30M), but WoW has upped the ante for DDO and LRO to where that probably won’t pay for either, never mind both.

In a word? Weak.

I believe we’ll forget about this one rather soon.

Tobold has, as always, the kind, optimistic review.

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Watch List

Work In Progress

This node isn’t frontpaged because it’s just an ongoing project that I want to start and ‘fix’, before giving it an actual shape. You aren’t supposed to read this but you may happen to finish here if you follow the “recent post” page.

Plan: Everything here is subjective. This is also the purpose of the whole site, hearing a subjective point of view, following subjective likings and suggestions. It’s a resource for me and noone else. At the same time you are supposed to be interested in what I think, as a specific point of view. The same is for me when I go read other blogs and forums. I’m interested in others opinions, what others like. Their subjective, opinionated point of view. If you expect something else you probably wouldn’t read this but a more ‘balanced’ mainstream network filled with fluff and hype. Everything here is pure freedom. It follows just my curiosity and subjective interest.

When it comes to games I’m omnivorous. I’m curious about everything. I like MMORPGs, RPGs, action RPGs, Japanese RPGs, FPS, RTS, graphical adventures, arcade shooters, management games, strategic games, flight simluators, space simulators, wargames and more… the only genres that I mostly ignore are sport and puzzle games and there are exceptions even here.

The purpose of this page is to gather and list all the games I read about over the internet and on the magazines and that got me interested for a reason or another. I keep always keep forgetting about the less exposed games and I usually write on the site only if I have something consistent to write. This page will gather links and references so that I can keep a somewhat organized “watch list” of what tickled my interest, with some short notes to explain the reasons of the curiosity.

Watch List

Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends – This game sounds crazy. The graphic looks incredible and has a very unique and special mood that I’ve never seen in any other game. I don’t know much about it but it seems some sort of evolved RTS. Give a look to the screenshots, they are enough to generate all the hype you need. A mmorpg with those kind of environments in first person would be a wet dream. It also feels Steampunk, which I love. Release Date: Spring 06.

The graphics are fantastic. Effects flare and bloom with the majesty of royal fireworks, whilst units move realistically. While watching the elementals decimate ranks of men, one truly thinks “Yeah, that’s how I would move if I were a fire elemental.” Buildings all have fantastic detail, down to the men running the ledges waiting to open fire on nearby attackers. The cities, which are extremely different from those of most titles, are living, breathing things of beauty. They move in hundreds of ways and truly appear to be functioning factories of power.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars – Because it has batshit insane technology and looks great. It has the potential to be much better than Battlefield 2 and I always loved the look&feel of the Doom engine. 32 kilometres square maps. Many different vehicles and a Starship Trooper ‘feeling’. Its power will be in the immersion. It will try to encourage team play and simulate a huge battlefield that will feel as near as possible to a permanent campaign (and persistent character advancement, it seems). It will also try to minimize the HUD, as explained here. The design seems solid, same for the technology. Recently seen here. Release Date: End 06.

During the early part of the project we realised we wanted to be able to render these huge outdoor areas and John Carmack is undoubtedly the best graphics programmer on the planet. He proposed, and then devised, the idea for the MegaTexture, which is a single unique texture that covers the entire landscape.

It’s 32,000 pixels by 32,000 pixels, it creates a six gigabyte source file which we then have to compress to ensure good disk space usage but actually only ends up using 8Mb of video memory on a video card. We took this basic implementation of the technology and then started developing it further so we had it working on a 3D mesh, we introduced a single parallel light source for lighting, the ability to put other models and things on the landscape, foliage, tools like mega-gen which generates the texture, geometric texture distribution, the road tool that lets you just plop roads down along a route.

Prey – Imho, the surprise of 2006. If they don’t screw it. The hype is definitely not enough since I expect this game to become a huge commercial success. It looks amazing and I really think the artists have done the best work possible. This game is pure art. I’ve written more about the game here. It will be the best FPS of this year. Release Date: March 06.

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Two (+1) ideas about Eve-Online

These two ideas (plus one I was forgetting) sit on a text file for a lot of time. They aren’t anything impressive, just two “quality of life” features that I believe would improve the game and be well accepted by all the players. They don’t add content or depth, but I believe they shouldn’t be too complex to implement and would be used extensively by everyone, instead of just a minor feature than noone will ever use much.

Here are my thoughts:

(ship model browser)
– One of the fundamental problems I think the game has and that contributes to make the accessibility hard is about the presentation. Often the game is hard to figure out because its structure is not well presented. I’m not saying that the structure should be changed, I’m just saying that it could use a better presentation. The first idea is a tiny step going in that direction and it comes directly from the frustration I had in the game. The icons of the ships when you delve informations from the market really don’t do justice to the models. They aren’t good enough to give you an idea of the ship you are browsing. Often the icons aren’t even centered and oriented properly and it’s simply impossible to understand the scale. This makes all the ships really hard to recognize at the first glance.

The idea (but it would be only the first part) would be to add an option to the window with the detailed informations of a ship. A button that you can click and that would open a window working like a “3D model browser”. You could then see the ship, rotate it and figure out its scale (shown in a corner). This would help not only to see what you are buying and going to fly, but it will also accustom the new players to the different ships in the game, helping them to recognize them instead of just stare at counterintuitive numbers. Having a precise idea of the scale would already help to compare the role and purpose of each ship.

(more accurate graphical combat representation)
– The second idea is one I already hinted (at the end). Eve doesn’t feel that different from those browser-based managment games (here’s one) and could really use better its graphical possibilities. Right now it’s mostly an evolved interface and all the gameplay pivots around it more than the simulation itself. I already wrote at length about moving past the interface for a better immersion. In this case the “technicisms” are part of the setting and the type of game, but there’s still some space to make the graphic reflect what is actually going on.

The graphic representation seems rather rudimental, when it comes to combat. Sometimes it is out of synch and I’ve seen missiles just vanish in the space. All these quirks aren’t really problems because what you see is only an approximate representation of what is going on with the numbers. You react to these numbers, and elements of the interface, not to the action on screen iself. This could hardly change without a complete redesign of the game. But even here a better presentation could do wonders. For example, it is already known that if you shoot a tiny missles to a Titan (those HUGE ships) the impact will make the ship shake violently. This because the graphic representation is hardcoded: for every missile you shoot, the missiles will land and shake that ship with a strong explosion. The client knows only one pattern and repeats it in every situation. It doesn’t factor anything else, like the damage, size of the ship or even a ‘miss’. The same for the turrets, you fire them and they display their effect. This effect is NOT a representation of what is going on.

The graphical combat just doesn’t recognize a difference in damage and doesn’t even distinguish between a ‘hit’ or a ‘miss’. This is why I’d like to see some more accuracy implemented that could also be helpful to understand what is going on. In Eve the turret mechanics are rather complex and the possibility to hit while invulnerable to enemy attacks is a viable and absolutely normal tactic. The point is that with this type of graphical representation you’ll still see your ship being hit by the lasers and shaken violently by missiles. Even if those lasers aren’t even hitting you and those missles doing zero damage.

So what I’d like to see is an implementation of the “misses”, so that I could clearly see that the laser is missing my ship instead of watching it hit, while the combat log says it missed. And also the feedback tuned and scaled accordingly based on the damage. For example making the ship not move if the missile isn’t doing any damage, or shake it heavily in the case it is getting almost one-shotted (concretely it would be about matching and scaling the graphical effect with a % calculation on the damage done to a ship).

Of course this would require some coding on the client but I believe it’s definitely needed and would be another little step forward for the game that I believe noone would criticize or rant about.

(make the right click menu sticky)
– The right click menu is what I use the most to interact with the game. It’s rather small but I wouldn’t like to have it changed (and it already was with the last patch). Still it’s rather frustrating when you have to navigate through multiple sub-menus, for example to do a warp or, even worst, in the heat of combat, then move the pointer slightly outside it and lose the selection, so that you have to navigate again through all the nested menus from the start.

The idea here is rather simple. Right click to open the menu (as right now) then left click on a sub-menu to make it ‘sticky’ so that you don’t lose the selection if you move the mouse pointer away, at least if you don’t click again to select something else. That’s all. I believe it could really make the navigation of the nested menus easier and more precise, in particular where you are trying to issue a command during combat and continue to lose focus because you are trying to do it too quickly.

I think this feature could have saved my ass in the game a couple of times if it was implemented.

NOTE: The first idea ties to what I wrote here. In particular about a reorganization of the ships to make the classes more defined and understandable. Again this doesn’t mean that I would like to see the statistics of those ships changed. It’s still about the presentation, not the content.

Christmas finally arrived

I just ordered Civ 4 and Dungeon Siege 2 from Play.com – I’m happy.

Why I bought DS2? Because I wanted to try the Ultima 5 remake on DS1. Some of the guys in the community are involved and from the word of mouth it seems rather good. Now this doesn’t have anything to do with DS2, but just now a game magazine in Italy is being sold with DS bundled. Perfect timing!

Now I never bought or tried DS. I *hated* Summoner and disliked basically everything about NWN (design, gameplay, graphic. It’s clunky and dull. I hated it all and I still love so much more the previous games from Bioware and Black Isle). I’m also one of the few that never felt so hot for Diablo 2. I find it straining (I only liked the mess-battles with zerg of enemies).

So I always considered DS a “lesser” clone to keep as far away as possible. Yesterday I got the magazine with DS so that I could play the Ultima remake (still downloading). I gave it a quick look… and loved it.

Yeah, it’s a simple game, it isn’t anything crazy. But it has a so good interface, and controls, and mechanics. This game is really good, simple but functional to what it wants to be. It lets you play and enjoy the flow. It doesn’t get in the way. It isn’t annoying or unresponsive. Smooth. Sleek. Polished and well planned.

I loved how in just a few minutes your character has so many patterns available, all accessible. So you don’t have to just choose a weapon and swing it till the boredom kicks in. Instead you can quickly swap between melee, ranged and spells. I loved how I could swap to the bow to take down the enemies running to me and then swap back to a mace to finish them off when they were close enough. I liked how smooth and functional are the controls and how everything you need is easily accessible and serviceable. It has the best layout/UI of the genre.

This is an “action rpg”. The purpose of an action rpg is exactly to be serviceable and let you play it. Enjoy the flow. It’s all about the execution and I find the execution in DS very good. The battles are fun and I just loved the graphic. The game is old but it still doesn’t look bad to me. In particular it looks SO MUCH BETTER than NWN. The woods are decent and not just a tiled texture along the borders and I loved the z-depth in some parts of the game and the variable height, while, on the other side, everything in NWN is so flat, featureless and generic. In DS you feel inside an environment, in NWN you feel inside a shoe box. It also doesn’t have all the annoying quirks of the NWN engine (which does a so bad work with the structures covering the visual). The animations are also so much better compared to those in NWN.

I fiddled with the editor and loved it too. Fuck the tilesets, here you can at least connect the terrain the way you like (it feels like playing Legos) instead of just pasting together generic areas that look like shit. I cannot even suffer the player-built modules in NWN because everything looks too much the same and plays always so horribly (there’s just no way to shrug off the dull mood and create something that doesn’t feel exactly the same. You have the dialogues and that’s it).

I really find DS so better under most of the aspects. It may be more superficial but I still wonder why the mod communities didn’t use it instead of that clunky NWN or, even worst, Morrowind. DS seems to have very solid basis. There’s some space to build on top of that and give it some more depth, if you want (then I don’t know how flexible it is, I’m curious to see how the Lazarus team modded it).

That pretty much explains why I suddenly went to order DS2. If it’s better, I want.

EDIT: The more I look into this the more I LOVE it. You can basically do everything you like with the game. From rebuilding the UI till messing directly with the DLLs. It’s wonderful.

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So… The patch wasn’t too bad

Yeah, I think the title says it all. The patch wasn’t so awesome but not even too bad.

Tobold did a good work to summarize some of the changes, keeping a positive approach. The fact is that this patch added many little fixes and features that are helping the game overall. The linked auction houses, the shared Trade and LFG channels, the multiple queues for the BGs, till the smaller things, like the loot on the slimes (even if I would have liked the loot to be specialized for each mob type, instead of just enabled/disabled. They could be used for the new oils, for example).

If we want to rant there’s PLENTY to rant about and what I wrote about AQ still reflects accurately my point of view. So why the title? Because I was wrong with the “tone”. Actually it wasn’t directly my fault, but a reaction to the threads on the forums I was following. I had to defend my opinions and this brought to radicalize my position and underline those “mistakes”. But my point of view was originally quite simple (if you read the thread you’ll see why I started to counterattack).

The point is that the event is mostly an experiment. Easily doable and that probably didn’t require an insane amount of work. I have already noted some of the relevant points that are both at the base of my “rant” and the fact that the event itself isn’t too bad: “Again, it doesn’t add anything to the game, it doesn’t contribute with anything.”

The fundaments of the “rant” are that this type of mechanic is one that fits perfectly in the recent discussion about the levels on Raph’s blog. We have pointed out all the problems. In this case the mechanic doesn’t add anything worthwhile to the game. A new player joining now just wouldn’t see this mass grind as something that “adds” to the game. It doesn’t fit a specific function within it, it isn’t motivated. As I said, it’s a “void”. In this void Blizzard put a “myth” (the lore, server wide effort etc.. all ideal values), but it’s still a void that offers only the “gameplay” of the “carrot on a stick” (factional rewards and general advancement) and of a lottery (the random items) that can work only for the players already deeply involved. Then it affects other parts of the game, like the impact on the economy, the resource gathering and so on.

From a side the grind is absolutely optional. It doesn’t really impose itself on you. This is actually the very first mechanic that is truly shared and not directly mandatory. You can choose your reasons to join as you can just continue to play the game as if nothing changed. This was my first reaction. It wasn’t a rant. It was just a doubt. Why the players would care about this? I didn’t join the grind but I put in my own server tracker, messing with the code and updating it frequently. It is sort of exciting and refreshing, so it involved me even if I wasn’t interested in the grind. I’m part of it, dedicating to it my time and writing about it even if I have other things to write about.

Let’s focus on the roots. As I said this doesn’t add anything to the game because it remains a void. It works only if you are already absorbed. But isn’t this exactly the purpose? This event is designed to be “used” and forgotten. It isn’t a new mechanic added to the game, it isn’t a new cumulative feature. It’s transitory, to serve its purpose (a medicine for the economy, an effective cockblock for content and catass players) and then leave the game. It (hopefully) didn’t require too much work to be set-up, so it probably wasn’t a waste of resources that could have been spent to add something more relevant and elaborate. The fact that the grind is “validated” only if you are already a player, already deeply involved in the game, is also coherent with it’s purpose: it’s a retention mechanic for the players already in, not a feature to attract new ones.

Which is probably Blizzard’s first priority: retain those 5-millions of players they already have. We could argue whether there are better ways to do this or not. But, as I said, if you want to rant there’s always plenty to rant. Which is also why this genre is so interesting if you have the possibility to work within.

Finally, a last note. If this event went “right” and opened up so many interesting side-effects, it’s also because of the players. If this mechanic was applied to another game, the results would have been different and not as widespread. This again because right now Blizzard has the power of the mass-market, the power to influence directly the players. The power to define where the value is and convince all the players to move in that direction. This content is self-validated, not only self-excused. This is the most important mechanic here.

I define “self-excused” the carrot-on-a-stick. The motivation to do something not because you actually enjoy it (the journey), but because of the reward (the carrot/drug/stimulus). Then there’s another pattern joining this one: the self-validation. The carrot-on-a-stick works only if the player validates it. If the player thinks that the game isn’t appealing and not worth the time, the carrot-on-a-stick can even be the hugest ever, but it won’t work. The players play games obviously because they enjoy them. Then, AFTER this happens, you can add the carrots and keep them going. So these carrots are more retention mechanics than reasons why you play a game. And here the “self-validation” plugs in. Or the mass-market. In WoW you enter a large community that goes beyond the genre and the internet. It’s mass culture, you join a shared myth, not just a game with a strictly defined play session. The game continues beyond that play sessions.

As I wrote in that comment, you play and feel the motivation to play because everyone plays as well. This happened recently even with Eve, so it’s not something new. We can call this the word-of-mouth but this definition is limited to understand it. I call it “self-validation“. Once the initial pact between the player and the game is made, and so strong in the case of WoW, the game gains the possibility to impose its own values on the players. This is why we hear stories about these games messing with the real life of people. They self-validate till the point that the game has the priority over what you decide for yourself, it’s the game that plays you. And it’s the game to define exactly what you “value”.

This is why when you breach the mass market you become “untouchable”. Your (devs) mistakes will be forgiven, partly because the success of the game is undeniable and the /rimshot that just makes you shut up. And partly because the players are your “robots”. They’ll swallow everything and will love it. You won the possibility to decide what they’ll like and, right now, the community has a huge tolerance to broken design. They’ll scream like hell if the server goes down and you take the drug from them, but they are ready to accept whatever the game is going to offer. The communities will shape themselves around the content. At least till the “charm” will remain so strong.

So yes. The patch was so much better than my expectations. But from my point of view this was due to the community and the sheer power of influence that the game has right now.

/end of navel gazing

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“AutoJoin Battlegrounds while not looking” – updated

Yesterday I was able to fix it and make it work with the multiple queues. I really cannot do without it.

It works pretty well now and along with those queues it was a refreshing addition. Now you can spend some time in Warsong (finally alive) and Arathi while waiting for a spot on Alterac. More action and less waiting time.

My mod makes you join automatically the battleground in the case you are atl+tabbed doing something else, there’s a customizable delay so that you can still have time in the case you are busy doing something else and prefer to leave the queue instead of joining right away.

The mod also works along with CTMod, so you need it to configure the options.

Tiny_BGMod v3

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Clueless GMs + premade forms = Fun!

Taken from FoH, who took it from the official forums.

This week i ran BWL for my guild. During the RG fight i died and released along with several others Before RG was dead. once RG was dead i got a rez and dished out the loot. we cleared to the broodlord and called it for the night.

i later zoned in to BWL while in a UBRS raid and RG was back up. I WAS NOT SAVED TO THE INSTANCE.
i freaked out for a sec thinking we had to reclear. i then found someone who was still alive when RG died and made them raid leader.Then I zoned in to BWL and became saved to the instance.

also as where i was raid leader and not saved to the instance everyone who joined the raid after RG did NOT get saved.

I’ll break this down:
IF your raid leader dies and is released when RG dies and he/she will not get saved to the instance. every one who is not in the zone and dead will not be saved either but they can all still loot RG.

And here’s the answer from the GM: After some research it appears the issue you are having may be related to your User Interface (UI).

Got it? Now go exploit the hell out of it, for Blizzard it’s a problem of the UI.

Btw, as written in the comments, all the annoying changes to the reset timers of the instances were an attempt to solve various other exploits. It seems they have opened the way to bigger ones. Good work :)

Also remember that they disabled the /bug command right at launch so you could send your bug reports right to the GMs. Enjoy.

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