Tag Archives: WoW

World of Warcraft

I am a goon

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A few precisations about the leaked patch notes.

Yes, I am a goon. Not only, I’m more gullible than what you expect. In fact a part of me still believes and hopes that those patch notes are real.

You see, the point is not what I believe, what I predict or expect. The point is that those patch notes, beside a few lines here an there, were damn good. They raised my faith on Blizzard by a fair amount in a way that doesn’t happen in months. A few days after, that Shane kiddo posted the Battleplan about the future of the game. And that battleplan, for the most part is crap. It completely fails to deliver any exciting information about the development of the game and, at best, is able to to get a yawn out of a reader. It basically says: “Don’t expect much if not what you see and what was already repeated at exhaustion”.

I believe the hype. No, I don’t believe bad hype because I can see that it brings nowhere. But the good hype is always good. Even when it’s faked. I think that who put together those patch notes, no matter if a dev, a normal player or a kid with too much time available, did a way better work to arouse the attention than that lame “Battleplan 2.0”. That’s the major victory. Whoever put together those patch notes kicked the ass of everyone at Blizzard and put to shame that official letter.

Whoever put together those patch note is a very good designer. Yes, it’s easy to think about stuff and write about it without actually specify much and do the work. But a lot of what was written was about usability features that are already possible with the infrastructure of the game. The fixes to the battlegrounds, the changes on the queues, the changes to the meeting stones and so on. Those are all features that should have been available in the game LONG AGO. And it’s a shame that so damn good changes are confined to be just a joke to entertain us bloggers. It’s Blizzard that should arouse our interest with innovative ideas and new features, it’s not our work to imagine stuff to entertain ourself while the game arduously wobbles forward.

Now tell me. What would you have chosen to be a fake, the battleplan or those patch notes? You know my answer.

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Blizzard crumbling down to pieces

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It started a few months ago.

Or, better, a few years ago. We know that some important figures left Blizzard during the development of World of Warcraft. Arena.net and “Guild Wars” are one of the most notable fragment, Flagship Studios working on “Hellgate: London” is another.

Then there was the news of more devs leaving early this year to join a sub-division of NCSoft to work on an announced project. Which is what’s written in the link above.

World of Warcraft is starting to become a major phenomenon affecting and even overwhelming the whole game industry. What could stop it at this point? It’s simple, it can crumble from the inside.

I’m starting to see the leaks of devs above as the tip of the inceberg. In just a few days we have the news of more notable defections. Krones already spotted and commented one and I don’t have anything more to say about it. But he didn’t catch another that hit the news a few days before:

Castaway Entertainment is proud to announce that former Blizzard North studio lead Rick Seis has accepted the position of Technical Director and lead programmer for their current unannounced project. “I’m delighted that I will be able to rejoin friends and former coworkers from Blizzard North,” remarked Rick “and I look forward to reuniting with several others from that team very soon.”

Before joining Castaway, Rick held the position of development team lead at Blizzard North, the company responsible for the creation of the highly successful Action-RPG series Diablo. Prior to this position, Rick, who joined Blizzard North in 1994 as one of the company’s first employees, served as both a senior programmer on the original Diablo and the lead programmer of Diablo II. He has also functioned as the company’s director of technology.

“We are very excited about acquiring more of the most important resources of Blizzard North: the people that comprised the team there were by far their most valuable assets,” stated Michael Scandizzo, president of Castaway Entertainment. “With the team we have built, we will be able to maintain the quality of development Blizzard North fans have come to expect.”

So not only we have the news of one more important dev leaving Blizzard, but also the implicit declaration that more will follow and that Blizzard won’t see anything if not the crumbs of what is left (which reminds me what recently happened at Turbine).

Blizzard North is gone. Completely. If someone was left after the leaks that spawned Arena.net and Flagship Studios, now has probably joined this newest studio-branch.

Blizzard South doesn’t seem much healthier either. We know that a first group left to join NCSoft and now, as Krones reported, we know that more left to start yet another independent studio working on an unannounced mmorpg.

Who’s left? No, really.

Krones writes:

I’m not sure how many of the original visionaries are still with Blizzard, but in the wings there is always new and old talent ready to replace the traitors.

I believe in authorship, myself. Blizzard’s qualities come from the single devs who worked within. Maybe more and better talents will join, but it will still be something new that just cannot be related to what was before.

Thank you for the leak (1.8)

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The 1.7 patch is still stuck on the test server and rather badly bugged while we get leaked patch from the future. And they sound legit. Thank you (this time leaked directly on WoW’s boards through a character named “Spybot”).

(press button)

I give it a quick glance while reformatting it and it looks yummy. Lots of overdue usability fixes that are always an improvement.

And… Siege combat? Ohhh..

Let me build a quick highlights list:

Goblin Gizmo Gauntlet

Assemble robots to do battle via remote control against other players for engineering glory in this explosive event in Gadgetzan. Sign up for daily tournaments to win new parts to upgrade your invention! No engineering experience necessary.

General

– New Auction Houses in Stormwind, Darnassus, Thunderbluff, Undercity, Booty Bay, and Everlook are open and ready for business! Ask the guards in each city for directions. Auction Houses are now shared within a faction – Alliance, Horde, or the Steamwheedle Cartel. Extra heavy security in the form of Goblin Bouncers has been added to Auction Houses in goblin towns to put a stop to any… bidding wars.
– Buff/debuff tooltips will now be correctly updated from talents.
– The effects of +healing and +spell damage items will now be shown in the tooltips of spells they affect.

PvP

Honor System
– You will now receive some honor for restoring health to allies during PvP combat.
– Dishonorable Kills will now apply only to the players responsible, rather than to their entire party or raid.

Battlegrounds
– You can now exit a battleground from an option on the scoreboard at all times.
– Siege weapon combat has been introduced to the Alterac Valley battleground.
– Fixed several terrain exploits in Warsong Gulch.
– You can now enter the queues of multiple battlegrounds simultaneously. Once you become eligible and choose to enter a battleground, you will automatically leave the other battleground queues.
– You can now see the number of players from the other faction in a battleground queue.

Druids

– Druids have learned to dance while shapeshifted.
– There is now an animation for skinning and herb gathering in Bear and Cat Form.

Professions

– Plans for keyrings that hold multiple keys have been added to Blacksmithing.

User Interface

– Quest levels now appear in the quest log.

P.S.
I find fun how on FoH’s boards noone believes these are legit notes. But they are :)

I’m having a good fun seeing the moderators at full work trying to delete all the threads on the official forums.

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PvP in WoW is not happy, part 2

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EDIT- Reference also here.

I archive a post written by Tobold on his blog that connects with something I wrote in the past and another recent post:

Exploiting WoW PvP

I did a number of Warsong Gulch runs yesterday, all of which I either quickly won 3:0, or quickly lost 0:3. So I began to wonder where the balanced fights were. I noticed that the fights I won where always with the same people, the Horde PvP experts. And the fights that I lost were always against the same people, the Alliance PvP experts. Would be fun to see them fighting each other, experts against experts, wouldn’t it?

No chance. Because then I finally realized how they were exploiting the system. On a busy evening there are several instances of Warsong Gulch running. So the experts sign up, and the moment they appear in the instance, they quickly click on the button which shows the names of the players of *both* sides. And if they are paired against the other side experts, the type /afk, which instantly boots them out of the instance, and then they sign up for the other battlefield.

If you think that PvP is a fight of Horde against Alliance, you are wrong. It is a competition of Horde against Horde, and Alliance against Alliance. To get to the highest rank in PvP, you need to make more points than the players on your *own* side. What points the other side makes is totally irrelevant to your progress. So chosing your enemy well, and only fighting disorganized pickup groups, is your quickest way to the top.

Now I want to offer my 2 cents to try to point out the actual design problem that is causing that mess.

The problem is similar to the critiques I wrote about the communal processes and goals. In WoW the PvP is faked because there aren’t persistent elements (call them “consequences”) beside the PvP rewards. The PvP rewards are all but communal and are filed in the category of the “bigger e-peen”. Again communal processes (and not so much, in this case, since you can just go afk in Alterac and still farm honor/reputation) to reach egoistical goals. A duo that just doesn’t work as I often tried to demonstrate in the past.

The fact is that the PvP in WoW doesn’t exist. The war doesn’t exist. It’s all faked in a sort of detached arcade mode that roleplays itself, taking place somewhere else in the form of a detached, instanced zone. The PvP isn’t consistent, despite the two factions are at war from the “lore” point of view, they aren’t in the game. They don’t fight over something. They don’t conquer nor control (at least in the BGs, on the PvP servers the situation was better before they introduced the honor points). So it’s obvious how the whole and only purpose of the PvP is just the personal gain. A personal gain that can easily be exploited since the “war” exists just as a false excuse. As a pretence.

Basically the problems Tobold noted are just the consequence of a system that is not consistent. It doesn’t simulate what matters and the obvious result is about the players working around the faked war to reach the actual REAL, concrete goal: the personal reward. Once again the players outsmart the designers and show them where their ideas are broken and pretentious.

They made obvious how the “pattern” the designers assumed (a conflict between the factions) isn’t the “pattern” that the game actually offers (get phat loot through the reward system and a self-competitive ladder). The players finally found the shorter path to reach the “carrot”, which definitely isn’t through the conflict but through the avoidance of it. Because the conflict, in this game, is only assumed and never actually delivered (again because there is no persistence and no true communal goals).

Since the game offers no real war, the players have learnt how to avoid it and be happy (reach the carrot=discover the true mechanic of the system).

In other games where the PvP works there has always been a persistent element. Just because the war needs to be concrete within the game-layer, or it becomes stupid and pretentious. Like WoW’s PvP.

As I wrote in other occasions there is absolutely *nothing* to save in WoW’s PvP system. Nothing.

—

Mist-Warsong:

(about PvP rewards)
Not only that, but they’re infact anti-communal in that advancement is exclusionary to others, even others in your own guild. If you want to get to rank 14 as a guild, you each have to take turns playing one character a week to make up the last yard. The only thing ‘communal’ about PvP in WoW is that it takes an entire commune to play one char around the clock to get rank 14.

That’s a good point.

I started the thread but I disagree with most of the comments here. WoW doesn’t need harsher death penalties because, even if they could make the PvP more meaningful, they just aren’t fun and only add frustration to the mix. We go from one extreme to the other and this brings nowhere.

Unfortinately the awful MMO development brought the players to expect the bare minimum, so when I say that the war needs to be more “meaningful” everyone thinks to the death penalty. Which is again a personal mechanic that doesn’t really make the “war” more interesting, just more frustrating.

When I write that the game needs “persistence” I mean the persistence of the *world*. A war is never fought to just massacrate people, that’s a consequence. A war is usually fought for the territory and conquest. This doesn’t happen in WoW because the persistence of the territory and of the objectives is *volatile*. In Alterac you often fight the same named respawning evey few minutes. Nothing has effects and you can always switch to another instance.

In DAoC, beside the Realm Points, people fight for territory and keeps. If you go “afk” or you log out you won’t find a brand new “clean” instance when you decide to go back. You cannot “reset” the RvR. You cannot flee from the battlefield and spawn another one if you don’t like it. This makes the war concrete. The guilds have a role in the game and can conquer and upgrade their keeps and towers, the defence needs to be organized and if you want a bad situation to change you have to work for that change with the resources you have available.

In WoW there’s no guild involvement. All the mechanics are solely focused on the single character and the persistence of the war is completely gone thanks to meaningless instances that spawn at will.

This is what makes the war faked. Noone is actually fighting for anything else than a power-up.

It’s then not surprising if then the players find efficient shortcuts like going afk in Alterac or jump in and out instances in Warsong. That’s what the game currently promotes.

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Players Vs Time

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Yesterday Blizzard released its poor version of the Herald.

There isn’t really much to see. The Herald in DAoC is fun because it is permanent. From week to week the ranking pages remain more or less consistent, so you can work to get a better position over time. At your own pace. The system is open (accessible) for everyone and it is *persistent*. What you achieve in the ranking system will always remain there. Plus, it is also based on the guild system and alliances, so that the players can compete together, giving a guild an identity and a role in the game.

In WoW this doesn’t happen. The ranking pages aren’t themselves a fun mechanic because they are “volatile”. You can “catass for the victory” one week and show in the charts, but the next week, if you do not catass again and maybe more, you’ll vanish. This removes the identity from the system and makes it accessible only for a tiny fragment of the overall players.

But at least the page was useful to show the players how it’s actually impossible to go anywhere in the ranking system. On my server (Mannoroth) you need to be between the first 571 players only to reach the fifth rank. Which, in my experience, equals to at least fifteen hours to dedicate to BG farming per week.

Now what I’d suggest it to finally discover the true nature of this catass system. You see, these charts miss the most important field: a comparable metrics. In DAoC you see how many Realm Points you have, you see how many of them the player above you has and you know precisely how much effort it will take to gain a position. You know exactly that “x” position is equal to “x” points. In WoW you cannot because the requirements shift weekly depending on the catass performance of your realm and are in large part hidden in an obscure system. Well, this is false. WoW’s PvP system is simply based on “time”. It requires you to dedicate your full time to PvP and then more. Maybe you are curious about the requirements to reach the first ranks. Well, this requirement is rather simple: 24/7 time /played weekly, maybe AFK in an exploited BG (I know a few of the higher ranked players on my server).

That’s my suggestion. Add to the charts the time /played weekly, and we’ll really see how accessible the system is for the casual players.

Enjoy your “Players Vs Time”.

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Posting the Wrong Thing in The Hive

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So I created some mess :)

You, know, posting the wrong thing in the right place. The result is a lot of noise and the Shane guy to wake up:

Clarification

In case some of you don’t know, I’m Shawn from the interview. (I lurk – that’s what I do.) Let me address something in the hopes of providing clarification on my comments before things get too much further out there.

When I said “possibly” as to when an expansion will be out, that’s exactly what I mean. It is an estimation on my own part – not Blizzard’s official stance. That’s not me saying on behalf of Blizzard “mark your calendars”. The release date is determined not by a game designer such as myself – I can only provide anecdotal information based on my own experiences. An expansion is certainly NOT officially “slated” for any time whatsoever currently.

There are a lot of folks working on the project, and to assume I speak on behalf of the entirety Blizzard as the source of information as to when an expansion will be released (unless I say “Hey, here’s the official release date!~”) is a mistake. It could be out sooner or later than what I estimated, or I could be the Amazing Kreskin and have predicted the date spot on. There are a lot of unpredictable factors to weigh, and there are plenty of factors that frankly I just don’t know based on my position.

Just know that we’re working hard on things here, and are very excited about getting some good stuff out to you all.

Thanks much folks – back to lurking I go.

— Shawn Carnes
Game Designer
Blizzard Entertainment

Since I’m the one to have caused all that noise I’ll justify myself saying that an estimated date from a dev is better than no informations at all. Everyone has the right to discuss this, loud or not, happy or ranting. The discussion is always good from my point of view and never negative. I already explained my opinion.

Now I wonder. When is last time Blizzard respected an estimated release and when is the last time they released a product AHEAD of the estimated release? Just saying. If there are confirmed and official news we discuss those, if there are rumors we discuss the rumors.

Anyway, I wish it was this easy to drag the devs also into the meaningful discussions. Sadly, the discussions between the players and devs are a thing of the past.

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WoW’s expansion planned smartly and slated for “late 06”

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Taken from a thread on RNG forums (part of Grimwell diaspora):

Grimwell:
What range of levels will the content cover in this expansion? Will it focus only on the high level characters, or will there be something for everyone at every level?

Shawn:
While the full range of levels is covered, it won’t be equal; the support will be proportional to the population of the game, so it will tip to the high end of the game (as most veteran players will be of high level).

Any new quest arcs will fit into existing areas and arcs. Since WoW takes players on a deliberate path through the levels in specific areas, any new quests need to take advantage of these areas and pair up with existing content instead of making new areas for the same level range and moving or splitting up the player population.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read something smart and informative in an interview to a dev (I never heard before of this “Shawn Carnes”, he appears as a quest designer in the credits of the game) and in this case the whole interview is worth reading.

I quoted that part because it finally accepts concepts that I fought for in the past. And I’m definitely glad when my ideas can be proven correct and can be confirmed on a real game. In particular I’m referring to this and another post on this website. Beside all the lenghty articles I wrote about the mudflation.

Compare that quote from the interview above with what I wrote some time ago:

Right now “new content” and explansion packs are added to the margin of the game even when the “core” is still broken, not functional, unfun or unused. The fact is that this new content keeps derailing the development on something irrelevant. My idea is that you can add and expand the world by keeping a cohesive approach. To consider the game world as a “whole” instead of an amass of stuff you pile up randomly and that keeps growing without a sense.

Instead of creating new zones with new mobs and new quests, you can also re-consider what’s already in the game, add more paths and quests, add interactivity, adjust something that isn’t working properly and so on. With this approach you do not need a brand new zone with brand new monsters and quests in order to keep the game up to date and the interest of the players alive. The development can reuse, adjust and expand what is already available and add more “space” only when it is truly required.

(There’s also This thread where I discuss the same concepts with Brad McQuaid)

I believe those points are important and define the guidelines to bring the game more toward a “Virtual World” with its own complexity and personality instead of an enlarging stain of mudflated content that dries up and vanishes with the time, making the whole game progressively age and die. If they keep going in that direction WoW may have something to demonstrate even about its longevity.

But as I said even the rest of the interview is interesting. Firstly because it gives us more details about the behaviour of the subscribers (even more interesting today after this announce):

Grimwell:
With WoW breaking every MMOG record for subscription numbers, what is the plan at Blizzard for retention of users?

Shawn:
Current retention is high, and I am more impressed by the low turnover than our resubscription spikes during patches. The WoW live team continues to work on content directed to the existing customers to keep them interested in the game. If I had to guess, somewhere between 15 – 20% of our accounts have at least once 60th level character, so the content needs to cater to those customers.

Grimwell:
You mention spikes during patches. What are you seeing there?

Shawn:
Every time a major patch has been dropped for the game, we see a notable number of accounts reactivate. These spikes are easy enough to see and can be related to people wanting to check out the new content.

Then for some smart stabs at SOE:

Shawn:
Blizzard has no plans for in-game advertisements. They really do not fit the general nature of WoW. The development for WoW is, first and foremost, focused on the total game experience. What the players experience is our key to continued success.

Grimwell:
What of real money trading (RMT) for in game goods? Has Sony’s move to launch the ‘Station Exchange’ caused Blizzard to rethink its stance on RMT?

Shawn:
Blizzard does not condone RMT. We are more concerned about the experience of the players than we are in expanding in other directions.

And finally a surprising statement:

Shawn:
An expansion is planned, not in 2005, possibly in late 2006 barring unforeseen chaos. Work is already going on for the expansion, and it’s going good. What to look for?

Blizzard is good at polishing what we do well. The WoW expansion will be like other game expansions in that there will be new characters, items, spells, etc. but it will have the Blizzard twist.

And yes, between all the good ideas, I believe this one is particularly daring and will indeed payback. Breaking another of those annoying commonplaces about mmorpgs needing an expansion every six months or a year.

I already explained on Q23 why I believe Blizzard isn’t and shouldn’t be in a hurry:

Kunikos:
Honestly I’m surprised we haven’t heard of an expansion pack for WoW yet.

HRose:
Beside the other reasons, Blizzard has still the single-player mentality and you usually release an expansion pack when the game starts to sell less, so you can push it again in the shops.

But WoW is still at the top of the charts.

And now I’m positively impressed. They are taking their time to plan and develop a wonderful expansion, built on good principles and without rushing it. Focusing the rest of the development on the live game which is what truly matters right now.

Good work.

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Owned

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World of Warcraft breaks the 1 million mark just for NA subscribers:

IRVINE, California – August 29, 2005 – Blizzard Entertainment®, Inc. today announced that World of Warcraft®, its subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), has reached more than one million paying customers in North America. This brings the total population for Blizzard’s critically acclaimed game, the largest MMORPG in the world, to more than four million paying customers.

“It’s very rewarding to see so many new and returning players logging in to play World of Warcraft daily,” said Mike Morhaime, president and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “With the continued support of our retail partners, World of Warcraft has reached more than one million paying customers in North America well before its one-year anniversary in November. We would like to express our appreciation to both the players and our retail and license partners for helping us make World of Warcraft one of the most popular online games in the world.”

World of Warcraft’s Paying Customer Definition
World of Warcraft customers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or purchased a prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the installation box bundled with one free month access. Internet Game Room players having accessed the game over the last seven days are also counted as customers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or canceled subscriptions, and expired pre-paid cards. Customers in licensees’ territories are defined along the same rules.

My comment is still the same with the difference that this time I’m really surprised (past considerations).

I know that the game is still a best seller but I was expecting the subscription numbers to remain steady or just slightly rise. Balanced by the players leaving the game (the game is popular between younger players, which I considered less reliable long-term subscribers).

I underlined Mike Morhaime quote for a reason. WoW is considered the “fast food” of mmorpgs but I was wrong to believe that this fast food had a short life. In fact I still believe that the game has an high churn rate (people unsubscribing) but this is constantly compensated by returning players. McDonald’s is a fast food and we can criticize it on the quality of the food, but I don’t think today it has less customers than a few years ago. As McDonald’s, WoW is now conquering popularity (and unpopularity) all over the world exporting its own style. A successful style. As I already wrote this game is becoming more than a game and nearer to a cultural phenomenon.

Half a billion dollars a year. PC gaming is dead?

No, just owned.

Psyae commented on Ethic’s blog:

This is it. Finally, Bliz cracked the code opening the portal to this nth dimension. It’s what the geeks, the nerds, the hackers, the power gamers, the entrepreneurs, the closet RPers, the closet PVPers, the heroes, the maidens, the X-ers, the modernized baby boomers, the quiet, the loud, the you, and the me can all play together, simultaneously, daily, infinitely, and get a boatload of pleasure from it without feeling ashamed that you spend more of your “offtime

A cesspit

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EDIT- Updated.

Time to archive some stuff. This is a discussion on FoH’s boards about the awful faction grinding mechanics in WoW.
(complete thread)

—
Enjoy your endgame:

Tigole:
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.

They were able to hide the painful grind till level 60 to shove it back down your throat in all its splendor all at once.

REJOICE!

—

Malvesti:
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could raise your guild’s faction overall? It would be attached to the guild and you only get the benefit while an active member of the guild… Collective effort would not get wasted when people leave.

And this is a wonderful idea. So wonderful that you’ll never seen it implemented.

In WoW a “guild” is a shared chat and a tabard.

Dynalisia:
Getting faction for this shit is hardly connected to the endgame. The only thread between the two is the fact that you need some fire resist stuff for Ragnaros and it’s very easy for a guild to power a blacksmith to Exhalted and the other professions to whatever else is needed (some at honored, one at friendly I believe). I’m not complaining about the professions that really have holes in their makeup though, because I agree that theres a lot of stuff lacking. I’ll even grant people the fact that some things could be made somewhat less painful, but then again, this shit is supposed to be a grind. Tons of people have been whining about how WoW doesn’t have enough timesinks, so now they’ve implemented a couple. Remember that you don’t HAVE to do it, nobody is forcing you to grind your ass off or scrape your eyes out with a rusty fork.

Wodin:
Err, factioning up people for Thorium Brotherhood is purposely designed to be a guild effort and extremely hard. Yes, stealth-mining as a rogue is a horrible, mind-numbing task, especially now that the instance reset macro is fucked. But the point is that TB faction is one of those things that you only have a very few people at, and the entire guild throws their weight behind those people.

“Collective effort”? Hahahahaha.

Come on, WoW hasn’t anything collective into it. It’s just the greed for more phat leet to drive you further. You are just ready to stab your friend in the eye if that brought to a bigger e-peen.

“Collective goals”? WoW has yet to discover what that means.

FoghornDeadhorn:
What the fuck ever dude. What a crass, baseless statement no doubt grounded in many minutes of raiding guild experience in the live game. Don’t blame your guild’s, yours, or your perception of people’s motivations on the game. When you see people acting like kids at christmas telling you to check your mailbox because there’s a PURPLE BOOK in it, when you see a collective cheer go out that a gutgore ripper finally dropped, when big smiles go around when the long-suffering warlock gets his felheart robe, when every aurastone hammer or sorcerous dagger is met with guildwide glee — when any of these things happen you know people are looking out for eachother. If this is nothing you can relate to then I feel sorry for you and your sad little guild experience.

Nope sorry. It’s still egoistic-driven goals.

Truly communal goals are those involving not only a communal *process*, but also a communal *goal*.

If you need 100 players to kill a dragon that’s a communal process but the goal is still strictly personal and egoistic. You are there for your loot, that’s what the game is teaching to you. Sure, you can also be there for the fun or because you truly what to help your friends, but here we aren’t discussing a personal attitude, but the game mechanic. And the game mechanics NEVER give you communal goals. Just personal e-peens to grow.

The fact that the game FORCES you to group in order to reach your egoistical goal doesn’t make the community strong. Just selfish. Everyone will smile friendly at you till you can offer something to them they value. Well, I consider this AWFUL. It rewards egositic attitudes and I’ve seen plenty of drama and guilds collapsing just because someone else offered more phat loot.

Demonstrate that your guild can raid high-end content effectively and your requests for applications from new members will multiply for 1000. All ready to leave behind their friends to join the bigger guys where the phat leet is.

Again, please pay attention, I’m not speaking of the players, I’m speaking of what the *game mechanics* favor and encourage.

This game has yet to see truly communal activities where even the *goal* is communal. Not just the process. Give the players truly communal goals that will benefit *everyone involved* and not just the lucky guy winning the lotto or ninjaing the whole thing. That’s what would *truly* build a solid community and not the cesspit of selfish, whiny kids that WoW became.

—

Kildace:
What makes EQ’s / DAoC’s / FFXI’s mechanics different than WoW’s in such a radical way?

FFXI not much. The guild there is less than WoW. It’s barely a shared chat but at least you can equip and switch different linkshells. I don’t believe that the linkshells themselves are involved in any mechanics, so it’s not a good example.

For what I heard the missions in the two expansions could be considered communal goals. It seems there isn’t any form of phat loot to aquire at the end of the story and just the sense of accomplishment for being able to go through all that hard content. So it’s something you do together as a group and not driven by a personal greed. It’s not perfect but it’s already a positive model.

SWG and Shadowbane have towns. Those are communal goals because what you build is going to affect other players and the final result depends on the work of everyone and benefits the whole group.

DAoC’s RvR is both a personal and communal goal. Personal because you go there for the Realm Points, you gain skills and compete on the various ladders with other players. Then there’s the communal part that is about the real RvR. Guilds compete on a shared frontier, their performance affects everyone who goes there so the players become the *center* of the gameplay and do not just move on a fixed scenery. They can conquer keeps as a guild, upgrade them, defend them and organizing attacks. The “guild” is deeply involved on the mechanics, the guild itself gains points and is listed as every other character and you can also make alliances made up of different guilds. All this as a weight directly on the gameplay and what you do in the frontiers is again a shared purpose, a battle that isn’t personal but shared.

There are then the relics that go even beyond the level of the guild and become a *realm* effort. And here, again, you don’t go there for a personal greed but because you are contributing to a broader goal shared by everyone.

All this depends on how the game is built. The way the players can affect the environment and have an impact. In Eve-Online the corporation can conquer the solar systems and control them. These aren’t personal instances but part of the word shared by everyone else. They can build player-run stations in those zone and again impact the whole game world with their choices and action.

Again the players are at the center.

This is from The Escapist:

In the case of WoW, this has happened because Blizzard has taken the single player RPG, Diablo, and bolted the template over online technologies. If player vs. player combat is poor, or the capacity for self-creation is limited, then it’s because this was a game that took old standards of what makes a game successful and applied them to an entirely new way of interacting. The game is inflexible, focused on the individual and acutely reliant on content provided by the developers to keep us entertained. Sure, Bob is with you, and his dwarf looks funny, but you’re not exactly getting anywhere. There’s nothing unique here; you are, as one Icelandic games developer memorably said to me, “just queueing to be next on the theme park ride.” It’s empty, and you can’t do much to fill it up.

Communal goals require some impact. Because there’s the need to have an effect on more people or build something *together*.

There are already some examples out there but not many. You really do not need me to figure out what is a truly “communal goal” because, as I said, it’s just something to achieve or build where the *process* may be both communal or personal, but where the *goal* is shared. It affects and benefits a group of players.

The point is that in WoW the guild *doesn’t exist* at the level of the gameplay. I don’t know any mechanic in the game that is aware that there is a guild system, correct me if I’m wrong.

In DAoC not only you can conquer keeps as a guild, not only you can merit and realm points, not only there are statistics and alliances, but you can also get missions for the whole guild.

The point is that, in a way or the other, the game is *aware* that a guild exists and some of the mechanics revolve around it. I ranted a lot against Mythic because they didn’t go further on this path, but on WoW they are way behind.

Again, you don’t need me to imagine possible features with truly communal goal. You can just go to the first page of this thread and there’s a guy suggesting to link the factions to the whole guild. That’s one way to make the process truly communal and also a way to have the guild recognized by the mechanics in the game.

WoW needs this badly because, as the Escapist article says, from this perspective it is just dull and empty. The players have no impact and all is faked within instances that noone cares about.

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