Legendaries

Legendary weapons are interesting items in WoW. Right now, there are three expectations for a legendary weapon:

1. They will be rare. Not every character who can use a legendary will get one.
2. They will be very powerful. A legendary is not expected to be replaced until the next expansion, while most weapons are expected to be replaced in the next tier.
3. They will have a significant quest or lore attached to them.

In the past, these three elements have caused issues with each other. Rare and very powerful means that guilds who can recruit multiple legendaries have a significant advantage. Conversely, guilds who lose their legendary feel resentful and unhappy. There is also significant conflict over who gets the legendary first, because the people later in line may not get one at all.

Legendaries being Best-In-Slot for an entire expansion also means that they can only show up in the last or second last tier.  As well, classes which don't receive legendaries do feel slighted.

The quest attached causes three problems. First, only a small fraction of players will see the quest. Not all rogues will see the daggers quest line. It's restricted to raiding rogues who get the legendary. That seems like a very large set of restrictions.

The second problem is that the questline is a very long grind, because that is how Blizzard limits the supply of legendaries. I suppose it's better than the random chance method that previous legendaries used.

The third problem is that classes and specs which are not in line to get a legendary will not get an epic quest.

I like the quests and lore attached to these weapons. But I really wonder if the first two points are worthwhile. On balance I think those two points have caused more trouble than they are worth.

Can we have weapons with quests and lore without having them be very rare and very powerful?

I think we can. There is precedent here: [Benediction] and [Rhok'delar]. Both those weapons are fondly remembered by their respective classes because of the quest chains attached to them. I'd wager than the vast majority of characters who got those weapons back in the day still have them banked. 

Both those weapons were good weapons, best for that tier. But they were still replaced in the next tier. If all your priests had Benediction, it didn't unbalance the raid. They weren't super rare, but were still worthwhile to get.

I think [Benediction] and [Rhok'delar] are the better model for quest and lore-driven loot. Solid, well-loved weapons, with interesting questlines, but without the unbalancing effects of rarity and power that current Legendaries have.

It would be easier for Blizzard to add more of these, even for more obscure classes and specs. For example, [Fandral's Flamescythe] might have been a very nice questline weapon, even if it isn't as powerful as a Legendary.

In my view, legendary weapons cause more trouble than they are worth. It seems to me that we can get almost as much mileage out good epic-level quest-driven weapons modeled after [Benediction], without the drama and unbalancing effects of legendaries.

Player or Character as Central Entity

In WoW and most other MMOs, the character is the central entity in the design around which everything revolves. But players have multiple characters. And there are a lot of game play elements which are fun the first time around, but are not so much fun the second time around.

The quintessential example here is reputation grinds. Working on rep is reasonably interesting on your first character. But it's excessive on your second character, especially if the reputation is necessary for endgame. Right now, WoW gets around this limitation by making important items Bind-on-Account, which allows you to transfer them to characters who don't have the necessary rep yet.

But, what if reputation was tied to the player account, not the character? Once you're exalted with the Argent Dawn, you're exalted on all your characters. You could have the long reputation grinds and chains once again, because a player only needs to do them once.

There are a lot of other elements which could be moved from the character to the player. Reputation, Achievements, Pet collections, and Mount collections are the straight-forward ones. But what about some less obvious elements?

Friends - We're already moving towards this with Real Id and Battletags. I predict that eventually the Friends Lists will exist at the account level, and consist of other accounts, rather than characters. Same thing with the Ignore List.

Gold - Gold could work at the player level. All your characters would have access to, and contribute to, a central gold stockpile.

Currencies - To extend gold, why not all currencies, including Valor and Honor points?

Inventory - This might sound a little odd, but does each character need a unique inventory? Could the same set of bags be used for all characters. There would be issues here, of course, but how necessarily unique are inventories?

Bank - A bank might work better at the player level, shared between all characters. Certainly would be easier than using the mail system all the time.

Guilds - There are probably a lot of objections to having players belonging to a guild, rather than individual characters. But there are also a lot of requests for being able to belong to multiple guilds at the same time. If we did have a multi-guild system, it certainly would be easier to have the account belong to the different guilds, rather than individual characters.

Attunements - I liked long attunement chains, especially for the first tier of content. But again, once you've unlocked something, it should be unlocked for all your characters.

PvP Matchmaker Ratings - Really, shouldn't a player's rating be consistent across all her characters? As far as I see, having ratings be character-based just allows people to game the system.

Areas like Molten Front - Similar to attunements, areas like the Molten Front would be better if you only needed to unlock it once. You could even make the process longer and more intricate, confident that each player only needs to do it once.

Lockouts - Possibly the most controversial element I can think of. But consider the idea of having 2 lockouts per account per week. You could do two raids on the same character, or raid with two different characters. There are also some shenanigans with alts at the very high end which this might cut down on.

When we look at the original design of most modern MMOs, almost all gameplay elements are unique to each character that is created. But I think that perhaps a better design might see the player as the central element, with all her characters sharing many elements.

[SWTOR] Imperial Agent Done!

I got my Imperial Agent up to level 50 and finished the class storyline and also the main quest storyline. The Imperial Agent storyline (especially Light-side Imp Agent, in my opinion) was very, very good. Very spy-like, lots of twists and turns, betrayal, double/triple agents, etc. The main theme of the storyline, of how the non-Sith exist in an Empire ruled by the Sith, was really interesting.

I was expecting a lot of the traditional spy stuff, and that was there in spades. At one point, I was pretty sure I was a quintuple agent, which in retrospect makes no sense, but indicates the level of paranoia that was going on. But I was not expecting story elements to be based on Isaac Asimov's work. It was brilliant, and well thought out.

For tactics, I played Marksman Sniper. It worked fine for the most part, though it is rather weak until you get to about level 30 or so. At that point you get two abilities (one from talents, one trained) which are a core part of the rotation, and damage starts flowing.

The difficulty level is interesting too. In general, class quests were slightly easier than regular story quests, which does make class balance seem slightly questionable. Overall though, most fights were roughly the same difficulty, save two.

These two fights are significantly harder than all other fights, and it does seem rather odd. The first fight is the class fight at the end of Chapter 1. It doesn't help that it's pretty buggy. But the entire fight is based around interrupting, using any ability that can interrupt, including knockbacks.

The second hard fight is main quest boss at the end of Voss. When did pillar-humping become an acceptable PvE tactic? This fight is literally pillar-humping as you use two pillars to break line-of-sight while keeping dots up and the occasional instant.

Oh well, those two fights do seem a little out of character.

But now the question becomes what should I do? Should I start a new character and check out a new story? Should I try and do instances? Lots of choices here.

Nerfs and Listening to the Hardcore

Kurn wrote a good post about the upcoming Dragon Soul nerfs. She is unhappy with the nerfs. I am on the opposite side of the issue. However, I want to address two specific points in her post.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — I like a challenge. I loved attunement quests, no matter how crappy they were to do (doing Jailbreak twice in a single night for Majik because he was a dumbass and died? Not fun.). I loved working out strats for encounters in Burning Crusade raids, which, at the time, were incredibly punishing (Vashj, Kael, Bloodboil all come to mind off the top of my head). We were nowhere near server first, we were over a year behind in most cases. But we persevered and worked through it. The only nerfs we took advantage of were attunement removals (except the BT one, because we needed the necks for shadow resistance) and the 3.0 nerfs because, dangit, we weren’t ready to stop raiding yet. (Still, we were 4/5 Hyjal and 5/9 BT when 3.0 dropped.) By and large, Vashj was pretty similar an encounter when we downed her (on June 2nd, 2008) as when SSC opened up in 2007. There had been no 20% zone-wide nerf. No stacking 30% player buff. Nothing of the sort. 

There was a measure of pride there. I still wear my Hand of A’dal title because of what it took for us to kill Vashj and Kael and finish the Vials of Eternity quest.

I remember Lady Vashj too. What I remember about Lady Vashj was that she broke the guild I was in. We went 3/4 TK and 5/6 SSC, but we broke on Vashj. Maybe she was beyond us, maybe we should have improved, maybe we should have practiced more or been better players.

Really hard bosses break guilds. Vashj, Kael'thalas, Vaelastraz, Ragnaros.  These bosses are known as guild-killers.

Broken guilds are not good for the game, in my view. Guilds that get stuck on a hard boss, with no respite in sight, die. These nerfs keep guilds from getting stuck. Small, steady nerfs keep people moving forward, keep them from being completely stuck forever.

To me, the choice seems to be between guild-killer bosses, or nerfing. I choose nerfing.

I’ve long felt that Blizzard is ignoring its population of older players. I have been playing WoW since October of 2005. This doesn’t grant me any in-game advantage, and that’s okay, but those things that I “grew up” with, like attunements, like keys, like epic class quests, like epic instances without the novelty of a “heroic” mode… those are the things that kept me interested in the game. Those are the things that helped grow the game to 11 million players. Precious few of those mechanics and concepts remain. Is it any wonder why people are quitting? Is it any wonder why I now believe this to be my final expansion? The game is unrecognizable. The playerbase is maddeningly lazy and unwilling to put forth the effort that so many of us old-timers did and their laziness is affecting us.

Honestly, when has listening to older players ever helped Blizzard?

Blizzard listened to us at the start of Cataclysm. "Wrath was too easy," we said. "Make heroics hard like in TBC!" "Bring back crowd control!" "Make raiding hard again!"

Blizzard listened to us, and was rewarded with a significant drop in subscriptions. It's obvious from their subsequent actions that their internal numbers were telling them that the drop in the subscribers was coming from the people who found endgame too hard.

Consider the idea that ignoring the older players is the right thing to do. That they are merely a vocal minority. In my view, all the evidence points to that conclusion.

I am obviously not the type of player they want playing their game. And that’s what’s so very shocking to me. I am a good player. I am a community asset. I am a guild leader, a raid leader, a healing lead. I write a blog dedicated to the game that has had hundreds of thousands of visitors and pageviews since December 31st, 2009 (and more before then, but I don’t have any data before 12/31/09). I co-host and produce a podcast dedicated to the game.

Kurn loved the original Cataclysm heroics. So did I. We both wrote multiple blog posts extolling the experience.  Many, many other bloggers out there did the same.

And what was the result of the best efforts of these "community assets"? Two million lost subscriptions.

Our set is not as important as we think we are. We are loud, but occupy a small, tightly bound niche. There is no reason that Blizzard should give our concerns any extra weight. If anything, the evidence is proving that our concerns should be given less weight.

[SWTOR] Dungeon Finder

The Old Republic doesn't have a dungeon finder.  A lot of bloggers seem to be applauding this.

I don't know. Maybe they're right. Maybe a dungeon finder does damage the community and make running instances less fun.

All I know is that my highest level character, a 42 Sniper, has only seen the first three flashpoints, and only the first two were done at the appropriate level. The third flashpoint I did when I was 15 levels higher than the recommended level. I have not finished a [HEROIC 4] group quest since the second planet, at about level 16.  I have done some of the smaller [HEROIC 2+] quests though.

I have a whole set of outdated quests in my log, pointing to the flashpoints I just have not been able to do.

Now, maybe it's my fault for choosing to play a DPS character instead of a tank or healer. Maybe I should have found and joined an active guild with people at the correct level. Maybe I should be more willing to spend hours on the station looking for a group, instead of continuing on my quests.

Maybe I should have stuck with the player-made global Looking For Group channel, despite the fact that everyone was using it as a general chat, and it was worse than Barrens chat.

I did try for the third flashpoint when at the correct level. I spent an hour looking for people, but only found one other person, at which point I gave up.

I really enjoy doing small group content at the correct level. I don't like being carried by higher level players. But as far as I can see, that's pretty much not an option for me in The Old Republic.

I guess I'll get to see the flashpoints when I'm at max level, and there's nothing better to do but hang out at the station and scan the chat.

Maybe the dungeon finder makes running instances less fun. But at least with a dungeon finder, I can actually run the instances.

[SWTOR] Through a Glass, Darkly

The Old Republic has an interesting mix of zones. There are zones unique to each faction, like the starting planets and the capital planet. There are "shared" planets, like Hoth, where both sides quest (and gank, if on a PvP server) together.

And then there is Taris.

Taris is a city planet, destroyed by planetary bombardment by Darth Malak back in Knights of the Old Republic. It's now infested by rakghouls, a vicious bunch of monsters who infect their victims and turn them into more rakghouls.

Taris is a level 16-20 zone for Republic and a level 30-36 zone for Empire. But Taris is not a shared world!

Both zones use the same geography, and the same planet, and the same concern with the rakghouls. But on the Republic side, the Republic holds Taris and is attempting to reclaim it from rakghouls and pirates. On the Empire side, the Empire holds Taris and chasing the remnants of the Republic off it.

It's as if the two Tarises exist side-by-side in parallel universes. In one universe the Republic is dominant, and in the other universe the Empire is ascendant.

It makes me wonder if SWTOR is a shared universe between the two factions. In World of Warcraft, it's obvious that the two factions share the same world. You can go and visit the home cities of the other side.

But SWTOR seems to be running two parallel universes that only occasionally overlap. Which is really odd at first, and seems quite unusual. But there are advantages. With two separate universes, the storyline can unfold differently for each side. One side can "win" without the other side suffering a "loss".

Still, this quite caught me by surprise. I'm so used to the shared world, that other setups seem hard to grasp.

Is Diablo 3 Gambling?

Tobold asks if Diablo 3 is gambling and concludes that it is:

And thus the question whether the randomized way in which the player acquired the Sword of Uberness is a form of gambling is valid.

I disagree with this interpretation. Wikipedia's definition, which I think is a good one, states:

Gambling is the wagering of money or something of material value (referred to as "the stakes") on an event with an uncertain outcome with the primary intent of winning additional money and/or material goods.

The wager is the important part of gambling, and that's the part that Diablo 3 is missing. When you go to kill a boss to get a random drop, you don't bet anything. And you don't lose anything. Sure the reward is random, but there is no loss, and no initial bet.

You have to be able to lose your stakes based on the random event for the activity to be considered gambling. In a lottery, you have to purchase a ticket, and that's your stake. Losing that stake, tiny as it is, is what makes a lottery gambling.

Where you can lose money is in the buying and selling of items. But that's trade, and it's not random. Sell at the price the market will bear, and don't purchase over-priced items. In fact, if you never buy an item, and always sell at below market prices, I don't see how you can actually lose money in D3. You may end up only making a tiny amount, and the amount per hour will be orders of magnitude less than a real job, but there's no actual loss.

But without the wager, without the bet, without the possibility of loss, there is no gambling. Diablo 3 doesn't make you put down wagers on what the random loot will be, and thus is not gambling.

The Tyranny of Skill

In a lot of ways, World of Warcraft raiding is an extreme meritocracy.  The better a player is, the more highly skilled, the more weight her voice carries. All the guilds I've been in follow this general pattern. The players who are listened to are the ones who can perform the best. For this reason, it's very important that officers in a serious raiding guild be among the top half of the players.

In my experience, this pattern even holds in PuGs. I have never been treated badly in a PuG or LFR. It is really hard to argue with a person decked in high end gear, or topping the meters.

And yet, the high skill players are not always right. I mentioned in the previous post that:

There is a type of person who believes that all failure is caused by people playing badly. That skill is everything in this game. That the only response to any problem, any difficulty, is to tell people to play better, or recruit better people to replace the failures. That you must always take the "best" raiders you have to a raid to ensure success.

The people who espouse this view are always really good players. Of the players I've known with this view, the vast majority of them were far better than I am. Indeed, it is highly possible that they are this good because they hold themselves to this standard.

Not all of these players yell or are unpleasant. Many of them are nice and rational. They simply believe that all failure is a failure of personal responsibility.

A lot of the time these players are right. Enforcing standards makes people live up to those standards. Sometimes you'll encounter players who just will not live up to the necessary standards for the level you play at.

But sometimes these players are wrong. All my raiding experience leads me to believe that this style of play, where the only important thing is personal accountability, is brittle. When you get a good group going you can progress exceptionally fast. But sooner or later you lose people just through normal attrition, and have to recruit more and that leads to uneven progress. Or you hit a wall, and relations become acrimonious over who's failure it is.

But the problem is that all these highly skilled players just cannot see that. Suggestions that weigh any other considerations get met with comments that such suggestions are akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. That the only thing that will lead to progress is the individual players stepping up and improving their play. Or under-performing players being replaced by ones who can perform.

And because they are highly skilled, their voice carries a lot of weight. And that is the part that is very hard to combat or argue against.

Edit: Copying this response to Kalon in the comments, because it may make things a little more clear.

Or there's a third option - that you lose people through attrition and instead of accepting recruits that are perhaps subpar you always recruit for the best and do not settle.

But then you don't actually raid. Because you don't always have the numbers to raid.

Part of this--which I left out because I though it was tangential, may have been wrong--is that this style of play is very hostile to maintaining a bench.

If you are always taking your 25 best raiders to new content, then your bench doesn't get to raid. And quality players will not hang around a mid-Aristocracy guild if they only get to raid 1 of 3 days at best. Maybe they'll feel that's okay in a Royalty guild, but not at my level.

And to be honest, that's my main issue with this playstyle. Personal accountability is a secondary priority. The first and greatest priority is maintaining a full raid force, with a deep enough bench that you are always able to raid with a stable group.

Basically, the personal accountability folks felt that because people didn't perform, we didn't progress fast enough in order to attract quality recruits.

I felt that because we couldn't retain people (especially people who were on the bench), we couldn't put together a consistent raid in order to progress consistently.

In the Wake of a Bad Merger

You guys have probably noticed that I haven't been writing a lot over the past two months. And that most of my posts have been about Star Wars. Well, there's a reason for that. Looking back on it, I think I've been playing so much SWTOR not only because it's the new hotness, but also to avoid logging into WoW. Which is somewhat ironic if you take the view that people often play WoW to avoid real life.

When I last talked about my guild in the beginning of November, I mentioned that we had gone through a split, had moved to a more populated server, and were looking at merging with another 10-man guild to get back up to 25s.

That merger turned out to be the worst mistake in the history of our guild.

There is a type of person who believes that all failure is caused by people playing badly. That skill is everything in this game. That the only response to any problem, any difficulty, is to tell people to play better, or recruit better people to replace the failures. That you must always take the "best" raiders you have to a raid to ensure success.

There is a degree of truth in this.  But in my view, there usually there are a lot more elements that you can look at before you conclude that the problem is solely due to bad play. Sometimes the strategy is not quite right. Sometimes people misunderstand the plan. Sometimes people just make mistakes. Sometimes you just need practice, to wipe a few nights before everything clicks. Sometimes you just have to go with the army you have, rather than the army you wish you had.

In any case, the merging guild was entirely made up of people who held the first view. They were all very good players, at least pure skill-wise. But their response to any wipe, any failure, was to yell at people, to point fingers and berate them.  Sometimes the yelling would start before the attempt even finished, while we still attacking the boss.

It was the worst raiding experience of my life.

And of course we started hemorraging members. In two weeks we went from 35 raiders online to barely 25. We lost some essential people from our old guild before the merger.

The final blow came last week. We only had 23 raiders on, so it was decided to take the 10 "best" people and down some Heroic bosses for progression.  Apparently that team had trouble and drama blew up, with lots of yelling and finger-pointing, and the upshot was that the entire group of merged people left the guild.

So we're back down to maybe a 10-man worth of people, minus those people who left earlier. I'm not really certain what will happen. A lot of the people who remain sound rather "shell-shocked", with their confidence in their ability to tackle Heroics broken.

[SWTOR] Chat Box

So far, the single biggest mistake Bioware has made is their default chat filters. It's a simple mistake, but I think it has surprising large ramifications.

Now, this is a hobbyhorse of mine, so maybe I'm overstating the impact. Especially since every recent MMO has made the same mistake, in my view. Heck, maybe it's a sign that I'm wrong.

By default, system messages are sent to the general chat box. And there are a ton of system messages. When you hit level 25 and unlock your Legacy (shared XP pool and last name between your characters on a server), you start getting a Legacy XP message every time you earn normal XP. That's two lines in your chat box for every XP event. Which is every time you kill a mob. And the default pull is pack of three to four mobs.

Basically, the spam of system chat messages makes your chat box useless for its primary purpose. SWTOR is an extraordinarily quiet game, which is surprising for such a new game, and one that gets quieter as you increase in levels. This is very unfortunate, because you need the chat to organize groups to take on the heroics.

Go into the game, and turn off system messages in the general tab of your chat box. Turn it on in the Other tab (may actually happen automatically). All of a sudden, the general chat becomes usable once again, and you still have the Other tab if you need to recall a system message.

Of all the changes Bioware could make in their next patch, I strongly urge them to turn off system messages in the default chat box. I think it would make a world of a difference community-wise.

The Guild as a Nexus of Contracts

If you look at the Guild Relations Forums, there are a lot of posts of (ex-)Guild Masters decrying the new Guild Takeover mechanisms. This is where, if a GM does not log on for an entire month, the next highest ranked officer can take over the GM position, demoting the original GM. A lot of the GRF regulars are responding that:

1. This was the policy all along, it just required a Help ticket previously.
2. You can't really be a good GM if you don't log on for a month.
3. If you are going to be gone for a month, you should promote someone trustworthy to the second-in-command rank.

These points are all correct, but I feel that they are missing something. Something about how the relationship between guild and the individuals in guilds has changed over WoW's history, and something about the nature of ownership.

Background

Ownership is complicated concept. To own an item implies that one has a great deal of control over that item, often absolute control. If I own a chair, I can sit on it, move it around, paint it, disassemble it, burn it, chop it to pieces, sell it, give it away, or any other myriad options.

Conversely, if there exists an object to which I can do all of the actions above, then for all intents and purposes, I "own" that object.

In common parlance, a corporation is "owned" by the shareholders. But that relationship is not the same relationship as my ownership of my chair. In fact, it is so different that several academics declare that using the word "own" is wrong and misleading. As Professor Stephen Bainbridge of UCLA puts it:

Ownership implies a thing capable of being owned. To be sure, we often talk about the corporation as though it were such a thing, but when we do so we engage in reification. While it may be necessary to reify the corporation for semantic convenience, it can mislead. Conceptually, the corporation is not a thing, but rather simply a set of contracts between various stakeholders pursuant to which services are provided and rights with respect to a set of assets are allocated. 

Because shareholders are simply one of the inputs bound together by this web of voluntary agreements, ownership is not a meaningful concept in nexus of contracts theory. Someone owns each input, but no one owns the totality. Instead, the corporation is an aggregation of people bound together by a complex web of contractual relationships.

Application to Guilds

The above description does sound a lot like World of Warcraft guilds. Sure, the contracts are implicit rather than explicit, and there's very little money involved, but the basic concept of a "web of voluntary agreements" holds.

But when WoW first started, in practice Guild Masters held such mechanical power over the guild that it could be said--with accuracy--that a Guild Masters "owned" her respective guild. A GM could disband her guild, kick people out, promote people, prevent individuals from talking in guild chat, etc. And there was really nothing a non-GM could do. Because of this power, a lot of GMs felt a true sense of ownership.

However, this ownership did not really matter. Mechanically a guild was nothing more than a glorified chat channel and a tag over your character's head. If the GM abused her authority or disappeared for months, the other guild members simply left and reformed with a new name, with no major loss, save for particularly stylish guild names.

As the years have passed though, the guild entity has taken on more and more "real" weight. First we had common guild banks, then shared repair costs. Then with Cataclysm we got the entire system of guild perks, and automatic guild contributions.

Now, regular members have a higher stake in a guild. If you have to leave, you lose all the perks, all the stuff in the guild bank, etc. Thanks to automatic contributions, everyone in the guild has contributed to the guild's current state. Even if everyone in the guild but the guild master leaves and reforms, there is still significant loss.

Basically, the idea that a guild is a nexus of contracts has gotten more and more important.  Finally, in Patch 4.3, we got the ability to dethrone guild masters in specific circumstances. This is a recognition that the balance of power in a guild is too far weighted on the guild master's side, and some of the power needs to come back, especially in the situation where the guild master simply disappears.

This re-balancing of powers makes perfect and necessary sense if you think of the guild as a nexus of contracts between current players. But it also conflicts with a lot of guild masters' sense of "ownership". To this type of GM, she created the guild, she got the signatures, she did all the work, she has all the power. In a sense, she is merely letting other people play in "her" guild.

In the past, such views would have been perfectly correct, and still are correct. How can you say that a Guild Master does not own a guild if she can kick everyone else out of it?

To this GM, the takeovers are nothing less than theft. The theft of the property she "owns", that she has worked to build up. And thus she has a very visceral reaction to that theft.

That reaction is far more understandable than most of the GRF regulars are willing to admit. And I think it is a somewhat valid reaction. I think that Guild Masters have an understandable sense of ownership of their respective guilds, and the entire lifespan of WoW up to the last few months has encouraged that sense of ownership.

I am not certain that Guild Takeovers were the best option possible in light of the way power is balanced in a guild. But on the other hand, because of that power balance, a GM who disappears for over a month can cripple a guild, and the Guild Takeover becomes necessary.

[SWTOR] Crafting

The crafting profession subsystem in SWTOR is very different than the one in WoW, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Background

A character in SWTOR can have up to three professions or "crew skills". There are three types of skills: crafting, gathering, and special professions. So the obvious pattern is to take a crafting skill and then take the gathering and special skills that compliments it. The gathering skill gives the materials to make green items, while the special skill gives the materials to make blue or purple items, as well as gifts for your companion. There is an additional special skill, Slicing, which essential gives money and schematics.

Crafters can reverse engineer the items that they make and that gives them a chance to learn to make the higher rarity version of the item, as well as some of the raw materials. For example, reverse engineering a green item gives a chance to learn the blue version. The blue version is better than the green version and has the same level requirement, and uses the same type of material to create.

For example, my Imperial Agent has Cybertech as her crafting skill, with Scavenging as the gathering skill, and Underworld Trading as her special skill. Scavenging gives the materials required to make green mods (items like gems). For example, I can make and use Green Skill Mod 10. Reverse engineering Green Skill Mod 10 gives a chance to learn Blue Skill Mod 10.  Blue Skill Mod 10 probably has the same stats as Green Skill Mod 12, but Skill Mod 12s require level 29 to use, and I'm not at that level yet. Blue Skill Mod 10 also requires some materials from Underworld Trading.

So if you keep your crafting up to date, you gravitate towards using the blue mods in your personal gear, and making green mods to level up. If you're behind on crafting though, you'll probably just make green mods to catch up.

Key Innovation

In any case, the key innovation in SWTOR's crafting system is the introduction of a new material: Time. It takes a certain amount of real time to craft an item. At the beginning, it's only a minute or so, but the time keeps rising. Right now, it takes me 15 minutes or so to craft an item, and I imagine that the time will increase to hours or possibly even days.

I've mentioned before that there are four elements to crafting: gathering knowledge, gathering raw materials, transmutation, and using the created item. In WoW, transmutation is a negligible element. In SWTOR, transmutation is a vital element that has to be taken into account.

The way this works is that your companions who remain behind craft for you while you adventure with your regular companion. You tell your droid to go make a skill mod, continue questing, and then the droid announces his success or failure 15 minutes later.

The reason this is so important is that it puts a significant constraint on the supply of items. As well, it's very hard in WoW to make a profit in crafting because the buyer often supplies her own materials, and the crafter is expected to make do with just a tip.  Or have guild crafters who do all the crafting for free.

For example, after my raid the other night, I did enchants for four or so people and cut gems for another person. It took maybe 10 minutes to do all that, and most of the time was coordinating the trade as they gave me mats, and then I gave them the enchant.

In SWTOR, it's literally impossible to do that. Even if they gave me mats, I'd have to queue up the crafting, and it might take several hours for it to all finish. This means that the buying and selling of crafted items will move entirely to the Auction House (or Galactic Trade Network) marketplace. Which means that people only purchase finished items, not raw materials, and that prices will float and a profit can be made from crafting.

It is a very intriguing system and I am greatly looking forward to see how this all plays out.

Major Weakness

But it does bring us to the greatest weakness of the SWTOR crafting system, and that is the fact that the Auction House interface is pretty terrible. It's worse than WoW's default AH. Something as simple as a price check for an item you want to sell takes like five steps. Select category, select subcategory, search, type in the name of the item, then filter the search. Repeat all the steps for each item you want to sell.

The SWTOR crafting systems needs a fully functional Auction House to reach its full potential. If I had one suggestion for the SWTOR crafting devs, it would be to take a look at the WoW AH mods that the serious goblins use, find the one with most usability, and copy that. Pretty much anything will be a significant upgrade over the current interface.

[SWTOR] Character Personalities

I'm rather enjoying SWTOR. I'm slowly making my way up. My Imperial Agent (Sniper) is level 27, and has been a lot of fun.

This blog is probably going to have a lot of SWTOR posts in the near future, mostly because it's the new hotness and because--for all that it is a WoW clone--there are some very interesting differences between the two games.

Normally, I don't roleplay at all in MMOs. In fact, I've gone on record as saying that roleplaying is irrelevant to MMOs. But I find myself assigning personalities to the characters I make in SWTOR, and using that to determine which choices I make in conversations. I'm usually Light-side, but it's interesting how much variation there can be.

Imperial Agent - pure Light-side for the greater good of the Empire. Absolutely loyal to the Empire, but feels that Light-side choices brings order to the Empire, as opposed to the chaos of the Sith. This works astonishingly well with the Imperial Agent storyline so far.

Sith Inquisitor - mostly Light-side. Is snarky and insulting towards the pompous, arrogant Sith, but respectful to those Sith worthy of respect and to the lower orders of the Empire.

Republic Trooper - again, mostly Light-side, but will go Dark Side to foil the Republic's enemies, both foreign and domestic.

Jedi Knight - la belle dame sans merci. Again, Light-side for most choices, but does not show mercy to defeated enemies, and kills them instead. Follows the principle that Batman should have killed the Joker, rather than imprisoning him in Arkham Asylum, as the Joker will inevitably escape and kill more innocents.

It's actually kind of surprising how many Dark-side points the last will get you. I'm running about 2-to-1 Light-side to Dark-side points.

[SWTOR] Shared Reality

I find SWTOR's use of phasing to be fascinating.

The world changes. NPCs do different things and even die.  But the areas where the changes occur are cordoned off from the rest of the world, and are explicitly marked off using red and green force fields. If you enter one of these areas, there's an explicit note on the UI, telling you who controls this reality. It's generally the first person in the group who enters the area.

To put this in WoW terms, imagine if all the changes to the throne room of Stormwind in WoW's history still existed.  Bolvar and Lady Prestor start there. When Onyxia is revealed in the Great Masquerade, it phases to become just Bolvar. Then when Varian returns, the phase changes again. But the throne room would have an explicit entrance. When you enter, you get put in a specific phase, and you know who's phase you are in.

WoW uses what I call "seamless" phasing. The world changes, and you really cannot tell where the change starts, or who's reality you are seeing. Or more accurately, you are always seeing your own personal reality.  Two people in the same group can be in the same area, but be out of phase with each other.

By having the explicit entrance to the phased area, SWTOR has its phasing be less seamless and more like instances. Which makes it seem more gamist and less world-like. But this system has the advantage of making things clearer for group play.  And parts of the world still change in response to events.

The problem with phasing has always been, given a group of two players with different states, determining which player's reality should hold for the group. I have seen many algorithms and strategies proposed, and they all have some flaws.

SWTOR chooses to delegate the decision on which reality to use back to the players. It is a very interesting strategy. It is a lot easier to deal with, at the price of making the world less "world-like" and more "game-like".

Looking For Raid

I rather enjoy Looking For Raid.

It's quick, it's pretty easy, but it also "feels" like regular raiding.  The large group, the controlled chaos. It's tuned almost perfectly, I think. It does feel like the group needs to do things correctly, but there's definitely a lot of slack.

The way Blizzard has handled people dropping and joining groups is perfect too. It's seamless, and almost invisible to the group participants.  It is gloriously transient, and I think, pitched perfectly at that demographic.

What I've found is that so long as the group has one person who looks like they know what they're doing, one leader, people will follow.  Most of them anyways. For some reason, target switching seems to be very hard for people. It's one thing to switch late, or not as fast as you could, but to never switch at all?

It's also interesting to see what mechanics Blizzard changed, in order to make the fight possible. The one mechanic that has caused the most problems in my LFR experience is the ice walls on Hargara. Almost every time, the first attempt sees half the raid dead. Oddly enough, the second attempt usually goes well, as most people get the hang of it.

But that's pretty much the only "Do X or die" mechanic. Everything else is healable, and the healers can basically carry the group if there's a decent tank and a few decent DPS. Ultraxion is especially funny, because every special, you can see the people who should have died, but that you can heal up in LFR difficulty.

Loot-wise, the current system is "good enough". To my mind, it just illustrates the difficulty of loot distribution, especially when you have to take off-specs into account.

I wonder if all the people who confidently predicted that this would be a total failure are willing to reconsider. In my view, Looking For Raid is another bold success for Blizzard.

Edit: I was thinking about it, and LFR really reminds me of raiding Molten Core, back in the day. It just has the same sensibility as the raids back then.

[SWTOR] Queue Troubles

I got into the head start of SWTOR on Wednesday. But Wednesday is our raid night, so I decided to just play for bit after the raid night. I rolled an Imperial Agent on a server, did the first couple of quests, and got to level 3. Then I logged off for the night.

On Thursday evening I log in, excited to get a good stretch of playing time in, and was confronted with a 30 minute queue.

Personally, I can't stand queues, so I ended up rolling characters on different servers. I tried a Jedi Knight, but found it to be boring. So then I rolled a Sith Inquisitor and ended up taking her to level 10 and finishing the starting area.

So now I have a bit of conundrum. Should I continue with the Inquistor, or try for the Agent? My initial plan was to have the Agent as my main.

In hindsight, maybe I should have just stuck out the queue. I wonder what I'm going to do if both servers have a queue tonight.

How do you deal with queues?

[SWTOR] Pre-order Waves

I did not get into the first day of early access for SWTOR. And yeah, that kind of sucks a little.

But, you know, I'm rather okay with the method that Bioware chose to gate entry into early access.  The people who pre-ordered first are the ones with the most faith in Bioware. The ones who were willing to put up their cash first as a concrete manifestation of their faith.

They made the largest sacrifice, such as it is. They were willing to "put their money where their mouth is".

And if Bioware rewards them by giving them first shot at early access by a day or two, then that's okay by me. It is a reasonably just way to determining who gets to go first.

Ask Coriel: Breaking the Judgement Habit

Chantal asks:

Ever since the patch was released I've had large mana problems and I'm a fairly geared paladin. I'm still stuck on judging every 8 seconds from force of habit.

Would you consider any addons to remind or report judging after 30 seconds? Before it was easier because usually after cool down it was easy to judge after 8 seconds (every time judgement came off cool down.)

The first thing you could try is simply to change the key you've bound Judgement too. Perhaps moving it to a different key will be enough to break the habit.

For keeping track of the Judgements of the Pure buff, I actually use two mods, TellMeWhen and Paladin Beacon of Light/Sacred Shield Tracker.

The second one is a pretty old mod back from when we had to track Sacred Shield and the HoT, but I still use it to track the Beacon and Judgement of Light timers.

For TellMeWhen, I have it set up to display the Judgement icon when Judgements of the Pure either does not exist or only has 15 seconds remaining. I also use TellMeWhen for Holy Shock and 3-pt Holy Power.

Here is the TellMeWhen setup:

A Screenshot

I was poking around in my screenshots directory, and found this:

Dragon Soul 25-Normal is Correctly Tuned

There was a lot of chatter in the community last week that normal-mode Dragon Soul is too easy.

I disagree. After experiencing the first six fights (on 25-man), I think that Blizzard has done a solid job and the majority of the fights are correctly tuned for normal mode.

The thing about T11 and T12 is that the difficulty curve was very flat. There was not a lot of difference in difficulty between the non-end bosses. If you can beat Shannox, you can beat any non-Ragnaros boss. I've talked about this before, but I think that was a mistake. An instance works better when there is a clear ramp up in difficulty.

Morchok is pretty easy, true. But he's the first boss. Yor'sahj and Zonnzoznzonznnnz (or whatever his name is) are a solid step up. Hargara is another step up from those two.  Then Ultraxion is large step up from Hargara (possibly a touch overtuned). Warmaster Blackthorn is about the same level, but is a coordination fight instead of pure performance.

There is a very clear slope of difficulty in Dragon Soul. Almost every guild should be able to get Morchok down. Then they can at least farm him and Raid Finder until they can beat the next two.  And so on.

Normal mode Dragon Soul features a real progression in fight difficulty, unlike all the other tiers this expansion. Blizzard has done a good job with tuning this instance, at least in 25s.

Ask Coriel: Judgement Talents in 4.3?

Jeremy asks:

Are enlightened judgement and improved judgement essentially useless at this point? Judging is obviously not a priority and there is plenty of time to move in close once per minute to exclude the need for longer range. I can see some value in having the spirit to hit for when my mana pool is fine and I shock and exorcise the baddies for fun.

I am not sure. The thing is that judging is still very important to our class. You must judge, only you judge a lot less than before. However, in a six minute fight, you're still judging at least 6 to 10 times.  That's 6 to 10 times you'll have move up to melee range and back.  In general, you want to minimize unnecessary movement. Time spent moving means less time healing.

I would say that you should have at least 1 point in Enlightened Judgements. That will give you enough hit rating so that your Judgements always hit, and 15 yards of range.

So then the question basically boils down to 2/2 Improved Judgements for 35 yard range, or 2/2 Blessed Life for extra Holy Power.

If you can handle running in and out of melee, or staying in melee full-time, Blessed Life will increase your throughput.  However, Improved Judgements makes life a lot easier. You don't have to run. You can stand at range or in melee. You can refresh Judgement whenever you need to. You sacrifice a little throughput for a lot of stability, which I find valuable.

So that's my choice. I have 1/2 Enlightened Judgement and 2/2 Improved Judgement. I would rather lose a little throughput, in order to minimize movement and improve positioning flexibility.

Judgement Macro

Also, apparently Judgement was changed slightly so that it doesn't auto-target the way it used to. I saw a good macro for smoothing out Judgement for a healer:

/cast [harm][@targettarget,harm] Judgement

This casts Judgement on your current target if it is an enemy, or on your target's target, if you're targeting a friendly player.

Players and the Sack of Theramore

Mists of Pandaria will have a renewed focus on the Horde versus Alliance conflict. As part of that, it's been revealed that Theramore, Jaina Proudmoore's city-state, will be sacked by the Horde.

Now, it's probable that, like most major storyline events, this will happen "off-screen", in a novel or comic, or maybe a cut-scene before Mists of Pandaria comes out.

One of the problems with this method is that it's never the player's fault that the Alliance and Horde are at war. It's always that angry Garrosh, or stupid Varian. If only they were sensible and intelligent, then all these problems could be avoided.

I think it would be better if the players were responsible for the destruction of Theramore. If they had their bloody handprints all over the ultimate trigger for the FourthWar.

Here's how I envision it playing out:

Garrosh Hellscream (questgiver): Lok'tar Ogar, Champion of the Horde, Slayer of Deathwing! The Alliance have held us back for too long. Even now their armies encroach upon our territories, and kill our soldiers. It is time for us to deal with the main Alliance stronghold on Kalimdor. Your orders are to sack Theramore, destroy their ability to threaten us, and eliminate their leader, the mage Jaina Proudmoore.

Horde Player: What!?! Are you mad? This is an atrocity, an act of war. It is stupid and short-sighted! I will not do this.

Garrosh Hellscream: I offer you this epic weapon, Champion, and this rare striped kitten. It is not just any kitten, it is a Kitten of the Horde!

Horde Player: Theramore will burn, Warchief! The men and women will be put to the sword, and their children enslaved. Also, I would also like a gemstone collar for my kitten.

And then we have a phased instance of Theramore like the Wrathgate, only the players would be treated as the champions of the invading army. The Horde player's object is to destroy Theramore. The Alliance players also have a similar questline, but their quest would be to hold the line as long as possible, and then evacuate and get Jaina to safety.

I think an event like this would get the players deeply invested in the Horde/Alliance conflict. And it would force them to take responsibility for the conflict as well, the blood on their hands, rather than treating it as something that stupid NPCs came up with, or was written in a novel that most don't care about.

[Mists of Pandaria] Hammer of Wrath

First off, I'd like to say that I like the 5.0 Holy Paladin. For the most part it looks like it will play the same as the 4.2/4.3 Holy Paladin, and that's good. However, I have a small concern, and that is the fact that Hammer of Wrath is going to be Retribution-only.

Hammer of Wrath is an extremely fun ability. It always has been. I remember when it was first introduced, and it has always had a spot on my bars since that time.

It's definitely not a necessary ability for Holy. But you know, when it's the end of a tense fight, down to the last 10% with the enrage timer coming up, being able to throw a few Hammers of Wrath at the boss is extremely fun. It feels like you are contributing even more. It hits hard, but has a cooldown so you can't abandon your healing.

I don't really know how to phrase it well. It's the perfect ability at the perfect time. Our dps is terrible, but when things go down to the wire, Hammer of Wrath allows us to step up, like the ace up our sleeve.

I'm sure every long-time Holy paladin has a story about the one time the boss hit enrage with 2% left and people were dying left and right so you bubbled and flung a Hammer of Wrath for the kill.

And even if you've never done that, there's always the hope that someday, somehow, it will happen. That you'll need to step up and drop the boss with Hammer of Wrath.

Even in PvP, it's quite fun. I've always enjoyed sniping killing blows with Hammer of Wrath.

I guess I'm just saying that as a Holy Paladin I love Hammer of Wrath. I know it's not essential to healing, and may even cause small balance issues. But it is just plain fun, and I think the spec will be poorer for its loss.

I urge Blizzard to consider giving Holy access to Hammer of Wrath in Mists of Pandaria.

Holy Paladins in Patch 4.3

So, Patch 4.3 is upon us. I'm looking forward to the new 5-mans and the new raid.

Kurn has a very good roundup posted. I'll just focus on a couple of the major changes for Holy Paladins.

Holy Radiance

Holy Radiance has changed significantly. It's now more of a heal you cast multiple times on the raid, rather than a "fire-and-forget" heal.  The new Holy Radiance is a group heal with a direct heal component and short heal-over-time component. It also generates one Holy Power with the Tower of Radiance talent.

The heal-over-time component means that you should cast Holy Radiance on different people if you cast it multiple times in a row. Cast it on Player 1, then Player 2, then Player 3, then back to Player 1 to get the most healing out of it.

The thing is that Holy Radiance is no longer something you have active while you are tank healing. Rather, you have to switch modes when you use it, to move from tank healing to raid healing.  A lot of times, this will be the wrong thing to do, as your raid will rely on you to keep single-target heals flowing on the tanks while other healers raid heal.

But now, you might be assigned to raid heal, while someone else tank heals, and that's when you bust out Holy Radiance.

In raid-healing mode, the new rotation is something like:

• 3x Holy Radiance, 1x Light of Dawn - Maximum throughput, high mana cost
• 2x Holy Radiance,  1x Holy Shock, 1x Light of Dawn - Less throughput, but less mana cost

You'll have to see which works out best. But the key is to remember to target different people when you cast it in succession.

Judgement

The other major change is to Judgement. Along with the Haste buff of Judgements of the Pure, you also get a significant boost to your regeneration from Spirit.  This means that you must Judge as soon as you enter combat, to get the JotP buff up right away.

You don't need to judge on cooldown any more. In fact, it is a waste of mana to do so. So you may want to move your Judgement keybind if you are in the habit of hitting Judgement often. But you absolutely cannot let the JotP buff fall off.  I would recommend judging every 45 seconds or so.

Get the Judgements of the Pure buff up ASAP, but only Judge to refresh the buff, instead of Judging on cooldown.

Stat Value Changes

Gear-wise, the Judgement change means that non-Spirit builds are no longer viable. Spirit is pretty much established as the best secondary stat. (Intellect, of course, is still the best overall stat.)

There is some debate over whether Mastery or Haste is the next best secondary stat after Spirit. At this point, I would lean towards Haste, but I think it's still inconclusive.

[SWTOR] Beta Weekend 2

Alright, this was the second beta weekend I've participated in and probably the last one before launch. Here are some more thoughts.

Advances in Griefing

Every time the MMO genre takes a step forward, it seems like the griefers also move forward as well. Bioware's main emphasis is story, and it should be no surprise that the griefers will seize upon that.

The new griefing in SWTOR: spoilers in general chat.

I would strongly suggest turning off the general chat channels when you start a new character if you care at all about spoilers. People will spill details about your companion and plot twists.

As a bonus, with the chat channels turned off, you won't have to listen to the constant chatter about World of Warcraft. Seriously, this makes me want to play WoW even more, because at least there people are not constantly talking about WoW.

But not having the chat channels active does make the game feel like less of an MMO. Part of the draw of MMOs is the fact that you are playing with other players, sharing an experience with them. Seeing chat go by is a large part of that experience, and I do miss it when it is turned off.

Other Classes

I tried the Republic Trooper and Sith Warrior, with a little of the Bounty Hunter and Smuggler. These stories were all good, but not quite as good as the Imperial Agent and Sith Inquisitor.

I took the tanking advance class of the Republic Trooper, the Vanguard. It's ... a bit odd. It's a "short-range ranged" class, as far as I can tell. Melee range is 4m, and long range is 30m to 35m. But the Vanguard's core skills have a range of 10m. So you're not in melee, but you're not really at range either. It does feel a little weird.

The Bounty Hunter is the exact same as the Republic Trooper. However, the skills are skinned in the inverse way, which is kind of neat. The Trooper starts at full Ammo, and abilities uses up Ammo, and Ammo slowly recharges. The Bounty Hunter abilities, on the other hand, generate Heat, and the Bounty Hunter starts with zero Heat, and Heat vents over time. The systems are the exact same numerically, I believe, but are presented in opposite ways. It's rather amusing.

Flashpoints

I did manage to try some more flashpoints (dungeons). It's odd, but I've never managed to get into a "fresh" flashpoint. I always seem to join groups who are partway through.

I didn't try healing again, I just went with the Trooper and Sith Warrior.  The flashpoints went reasonably well. I really like Bioware's conversations with multiple players. That system is superb.

In one flashpoint with the Sith Warrior, I got to see a strong advantage of the companion system. One person left midway through, after a wipe. So I brought out my companion, and the three of us plus the companion continued through the instance. It worked reasonably well. Then we got to a boss that wiped us a couple of times, and another player brought out a different companion who could heal. We beat the boss with that configuration. (Though to be fair, it was also because we figured out how to avoid the boss' special move.)

I don't know how effective a companion will be in the higher-level dungeons (as opposed to the introductory ones), but it was really nice to be able to "patch" the group and keep going, instead of having to find a new person.

The only problem with flashpoints so far, in my view, is that it doesn't really feel like you are in a group. The sense of teamwork, of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, is very weak. It feels like four individuals attacking all the mobs, rather than one team. Perhaps the sense of team will grow stronger when the tanks and healers come into their own.

Factions

To be honest, the major thing this beta has done is to make me second-guess my choice of class. I was originally going to go with a Jedi Guardian. But I found the Sith Warrior mechanics to be awkward. And for some reason, the Sith Empire is much more interesting than the Republic. The Sith Lords are very well drawn, and it seems like the Republic characters are much less memorable.

Of course, the problem with the Sith faction is that most of the (vocal) Sith players appear to be "Hur, hur, look at me, I'm evil."  That's always annoying, and is going to be especially annoying in a game that actually allows players to act evil.

I'm still definitely looking forward to the game, but I now have no idea what faction or class I am going to play.

[SWTOR] Thoughts on Beta

These are some thoughts about Star Wars: The Old Republic, written after the beta test weekend of November 12. The NDA has dropped, so here is the post. It's probably missing a lot of clarifying details, though.

Overview

I played a Sith Inquisitor and Imperial Agent, both to about level 10. I did all the quests in the starting zone.

Technical Aspects

The game performed very well. No lag, good frame rate. The only issue I saw was rubber-banding on other players when going down a lift.  There were some minor tooltip problems, and some missing or incorrect gear icons.

All in all, I think the game is in solid technical shape for release.

Story Line

The quests and stories are amazing! I liked the voice acting for all the various NPCs, and even my own characters.

I really like the use of seamless phasing/instancing (areas where access is controlled by green/red forcefields) that separate important story points from the world at large. That was very elegantly done.

I would particularly like to single out the support for playing a Light-side Sith. It was very well scripted and written. It is a particularly unique experience to play a good guy working for the bad guys, and lying to everyone for the greater good.

In some respects, it's even better than Bioware's single player games. In the single player games, there's always the sense that I can save and restart this conversation if it goes badly. I found that having only one try at the conversation to be much more immersive, and it felt like conversation choices were more meaningful.

I think having repeatable group quests very early on (around level 4 or so) was a neat idea. However, the implementation where you can group and converse in General Chat with people in different instances made assembling groups a bit of pain. After a few tries, I gave up on forming groups and just did the quests with my companion.

Graphics

I like the graphics. They are clean and good looking. In particular, they look very good when in the conversation screens.

The animations are all excellent. Combat animations are great.

The only problematic animation is the humanoid female running animation. It is slightly incorrect. Or more accurately, it's correct when viewed from the side, but when you view the character from behind, the elbows sort of disappear, and the character looks as if she is running in an awkward or "prissy" manner. Lord of the Rings Online has this same issue.

Chat Box

The chat box is pretty good, it's easy to talk to people. However, there are a few too many system messages being sent to it by default. In particular, selling items is a particular bad offender. Going to a vendor makes your chatbox useless. Also when you die, there's this "8 4" which is sent to the screen and chatbox, which is very confusing when you look back at the box a bit later.

In general, the cardinal rule of chatboxes is that they are for talking to other players. The less game messages that are sent to it, the more useful the chatbox will be.

Mechanics

As is normal for Bioware games, here's where the problems start.

Self-healing

Before I start in on things I didn't like, I would like to mention that I really liked the ability to quickly heal up outside of combat. All classes get a variant of this.

In particular, Seethe (for Sith classes) is amazing. It's the pacing that Darth Maul does when he's fighting Qui Gon Jin in the Phantom Menace. It just works, looks awesome, and makes your character seem like a total bad-ass. I look forward to pressing the Seethe button whenever I can.

Number one reason to play a Sith: you get Seethe.

Auto-Attack

The decision to not have an auto-attack is interesting. However, I think giving a zero-resource attack at the start was a bad idea. It takes up an extra button slot for an ability that is hit somewhat infrequently. You use it enough that you need it on your bars, but it really doesn't do enough to justify its placement.

More importantly, there are a lot of players who seem to use that zero-resource attack exclusively. I found this especially problematic with Agents. I grouped a couple times with "quiet" players. People who were in the same area to do a group quest, and didn't talk, but accepted an invite when I sent it to them. I found that these guys seemed to use the zero-resource attack almost exclusively (well, they also used grenades). They never went into cover, never sniped.

These types of people are going to perform really poorly in groups, and I'm not certain I can blame them entirely. The whole "cover" thing takes getting used to, but if the zero-resource attack is good enough, combined with your companion, that's what people will use entirely.

In some respects, it might be better to delay giving people a zero-resource attack until a later level. Let them get used to managing their resource, even if it means waiting for the resource to regenerate. Most early fights end before the resource bar is exhausted entirely.

Edit: I am not 100% sure about this critique anymore. I did not realize it, but the resource bar regenerates non-linearly. The closer it is to full, the faster it regenerates. I still have to think about how this works.

Number of Abilities

You gain too many abilities in the early levels. It completely swamps your hotbar. As well, these abilities often seem contradictory. Why am I getting knife attacks when I snipe? Why do I have so many cooldowns? Two types of lightning attacks and saber attacks, which should I use?

It was somewhat hard to figure out exactly how my character was expected to play. I ended up picking a couple of abilities and using them exclusively, ignoring the majority of the hotbar.

It was only after I hit level 10 and the advanced classes that I understood the logic behind the early game. Bioware gave us two sets of abilities in the early game, to get a feel for how each advanced class will play. But you don't know that when you get the abilities. It just seems like you're getting overloaded with abilities you rarely use. And if you try to use all the abilities together, you feel less effective.

I think the early game would work better with fewer, more cohesive abilities. Every time you get a new ability, you should be able to add it to your rotation and perform better than you did before.

Advanced Classes

The transition to advanced classes at level 10 is flat out terrible. There is almost nothing about this process that I can say was done well or done correctly.

First, you can leave the starting planet before level 10. In particular, the Sith Inquisitor story line doesn't seem to give enough experience. So I left at level 9, realized that I needed to be 10, and came back and ground out the rest of the level by killing random mobs.  But it seemed really easy to end up missing the advanced classes quest line and keep going when you really shouldn't.

Second, the advanced classes are sprung upon you with almost no warning. You get to make an irreversible choice that affects the rest of your game. There isn't even a confirmation screen! Misclick, and you've wasted hours.

Third, having your advanced classes abilities be in a separate tab in trainer screen is non-intuitive. I chose the  Sorceror so I could heal, and then could not figure out how the game expected me to heal. I only noticed the new separate tab in the training screen after 15 minutes of searching for any way to heal another player.

Why not just combine the two ability lists at the trainer? I don't particularly care if an ability is a Sorceror ability or an Agent ability. All I care about is if there is a new ability to train or not.

The entire experience of getting an advanced class should be a reward. Instead, it's a process full of perils and pitfalls, where it feels like you are making an enormously consequential decision on very little information, and you're not even sure you did things right.

Healing and Flashpoints

I don't really have much experience with the flashpoints. I only tried one Black Talon.

I chose Sorceror so I could heal, and I saw a group advertising in General for a healer, so I joined them. They were partly through the instance, at some sabotage droid boss.

I tried healing, but the one heal I had was so small compared to the health bar and incoming damage. I'm not sure if I should have tried to do damage as well/instead, but healing took all my Force and my time. We ended up wiping and the group dissolved.

I'm not sure if there was something else I was supposed to do, or if the other guys just didn't do enough damage, or if the tank was playing badly and taking too much damage or what. But all in all, it was a pretty lousy experience. When you fail, you should kind of know why you failed. I have no idea what went wrong in that group. I only had the one heal and I was spamming it with almost no overheal.

The main thought I had after the flash point experience was that I should have chosen Assassin so that I could have gotten back to regular quests.

Conclusions

TOR is a Bioware game. It has all the strengths of Bioware games, and all the weaknesses.

The quests and storyline, and general solo play is amazing. I really enjoyed that and I look forward to fully exploring the game when it releases. Also, I'd like to reiterate that I loved Light-Side Sith.

But mechanically, it feels like there are a lot of design issues. These don't really matter for solo play, but I think the crucible of group and endgame play will expose a lot of flaws.

Guild Updates and a Shocking Nerf

Guild Updates

After a bit of time at the 10-mans, my guild has crawled back up to 25s. We transferred to Lightbringer, merged with another guild, and got some new recruits. Hopefully this has put us somewhat back in gear, in time for 4.3.

Also, in an amazing feat of RNG, Shannox managed to drop 4x [Scalp of the Bandit Prince] in a single kill. No one in the raid needed the helm.

A Shocking Nerf

Gentle readers, I regret that I must inform you of a most shocking nerf, a nerf that threatens the very foundation of our illustrious civilization. A nerf so disgraceful that it truly deserves the most outrageous appellation that we, as moral and decent gamers, can apply. Yes, dear readers, this nerf is a veritable slap in the face!

Lady Vashj's [Tainted Core] no longer roots you in place.

We ran an SSC/TK the other night to get some transmog gear. I went along for a shot at [Ashes of Al'ar]. When we got to P2 on Vashj, I killed a tainted elemental, got the core, and threw it to another party member who was jumping at the top of the stairs. That player threw it to another person standing by a pillar, and the pillar was disabled.

Just as God intended it to happen.

Then another player, who had never been to SSC before, killed a tainted elemental, looted the core, and ran up the stairs to the pillar!

I was shocked, appalled, and even horrified. Is nothing sacred in this world?

Bioware Games

Hagu asked about Bioware games, for people who haven't played any of Bioware's previous games.

First, if you haven't played any Bioware games, go out and buy Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. They are amazing games, showcasing Bioware at its peak.

Strengths

Bioware games are Roleplaying Games. You build a main character, take her out into a world, and follow a storyline until the end. The main character gains experience and levels as you go through the game.

The main difference between Bioware games and the current crop of MMOs are Conversations. Whenever you talk to an NPC, it starts a conversation where the NPC says a line, and you choose a response from a given menu of options. The responses can cause the conversation to go in different directions and result in different outcomes.

Conversations are a huge part of Bioware games. It's quite possible that you spend more time talking to various people than actually fighting. Though there's quite a bit of fighting too.

The thing is that Bioware uses the conversation trees to deliver powerful storylines. In some respects it's closer to interactive movies than traditional games.

The next major component of Bioware games are Companions. In Bioware games, you don't just control your main character, you control a small party of characters. You can directly control your companions in combat, but usually they have some AI and you let that run, only intervening when you need to.

Your companions are very detailed NPCs. They usually have a backstory. You have to engage in conversations with them to reveal their background, and usually end up with special quests to give them closure over their own story.  Usually you can also set up a romance between your character and one or more Companions.

Your companions also interact with the world, adding commentary and participating in conversations.

The third component of Bioware games is usually some form of Moral Choice. Very often the game will offer choices--especially in conversations--between good and evil, between Light and Dark, between Paragon and Renegade. The path you pick changes the reaction of your companions to you, changes the outcome of quests, and can change the ending of the game as well.

So those are main strengths of Bioware games: Conversations, Companions and Choice. Bioware combines those three elements in a beautiful way.

Weaknesses

The main weakness of Bioware games, in my view, are the actual game mechanics. Very often they're overly complicated, somewhat unbalanced, often non-intuitive, and don't really "play" well. They're not outright bad though, and as it's a single player game it doesn't really matter if the mechanics are the best or even balanced.

As well, because companions do play a large part in combat, there's often significant effort in making sure they play properly instead of say, blowing all the mana they have on weak DPS spells when you'd prefer them to save it for healing.

In my experience, you play Bioware games for the stories, and not because combat is amazingly fun or challenging. Some people do like it, because very often you can pause and micromanage your party for extreme effect, and it's fun figuring out the very powerful stuff.

Most of the time I just set the difficulty to easy, and savor the story line.

I do have to say that I actually really liked the way Mass Effect 2 played. Though possibly that was mostly because the AI was finally somewhat competent, so I could let Garrus and Miranda take care of stuff while I sniped (boom, headshot, never gets old) to my heart's content.

So those are the strengths and weaknesses of Bioware games, as I see it. I do strongly recommend their games though, especially the Mass Effect series. That series is science fiction, and not the typical fantasy story. I am greatly looking forward to Mass Effect 3.

The Old Republic Beta Test

I got into the latest weekend Star Wars beta test.

I want to discuss and dissect this game so badly! There are so many interesting design points. This NDA is killing me!

Hopefully this won't get me into trouble, but here is my initial reaction to the game, in its beta state:

The Old Republic is a Bioware game. It has all the strengths of Bioware games, and all the weaknesses.

The Old Republic NDA

Why do you think Star Wars: the Old Republic still has an Non-Disclosure Agreement up? There's about a month and a bit until its release, and information from the beta testers is still (officially) locked down tight.

Some theories:

1. It's a dog of a game. EA/Bioware is hoping to maximize the initial box sales and hype by preventing people from talking before the game is released. Same theory as the movies which don't give advance showings to critics.


2. The NDA will be dropped one week before launch, to saturate the media battle-space. This gives the Star Wars hype no time to drop before the game is launched.


3. The NDA will be dropped when Patch 4.3 for World of Warcraft comes out, in order to drown out any publicity WoW gets before the game is launched. EA/Bioware tried this with Blizzcon, but it seemed like a miserable failure to me.

Talent Trees

There's been a lot of discussion of the Mists of Pandaria change to talents, essentially the removal of talent trees, and adding in a new system. Most of the discussion has focused on World of Warcraft and what the change means. But I would like to step back and look at the broader, more interesting view.

In the gaming industry, Blizzard raised up talent trees for RPGs. Previously, the main place you saw talent trees were the technology trees of games like Civilization. But with Diablo II and then World of Warcraft, Blizzard made talent trees truly mainstream.

And yet, Blizzard is abandoning the talent tree concept almost entirely. Starcraft II did not use talent trees, Diablo III will not use talent trees, and World of Warcraft will also stop using talent trees.

So that begs the question, what is the fatal flaw of the talent tree concept? What made talent trees appear like a good solution at first, but now appears to have been a blind alley?

Talent Trees and Time

Let's start by looking at what exactly talent trees do. When you first encounter a talent tree, you are presented with a few choices. You pick one of those choices, and that may unlock future choices.

The key thing here is talent trees essentially have a "zone of choice" which is limited to a small fraction of the total tree. As time passes, the zone of choice moves further down the tree. However, it does not usually get much larger or smaller. Almost always, you still limited to choosing from a small number of talents.

What's really important about talent trees is that while you are moving through the tree, the order in which you gain talents is very important. For example, if you are playing Civilization, you can go straight for Literacy, but you give up other talents, like Calvary.

However, this choice is a temporary choice, not a permanent choice. In the end, you usually get all the necessary talents you missed. After you pick up Literacy, you go back and grab the Calvary and declare war on Babylon.

As another example, in RIFT, I'm leveling a rogue. The end goal is Ranger 31/Marksman 18/Assassin 17. The top of each tree gives a specific benefit. Ranger gives a new pet, Marksman gives weapon enchants, and Assassin gives bigger crits. While leveling, the tree I focus on makes a big difference. Do I want the big crits early, can I wait for the pet, etc. But at max level, that doesn't matter anymore. The path to the final build is not important anymore. Only the final build itself matters.

Between those two aspects, we start to see some of the issues with talent trees. The small zone of choice explains why, even though there maybe 30 or more talents, it always seems like you only get a choice between 2 or 3 talents at the end. That's where your zone of choice has been pushed to.  And how the talents were assigned, point by point, ceases to matter.

In a lot of ways, I think the above points demonstrate why talent points were embraced at first. Zone of choice and the order of points mattering are great features when you are looking at leveling. But when time stops mattering, those advantages aren't really advantages any more.

Explicit Choices

In a talent tree, almost all choices are implicit. Every talent matches up to every other talent that can be taken at the same level. There is no idiom for making an exclusive choice within a specific talent tree.

To see what I mean, let's say that you have two talents, Talent A and Talent B. You would like a Holy Paladin to be able to take one of those talents, but not the other. Where do you place the two talents?

In the current WoW talent trees, you place talent A in the second tier of the Protection tree, and you place talent B in the second tier of the Retribution tree. In the old talent trees, you would have to place one talent at the top of one tree, and the other in a different tree just out of range (31/21, etc.)

Kind of honestly, that just doesn't seem right. Talent trees make it very hard to offer exclusive choices. You have to assume that any player can take both talents. For example, a Fury warrior can take both Titan Grip and Single-Minded Fury. It's a bad idea, but nothing in the tree structure prevents it.

The lack of explicit choices means that all talents within reach are compared to each other and ranked accordingly. And this has lead to some awkwardness. For DPS, damage talents always outweigh survivability talents. For tanks, survivability talents always outweigh damage talents. So for a final build, the only choice is between a few talents that you don't really care about, that aren't really important to your role.

In a talent tree, it is extraordinarily hard to make someone choose between two good choices. Most of the time the player will take both, and drop a third, less important choice.

The New System

The new system that Blizzard is using in Mists of Pandaria--and the one they used in Starcraft II--is a series of explicit choices. This system is simpler, and does in the end offer more real choice than a talent tree does.  You have to choose between good talents, instead of being able to take them both.

The other major advantage of this system is that it allows Blizzard to easily offer a choice between a less powerful but lower-skill option, and a more powerful but high-skill option.

For example, let's look at the Tier 3 Paladin talents in MoP:

Sacred Shield
When reduced below 30% health, you gain the Sacred Shield effect. The Sacred Shield absorbs 18005 damage and increases healing received by 20%. Lasts 15 sec. This effect cannot occur more than once every 60 sec.

Ardent Defender
Reduce damage taken by 20% for 10 sec. While Ardent Defender is active, the next attack that would otherwise kill you will instead cause you to be healed for 15% of your maximum health. (Instant, 3 min Cooldown)

Ardent Defender will be the choice of all high-end tanks. But it does require precise timing to use to full effect. Use it too early, use it at the wrong time, or simple not use it when you should have used it and you might die.

Sacred Shield, on the other hand, is a decent option for a less experienced tank. It procs automatically, is one less option you have to think about, and will help with survivability. A less powerful ability that actually gets used is better than a very powerful ability that is never used.

But the point is that this type of choice is very hard to offer in a talent tree. If both talents are in the Protection tree, then every tank will take both talents and drop some threat or utility talent instead.

This is the major significant benefit that the dev team gets. Each talent doesn't get compared to the entire tree, only the other talents in the separate tier. Utility talents match up against utility talents, healing talents against healing talents, and damage talents against damage talents.

Conclusion

Though talent trees were very attractive at first, the lack of explicit choice has proven to be a fatal flaw. The new system is simpler, easier to understand, and has the potential to offers more significant choices than talent trees could have.

On Auction Loot Systems

Ferrel at Epic Slant had a post on Bidding Systems, where he was looking for comments on a zero-sum bid system. I commented with a giant wall of text, and figured I'd post it here as well.

My guild used to run an auction system (English bid, multiple bidding rounds, winner pays bid, like a traditional auction) before we switched to a Loot Council system. What we found is that a bid system works best if the players are willing to be aggressive with bidding. But a lot of players don’t like the feeling that they are competing with fellow guild members–the adversarial nature of the system–and they do things like “pass to someone else, she needs it more”. Which you know sounds like a good thing a tight-knit group would do, but actually tends to warp the bid system.

I’d like to add that the “not bidding aggressively” was not collusion per se. It was more a feeling that bidding aggressively was “impolite”. That aggressive bidding, especially if you had won something already, was somehow saying that gearing up your character is more important than gearing up your guildmate’s character. So out of respect for the social ties that bind the guild together, people refrained from bidding if they saw that someone else really wanted the item.

But in reality, that aggressive bidding was *necessary* for the auction system to work properly. Points needed to be spent, and items need to go for their “true price”.

Like, let’s say you know your popular guildmaster really, really wants Uber-Weapon off this boss you haven’t killed yet. On your first kill, the weapon drops. If your guild is the type of guild who would collectively pass the weapon to GM in appreciation for her hard work, your guild is a bad fit for an auction system. That weapon needs to be auctioned off, to be sold for hundreds of points, even if a relative new person gets the weapon over the GM. There is no room in an auction system for your raiders to feel bad about outbidding the GM for the weapon.

There was also some drama associated with bidding. Like if people knew that Dave wanted an item, they would bid on that item to drive up the price. But if Sally wanted the item, no one would compete against her, letting her have it for very few points. Naturally Dave would get upset at this behavior.

That was my experience with a bid system. I liked it a great deal, our paladins were okay with bidding against each other for items. I think we liked having the rest of guild be amazed that a healing shield would go for hundreds of points. But a lot of the other classes and people had issues with bidding, and it prompted the change in loot systems.

From a more theoretical standpoint, what’s important in a bidding system is not really where the points come from (the zero-sum part). Bid systems tend to flush out point inflation by their nature (again, if people bid aggressively). So you don’t need to use zero-sum. Handing out points based on time or attendance will probably be easier.

The important part is how the auction occurs. English bid is the system everyone knows, but multiple rounds means that it is very time consuming. It’s also a good system to “discover” prices. If you don’t know how much an item is worth, you’ll soon find out as the price starts increasing.

Sealed first-price auction is a single round of secret bids. Whoever bids the highest wins the item, and pays what she bid. It’s fast, but it can be very hard to judge how much to bid. You don’t want to bid thousands of points if you’re the only bidder.

Vickrey auctions are my personal favorite. Like the auction above, there’s only one round of bids. But the winner pays the *second-highest* bid (sometimes second highest + 1). This means that the optimal strategy in a Vickrey auction is to bid what you think the item is worth. You’ll either win the item and pay less than you think the item is worth; or someone else will win and overpay for the item. The problem with Vickrey is that a lot of other people simply don’t “get” the system, and not understanding it leads to dissatisfaction. There can also be some drama when people deliberately pitch bids high in order to make someone who really wants the item pay more. This is mathematically a bad strategy, but can lead to bad blood and harsh feelings.

That’s what I think of auctions. To be honest, if I had a guild that was totally on-board with Vickrey, it would be my preferred loot system. But I think the other two types of auctions have enough disadvantages, especially with regards to speed, that I would not use them if I could use another system instead.

Glyph of Holy Wrath

I've been running [Glyph of Holy Wrath] for the last couple of months. Originally, it was for Ragnaros, to add extra stuns on the Sons of Flame.

But it turns out that there are a lot of other places you can use Holy Wrath and get off a short stun, especially in Firelands. This glyph is turning out to be quite enjoyable. I'm rather glad that Ragnaros provides an excuse to take this glyph instead of the more pure healing choices.

My current favorite place to use the Holy Wrath stun is Heroic Ryolith. The little blobs that move towards Ryolith and increase his armor when they fuse are elementals. So you're busy healing, and you notice that a pack of blobs are moving past you towards Ryolith. A quick Holy Wrath, they're all stunned, and that delays the increase to Ryolith's armor, theoretically speeding up the kill.  Realistically, it probably doesn't make a huge difference, but I enjoy stunning the blobs, so I'll pretend it's vital for the kill.

You can also stun the regular elemental adds, but that's less interesting.

There are a lot of other places where the AoE stun can be used. It's especially easy for a healer to use, because you don't have to change targets, you just have to be close by the mobs.

So, [Glyph of Holy Wrath]. A surprisingly fun and useful little glyph.

Vindictus

I've been playing a bit of Vindictus lately. It's an action MMORPG that's sort of like Diablo. The game is over-the-shoulder 3rd person perspective like WoW.

But it's an action game where left-click is one attack, and right-click is a second attack. So you string these moves into combos like LLLL+R or LLL+RR.

It's more of a central hub with NPCs, followed by instanced dungeons/quests, than a virtual world. Each dungeon or quest can be run multiple times with up to four people.

The classes are named individuals, which I find odd, but seems to be a common thing lately. There's Lann, male who dual-wields swords, Fiona, who is female sword and shield, and Evie, who is a female mage.  But you can still customize your character's look extensively.

As you level up, you improve your skills and combos, and get new abilities. For example, I'm playing a Fiona, and she's all about blocking hits. But when you're blocking, you aren't attacking, so there's a bit of timing involved.

Combat is very twitch-based, especially boss fights. There's lots of running and dodging out of the way of the boss' big special attacks (or blocking them at the right time). The animations are quite good and add a lot to the game.

One of the interesting things so far is that you don't really get weapons or armor from the dungeons. Instead you get materials and you bring the materials to crafters in town to make items for you.

It is not quite as polished as some of the big name MMOs. In particular, the central hub and all the NPC interactions and UI feel a lot more complicated than they need to be.

But the basic gameplay is very solid. Just running through waves of enemies and the boss fights are a lot of fun.

It's a F2P game. I believe that after the beginning quests, each dungeon/quest costs tokens to run. But you get a certain amount of free tokens each week.

In some respects, this feels like the game Age of Conan should have been.

Challenge Modes

Challenge Modes are the evolution of Zul'Aman bear runs and Culling of Stratholme drake runs.

Like Pet Battles, Challenge Modes are a non-gear based activity. Gear will be normalized to a set item level. Where Pet Battles are solo, Challenge Modes are aimed at small groups. Challenge Modes are also indirectly competitive. Total times will be compared, but groups don't directly challenge each other.

I think Challenge Modes will shine a spotlight on tank classes, more than any other role. I think that we will see differences in the tank classes be magnified on the forums, and one tank class will be declared the best, three will be average, and one will be known as the worst.

I think Challenge Modes will be a good addition to the game. It's small scale, somewhat transient content. The emphasis on speed means that actually completing a Challenge Mode dungeon takes relatively little time, and should take less than an hour.

I don't really know how well Challenge Modes will work with a random group, though. My gut feeling is that running Challenge Modes in the Dungeon Finder will be less fun.

But on the other hand, if you still get the Valor/Justice points, it might be better to run Challenge Modes instead of heroics after you've finished gearing up. You don't need the gear drops and the people you group with are also focused on speed. From a strictly-rewards point of view, after you've gotten your gear, there's no downside to doing Challenge Modes instead of Heroics.

That means that the "Go Go Go" people are filtered out of Heroics and into Challenge Modes. Which would make Heroics a more pleasant place to be, with people who are actually interested in gearing up and killing all the bosses.

I don't know if that will actually happen. Maybe random Challenge Modes will remain a ghetto, with most people doing Challenge Modes in premade groups, to ensure the best chance of success. The effect of Challenge Modes on the "normal" dungeon runs will be very interesting to observe.