4.0 Early Levels, Part II

I'm just rolling new classes and giving the first couple levels a whirl on the PTR. These are some impressions.

Hunters

Uhh, low level hunters are a little insane. Before, Arcane Shot had a 6s cooldown, so you only got one shot off per fight. Now, Arcane Shot costs 25 focus, and you start with 100 focus, so you can pop off 4 Arcane Shots in a row. The new hunter starts with a pet, which is great, but stuff dies before your pet even reaches the mob. Maybe low level Arcane Shot should do a little less damage, so combat lasts longer than 2 GCDs.

Mages

Mages are very nice at low levels. You start with Fireball, which is pretty much the essence of magery.

Then at level 3 you get Arcane Missiles. The new Arcane Missiles is a lot of fun. It's now activated (like a proc) by your spells, but it's free. So you Fireball a couple times, and then Arcane Missiles proc and you blast the mob with them. It's lots of fun, and much better than just spamming Fireball.

The proc also shows off Blizzard's new built-in Power Auras. When Arcane Missiles proc, two purple lines appear on your screen to either side of your character. It's very noticeable, and is much better than watching your action bar or buffs.

Warlocks

Warlocks start with the Imp and Shadowbolt. They also start with Demon Armor, but that wasn't on the action bar so I didn't notice it.

The Imp is good, but I don't agree with Shadowbolt. It makes the low level warlock feel too much like a mage. But then again, I'm prejudiced against Shadowbolt. I think the single worst mistake ever made by the WoW Class Dev Team was warlocks at the end of TBC. We started with a pet class with a focus on DoTs and lovely, lovely complexity. Then it was turned into a class that sacrificed the pet and spammed a single nuke.

So yeah, putting Shadowbolt forward as the introductory warlock spell is bad. I would suggest giving level 1 warlocks Drain Life instead. It's very different from mage spells, and is much more appropriate thematically. Warlocks don't just blast you down, they drain the very life from you, healing themselves at your expense.

As well, 4.0 warlocks get Drain Life at level 8, so moving Shadowbolt up to level 8 in its place doesn't really change things in the long run.

Warriors

Level 1 Warriors are very meh. You start with Attack, which starts auto-attack, and Strike, which is a 20 rage attack. It's better than starting with Heroic Strike, I guess. It takes about two auto-attacks to generate enough rage for a Strike. I found that I was actually pressing the Attack button, just to have another button to press during combat.

But then, at level 3 you get Charge. And the warrior goes from meh to great. Charge, swing, Strike, good times. Charge is just awesome, definitely a contender for best spell in the game.

And at level 5, warriors get Victory Rush and go from great to outright amazing. Victory Rush does a fair chunk of healing and damage. Charge, swing, Strike, Victory Rush the next target, swing, Strike, Charge, Victory Rush, etc. It just flows so beautifully.

Other Observations

I like the low level tooltips on abilities. They're geared to the beginner, and often offer tips on how best to use the ability. For example, Fireblast suggests that you use the spell when you are moving or in melee.

Ranged classes also had their range increased to 40 yards. I'm not sure I really like this. It feels a little too far from the mob. 30-35 yards felt a little better.

As well, from a healing point of view, 35-ish yards was ideal because heals reached 40 yards. The tank was often on the other side of the mob from you. So when ranged stood at 35 yards from the boss, you could stand with them and still reach the tank on the other side. And if mob did that charge the closest range thing, they'd hit the ranged instead of you.

Now with both heals and ranged hitting 40 yards, if the ranged stands at 40 yards, the healers will have to stand closer to reach the tank. That creates some separation meaning that AoE heals will be a little less effective. Not to mention that rather than just having the melee in one place and ranged in another place, we'll now have melee at point 1, healers at point 2, and ranged dps at point 3. As well, healers will soak random mechanics that target the nearest range. Or that any effect which causes the ranged to run will probably cause the healers to have to run farther or in different directions.

4.0 Early Paladin

So the 4.0 PTR is out. You can download it (16 gigs!) and test all the new class talents and mechanics. No Cataclysm content is available though.

Character copy wasn't working for me, so I decided to test out the low level paladin experience.

First off, the UI changes are superb. The new character pane is great. The new guild pane is pretty nice as well. The only thing I would change is that the Guild pane really needs a default hotkey.

As for the newbie paladin experience, I don't really like it. The thing is that the very first level sets the tone for the class. Cataclysm Paladins start off with only Crusader Strike. No heal. CS is a great skill, and does make leveling more interactive. But it makes the level 1 paladin feel like a warrior. Previously, a level 1 paladin had Seal of Righteousness and Holy Light. It set the tone that the paladin hits her enemies and heals her allies.

The next few levels don't help either. At level 3 the paladin gets Judgement and Seal of Righteousness. Judgement doesn't even have the healing debuff, so it's a straight combat move. You get Devo Aura at 5, but still, it just doesn't feel right.

The other problem with level 1 paladins is that CS generates Holy Power, but you don't have any skills to use it. An extremely common question in general chat is "What is this yellow bar under my paladin's health/mana?" The first skill that uses Holy Power is Word of Glory (the instant heal) at level 9.

What I would suggest is that Word of Glory gets moved to level 1. That way the paladin gets both a melee attack and a heal right from the very start. Both facets of the paladin are represented, and paladins are once again differentiated from warriors. As well, you get an outlet for Holy Power, and get paladins used to the new mechanic right from the start.

Then you could move Judgement to level 5 and push Devotion Aura to level 9. You don't really need Judgement right away at level 3.

I think this scheme would work better for the initial paladin experience.

Tier Sets in Wrath

For some reason, I feel like the Tier sets in Wrath were less ... effective, maybe ... than the Tier sets in TBC and Vanilla. For me, the main differences are colors and uniqueness.

When I think of old Tier sets, I remember the colors more than anything else. The red and gold of Lightforge, the black edged with red/gold of Judgement, the blue and gold of T6, and even the purple of T5. The Wrath Tier sets, on the other hand, have as many as 3 different variations, and that greatly decreased their memorability. You couldn't just look at someone and recognize the Tier set, like you could in the previous version.

Of all the paladin sets of Wrath, the white T8 may have been iconic enough to stand near T2 and T6.¹ But having the other recolors of the same set diluted the effect.

The other issue with Tier armor this time around is that the non-Tier armor shared the same look with the Tier. Perhaps that this was done so people would look more cohesive, not have the "clown" effect of TBC. But it just made Tier feel less special. You couldn't just look at the crowd and pick out someone in her full Tier set.

Blizzard should step back a bit and make Tier armor feel a bit more unique. Use a single, iconic, color scheme for both normal and heroic variants. Use a different, more generic, armor model for non-tier gear. Tier armor pieces are the main Loot as Reward items in raids, the armor you collect and save in your bank. Someone in full Tier should look significantly different than someone in mixed gear, and that really wasn't the case for most of Wrath.

1. Also, T10 should have gone with pants. I like the plate skirt/cassock of T2, but it's something that should be used sparingly, and regular plate pants worked better with the rest of T10. The skirt/cassock works better with sets that have a cleric-ish vibe, but the dragon helm of T10 evokes knights.

Response to Spinks on Gamer Misogyny

This is a response to Spinks' That 'women in gaming' post. I posted a comment to that post in haste, and didn't really convey what I wanted to convey. So this is my second stab at it.

Proposition 1: A significant portion of gamer culture is virulently misogynistic.

I completely and utterly agree with this proposition. It's pretty much self-evident.

Proposition 2: A significant portion of gamer culture is virulently misogynistic, because of the way games are designed.

I completely disagree with this proposition.

Aside from the few companies who are stupid and/or deliberately provocative (*cough*Rockstar*cough*), modern Western games--not gamers, but games--are extremely respectful to women. They feature strong, competent female characters. Off the top of my head consider Jaina, Sylvannas, Jaheria, Bastila, Annah, Fall-From-Grace, Leilana, Morrigan, Wynne, April Ryan. Western game rulebases do not differentiate between male and female. Female characters are just as likely to be successful as male characters.

Female villains are just as daunting as male villains, without resorting to offensive caricatures. Quite frankly, this is something the game industry does better than any other media out there. Consider Onyxia, Queen Anora, Kerrigan, SHODAN, GLaDOS, Carmen Sandiego. There aren't that many female villains, but the ones that are tend to be drawn quite well.

Most game companies also go out of their way to be welcoming to women. A decade ago, when Wizards of the Coast released Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, they wrote the rulebooks using female pronouns (she, her instead of he, his), to basically hammer home on every single page the point that women were welcome. I don't really know how successful that method was, but I thought it particularly stylish, so I copied it for my own writing.

In my experience, the modern game industry is more respectful of women than most modern movies, music, television, fiction, and even media aimed mainly at women like romance novels¹. In my opinion, the only genre that routinely treats women better than modern games is young adult fiction, and even young adult fiction rarely has good female villains.

So then, how do we square the fact that many gamers are misogynistic, when most games are not, and in fact do make significant efforts to be respectful to women?

I think it is a combination of three factors.

The first factor is that gamers, especially teenage gamers, are treated badly by female culture. Male culture has mostly absorbed gaming to the point where almost every young male games casually. But female culture still looks down on gaming. Exactly how many guys would tell a girl that they gamed on first acquaintance? Versus pretty much any other hobby? What other moderately mainstream hobby carries such social stigma as gaming?

So is it any surprise that some gamers, especially teenage males, lash back defensively? It completely fails to excuse that behavior. Misogyny is inexcusable. But if the misogyny stems from this cause, then there is really nothing that game makers can really do. They've been trying to make games more popular and more main-stream for years now.

The second factor is that it is much easier for like-minded gamers to find each other and group together, reinforcing their negative tendencies. This is because gaming communities are heavily internet-based. In a smaller or geographic-based community, the community leaders could police these behaviors, and bring deviants in-line with the rest of the community norms. But in a very large community, such as the internet, the deviants just slink off and form their own sub-community and impose their behavior on others.

Again, I am not really sure what game makers can do about this. Would you really accept limitations on your right of association? Imagine if you could not choose your guild, but were randomly assigned to one. And you could not easily switch guilds. What would the social structure look like? What norms would prevail? I think it would prevent the reinforcement of an individual's misogyny, but it would also prevent reinforcement of some positive norms. Not to mention that most people want to play with their friends.

As well, so much of association is carried out on Vent and external message boards that the game maker cannot control.

The third and final factor is anonymity. Anonymity dehumanizes people. You don't see other people in the game, you start to see just characters running around. These gamers do not see how many women actually play the game, do not see that real people control the characters that they are insulting. Anonymity also reduces fear of reprisal. People act badly just because they can. They pay no social price for their vitriol.

Consider the game of chess. In many ways, chess maps to gaming in that very few women play, and it has a low social cachet. Yet, chess culture is not nearly as misogynistic as game culture can be. Now, maybe it's because chess is more staid, but I think it is because chess lacks that culture of anonymity. Everyone uses their real name and are ranked with that. And as a result, chess culture is far more respectful to everyone than gaming is, even if almost no women play.

But then again, none of you agree with me about anonymity and real names. Everyone is too concerned with "privacy" in video games². And so we reap the consequences of that decision.

That's where I stand on this issue. I agree that a significant portion of gamer culture is virulently misogynistic. However, I think the games themselves have done a really good job of driving out disrespect to women in the actual game and rulebase. I'm not sure that there is too much more that they could do. They can't force female culture to not stigmatize gaming. I think gamers would fuss if they made a solid attempt to break the right to choose your associations. We've already seen that gamers howl if their precious "privacy" is in any way threatened.

So what's left? Fiddling with crafting and pet collecting in a futile effort to entice more women to play? (Does anyone really believe that women don't game because there's not enough pet collecting?) And this will reduce the misogyny how exactly? More women in the game won't matter because you cannot force the misogynists to associate with them. Social shame is pretty much the only option to control them, and that path is blocked.

Games cannot be held responsible for factors out of their control. Modern games have done, in my opinion, a superb job of creating strong, competent female characters and generally being friendly to women. If I had daughters, I would much rather them take Sylvannas as a role model than most other characters in non-gaming media (though maybe with less emphasis on the whole "raising the dead" thing).

1. I read Regencies, and kind of frankly, sometimes I wonder that women accept the way women are treated in a significant minority of those novels, let alone how men are treated. If women were treated that way in a male-dominated medium, there would be Senate hearings. Also, what's the deal with red hair?
2. Meanwhile, your local government is probably putting your house plans and property taxes up on the internet. Not joking, by the way.

Namespace

One of the good things about WoW is that Blizzard never deletes old characters, and Blizzard allows to have up to 10 or so characters on each server. However, each character's name is unique per server.

I wonder if this combination of factors will reach a boiling point as Cataclysm approaches. It is getting harder and harder to find a name for a new character. Instead it's a continuous round of "That name is not available" until you finally hit some acceptable combination. I think this factor has contributed to the large amounts of odd names and non-standard characters used these days.

Over 5 years worth of names have been locked away. And that might present a problem when Cataclysm hits. With two new races and a large overhaul of level 1-60, people are going to be making lots of new characters which will require new names.

Maybe it's time that Blizzard starts looking into ways to free up some of the names that are gathering dust. Deleting characters is excessive. But maybe Blizzard could unlock the name of any character under level 40 and that has not been logged in for 4 months. Anyone could take the name, and if the old character logs on, she will have to choose a new name.

I was skeptical at first, but I really like the way Cryptic handles names. They use "characterName@accountName". In-game and on nameplates only the Character Name is displayed, while the full name is shown in the chatbox. Though, the character name is emphasized and the account name dulled. To friend someone or send tells, you use the account name.

It's really nice to be able to just create a new character with the exact name you want, and not have to play "That name is not available" roulette.

Female NPCs

So there was some chatter in the blogosphere over the last couple weeks about women or feminism in WoW. No real comment on that issue, but on reading some of the posts, I had a random thought:

What if Garrosh was female?

Would Garrosha still be presented in the same fashion that Garrosh is, as a hot-headed warmonger? What would the player-base's reaction to a female character who displayed the same traits as Garrosh does?

I actually started thinking about this while playing the Starcraft II storyline. There is only one female character¹: Dr. Ariel Hanson. The thing is that there is nothing wrong with Dr. Hanson. She's smart, educated, kind, a leader for her colonists. She is entirely unobjectionable. She is also completely uninteresting. For all of Tychus Findlay's flaws, he was a far more intriguing character.

You kind of see the same thing with female Warcraft NPCs. The only interesting (non-villain) female character is Sylvannas Windrunner. The other ones, Jaina, Tyrande, Liadrin etc., all tend to fall into this unobjectionable category. They're all competent, powerful, smart, non-sterotypical² characters.

The female villains are interesting. Lady Prestor had style, and I really liked the portrayal of High General Abbendis of the Scarlet Onslaught, as revealed through her diaries³. But this doesn't seem to extend to female heroes.

Varian and Garrosh are at least unique characters, even if they are--or perhaps because they are--terribly flawed. They generate debate and passion. But it seems very unlikely that Blizzard would make a female NPC like those two.

I wonder if that's a defensive reaction. To keep people from objecting to their portrayal of female characters, they make those female characters unobjectional. It's just too bad that this process seems to make them uninteresting as well.

1. Discounting Kerrigan/Queen of Blades as she is a villain.
2. At least, they don't match the sterotypes of previous generations. Whether this in itself is a stereotype of our current generation, I leave as an exercise for the reader.
3. [The Path of Redemption], [The Diary of High General Abbendis]

Advice From a Loyal Reader

I was surprised the other day when I logged in and found that I had advice in the mail from a long-time, though anonymous, reader:

I thought I'd go through this faithful reader's concerns, and talk about my choices about my current gear. (Points slightly rearranged for ease of response.)

Your armory makes me cringe. Drop the MP5 and SP gems and the MP5 enchants. Utter garbage. Gem pure int with 1 Nightmare Tear in the helm.

This is the major point where I differ with what I see as established Holy paladin theorycraft. Most high-end paladins gem, and even enchant, pure intellect. Personally, I like getting socket bonuses, so I use SP/Int, Int, and Int/MP5 gems. So far I haven't had any issues with mana. But if I was to change anything, this would be it.

I'm not really sure what MP5 enchants are being discussed. The only MP5 enchants I have are the faction head/shoulder SP/MP5 ones. As far as I know, MP5 is considered better than crit, so these enchants are the ones to use.

Get the 245 libram from Triumph Emblems. It's BiS.

I use [Libram of Renewal]. My loyal reader suggests using [Libram of Veracity] instead. I am somewhat puzzled by this. The point of gemming full Intellect is to spam Holy Light. Holy Light spam costs a lot of mana, and reducing the cost of HL by 10% is very powerful. Plus HL spam tends to have high overheal, so extra spellpower often just increases your overheal.

Pick up another 400 Haste. Stop wearing MP5 gear. Crafted legs are BiS. 60 Frost gloves are BiS. Crafted boots are BiS

These are pretty good suggestions. To be honest, I kind of just take gear as it drops. I don't do 10-mans, though, so I'm relatively behind on badges.

Consider a 51/5/15 spec for better HPS and efficiency.

I use a 51/20/0 spec for Divine Guardian. I think Divine Guardian is a really powerful cooldown that is extremely useful.

Drop Glyph of BoL, it's garbage. HS or FoL is the way to go.

I disagree here, Glyph of Beacon of Light is a better choice. It saves a bit of mana, saves a GCD every so often, and most importantly, staggers your BoL and SS refreshes. Taking two GCDs in a row to refresh buffs is a long time between heals. As for the other two, HL is the spell of choice, so buffing the other two is less valuable. Better to buff the spells you use most often, and Beacon is always up.

Drop enchanting for JC.

My second profession is already Jewelcrafting. Seems kind of silly to drop Enchanting at this point.

Seriously, after you got denied from Reclaimed I thought you would at least try to fix your !@#$. It just bothers my soul that you have a blog and give people advice when your own character is such a wreck. I feel bad for your guild. You at least owe it to them to research your class and play correctly.

Heh, Reclaimed was two years ago. I'm somewhat surprised that someone would remember and consider it important enough to reference. Or take time to look up my armor, make notes, create a character on my server and send me an anonymous mail with advice.

Still, the "bothers my soul" line is a tad over-wrought.

It's always useful to see what better players are doing. Let's take a look at Diamondtear of Paragon.

The immediate difference I see is that Diamondtear gems and enchants pure intellect, and does gear for haste (though she uses the same legs that I do). Otherwise, we use the same faction enchants, use the same libram, and have similar specs and glyphs.

The Copyright Bargain

The Original Bargain

THQ and Penny Arcade kicked off a debate last week on used games. Tycho compared used games to straight-out piracy, and got a lot of heat for that view. Here is my perspective on the issue.

Our society created a bargain called copyright between creators and consumers. Creators got certain rights, such as the sole ability to make and distribute copies and derivate works for a set period of time. Consumers got certain rights, such as the right to sell or lend their copy to another person, and to quote snippets of the work in other works, such as essays.

By and large, this bargain worked pretty decently up until the end of the last century. Creators got enough rights that they could make a living selling their work. Consumers did not get penalized for using works in a normal manner. Aside from maybe Disney's efforts to extend the term of copyright for far longer than originally set, the copyright bargain was fair to both sides.

But this bargain was forged when all creative works were physical media. Digital media, on the other hand, differs from physical media in subtle ways. That difference may be enough that the old bargain is no longer fair to one of the sides.

Differences Between Physical and Digital Media

There are two major differences between physical media and digital media.

First, physical media can degrade. Why buy a new book instead of a used book? Well, for one thing, the new copy is pristine. A used book might have water stains, or torn or dog-eared pages. Some barbarous philistine may have underlined or highlighted sections.

That concept of pristine doesn't really apply to digital media. Pardon the pun, but digital media is rather binary: it either works or it doesn't. Your game either installs and runs, or it doesn't.

Second, copying physical media is expensive. Copying a paper book is an arduous process for an individual consumer. There's no concept of making a backup copy of a book, or a transformative copy to a different format.

Copying and manipulating digital media, in contrast, is trivial. That's pretty much the whole purpose of computers: to copy and manipulate data.

Because copying physical media is so expensive, copyright's restrictions on copying really only affected the corporations and not the end consumer. But digital media changed all that.

Conclusions

These two differences have put more pressure on the creator side of the bargain. It is important that the bargain is fair to both sides. The harder it is for creators to make money, the fewer works that will be created. There is such a thing as "killing the goose which laid the golden eggs." At the same time though, making end consumers jump through hoops is just going to annoy everyone.

I think that the differences between physical and digital media are strong enough that the copyright bargain may need to be adjusted. For example, maybe we could ban resale and lending, but cut the copyright term to 5 or 10 years. So the creators can make more money, but only for a shorter time.

If we had a political class worth a damn, maybe they would look at this issue and hammer out a reasonable compromise. But we don't, so we'll just muddle along, trying to force the old bargain to apply in a world that it is not suited to.

On Crafting

There are four aspects involved in crafting:

1. Gathering knowledge - This is learning how to craft items. It can be finding recipes, or trial and error, or even random chance.


2. Gathering raw materials - This is getting the ingredients necessary to make the final item.


3. Transmutation - this is the specific process of converting the raw materials to the finished product.


4. Using the created item - Using the item for it's intended (and maybe unintended) function.

Different games emphasise different aspects. For example, in A Tale in the Desert, Transmutation is a complicated process, essentially a mini-game within the game. In contrast, WoW abstracts Transmutation to a single press of a button. In WoW, the game associated with crafting is primarily focused on the first two aspects of acquiring knowledge and raw materials.

A lot of people dislike this choice, and feel that Transmutation should be more involved. I am not so sure that this is the case. An interesting mini-game is fun the first time you make the item, but it what about the tenth or hundredth time? Not to mention that it is inconvenient for potential customers. If I get some new gear and need 5 gems cut, I don't really want to wait for my jewelcrafter guildie to struggle through 5 games of a Bejeweled clone, maybe even failing some of them. I much prefer getting the raw materials, giving them to her, and getting cut gems almost immediately.

I think where WoW's crafting really falls down is actually Aspect 4: Using the Item.

Initially, WoW is character progression through level. But at the level cap, it switches to character progression through gear. But that progression is controlled through the Bind-on-Pickup mechanism. Bind-on-Pickup ensures that a player needs to actually complete content to have their character improve. While there is a smattering of items you can buy, or alternate ways to earn gear like daily heroics, the vast majority of good gear can only be gained by going out and defeating content.

The problem is that currently crafting cannot partake of the bind-on-pickup mechanism. As I've mentioned before, WoW crafting is missing an action: a crafter cannot create a Bind-on-Pickup item for another character using Bind-On-Pickup raw materials that the other character has acquired.

Crucially, an NPC can do this. That's why crafting is sidelined in end-game, and NPCs hand out emblem gear. Crafting is missing that crucial verb that would allow it to be used in the endgame content.

If a crafter could make Bind-On-Pickup items for another player, that would open the door to a lot of possibilities. For example, Tier armor could be crafted entirely, given that it is already tokenized. Raid bosses could drop recipes, and players would gather raw materials along with special boss drops and take them to a crafter to get their tier gear. You could even restrict recipes to specific classes. Imagine if you had to find a paladin blacksmith to forge Lightsworn Battlegear.

Such a scheme would make crafting armor--not just consumables--an integral part of endgame once again. I think it would also feel better. To see what I mean, compare turning tokens to a vendor to gathering raw materials (could have a field day with what you need to collect) and getting armor forged by a blacksmith who learned the forgotten recipes deep inside the epic dungeon. On one level, both methods are really the same thing, but on another level, the latter would be so much more stylish.

Much better than getting to play a random Tetris-clone every time you want to cut a gem.

Roleplaying and MMOs

Hopefully, roleplayers won't feel too insulted by this post.

Kill Ten Rats has an article up asking why there isn't more role-playing in Dungeons and Dragons Online? We can extend the question to ask why--since MMOs stem from pen-and-paper (PnP) roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons--relatively few people roleplay in MMOs?

I'm going to say that it is because roleplaying in an MMO is fundamentally different than roleplaying in a PnP game. And the difference is significant enough that the majority playerbase sees MMO roleplaying as mere affectation, irrelevant window dressing that kind of misses the point of the underlying game.

The thing is that the point of pen-and-paper roleplaying is "conflict resolution in character". You play a character, you are presented with conflicts, and you resolve them in character. It's sometimes hard to see this in D&D because so much of the rulesbase concerns itself with combat. But if you look at indie PnP games such as Dogs in the Vineyard, where conflict resolution is more abstract, it becomes really obvious.

But in an MMO, you can be in-character all you want, but you cannot resolve conflicts in character. You are limited to the options provided to you and the need to share the same world with other players. You can try and spin "extra" conflicts between other players, but those do not have same weight as the conflicts the game itself provides. It's not "roleplaying" per se, it's just amateur theatrics.

(As normal, we pause to insert the standard EvE Online disclaimer. This is mostly because EvE Online gives players the tools to resolve said conflicts: ship-to-ship missiles.)

So I think that role-playing is not really relevant to MMOs, and isn't really something that should be expected from the players, regardless of the lineage of the genre. If players want to indulge in RP, there's nothing wrong with that, but I don't think it is something that game developers need to spend time worrying about. And I don't think that the presence or absence of a roleplaying community has any bearing whatsoever on the quality of an MMO.

Recruiting

My guild, Ad Infinitum, is trying to make a last push for Heroic Lich King before Cataclysm comes. We're looking for some people to fill out our raid.

Specifically, we're looking for priests and mages, but we're always willing to talk to good players of any class.

We're 11/12 Heroic ICC. We're a Pacific Standard Time guild on US-Lethon, which is a low-pop PvP realm. We raid 25-mans 3 days a week (Wednesday, Sunday, Monday) from 7pm - 11pm PST.

There's also several 10-mans throughout the week and an alt 25-man on Fridays.

If you're at all interested, please take a look at our website and apply. If you have any questions, feel free to email me or comment on this post.

Virtual Passports

John Patricelli wrote an exceptionally good post on MMOs as a virtual government. It's extremely thought-provoking.

I do have a couple of quibbles. For example, sometimes changes are made for reasons other than controlling player behavior. For example, John cites the tremporary window where you can trade BoP items with other people in party as a reaction to ninja looters. It's far more likely that this was done so that people could correct genuine mistakes, where someone accidentally rolled need, or the item was master-looted to the wrong person.

That's a general weakness of attempts to legislate good behavior through programming. It's often hard to distinguish between someone actively griefing, versus a genuine mistake, or someone who doesn't know what the "right" thing to do is. The classic example is a newbie hunter joining a group with his pet on aggressive. Very annoying, but it's hard to tell if it is a griefer or a new player.

(Though, 99% of the annoyance could be removed if Aggressive was disabled in instances. The new Defensive is more than good enough for group play, even for a hunter who doesn't micro-manage their pet. To be honest, I don't really see why Aggressive pets are a good idea to start with. The new Defensive could be Aggressive and bring back the old Defensive. I'm not sure it's good gameplay for the Hunter to ever lose control of her pet the way Aggressive does.)

I would like to point out the very first example of Blizzard attempting to promote good behavior via game rules: the language barrier between Horde and Alliance. It was done in order to remove trash talking from the PvP game, or at least move it to the forums.

Warrior Tanking is Fun

You know, I really like the way the warrior tank plays in Wrath. At least at level 66, which is where my lowbie tank has gotten to.

There are two major things I like about warrior tanking. First is Charge. Warbringer is one of the best talents in the game. Charging into combat is fun. Charging around during combat is fun. Charging into the next pack when the current pack is almost dead is extremely fun.

The second thing is Thunderclap and Shockwave. The thing about these skills that I like is that they very much reward you for timing things well. There's a satisfaction from Thunderclapping at the exact right time to get every mob in the group. Or lining up the perfect Shockwave and stunning everything just right.

It's not like Thunderclap and Shockwave are hard to use. But you can make mistakes with them. And that makes using them correctly valuable.

All in all, I really like the way the warrior tank plays in Wrath. I hope it doesn't change too much in Cataclysm.

Gearscore and FICO scores

I came across a couple of interesting articles by Megan McArdle of The Atlantic where she talks about a new trend of employers using FICO (credit) scores to weed out job candidates.

This situation immediately reminded me of Gearscore, and the way the WoW PuG community often uses Gearscore to determine who gets into raids.

(For those who don't know, Gearscore is a mod which examines a character's gear and gives a single value score that represents the quality of the gear. The higher ilevel, the higher your Gearscore.

FICO is a credit score that represents your credit-worthiness. It's the main score used in the United State. It is generally used when people are deciding if they should lend you money. Low scores generally mean that you have trouble paying back loans, or have declared bankruptcy, and are likely to be a bigger risk for a loan.)

In the articles, employers are using these credit scores as a general proxy for your overall trustworthiness, just like raid leaders use Gearscore as a general proxy for your skill as a raider.

In both situations, the measurement is a weak proxy for what the evaluators really want. It's easy to imagine that someone with a poor credit score might still be a good employee, or someone with a lower Gearscore might still know how to play.

But there are reasons that these scores are used. It's too easy to say that using Gearscore or FICO score is wrong, and so raid leaders or employers should be forbidden from using it.

First, it's fast and obvious. A FICO score of 300 is worse than one of 800. GS 4k is worse than GS 5k.

Second, the best method to determine competence is unfeasible. The best method is by giving the potential employee or raider a trial. But this is just not possible due to logistical constraints. Even the second or third-best methods are not viable. For raiding, high end raid guilds often require proof in the form of logs, or will ask the candidate questions in an interview process. You just don't have time to do this when making a PuG.

Third, you cannot trust the potential employee or raider. People lie on their resumes all the time, and due to litigation concerns, most previous employers won't do much more than confirm employment dates. Similarly, all raiders say they know the fights and will do top DPS.

Finally, it is better to be wrong in one direction than to be wrong in the other. For example, when picking up a PuG raider, there are two different ways a raid leader can be wrong. He can turn down a good player, or he can pick up a bad players. The consequences for picking up a bad raider are much higher, and so the raider leader will pick a method that minimizes the chances of that outcome, even if it increases the chances of the other wrong outcome.

The same thing happens with employment. It is generally considered better to turn down a good employee than hire a poor one.

I find the two parallel situations to be very intriguing. It's always interesting when a real world issue comes up independently in a controlled game world.

Note that I don't actually use Gearscore. It's a chatty mod, and I dislike taking a chance of being disconnected in raids. But I still understand why people do use Gearscore.

If I had to make a Gearscore-like mod, what I would actually do is evaluate gems/enchants against spec. The more optimal your gems/enchants for your spec, the higher your score. In my experience, people who care enough to keep their gear in good condition, regardless of the underlying ilevel, are more likely to be successful raiders.

Cataclysm Talent Tree Awkwardness

I figured out what was bothering me about Cataclysm tree design.

If you look at the first row of talents, Blizzard usually has 2x 3pt talents and a 2pt talent. That means that if you want to only spend 5 points in the first row to get to the second, you get the 2pt and one of the 3pts.

However, in a lot of cases, the 2pt talent is "more optional" than the 3pt talents. If you look at the current paladin trees, Ret has Eye for an Eye at 2pts, and Prot has Imp Hammer of Justice. Both of those are more PvP talents, and somewhat less attractive to other specs.

Because of this, you tend to be pushed towards taking both 3pts in the first row, leaving you with only 4 points for the second row. So you can take a 3 or 2pt talent, and then you're left with 1 or 2 points and very few options to cap out. No matter what, if you are subspeccing, you cannot take 2 3pt talents in the second row.

I think talent trees would flow a little better if the 2pt talent was "less optional" than the 3pt talents. That way, you'd grab the 2pt and choose which 3pt you liked, making the next tier easier to finish. And you'd less likely to have 1 point left dangling in a standard 31/10 build.

For example, in Retribution, I think that tree would flow better if Crusade was 2pts and Eye for an Eye was 3pts. Then PvP/Prot would take Eye for an Eye and Crusade, and Holy and Ret would take Rule of Law and Crusade, and that would give everyone 5 points for the second row of Ret or for the first row in Prot.

Holy Power

The Dev chat on Friday revealed the new paladin mechanic for Cataclysm, Holy Power:

All of the paladin specializations will make use of a new resource called Holy Power. Holy Power accumulates from using Crusader Strike, Holy Shock, and some other talents. Holy Power can be consumed to augment a variety of abilities, including:
An instant mana-free heal: Word of Glory
A buff to increase holy damage done: Inquisition
A massive physical melee attack for Retribution paladins: Templar’s Verdict
Holy Shield’s duration is now extended by Holy Power
Divine Storm’s damage is now increased by Holy Power

Templar’s Verdict: An instant weapon attack that causes a percentage of weapon damage. Consumes all applications of Holy Power to increase damage dealt:
1 Holy Power: 55% Weapon Damage
2 Holy Power: 125% Weapon Damage
3 Holy Power: 225% Weapon Damage

Word of Glory: Consumes all Holy Power to heal a friendly target for a specific amount per application of Holy Power (0 mana cost, 0 cooldown, instant cast).

It looks like the closest mechanic to this is rogue combo points. Certain of our abilities generate Holy Power, and other abilities will consume all of it, and have an effect proportional to the number of points consumed.

However, where the rogue is focused on combo points, and most GCDs are used either generating or consuming combo points, Holy Power looks to be layered over top of our regular abilities. Paladins look to generate a point of Holy Power every 4-6 seconds using our normal rotation, and use a Holy Power finisher roughly every 12-18 seconds.

I guess that this is intended to make paladin gameplay a little more dynamic, and we weave in Holy Power finishers every so often, or maybe even save them for times when we need burst.

On paper, this seems pretty good. We'll have to see how this plays out. There is always the possibility that tactics getting a 3-stack of Holy Power, then running to a new PVP target and unloading a full-power Templar's Verdict will be deemed overpowered. (And naturally, hotfixed 24 hours after Cataclysm's release.)

The other thing I like are the new paladin ability names. Word of Glory, Inquistion, Templar's Verdict, and Light of Dawn (new cone healing spell mentioned in the Dev chat) are very nice paladin names that avoid resorting to the words Holy, Judgment, Light, Righteousness, and Divine.

On the other hand, "Holy Power" is a rather bland name, and could stand to be spiced up. I suggest using a name that paladins have been waiting to see in WoW since Diablo 2: Zeal.

Beta Talent Trees

There are beta talent trees up at WoWTal.

Honestly, the trees are still a great state of flux, so it's really too early to comment on them. In general, I like the paladin trees so far.

The only comment I have is that I keep making builds for many different classes and specs, and I always seem to have 1 talent point left over, and 2/3-point talents to use it in. So I have to partially fill a talent, which I've never really liked doing.

Maybe it's just a general problem with the numbers used to make the talent trees, but it seems kind of odd to be happening so often.

Talent Tree Changes

Extensive talent tree changes coming in Cataclysm.

I'm not really sure what to think of these changes. In general, I like the smaller trees. I'm just not sure about the forced specialization.

It means that there is much less potential builds out there. No 30/11, or 21/20 builds will be possible. But on the other hand, such builds tend to be rare anyways. Sometimes choice is an illusion, and in reality there are only a handful of viable builds. So the end result might be the same now and in Cataclysm, but it will just be more obvious.

As well, right now the 11 and 21 point talents tend to be a little weak, just to keep other-spec builds in check. This is especially true when leveling. Take paladin trees for example. Aura Mastery, Divine Favor, Divine Sacrifice, Blessing of Sacrifice, and Sanctified Retribution are good abilities, but they are a little boring.

Compare them to the 31 point talents of Holy Shock, Holy Shield, and Repentance. Those talents are "fun" talents, but they come so late, and you get them at a much higher level, just to prevent off-talent builds from picking them up. Wouldn't Protection leveling be much more fun if you could get Holy Shield at level 20?

The one "fun" early ability, Seal of Command, is perfect to get at level 20. Unfortunately, it's quite arguable that Seal of Command has made Protection overpowered at producing AoE threat. Because it is available so early, Protection can pick up Seal of Command, forcing a choice between leaving Protection slightly overpowered, or weakening Retribution.

The enforced specialization does away with those concerns. You could move more interesting abilities earlier in the tree, confident that you won't accidentally overpower one of the other two trees.

The current trees are a little top-heavy. Sometimes it's hard to be enthusiastic about pushing through those rather boring mid-tier talents, and then you want to get all the juicy, game-changing top-tier talents.

It probably will be easier to balance PvP as well. PvP builds often forwent the deep damage increasing talents in favor of mid-tier utility and survival talents.

So on the whole it's probably a good change that strengthens the game mechanically. I guess I mourn the illusion of a potential vast amount of builds. An mirage of possibilities. But that was just a dream, and high-end group play rudely awakens you to the fact that only a few builds are ever truly viable.

Death Penalties

Recently there has been some commentary about death penalties. There are some people who feel that the current penalties are too low.

My question is:

Why is it so important to punish failure?

I mean, you shouldn't reward failure, but I don't really see the need to punish failure either.

No one really wants to fail. And failure is often obvious. Your character is dead on the ground and you have a corpse run. You can't really miss the fact that you failed.

Do high death penalties really make players better, or do they just make players more cautious? It's arguable that one of flaws of lower tier raid guilds is that they don't fail enough. They'll wipe 5 times and then call it, or move on to something easier. While a high end guild might wipe 200+ times when learning a really hard fight. I don't think that an even greater death penalty would help these guilds, and it might actively hurt them.

What you do want to keep in check is the ability to fail with partial success, so that several failures add up to a success. The ability to zerg something needs to be carefully watched. But that can be done without harsh death penalties. Quest timers, group respawns, instances that prevent you from zoning in while a fight is in progress, requirements that you do X without dying, etc.

Of course, you do have to be careful with this. If quest progress was wiped on death, and you had a quest to kill 100 boars, it would really, really suck if you died on the 99th boar.

Of course, some people insist that punishing failure in raid groups is the appropriate way to go, like docking DKP for making mistakes. But is the punishment the key driver of improvement, or is it the fact that the mistake was specifically identified and called out, giving the player the feedback necessary to improve?

I don't think that actively punishing failure works when the player wants to succeed. So I don't think that death penalties need to be harsher, and if anything, they could stand to be easier.

RealId and Forums

Most of us have heard of John Gabriel's Greater Internet F******d Theory (link slightly NSFW). I would wager that the majority of gamers even believe it to be true.

But it has never truly been proven, or conclusively demonstrated. So for that alone, I am looking forward to Blizzard's plan to integrate RealId with the WoW forums. Maybe it will turn out to be a good idea, maybe it will turn out to be a bad idea. But at least we'll know. There's something to be said for actual experimentation, rather than just armchair theorycrafting.

Heck, maybe the *real* problems with RealId on the forums will turn out to be completely different than anything that has been thought of.

Sometimes I think our society spends too much time worrying over potential outcomes, and not enough time actually doing things. Not to say that we shouldn't think ahead, but there is a balance, and right now I think we've swung too far to the worrying side.

I think that, on the whole, RealId integration with the forums will work out well. I think the official forums will become much more usable. Many people, both good and bad, will migrate to other forums like Tankspot, and that might pump up some of the non-official sites. But I could be wrong. Maybe there will be many negative consequences.

In some ways, this is probably a tipping point for gaming companies and the internet. If the forums calm down and Blizzard does not lose customers, every gaming company that can will follow their lead. If Blizzard does end up losing money, then we'll probably never hear these schemes again.

Though, kind of honestly, it's going to be weird seeing Greg Street post instead of Ghostcrawler.

Pods: A Raid Force Management System

Managing a raid force is a very complex task. You have to recruit enough people so that you have redundancy, that you can still raid when some members are missing. You have to have enough redundancy to cover the essential roles. Yet you also have to ensure that everyone gets enough raiding time. Sometimes a player can get left on the sidelines more than you expect, and they end up leaving the guild because they feel they aren't getting into raids enough. You have to constantly recruit and people are constantly leaving, creating new holes in the raid force that have to be filled.

Yet, for such a complex task, most guild leaders operate in an ad hoc fashion. They react to events a lot of the time and things slip through the cracks. This is my attempt at creating a system, a set of rules and heuristics, to help a guild leader manage her entire raiding force in an efficient manner.

The system is called Pods, because the central element of the system is a pod.

A pod is a group of three players who share a similar raid role. The basic pod types are:

1. Main Tank - players who always tank
2. Off Tank - players who switch between tanking and DPS
3. Melee DPS - melee DPS players
4. Ranged DPS - ranged DPS players
5. Main Healer - players who always heal
6. Off Healer - players who switch between healing and DPS

Each pod owns two slots in the raid. So a 10 man raid is made up of:

• 1x Main Tank pod
• 1x Melee DPS pod
• 1x Ranged DPS pod
• 1x Off Healer pod
• 1x Main Healer pod

A 25-man raid would be:

• 1x Main Tank pod
• 1x Off Tank pod
• 3x Melee DPS pod
• 3x Ranged DPS pod
• 1x Off Healer pod
• 3x Main Healer pod
• 1 free slot

Now, since each pod has three players, but two raid slots, one person in each pod sits out each night. Anna sits out first, the Betty, then Charity, then Anna's turn comes around again. Of course, the players can trade nights with each other but only within the pod. Since there are only three players in a pod, scheduling that pod becomes a much simpler problem than scheduling the entire raid force all at once.

For the Off Tank and Off Healer pods, one slot will act as the extra tank or healer on necessary fights, while the other slot will be pure DPS. (Or both slots can go tank/healer if the fight is really demanding). Which player gets which job can rotate just like sitting out.

If only one or zero people from a pod show up, then people from the other pods who are sitting out can be drafted to fill out the raid. If the problem is known in advance, as two of the three players say they can't make a specific night, that fact can be brought to the attention of the officers.

For 25s, the third slot can be given to a DPS player who alway shows up, or just reserved for any missing significant buffs.

With three people for every two slots, each raider is guaranteed a minimum of raiding 66% of the time. Some people may raid more than that, but no one will raid less. As well, each position has significant redundancy, which should ensure that you never call a raid because you don't have enough healers, but enough DPS and tanks.

In addition, the guild can use the pods to guide recruiting efforts. The pods with unfilled spots are the positions you need to recruit for. You don't need to consider the entire guild as a whole, you can just go pod by pod and recruit for each position.

Of course, there are potential issues with this system. For example, since sitting out is determined in advance, people might decide to not show up on nights when they are scheduled to sit. This can cause problems if there are unexpected absences. There would need to be some understanding that everyone in guild who can show up does.

In general, the idea is to have each pod run itself to a certain degree, without needing the officers to get involved all the time. The officers' main job is to make sure that the pod is filled with players, and to intervene in unusual situations.

But on the whole, I think that this system would reduce the effort involved in managing a raid force. It provides redundancy for all positions, while guaranteeing a minimum amount of raiding for each individual.

Age of Conan: Group Play

Group play in Age of Conan is an interesting experience. In many ways it is very different than WoW, even though they are both games based on the trinity of tank-healer-dps.

The nature of AoC groups stems from how healing in AoC is designed. All three healer classes have the same type of spells. There are three healing spells: green, blue, and yellow.¹ The green spell is a group HoT. The blue spell is a stronger HoT that affects people in a cone in front of you. The yellow spell is a direct group AoE spell, but a player can only be affected by a yellow spell once a minute.

So healing is essentially HoT-based. You put up your green and blue HoTs and then do damage until you need to refresh them.

The first consequence of this design is that one healer can heal multiple tanks just as easily as one tank, so long as the tanks are positioned correctly.

The next element in AoC group play is that mobs hit like trucks. The standard pull in AoC (so far) is two mobs. Each tank grabs a mob and tanks them next to each other. If you get more than two, the tanks try and hold them and the group uses knockdowns as much as possible. When a mob is knocked down, it doesn't do damage while it gets back up, giving the HoTs time to tick.

In WoW, this is the sort of situation in which crowd control would be used. But AoC is a PvP game, so all crowd control is short duration, on the order of a few seconds. As well, you don't deal damage to targets exactly, you deal damage to the area in front of your character. This means that there is a lot of splash damage, which would mean that crowd control would need to ignore damage.

With two tanks, boss mobs are often handled by the tanks swapping aggro. Since both of them are getting healed at the same time, one tank's health is dropping, while the other tank goes back to full. Of course, tanks don't have a threat meter or even a baseline taunt, so this can be pretty hard. A tank swap is often accomplished when the lead tank dies.

The long and short of this is that in AoC the normal group size is 6 people, and consists of 2 tanks, 2 dps, and 2 healers. Yes, that's a worse tank/healer/dps ratio than WoW. This is despite the fact that there are 3 tank classes, 3 healing classes and 6 dps classes.

Oddly enough, even though healing in AoC is fairly easy² and tanking rather difficult, it's not that hard to find tanks. It's still hard to find healers. I think that's an interesting difference between WoW and AoC. Healers are scarce in both games, but tanks are more common in AoC than WoW.

Of course, maybe part of the reason is because I am starting late, and everyone else who rolled a DPS character rolled a tank to get into groups.

All in all, group play in AoC is different enough from WoW to be interesting, yet similar enough to be easily understandable. Now, if only forming a group didn't take several hours.

1. The spells put a colored circle around the feet of your teammates, so you can see who is affected by each spell.
2. At least healing is easy in theory. I seem to have a hard time finding healers who understand the idea of keeping the two HoTs up at all times.

Single-Colour Gems

It occurs to me that gemming has become very boring these days. It's pretty much choose the best stat for your class and stack it.

When jewelcrafting was first released, it seemed much more exciting. There were all these colors of gems, with different colours of sockets, different socket bonuses, and meta-gems with interesting requirements.

Pretty much all of that has been bled from the system. Socket colours are pretty much ignored. The different types of socket bonuses have disappeared, replaced for most classes by a single stat. For example, on plate DPS armor, the socket bonus is always strength. It's the only stat that can possibly tempt someone away from mono-coloured gems. Meta-gem requirements have been reduced to the bare minimum. And even that is not enough. The meta-gems which require 1 of each color are considered much better than the meta-gems which require 2 blues, because you can use only 1 Nightmare Tear and meet the meta-gem requirements.

As well, I'm not sure being able to focus so much of your item budget on your single-best state is good for the game. It allows for an extremely wide range of that one ability. For example, the health difference between a tank stacking all stamina gems and one matching socket colors is very noticeable.

Is there a way to make gemming interesting once again, and maybe also rein it in a bit?

My suggestion would be to remove single-color gems. If all gems are dual-colors, then it might be easier to hit the socket bonuses. You can't focus so much in the same way. The choice becomes not so much between best stat and second-best stat, it's between second-best stat and third-best stat. Oftentimes, that's enough wiggle room to make decision-making interesting again.

In my opinion, sometimes offering the best possible choice as an option is not the best way to go. Making a decision between two flawed choices can be more interesting.

On Reforging

In an interview on Gameplanet, Ghostcrawler talks about reforging:

The way [reforging] works is, instead of being tied to trade skills, now there are NPCs in the major cities. You go to this NPC and tell them you want to reforge an item. The interface opens and you place the item in it. It then asks you to pick a stat to reduce, and then pick a stat to add. You can’t use primary stats like agility, strength and intellect, but you can use all of the secondary stats like hit, crit, haste, parry, dodge, things like that. Then you reduce one of the stats by – at the moment it’s 40% but to make the example easier, say it’s 50%. If you have 100 crit, you reduce that by 50, that then gives you 50 points to put on, say, hit. And the cost of that transaction is the vendor cost of the item, so if you later decide to sell that item, you’re not really out of pocket.

I have to say that I thought reforging was going to be something you did rarely, to get rid of excess hit or a really bad stat. But from this description, it seems like reforging will be something that you do to every piece of gear.

To see what I mean, let's use our old technique of assigning a dollar value to stats. The standard 4-stat item has 2 primary stats and 2 secondary stats. We'll just ignore the primary stats because they don't change during reforging.

Let's assume, that for our class:

1 Crit rating = $1.00
1 Haste rating = $1.10

[Item with Crit and Haste]
100 Crit rating = $100
100 Haste rating = $110
-------------
Total = $210

Then we reforge some of that crit into haste.

[Reforged item]
50 Crit rating = $50
150 Haste rating = $165
-------------
Total = $215

Reforging the lower value stat into the higher value stat always makes the item better. So whenever you get an item, the first thing you do is reforge the lower value secondary stats into whatever secondary stat has the highest value for your class.

Pretty much the only time you wouldn't do this is if you are hovering around an inflection point in the value of a stat, such as the hit cap. At that point you get to bust out the spreadsheet to see if reforging is a gain or a loss.

Now, if you can't increase a stat that already exists on an item, then items with the two best secondary stats won't be reforged, but all other ones will.

I guess I understand the impetus behind reforging. My paladin has an i264 2H weapon, which I would like to use for Retribution, but I can't use it because it puts me 3% over the hit cap. However, I can't help but wonder if the implementation as described will just lead to an extra layer of complexity. You get a new piece of gear, and you have to reforge, gem, and enchant it before you can actually use it. Sometimes, I miss getting a new item and being able to equip it immediately.

Not to mention that there's a possibility for unintentional power inflation, as every item will contribute more than the design on paper, and maybe a lot more if a specific secondary stat turns out to be much more valuable than the others for a specific class. With both reforging and gemming, a character could focus a huge amount of her equipment budget on one specific stat.

Heroic Loot in Icecrown Citadel

Heroic loot distribution in Icecrown Citadel is slightly different than in the three previous tiers.

In Naxx, Ulduar, and Trial of the Crusader, heroic loot dropped in addition to regular loot.

In Icecrown Citade, heroic loot drops instead of regular loot.

This small change has some subtle ramifications for guilds doing heroic content. It's now a lot slower to gear up new players to the heroic standard.

The new players can get to the i245 level fairly easily. But since you're doing hard modes, i264 loot is actually somewhat scarce. In the past, new people would be geared up very quickly with all the regular loot that the established raiders had already acquired.

But when you're working on hard modes, that regular loot doesn't drop anymore. You get mostly i277 gear, which the established raiders want, and the new people have to compete against them.

The only item that this doesn't apply to is class tokens. i277 tokens drop in addition to i264 tokens. As a result, it's really easy for a new raider to get all their tokens in short time period. However, then she's blocked on Emblems.

I guess the solution is to try and recruit more people who are already in i264 gear.

Measuring Performance with Plus-Minus

Measuring performance in a raid is somewhat hard. You can do a bit with damage and healing meters, but those meters are often skewed by the specific fight or class or spec. Sometimes it's hard to track the small things, like people who hit cooldowns at the perfect time, or kite mobs perfectly, or step beyond their specific role at the absolute correct time.

There is a statistic in ice hockey called Plus-Minus. If you're on the ice when your team scores an even-strength goal, you get +1. If you're on the ice when the opposing teams scores, you get a -1. So at the end, if you're positive, it implies that you are helping your team. If you are very negative, your presence on the ice actually hurts the team.

Of course, it's not a perfect stat. Since it relies on the team, a person on a bad team usually has a lower plus-minus than a person on a good team.

But it might be an interesting stat to use to measure a player's contribution to her raid team. After all, the ultimate goal is killing bosses. If you being in the raid means that bosses are more likely to be killed, then you are doing well. If the raid is more likely to wipe if you are in raid, then that's a problem. Rather than trying to measure and quantify the individual aspects of your role, we could just try and measure your effectiveness.

Here's how I'd set up a Plus-Minus system for a Raid Guild:

1. +1 for each boss kill.
2. -1 for each boss wipe.
3. Only count a maximum of 4 wipes per boss. This is so that raids with an obviously bad composition don't just give up to keep from wrecking their rating.
4. Don't count wipes on new bosses that haven't been defeated.

Going by this system, I was +4 this week. Not bad, but not really good either. But Plus-Minus is a relative system. So it would depend on what scores my other guildies would have.

Of course there are issues with this system. People who are in the raid all the time will have the same rating. It's not a problem in hockey because people are constantly taking shifts out on the ice. Certain bosses are more likely to cause wipes than other bosses. The method only works if you actually expect there to be some wipes.

Ultimately, killing bosses is the goal. Measuring effectives by how much a raider contributes to that goal might be a better method than trying to rank damage meters. But on the other hand, going through meters gives feedback on how to improve. A Plus-Minus system only identifies outlying players in either direction. It does not say how that player makes the raid better or worse.

Goblin GDKP Variant

I missed this when Gevlon first proposed it, but he proposed a variant on the standard Gold DKP loot system.

For those people unaware of GDKP, it's a loot system where raid members bid gold for items. Items are auctioned off in a standard multiple-round, public bidding process. The gold all goes into a pot and the pot is split equally among all the raid members at the end of the run. It's good system for pickup groups because it provides an easy way to compensate people who don't win items. If you don't get any items, you at least get several hundred or several thousand gold. This encourages geared and experienced players to join the PuG, giving it higher chance of success.

Gevlon proposes a rule giving 1/3rd of the winning bid to the second place bidder, in order to encourage higher bid prices and discourage "fake" bids.

I'm not really sure that this rule actually accomplishes anything useful.

Look at it from the point of view of the optimal bidding strategy. In a normal English auction, the optimal bidding strategy is to bid (up to) what you think the item is worth. In a normal GDKP auction, the optimal strategy is to bid you think the item is worth plus a little premium, because you get back a portion of your bid when the pot is divided up at the end of the raid.

Under the Goblin variant, the optimal bid is to bid 150% of the items worth (plus a little bit for the pot-split). To see this, let us ignore the pot-split for now, and imagine that there are two items that a player values at 1000g. The player bids 1500 for both and wins one and loses one (for 1500.01).

For the winning bid, the player nets 1000g (item) - 1500g (bid) = -500g.

For the losing bid, the player nets 500g for being the second place bid.

So when the two bids are taken together, it's a wash. The extra money you get from being second is cancelled out by the extra money you have to pay to win items.

Also, note that the size of the pot doesn't increase. There were two bids of 1500g, whereas under the regular rules there would be two bids of 1000g. But the pot is 2000g in both cases.

So as far as I can see, the only person who benefits from this rule is someone who is very skilled at bidding just enough to get second place. For example, consider a spoiler who only joins in bidding when there are two other people bidding. With three people bidding, the price gets pushed up and up. When one of the original two bidders drops out, the spoiler immediately drops out right after, guaranteeing that she has second place. It is very unlikely that two legitimate bidders will drop out at the exact same price point. There will be a small difference between their maximum amount which they are willing to pay, which the canny spoiler bidder can exploit.

Far from discouraging strategic bidding, I think this system actually creates a legitimate opening for someone who is bidding to push prices up. People who win items do not benefit. Higher end players carrying the group to earn some extra gold and maybe hoping a rare trinket drops do not benefit.

This rule just adds extra complexity for no good reason. It encourages people to bid using a non-optimal manner, just because they want the extra gold from being in second place.

Regular GDKP is a good system. It is close enough to English auctions that everyone understands it, and close enough that the strategy of bidding what you think the item is worth is very close to optimal. It's been my experience that when bidding systems stray from this optimum, they are more fragile, because people don't really understand how to bid well.

Gevlon's rule of "1/3rd to the second bidder" is not an improvement on GDKP, and should be avoided, in my opinion. It will still work, but it is more complicated, has a less intuitive optimal bidding strategy, encourages strategic bidding and does not actually add any positive effects that I can see.

Paladin Medium Glyphs

Blizzard announced that they were scrapping the Path of the Titans system and instead fleshing out Glyphs a bit more. Seems like an interesting decision. I think that Glyphs never really lived up to their full potential. They were touted as a way to "tweak" your spells, and a lot of early glyphs had both positive and negative effects. For example the old Glyph of Flash of Light cut the direct healing in half, but added a non-stacking HoT.

However, the Glyphs that were purely positive were the most popular, I think, and soon Glyphs become nothing more than extra talent points that improved your best spells.

Cataclysm is adding a third row of Medium Glyphs. As I understand it, Major Glyphs would enhance the main spells in the rotation, Medium spells will enhance situational spells, and Minor glyphs will be cosmetic or reageant effects.

I was thinking about what paladin spells would have Medium glyphs, and was struck by the fact that we don't have *that* many situational skills. Paladins have a lot of abilities, but each spec uses different ones all the time. For example, Divine Plea is situational for Holy and Ret, but a main spell for Protection. Seals are now active most of the time. I can't see Seal of Light or Wisdom going to Medium glyphs.

So what spells would be eligible? My list would look like:
- Lay on Hands
- Divine Intervention (no clue what a Glyph of DI would do)
- Hand spells
- Holy Wrath
- Turn Evil
- maybe Seal of Justice and Judgment of Justice
- Divine Shield / Divine Protection
- Hammer of Justice
- Avenging Wrath

Pretty much all the other spells are used full-time by one of the specs, or are a Blessing/Aura, which really are not good candidates for Glyphing. Blizzard is moving away from improved Blessings/Auras to make coordinating them easier.

I suppose that's enough spells to do stuff with, but I'm not sure that any of these spells can be really exciting.

Personally, I don't think much of the current design of Glyphs. We already have talent trees. I don't really see the need for talents which are not talents. Glyph of Seal of Wisdom/Light could just as easily have been a Holy talent (Improved Seals) which read, "While Seal of Wisdom is active, the cost of your healing spells is reduced by 1/2/3/4/5%. While Seal of Light is active, the effect of your healing spells is increased by 1/2/3/4/5%."

I think the idea of glyphs being a double-edged sword--actively changing how that spell was used--was much more interesting.

LotRO and Free-To-Play

In the last post, I discussed what I see as the economics of Free-To-Play versus Subscription games. Here is my reasoning on why Free-To-Play may be more more understandable for Lord of the Rings Online than most other games.

First off, you cannot discount how the DDO resurgence went. DDO was a dying game, and looks to have been revitalized by it's move to F2P. I's debatable how much of the revitalization was due to F2P, and how much was due to the fact that Turbine spent a fair amount of effort improving the game, and that the massive publicity of going F2P got enough people to take a second (or first look at it). But regardless, if a suit sees that income increased by 500% (increasing small numbers always looks impressive) after going F2P, then of course she's going to assume that going F2P will have a beneficial effect on the other games.

However, I think the more compelling economic reason for LotRO to go F2P is their Lifetime Subscription program. By all accounts, it's been reasonably popular. But Lifetime Subscriptions aren't always profitable, even after accounting for the time-value of money. If we assume a 10% annual rate of return, a $300 Lifetime Subscription is worth roughly 22 months, or slightly over 3 years, of a $15 subscription. After that, the company is essentially getting no money from those subscribers. And Lord of the Rings Online was launched just over 3 years ago.

Furthermore, who are the people most likely to buy Lifetime Subscriptions? The people who buy Lifetime subscriptions are the people who are more inclined to spend lots of money on their hobby. Section B in the graph.

So I think that LotRO's income chart now looks more like this:


The higher the inclination to spend money, the more likely the customer is to have purchased a Lifetime Subscription, which has now run its course. So Turbine is actually getting the least money from the people that should be giving it the most money!

And because Lifetime Subscriptions are implicitly pitched as "You never have to pay again!", it's much harder politically to introduce things like Star Ponies. The Lifetime Subscribers have a reasonable expectation that they don't have to pay for anything, and the optics of the situation just look bad. But in a wholesale revamp of the payment model, such problems are greatly diminished.

So the real advantage of LotRO going F2P is that the Lifetime Subscription gets converted into a monthly subsidy of Turbine Points. This frees up all those people in Section B to to follow their natural inclination and spend more money on the game. They don't have to spend more, but they can, and because they are inclined to, they probably will. They may spend a little less because of the subsidy, but it's much better than getting nothing from them as Turbine would otherwise.

I think the real lesson to draw from this situation is that Lifetime Subscriptions aren't really a good idea for MMOs. If the game is good, you can count on people playing for a fairly long time. Lifetime Subscriptions only make sense if you think that people will stop subscribing before the break point. I'm not sure that is a good assumption for anyone with a decent MMO to make.

Free-To-Play versus Subscription

The recent news that Lord of the Rings Online is going Free-To-Play, and being supported by a cash shop instead of subscriptions has reignited the debate over the two payment methods.

Before I post about LotRO specifically, I'd like to talk about the underlying issues as I see it.

In every hobby, different parts of the potential audience are inclined to spend differing amounts of money. For example, take Collectible Card Games such as Magic: the Gathering. You have some people who purchase a couple packs a month, some who purchase several packs a week, and a few who buy boxes of cards at a time. In theory, by having a variable amount that can be purchased, the company does not "leave money on the table", and gets the maximum income it can.

That's basically the idea behind the economics of the F2P games. They feel that subscriptions leave money on the table both in the segment of the audience that is inclined to pay less than the subscription amount, and the segment of the audience that is inclined to pay more.

The following graph shows how the income from the two forms compare against each other.

Note: Not real numbers, just hand-waving to get the idea across.



There are three sections where the two payment methods do not overlap. Section A is money from people who aren't willing to pay the full subscription. Section B is money from people who are willing to pay more than the full subscription (Star-Pony-land).

However, what people are inclined to pay--their "rest state" of spending--is not the same as what they will pay. If the only way to play the game is to buy a subscription, a lot of the audience will pay up. That's what Section C represents: the extra income that a subscription can extract above inclinations for a specific part of the audience.

So what the F2P companies are betting is that A + B > C.

Now, I don't have any access to any real world data about what the actual size of A,B and C are. This is just punditry. However, I think that the F2P companies are gravely under-estimating the size of Section C.

In my opinion, the gaming/scifi/fantasy subculture is terribly "penny-wise, but pound-foolish". We will talk a good game about paying up, but the vast majority of us won't pay unless forced to. We will come up with all sorts of excuses, but will try and evade payment by any means necessary, legal or illegal, and even take pride in it. No matter that it leads to the destruction of the companies involved, or the cancellation of shows or games that we enjoy.

If the game is good, and the subscription reasonable, I think Section C will be significantly larger than Sections A and B. In fact, I don't think Section A actually exists, and the F2P companies will end up depending on a very small, but high-paying segment to survive. Which is an unstable way of life for the company, and is often not too healthy for individuals in that small segment. For every millionaire tossing wads of cash at the item shop, there's an addict spending money she can ill afford to waste.

That's why I think that subscriptions will put a game on a firmer, more stable financial footing than cash shops, even if they do leave some money on the table. Of course, your game has to be of a certain quality to make subscriptions viable, and that's where most companies seem to be falling down these days.

(LotRO is a special case, in my opinion, which I will discuss in a later post.)

Another System for Raid Ids

Jeremy had a very interesting idea in a comment to the last post:

I just had an epiphany: Blizzard is building a Raid Finder for a mid-Cataclysm patch.

They just announced that raid IDs will be more forgiving: if your raid ID has killed the same set of bosses as another raid ID, you can switch over to the other raid ID.

Now add a Raid Finder that matches you with another group of players that all have a compatible raid ID. You join a raid, do your best, kill a few bosses, and then tomorrow, you log on again and join a different group that has the same set of bosses downed. It doesn't matter whether it's the same group as yesterday, as long as they've made the same amount of progress.

And there you have it: no more distinction between transient and extended content. Why should there be? Raiding is not rocket science, and the biggest barrier is that it's hard to find a regular group of people who are all online at the same time as you. Right now, nobody wants to PUG, because you'll just get locked to a dungeon with one boss down, and never see that group again. But with this feature, you can get a new group every day, and you can raid whenever you have the time for it. Brilliant!

(And Blizzard, if you're not working on this feature, you should be. It will actually make raiding feasible for all the players who are interested in and capable of raiding, but can't carve out regular weekly times for a guild raid.)

A system that implemented this isn't that hard to conceptualize (at least theoretically, real code always makes easy ideas hard). Right now, raid instances have an existence in the world. My character is tied to this specific raid instance, which exists even when my character is not online. And this has consequences. In the worst case, the raid id can be "stolen", and the remainder of the raid completed by another group, leaving most of the people in first group out in the cold.

But suppose a player's raid id was simple bit field, with 1 representing a live boss, and 0 representing a dead boss. So a player's TotC¹ id could be 00011, saying that they've killed the first three bosses, but Twin Valks and Anub are still alive.

For any given group of players, it becomes trivial to find the common set of bosses still alive. Simply bitwise-AND the raid ids together, and you can use the resulting mask to populate an instance with the bosses that no one has killed.

For example, Player 1 kills Beasts and Faction Champs (raid id 01011), and player 2 has killed Jaraxxus, Faction Champs, and Twin Valks (raid id 10001). 01011 ∧ 10001 = 00001, giving you an instance with only Anub'arak active. You can just keep bit-wise ANDing with all the players in the raid.

You can put in checks if you don't want early bosses to be alive and later bosses dead. Or you might not bother. After all, does it really matter if someone with Lich King dead gets to knock off Marrowgar the day after?

The key here is that there is no logical reason the specific raid instance needs to persist as its own entity. It can be generated at raid time so long as you know the set of bosses to populate the instance with. And since the bit fields are connected to the experiences of the individual players that week, you can easily generate the correct set of bosses for any given group of people.

You can also use the mask to determine whether to deny a new addition to the raid entry into the instance. If the current raid mask AND the new player's raid id is not equal to the mask, she cannot enter.

Even a Raid Finder wouldn't be that complicated to implement. The number of 1's in the result mask would make a strong foundation for the fitness function of the grouping algorithm. You want to group people such that they get an instance with as many bosses active as possible.

The hardest part, in my mind, would be making sure that an individual's raid id gets properly updated in each fight. You'd have to account for people intentionally disconnecting and joining at points in the fight in order to evade being tagged with the kill.

But as Jeremy points out, such a system would change raiding from being de jure extended content into transient content. It might still be de facto extended content, simply because a consistent group would be the best path to success. But it would put a lot less blocks in the way of individuals wanting to raid in a transient fashion, while still preserving the rule that "you can kill a boss a maximum of once per week".

1. I'm using TotC because I don't want to write out 12 digit bit fields.

Group Content and Group Creation

First, let us stipulate that there are two types of group content: transient; and extended.

Transient group content is content that is expected to be completed in a single session of play. The group is formed, the group completes the content, and then the group is disbanded. In WoW, group quests, battlegrounds, and 5-man dungeons are transient group content.

Extended group content is content that is expected to be completed over several sessions of play, and where the group is composed (more or less) of the same individuals throughout. In WoW, raids and PvP arena are extended group content.

Lately, I've come to the conclusion that transient group content is crippled without automatic group creation.

I've been playing a game (Age of Conan) which doesn't have a Dungeon Finder for groups. You have use a Looking For Groups channel, like in the old days. And it is terrible. It literally takes hours to form a group. I have never appreciated the Dungeon Finder as much as I do now. I remember having a lot of the same issues when I was playing Lord of the Rings Online. In fact, I stopped playing that game because I rolled a group healer and yet I found grouping to be too hard.

As well, because group creation is so hard, people seem to feel free to take advantage of the group with long afks, or generally do their own thing while the rest of the group waits for them. I remember that this used to happen a lot in WoW in the pre-Dungeon Finder days, but has since been eradicated from the game. Whatever the faults of the "gogogo" culture, at least they aren't wasting my time.

Without automatic group creation, the amount of time spent forming the group is excessively long, and makes grouping an unattractive proposition. I think this group creation time is really what keeps people from grouping up, more than any other concern such as rate of experience gain.

Other games have sort of approached this, while still leaving humans in control. For example, Warhammer Online had "open" groups, where you could just join a group instead of needing to be invited. While that was better than the old system, it still isn't as good as a fully automatic system.

It's interesting that the PvP side has always seemed ahead of PvE when it comes to this. Battlegrounds featured automatic group creation long before PvE. Perhaps it is because of a lot of the formative ideas for MMO PvP came from the First-Person Shooters and Real-Time Strategy world, where automatic group creation is the norm. While PvE grouping was stuck with the idea that it was important to let people choose their own groups.

Of course, automatic group creation is probably a bad fit for extended group content, if only because play sessions for the group need to match. In transient content, you know the play session matches because everyone is already online.

But it's also possible that I am wrong about extended content, that I am too used to the old system of making guilds, and I overweight the problems, and underestimate the convenience.

Perhaps an automatic matching system would be a good improvement for extended content. For example, a Guild Finder. Guilds could post what their schedules were like, or what type of guild they were, and players could do the same, and the system would automatically add people to guilds.

I think the bar has been raised for future MMOs. If an MMO has transient group content, it had better have automatic group creation for that content. As well, WoW needs to implement a system for group quests, as that is the last piece of transient content without an automatic group creation system. And group quests are noticeably the hardest content to find a group for.

Ask Coriel: A Holy Paladin AoE Heal Idea?

HolyPally - Barth writes in:

Basically it is obvious that the paladin needs some sort of AoE heal but nothing amazing because you don't want every class to be able to do the same things. You dont want a pally looking exactly like a priest and so on.

So my idea consists of giving paladins a talent in the holy tree which gives them a spell that is activated after receiving holy power from casting healing spells. Once a certain level of holy power is accumulated, then a single AoE spell may be cast.
E.g. Holy Light is cast 3 times then the ability is activated and ready to be cast. Or Flash of Light is cast 5/6 times then the same spell is available for use. By giving pallys the ability to only stack either the FoL buff or the Holy Light buff at one time, limits the spell so that it isn't overpowered. Also considering adding flexibility to the spell and making the FoL use of the spell different from the Holy Light use.

Also in regards to mana consumption you could put an increased mana cost on the spell when it is used with the FoL stacking so that you cant just spam FoL and get a powerful AoE heal equal to the heal gained from using Holy Light at an increased mana cost. Just a quick idea I came up with while I was reading your blog.

It's an interesting idea. However, it might not be "different enough" from Circle of Healing or Wild Growth. Both of those spells have a 6 second cooldown. It would take about 6s to cast 3 Holy Lights or 4-5 Flash of Lights. So in actual game play, it might end up playing just like CoH or WG does now. I'm not sure Blizzard wants to give us something equivalent to CoH.

It's not exactly the same, I know. For one thing, you can't cast the AoE spell at the start of the fight, you have to charge it up. However, I think it would end up being too close to CoH/WG for Blizzard to be comfortable giving something like it to paladins.

Like, if you look at the new AoE spells coming in Cataclysm, the shaman's Healing Rain and the paladin's Healing Hands, both those spells are continuous area-of-effect spells. Thus they will have very different gameplay than CoH/WG, and I think that is what Blizzard is aiming for.

Quest Rewards for Hybrids

This post was, oddly enough, prompted by Age of Conan rather than WoW. But you get a similar situation in WoW as well.

Most hybrids I know maintain multiple sets, even if they have one main spec and one offspec. So what do you do if a single non-repeatable quest gives rewards for both main and offspec?

Obviously most people choose main spec. But what if the main spec upgrade would only be a slight upgrade, and the offspec upgrade is a large upgrade?

One theory is that you should keep your main spec as advanced as possible, even if that hurts your offspec. Another theory is that you should use quests to advance your offspec. Your main spec will get better rewards in instances and group content. After all, it's much easier to get healing items while you are a healer, rather than fight with DPS for DPS items.

(Note that I am only talking about situations where questing would provide roughly equal rewards to instance loot. Like levelling or maybe the Quel'Delar questline.)

The specific incident that started me thinking about it was from Age of Conan. My main character is a level 35-ish Conqueror, which is a 2H or dual-wield class. I'm playing as a 2H Conqueror. There are two group quests in a chain. Both reward good 2-Handers, with the second one being slightly better than the first. But the second quest also offers a choice of a really good 1H, which would be a larger upgrade for that set of mine. Yet, I'm not likely to ever actually use those weapons. The 2H would be used all the time.

Unless, of course, I decided to respec.

Ah well, just getting a group going in Age of Conan is pretty hard, so this might be a non-issue in the end.

Interesting Vote Kick Changes

Zarhym posts:

We have found that most players using the Dungeon Finder don’t use the Vote Kick feature or abandon groups very often. For these players, we are removing the cooldown on voting to kick players from a dungeon party. In contrast, those players who tend to kick players or abandon groups more frequently will notice that the Vote Kick feature maintains its cooldown. The goal here is to make sure players who are generally patient can make use of the Vote Kick feature when they really need it, without giving a more powerful tool to those who try to kick others or abandon dungeon groups very frequently.

This functionality will adjust itself as a player’s behavior while using the Dungeon Finder changes.

This is a really intriguing change. In many ways, it's the first stab in WoW at using a player's past behavior to control the powers available to her.

There's an awful lot of functionality that would be really nice to have, but you can't include in the game because a very small minority would abuse it. Right now, if you can't give something to everyone, you can't give it to anyone.

I think the concept of identifying who exactly that small minority is, and depriving them of those powerful abilities might do a world of good in keeping the community on the straight and narrow.

I wonder if we might end up seeing things like this in world PvP systems, to moderate the corpse campers and gankers.

Oh, and for those people complaining that they "need" to be able to vote-kick freely because all their PuGs are terrible, I've done 40 levels with my lowbie warrior tank in the Dungeon Finder and have only ever kicked one player. Maybe you should look in a mirror for the source of all your troubles.