Like a broken record

January 30, 2006 by Abalieno | Leave a comment

Bla. And then bla. Still archiving the same shit. Also read this to put things into perspective. Before all my other comments, actually.

Again I “use” Blizzard because I need antagonism to mark my ideas. Not because I’m “angry” at them.

—

mouselock:
Bump PvP, equalize PvP inherently, or build PvP items which are simply more effective against real players than they are against monsters.

Yes, add even more cockblocking and selectivity. As if the game hasn’t enough already.

The faction grinds aren’t for the players who want all the fun of a raid zone but by themselves. I have absolutely no clue how you’d go about designing that.

So raiding is now the only fun that can be had in a game?

I guess not. So, if fun can be had in the game through other means, why these other means couldn’t offer comparable rewards?

“The best route should also be the most fun route.”

Practical example: In AQ not only you get the uber loot, but now you get even new “tiers” of your skills. So the power creep increases two folds.

It would have been hard to add also two “means” to achieve those skills, one within those raids and another more easily accessible?

Some of them suck, some of them don’t. There’s good gear out there for me at various places with revered to exalted faction. Needless to say, I’m not grinding faction despite this. There’s also good gear out there in dungeons. I’d much rather do the dungeons. There’s also good gear out there in raids. I’d also much rather do the raids.

If this was true noone would complain.

The wrong part is that there isn’t “good” gear in the raid instances. There is *better* gear. A different concept. Raiding gear stacks up in tiers, it doesn’t offer a flat power growth.

In fact the possibility to choose your own patterns would be a very good idea. But you cannot. In fact most of those activities are selective as the first example here above I commented about the PvP. The game promotes specialization and your character is developed through this specialization that doesn’t open the possibilities of the game. It closes them if not what you specialize into.

—

What you’re bitching about is that there’s not good gear in an utterly fun quest chain that a solo player can get that rivals raid quality gear in some way. Guess what? That’s an awfully specific condition. But supposedly Blizz. will still be trying to take care of you in an upcoming patch with the second dungeon set of armor. They’re supposed to come from quest lines most (but not all) of which are accessible solo. If I may be so bold, I’m going to predict here (because I don’t have a blog) that you will find fault with this solution when it’s implemented and you know the details

Of course I’ll bitch. Because I don’t see how this is a concrete answer to the problem. It’s just another “sop” to buy time. As the rise to the level cap.

These aren’t answers. These are temporary workarounds. It’s obvious that they don’t “convince” me.

Of course I’ll also check out this content. And hopefully will find it interesting. I’d do the same even if they added a level 30 instance. And I’m sure many other players would do the same.

I always enjoyed the content in WoW from 1 to 60. I never looked about the exp bar and I actually dinged 60 before finishing most of the stuff I began. I couldn’t care less about the power creep.

After that things changed and I was forced to start to care about “what I was wearing” because from that point onward you can access content and join other players only if you are “this tall”. And my way of play the game HAD to change. The alternative was cancelling (see Angie’s post up here on this page).

But here we were talking about the increasing gap between the “have” and “not have”. If with the new raid zone the skills and armors of the leet guys will skyrocket, I suspect that these upcoming Tier 0.5 will be laughable at best.

Or would involve another endless factional grind.

I’d be happy, instead, if they worked to level the power differential instead of increasing it exponentially. And if they worked to add some more satisfying progression that isn’t exclusively centered on that power growth.

Which are the same points I’ve written about in the last months:
1- Try to bring the players together instead of apart
2- Explore other possibilities that these games have to offer beside the endless power growth

Which also doesn’t mean that I would revolution WoW and make a completely different game. But only that I would try to improve on its qualities instead of making it progressively more alienating.

Again, I do not think the alienation and selection is what made this game successful. In fact I believe it’s what granted Blizzard the possibility to wipe the floor with EQ.

grumbles

January 30, 2006 by Abalieno | Leave a comment

No comment.

From Raph:
The paradigm in these so-called “sandbox games” is the same as it is for the MMORPG: a space in which there are multiple activities. Now, some of these activities may be games (levelling up, completing a time challenge); some may not be (chat systems); some may seem more important than others, or have more development time associated with them… In fact, we frequently see that they even have a “magic circle” insulating them from.

What we shouldn’t do is confuse the act of moving from one activity to another within the virtual space as being equivalent to playing a game. That’s why I try, when I have the luxury of being pedantic, to call most modern games “interactive entertainment experiences.”

It is reductionist for even game-centric MMORPGs to be considered to be merely games; even the most game-centric of them embeds some experiences that are not games, and of course, more can always be added. We tend to call a virtual world a game world when all the reward mechanisms are tied together into one game of advancement; that isn’t even the only way to make a game, much less the only way to make a virtual world.

Of course, the fact that MMORPGs aren’t intrinsically games doesn’t at all mean that if you choose to embed a game, you can pay it any less attention, or regard it as somehow less important. Arguably, we have regularly done games a disservice when putting them into MMORPGs, by failing to make the gameplay good enough and instead relying on the virtual world’s nature to prop up the gameplay. A good test for an embedded game in a virtual world would be to play it without the virtual world itself; if it’s fun enough that way, then we’re doing the game justice.

I believe that regarding virtual worlds this way opens up the door for a very different outlook on how to design them; the spread of possible worlds becomes much wider. If we let go of the notion that virtual worlds are games, not only will we get better virtual worlds: I believe we will get better game worlds too.

From Tess:
I have a rogue, on WoW, and she has been quite cheerfully running about, collecting Ancestral Coins for the Lunar Festival. Only, being me, and loving diving into dangerous places as much as I do, I’ve been sneaking around, trying to get some of the most difficult ones. (And being only level 42, many are excessively difficult.)

Little Railee has been shimmying along cliff faces, running through enemy cities with her hair on fire, chased by giants, knocked off of mountains by evil albino hippogryphs, and pinned against walls by packs of slavering hyenas. She showed a higher level druid how to best sneak past a group of monstrously higher level nagas, and then teamed up to fight the two that attacked, when they reached their goal. She rescued lowbies who were blithely charging into dire peril, and skated across a frozen lake full of murderous ghosts.

All-in-all, it’s some of the most fun I’ve ever had in one of these games. Yet, it’s not collecting coins that makes it fun. Honestly, I hate playing most collect-the-coin type platform games. They bore me to tears. In an MMO, however, this otherwise mundane coin collecting activity can become almost epic. You’re not just collecting coins. You’re journeying across perilous terrain into almost certain doom, with nothing to protect you but your flimsy armor, and the optimistic belief that you can find some clever trick to get you to your goal at the end of the road — assuming you make it to the end of the road. You may even make some friends and enemies along the way. The sheer openness, complexity, and richness of presentation provides a compelling array of possibilities that has more in common with reality than it has with most traditional games.

Wasting some time on the Lunar event thing

January 30, 2006 by Abalieno | Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How lame.

About the accessibility barriers and the two player “types”

January 29, 2006 by Abalieno | 9 Comments

Still the same line of thoughts. But here I archive my comments on the forums (mostly from here). Tomorrow I’ll archive the comments of other players because there’s a lot of interesting stuff.

I already wrote my conclusions here, before the discussion even started. The future of this genre will be for those who can provide concrete answers to these problems.

—

Rywill:
(about the distinction between “casuals” and “hardcore”)
This dev is, as nearly as I can tell, exactly right: WoW has essentially two sorts of players.

Wrong. WoW CREATES those two sorts of player. That’s a huge difference.

The content defines how you play, not the other way around.

– If the “content” requires eight hours of continuous gameplay, only those players who can afford that will find that content accessible.
– If the “content” requires you to have 200+ fire resist to hope to win an encounter, only those players who have access to it will be allowed in.

There aren’t gaps between the players if not those that Blizzard GENERATED.

Want another example?

How many people here would be interested in 40 person raid content if they could get the same spoils in a much smaller group that would likely contain a higher proportion of agreeable personailities? There’s probably somebody, but then there’s apparently people who get off on having their genitals tortured with woodworking tools too.

So the reason to have the greater rewards for the biggest raids is because, guess what? Without those rewards noone would bother raiding. How funny.

Where are these “types of players” that love so much raiding to the point of doing it even if the mobs dropped jack shit?

—
The “wrong” part with raiding is not because it’s wrong to have big PvE encounters in a game. But it’s when these raids become mandatory to compete and be part of a guild. The need to “catch up” or be left out from the game. Getting excluded. The social outcast.

The game “continues” in that direction, but at some point you crash against a wall that is not “permeable” for too many players. Those casual players that made this game so successful.

I’ve seen the MAJORITY of the guilds on my server collapse and get cannibalized by bigger guilds because that’s where the artificial appeal of the game is and what it demands, whether you like it or not. Or you adapt to this situation and are able to satisfy those requirements of time commitment and able to join the catass guilds, or you are out and are left watching. Those players will be encouraged to leave a guild if you cannot offer them access to the same uber stuff and remain in the game.

I’m sure that the great majority of the players would like better to stay in their smaller groups and guilds and play with their friends. To find that type of game “viable” instead of ridiculed by the insane, exponential power creep that sets differences of “second citizenship”.

I really don’t know why it’s unreasonable to reward raids in other, different ways instead of through just highly unbalanced power differential that consequently becomes YET ANOTHER accessibility barrier to the content.

The problem IS NOT because there’s this type of content available. Noone would complain about this.

The problem IS when this content becomes selective and mandatory.

One (selective) destroys the guilds and an healthy social fabric, the other (mandatory) destroys the balance and the natural competitiveness of a MMO.

—

Damien Neil:
So cancel your account, build a bridge, and get over it. Or keep playing and admit that no matter how much you complain, Blizzard has their claws into you well and good.

If I didn’t care I wouldn’t write about it.

If I write about it it’s because things could be better and I have a passion for this genre as a whole. So its problems are what interests me and what I care writing about.

It’s what will drive things forward, so it’s what MATTERS discussing.

As simple as that.

—

oinkfs:
Guilds get destroyed and gobbled up in every online community I’ve ever been in. I don’t see how that speaks for a maligned system.

Because here we have something specific and the design of the game directly affecting these guilds. *Actively* affecting this.

Most of the uber guilds are tightly locked. Even if you eventually have the time availability to join these raids you would still find rather hard to join one of these guilds.

It’s again because the content shapes the guilds. If you can support a 40-man raid, all the players ABOVE or BELOW that threshold are left out. If you don’t keep up with the “pace” of your guild you’ll get excluded because your gear won’t be able to compete with the gear of those who were able to be in 100% of the raids instead of 25%. So there’s the greed for loot. The NEED for loot.

Because if you don’t catch up and start winning the rolls (or pile up DKP or whatever catass point system is your guild using), you’ll get excluded again. Other lucky or with more time available players will get better loot than you and will replace you in those raids.

There’s a continue process of selection and exclusion. And this is BECAUSE of the design of the game.

I don’t think you did an adequate job rebutting Rywill’s conclusions, either Hrose. Like Dannimal said, FFXI doesn’t sound so different from WoW. I’ve heard that they have plenty of mind numbing raid content as well.

I never said that FFXI is a better game or that doesn’t have that type of raid content.

I just brought an example about PLENTY OF CONTENT (two whole expansions) that focuses of interesting, supposedly fun, consequent missions and *whole zones* that aren’t there to make you insanely stronger.

You do them because they are fun, challenging and because there’s a sense of progression coming from the storyline. You DON’T DO THEM because they hand out exponentially more powerful loot.

The point is: raid content can be challenging, fun and interesting WITHOUT this power creep huge unbalance. And WITHOUT creating this huge gap between the two “types” of players.

Again it’s the game that encourages this alienation of the community in two distinct groups.

—

Menzo:
Blizzard Guy Exec: Congratulations, team, you now have over 5.5 million paying subscribers worldwide. WoW is, by far, the most successful US-launched (and perhaps worldwide) MMO by a huge margin! And subscriptions aren’t going anywhere but up by our numbers – you’ve managed to grow the genre and the industry by creating what may be (arguably) the most important PC game ever made. What are you going to do now?

Blizzard Designer: Let’s throw our whole game design out the window and change everything! Forget this “high end” content crap, what people OBVIOUSLY want is low-end content. Forget the fact that they’re rewarding us hand over fist based on our design that puts hard-won loot at a premium.

Yes, because we all know how those 5.5 millions are there because of the raid content.

I believe that the success of the game is IN SPITE of the raid content and generally awful endgame content. Not thanks to it.

—
What about handing out good loot as the result of FUN content?

Because till today the alternative to raiding has been about grinding stuff to death.

But you can reverse the question: why the hell we *cannot* have the best loot from content that is accessible and challenging for everyone? What are the reasons preventing this to happen?

Because there must be reasons, right?

—

mouselock:
Oddly, the game already does this for me. So whose definition of “fun” do we use, then? (or, fuck, whose definition of “good”? There’s plenty of “good” loot available in places other than MC and ZG, y’know.)

“Good” as “comparable”.

The “fun” is easily defined by content. If removing the carrot from the raids would make the players STOP to raid completely (despite this content was available) would mean that “raiding” is unfun. As simple as that.

“Fun” means that you do something because you enjoy doing it. Not because it is mandatory to be somewhere else. It’s again the example of the “journey” compared to the “destination”. Which is the same shit we are repeating from 10 years. So I don’t think I need to explain the basics all over again.

The point is. Raid content can be FUN. I have fun doing it to an extent. Arguably the catass guilds get loot WHILE having fun.

The point is that this doesn’t translates to the casual players. Instead of giving them fun, playable content, they just slap in a pointless faction grind: “kill this worm one million of times”.

As I wrote other times on this forum the problem isn’t that there aren’t alternate advancement paths, but that these paths suck. They are terrible. One player enduring one of these factional grind would need his brain examined. Not rewarded.

Challenging for everyone and accessible to everyone. Accessibility and challenge are, in fact, conjugate variables. The more challenging something is, by definition, the harder it is to do.

No. Because once again “challenging” =! requiring better gear.

Gear in WoW is yet another barrier between the players and the content.

Which is exactly the fundamental point that generated all this discussion.

I want more of this

January 29, 2006 by Abalieno | 1 Comment

More than a month ago I promised myself to write down some comments about Lum’s book “MMG for dummies”. Then, along with a million of other things, the intention remained there, with an idea about the things I was going to write, but without actually finishing anything.

It’s so damn frustrating when you have a list of “things to do” that only keeps growing, leaving you with the feeling you are doing less and losing terrain every day.

Anyway, I wrote a reply on Q23 after the review on Slashdot and I was able to touch some of the points I was going to write about. So consider it a short version of that review and an idea of what I was going to say.

Of course I would have never bought a book like this if it wasn’t for Lum. And it’s really worth it, imho.

—
The book is really good because of Lum’s writing style. Then it’s not terribly useful for an already experienced player but this “usefulness” wouldn’t be the reason to read it.

The point is that it couldn’t be better than that. Lum really adds to the book and if it wasn’t for him it could have been rather boring and redundant. Instead it isn’t and it’s a great fun reading it.

You can basically imagine a “MMO for dummies” book and apply to it all the qualities that Lum’s writing style has and you can have an idea about why the book is really that good and worth reading.

It also helps a lot to see things in persepective, out of the momentum. There’s a sense of progression and history that is being slowly built. It builds “community”. While reading the book I couldn’t stop to imagine how absolutely great it could have been if he didn’t have to limit himself to introductory text.

The book is really wonderful in the way Lum approached the topic and wrote about it, but it leaves you wishing all the time he was more free to explore and discuss some of those arguments and MMO history that are only hinted due to the scope of the book.

Think to Tolkien. One of the best qualities of LOTR is that there’s always a hint of a bigger story and setting behind the scenes. A whole world to explore that in the book is never fully disclosed, never “reached”. It builds desire without satisfying it.

Lum’s book is pretty much the same :)

Then you can basically open the book at random and find always some great passages. Two really random examples.

About the “guild drama”:

Romantic Triangles: Bill meets Sue through the guild. Bill likes Sue. Sue likes Bill. Bill and Sue talk. A lot. Sue also likes Bob. Sue and Bob talk. A lot. Sue sends Bill a message that was meant for Bob. Things get ugly. Fast.

Or the anecdotes:

When good evacs go bad

Once in EverQuest, a multigroup raid was using the public OOC (out of character) chat channel to organize their raid, to the irritation of others that were in the zone. One wag decided to solve the problem by yelling “EVAC!” in the OOC channel. Many of the characters with evac did the thing they’d been trained to do by months of gameplay — they immediately hit the evac button when they saw the word EVAC! in the chat channel. The raid ended horribly immediately thereafter…

Lum is a talented writer, he could write about “cooking” and make it unique.

Get a clue.

January 29, 2006 by Abalieno | Leave a comment

Continuing on the same tone.

We always wonder about the magical recipe that would lead to “better games” and “humongous success”. Everyone would like a slice of Blizzard’s pie. The new kid on the block that stole all the market with just one game and as a first attempt. The MMO Jesus that multiplied the number of potential customers like the bread and fishes. Leaving all the other veteran companies to bite the dust and run salvage what’s still salvageable.

So what’s this magical recipe? What did Blizzard’s genial devs to make everyone else feel done? Well, it’s simple. They worked on the accessibility of the game to make it more polished and appealing and introduced a quest system that was partially able to hide the feeling of grind and pointless repetition by adding some convenient variance in the patterns. Which is exactly what our “rant communities” HAVE POINTED OUT FOR YEARS. Ignored.

Blizzard gave a decent answer to a problem. A better answer. Making a game “for everyone”.

We don’t need brilliant and experienced game designer like Raph because this genre is already stuck *at the most basic level*. It needs common sense, maybe, but there isn’t anything complex or arcane to understand.

MMORPG design is really that simple.

And what will be the market of the future? The true answer to this quastion is worth billion dollars. It’s like finding the Philosopher’s stone. It would turn everything into gold. And the answer is just IN FRONT OF EVERYONE’S NOSES. Exactly like Blizzard’s “brilliant” design was already so obvious if just some people at the decision-making level had a clue and woke up before.

The future of the genre is to make these world even more accessible and immersive. Working on the qualities that we already discovered and going to tap that potential that is still dormant. The future of the genre will be about offering *solid answers* to the problems that are now dodged or dismissed. It will be about games that bring the players together instead of apart and that will continue to appeal to casual players, without imposing them unacceptable strains and dependencies. Games that will let you contribute to the “world” without the need to schedule your life around it. Games that are accessible and don’t separate the players in social classes of uberness.

Bringing together, and not apart. Removing the barriers, accessibility. It’s always *the same shit*. We don’t need geniuses or Civ4’s “Great People” to advance this genre.

We just need to pay attention. Observe. React. There are already plenty of hints suggesting where the market is going and what are its true demands.

Part of the current success of Eve-Online (and, in particular, the “viral” part of it) is the direct consequence of their “one-shard” model. Which lets you “hear” about the game from your friends and join them right away (and as simple as a direct download for a full, updated client not shattered between a moltitude of expansion packs). Its viral success strongly depends on veteran MMO communities that slowly build up interest and curiosity. Letting the new players join the community without having to crash into barriers and discover that all your friends are spread between twelve+ servers and an arbitrary number of levels. Or that require a videocard so “uber” that would suck alone a whole month of real life work.

Things “come to life” in Eve, despite the shallow initial impression, because the game provides the right conditions for the players to organize and create something.

The pattern was really simple:
1- The devs work hard to make the game appealing on certain aspects (In Eve it’s the sandbox mode, the freedom and scope of the players’ interactions).
2- The players arrive and start to grow in number, bringing their friends in and constantly creating more curiosity and interest. The new players aren’t segregated and dispersed into hundreds of servers, but share the same space. Creating “permeable barriers” that don’t isolate them and encourage them to *connect* with the bigger, emergent community.

CONNECT. Get some “hints” from Xfire. Or its clones. That’s where we are going.

The games of the future will be those where the players won’t be fragmented and isolated between hundreds of servers, but those with permeable barriers. Where from a side you create “cozy worlds” where the community can build up still within a manageable scope, while from the other allowing the players to cross those barriers.

In the same way the players should be able to partially bypass their forced dependence on other players. Permeable barriers, again.

Leaving behind the restrictions and narrow design limitations of level-based treadmills. Removing that silliness that segregates the players till the point where there are huge gaps between the catasses and those who are left behind and are kicked out of the system. Excluded because they couldn’t “keep up” with the power creep and time requirements.

Creating more immersive, consistent worlds where the player will be able to interact more directly and naturally with the game world. Without the interfaces growing and crowding the screen till the point that you can’t see past them. Immediate, visceral, direct gameplay and not “try to find and hit the right button between a million others” while micromanaging everything at the most insane level.

Some of these problems were analyzed and explained by Raph brilliantly and in great detail. But we didn’t need Raph to bring those problems up! Our community already pointed them out from a long time! It was already all so fucking obvious. GLARING.

You just need to open your eyes.

And no, we don’t need fancy new genres or crazy Korean stuff. Because fantasy-themed games can be all that and SO MUCH MORE. Can’t you see?

We need *answers*. Practical, concrete answers and not more, endless dissertations wasting time like I’m doing here. I cannot provide those kind of answers because I have no powers on that front. I can only offer ideas opinions for what they are worth. But there are those, out there, who can. And they have this responsibility to start to move things forward. Concretely.

P.S.
It’s MMORPG design to be stupid and obvious. Execution is still hard. There are no shortcuts for that, I’m sorry.

And the answer to WoW’s casual players is…

January 29, 2006 by Abalieno | 4 Comments

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

Blog commentary here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q. What can you tell me about Naxxramas?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I also love this part:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WAKE UP!

The “healer” problem

January 27, 2006 by Abalieno | 15 Comments

Today I was trying to clean my desktop to make some space and I found a text file sitting there from a long time (along with tenths of others) with some quotes that I must have saved from some forum:

But healing really needs a revamp in terms of keeping track of the group. One of the most boring things ever is staring at health bars 90% of the time instead of actually seeing the world.

Would be cool to have a system in place that would allow you to keep track of everyone without having to stare at health bars. It would have to be some extremely innovative shit, tho.

This is a screenshot showing what our guild’s main priest sees in WoW (I hope she doesn’t kill me if she finds out I’m using it, noone knows of this site, anyway):

Not so different from a browser-based game. Are we sure we are actually using the potential of three dimensional worlds?

It’s definitely not a superficial problem and one that seriously needs an answer. I also believe, as the comments I quoted, that we should move away from UI-intensive gameplay and focus more on the immersion, realism and even a simplification of the combat mechanics.

Something to think and write about in the future. Consider this a memo.

“Prettier Cotsworld” patch: part 3

January 26, 2006 by Abalieno | Leave a comment

What “Class Changes and Cross Cluster Guilds and Alliances”. This is “Prettier Cotswold” patch! REJOICE!

Mythic is pushing out patches on the test server at an incredible speed, so the week isn’t ended that we have already the third part just two days after the previous.

Most of this patch focuses on more class changes to the assassins and some adjustements to the previous changes to the hybrids. I noticed they moved the proc heal styles to the enhancement line instead of the healing one, solving at least one of the problems I pointed since the other line usually doesn’t have a lots of points into it, making those skills too weak to be worth the space they take on the quickbar and still not enough to justify a respec. I won’t comment further the other class changes and fixes because I don’t find useful to try to explain those changes if I cannot offer worthwhile comments. I just don’t know the classes well enough and instead of gathering some superficial comments I decided to just shut up. I’m also having an high degree of frustration writing here in the wider context and not being able to say anything incisive (I’m at loss about this site for some reason. I cannot gather my thoughts, I find hard to explain things and even writing a few lines is a pain and takes me too long).

All the changes appear to be solid, though, and make sense.

On the other side there were many changes behind the scenes to the recent overhaul of the starting villages. Some of my complaints in the other post were solved and running around the village to check all the minor changes made me remember how much I love this game and how much I’d like to see it more popular, successful and evolving. In fact the main reason why I hate to write about the class changes it’s because I always feel that six months from now we’ll still be at the starting point. You seem to never achieve anything and most of the class redesign are circular movements. You never make a step forward, it’s all redundancy.

Instead the little things and fixes, the graphic updates, the reorganization of a zone, streamlining the newbie experience, enhancements to the UI, client and controls… All these are small, always understimated changes that instead always go in a positive direction. They are always definite improvements without the gain/loss scenario of the class changes where you always gain some and lose some as if you can never achieve anything satisfying and are stuck permanently in a sort of “meh” status.

Running around Cotswold makes me content and I wish that these types of enhancement would never stop. The place is so cozy and pretty now. They added “pathway” textures to lead to the various places and this alone makes the zone so much better. The newbie Darkness Falls dungeon now has a path leading to it, even if it’s still located outside the town. It’s still hard to spot but I changed my mind on the critics I made. The orientation of the cave entrance, away from the village instead of facing it, is good after all because more coherent with the sense of story. You move out of the village to find a place that doesn’t belong to it like if it was just another building or the entrance to SI. They added a new NPC that is easy to spot. It gives a funny quest (ooh, “spin the elixir”) that will drive a new player naturally inside the dungeon. So this NPC along with the new pathways on the ground will do a very good work to direct the players without making them feel lost. I truly approve these changes :)

These pathways added really add a new dimension to the game. No, I’m not crazy. This is the major difference between how the great zones in WoW are compared to those bland and dull in DAoC. In WoW each place is planned and modeled to have its own identity. You can take a screenshot and I’m able to recognize the exact spot. These zones build a seamless world with its own consistence and this is one of the things that WoW did better. In DAoC, instead, the zones are usually flat and featureless. There’s “terrain” but there aren’t really “places”. Pretty much all of the starting zones are about a mix of hills and plains bundled together just as a “space”. A “case”. It’s a box for the players to move within, but it doesn’t really have environments or “places”. There’s the grass, the hill and the trees, mixed together at random and failing at creating an immersive environment. It’s only a simulation of an environment without an actual content that gives it a quality.

The pathways instead are a perfect example of that dimension that DAoC missed. It was enough to add a few textures to create paths and some wood fences here and there that the game space acquired some direction and personality. It’s hard to explain in words what I mean but it’s enough to look at the new path that now connects Camelot with the housing zones that you easily understand what a big difference it makes (Mythic, consider this while developing the zones for Warhammer, these are the important “details”). See how the trees now border and follow the road instead of just being scattered randomly? See how this is already enought to bring some life to the place? It’s not anymore just a space connecting two points (the capital and the housing zones), but an environment with its own consistency. It’s not anymore “filler” space (see how it looked before) with a bunch of hills and trees distributed randomly, instead it becomes an handcrafted environment that has something to offer. A quality that gives a new dimension to game space. Making it interesting and helping the players relating to it (both for the immersion and to not feel lost in the continuity of the randomness of trees and hills). The terrain cannot remain just terrain as a space to hold something. It must be modelled and created. Shaped so that it can acquire its own quality that adds to the rest of the game. The terrain isn’t just a functional backdrop, it’s the fabric of the world. And that world need consistence and value already on its own.

Beside the paths I think they added some more objects inside the houses and slightly tweaked the lightmaps (they look more consistent now even if still not perfect). About the lightmaps: I hate DAoC’s engine but one thing that it does wonderfully is the rendering of the lights and colors (Morrowind is the same). I would really suggest this truly revolutionary idea. Why not get rid of the faked player torches in the game so that you could build an environment without having to tune it for both possibilities? This could even join another idea I suggested a while ago. This is another of those innate qualities of the game that could really be better used. Removing the player torches as a triggerable, artificial light could make all the zones and dungeons much more immersive and good-looking. As a compromise between a place too dark and one too bright, so that the colors would *really* come to life. Adding then dynamic, colored lights to all spells and effects (like the glowing weapons) would transition the game into a visual MASTERPIECE. Of course this isn’t a simple task and would probably require a huge work on the programming side, but then you could take advantage of the Warhammer fork to justify this work and integrate it with both games. It would be really an unique feature that no other game will be able to mirror in a long time.

Finishing the comments about the latest changes to the new starting village layout: I think they added a new tree type that looks nice and adds some variety and it’s now possible to see outside the buildings through real windows. New players now spawn in the world near their class trainer instead of inside an empty house (as I ranted about in the comments to the previous patch), and the Shrouded Isles portal has now a new look. It looks better in fact and, as I said above, contributes along with all the other tweaks and changes (pathways again!) to make the village so pretty and welcoming. If you try to log in the old version after getting used to the new changes the difference seems rather big.

I so love it! You did a great work Mythic.

(I collected some more screenshots)

P.S.
Make some of the emotes reset if the player moves. /worship while moving looks just too silly.