We know about people working in a game for real money.
We know about people using their real money to buy in game stuff.

But I think this is the first case of someone working in real life for in-game money.

More spiffy portraits on the order thread.

(and he is one hell of an artist)

I hate the queues to enter the BattleGrounds.

I can accept to wait for a while but Blizzard cannot PRETEND that I stay there and stare the screen. Nor I can plan something in the game else since I don’t know if I’ll get in after a minute or after two hours. So I ALT+TAB and do other stuff while I wait. Well, the problem is that it’s really not rare that I miss that fucking pop-up window by a few seconds and if I was waiting for Alterac that means that I’ll have to restart from zero and wait another hour+. And it pisses me off, to the point that I didn’t even try anymore to queue for it.

Today I felt more pissed off than usual and used Google to search for an UI mod who could get rid of this problem. And I found this.

The mod works but it does a bunch of other stuff I don’t need. Plus it requires you to remember a command to type. So I started to cut out all the superfluous and recoded it so that it is integrated with CTMod, where I can just go and press a button to have the function active and without having to remember the text commmand.

Here it is: Tiny_BGMod v3

Update
07-Nov-2005 – ver 2c – You can now choose between these options (On/Off – 30sec – 1min – 2min) by pressing on the button on CTMod panel (misc tab), so that you can set a delay before you automatically join a BG.

06-Jan-2006 – ver 3 – Now working with the 1.9 patch and multiple queues. It really does well its work thanks to the good original planning :)

Now a request if someone is reading and knows WoW UI a bit better than my superficial cut/paste of stuff: How I can add a “delay” so that, instead of entering the BG all at the sudden, I still have 20-30 seconds before it autojoins it? If you have a solution leave me a comment. (done)

Btw, can we please fix player names? Thank you.

At the end, and despite an early comment, BlizzCon was useful to delve a bit deeper on the plans about the game.

Here you can find three screenshots of concept art for Tier 2 armor sets that look a bit too much like Power Rangers. (mirrored at the bottom of this article, will be back in a few days)

And linked through FoH some surprisingly interesting and information-dense articles on various aspects on the game that were discussed during the conference. I don’t think we will get much more than that in the upcoming months and I’m also sceptical that those features planned for the live patches will be added in time as planned.

You can go follow those links or “read more” for my consolidated backup. (I’ll repaste it when the kids move on)

P.S. For the goons thinking I’m taking the paternity of what was written below: I DIDN’T WROTE THAT. Hell, I didn’t even go to BlizzCon. If I take informations from the internet and archive them here instead of just linking them it’s because after a couple of months I have the blog filled with broken links. To preserve the integrity of the informations I back up them AND provide the original links to the sources till they are available.

What the hell. Fuck you all. Get away from this fucking site. Follow the goddamn links you LAZY ASS.

 

 

BlizzCon: A Brief Look at Blood Elves

The new Horde race for the World of Warcraft game, blood elves, will become available in next year’s expansion, and it was previewed at BlizzCon in Anaheim this weekend.

A guildmate of mine pointed out that waiting in the 90 minute line to play the Burning Crusade expansion wasn’t necessary, since we could wait for two minutes at the Nvidia booth to play it there. So we did.

Pregenerated blood elves — mage, warlock, warrior and priest — were set up on all the demo machines at BlizzCon, and we each gave Blood Elves a whirl. Only one quest was initially available on Sunstrider Isle, although I suspect people before us did most of the level 1 quests. The one quest available was to kill mana worms — think tiny versions of the flying dragon snake thing in “The Never Ending Story.” But running around the island, we got to see hostile miniature treants, a banished blood elf warlock (hostile) and some small great cats, also hostile.

The blood elves are definitely not simply repaints of the existing night elf models. Their features are more rounded, their ears stick straight up, and their bodies are less muscular. All of their newbie gear has a more stylized look, including kukri-inspired daggers and swords, and newbie robes with gold ornamentation. They jump in sort of a flying martial arts pose and instead of sometimes flipping, they sometimes spin instead. Their dance is a 1950s style shimmy of the hips combined with rubbing a toe on the ground — I think that might be called the Mashed Potato, I’m not sure. It was too loud to hear any vocal emotes, if they’ve even been added at this point.

Their innate mana-draining ability is pretty impressive against level 1 and level 2 foes, but only the silence ability — which has a significant cooldown period — is likely to be useful past level 20 or so.

Sunstrider Isle looks sort of like I’d imagined: Take night elf art and architecture, rip out all the nature-based motifs, and replace them with a strong reliance on magic. Objects like bookshelves float or even rotate in the air. There are small translocation gates used to get around between floating platforms. Pet Siamese cats are everywhere. Life for survivors of the Scourge attacks on Quel’Thalas looks to be quite comfortable, even if they’re effectively just living in a small gilded cage.

The one quest text I was able to read specifically mentioned the destiny of the blood elves is on Outland.

Having seen the new race creation process through the alpha period, from this brief glimpse — only one quest, and I wasn’t able to get to the zoneline for the next zone, if it was even open, with a level 1 blood elf dodging angry treants — the polish and quality looks comparable.

 

 

BlizzCon: Rob Pardo talks WoW classes, up to level 70

Blizzard Entertainment’s Rob Pardo presented an overview of the classes in the World of Warcraft, addressed questions about what raising the level cap to 70 in the Burning Crusade expansion would mean for characters and fielded audience questions Friday afternoon at BlizzCon in Anaheim.

For starters, he noted that on “normal” servers, players with level 60 characters respecced their talents an average of 2.8 times. On player-versus-player servers, the average was 3.6 times.

With the understanding that talents are important to players, Pardo said that they would be extending the talent trees up 10 points, so that players would have to choose between putting their additional 10 points in previously available talents, or going after new 41 point abilities.

But those won’t be the only new abilities player characters will be getting: Look for new types of abilities or spells between 60 and 70 — “probably four or five new spells, per character class” — and in time, the team would be going back and adding more new abilities between 40 and 60.

Also look for more racial differentiation within a class, similar to how priests have a special spell based on their race.

Paladins wanting a break from buffing, buffing, buffing on raids will be able to buff all the members of a class at once on a raid in the 1.9 patch.

Fire mages concerned about the high fire resistance on many current raid targets (although Pardo said fire resistance wouldn’t be an issue in the next two raid dungeons added to the game, the Ruins of Ahn’Quiraj and the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj) have some help coming in the form of the Spell Penetration ability on equipment, which will allow a spellcaster a better chance of penetrating an enemy’s spell resistances.

And Invisibilty, a spell that was removed from mages during the beta test, will be coming back in a significantly altered form as a post-60 spell in the Burning Crusade expansion.

 

 

BlizzCon: Chris Metzen explores the lore of Warcraft

Blizzard Entertainment’s Chris Metzen delved deep into the lore of Azeroth, Draenor and the rest of the Warcraft universe in a discussion with Blizzard gamers Friday at BlizzCon.

He started by discussing the just-announced expansion to the World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade.

“It’s the proper name of the ongoing war of the Burning Legion to snuff out all life,” he said. “The Burning Legion has wiped out thousands, tens of thousands of worlds.”

The only world to ever survive being in the demonic Legion’s sights is Azeroth — and the world has done it twice now, most recently at the climax of Warcraft III: The Reign of Chaos.

“The Legion has thrown themselves against this planet twice now,” Metzen said. Recognizing their problems with Azeroth, the Legion is changing tactics as a result: “The Burning Legion is going full court press on every other world out there. And the heroes of Azeroth are being called into void to fight against the Cruasade.”

Although there are numerous other areas Blizzard could have chosen for this expansion — Metzen specifically mentioned Northrend, Undermine and the South Seas — the Burning Crusade’s Outland focus was chosen because it reinforced an important theme of WoW.

“At this point, we really want to stress that this is a cosmic conflict.”

(Northrend is also out for another reason: The expansion is only raising the level cap to 70 this tie. “I mean, come on. Arthas at level 70? No.”)

But there’s a wrinkle in the heroes’ fight against the Burning Legion. Illidan Stormrage, licking his wounds after his battle with the Lich King, has shut down all of the dimensional portals originally opened by the orc warlock Nerzhul to other worlds. Illidan is afraid the Legion will find him through the portals.

“We’re going to Outland to reopen these gateways and take the fight to the Burning Legion,” Metzen said. “Of ourse, Illidan is not going to be happy about this.”

Blood Elves were chosen as the Horde expansion race in the Burning Crusade because designers were thrilled with how well Samwise had redesigned the classic wood elves with the night elves. And they knew that, “one day, high elves are going to have to get a facelift, too.

“I don’t think anyone has abused high elves to this degree,” Metzen said.

Players surprised that the Blood Elves would have any interest in joining the Horde don’t know everything that’s going to lead the groups to joining up.

“Magic is absolutely corrupting. You shouldn’t play with it.” In the wake of the destruction of the Sunwell, the high elves of Quel’Thalas turned to demonic sources of magical energy to feed their magical addiction (which was thanks to thousands of years of constant exposure to magic, even for the high elves who didn’t practice magic themselves). But messing with “fel energy” is scary stuff, and it frightened the other races in the Alliance. “Dwarves and humans don’t want to hang around them. They’re not returning their phone calls.”

But the Blood Elves “could care less, they’re going to do whatever they have to do.” And thrilled by this new, seemingly endless supply of powerful magical energy, the Blood Elves have a unique take on the shattered planet of Draenor, now known as Outland. “They view Outland as an Eden. … Their homeland is great, but Outland is where their destiny is.”

The Blood Elves will leverage their relationship with Sylvanas, leader of the Forsaken and the former Ranger-General of Quel’Thalas. And more importantly, the Blood Elves will not come to the Horde, hat in hand.

“The Blood Elves are going to bring something to the table the Horde can’t do without.”

Look for the lead-up to the Burning Crusade to play out across World of Warcraft servers in the coming months.

The Alliance heroes of Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal, who sealed themselves on Draenor as Nerzul’s dimensional portals tore the planet apart — and whose statues can be seen in the Valley of Heroes in Stormwind — will play a major part in the Burning Crusade.

“They’re still alive, and they’re kicking ass. They’re BAD. ASS. There’s a reason their statues are in Stormwind.”

The development team also fielded questions from the audience.

The two Hakkars that appear in Warcraft lore was Metzen’s fault, he said.

“The answer is my bad.”

He liked the name when he read it in drafts for Richard Knaak’s War of the Ancients novels, but forgot where he heard it, and when it came time to give the Soulflayer the Zul’Gurub trolls worship, the name came right back out.

“That happens daily” to him, he said. “‘Dude, there’s already a Luke Skywalker.'”

Lingering quest lines, including the intrigue with the Grimtotem Tauren and the fate of the King of Stormwind will be resolved, although the team couldn’t promise an immediate resolution. But things are happening: The King of Stormwind will be gone from the island prison many players have found him in when the 1.9 patch goes live.

“We know there are some unfinished quest lines out there that we’ll get back to,” Pat Nagle said.

The racial lifequests talked about for each race before the game was released have been scrapped. The idea had apparently been to give each player a storyline that would take them from humble beginnings to heroism, but while the quests felt great in a single player context, they didn’t work when thousands of undead were dealing with feelings of abandonment, or everyone was searching for their long-lost father, and so on.

“We didn’t want to make this canned story for everyone,” Metzen said.

Players wanting more interaction with the dragons of Azeroth will get it soon. Anachronus, the dragon guarding the Caverns of Time, will begin giving players quests in the 1.9 patch.

 

 

BlizzCon: Blizzard surveys the battlegrounds

Blizzard Entertainment developers held a candid discussion of the bumpy learning process experienced when making player versus player battlegrounds for the World of Warcraft Friday afternoon at BlizzCon in Anaheim, including a discussion of two scrapped battlegrounds.

Alterac Valley was originally going to be a persistent — not instanced, in other words — and quests and non-player-character-driven content was added to give players something to do for the times when no one from the opposite faction was around. When the team ended up making the battleground instanced, the quests and NPCs remained, but Alterac Valley, as it was, had quests that took players away from trying to achieve victory conditions, had a high risk of player death due to NPCs instead of players and had several zone design issues that made achieving objectives harder than they needed to be.

Azshara Crater, which was to be the second battleground, was very similar to Alterac Valley, but given all the problems that had cropped up with the battleground, work on it was stopped, although its entrances are still located in the game.

Following the success of the “lunchtime battleground,” Warsong Gulch, which featured a PVP standard, Capture the Flag, Blizzard looked at using another PVP staple, single-elimination Deathmatch play. The battleground, Gurubashi Catacombs, was to be located beneath the Gurubashi Arena, in pens where dangeous animals were once kept.

But the 5 versus 5 single elimination match invariably turned into melee classes killing spellcasters immediately, which was great fun for the melee classes, but absolutely no fun for the casters: “Of course you’re going to kill the guy in the dress.”

The issue could not be resolved, the designers felt, without a fundemental class revision that would make every class equally able to survive an attack by any other class.

The battleground was scrapped, but group duels might be made a feature of the game independent of battlegrounds at some point in the future instead.

Learning from the mistakes of their past, Blizzard has plans for future and present battlegrounds:

* They are lookin at a variety of ways to get battlegrounds to the critical mass needed to start a battleground more easily.
* They are looking into ways that, when possible, the game will automatically match up opponents more evenly.
* They will attempt to even out the honor gained per hour in each of the battlegrounds, so that people will choose a battleground based on what they enjoy, rather on where they will get the most honor.
* Battlegrounds will begin to have some sort of impact on the world outside of the zone.
* More improvements to the queueing system will be coming.
* Groups will automatically form when players enter a battleground.
* Siege weapons are currently not being worked on, since they couldn’t be made cool enough, but will be worked on again in the future.
* General PVP changes will be coming later, with announcements to follow.
* And in the 1.9 patch, multiple battleground queues can be joined at once time, and those who /AFK out early will be assessed a penalty on their times for the next queues.

 

 

BlizzCon: The shape of raids to come

Blizzard Entertainment’s Jeff “Tigole” Kaplan walked BlizzCon attendees through the design process for raids, starting some of the basic design philosophy.

“Players are only going to level up, and we want to have something for them to do.”

He also took issue with the belief that many players don’t raid.

On an average weeknight, he said, citing statistics collected by Blizzard software, 250 instances are running of Blackwing Lair, 700 instances are running of Zul’Gurub, 500 instances of Molten Core are running and 150 instances are running of Onyxia’s Lair. And given that all of those zones lock players out from visiting on consecutive days if they successfully kill a boss in the zone, the numbers of people using each is even higher.

Other things Blizzard designers take into account are what each class should expect to be doing on a raid to contribute — and it’s not always the same tasks: Druids were consciously given a chance to use their crowd control abilities in Zul’Gurub, for instance. Designers also like to design with a set duration for an average instance session in mind, which varies with each dungeon.

He also answered the common question of why non-player characters aren’t “smart” and behave like players, say, by killing characters who can heal others first.

“OK, we can kill you at any point we want,” Kaplan said. “That doesn’t make for a fun fight.”

How many healers would be interested in coming to fight Onyxia, he said, if the first thing the black dragon did was to target and pick them off?

Going back to results from Blizzard’s software, he ran through a list of the deadliest raid opponents in the game: Since the game went live, Vaelastrasz has killed more than 24,000 player characters, the Bloodlord had killed more than 11,000 and Firemaw has killed more than 10,000.

The software is used as part of an overall system of testing after content is released. In-house testing, he said, could never be as good as having players hammer on content, because despite having many highly skilled players on the team, a cohesive guild that raids together regularly will always be better at handling challenges than a group of competent people who rarely play together. (Quality Assurance has a new in-house raiding guild that is working their way up through the content, however, to help improve the testing of raid content.)

The panel also previewed the next raid content to be added to World of Warcraft: The Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj (an outdoor 20-person dungeon comparable to Zul’Gurub in difficulty) and The Temple of Ahn’Qiraj (a mostly indoor 40-person dungeon slightly harder than Blackwing Lair).

The zone will open with a war between the Horde and the Alliance (and presumably the Cenarian Circle) and the returning Ahn’Qiraj menace. The war begins in Silithus, but takes place all over the world. Before the new dungeons are opened up, players of all levels will help fuel the war effort by gathering materials and achieving certain military objectives. Meanwhile, the uber guild types will be assembling a four-part scepter, which is used to ring the gong outside the Scarab Gate. And at which point, all hell breaks loose, and Silithus is consumed in a massive war. When the dust settles, two new dungeons are available on the server forever more.

The expectation is that most servers will accomplish the tasks within three weeks of the dungeons being patched in with the 1.9 patch later this year. On the off-chance the players on a given server have no particular interest in advancing the war effort, non-player characters will eventually get the job done on their own.

A brief run-down of the Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj was given, including a glance at General Rajaxx, the first boss reachable in the dungeon. Players will fight him with the help of NPC allies, and the more allies that survive, the better the resulting loot will be, similar to how the tribute run in North Dire Maul works. (The Temple of Ahn’Qiraj will have a similar event.)

Even more so than Zul’Gurub, the ruins will be a non-linear dungeon, allowing raids to pick where they want to go and who they want to fight to a certain extent: “All roads lead to phat lewt.”

The peek at the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj showed obsidian destroyers, and the first boss, the Prophet Skeram. The dungeon is huge — the map of the Scarlet Monestary library wing was showed beside the temple layout to scale.

“Scarlet Monestary can, like, fit in the boss room” of the temple.

They also briefly talked about Naxxramas, Kel’Thuzad’s necropolis floating above the undead-controlled city of Stratholme. The final fight will include a massive frostwyrm and the necromancer Kel’Thuzad himself.

The tower of Medivh, Karazhan, which will be part of the Burning Crusade expansion, will be a 10-person raid zone, probably, and one of Blizzard’s biggest dungeons to date.

“It will definitely be bigger than Blackrock Spire, upper and lower combined.”

Among the highlights: A fight in an opera house within the tower, including a battle on stage with a boss.

Also in the Burning Crusade will be the Caverns of Time, a dungeon with four wings, including at least one five-person dungeon and a full-blown battleground.

The Outland fortress of Kael’Thas Sunstrider, Tempest Keep, will also be designed with wings, and include a Molten Core-sized raiding instance.

In contrast, Hellfire Citadel, the prison where Magtheradon is kept, will be similar to Onyxia’s Lair, where players only need to dispense with a few “trash” enemies before getting to the showdown with Magtheradon himself.

And, of course, Illidan Stormrage will be the ultimate goal in the Black Temple.

Look for smaller raids in future rather than larger.

“We feel that even a hardcore raiding guild enjoys a smaller raid zone,” Kaplan said.

There will also be a change in the raid lockout system in the 1.9 patch, changing to a calendar-based system, but the details of what that meant were not clear.

 

 

BlizzCon: Morhaime & Dabiri kick off BlizzCon

After a horrendously long registration line — next year, Blizzard Entertainment needs to just mail tickets to folks, and if they don’t, make sure to get your tickets the night before the show, no matter what — Blizzard President Mike Morhaime welcomed gamers to the company’s first-ever convention, BlizzCon.

“Eleven years ago, we created the first Warcraft game, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. It could be played by two humans over a modem, and we thought that was pretty good,” he said. “When Frank Allen and I started Blizzard, we just wanted to make great games.”

Almost 8,000 people were expected to attend BlizzCon over the weekend, he said.

“So, on behalf of everyone at Blizzard, we want to thank you.”

He also had two bits of news. The second — that Blood Elves would be playable in the first World of Warcraft expansion, the Burning Crusade — was already fairly well-known via leaks from the international media prior to the show.

But the first was greeted with applause and cheers: The zerg will be playable in multiplayer StarCraft: Ghost, the forthcoming console game.

Shane Dabiri, the lead producer for World of Warcraft, then took over the presentation, segueing into a presentation of the Burning Crusade.

Like Morhaime, Dabiri thanked the players in attendance for making it all possible, and reaffirmed the development team’s commitment to content updates for the current game. Among the forthcoming additions to World of Warcraft were the two dungeons of Al’Qiraj, Kel’Thuzad’s flying necropolis of Naxxramas, linked auction houses “in every city” (at which the audience predictably went crazy), weather (“I’m not talking about Southern California-type weather,” but sandstorms, blizzards, driving rain, fog and so on) and more.

As for the Burning Crusade, he covered what had been rumored in light detail:

“You’ll be able to play two new races, the first of which we’re debuting today: The Blood Elves of Quel’Thalas.”

Also included in the Burning Crusade will be Medivh’s Tower of Kharazan and the Caverns of Time, along with a chance to face off with Illidan Stormrage himself, the main villain of the expansion.

“You get to go to the Black Temple and kick his ass.”

Epic flying mounts will be available in Outland, the shattered remains of Draenor. And they’ll be needed, since there will be areas that cannot be reached except by flying.

The new profession of Jewelcrafting, which owes a lot to the Diablo II socketing system, will also be added in the expansion.

“There’s just too much. I’d rather just show you,” he said, signalling for the video to play. (The video is also available at the Burning Crusade official site.)

“Blood elves, huh? I guess that means more guys playing girls,” he grinned.

On the FoH’s forum you can find a thread with the links to the scans of the 10-pages expansion preview further confirming what has been leaked all around, in the case you were fooled by the awful coverage of the mainstream gaming news sites.

No need to squint over the scans. Those articles are long but say nothing over what I already summarized a week ago.

What was interesting to read, instead, is some lore informations about the Blood Elves. The way Chris Metzen describes this race and its relationship with the Horde is in fact near to the thoughts I wrote back at release:

For example I didn’t know that the actual “normal” servers are excused in the lore, while the PvP servers are more ‘off’. The two factions aren’t at war from the lore point of view. Yes, they don’t coexist easily but the positive direction is about trying to find the peace. In this scenario, right into the lore, there’s NO distinct line between good and evil as alliance/horde. The horde isn’t evil at all, in particular the Taurens and the Forsaken (undead). To the point that the Night Elves could even be considered more evil than those (same for the Gnomes that aren’t portrayed as a good race *at all*).

From the lore point of view the gank squads on the PvP servers aren’t anymore patrols “to defend” a realm, they are instead attempts at breaking the alliance between the two factions, disrupting all the progress that was being made. Like terrorist acts to destabilize the situation. Something that I’m not sure the players are actually seeing.

Not only we have solid gameplay with each class working into its own special way, but even the races have back stories with a lot of depth that shape their role into the world and they are also not superficial at all.

They go right into the heart. Trying to reply the true essence of our myths. Civil wars, terrorist acts, heroism, peace, alliances, truces: the Taurens/native americans, the gnomes and their faith into tech that made them nuke their own population (Gnomeragon), the Dwarves and their nature to preserve and stay away from the battles, with a nostalgic attitude about the past, the Night Elves and their troubles with a world changing and destroying the “magic/nature” that they need to preserve so they can survive, the Orcs and their attempts at searching tranquility, in a dichotomy between a simple but rude attitude that makes them trying to go close to the peace they are searching and then ruin it…

WoW tries to shape and reproduce a long, long list of myths and archetypic situations. Even from the lore point of view it’s a masterpiece and does a lot more of any other game at trying to capture the essence of a fantasy world or also ‘why’ so many peoples love it.

When we firstly heard about the Blood Elves many players started to rant because they wouldn’t fit with the lore, but, in the light of some more details that were revealed, I believe that not only they fit perfectly, but they will also add a lot of appeal and justified controversy to the Horde. Metzen speaks of a “cultural trauma” that forced the Blood Elves to ally with the Horde just as a desperate act to survive, along with an ill-fated path with Illidian in order to draw their life source from demons. Their curruption isn’t blindly tied to a superficial dichotomy of good/evil. Instead it delves deeper in out cultural myths and how we perceive them.

The separation between good and evil is never so blatant and definite, “evil” is often the result of a compromise that just cannot be avoided. The most interesting evil characters are those that are felt “trapped” in a situation where they have no choice and where they need to accept the corruption only as a way to survive or even try to save who they love. “Corrupted good” is always more interesting than just straight evil and simply because it goes near to the real life and the situations we see each day. After all we love these fantasy worlds not because they are far from the reality, but mainly because they abstact and shape concretely (even visibly) those true cultural myths that strongly influence our life. Squeezing out the essence of the “cultural world” we perceive and within which we live.

Not only the Horde gains a graphically appealing race, but it also benefits from a further blur between good and evil. This faction acquires some more depth, becoming even more believable and solid than how it is already. From the perspective of the players more interesting to impersonate and feeling involved with.

A precisation about the mudflation and the rise of the level cap.

We used think about the mudflation when it comes to the content, itemization and economic systems but we forget that the mudflation goes beyond these boundaries. As I wrote in the other articles, the mudflation is a style of development that affects the whole game-world at its roots.

In particular I have a quote from Shane Dabiri (a producer of the game) which is reliable and adds one element that slipped out of my previous article: “We do not only give the existing spells a new level, we create new skills and talent-mechanisms”.

This is rather important because the mudflation will have an effect even on those new spells, skills and talent-mechanisms. The idea of having more tools and mechanics is an illusion. The mudflation, as explained, is a progressive erosion and loss of content. Not a growth.

The idea of adding depth and purpose to the game is exclusively a pretense and excuse. It’s a recursive, blind pattern coming right from the game mechanics to justify themselves and excuse the waste of more development time. It’s like if at the origin of a project there were deliberate flaws so that the product can be systematically replaced later on. This is the awful inheritance of the consumer society. We need to EXCUSE the production of new goods, so everything is created to be *already* flawed, disposable and temporary:

Jeff Freeman:
We’re more like Sports Illustrated.

The reason why game companies produce expansions for mmorpgs *is not* to expand and let the game-world evolve. It’s to PREVENT this. The mudflation is a way to CHOKE the potential and freeze the game in a recursive status where brand new excuses (like the rise of the level cap, or “better” versions of items) are produced to justify the new “fix” of content. We consume these worlds till there’s nothing left and need to move to something brand new to leech.

This could work for all the derivative goods that we consume daily. But it doesn’t work for a world. It is not appropriate and prevents the games in this genre to fulfill their true potential.

This is why I wrote down that silly idea about “MMORPG design with an ecological sensibility”:

Mudflated games finish to become just patchworks of more or less successful development. In 90% of the cases something broken or terribly unfun isn’t properly addressed and refactored. It just lies there as a “museum” while the developers work on something completely new in order to replace that part.

This is an approach that is strongly deep-rooted in a CULTURE. We produce JUNK. Nothing is reused because we throw everything away and buy something brand new. It’s the consumer society.

I do not like this because as in the real world this approach is killing the place where we live. It’s viable only as a temporary solution. We live on a countdown. We destroy the world because we have the illusion that everything can be replaced. There’s always space, always an exit. If something is broken or has problem, we do not fix it: we throw it away. We do not face the problems, we simply dodge them.

We bury them like we do with junk. We hide.

Going back to the idea of new talents, spells and skills. As I said, this doesn’t represent an exception to the mudflation. WoW is already *overwhelmed* by the insane amounts of buttons. While this made sense to offer classes that have more tools to use in the different situations, the principle has been stretched too much, chasing the superficial idea that: more is better. Whoever played some tactical games and understood how they work, knows that the depth of a system isn’t just because of the number of elements and rules involved. In fact the more you add them the more you move away from a tactical depth to drift toward something way more simple: the randomness. When there are too many rules and elements you obtain just a system that behaves at random and that noone can figure out. It would just be unfun and clunky.

If right now the buttons and bars take an 8% of the screen, I really hope that after 4-5 expansions I’ll still be able to see something beyond the UI. Good systems are kept simple. This is why the mudflation will have to take over this part as well. Some of the new skills and spells will *have to* replace old ones and become preferable (something similar already happens with the trinkets). An encounter cannot last for an hour so you can deploy all you have. At the end you’ll figure out an optimal pattern using around 8-10 buttons while the others will remain as rare, situational quirks.

This is why the fancy feature list on an expansion box claiming “more this and more that”, is just another empty excuse to justify the expense of more money while the designers remove content and open gaps that you *have to* fill if you don’t want to be outcast from this game-world.

Basically you are forced to join to comply and conform to this consumer sub-society with the greed for “more”.

Mkopec1:
And if they do this, will there be enough Lv70 type 5-15 man instances to appease the general public? and if they are in fact locking us out of the older Lv58-60 instances, are they gonna become ghost towns? Like 98% of EQ’s contentafter 5 years?

Tripamang:
Well they’re basically destroying what little content there is existing in the game, announcing it a year’ish in advance.. whats the point of even continuing if I come back 6-7’ish months form now, get the same gear in half the time and just plow through whatever new content there is at 70 for gear that’s might be worth keeping around that much longer =p

I guess what I’m getting at is that kills any sense of progression I’ve made so far.

Mkopec1:
This is what was concerning me also. If this is the case, why grind MC BWL and all that shit right now, when in a 1/2 years time all that shit will be obsolete anyways.

Algol Devilstar:
Why is this always brought up? Its called mudflation and it happens in every MMoRPG. Get used to it.

While BlizzCon approaches to “reveal” and hype the news that I anticipated a week ago, for me it’s time to do what I actually find more interesting: commenting the new features and expressing my opinion about where the game is heading.

What I’d say is that I both expected and dreaded this rise of the level cap. If there’s something that shouldn’t happen to the game is to chase once again EverQuest’s tail and all its mistakes. The rise of the level cap included. At the same time, if I was leading the design of the game and if I was completely accountable about its progress, I think I’d put in the expansion this fancy feature: the level cap rised to 70.

The point is that the whole argument is way, way more complex and deep than how it appears. From a strictly functional and material (commercial) point of view the first merit of WoW is its accessibility that gave it the possibility to become a “mass market” product. It’s not a novelty if I say that WoW is great about everything but the endgame (this simple reference summarizes a fundamental point). If the players leave or don’t find the game anymore (or not enough) satisfying it’s because at some point you reach the level cap and have to deal with the horrible design that plagued the game from that point onward. Even if it’s true that they tried to cater and cover all kinds of players. Blizzard did a wonderful work to streamline and adjust the design of this genre to valorize the good parts and remove the bad habits, but they weren’t able to see past the curtain and even understand and address the real radical points that represent the mixed blessing of this genre (superficially: the “satisfying repetable content”, whether it is PvE or PvP).

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

That’s the reason why if I was responsible about the game I would choose to go that way. Despite it conflicts with every other principle I have.

This premise is just to make clear that I criticize this half broken solution, but at the same time I expected it to happen and I also tend to justify it. What would actually matter now is about how it is implemented in order to minimize the problems. Because I believe that if you are aware of the risks, you can also decide to rise the level cap without breaking the game too much and actually offer something new and refreshing. How you use these tools is more important than the type of the tools you use. In this case I won’t go again in an endless dissertation about my design ideas about how this transition could be driven at best. Mostly because noone at Blizzard would read this and so it would be again just a wasted effort on my side and I prefer to dedicate myself to something else I find less frustrating.

Instead I think it’s interesting to point out the possible problems. Those “risks” I hinted. Between the various comments I read, I’d link Tobold’s comments, mostly because he writes clearly and always focusing on one-two arguments that can be then followed linearly instead of mixing and abstacting everything as I always do. His most interesting point beside the design difficulties to adapt the current content (talents, tradeskills, monster levels, PvP rewards etc..) is about the suggestion to stop to play right now and come back when the expansion is out. Which sounds crazy but is also true. While we can argue whether the current content will go or not right in the toilet, what is sure is that the current *progress* will.

We could assume that the players will retain their current gear for most of the hike to 70 but if this is true Blizzard would lose one of the strongest “fun” points: the sense of achievement. In the current game levelling is fun because you acquire new skills, spend talent points, get access to the mount and acquire progessively and constantly new gear. If the next 10 levels become just a grind with each level just giving out higher stats and nothing else, the “magic” would vanish easily and the expansion would finally feel rather dull. A game where you retain the same sword for 10 levels is a game that isn’t fun. So what could happen? Where is the line that will part the brand new level 60 character ready to move to 70 and those other players that have been at 60 for more than one year and collected all sort of powerful items? From my point of view the expansion will HAVE TO replace the gear for *all* the players. So, in a way or another, even the current purple gear will have to be mudflated and easily replaced. Not only through the new endless grinds awaiting us at 70. But also along the way, as accessible content even for the casual players. This is why Tobold is correct. Your current progress in the game is nihil if seen in perspective and prefectly fitting this following, explicatory, image (click on it to read a rather pertinent discussion):

When I say that this idea about raising the level cap is against all my principles it’s because it’s an argument that I discussed to exhaustion back then. It’s about the infamous mudflation. Quoting from three different articles:

“The mudflation is a way to continuously create, burn and replace.”

“The more the system is able to forget, the more the system is able to grow.”

“At the end the moral is that this cannot be an optimal process. There must be something better. The games modeled on a stain give only the illusion of content because the truth is that they are kept alive thanks to the mudflation. The truth is that the erosion, so the loss of content, is the reason why they still survive. This rings a bell? How it is possible that an old game can only survive through a loss of content when that content is supposed to be its main strength? How it’s possible that this loss underlines a quality (and probably the only one it has)?”

This last comment is particularly relevant because it brings the discussion on its real origin. We are back at considering the “satisfying repetable content”, or the lack thereof. If at the endgame we need to repeat an instance 50 times to get a drop it is not because the developers are sadistic. But because it’s the only way to keep up the pace and save time. I think everyone can agree without the need to follow a billion of explanatory links that the very first problem of WoW at the endgame has been about the “lack of content”. This has been the main topic since launch and it’s a general problem that is shared between ALL mmorpgs. Every developer working in this genre knows that the first issue is to find a viable solution to produce acceptable content at a decent pace. The debate between handcrafted and randomly generated content is still alive and well (think to the brand new discussion about Will Wright’s “Spore” and the use of algorithmic models, textures, worlds), exactly to try to deal with this need to optimize and maximize the production of content.

In this genre this is one of the main issues and probably the only one to which both the players and developers agree. Now, if this is something so absolutely fundamental, why the hell we design games that mudflate, hence erase progressively the content? Isn’t this totally absurd, inacceptable and counterproductive when the very first problem is to produce that content that now is meant to be replaced? How can this be logical and acceptable?

This brings the discussion back to the idea of mmorpgs like “disposable goods”, something that I strongly criticize and feel like the antithesis of the nature and strength of this genre. Not only this type of design is nowhere efficient and optimal commercially (since it demands a pace of content production that isn’t realistically possible and surely not convenient), but it also breaks what this genre has to offer. And instead of actually dealing with this problem, the decision to rise the level cap is mostly a way to “buy time” and postpone.

Blizzard has spent almost a year (and by the time the expansion is out, a year and half) trying to cope with the request for more endgame content. And with just one nimble gesture they are going to dismiss all that work to warp back in time (this is the true nature of the mudflation) and restart from zero to add to the game brand new content aimed to the new level cap and the following super-slow grind to progress on the gear acquisition. This is a silly excuse to waste development time, not a proper answer to the problem and a way to let the game develop in a positive way in the long term. As I wrote in my comments on the mudflation, this type of development will just deteriorate the game over time and its negative effects will be evident only later, when it’s not anymore possible to plan everything in another way.

Adding the comment I wrote on Corpnews for a more concrete and direct summary:

—
A whole lot of content will go right in the toilet.

The point is that a more or less trivial quest at 70 could hand out a “blue” that would just be more or less the same, if not better, than the “purple” at level 60.

Why the hell would you want to organize raids and farm 100 times those fucking old instances when you can get better rewards from the new content?

You are forgetting that it isn’t enough to go there and finish the instance to get your loot. You need to go there 50-100 times to get your stuff.

And why the hell a player would want to endure that fucking boring grind when there will be brand new shiny content at *all levels of difficulty*?

You assume that level 70 instances will be super hard (btw, “hard” was doing Blackfathom and Gnomeragon at the proper levels, not that dull raid content dissimulated by lag and choreography). But if Blizzard repeats their design and principles at 70 you’d have instances that need super catass equimpent as well as the brand new 5-man we had at 60s made now 70.

Without even considering that the whole lore goes to hell when you kill daily Ragnaros and all the rest. The feeling of a cohesive, immersive and consistent world just goes to hell. It’s violated.

This type of design has its head stuck in its ass. We complain about the lack of ideas, but the problem is that it’s all dark in there.

—
To conclude, a “dialogue” taken right from the official forums:

Foozle #1:
If the level cap is to be raised, what happens to the people who choose not to buy the expansion? Will everyone be able to level up to the new cap or only the people who buy the expansion?

Foozle #2:
you will have to get the expansion, unless you wanna sit in the world by yourself…

Foozle #3:
stfu and buy it you cheap ninja

(continued)

For the recap I’ll send you here.

I was finally able to read even the first part of the preview, so here’s a few more details that were missing from my other reports:

– The whole expansion will be centered around the Outlands, Medivh and the Dark Portal to make the main storyline progress.

– Background: Sargeras, the Titan representing the “evil” in the game, still wants to destroy the universe. His last plan is to ignore Azeroth, where he ecountered an unexpected resistence, to focus on the Outland. The realm with the remains of the planet of Dreanor, homeland of the orcs. What is left of this place grants access to the Twisting Nether, a portal that can be used to access every other plane of the existence. Here is where the battle between the forces of Azeroth and the demonic forces of Sargeras and his two lieutenants, Archimonde and Kil’Jaeden, will take place.

– The orcs were brought on Azeroth by Medivh through the Dark Portal. Still through the same portal the humans invaded Dreanor and damaged the portal, producing devastations on both sides. Destroying Dreanor from one and creating the Blasted Lands from the other.

– Through the Caverns of Time (located in Tanaris) the players will be able to see the zone surrounding the portal before the disaster and, in particular reenact the invasion of the orcs through the portal. The Caverns of Time are the place where the bronze dragons lead by Nordozmu “supervise” the flow of time.

– The Caverns of Time will allow the players to reenact three events. The invasion of the orcs as written above, the release of Thrall from enslavement and the battle of Mount Hyal, where the humans, orc and elves defeated Arthas and his army.

– The Deadwind Pass zone should get a restyle with the new year to be ready for the release of the expansion and the Kharazan instance.

– At least these two big instances are confirmed. Kharazan and the Caverns of Time.

Part 4 of 4 (1 – 2 – 3)

BLEEDING EDGE EDIT OF THE VERY LAST SECOND:

1- The feature list I anticipated here is 100% confirmed. All the other fancy leaks you see elsewhere are, instead, FAKE (believe me or not. In a week you’ll see I was right as always).

2- I’m going to edit that post in the next minutes to add lots of more insight infos I got (thanks interweb).

At least if the stress or the cops don’t get me.

—
It’s all here.

I’m franctically backupping things but I’ll hardly host that here or I’ll go overboard with the bandwidth in two days.

Anyway, if the links go down I’ll find mirrors. The interweb is big.

In the meantime I received my Vanguard beta application invite.

Have a funny leaky day.

EDIT: As explained the screenshots have been removed from this server. The original description was:
“includes more Blood Elves/SunstriderIsle screenshots, Karazhan and Black Morass Dark Portal”

EDIT2: Noone remembers but these new leaks confirm some five months old leaks. Anticipating news is fun and exciting.

EDIT3: First mirror went boom. I’m trying to host the file locally. Expect this own site to explode as well soon (or my bandwidth to go through the roof).

Last minute edit: The expansion feature list I translated here is almost certainly confirmed. The reader who wrote the summary posted on the forum a real photo showing the cover of the magazine. The informations were also confirmed by different sources.

CENSORSHIP HERE WE COME! I just received a fancy phone call from Vivendi asking me to remove the screenshots. The guy who contacted me was actually rather confused and I had to explain that I just collected and organized what I found. Anyway, Blizzard is RAGING and willingly to persecute everyone. The screenshots go down here.

But you are silly if you think you can stop the internet. Even if you have Blizzard’s money and believe you rule this world.

In the Q23 thread the images were thumbnailed and saved on imageshack. The original source seems also still active.

I wish I could still host everything here but I cannot afford the risk to go overboard just because I love mmorpgs and share informations.

Threaten for the win. Blizzard, you won a badge today.

EDIT4: Blizzcon is a thing of the past, so I restore the screenshots I was ‘asked’ to remove: