Rigged statistics

People are toying with WoW’s new statistics page.

Lum in particular says (or not, see comments) this is the perfect Mordor’s all-seeing eye that every designer would desire. Instead I’m one of thise who looks at statistics only with a mild interest.

People usually like statistics because they can be seen as something “objective”. But the truth is that they only give the illusion of the objectiveness. Even the statistics can be seen from different perspectives and there’s always something you miss. You can never be sure of your observation and at the end this makes statistics pretty much as arbitrary as any other observation.

Take for example this problem of the Defias. It’s the most evident one if you look at the kill list, and if you browse it you can see that every flavor of Defias is in pretty high position on that list.

So, instead of trusting what that page tells me, instead I consider my own experience. Well, in my own experience the Defias, and all Westfall in general, aren’t all that dangerous. Quite the opposite. In fact the last time I leveled a character (recently), moving to Westfall felt like a liberation because I knew things would have been very smooth and better manageable.

The most (and by a HUGE margin) dangerous zone for me at that level range, alliance side, has always been Loch Modan. I’ve died hundreds of times in Loch Modan and sometime even logged out in frustration. That kind of frustration that makes you want break things. That zone is pure hell and the quests really, really hard if you go solo and don’t outlevel them. There is aggro just everywhere and there’s always a random mob waiting to ambush in the worst moment possible that it feels almost like they have developed an artificial intelligence on their own.

I’ve died to troggs at least ten times more than I died to Defias. In particular if you aren’t a melee class, it’s basically impossible to fight troggs without aggroing the whole zone. Not only the troggs themselves are a great pulling puzzle, but there isn’t any decent safe space because as you move one step you aggro a spider or a bear or a whole other trogg camp with javeling throwing scouts and casters. If something goes wrong the risk of dying is extremely high. That zone is packed with roaming mobs and all the quests send you inside caverns or through narrow places that get increasingly dangerous. The quest given by the gnome who crashed near the lake with his plane is one of the hardest in the whole game for that level range. It sends you recuperating objects that sit deep in troggs camp where you have no possibility to pull one by one and also risk that they respawn right on you if you don’t clean the zone fast enough.

Westfall, instead, is much more open wide, there are safe spots and the encounters are much more spread apart. It has more breadth and it is much more accessible in general.

So. Ubiq says that Defias need nerfing. You know what? My theory is the exact opposite. Westfall and the Defias are the “easiest” part of the WHOLE game. And it’s for that reason that the players prefer it to other zones and play there for most of the time.

The kill list, as well as the number of “soul shards” created are documenting an use. Nothing more, nothing less.

The Defias are high on the list because, yes, they are more dangerous, but more dangerous among content that has the higher usage. This reveals a *preference* more than anything else.

Loch Modan is HELL compared to Westfall, but it isn’t represented in that list. And it isn’t represented not because the zone isn’t deadly, but because the players have learnt to AVOID that zone. As it is dangerous.

Moreover, the choice of (1) the faction and (2) the race, strongly influences those stats. It’s kind of obvious that the monsters who are being fought more often (and that may kill more players) are on the alliance/human side. No surprise there.

My conclusion is that those stats aren’t saying that Westfall is the deadly zone that should be nerfed. Those stats are instead the demonstration that Westfall is the zone preferred by the majority of the players and those zones that should be looked at are the others that the players have learnt to avoid (mudflation, or path of least resistance). Which is something I had understood from my own (arbitrary) observations, and not because a page of statistics was able to reveal all that to me.

And what I wrote here is just the demonstration that the use of statistics is an arbitrary observation as any other. And as valid as any other.

On WoW’s players retention

It’s a while this topic isn’t discussed and I take the occasion from a discussion on a forum (the GMG thread again) to bring this up again.

We are also close to the anniversary of the great analysis on “levels” that Raph wrote a year ago, and the long discussion that sprang from it. This was also tied to my further analysis (this is how MMORPGs die) that also led to the comments here below.

I do believe that Blizzard has focused on retention AND new player influx more then any other company really has, but thats saying a lot because they’ve also designed their game around new players vs. veterans.

At all.

Let’s be honest. WoW has an unexpected player retention but this is due to two main reasons:

1- WoW is “king of the hill”, and that fact alone assures a good retention and constant influx of new players. And this fact won’t change till WoW won’t have a serious competitor (and it won’t happen anytime soon).
2- The good retention the game still has is NOT due to what Blizzard did from release till today, but the great work on the “accessibility” that was done BEFORE release.

For example something that I repeat from *years* is that a soloable game usually ages better in the longer term as it can depend less on the presence of other players at the lower levels.

But despite WoW has a very good retention, it is still a clone of a model that is PREDESTINED to a decline. This is a rule.

A game world based on THAT model can die more or less slowly, but the fact that it WILL die is assured.


In particular I want to underline that “point 1” doesn’t depend on WoW’s game design worth, but just on a moment of the market.

While “point 2” is surely a WoW’s quality. Today the importance of soloable content is widely accepted everywhere, but it is often misinterpreted on its real meaning. Soloable content IS NOT important because there are players who prefer to play alone and that preference should be respected. That’s irrelevant, the least important aspect that is often seen as the main one.

The importance of soloable content doesn’t depend on a “preference”, but on the side-effects that forced grouping brings. The problem isn’t that some players dislike grouping, the problem is that EVERY player dislikes, for example, to sit LFG for a long period of time because he cannot progress in the game without a group. And maybe he has to sit LFG for a long time WITH a group because they cannot find an healer (and this is an example of a problem of game design that I did try to solve *radically* on this website with concrete ideas). The players don’t refuse force grouping, but they just don’t accept to have some time available only to see it wasted because they depend on other players. What is “punishing” and that was rewarded in soloable games that eliminated it, is the *dependence*.

So, if you could design a game where forced grouping can happen without side-effects, then you can also have a game with forced grouping that is largely successful. Today we have learnt that the solution isn’t forced grouping, but “favored” grouping. Where “favored” doesn’t mean that you put better incentives on grouping (like an exp bonus), but that you give the players better tools so that they can meet and play together more easily, with less burdens. For example by giving players the possibility to summon their friends (that WoW does with a warlock ability), or by giving them better LFG tools (that WoW still lacks today). Or by working on “permeable barriers” + “gated content”.

The key is removing the barriers, instead of building new ones.

And even in all these cases it is still a matter of “accessibility”. That’s the keyword of WoW’s success. That’s the word that defines WoW’s success. It is often mistaken as “polish”, but polish is important only in the measure it makes the game more accessible.

For example an interface is usually considered good when it is intuitive and simple to use. We can assume that a well polished interface IS intuitive and simple to use, but the “polish” is not the relevant trait. Because what really *matters* is the accessibility of that interface.

MMORPGs in general, but also MUDs, had a LONG story of user UNfriendly-ness. That’s the habit that WoW broke and that’s the real major key in WoW’s success.

The rest are a myriad of details, all with their own importance but also all subordinate to the “accessibility”.

P.S.
Also notice that this thing about the “accessibility” isn’t just my own fixation. There are games out there who made the accessibility their MAIN marketing strategy. Think for example to Guild Wars and their major decision to not require a credit card. This is again a case that falls in the field of accessibility.

There are aspects of the accessibility that are external to the game. Like this case about the credit card or the hardware requirements. But there are also aspects internal to the game and that are competence of game design, some of which I considered in the link above about permeable barriers.

Condensed comments about WoW’s expansion delay

1- Oh, rly?

2- More than Blizzard’s polish this looks like classic MMO delay.

3- This is the first time Blizzard gave an official release date (January 07)…

4- …And is going to miss it. (I’m ready to bet it won’t be out before January 31 2007)

5- Maybe now EQ2 and Guild Wars will sell some copies of their expansions ;p

6- It’s pretty fun to remember the end of the world when a Blizzard designer in August 05 said that the expansion wouldn’t probably be ready for Dec 05.

7- Someone has seen X-files too many times. (come on)

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Meeting Stones fixed in TBC

The most stupid design idea in the whole game (beside the PvP system) is going to be replaced with something more useful:

– The meeting stones will work like stationary warlock services. You click on the stone along with someone else and you can summon to the dungeon entrance the rest of your group.

Why I’m writing about this? Because, at last, they are also introducing a LFG system:

Notice the tabs on the bottom. There isn’t just the “LFG”. But also the “LFM”.

Going back to my comments about LFG systems:

It is fundamental for a LFG system to let you search specifically for groups already formed and active (both full or LFM).

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AGC: Rob Pardo’s keynote

World of Warcraft’s Deus Ex Machina Rob Pardo finally talks about the game as a whole.

I read it but I didn’t find anything particularly interesting or unexpected as he points out all stuff we have already discussed and analyzed ad nauseam. Often even before WoW, unheard.

These are the parts I liked more:

The Blizzard polish. Polish is the word associated with us in reviews. There’s this big assumption that polish is something you do in the end. That we’re successful because we spend 6-12 months at the end polishing. We do get more time, but we do the polish right from the beginning. It’s a constant effort. You have to have a culture of polish. Everyone has to be bought into it and you have to constantly preach it. if you leave it to the end, it’ll be mor difficult.

You’ll get a lot of “why does it matter that this feature is polished? it’s so small.” But people notice 1000s of polished features, not the single polished feature.

Polish starts in the design process.

Control is king. Game control is taken for granted a lot of times. I remember on Warcraft 3 I could feel a little bit of lag on the mouse cursor, and I kept saying it to the programmer, but he kept saying he couldn’t see anything wrong. Finally he coded in a hardware cursor so we could run both cursors at the same time, and lo and behold there were three frames of lag. And that matters, it’s important. People will leave over that, but you’ll never know that is the reason.

I hope we turn this genre into something special. The thing I think is really unique about MMO games — you look all the other genres, and the genre depicts a very specific type of gameplay. But massively multipayer, this genre has the biggest frontier, it has the most we can achieve, and we should be pushing at all kinds of differnet directions.

The rest was pretty much obvious to whoever has kept the eyes open in the last few years.

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WoW still growing?

Raph does SirBruce and found another investor presentation from Vivendi.

Or maybe not. In fact it the same I already commented, but I was somewhat fooled and went analyzing again the whole thing.

Here is some extrapolated data/best guesses I taken out from the graph, comparing it with the other official sources.

March 05 – 1.4 western [graph] – 550 eu – 850 na [March 17 press release, 500k eu – 800k us]
June 05 – 1.8 (+4) western [graph] – 850 (+3) eu – 950 na (+1)
September 05 – 2 (+2) western (+2) [graph] – 900 eu (+0.5) – 1.1 na (+1.5) [August 30 press release, 1M us]
December 05 – 2.4 (+4) western [graph] – 950 (+0.5) eu 1.4 na (+3)
March 06 – 2.7 (+3) western [graph] – 1.1 (+1.5) eu – 1.6 na (+2) [January 19 press release, 1M eu]

March 05 to 06 – (+1.3M) western – (+ 550) eu – (+750) us
March 05 to 06 – (+4M?) eastern
March 05 to 06 – (+5M) worldwide

However the graph seems a bit imprecise. If we follow the progress of the official press releases this is what we have:

March 17: 1.5M worldwide
June 14: 2M worldwide
August 30: 4M worldwide
November 8: 4.5M worldwide
December 20: 5M worldwide
January 19: 5.5 worldwide
February 28: 6M worldwide
May 10: 6.5M worldwide

The substantial jump between June and August is because of the launch in China. If we follow just the data coming from the press releases this is how the graph would look:

The red line is the progression shown on the graph, the blue line the progress shown through the press releases. They are similar but I guess they tried to make the graph and the progression look more uniform.

In November they launched in Taiwan. Now my suspect is that the graph was slightly rigged to show better numbers for the western market and impress the investors. I believe that the curve is flatter than that and that the ratio could be more unbalanced toward the eastern market if we consider all the elements.

Let’s have a glance at the future. The trend of the red curve is rather stable, so it’s possible to extend it ideally. Well, if nothing changes we would see the subscriptions climbing at above 8 million just by the end of September. But, hey, it IS September and no other press releases arrived from Blizzard. No 7M worldwide being surpassed. If we also take into consideration the last quarters +2 or +3 on the NA market we would also have the subscriptions for NA dangerously near or above 2M. While if we take the progression from March to September of the last year we would have instead a +2.5, putting the NA subscribers at around 1.8/1.9M *right now*.

If that’s true it would be a safe bet saying that the NA subscribers will climb above 2M BEFORE the launch of the expansion. Again, I doubt it. We’ll see if I’m wrong but I’m not so sure that the NA subscribers are even above 1.5M. That would disprove the data we have now, though. But that’s my suspect.

I’ll wait to see if there will be new announces about our market in the next few months that disproves my theories.


Honestly, I wasn’t expecting the NA market to show that kind of growth between the summer of the last year and now. I thought that the european market would have surpassed it at some point. Instead, if the data on that graph is correct, not only it is still smaller than the NA one, but also growing more slowly. While my estimate gave the NA players at around 1.3M right now, nearly at zero growth. Instead the game is still growing.

It would be interesting to see the results of the 2Q and 3Q 2006 on that graph as it is much more interesting to see how things are going right now that the game is launched in every major region, with the expansion still months away.

I agree with what Raph wrote here:

Given that curve, we can see that WoW likely has not yet stopped growing. It has a tremendous amount of headroom in Asia, and maybe another couple of quarters worth of growth in the West. It looks to me like WoW will crest around 3.5m in the West. Asia is anyone’s guess; the curve can be severely “kinked” by the appearance of a major competitor, and Asia is more likely to create one of those than the West, in my estimation.

With the difference that I think that a major competitor could appear in Asia, but affecting exclusively asian players as I don’t have even an ounce of faith that one of those mmorpgs in development such as Huxley, Sun and all those new titles popping up every day is going to draw much attention in our market.

But hey, there’s Warhammer. It plugs right in a kind of gameplay that is completely screward in WoW: the PvP. So it could become a better answer to a demand coming from the players. DAoC in the last years has been more popular in europe than in NA. WoW demonstrated that the european market is at least as big as the NA one, you just need the right offer. Moreover it seems to me that european players are much more inclined toward a PvP game and the Warhammer brand has always been stronger here.

Ideally Mythic *could* be Blizzard’s most serious competitor.

Katamary Damacy aliens called for help after WoW patch woes

I hear the servers are having some problems but this surpasses everything.

Taken from Q23:

MarchHare: If I wanted to complain about WoW, I would have started a thread talking about all the server instability yesterday that resulted in hundreds of players falling through the world and ending up in a stack of corpses piled high in the air (with no way to return to your body).

mouselock: There is no perhaps about it. It’s rare to find a screenshot that amply and unambiguously demonstrates the fubardness of patch days in the way this one does.

Instead if you are one of those interested in the vain speculations about class developments in the expansion, there’s a link with some unconfirmed news leaked from that “Friends and Family Alpha Test” that Blizzard tried badly to keep hidden:

[23:40] : oh btw there’s this totally sick herb in the BE starting area
[23:40] : called bloodthistle
[23:40] me: yeah?
[23:40] : it increases your spell damage and healing by a small amount for 10 minutes
[23:40] : but
[23:40] : when it wears off
[23:40] me: the herb does this?
[23:40] : yeah
[23:40] : but when it wears off you get a 15 min debuff called “bloodthistle withdrawal” that reduces your spirit by 5 :P
[23:40] : BE’s = potheads

[23:54] me: how’s the zone look?
[23:55] : badass
[00:00] : umm… the blood elf male ears bounce in even more annoying a way than the night elf
[00:00] : and they have three basic types of hairstyle
[00:00] : you can be Elrond
[00:00] : you can be Legolas
[00:00] : or you can be OMGDRAGONBALLZSUPERKONNICHIWASAN ^_______________^;;;;

What I’m wondering is the reason of the secrecy. I applauded them when they decided to drop the NDA from the beta long before the original release. I think it was a good thing for the game and contributed to its success and polish. That NDA was dropped around February. The release was at the end of November.

Now we are still supposed to see the expansion released before the end of the year, but it’s the end of August and we still know very little about it.

Or the lessons learnt during the beta were forgotten, or we’ll hardly see the expansion this year.

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Comments on WoW’s “world PvP”

Yesterday the 1.12 patch went live with those two BattleGrounds-like world PvP things.

I don’t have much to comment as I already wrote extensively about all that. I patched the game but still haven’t logged in. Nor I have an interest to, so I’m probably only going to follow how things go “by proxy”.

Here are some comments carefully picked out of context from FoH’s:

Quineloe: I think Blizzard was just trying to prove the point that world PVP is stupid. Good job on their part.

Cuppycake: Well what the heck did they think was going to happen? That’s *not* the kind of World PVP that anyone was ‘missing’ or ‘wanting.’

Etadanik: Actually, the only thing they proved is that they suck as PvP system designers.

Frott also makes some interesting points. There would be more to say about those but, again, I’ve done that already.

Blizzard will never get PvP right. Mark my words.


EDIT: Some comments about the problem of “worthwhile rewards” added to PvP.

No, the only problem is that if they make world PvP actually fun and rewarding it will become obvious how the BGs are stupid and all the work that went into them suddenly wasted since noone would bother with them. As people have and know already better games where they can play CTF.

They cannot afford that. So they keep designing world PvP rewards that sucks so that they cannot compete with BGs.

They just cannot allow that “world PvP” becomes a valid competitor of the BattleGrounds. They just cannot allow that the players have a real choice between one or the other.

In the exact same way they cannot afford 5-man/casual content to really compete with raids.

Watch out, I have a poisoned tooth.

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Honor system revamp and world PvP

Second batch of comments about the latest news on WoW’s upcoming expansion. This time about the changes to the Honor system and some more details on the “world PvP” that should also have a decent role in the new zones.

The first concern is that with the Arena’s rewards outclassing those coming from the Honor system, the role the latter will have in the game will have to be reconsidered. The impression I get is that Blizzard is trying to somewhat differentiate more the game on playstyles, in the sense that the Arena and Honor system will become two different, alternate paths that will become available in the hope of making everyone happy.

The “casual” player who ranted endlessly along these two years against that horrible Honor system will have it made more accessible, with the Honor points converted into cumulative currency (with the hope that they will also drop the “decay” over time) and where all the rewards are “eventually” reachable with enough persistence, while the “competitive” player will be contented with the Arena system that is going to work as a ladder based on “skill”, so again as a direct answer to what the players have asked for so long.

Initially I was thinking that they were going to use the ladder and calibrated matchmaking system even for the BattleGrounds and the Honor system, but after delving in all those details I have examined about the Arena system, now I’m more sure that they are aiming to keep the two separated exactly to split those two playstyles:

– One about time invested (the revamped Honor system unified with the faction)
– The other giving the illusion of “skill” (the Arena/ladder system)

With the second more selective and where the better rewards will be. So the two paths will be still alternate and aimed at two different types of players, but they won’t prefectly overlap since they are going to fit two different purposes.

See this lame graph I quickly made:

From the left to the right you have the progress and desirability of the reward, near the left there are the rewards more accessible but also weaker, while on the right you move toward the best ones, but also available to less and less players. Both “types” of players will be able to toy with both system but the very best rewards will be only for those at the top of the ladder in the Arenas.

I think Blizzard’s goal in this case is about maintaining the status quo, where only a very small group has access to the best gear, while the large majority of the players sit at the bottom of the pyramid and have a very hard time to move up from there, but with the difference that this time the top of the pyramid will be based on a ladder system built around that ELO rating system. So not anymore rewarding those players who grind the BGs every day at an insane level.

From THIS perspective the changes are good. Because the insane timesink that was the Honor system will be replaced by another quite awful timesink, but that is at least viable. While the Arena system will be based on a weekly ranking system that will measure the PvP performance instead of directly the “time wasted”. So in both cases the PvP will move away from that crazy incentive to never log out the game to not risk to drop in the ranks.

Our goal was not to create a system that involved a massive amount of time investment, it’s counter to all of WoW’s designer philosophy. We’ve never been focused on trying to be a time sink. Our PvP system in its current incarnation is very much like that, so what we’ve done is design a new PvP system that will go live with The Burning Crusade.

What is to still consider is that most people look at the Arena system as something widely accessible, while instead the truth is that it will become the higher-end of the PvP system, the most selective and hardcore.

With all these changes and the split between Honor system and Arena system I suspect that they’ll streamline the first, that now is divided between faction rewards and Honor ranks. With the Honor points transformed into “currency” their purpose directly overlaps with the way the faction grinds work (both become grindy exponential progressions). The underlying mechanic is the same so it’s possible that they will unify them into one.

The Honor points will become generic “currency”, while the factions will offer an incentive to play in every BGs instead of grind points in just one:

The Honor System will be a system where you gain honor points a lot like you do today, but you then just use those honor points as a currency, effectively. That will include items that were previously earned through reputation. We’ll kind of roll those into the Honor System, and it will also include a whole lot of new equipment for level 60 to 70 and beyond

There will be no more ranks in the honor system but those that have been participating will be able to keep anything they’ve earned to date including titles and equipment. The hope is also to encourage players to move between battlegrounds by having some equipment cost basic honor along with specific honor won in different locations.

Summary, with some guesswork:

– Honor points being converted into currency
– Ranks removed from the Honor system and migrated to the Arena/ladder system
– All current PvP rewards merged into one pool of items where each has a different cost
– Faction points being converted in BG-specific Honor points

So even if the items won’t be anymore ranked and will be unified into one pool, they’ll still be divided by BG, where to get one you have to spend some “generic” Honor points along with some “specific” Honor points you get from that BG. My guess is that the “specific Honor” is just going to be the new form of faction points (they said that they were going to revamp even the faction system, but no details yet), so with items requiring Honor + Faction points.


My opinion about the whole thing changed a lot while I was delving more and more details. Initially I was positively impressed, then disappointed when I figured out the way the Arena system was planned and finally went back to reconsider my critics after I placed every element in its place. I think that the plan they have is at least an improvement on the current situation. The Honor system was just stupid and it is being unified with the faction system, hopefully offering a better granularity for the rewards, instead of having to grind for months to just get a piece of armor. After all the juggling the system is more bearable. Still, it’s kind of weak for a PvP system, because they aren’t really tapping on what makes PvP fun in a virtual world.

But given the rules WoW currently has and pursues, overall the changes will work out better. So from a “functional” point of view they are okay. Then we can criticize the merit and the overall model used. For example I think the Arena system, will get EXTREMELY boring, redundant and repetitive. Since it will be highly competitive, after the initial popularity I believe most players will figure out they cannot compete and let the catasses to catass it. That’s what happened already with the Honor system: most people don’t bother.

What is important is to remember what the players really complained about. No, it’s not because they all want purple items and they want them be easy to reach. It was just because outside the PvP grind and the raid endgame there wasn’t much to do in the game. There weren’t “worthwhile alternatives”.

So it’s important to look at all this from the correct perspective. Instead of insisting on the fact that even after all the changes the best items will still fall in the hands of a small minority, what is important is to figure out if the “endgame” that comes in the expansion will offer something that is “worthwhile” even for the casual player. That is fun, that is rewarding. Whatever. Something different from what the game offers now.

People are interested into things to look forward to. This is why we read the previews. Because there’s some delusion about the current game and people are interested to know if in the expansion there is something for them.

In the case of the PvP we’ll see three different models. The Arena system on top, highly selective, with the best rewards dedicated to the most competitive players, then the Honor+faction system, nudged back and sitting on the lower end, with the usual structure in BGs. And then the “world PvP”, the one with “no reward” beside the fun you can get.

Sadly you can see how the last one is the one with the best potential, and still it’s the one completely irrelevant from the “function” in the game. It’s here that we enter in the merit of the problem. Essentially all these changes to the PvP system don’t add or transform much. People already ignore the Honor system just because they cannot compete, the Arena system will be somewhat more fair and practicable since it will depends more on performance than time, but what we’ll see will be just a slight shuffle of players. Some of the players who couldn’t compete in Honor system will have the possibility to compete in the Arena system, and at the same time some players who could compete in the Honor system, won’t have a chance in the Arenas.

Some players will move in, some out. My point is: for the great majority of the players things will remain unaltered.

The Arena system by definition will only interest (still seeing at things strictly from the functional perspective) a very small number of competitive players. So it won’t change the life in the game of the masses, the “world PvP” still has no reward (so again put aside for now), so what is supposed to have the significant impact on the playerbase is the Honor system. Even if we have ALREADY that system active in the form of faction rewards. So where are the changes?

There are two. The first is the hope that the Honor system rewards will be also revamped, so that they will require less of a huge timesink. The progress from one faction level to the next is way too spaced out, and it’s really a quite bad incentive since you see the reward too far away to look appealing. As we know these kinds of games are fun when the rewards are well-paced, frequent. If between an armor piece and its upgrade you are required to grind for three months full time then you can see how the system will still suck greatly. Here the problem is mostly about having to rely just on gear for the PvP rewards, so it’s more a structural flaw in the concept of the game.

The second is that, even if the Arena system will “matter” for a small number of players, it should still serve perfectly the purpose of the “time waster”. Without caring much about the loot to get at the end, the players could just like the cheap&quick fights in the Arenas. Even if you suck in the ladder system, it can still become a great way to kill time between an instance and the other, or group with a few guildies and have some quick, mindless fun. The idea of using very small teams and cross-faction matches is a great one because this will remove the queues and possibly have these arenas “always on”.

After all the players already duel all the time outside of the capital cities. The Arena system will become for many just that kind of low-commitment environment. In a game so strongly focused on “progress” and “investment” this could be a minor detail. But I suspect that instead it’s exactly because it will be so easily accessible that it could become truly popular and a phenomenon on its own. Again not because of the reward, but just because it’s a kind of casual playstyle within a broader game. With the big guys fighting for the carrot, while everyone else fights for the low-commitment fun.

A place where to go to “chill out”. Between a “serious” game session and the other. So the strength of the arena system will be in the fact that it actually LACKS a purpose. Instead of the big carrots at the end.


Let’s recap. We’ll have an Arena system with a double use. Where most of the players will go just to chill out and have some quick, mindless fun after an instance and the other, while a small minority will play it as an highly competitive environment, then we have the Honor system and the various BGs, which basically remains unaltered from what we have already in the game and where the players will farm points to get the loot. And finally we have the “world PvP”.

For the fun and the glory. But with no rewards.

Here is where I have some ideas that go in the exact opposite direction of what Blizzard is trying to do. To begin with, I would instantly remove forever the Honor points outside the BGs, so that the game goes back to that model I loved.

Then I would convert the “PvP objectives” in each zone to fit in the system I was suggesting to replace the current one. Flag those PvP objectives as “hotspots” and then reward Honor points for each kill the closer it is to the Hotspot. So that the PvP action can actually converge on those points and achieve three major goals:

1- Discourage ganking (no points if the kill happens far away from a PvP objective)
2- Leave relatively alone those who don’t want to be bothered (avoid the PvP hotspots)
3- Plug back the “roleplay” and “choice” into PvP (explained two links above)

Sadly this won’t happen and we’ll have to continue to deal with an half-assed implementation of world PvP. Exactly that part of the game with the most potential and that is instead the most deluding.

Some of the ideas they have about the mechanics and purposes are good. The point is that it’s the overall scheme to suck.

We also want to get world PvP flowing again in WoW. A lot of players missed it, so every Outlands zone was designed with a major PvP objective in mind.

All of the zones in Burning Crusade will include objective PvP areas. One of those was in a lush green zone we had our first chance to get a look at today called Nagrand. Smack in the middle of the zone is a neutral town that can be captured for the Horde or Alliance. The owner of the town will have access to merchants that have items unavailable anywhere else along with some other bonuses.

More interestingly, the gameplay surrounding the zone will involve stations set up on the four bridge entrances into the town. For instance, if the Horde holds the town, the Alliance will be able to set up griffon towers that players can use to fly across the town (on a rail) and drop bombs onto the NPC guards and enemy players. Attackers will have to aim and blast what they can quickly because defenders can run across the bridge (without dying of course) and click on the towers to knock them down. Once the NPC guards have been killed the town can be captured in the same way that flags are captured in Battlefield games.

See, these idea about the specific gameplay sound quite fun, the problem is the context.

Sadly the world PvP directly overlaps with the purpose of the BGs and this situation could be solved only with a more radical approach. So let me dare:

1- Remove those fucking diminishing returns on the Honor points, they were retarded since the very beginning
2- On the PvP servers only give Honor points in world PvP, nothing in BGs

Then the Honor system can be kept separated. From a side we have the “faction” rewards that are specific for each BG. As per the official description above, each reward will have a cost divided into “generic points” and points gained in that specific BG.

On The PvE servers, you would gain Honor points BOTH from fighting in a BG and in the world PvP. While on a PvP server the “generic” Honor points would be gained exclusively in the world PvP, while you would get in the BG instance only those points that are specific.

This would have the positive result of making the world PvP much more viable and popular on the PvP servers, while the cross-server BGs will also prevent the population in the BGs to thin out.

At the end this step MUST be done. On the PvP servers or it’s one or the other, you cannot support both. If there isn’t a purpose in the world PvP, people will just ignore it. Because after the initial burst everyone will still pass the great majority of the time closed in an instance. And that’s the death of the world PvP.

You need a reason to bring them out. The world PvP has the potential to be more fun, varied and compelling than just farming points endlessly in a BG. I think it’s time to valorize this part of the game and also offer it a role.

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