That looks a lot like the Barrens with floating trees.

It seems that a korean site released a bunch of screenshots from Draenor, an unfinished region in “The Burning Crusade”, the expansion for WoW that will arrive later than sooner.

Eww. It seems that WoW’s solid art style just went to hell. Too many things and textures are clashing or looking plain bad. Most of the stuff that doesn’t look terrible is about reused art assets that are already in the game. One of the best things of WoW is the wonderful art of the ground textures. This is the first thing that seems lost in these screenshots. The new brushes used are terrible and only a very bleached copy of the graphical splendor of the Blasted Lands (or the orc/troll lands but I didn’t have a screenshot ready).

The sense of choesion and careful level building seems also completely lost and leaning more toward the bowl-model of zone, with the mountains at the margin and open space in the middle. Without the nooks and crannies to explore, small passages to cross and all those elements that make the exploration of the places so much satisfying. Instead this zone seems to have no sense, with the objects added at random and without a specific planning.

Of course it is obviously far from finished. We can only hope that the final result will look completely different but the work in progress looks at the antipodes of the concept art at the base of that region. The zone will be polished, but it’s the overall layout and feeling that isn’t convincing me. I’ve seen plenty of unfinished zones in the past, but noone looked ugly like in this case.

The original source is here. I have the images saved on the HD in the case that site goes down.

EDIT- Comments useless since it seems that the zone was already in the mpq files long ago.

EDIT2- Tigole commented:

Bogus
Those aren’t pictures of anything in the Burning Crusade. Those are hacked pictures of a 2-year old demo zone that a level designer was experimenting with before he had tile sets, objects etc. You can see Eastern Plaguelands mushrooms there and the thorns from the Quilboar camps from the Barrens. That’s what level designers do when they are experimenting — they use existing textures and objects to try to simulate what an actual zone would be like.

It’s a picture of a level designer’s experiment, ripped open with a map hacker. I’m confident you’ll find the actual screenshots of the zones in Outland to be much more pleasing.

I was writing some comments on what Tigole wrote after all the bitching of the past days when Lum posted his thing that dragged me in a whole different direction (but an occasion to mark the points).

So back to the bitching now. I defined what Tigole wrote as “PR fluff”.

When he’ll have something to add to the discussion or even willingly to have it, I’ll consider what he has to say. Or what he has to show when the patch notes are up.

Till then, this is the summary of his (void):

Tigole:
It’s not an argument as simple as “hardcore versus casual” – it goes way beyond that.

It goes beyond that. But of course he refuses to say what it is.

I think it also needs to be mentioned, that players need to keep in mind that by railing against content that you don’t personally enjoy – whether it be raids, casual content or PvP – it won’t improve anything.

And that’s the whole point that he is totally missing (and that his design will probably fail to address if it reflects his words).

If you want to play this game and don’t want be left out of the community or your friends. YOU HAVE to adapt. It’s not a choice.

This is what the players are complaining about. Not that there are distinct options available. But that they are strongarmed into a direction that they don’t like. So they bitch because they would like the game to steer away from that mandatory progression.

It’s about the accessibility and REQUIREMENTS for that content. Set by the design. DEPENDENCIES. Commitment. They *forced* the players in that direction.

The increased requirements to access content. The need to “catch up” or “put up with”. The game CREATED these requirements and is responsible for putting many smaller guilds (and players) out of business.

The main point is that Tigole is acknowledging the wrong problem, while he is totally ignoring where the real issue is. Which brings me to a comment from Megyn that I steal from Lum:

Man, and I remember when it was just rants about the ongoings of UO and Great Lakes :) I’ve always understood the plight of all sides of this argument. Unfortunately, I think developers always pick one of the sides and cater exclusively to that one. Blizzard knew this was going to happen in beta. Because several developers astutely observed “we’re out of stuff to do,” which was preceeded by the testers levelling through the whole game three times and saying the same thing. They won’t fix it because I don’t think they know how.

That or they’ll build a money boat and sail to a money island and forget about this world of warcraft thing.

Tigole’s defence didn’t end with that “letter” and inflated “declaration of intent”, but he went on revealing some details about the next patch. The next patch is the 1.10. The next patch is also the one that the CMs tirelessly repeated IT’S NOT the one where the new “casual” armor sets will go in.

I guess things can change quickly ;)

We’ve been hard at work at Patch 1.10 and I’m excited to bring you a small sneak preview of some of the content. We’ll be offering a series of quests for maximum level players so they can obtain a really good, class-specific armor set. This should prove to be a great way for non-raiding players to upgrade their gear. Here are some highlights:

• Characters follow a new quest line to obtain an armor set
• The armor sets contain 4 rare and 4 epic pieces
• Some of the pieces can be obtained by soloing (including one of the epic pieces)
• The most difficult pieces to obtain require a UBRS level group
• We are adding new bosses to existing dungeons
• Some of the existing dungeons are being re-itemized

Now, some of these points aren’t bad. The last two in fact are good decisions and I surely support that approach (add more meat to the spaces we already have, add more quests for the same dungeons and so on – previously linked).

We still have to see if “some of the pieces can be obtained by soloing” actually translates into “some of the pieces can be obtained by farming“. Because that’s the whole point that is worth discussing. Whether this content is desirable or not (both journey and destination).

And we still have to see how “really good, class-specific armor set” actually translates, compared with the rest of the gear in the game. Where it will be “positioned”. Because “gear” here is a systemic relationship where the value is defined by the relation and relative position of a loot piece within the whole system. If the whole system shifts, even the value of the single loot piece does the same. Which concretely means that “really good” is subject to change.

So we got some informations but not much really worth commenting. We know that they are being lazy (reusing the same dungeons) and that they’ll add some content. But we still don’t know if this will help the current situation or not. Because I still have the suspect that they are addressing the wrong problem.

EDIT: 1UP has already some images of the stats of these armor pieces. Starting from here.

We’ll do everything in our power to make sure that we can deliver content for everyone, not just a select few.

Oh yeah. In fact they have right now the artists working on two new boar models and four worm models. Just for you casuals!!!

While the catasses get the flying city, of course :) And dragons, demons, new tiers of the skills, new powers…

—
Beside all this I spotted a comment from Caydiem that made me really happy and still about the upcoming patch:

Caydiem:
(about weather effects)
I believe they’re currently still slated for 1.10.

They do look awesome, and for what it’s worth, I haven’t noticed any significant slowdown in performance when they were on.

Wow! Finally! I’m happy!

Well… at least till I scrolled down to discover another message that killed my enthusiasm:

Of course, the option will be there to turn them off if you dislike them or you find they’re causing you issues, but performance is definitely something the developers kept in mind when creating the effects.

DUH….

Turn the weather effects off …?

Okay, so why not let everyone turn off the terrain, the buildings so you can more easily see through them? Why not making everyone feely port everywhere? Why not letting them turn off the spell effects, or set a custom time of the day so you can play during the day or at night all the time? Why not removing the hills and valleys? Why not removing the trees and other barriers so that you can walk in a straight line?

There’s only one thing that you can screw in the design of weather effects: giving the players the possibility to “turn them off”.

Blizzard managed to do even this. How lame.

So I took Foton’s bait and went coin collecting expecting all sort of fat loot. Instead I didn’t find much when I finally ported to Moonglade with 20 coins (those soloable in the Eastern Kingdoms) and lots of hopes in my backpacks.

I was lured in this with the promise of “kinky quest rewards” and engineering recipes. Instead all I found was some dresses, food and fireworks. And an obscure raid quest that a few guys are organizing right now while I alt+tabbed to write this. Well, in the worst case I’ll finally ding “Revered” with my faction (each of the 50 coins gives you 50 rep to all your starting factions, for a total of 2500 if you collect them all).

Anyway. There are rumors about four epic (I think the color is just bleached) trinkets. If you notice their names you can see how they are probably connected to these coins.

This is something more interesting than dresses and food :) Has someone more informations to share?

P.S.
I don’t think the raid is going to end well. Or maybe it is.

Yeah, we managed to kill it. The harderst part is that it casts a “Starfall” AOE doing 700+ arcane damage per tick. It wouldn’t be too hard to dodge it if the graphic effect wasn’t HALF the actual (huge) radius of the AOE. So pretty much always you finished to noticed it when your health is already going down, with no time to manage to get out of the radius before dying.

The raid would have ended in less than a minute if we didn’t discover that this huge dog basically spawns on the graveyard. So you can fight as long as you want if you don’t mind the repair bills. It was a long fight with the dog walking all over Moonglade but at the end we got it. The best strategy seemed to be about sending just one Main Tank while everyone else does range damage or keeps the MT alive, without bothering about moving out of the AOE (the MT, I mean). The big dog is also immune to taunts.

Now I’m pissed off because for some reason I didn’t get credit while my equipment is all broken. The dog also dropped nothing at all beside a buff and I think people got a bunch of fireworks and nothing else (edit: the quest drops a lantern that just casts those lights that you see at each Lunar spot. So fireworks, the light thing and a 10% one hour buff to all stats).

EDIT: I read about it too late – Warning: In order to complete the quest after the kill, you must stand inside the corpse for 60 seconds. You DO NOT have to be the group tapping and killing Omen. Just be at the corpse while it’s there and you WILL complete it.

How lame.

…Another 40-man raid instanced slated to launch this spring! Rejoice!

Blog commentary here.

The original “news” starts with a great handjob. Here is a summary of the relevant parts. Plase also notice as Rob Pardo isn’t leading anymore WoW as I rumored many times:

Jeff Kaplan knows what it’s like to try to please all of the people all of the time. Don’t envy him.

As a lead game designer at Blizzard Entertainment for World of Warcraft, the ridiculously successful online PC game that now has more than 5.5 million subscribers, Mr. Kaplan, 33, is a combination of long-term planner, whipping boy, police chief and deity for a rabid global player-base that is about as large as the populations of the cities of Chicago, Houston and Detroit combined.

That ease of play has made the game fantastically successful, but it has also created what has become almost a blood feud in the game and on Web message boards between the game’s casual users and more serious players. The issue is that once players reach Level 60, if they want to keep fighting bigger and badder monsters and if they want to get rarer and more powerful loot, they must start to work in teams, perhaps of 10 or 20 players. The most epic challenges, like conquering Blackwing Lair and its master, the black dragon Nefarian, require 40 players to work together with the coordination of synchronized swimmers.

But because the game from Level 1 to Level 59 is so easy, there are a ton of Level 60 users who don’t know how to be team players and don’t have the time or inclination to learn. And that is the root of the current conflict. Casual players complain that they can’t get rewards comparable to those earned by hard-core raiders, like the Claw of Chromaggus or Mish’undare, Circlet of the Mind Flayer. Raiders like me often respond that casual players just want a handout.

On Thursday morning, Mr. Kaplan took time to discuss World of Warcraft’s high-end content, including new details about the game’s next hard-core dungeon, the Naxxramas necropolis, home of the undead Scourge. (There is also an additional retail expansion expected later in the year, probably in the fall, that will increase the level cap to 70.) Here follow excerpts from the conversation:

Q. Tell me about your general approach to top-level content and how you can appeal to such a diverse user base.

A. What we constantly do is look at the whole picture. We need to address an audience like my mom, who plays once in a while but still manages to get to Level 60 and doesn’t raid, all the way to people who play 14 hours a day who need less sleep than the rest of us. People talk about the game fundamentally changing at Level 60, and they are right. There are people who are seeking that hard-core endgame experience, but to people who casually follow the quests and just ended up at Level 60, it can be very jarring to them. We’re trying to put in more content for them, like the Field Duty quests in Ahn’Qiraj, but the resolution we’re all hoping for is the expansion, which will give those players more WOW as they know it. [Mr. Kaplan also said that the game would soon add a new casual-player-friendly armor set obtained through a multipart quest. The first parts can be completed by a solo player, he said, while the later parts will require a group of no more than five people.]

Q. Why not just let casual players get rewards comparable to those from raids?

A. It would be almost impossible for us to do, and this is a philosophical decision. We need to put a structure in place for players where they feel that if they do more difficult encounters, they’ll get rewarded for it. As soon as we give more equal rewards across the board, for a lot of players it will diminish the accomplishment of killing something like Nefarian. My favorite times in the development cycle are when there are encounters that are close to being defeated but have not yet been beaten. It really creates a sense of awe among the players that there is something big and truly dangerous in the world. But it would be very disappointing if the items found on Nefarian were the same thing you could get in your nightly Stratholme run. [Stratholme is a much easier five-person dungeon.]

Q. What can you tell me about Naxxramas?

A. Naxxramas is going to be the most difficult thing in the game until the expansion pack comes out. It will be the pinnacle, and it’s absolutely massive. You’ll see this big necropolis floating above Eastern Plaguelands. It’s a 40-man raid zone, and it’s bigger than the Undercity [one of the main cities in the game]. Things could change, but we’re up to something like 18 bosses in there, and they are really cool, too. But it’s going to be hard. Really hard. We’re hoping to release it in the spring.

Btw, I love how he quotes his “mum” as an example of the casual player who cannot access raid content when this October (Blizzcon) he used her again to demonstrate pretty much the opposite:

By making sure that there is “unbeaten content” in the World of Warcraft, it not only enriches the world for the people the ‘high end guilds’ that strive to beat it, it also makes the world feel bigger and more alive for everyone else. It gives people something to strive for. Blizzard take issue with the charge that endgame dungeons are designed for the ‘1% of the game world that will actually see it.’

Jeff Kaplan (Tigole): My mom has two level 60’s and a level 40, and she gets MC raid invites.

The solution for the casual players? Straight from Tigole’s mouth:

but the resolution we’re all hoping for is the expansion, which will give those players more WOW as they know it.

Which is exactly what Tobold commented (and I quoted many times already): “pushing the unfun further back”. That’s the solution they have, stretch the treadmill and temporarily dodge the bullet because they have *no clue* about how making WoW more fun without resorting to the same patterns they copied and refined from other games. Here we go with the mudflation. You’ll love it.

I also love this part:

There are people who are seeking that hard-core endgame experience, but to people who casually follow the quests and just ended up at Level 60, it can be very jarring to them. We’re trying to put in more content for them, like the Field Duty quests in Ahn’Qiraj.

So, your role as a casual player is as a worker for the uber guild capitalism. You grind and farm stuff so that the patrons can access content while you sit there staring and drooling on their shiny armor.

If all the players could access all the content “it would diminish the accomplishment” (Tigole’s words) for the catass uber guilds. So there must be a gap between you and them so that they can feel cool and mock you with their uber superiority (laughing at your dead body in PvP while dissertating on how much more “skilled” than you they are in their deep purple suits and epic mounts).

That’s pretty much the same design phylosophy of Brad McQuaid (first paragraph quoted), you can see clearly their “shared background” (Tigole was a famous catass guild leader in EverQuest).

Enjoy your second citizenship and the “MMO social pyramid”:

They are doing a pretty outstanding work at demonstrating that they have no clue. And that they don’t deserve that success they are seeing now.

Things will change, albeit slowly and depending how much more fucking *asleep* the other MMO competitors will remain instead of waking up and take advantage of all the mistakes that Blizzard is currently doing. And instead of contributing to its success by being more clueless than them and copycatting them while dying of envy.

Don’t chase the tail and bite the dust. Solve the core problems. Anticipate!

WAKE UP!

They could have implemented this better. Like 5 days of catass fetch quests to bring the 2 millions of mats down to Silithus :)

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