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They are all ready, Blizzard is just waiting to switch them on to build up some suspense.
Tag Archives: WoW
World of Warcraft
We want more Bling Bling
Another inner split for WoW, this time not about devs but publishers, and despite Big Money Involved (TM).
The9 and Blizzard/VUG are in a dispute over The Burning Crusade, the expansion for World of Warcraft. Blizzard/VUG is apparently taking that stance that The9 does not get it as part of their original deal, and that the Chinese operator needs to pay an additional license fee and/or give Blizzard/VUG shares in the company. According to our insider, things have gotten to the point where Blizzard is even threatening to turn Burning Crusade into WoW 2 and find another partner for China.
See Blizzard/Vivendi going “My precioussss..”
I’m not even sure that The9 grasps the concept of “expansion”. They have a deal to run the game for four years, from June 05 to June 09, and pay royalities for 22% on the prepaid cards (more infos here). I believe the game can be freely downloaded and the players just need to pay for each hour they pass in the game as it happens in Korea ($.06 per hour, see here). Expansions and content patches are usually offered for free so I don’t think that The9 was expecting Blizzard to ask them to pay for another licence for the release of the expansion.
It will be interesting to see what happens if things go wrong. 2.5 of the 6 million of subscribers that WoW has worldwide are in China, if not more:
The operation of WoW in China attained peak and average concurrent users of approximately 530,000 and 270,000 in the fourth quarter of 2005.
With these chinese players raging against the machine and starting boycotts for the poor service. Disconnects, lag, long queues, the same stuff afflicting the western players, with the difference that in China you pay hourly, making these problem much less tolerable.
This while SOE completely failed. With EverQuest 2 being cancelled even before it was able to come out of beta.
Less than 5% of the players go to raid, I wish
From Nick Yee (and from a reasearch on WoW):
3.6% of all observed characters spent more than an hour in raid content over the month of January.
“I want to believe”. I REALLY wanted to believe.
I was ready to close an eye and use that piece as a wonderful occasion to rant again against a utterly stupid model of development that just goes nowhere. But what Nick Yee writes is largely bullshit and this time the bullshit is even too easy to detect.
His previous research was also completely off, isolating cases from the context when it was instead the context to be the most important element and the one that was interesting to observe. Extrapolating theories from aseptic environments is just an excellent way to see what you want to see. You can prove everything and nothing and along the years there will be an endless cycles of researches that just contradict each other. Rigged points of view.
This time what that test seems to say is also completely wrong. Of course is not the test itself to be wrong, but its interpretation. What they did was to track unique characters. The problem is that a character doesn’t represent in any way a player or an unique account. It’s kind of obvious that there is a majority of alts that aren’t ALL involved in raid content even if the player is actually a raid player. The equivalence that 3.6% of all observed characters represents a 3.6% of unique accounts is just plain wrong. Of course this isn’t what Nick Yee wrote but it is what everyone else would assume by reading what he wrote.
The point is that the test just says nothing useful and nothing that could be used on a concrete discussion (typical bullshit of academic discussions). We already knew that there’s a disproportion between raid players and those who don’t raid, but we still don’t know exactly how significant this disproportion is and the test throws just more smoke in the eyes. I could have five characters, one of them being my main with which I raid most of the time, while the other four are used to dick around, play at the auction house or characters that I logged in once and then forget. This test would still say that 1/5 of the characters raid, we assume that 1/5 of the players raid, but this is wrong because in this example I am still a raid player that raids for most of the time.
Nick Yee can track the characters, but he cannot track the behaviour of a single account. So these tests are bullshit, they don’t say anything useful or more reliable than the assumptions we already made without running tests. Things we already know.
The truth is different. The truth is that WoW transitioned many players to the hardcore group. Players that weren’t like that and that finished to adapt to the game, dragging their friends in as well. WoW has the “merit” to have made the raid content much, much more accessible and widespread compared to other games. This is why the debate between casuals and hardcore is so strong today. WoW exposed this problem because before the “casual group” didn’t even exist. We were ALL hardcore. Only the catasses used to play mmorpg. This genre was closed and specialized.
WoW brough the revolution, it broke the mold. It took the genre and demonstrated how narrow it was, how many limits it had. But at the same time it exposed a bigger problem that before was only latent. To that problem Blizzard wasn’t able to answer. But there’s a merit there, the merit to have gone past everyone else and having encountered a problem that noone else had to solve.
This cannot be denied and it’s part of that “intellectual honesty” that doesn’t allow me to just jump on the badwagon and attack Blizzard using bullshit data as a proof. I just cannot do that, despite there are huge flaws in how these games are developed and despite this could have been a perfect occasion for another stab.
We already knew there’s a pyramid, we already knew that the current mmorpg development is retarded and narrow sighted, we already knew that Blizzard’s development is now clueless. But the data in that test isn’t significative and only confuses some more the situation, hiding what really matters.
I thought it was a good idea to point this out before everyone else and their sister start to wave that test as a proof of I don’t know what. I had a post open on Q23, with the title written, before I discovered that it was just bullshit. So this is for all you bloggers. Just think a second before going on a crusade on this. I stopped right in time.
Catass for a day
Right now the WoW’s test server is up and you can “transfer” to it not your “main” but a set of premade characters for all classes. These are already fully levelled, skilled and equipped (with some epics). The dream of the insta-60. If you want a taste of a class you never played, now you can.
As you log into the starting dwarf/gnome zone you don’t see a bunch of level 1 chars, but a ZERG OF PRIESTS all looking the same (plus some warlocks).
I was in early today. I think seeing a bit of snow is asking too much, it was sunny as it has never been in Dun Morogh.
Catass for a day… If you manage to wade through the queue, heh:
I think soon we’ll need a queue to enter the queue.
EDIT: I assisted to the best duel I’ve ever seen (btw, Dun Morogh is sunnier than yesterday) between a druid and a paladin. It went on for more than five real minutes and it was one hell of a fight, with both trying all sort of different strategies to overpower the other. Long fights that don’t end in two hits are so much more fun, you finally have time to play the game instead of just fighting the lag nuances.
PvP in some games is like precocious ejaculation: as the fun starts you are already done.
WoW’s 1.10 patch doesn’t look too bad
The patch notes went up yesterday, while the test servers won’t go up till next Tuesday (EDIT: I’m wrong, they should be already up). I want to log in to see if these weather effects are acceptable or lame.
The only gripe I have is that the development is continuing to be very slow, and this patch has mostly tweaks and a remix of the same elements. I guess it won’t hit the live servers till around April which means three full months from the previous one which was also another three months from the previous.
We have three months patch cycles, here. They are slowing down, not picking up. A year ago we were all screaming at this pace, a year later and we became pretty used to this, to the point that we feel it just normal and acceptable. Even when the patch isn’t really all that significant.
I guess the slowdown is imputable to the expansion.
Anyway, even if the changes are on the “cheap” side, they are still very, very good. I like them, they look smart and well-thought.
– weather
– xp to gold
– improved flight paths
– 5-man enforced instances (people will remember how running them is harder than running 40-men)
– no loss of target when feared
– very good rep changes in PvP
– KORRAK GONE!
As always I won’t comment the class changes, but what we have here is really good. Back in beta I was one of those begging the instances to be capped properly and I was FLAMED by just everyone, like if I became the antichrist of the “fun”. Now I’m glad that the devs have found an excuse (the revision of the dungeons) to put the rules back in line with the original plan. I wish this would have happened sooner, like… before release.
I don’t believe anyone has underlined enough the faction changes in AV. They are THAT good.
Previously you had people sitting on their asses, doing nothing but getting rep for just being there. Now to get rep you need to KILL.
No more sitting on ass.
If you go give a second look at all these changes you would notice that they are good because they are finally concrete answers to problems that were pointed long ago, with the exception of the “xp to gold” idea and the weather system.
So what I say is that the patch is very, very good. And it is delivering more than what I expected. But I wouldn’t exaggerate praises too much, because:
– It is coming after another three months
– It contains fixes that were long due
– Its content is mostly a cheap remix with a new lipstick
And please notice that I didn’t comment on the new armor sets and dungeons tweaks, since I want to see how they are implemented before expressing my opinion.
Rage against the catass
I forgot a note from the previous post. Consider this like its “short version”.
Something such as a new instance cannot be just thrown together, plopped down, and expected to be fun or well received. Your proposal seems more like a Fargodeep mine with elites thrown in, and it probably wouldn’t satisfy those looking for new instances. That being said, even to drop everything and create this new instance would require key people being pulled from their current projects.
WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU DOING ALONG ALL THESE MONTHS THEN? PLANNING RAID INSTANCES? RIGHT.
(then I still complain about how the raid instances are designed, and not because they exist)
Casual players …where? RUN!
Beside the fact that I still feel silly this distinction between two groups that Blizzard generated (and so is responsible about), I’m amused at the reactions of the development team that gleam through some of the posts.
Originally I thought that they were developing another “casual-player dungeon” but that it wouldn’t be ready in time for the next patch (1.10). Then the drama mounted and the players started to rage even more than before as Tigole announced that a brand new 40-man instanced zone with, ZOMG, 18 bosses was going to be released this spring.
Now we know that the huge raid zone was in fact planned to be released with the 1.10 patch:
With all due respect, we’re not going to put Naxxramas on hold longer than we did.
It was originally scheduled for 1.10.
It is not anymore because the players started to RAGE. It seems that the protests have forced Blizzard to delay that instance to avoid an open conflict beyond what they have already.
But, you see, that’s the trend. Tigole is …annoyed by all these swarms of players that demand to be taken into consideration. While the great majority of the resources are put to the happy EverQuest raiders that Tigole proudly leads:
The way the raiding game operates is different from the non-raiding game. We’re working on non-raider content as well, but again, Naxxramas has been in the works for months longer than this debate has been a hot topic.
The fact that they are taking in consideration non-raiding players is a flat out LIE. NOTHING AT ALL was being designed, nor even ROUGHLY PLANNED, till the drama exploded and their whole smart design plan spectacularly backfired on them.
Before the “debate has been a hot topic”, noone cared about the two distinct groups that Blizzard defined in the game.
“The way the raiding game operates is different from the non-raiding game.”
Can you see the distinction and difference of treatment? Elitists and mass. Included and excluded. Heroes and meatballs.
This “mass” of players that Blizzard gathered in their game is a …nuisance that wasn’t expected. The raiding game was supposed to be the “grand scheme” of things that would have brought the game to a new level.
18 April 2002. Four years ago. Tigole, catass leader and Blizzard freshmeat:
Blizzard’s desire to provide well designed high-end content will prove to be a breath of fresh air for the readers of this site. Unfortunately, I cannot go into much detail at this time but I can say that there are ideas being discussed for the hardcore, end-game player which are nothing short of groundbreaking. You guys, the fans of this site, know how discerning I am when it comes to “uber” content in a game. Trust me, you have much to look forward to.
The intention was already there.
Blizzard never, ever considered a distinction between two groups and never, ever planned the game to support anything but raid content (and broken PvP) at the endgame.
The attrition between the two groups that we have seen in the last months is just an …inconvenient. Something that took them totally unprepared. They had months and months of raid content planned and in the work. Then the drama explodes and Tigole is caught off guard. The “mass” of players pretends to be heard and treated with the same treatment.
Reminds me the French Revolution :) The nobles assaulted by the crowd who didn’t tolerate anymore an uncivil separation in “two groups”.
As in that case, the problem is NOT that there are two categories of people. The problem is that those two categories existed and that a distinction of “merit” was created.
This is again my view on the whole problem.
Blizzard didn’t expected this. They have no plans to solve the underlying problems and now they are caught in an unmanageable situation. They have no idea about how to resolve the attrition they generated.
The truth is that they have no clue about how to provide decent content for the casual players:
We’ve been making a number of improvements to item drop rates in Stratholme, Scholomance, Upper Black Rock Spire, Lower Black Rock Spire, and Black Rock Depths. In the next patch, the drop rate for many items will improve. In some situations, we will even be improving the quality of select items found in these dungeons.
Beyond this, we’re also adding several new items to existing bosses, and even to new bosses which will be available at various locations throughout these instances. Many of the new items will offer statistical improvement with certain classes in mind, such as rings which offer both spell and melee crit, ideal for the Paladin, Shaman and Druid.
A brand new eight piece dungeon set will also be scattered through the locations outlined above. This set, available only to the Warlock, Mage and Priest will offer a substantial amount of armor, hit points and intelligence, making it great for PvP.
There is no content for the casual players. After the “mass” started to rage they had to barricade themselves and think of something QUICK to bring back the situation under a manageable level.
The result is a shuffle to the itemization, some massive grinds added and a kick in the booty sending you to rerun the same instances for another million of times.
My opinion remains exactly the same and unaddressed: it’s not that the casual players don’t have alternatives, it’s that the alternatives available SUCK.
Enjoy your cut&paste casual-player content. Tigole has some serious work to do on those, ZOMG, 18 raid bosses.
For now my satisfying casual-player content is EQ2 :)
But he did the quests in Westfall! All of them!
Don’t get me wrong. Some of those ideas are very good and I’m going to write more about them. But the heart of the issue is that they have no idea about how heal the fracture they created between casual and hardcore players.
And that fracture is going to HURT.
Loose brainstorming session on PvP blended with PvE
(if you cannot suffer my long posts just look the end, there’s a summary)
A discussion on EverQuest 2 PvP triggered some thoughts about impelementing a PvP model that would blend at best with a PvE game. Where one part isn’t detrimental to the other and with a goal to create a system that is fun, deep and still easily approachable for non-hardcore players.
Something that could be enjoyable for the majority of the players instead of a small niche.
The first part is about some general considerations I made, the second part is more about pulling ideas. This is just a five minutes brainstorming session, so don’t look for the details, polish or possible exploits. It’s just the scheme I would start to work on.
—
Open field PvP, to work and remain fun when is paralleled with PvE just CANNOT have rewards attached to it. This is why WoW’s PvP was so much enriching before they ruined it with the honor system.
This doesn’t mean that I believe that PvP should have no rewards. But it should have PvP rewards (skills, powers or loot, it’s not so important) tied with PURPOSES, OBJECTIVES. And not the free ganking. I don’t want to reward gankers in any way.
The scheme should be like this:
– Open PvP without restriction outside the newbie areas (WoW’s distinction between “friendly” and “contested” is good, so I would retain it).
– No penalty for the victim. No xp debt, nor any other kind of penalty for who is killed. The small timesink is enough.
– No reward for the attacker. The PvP should retain a roleplay value. Meaning that the “free ganking” shouldn’t be punished nor rewarded. Attacking another character should be remain asn open choice and the game shouldn’t artificially push a decision on you.
– Special PvP goals (towns, towers, hot spots that the players can battle over) in BOTH dedicated areas and normal PvE areas.
– Points awarded EXCLUSIVELY by conquering and holding these “hotspots” and not for the direct kills.
This is the perfect model for a game where PvE and PvP have to coexist.
The PvP goals/hotspots would attract most of the PvP action, still blending uniformly with the non-instanced game world. This would bring to life the environment and the various zones, while still remaining accessible and fun for the new players.
—
The next step is to figure out some ideas (and override some of those above) to give more consistency to the system. Adding a meaningful PvP scheme to an open PvE world isn’t easy for a number of reasons.
These ideas are based on games build with the same structure of WoW or EQ2. So there are two factions and they share a single PvE world where the players engage mostly in PvE activities. As I write in the first point above, I like the separation between “friendly” and “contested” zones, so this idea will be carried over.
The first point to figure out is about two aspects of the same problem. The first is that in a PvE world with an high number of zones you have to find ways to consolidate the PvP action only in a small number of “hotspots”, or the action would be too spreaded out and it would be too hard to find some quick PvP action without sitting in one place and hoping someone to pass through. This is the first goal.
The second problem is about the reward. If we don’t award points for a direct kill, but only for conquering a PvP objective, the risk is that the two factions will avoid each other to farm points passively. My original idea was in fact to add hotspots that could be conquered and then “held”. Pretty much as it happens in Arathi Basin (WoW) you gain points over time till you have that hotspot capped. As you can imagine this idea is already broken because the players in a huge world like the one in EQ2 or WoW, would just go to cap undefended hotspots to farm points while sitting idle. This is obviously not fun, nor an incentive for PvP (which assumes the players whacking each other, and not sitting). So this idea needs to be discarded.
At the same time, though, I still want to reward the players for PvP goals and objectives and not for the pure ganking. So I need a way to:
1- Have the whole game world enabled for PvP but still focusing the PvP action only in a few spots at any given time.
2- Reward the players for accomplishing objectives instead of ganking.
3- Reward the players for active battles and fights instead of encouraging the players to avoid each other to farm point passively.
To begin with, each “contested” zone can be actively conquered by one of the two player factions. The ownerships could influence an overall layer (like granting bonuses like DAoC’s relic system) but wouldn’t affect the PvP rules in that zones. So if a contested zone remains neural or is “capped” by the good or the evil faction, the rules don’t change and everyone can still initiate attacks at will.
The first design goal is that, at any given time, the majority of the contested zones should remain neutral (first point listed) and only 3-5 zones should instead be “flaming”, meaning that a battle is taking place in that zone (also flagged so in the map, so that the players can quickly see if where a battle is taking place). The consequence of this is that in all the contested zones that remain neutral (again the majority) the PvP is open but yelds no reward. This means that ganking in those zones is possible but it remains an open choice that the game doesn’t promote in any way. So the players are supposed to go questing with relative ease as it happened in WoW before the introduction of the Honor System.
The next step is to push the game in this direction. So how to prevent the players to go conquer all the map at the same time? Initially I was thinking about having NPCs defending these hotspots, making the players work hard to conquer one, but then I got a much simpler idea that can totally eliminate the need of NPCs.
PvP Hotspots
Each contested zone should have one and only one “hotspot”. These hotspots can vary depending on the zone. They can be a tower, a small camp, a village, a huge town, a fort and so on. They basically consist in an empty structure that should grant the defenders a tactical advantage and a flag to cap as in WoW’s battlegrounds. In WoW the zones usually have one village/camp for the Alliance and another for the Horde. In my idea these wouldn’t be affected by the PvP system. The “hotspots” are a completely different point on the map so that the battles won’t focus on those villages, disrupting the gameplay for those who only want to PvE and need access to the NPCs.
Each “hotspot” could have different “requirements”. For example you would need at least 10 players if you are going to “cap” a small outpost, while you would need more if you are going to “cap” a bigger hotspot. This would differentiate the PvP zones, so that some zones would be appropriate for smaller battles, while other adjusted for bigger ones. The requirement is simply based on the number of players in the proximity of the hotspots. So if you don’t have enough players with you, you just wouldn’t able to cap the hotspot. It’s a very simple mechanic.
If the requirements are met, the hotspot will begin to shine even at a long distance and a warning broadcasted to the whole zone. This means that the opposite faction will know that an hotspot is being capped. There’s also a timer before the players will be successfully conquer the hotspot and put *their guild flag* on it. Once the hotspot is conquered, it will start to reward PvP points over time to ALL the players within a radius from the hotspot. The more the time passes, the more points will be awarded and the “bounty” on that hotspot will rise.
In order to prevent the players to passively farm points, these rewards over time are still supposed to be minimal and not an optimized way to achieve a good amount of PvP points. So what’s the optimal pattern?
Hotspot radiuses
The idea is that, once an hotspot is capped, the PvP rules on that zone will be affected. It means that all the kills in the proximity of a capped hotspot will start to be worth PvP points. This radius is supposed to cover at least 2/3 of the whole zone. The more you are closer to the hotspot, the more points your kills are worth. This means that the players will be encouraged to focus their PvP activity as close as possible to the hotspot, creating again a “meeting point” and without disrupting the gameplay of those who don’t want to get involved (who also have the possibility to move to another zone where there isn’t an active PvP battle going on, see [1] above).
As there are requirements to cap an hotspot, there are requirements to hold it. For example, if the hotspot needs at least 15 players to be capped, it would require at least five players to remain there defending. If less than five players remain there the hotspot would return neutral on its own and ready to be capped again by another group.
—
That’s pretty much the whole idea. I’m not sure I explained it clearly but it is rather simple and intuitive. I believe it would be fun and not even too hard to implement in a game structured like WoW or EQ2.
In short:
– The contested zones have one conquerable “hotspot” each. The players can organize and go cap one, putting their guild flag on it. The hotspots don’t have any NPCs defending them, just players. Once capped all the kills taking place in the proximity of the hotspot will start to be worth points. Enocuraging the PvP action to move away from the PvE hubs (villages, towns, camp spots), so without disrupting the gameplay of those who don’t want to bother.
This coordinated with what I wrote above. So no xp penalties, no looting, no incentives for the free kills whatsoever and completely open PvP in all the contested zones.
Tell me how this wouldn’t be so much more fun, involving and still accessible compared to all the other PvP implementation we’ve seen till today. Tell me why it wouldn’t work plugged in directly into WoW or EQ2, And tell me why it wouldn’t be better than their official rulesets built by experienced dev teams.
Tell me why.
Patches gone bad
Way to go with the fixing of what didn’t need fixing. From F13, another proof of brilliant game design…
(it reminds me of something)
—
From the patch log:
Raid & Dungeons
– Molten Core: It should now be very difficult to remain out of combat while fighting the bosses in Molten Core.
Well according to players on the official boards this has also led to a number of serious bugs and nerfs for several class specific talents and skills.
An excerpt:
“Using Hunters to pull and Feign Death if it goes wrong: BROKEN. Now the whole raid will die.
Player suiciding on an accidental or bad pull: BROKEN. Now the whole raid will die.
Rogues and Hunters escaping combat as their class skills specifically ALLOW, for example, when the raid begins to wipe: BROKEN. Now they get put back into combat immediately.
Warrior off-tanks using Charge to initiate their portion of the battle: BROKEN. Now they cannot use Charge after anyone else engages.”
Hunters can not feign death a bad pull and if a hunter FDs during a wipe the boss will be evade bugged until the hunter stands up again. If the hunter does stand up the boss will kill him. Same with rogues.
Also a boss will aggro across the whole instance so when you wipe on Golemagg and there are already players at the entrance he will run through the entire instance training all mobs on your unsuspecting players waiting for the port.
—
Yeah I wondered what was up with the whole “you are in combat” thing when I tried to charge a mob last night. Looks like their “brilliant” idea to fix the combat-rezzing “problem” was a half-baked as any of SOE’s back in EQ.
“Hey guys, they’re not playing the way we want. They’re holding folks back so they can rez in the middle instead of waiting on the 30 minute rezzes on the 3-4 druids they have.”
“Well we can’t have that.. let’s just flag THE WHOLE RAID in-combat. Surely there won’t be any side effects to that.”