Bubble-Hearth Returns!

A lot of Mists of Pandaria information has flooded the internet today. Here at BoK, however, we focus on only the truly vital and important elements for our discerning readers.  To wit: Bubble-Hearth is back as a Minor Glyph!

Glyph of Righteous Retreat: During Divine Shield, you can invoke your Hearthstone 50% faster.

Ahh, bubble-hearth. How we love thee. Things are looking up for Mists of Pandaria.

Here are the other paladin minor glyphs:

Glyph of the Falling Avenger: You slow fall during Avenging Wrath.
Glyph of Winged Vengence: You grow larger during Avenging Wrath.

Pretty neat. Wings give you slow fall and make you bigger.

Glyph of Bladed Judgement: Your Judgement spell depicts an axe or sword instead of a hammer, if you have an axe or sword equipped.
Glyph of Fire From the Heavens: Your Judgement and Hammer of Wrath critical strikes call down fire from the sky.

Axes and swords are cool, and adds a little customization. As for Fire From the Heavens, we'll have to see the graphic. Judgement and Hammer of Wrath are already flashy, adding fire might be overkill. Or it might be awesome. There is a fine line between the two, especially when it comes to holy fire.

Glyph of Mounted Kings: Mounting a paladin mount automatically casts Blessing of Kings on you.
Glyph of the Luminous Charger: Your paladin class mounts glow with Holy Light.

Mounted Kings is a bit odd. But hey, why not? And it might be good in battlegrounds where you can just mount up and have Kings cast on the raid. Luminous Charger should be awesome. Though paladin chargers already have a bit of glow. But maybe the glow is turned up to 11. Should be good times.

I'm thinking Righteous Retreat, Falling Avenger, and Luminous Charger for my three minor glyphs.

Excellent work by the Mists team. Paladin minor glyphs have been very lackluster up to now, and Blizzard is correcting that with a vengeance.

Mass Effect 3: My Ending

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the ending of Mass Effect 3.

A commenter suggested that I write my own ending for ME3. They may have been tongue-in-cheek, but I'm bored, so here's my ending.

Continued below the jump.

[SWTOR] Mass Effect 3 Fallout

I want to express my displeasure about the ending of Mass Effect 3 to Bioware in the strongest possible terms.

I know, it's not really fair to the SWTOR team. But they got the advantages of the Bioware name when times were good, so now they must live with the downsides of that name.

Edit: Just to clarify, this is me cancelling my SWTOR subscription. In my view, companies like EA will only care if protests have a monetary effect. Outrage on a forum or blog does nothing.

Warning: Some of the comments contain spoilers.

Mass Effect 3: Endings (Spoilers!)

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the ending of Mass Effect 3.

99% of Mass Effect 3 is amazing, beautiful, outstanding, and superbly-written. 1% is a horrific travesty. Unfortunately, that 1% is the ending.

(The rest is below the break to avoid spoilers.)

Flow and Fiero

Zac Hill, who is on the Development Team for Magic: the Gathering, wrote an excellent article the other day: Sculpting Flow and Fiero. It's written from a Magic perspective, but a lot of it applies to games in general.

Flow and fiero are the two emotions evoked by games. From Zac Hill's article, here is the description of flow:

The flow experience is one of the most universally euphoric experiences human beings enjoy. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defines it as "the satisfying, exhilarating feeling of creative accomplishment and heightened functioning." In fact, he dedicated almost a decade of his life to researching flow. Where can we find it? Why do we enjoy it so much? And what are the secrets to getting more of it?

Csikszentmihalyi found that central to the flow experience were three factors: clear goals, rigidly defined rules of engagement, and the potential for measured improvement in the context of those goals and rules.

And the description of fiero:

If flow represents the height of the human capacity to learn—and therefore to triumph—fiero is the payoff that happens once we do that. 

According to Dr. McGonigal, fiero is "possibly the most primal rush we can experience." It's the feeling we get when we conquer an obstacle that, for whatever reason, is emotionally important to us. It's the weird and surreal force that leads to touchdown dances, fist-pumps, and the compulsion to scream "GOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL" when someone scores in a Premier League football match. 

The harder the challenge, the more severe the payoff. We love, after all, to confirm our own narratives of exceptionalism. But the obstacles we overcome must feel genuine. If I've just taught someone Magic, something is wrong with me if I just relish the opportunity to bash in that player's face by playing every match like it's the finals of the Pro Tour. On the other hand, a masterfully sculpted game like the recent Kibler-Finkel semifinals feels like a well-choreographed dance, and the moments where we win such games feel viscerally like they mean something. The root of that meaning is the fiero impulse, which inspires optimism by evincing mastery—and mastery helps us feel capable of meeting the most intense challenges of our lives.

An excellent article, and these two concepts seem very important to MMOs.  The part that MMOs are struggling with is taking the flow and fiero, which exist on an individual level, and trying to evoke them on the group level.

Mass Effect 3!

Yeah, I wouldn't expect any real posts for like a week.

Companion Affection

Milady wrote an interesting post on the evolution of Bioware's romances on her site Hypercritism. I started to post a response, but then had to think about it some more. It seems to me that the real issue is not so much the writing of romances, so much as it is the underlying companion affection system.

The companion affection system reminds me of valor points in WoW. The connection is probably not obvious, but they're both systems which have been iterated on over time, and which may no longer serve their original purpose.

Think about why Bioware came up with companion affection. What problem was it intended to solve?

In the early Bioware/Black Isle games, your relationship with a companion was really independent of your actions in the game, independent of your character's nature. Really the only thing that mattered was your previous conversations with the character and your progress in the game. Those were the keys which unlocked subsequent conversations.

I think the original idea behind companion affection was that your character's personality--as revealed through her actions in the game--should matter to your companions. A good-aligned character should find it easier to get along with other good-aligned people, and harder with people who share different values.  I think this idea makes sense, and is a reasonable behavior to try and simulate.

So Bioware decided on a simple scale. If your character took an action or dialogue a party member agrees with, your affection with that character increases. If they disagree, the affection decreases.

The next hurdle comes when you have more companions that party slots, and the game has roles. If your character fulfills the same combat role as Alistair, you're not going to have him in your party. But that means that Alistair's affection does not change, and so you will never see Alistair's personal storyline.

So Bioware implemented gifts. Gifts allow you to increase the affection of companions you don't adventure with. In The Old Republic, gifts also allow you to increase affection if you don't quest, if you PvP or do space battles or group instances.

But if you think about it, gifts also invalidate the very purpose of the companion system. Your character's personality doesn't matter to the companion any more. Instead you just ply them with gifts until their stories unlock.

What the gifts do is turn the companion affection system from a simulation into a grind. Another xp/rep grind that you fill out for rewards or to unlock content. I bet many players in SWTOR will have all five companions with their affection maxed out.

The other part of this is that players, especially MMO players, don't really like making permanent decisions, especially decisions that close off content. Gifts allow you to circumvent the choices made during leveling. Your choices are no longer permanent.

I think that companion affection systems would work better with two changes. First, no gifts, no ways to circumvent the choices you make in the game. Your companions react to your character as revealed by the choices you make.

Second, changes in companion affection are not restricted to your current companions, but rather occur for all the companions. This means that you can't avoid the loss of affection by using a different conversation. Conversation and decisions trigger a reaction in all characters, so a decision might see a gain in affection for some characters, and a loss for others.

Of course, the downside of this is that you won't see the stories for all the companions. Maybe the companion affection system is entirely unnecessary, and the old way of unlocking stories as the game progresses was just better. Maybe trying to make your character's personality--outside conversations with companions--matter to your companions is not worth the effort, and has too many negative consequences.