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.

Not really much to yell about. I just find this funny.

Firstly a reblog:

Account Action: 72 Hour Suspension

Offense: National
This category includes both clear and masked language which:
. Promotes national hatred
. Is recognized as a national slur
. Alludes to symbols of national hatred

Details (Note – Times are listed in Greenwich Mean Time, GMT):
7/6/2005 15:02 Arcdelsol General – Ironforge the french dont have humor. They sold it to the Nazis

Secondly a similar mail, posted on my server forum:

Account Action: 3 Hour Suspension

Offense:National
This category includes both clear and masked language which:
. Promotes national hatred
. Is recognized as a national slur
. Alludes to symbols of national hatred

Details (Note – Times are listed in Greenwich Mean Time, GMT):
8/1/2005 4:22 (GMT) Speedfire General – The Barrens “except australia”
8/1/2005 4:23 (GMT) Speedfire General – The Barrens “!&$%ing kangaroos”

Hahahah, from my favourite blog:

(Currently in a reblogging frenzy)

There is no “Blizzard”. Old argument.

From Caydiem the confirmation that today World of Warcraft is lead by a “hydra”:

Foozle question:
Didn’t the lead developer leave blizzard and go to NCsoft?

Caydiem:
EnoYls is still here, as are Tigole and Kalgan… these people being the lead developers for World of Warcraft.

So no. :P

Who are these guys? Is this really Blizzard or just a bleached shade of the old company?

EnoYls is Rob Pardo. He definitely is a piece of Blizzard history and knows how to design a game. He was behind Starcraft, Diablo 2 and Warcraft 2 and 3. If WoW is so much successful it’s because he knows how to do his work. He’s also one of the few who remained on the projects from the beginning to the end. He is responsible for the game in all its parts.

Tigole? I don’t even know his real name (found it: Jeff Kaplan) and he’s known mostly as a “catass” guild leader. I do not have many more informations. He is one of the two we know about that was hired specifically for this project (the other is “Furor”, part of the Quest team and not a “lead designer”) and, specifically, to make the game appealing for those “uber guild”. In fact he is responsible for the endgame raid content. From my point of view he isn’t a bad guy and definitely knows what he is doing. But we also know where he wants to go and right now the “endgame” in WoW is clashing directly with the rest of the game and the part that has more problems. In this case it’s the approach to be wrong and not the specific work of the designer himself. Beside this, he is definitely not “Blizzard”. He arrived just for this game and was hired in 2002 when the project was already ongoing:

Originally posted by Tigole, 4-18-02

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.

And finally we have Kalgan. My little pet peeve. He is the one responsible for the utterly horrible PvP system. The one we have to thank for having thrown the true potential of the game right in the toilet. Depending on your opinion you can also blame him if you feel the classes aren’t balanced. If Tigole cannot be considered a Blizzard guy even more so can be said about Kalgan. He arrived when the game was in beta and just a few months from release. Right in time to wreck the PvP implementation, killing all the fun we started to see and appreciate with the well designed (at that time) PvP ruleset servers. He is also known as “Evocare”. He used that nickname when he was the lead designer of Ultima Online. Real name is “Tom Chilton”. If mmorpg development is a social treadmill he is one of the best at catassing it.

Two of three are “not Blizzard”. Blizzard itself does not exist anymore. It has been cannibalized between Blizzard North, South, Vivendi, NCSoft, Flagship Studios and hell knows what else. Companies and brands are a stupid illusions. What matters is about the people behind. The authors. Those who keep jumping as grasshoppers from company to company and from game to game.

Read about the mudflation applied to art.

We know through the community manager that Blizzard is working behind the scenes to address the population unbalance between Alliance and Horde. We also know that one of the most effective idea to have the PvP Battlegrounds active and playable isn’t coming in the foreseable future.

I steal this piece from Terra Nova that explains the new strategy that is being tested in Korea. It’s only a guess but I believe this is a test to a system that may be deployed consequently even on the North American and European servers.

According to today news, Blizzard Korea primarily categorizes war(PVP) servers into 4 groups:

A: alliance & horde both over-population
B: both optimal
C: horde want
D: Both want

7 servers belongs to A group, 8 to B, 11 to C, and 21 to D.

—
The process of character migration in WoW Korea will be going as follows.

First, 7 new severs will be created.

Second, horde players in group A can have choice of migration to one of new 7 servers.

Third, alliance players in D will automatically be migrated to one of new servers assigned by Blizzard Korea.

Last, horde players in D will automatically be migrated to one of group C servers assigned by Blizzard korea.

Then, how many really bad Alliance/Horde imabalances are hiding in category D could be inferred from above procedure.

Which is a lame and static version of my cluster idea.

I wonder when these big companies will start to plan ahead the server infrastructure in order to isolate and address radically these problems BEFORE release and BEFORE it’s too late to change something at the low level.

Well, beside Arena.net with Guild Wars.

Time for the apologies. I was wrong in my last report about the broken distribution of honor points.

The patch of this month actually solved the issue and what I noticed was just a minor glitch in the Honor tab.

—
Well, too much alarmism and call to arms from my side. I have to be more prudent. This is my Honor tab today:

The Honor points missing from the session of two days ago showed up in the stats today. So what I saw wasn’t a bug in the allocation of the points but just the Honor tab losing track of the points that were being split between the two days.

Which isn’t anything critical to point out and yell about. *ashamed*

(it’s odd how the Honorable Kills of the “Last Week” and “Lifetime” sections didn’t update with the new numbers)

Someone with a good memory may remember my personal “crusade” about the Honor points not being correctly distributed in the Battlegrounds that started more than two months ago. It was the middle of May, the Battlegrounds were patched on the test servers and they were still severely bugged in all thier parts: design, implementation, polish, balance and so on. We were just behind the E3 and Blizzard decided, after a week, to close Alterac because too bugged to be displayed at the show. It was a rather odd choice because Warsong was way more bugged, to the point of being completely unplayable. The flags were vanishing as the players logged or ported out and this made the instances lock and stall without the possibility to reset them. The players could just try to join one just to discover that the flags were missing. This while Kalgan was already celebrating their success.

I check back a couple of weeks and patch later to discover that NONE of the severe bugs were solved. Instead they were able to break things even more (thread also here. When the Battlegrounds launched on the test servers a player was getting 498 honor points for each flag returned, a few patch later, instead of fixing the actual problems, a flag was worth just 68 points. Unblelievable. Returning the three flags and completing the BG was worth just a total of 166 points. Less than a single kill:

This means that, you know, playing the CTF game is now completely USELESS. You just go there, leech kills in solo for a bit till the diminished returns are off and then jump on another instance searching for new opponents. That’s the behaviour that this system is rewarding and encouraging.

I’d really congratulate myself with the dev team. I definitely didn’t expect them to be THAT clueless. That’s not anymore a matter of good or bad design. Whoever came out with this last idea is just an idiot. Nothing else. There’s no need to disturb the “game design” on this issue. That’s just pure idiocy.

But then a day later Kalgan comments the problem on the forum and dispels my attacks by stating that the change to the points is unintended and just the result of a bug. Which brings to my withdrawal from the discussion: the problem is acknowledged and there isn’t anymore a reason to rant about it, the BGs are still on test and we will just have to wait for a fix before the patch is pushed live.

Some more than a week later, after having confidence that the bug was being solved, I opened with a clear title: “I’m a fucking optimist”. The patch reached the live servers, the test was complete but THE BUG WAS STILL THERE, UNTOUCHED. Actually BOTH the bugs. The display of the points in the UI and even the actual amount of points rewarded. Which is so terribly frustrating when you spend so much time testing the patch on the test servers, writing detailed reports and comments about the bugs and trying to draw the attention so that they get properly addressed. FOR NOTHING. The whole problem was blatantly ignored as a minor detail.

I started to investigate the problem some more till I got some evidence that not only there was the display bug, but even the actual points weren’t correctly distributed. Along with me even some other players started to notice that something was wrong. From Blizzard just silence.

From there I stopped to bring the issue up. It was just about wasting time. On the official forums there were multiple threads spanning more than twenty pages, with zero answers from Blizzard. The Honor system was so utterly horrible that the players didn’t even care about it to a level that could have moved some devs from their prolonged nap.

Another two weeks pass without a word, till Caydiem “magically” appears on one of those threads that some players continued to bump:

Random Foozle:
Why are people getting this misconception that you earn 1660 for winning a Warsong? Look at the scoreboard, it says 49 for first capture, 99 for second capture, and for winning you get 166, meaning you either get the addition of all 3, or 166.

Caydiem:
That is not the proper honor reward. The correct honor is 1660 for the level 51-60 bracket.

We’re looking into the display issue.

Smarter Foozle:
There is a display issue. It’s showing 166 instead of 1660.

There is another issue – you are not being awarded 1660.

Caydiem:
My apologies. I was and am aware it is more than merely a display problem, but I was posting rather quickly. :/

The database folks are investigating why honor is not being correctly distributed.

So we are back at the same point. More than one month passed since the bug was intruduced, the patch was published on the live servers with the problem still there untouched. Two week later we get another confirmation that “the database folks are investigating it”. Okay. What exactly are these database folks? Let’s wait some more I guess? Eventually we will see a fix with the next patch. Or it’s asking too much?

This while a keen player posted an interesting discussion with a funny GM about those points disappearing in the ravines of these mysterious servers (re-edited to cut out random spam not relevant). Where the fuck these points are going? We will get them back someday?:

You gained honor from the individual kills!

You have pride in the victory!

Have a super-fantabulous day in World of Warcraft!

What. The. Fuck?!

This was still happening three weeks ago, we were about in the exact same situation and again I decided to keep all this aside and wait the next patch. This patch arrives the 13 of July. I do not even bother to check because, once again, I have no doubts that the bug has been finally solved after all the protests from the players and not just an from an isolated fool on his blog. I’m busy with other stuff and I really do not care to waste my time to go back and investigate the problem *again*. Till yesterday.

I don’t have time to spend in long raids, so I decided to play these days in Warsong and gain some points. I wasn’t trying to find something to rant about. The Honor system is crap whether it works or not. I just wanted my reward for what I was able to do. It’s late in the night and there’s enough players just for one active instance. We win it easily, three times in a row within a short time span. We probably aren’t going to get many points from direct kills because there are just us around and we fight against the same horde characters over and over.

But there are the flags. The flags do not have those fucking diminished returns.

Today I log in and this is what I find:

There were two bugs, the “display bug” and the actual points not being received. Guess which received the priority and is now solved? Time to reopen the thread:

—
Okay. It’s from the middle of May that I rant against this and it’s bordering the absurd.

The Honor reward for winning the CTF game in Warsong is STILL BROKEN after more than two months and multiple threads spanning more than twenty pages with absolutely zero feedback from the CMs or developers.

This is my Honor tab today.

In the last two days I didn’t log in so the yesterday tab is showing just the brief session I had in the night.

As I said the session was deep in the night on Mannoroth, around 5AM. There was just one single instance spawning and the exact same group of Horde and Alliance playing.

We were able to WIN THREE TIMES IN A ROW in a short time span.

Now we all know that due to the retarded diminished return system we didn’t got Honor points from the direct kills after the first session since we faced three times just the exact same opponents. But what about the honor reward given by returning the flag?

We won three times. Each time grants us 1660 points. Straight and clean and without counting the direct kills of 10 horde players for a minimum of four times.

1660 * 3 = 4980

We MUST have AT LEAST 5000 Honor points as a bare minimum. Plus the kills we did along those sessions. The correct amount would be near 6000-7000 HPs.

Now look again the Honor points that the system ACTUALLY granted us:
2521

That’s enough for ONE session while we went through it three times.

I’d like to receive some “feedback” on this because after two months of reports and demonstations we don’t even have the problem acknowledged and if this isn’t the duty of a Community Manager I don’t know what it is.

I found this message from Tigole while digging the archives. The reason why I’m digging the archives is another, though, and you’ll see it soon:

Yes, we have definitely thought about Cross Server Battlegrounds. It’s a cool idea for several reasons and also solves some problems.

Unfortunately, at this time, our server architecture does not support the concept. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t the chance that someday we could restructure things to accommodate the idea. It’s a cool idea and we’ll keep discussing it.

It’s a “cool” idea? No. It’s a working solution to a core problem of the battlegrounds that seriously need to be addressed.

The fact that its implementation needs work isn’t a justification. We were anticipating and discussing this exact problem more than one year ago. When there was the time to develop the premises that could have made this idea concretely possible and that would have PREVENTED the problems in the first place.

Instead of waiting till it’s too late and the problems arrive as a “surprise”.