Personal Traffic Light DPS Meter

I'd like to highlight a comment from Stubborn on the previous post:

How about borrowing something from a totally different genre of gaming, like my wife's Wii Zumba? When she's performing within 90% of max, her character is highlighted in green. When she's between 60% and 90%, shades of yellow, and below 60%, shades of red. There's absolutely no reason a similar, personal system couldn't be implemented to let each individual player know, based on the minimum dps requirements for the fight, how they're individually performing. That provides the feedback you need without the immediate consequence of creating a hostile environment.

This is a pretty cool idea. A simple green/yellow/red meter that was boss-dependent and displayed your personal DPS for that boss.  If all the DPS stay in yellow or green for the entire fight, the boss will die before the enrage.

Of course, the one thing that might cause issues here is DPS during the execute phase. Most DPS classes see their boss damage jump upwards during the last 20% or so. Accounting for that might be a little tricky. But not insurmountable.

You could make this pretty complicated if you wanted to. If you know the fight, you could draw a damage curve that accounts for phase changes, interruptions, and execute phase. Then just draw the players total damage as time goes on and compare to the curve to determine if the player is ahead of schedule or falling behind.

Still, it's a pretty cool idea, and be enough feedback without needing exact numbers, or revealing performance to everyone. Or maybe the red/yellow/green light should be revealed to everyone. After all, it's not players imposing arbitrary and unrealistic standards on each other. It's the game revealing the basic performance.

Enrage Timers and Meters

So, there's a little bit of a kerfuffle over DPS and enrage timers in The Old Republic hardmode dungeons. See Screaming Monkeys, Tobold, and Spinks.

The thing is that SWTOR doesn't have a combat log or DPS meters. So there's really no way for a DPS player to truly judge her performance. So we don't know if the enrage timers are actually tight, or the DPS players are simply not performing at a high enough level.

The variance between DPS can be huge. It's not like people are performing at 89% of theoretical max and they need to get to 90%. Very often, because of improper rotations and incorrect use of cooldowns, a decent player who isn't conversant with the best theorycraft might only be performing at 50% or less of the theoretical max.

And the DPS rotations in SWTOR are not trivial. I had a rotation for my Sniper that I was happily using. It seemed to be the best I could come up with. Then I went to sithwarrior.com and looked at their rotation. It was structured very differently than what I was using, and involved several abilities that I wasn't using. I switched, and I think my damage went up significantly.

Though, truthfully, because there are no meters and no combat log, I have no idea if what I'm doing now is better. It's better on paper, and seems to be better in game, but who knows.

Again, we hit a theme that I've hitting for years now. Good play requires feedback. Good dps requires feedback. And the best feedback for DPS is a combat log and damage meters.

But if you don't want damage meters, if you think they are detrimental, then you should not have DPS checks like enrage timers. Having strict enrage timers without meters strikes me as unfair to the DPS players.

Healing and Default UIs

Coop pointed out in the last post that one of the troubles with healing in SWTOR is the UI. But it's not just a SWTOR problem. Almost every MMO I've played has featured a DPS-centric default UI.

Which is rather odd if you consider the fact that healers are the one role which interacts with the UI the most. One would think that the default UI should be optimized for healing. A healing-centric UI would still be functional for the DPS and tanks.

Here are three elements that a good healing UI needs:

1. All the friendly health bars in one place.

Almost all health bars put your own health bar in a different location than the other friendly players. SWTOR puts the companion health bar in a completely different place too. This is the first thing which is fixed by every single healing mod. All relevant health bars are collected together in one compact location.

2. Minimize target-switching.

I would love to see a default UI implement mouse-over casting for friendly spells out of the box. It makes healing so much easier and cleaner.

I also rather liked having Warhammer Online's use of one friendly target and one hostile target, that could be switched independently. You can kind of work around this with focus targets, but it's a lot easier to keep an eye on enemies with true dual-targets.

3. Emphasize relevant debuffs and buffs.

This is the hardest element to get correct for a default UI. But simply displaying all buffs and debuffs on a target is just not good enough. A healer needs to know when important debuffs are on the target, especially for dispelling. As for buffs, in general you only need to know when your short term buffs like HoTs and shields have worn off a friendly target.

Conclusion

I strongly recommend that any new MMO design the default UI with healers in mind. In fact, I'd go so far as to insist that the default UI designer be a full-time healer. Healers are the class which will interact with the UI the most, and thus the ones who suffer the most with a badly-designed UI.

[SWTOR] Leveling as a Healer

Among other alts in The Old Republic, I'm leveling a healer Commando. My original plan was to run instances with this character, but I got bored of waiting in the fleet and went back to questing.

Leveling as a healer in SWTOR is interesting. I generally run with a DPS companion (Aric Jorgan at the moment). For normal pulls, I generally use the regular DPS abilities of the base class. But for strong and elite enemies, I do actually act as a healer. I let Aric kill the mob, and I keep him healed, with the occasional zero-dps attack if incoming damage is light enough.

I actually like it. Normally leveling as a healer means that you level as a very weak DPS and don't use your heals regularly. You only use them if you get into groups.

But healing a companion is very much like healing a regular player, and you get to practice your regular healing rotation.

It's probably slower than leveling as DPS, but it is nice to play solo as a healer, and still act like a healer. I do think that companions make life a lot easier for tanks and healers, allowing them to level with their preferred playstyle and get lots of practice with the correct abilities. It's a lot better than learning how to tank or heal on the fly in an instance.

Experiments

As long-time readers know, I am a proponent of experiments, of trying new ideas out and seeing what problems result, rather than trying to predict everything that will happen in advance. The best knowledge comes from previous experiments. We know unlimited PvP is not popular, because of the Felucca/Trammel split in Ultima Online.

There are lots of experiments I would like to see MMO companies try, even if most of us think they would end badly. Of course, it's hard for an MMO to wildly experiment when the cost of a failed experiment is the loss of many subscribers. I'm sure Blizzard has regrets about some of the experiments they carried out in Cataclysm.

One experiment I would like to see is the release of new content without increasing item level. A new raid tier is released, with new loot, new item sets, but the exact same item level as the previous tier.

Now, I think that we're all in agreement that this would go over like a lead balloon. But none of us are absolutely sure. It's possible that the audience would be fine with it, maybe for a little bit.

The thing is that if the audience is okay with new content at the same item level, that would help enormously with some problems in endgame. You wouldn't have this constant ramp up of power levels. You could introduce more tiers, or space out content in a cleaner fashion, without impacting the power level. You wouldn't need as many catch-up mechanisms.

Admittedly, it's unlikely that keeping the item level the same would be popular. But we don't know for certain.

Another experiment I'd like to see is not having raid content available on release. Open it up three months afterwards, and make sure that everyone knows this is the plan. I think there is a much greater pressure to blow through leveling content among veteran MMO players. Perhaps giving those players time to digest the leveling experience, to stop and smell the roses, would be beneficial in the long run.

What experiments would you like to see an MMO try?

Inconvenience

Distance is measured in time, not space.

That's not literally true, of course. But it does seem to map to how we think of distance. I live half an hour from work. The grocery store is a 5 minute walk away. The big city is four hours away.

So when you apply this to virtual worlds, geography needs to take into account travel time. Uldum is right next to Stormwind, despite being on another continent. This is because the portal is there. The portal is a convenience, but it also makes the world seem less like a world. Without the portal, the game would be more inconvenient.

I was reading the debates between theme parks and sandboxes, and it occurred to me that inconvenience is a very important factor in making the virtual world behave like the real world.

Take the entire concept of trade, for example. At one level, you buy items where they are cheap, transport them to where they are expensive, and sell them for a profit. But this entire transaction works because of inconveniences. Resources are distributed unevenly. The markets in the two different areas are not connected. There is a limit to how much weight one can carry. The transit takes time. The transit might be dangerous.

There are a lot of elements in a modern MMO that would need to be stripped away to model this type of trade. No common auction house, weight restrictions, and a long travel time to get from area to area.

The theme park MMOs are all moving towards smoothing away as many inconveniences as they can. And the playerbase demands it. Look at the outcry when portals were removed from Dalaran.

And yet, for sandboxes to truly work, I think they won't work despite inconveniences, they work because of those inconveniences.

But inconvenience is, well, inconvenient. Maybe sandboxes can never work, because the required inconvenience to truly simulate a virtual world will just drive players away.

Cataclysm, In Review

I find Cataclysm is a hard expansion to really pin down. The thing is that there were no "unambiguous wins" this expansion. It seemed like every element was "one step forward, one step back".

Compare that to Wrath of the Lich King. Lich King had, in my mind, at least two moments of awesome: the Wrathgate ("Did you think we had forgotten? Did you think we had forgiven? Behold, now, the terrible vengeance of the Forsaken!" - best speech since original Ragnaros); and Ulduar. Maybe the Lich King fight counts as a third moment, I'm not sure about that. Cataclysm, in contrast, didn't really have anything to match those highs.

The Good:

• Choosing specializations at level 10 - I thought this worked remarkably well. It made choosing your path a lot cleaner and simpler.
• Class balance in general - I really liked class balance this expansion. While there were a few issues at the very high end, for the most part almost all specializations were balanced against each other.
• The new healing model - Maybe it's because Holy paladins were one-button spam for so long, but I greatly enjoyed healing this expansion. Using many different spells, watching your mana, triage. The basic process of healing was interesting again. It did break down a bit near the end, admittedly.
• Twilight Highlands - Dwarven wedding! The best zone of the expansion.
• Mylune - You know you love her.
• Looking For Raid - excellent job on making a transient version of raiding.

The Mushy Middle:

• 10-man raiding - Pro: 10-man raiding became a first-class activity. Con: 25-man raiding was gutted.
• Guild levels - Pros: was fun to level up your guild. Cons: loss of perks made guilds too sticky, I thought. Also, the setup of cauldrons and feasts was terribly annoying, and done just to preserve the perk.
• T11 and Firelands - Pro: solid, interesting fights. Con: very static difficulty, gave rise to "dancing" claims, also possibly too difficult at the start
• Firelands dailies - Pro: Interesting quests, liked the storyline. Con: because of phasing worries, actual process was excessively grindy. Unlocking areas every single day was annoying. Blizz should have just had it unlock once and not worry about the phasing.
• Heroics - Pro: difficult and challenging. Con: difficult and challenging. To be honest, I still think these could have worked if the endgame had been structured differently. Take a look at how TBC heroics were placed in the attunements for raids
• Hyjal - Pro: good quests, interesting storyline. Con: excessively linear.
• Deepholm - Decent zone, nothing too interesting though.
• Uldum - Pro: quests with the cat people: Con: quests with Harrison Jones
• Old World Revamp - Pro: Lots of interesting new quests. Con: Loss of the old stories and common experiences. Many veterans felt it was too easy.
• Dragon Soul - I don't think I can look at this raid objectively. My feelings are coloured by the dissolution of my guild.
• Archaeology - Pro: neat items and very flavorful. Con: Very grindy. Fly a lot, survey, survey, survey, fly to the next area.

The Bad:

• Vash'jir - Underwater sucked. Was way too long and linear. Trapped a quartermaster midway through.
• Only 5 levels - Questing was too short, endgame came too fast. I much preferred the 10 levels of the previous expansion.
• Deathwing - Pretty boring villain. No style. Didn't appear often enough to feel like a true Big Bad. It felt like Blizzard thought they overexposed Arthas, and tried to pull back with Deathwing. But the problem wasn't that Arthas appeared too much, it was that Arthas always lost, and so started to come off as a paper tiger.

So that's what I thought of Cataclysm. The class mechanic changes were good. But all the content (except for Twilight Highlands) was all in that middle zone of quality. No moments of awesome.

[SWTOR] Improving Companion Gameplay

Companions are a fun and interesting part of The Old Republic, especially when leveling. For the most part, the system Bioware has in place works pretty well. Here are some suggestions or tweaks that I think would improve companion gameplay.

1. If a quest rewards companion gear, give the gear for all the companions as a reward.

Right now, if a quest rewards companion gear, you have to pick one piece for one companion. This method strongly encourages the player to only gear up the current companion, while the other companions lag behind. As well, if your current companion doesn't need the gear, it's a bit of a hassle to figure out which companion needs the gear the most.

There's also some issues when you need a specific companion at certain times, and not keeping their gear up to date can make fights harder than they should be.

On the other hand, if you simply got gear for all your companions at the same time, it would make life a lot simpler. All your companions get upgrades, keeping their gear up to date, at least with green items. If a specific companion has better gear, you can just sell that companion's piece for a few credits. There's no, "oh, I made a mistake, I should have gotten Kaliyo's helmet instead of Vector's".

Plus, you get to see the changing looks for all your companions as you level. I think this would greatly simplify companion gearing while leveling, without really overpowering anything.

2. Rearrange companion ability bars so "stances" show up in the 4-button bar.

Right now, the default companion UI shows four buttons: Attack, Passive, and the first two abilities. The bar can be temporarily expanded to show all abilities, but it overlaps one of your regular bars. For some reason, you cannot rearrange companion abilities on the bar, though you can toggle abilities on or off.

Each companion also has two stances, like a DPS stance or a tank stance. Or single-target versus AoE. A lot of times these stances are on the very right.

It would make life a little easier if the stances were on the left, so they showed up in the small 4-button bar. Then that bar would be: Attack, Passive, Stance 1, Stance 2. This way you could more easily swap companion stances as appropriate.

3. Not use AoE when Crowd Control is active.

Right now, companions are very good with not interrupting crowd control when they use their single-target abilities. But if you enable AoE abilities, odds are that your crowd control will get broken by their AoE within seconds of applying it.

It is a significant hassle to keep expanding the companion ability bar and turn on and off AoE fight by fight. On all my characters, I've gotten into the habit of just turning all the AoE off. It's so much easier to use crowd control abilities when you're confident that the companion won't break them.

A simple rule where the companion simply doesn't use AoE abilities when any enemy is under a crowd control would go a long way towards making companion AoE abilities useful all the time. You could just enable the AoE abilities, and be confident that your crowd control is not going to be broken.

To be clear, I'm not asking that the companion calculate if its AoE will hit a crowd controlled enemy. That is probably excessive. A simple check if anything is controlled or not is enough, regardless of where the enemy is.

4. Integrate companions into the healing/operations UI.

It is extraordinarily annoying to try to heal someone else's companion. Especially in two person groups for the small heroics.

All I would like here is for companions to show up in the operations UI. That UI is the best for healing. Just have the companion health bar show up as if it was another player. All health bars are in one place, and healing companions becomes just like healing other players in the group.

5. Improve conditions when companions start attacking someone.

There are two situations I've encountered where the companion does not start attacking as you would expect. First, is Imperial Agent Sniper. For some reason, most of the main abilities used by the Sniper don't cause the companion to attack. But other abilities do. It would be a lot easier if all Sniper abilities caused the companion to attack.

The second situation is if you are the healer in a group. Your companion only attacks enemies which attack you, or which you attack. That means a lot of the time you have to micro-manage your companion to keep him attacking. Otherwise he might kill one enemy, then stop attacking and just stand there. It's very annoying when you are busy healing, especially as you are trying to fight the UI as described in point 4.

I would suggest that your companion starts attacking when anyone in your group attacks someone or when anyone in your group gets attacked. This would make managing your companion while healing a lot easier, as easy as it is when you are dealing damage or tanking.

Conclusion

For the most part, companions work well and are an enjoyable element of questing. But I think the five improvements above would smooth out a few of the rough edges of companion gameplay.

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?