[TERA] Impressions So Far

I am really enjoying TERA so far. It's a great deal of fun.

I adore combat as a Lancer. Bringing your shield up to block at just the right time, taking no damage from a big hit, is awesome, especially with the visual feedback provided. Blocking a huge monster as it does some sort of bullrush attack, pushing you backwards as you take the hits on your shield, taking no damage, makes you really feel like a tank. Chaining combos together is also neat, and the animations make combat very visceral.

The thing I like about PvE combat in TERA is that it is very interactive. In WoW and most other MMOs, what your opponent is doing doesn't really matter, aside from maybe interrupting or stunning. You go through your rotation, and the mob dies. TERA really encourages you to pay attention to the mob, to watch for the tells and block or dodge.

The game also performs very well, and is very responsive. The game is colorful, and feels fun and full of whimsy.

I also find some of the design and art decisions hilarious.  Here's my Lancer with shield and lance at the ready. Looks pretty awesome, with a great shield design:

Now here she is showing her armor:

The armor is just hilariously bad. It's like it's giving the monster a target to aim for. But somehow, instead of being annoyed at the armor, it just amuses me greatly.

Now, TERA has it's downsides. The questing is very old school, and is just an excuse to kill a new set of mobs, rather than tell some sort of important or memorable story. The writing is not particularly good either. It's decent, and occasionally very funny (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, and sometimes it's hard to figure out if it's intentional or not).

Some of the subsystems are unnecessarily complex. For example, enchanting a piece of armor requires another piece of the same slot of roughly equal item level as a raw material. But for some reason, you can't put many items in your bank. So I'm carrying around a dozen chestpieces just in case I need to enchant a new chestpiece.

There are also some interesting design decisions as well. For example, gathering materials gives you a small random buff, rewarding you for making gathering part of your questing and combat routine. For some reason, I absolutely love this feature. It really does not make a big difference in questing, but it just works for me.

As well, I really like how they are handling the launch rush. There are queues on some servers. But TERA has server transfers implemented, and the transfers will be free for the first little while. So even if your preferred server has a queue, you can start a character on a different server and eventually transfer over once everything gets sorted out. This strikes me as a really good balance, allowing the population to flow from server to server in response to the changing conditions of launch, without heavy-handed dev intervention.

There's also an instance finder, but groups are also forming in area chat. So right now, you have the best of both worlds. I've done the first dungeon twice, once through instance finder, and once through a local group.

As well, for some reason area chat seems to be hopping. Maybe it's because it's the RP server, maybe because the chat box can display more than three lines, or there's less system spam. But whatever the reason, it's a very nice change from the quietness of most recent MMOs.

All in all, I'm really enjoying TERA. It seems to strike this nice balance of being "different enough" from most WoW-like MMOs, while not being too different.  I definitely recommend the game so far, and think it's well worth the initial box price.

Edit: Another small thing I like is that the quest tracker has a button to track or untrack by area. So you can easily swap up your quest tracking when you change areas.

Also, to continue the inappropriate armor screenshots, I got a blue armor piece from the end boss of the first dungeon. I really don't know how TERA will top this:

One thing I do like is that the character's hairstyle changed, to adjust to the new armor. That was a nice touch.

[Eve Online] PLEX and Cheating, Part II

I've been following Gevlon's comment thread, and I've realized that he and I are actually talking about two different aspects of PLEX.

PLEX versus Economic Simulation

From the outside, one of the main attractions of Eve Online is that it is this huge economic simulation with hundreds of thousands of actors. People harvest resources, refine resources, produce goods, trade, purchase and use those goods. Then you add on the player conflict overlaid on top of all that. It is a magnificent economic simulation and experiment.

It is amazing to realize that the ammo I purchase to shoot pirates was produced by another player, as is the ship I fly in and modules which the ship is outfitted in.

The thing about this economic simulation is that you can trace the flow of wealth, see how all the interlocking transactions combine into one harmonious whole. And each transaction makes sense within the universe.

But then, inside this beautiful simulation, you have some extremely large transactions that simply do not make sense within the context of the universe. Half a billion ISK transferred from one player to another, for no discernible rhyme or reason. That transaction weakens the economic simulation, warps it slightly, has trickle-down effects, and makes the whole thing less real than it could be.

PLEX as a Means of Skipping Content

Some people are producers. They enjoys earning ISK, either by harvesting resources or trading or producing goods. They do not enjoy being attacked by other players. But they deal with that inconvenience, and adjust their gameplay to defend or mitigate against that possibility.

PLEX buyers are consumers. They enjoy expending ISK, often on attacking other players. They do not enjoy earning ISK.

However, unlike the producers, the consumers don't have to deal with their inconveniences. They don't have to adjust their gameplay to compensate. They can spend real money to skip the part of the game they don't enjoy.

That is the part which is not fair. The situation is not symmetrical. One faction can skip the part of the game they do not enjoy, while the other faction cannot.

Consider the following hypothetical. Suppose CCP sold, for real money, an IMMORTAL module which rendered your ship immune to player attack (but disabled your weapons while installed). The module would have a lifespan of one month of real-time, after which it would self-destruct.

Would the Eve playerbase be okay with such a module? Or would using it be considered cheating?

After all, all it does is equalize the situation between producers and consumers. The consumer can buy PLEX to skip the parts of the game he doesn't enjoy. The producer can buy IMMORTAL modules to skip the parts of the game which she doesn't enjoy.

Yet I suspect that the Eve loyalists would howl if IMMORTAL modules were ever sold by CCP. But in many ways IMMORTAL modules are no different than PLEX in their effect on how an individual enjoys the game.

[Eve Online] Is PLEX Cheating?

Gevlon wrote a post saying essentially that PLEX was cheating. PLEX is essentially a a game card for 1 month of game-time, that is purchased from CCP for real money, but can be sold in game for virtual currency. Gevlon was promptly jumped on by Eve loyalists in the comments. However, I think he is sort of right.

Though, "cheating" is not precisely the right word.

Rather, I would say that PLEX is against the spirit of Eve Online. Eve is a sandbox game, a virtual universe inside which one builds a virtual existence more or less from scratch. Allowing outside transactions to affect transactions inside the virtual universe seems to cut against the whole sandbox idea.

It kind of comes back to the notion of inconvenience. It is certainly convenient for, as an example, PvP pilots to buy PLEX to fund their games. But there is a price for that. Those pilots don't have to work, to participate in the game economy, for those funds. If PLEX did not exist, they would have to do something, produce something of value, before they could get to what they think is the fun part.

Maybe they would take up mining, maybe they would become pirates. Who knows? But not having to do that does distort the economy in some small fashion. It weakens the notion of Eve as a self-contained sandbox universe.

But maybe PLEX is a necessary evil. Maybe its existence spices up gameplay, and makes the economy more liquid, with more and larger transactions moving around. Maybe the alternative is those players quitting Eve instead of continuing to play. Maybe it means that CCP would make less money, and not be able to fund development as Eve deserves. Maybe third-party ISK sellers would fill the void, leading to the same result, but with a lot more unfortunate side-effects.

Ultimately, inconvenience is what makes a world a world, and not just a game. PLEX is convenient, but makes Eve less of a world, and more of a game.

[Eve Online] A Weekend in Jita

Jita. The largest trading hub in Eve Online.  You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

At least, that's the case if you go by the local chat. Honestly, this was worse than Barrens chat, with multiple people spamming macros of repeated chat, ascii graphics, scams, and all other sorts of foolishness.

Like many others in Eve, I heard about the Goons attack on Jita this weekend and thought that I would go see it for myself. I'm just flying a Catalyst destroyer, so I figured that even if I died, I could replace my ship easily.

There were a lot of people in Jita, about 2000 or so. But nothing much seemed to be happening. Maybe I play at a different time than when all the events go down. There were a lot of ships flying around, and occasionally CONCORD (the NPC police) would blow someone up. I thought I would try and join the action, and targeted someone who was a yellow skull to me. But when I went to fire, I got a warning saying that CONCORD would attack me, so I didn't fire. I guess yellow isn't bad.

All in all, my time in Jita was pretty boring. I did like watching a fleet of about 30 Hurricanes set up some sort of interdiction net around the gate to the Perimeter system. That looked kind of cool.

But ultimately, after a couple hours in wandering around Jita, I got bored and went back to my usual mission-running systems.

After that, I thought I would make a mining alt. But when I started the alt, the game informed me that I could only learn skills on one character at a time. I wonder what the point of having multiple characters on a single account is with that restriction. Is it worth losing a month or so of skill time on your main to skill up an alt? It seems like I could just spend that month (or less because I already know some skills) and learn those mining skills on my main.

[TERA] Trials of a Knight-Errant: Miniskirt Edition

I was rather bored this weekend, so I decided to have another shot at TERA.  The thing about TERA is that I expect so little from it that the game is actually a great deal of fun. This time I chose to roll a character on the Role-Playing server, under the theory that the innuendo in general chat would at least be in proper English.

(As a complete aside, I rather wish there were Normal servers, but with the Roleplaying restrictions on names, chat, etc. A 'Polite' server ruleset, as it were. I have no interest in roleplaying, but I rather like being on a server with people who can write in full sentences, and no Arthasloldk in sight. But the roleplayers must get pretty annoyed that "their" server is overrun with people who don't roleplay at all.)

In any case, I rolled a female human Lancer, which is a lance-and-shield tank. Yeah, the first rule of TERA is not to question the logic behind anything, but just go with the flow. The lance telescopes somehow, automatically extending to full length when you enter combat. As expected, this leads to interesting commentary in general chat.

For some reason, TERA to me is symbolized by the following story. The female Lancer is very scantily-clad, which includes a miniskirt as part of her (theoretically heavy) metal armor. But as my female readers can probably attest, a miniskirt does not really go well with riding a horse. So what does any logical knight-errant do? That's right, she rides sidesaddle:

Coriel the Lancer, with mount. Note the telescoping lance on her back.

Somehow, this is just so perfectly TERA to me. Perfectly reasonable thinking, but from completely crazy starting points.

I'll talk more about tanking in a later post, because it's quite interesting, and quite possibly the perfect blend of tanking mechanics, of what Ghostcrawler calls "active mitigation".

Honestly, if you can get past the skimpy clothing, and the race that looks like little girls (who now wear shorts instead of tiny dresses), TERA is quite a fun and engrossing game, with some really intriguing mechanics and subsystems.

Bonuses for Mixed Gender Groups

Because I'm a fool, I'm going to comment on a gender-relations issue. One would think I would know better by now.

Syp at Biobreak finds an interesting idea from the developers of Prime World:

Prime World has an optional gender bonus: a shield which will automatically deploy if the health of a nearby player of the opposite gender falls below a certain level. This shield is cheap, is in the default talent set for all characters, and is designed to encourage players of opposite genders to fight together. Teams are thus more effective if they are composed of both male and female players. In addition, this bonus helps encourage beginning female players, who feel more helpful when fighting in a mixed group.

All the commenters on the post are pretty appalled at this notion. But is it really that bad of an idea?

Now, maybe the stated rationale for the move--helping beginning female players--is weak. Though maybe it isn't. In the reverse situation, a lot of men would be loath to attempt something that would make them look foolish or incompetent in front of women. Making that situation less likely might indeed make some beginning female gamers more willing to take a chance on a group.

Apart from that, there is a better reason to promote mixed gender groups. One of the greatest strengths and weaknesses of the Internet is that it allows like-minded individuals to find each other and form communities which reinforce each other. A lot of the time this is good. After all, most of us gamers get to participate in a far larger gaming community than we could have in real life.

But sometimes this is bad. There is a portion of the male gaming audience which is very misogynistic. The Internet allows them to find each other, and form all-male sub-communities that reinforce that misogyny, sub-communities which provide validation in the face of wider community disapproval.

A mechanic like the the one above pushes against the formation of deviant sub-communities. Mixed gender groups are mechanically optimal, and thus mixed-gender groups are more likely to form. I think it is harder to retain prejudice against someone when you're playing on the same team as they are. When the rest of your smaller sub-community values them as well.

Basically, if you have a poor opinion of women, and if you never play with women, I would think that you are more likely retain that poor opinion. Playing with good female team-mates forces one to readjust that opinion to match reality.

Another aspect to this situation is that women are often invisible in MMOs. Because the majority of players are men, and a lot of men play female characters, it becomes very easy to assume that every player you meet is male in real life. (What does GIRL stand for? Guy In Real Life.) A lot of women like this invisibility. They don't get hit on, or made uncomfortable, or in any way treated differently.

But there is a price for this invisibility. First, if everyone who meets a good female player assumes she is male, their prejudices can go unchallenged. Additionally, female players seem a lot rarer than they are in reality. If in every random 5-man group, one or two players were identifiably female, a female player would cease to be a novelty, and would be more normal.

Second, by choosing to be invisible, good female players cede defining the image of female players to those who are willing to publicly identify as female in-game. This often means the female players who are willing to trade on their feminity to get material concessions from male players, or to excuse poor play. Those women get to define female gamers, to the detriment of the larger female population.

You see much the same phenomenon with young players. There are a lot of teenage players who are competent, solid players. But they are invisible, and glide by on the default assumption of maturity. You only see the teenagers who are immature and cause drama. Thus all teenagers get tarred by the same brush, and many guilds institute age minimums.

A mechanic like the one proposed by Prime Worlds above might actually have positive effects on the game community as a whole. It nudges or pushes the players towards forming mixed-gender sub-communities as that is optimal mechanically. This makes it harder for misogynistic self-reinforcing sub-communities to form. It pushes women out of a comfortable invisibility, and forces male players to acknowledge them as female and as a significant portion of the community. The community definition of female gamers is more likely to match reality, rather than an unfortunate stereotype.

Between these two aspects, such a gender-based mechanic might actually foster a stronger, better community, despite the initial reaction of many people.

[WoW] Goblin Starting Zone

I don't really like the Goblin starting zone that was introduced in Cataclysm.

To me, the goblin backstory is "over-determined". For all the other races in WoW, your background before the starting zone is left very blank. You could be almost anything or anyone. But the goblin zone gives you a very defined place in goblin society. You have a job, a history, friends, and even a girlfriend or boyfriend.

It seems too pushy for an MMO. It might have been fine for a single-player game, but it seems really out of place in an MMO. I like having my character start out as a blank slate.

I think a better idea for the Goblin starting zone would have been to play out a twist.  When the goblins escape Kezan and their ship gets blown up, have a "dream fade" in to the next section. You know, one of those wiggly fades that indicates what came before was a dream. Then have all the NPCs treat you as more of a no-name goblin, like all the other starting zones.

So the goblin experience of Kezan becomes a dream or fantasy experience, which accounts for the over-the-top nature of that zone. This makes the true reality of events more obscure, and more in line with all the other starting experiences.

Community and Lobby-Like Gaming

In a comment to the previous post, Milady asks:

I was wondering what would you think about switching from an MMO to a game such as Diablo. You have said that D3 plays similarly to D2, yet the latter came out many years ago, when the community had not reached the stage of persistent world population, and the social ties that you could form were not as strong as in MMOs. Many people are migrating from WoW and other MMOs into D3 - would they like this step backwards into lobby-like gaming? 

Could you play without a persistent world, without a community?

There are multiple ways of looking at this question.

First, for me at least, Diablo is closer to a single-player game than a multiplayer game. Multiplayer is fun, but the first time I play any level, it will be as a single-player. You can go at your own pace, listen to all the voice-overs, experiment with different abilities, and ensure that every single barrel on the level has been broken before moving on. I suspect that the initial play-through for the majority of people will be similar, or maybe co-op with a real-life friend.

In this view, community really doesn't mean anything for a single-player game.

Second, if you play an MMO in a transient fashion, you will find that it is very similar to lobby-like gaming. You have to join the community in order to experience that sense of community. And a lot of people don't join the community. I know that I have never done so in any MMO other than WoW.[1]

So D3 would be just as persistent as my experiences in RIFT, Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings Online, etc. Of course, that may be the reason I never played for more than a few months.

However, I really think that the MMO literati gravely underestimate how many people actually play in this fashion, how many people are not part of the community.  In my opinion, what we think of the community in many of these games is actually a minority of the total playerbase.

Third, even transient games have an external community consisting of the forums and websites, where people can discuss the game, brag about stuff they done, and commiserate with others who have lost high-level hardcore characters. I suspect that the people who do end up playing Diablo for years tap into this community.

Fourth, the final view I can think of is that maybe Diablo becomes the equivalent of television for a lot of people. Log in, kill some monsters, get some loot, and log out. Maybe zerg a boss with some random people online. Mindless relaxation to unwind after work. In this view, community is really not important, and may even be detrimental as you don't really want to spend brain power and effort on that community.

Personally I don't think I could play Diablo for as long as I played WoW without the persistent world and community. But I also don't expect to play it for that long. It's a single-player game for me, with a little bit of random multiplayer after. I will probably play Diablo until the next interesting game comes along.

[1] Technically, I did join a guild in SWTOR. If I had made to the cap and started doing things with them, I might have become part of that community.

[Diablo 3] Open Beta Impressions

Diablo 3 is, well, pretty much Diablo.

Gameplay is pretty much the exact same as the previous version. About the only new element is monsters sometimes drop health globes. It's an interesting mechanic because it sort of shifts your relationship with health potions a little bit.

There's also no real mana potions anymore. Resources either regenerate with time, or specific attacks build resources and other attacks spend them.

A lot of stuff got streamlined. Town Portal is now an ability (with a long cast time) instead of scrolls. Items are automatically identified. You pick up gold automatically. All your characters share gold, the stash, and crafting professions.

The major area of change is how abilities are given out. I think Diablo 3 is the final nail in the coffin for talent trees, at least as far as Blizzard is concerned.

Instead you get a series of exclusive choices. I.e. you choose one of 5 primary attacks (left-mouse button), 1 of 5 secondary attacks (right-mouse button), 1 of 5 defensive abilities, etc. You can also modify each attack with different runes that alter the attack. Like the monk has a spinning kick secondary attack. The first rune adds some fire and a knockback, and the animation changes a bit.

All of these choices are unlocked as you level, and changing your spec up is painless. I'm generally a fan of the series of exclusive choices idiom. I think the total possible number of combinations is just as large as with talent trees, and the total number of viable combinations is much larger.

There's also some interesting innovations in multiplayer. For example, loot is generated separately for each player, so there's no ninja'ing.

It's interesting to look at D3 in light of future MMOs, and think about what will get carried forward. I think the individual player loot is one element that will show up in future MMOs. Indeed, Looking For Raid is going to work that way in Pandaria. As well, many elements are shared across your characters, including gold, your bank/stash, and somewhat surprisingly, your crafting progression.

As for classes, they're pretty straightforward. The witch doctor is a bit weird though. I'm not sure what class I will play. Normally I just go with the knight/paladin archetype, but D3 doesn't have one. Mechanically, the armored melee fighter is the barbarian, but it just doesn't feel the same. I was thinking about the Demon Hunter, but like Spinks, I'm not thrilled with the high heels. Boots would have been just as sexy, and far less stupid. But otherwise, the Demon Hunter looks good, so I'll probably end up going with that.

In the end, this is Diablo. It looks, feels, sounds, and plays like Diablo. It has the classic Blizzard polish, attention to detail, and excellent performance on even somewhat older systems.

Guilds for New Players

Syncaine of Hardcore Casual asks, "what excuse do [new] people have for not joining EVE University?"

That echos a lot of advice that Eve Online players have been giving me. In many ways, Syncaine's question is aimed squarely at me, as I'm in the exact position he's asking about. So here is my attempt to give a serious answer to that question.

The thing is that I don't like leaving guilds. I will leave if it becomes necessary. But ideally, it would never become necessary. And so I really don't like joining a guild that I know I will leave. And that's the case for newbie guilds like Eve University.

This even extends into all the themepark/leveling games I've played recently (hence the reason this post is not tagged with Eve Online). My experience in WoW has led me to believe that endgame guilds are structured the way they are for a reason, because that is the structure that is most conducive to success.

As a result, I really don't like joining all these leveling guilds that dream of one day raiding. I've seen guilds that tread that path, and it never seems to work out. I just don't have faith that a random guild will navigate the transition successfully. So to me there are three choices:

1. Join a leveling guild and try to raid - almost never works out, getting that critical mass of players willing to commit to raiding is hard for an adhoc group.

2. Join a leveling guild and then leave for a raiding guild at max level - I think this is unfair to the leaders of the leveling guild. They're trying to raid, and that's hard enough to learn, without people abandoning them

3. Level unguilded and then join a raiding guild - The least-worst option. But leveling is very lonely.

The other aspect is that I think it's important that I contribute to the guild's goals. Joining a guild should be a two-way street. The guild helps me, and I help the guild.

Guilds which are explicitly aimed at new players are all one-sided relationships. It's all take and no give on the part of the new player. And that feels less like a guild and more like charity. It may not be fashionable anymore, but I do have my pride.

These the two aspects of a newbie guild that give me pause: the fact that I know I will have to leave; and the fact that I think the guild-player relationship is overly one-sided. These are the reasons that I prefer not to join guilds like Eve University or even those random guilds which whisper you in Elwynn Forest.

[SWTOR] Free Time for Level 50s

Lots of buzz about Bioware giving current subscribers with Level 50s a month of free time. The long-time subscribers without level 50s are naturally unhappy, and so we'll see how that plays out. Personally, I thought SWTOR strongly encouraged someone to get to 50 before starting alts, so I'm not sure how common the above scenario really is.

But I'm not really interested in talking about that aspect. What's more interesting to me is the timing of this offer.

Bioware is giving end-game players a month of free time right when a major, heavily-advertised patch hits. Shouldn't the patch itself be a major attraction? Shouldn't people want to stay subscribed to explore the new patch and content?

To me this is like Blizzard giving every raider a month of free time right when Dragon Soul comes out. It's nice, but it's really unnecessary. Everyone would stay subscribed for a little while to poke around in Dragon Soul and LFR.

It seems like it would be much better to give out the free time a month or two after the patch has landed. To keep people from unsubscribing, to keep them playing a bit longer.

I don't know. Maybe Bioware needs to guarantee subscription numbers for a very specific date. Maybe there's something specific in their player habits that makes this idea useful. But I just don't understand the logic behind the timing of this offer.

[Eve Online] The Path From Here to There

By now, I think I have a reasonable handle on the Eve interface. It's not perfect, there's lots of small details that I just know there is a way to smooth out, but haven't yet figured out how to do it. For example, on the overhead display, I want to create a tab that just shows enemies. I managed to create a tab that shows stuff I can loot, and it's been an enormous help. But I just can't get one to show only enemies.

Ship-wise, I'm flying an Incursus, which seems to be the best Gallente faction frigate-class combat ship. So far, it's been pretty solid, and has allowed me to complete all the Level 1 missions I've been given.

Skill-wise, I've discovered certificates, which are groupings of related skills. Earning certificates is like a guide to what skills you should pick up. I'm going for what appears to be a standard fighter line, with things like Gunnery and Armor Tanking. Not really sure if this is the best route, but at least it's a direction.

The hardest thing in Eve, I find, is figuring out what goal to set for yourself. Or, if your goal is sufficiently advanced, figuring out the path from you to your goal, what sub-goals you need.  The truth is that I don't really know what I want to do in Eve, and as a result I log on, do a couple missions, and then log off.

This is the big advantage of the theme park games. My goal is to get to max level. My sub-goal is to get to the next level. My sub-goal below that is to finish the current quest I am on.

There is a path there that really is not present in Eve. In Eve, even questions like, "should I be moving on to a new solar system" are really hard to answer. How is this solar system really different from the one next to it?

I guess my next goal in Eve is to get and fly a cruiser-class ship. And I can see the skills I need to take to get to that point. What I don't really see is how to afford that cruiser. A level 1 mission pays like 100k ISK. The cruiser costs something like 100M ISK. Am I really to run 1000 missions? Or are there higher paying missions at some point? Or am I expected to take up mining or trading?

I find Eve is extraordinarily opaque when it comes to questions like this. But in some ways that's part of its appeal. Any answer could be the right answer.

I really feel the appeal of a corporation at this point in the game. At least in a corp, someone could give me orders and I could carry out those orders and feel that something is moving forward.

In a lot of respects, I feel the same as when I was a junior programmer. I understood the core concepts, how to program, and how to solve simple problems. What I didn't understand was the jump to large programs, and the larger architecture. That's something I really only learned while working on larger programs, getting a feel for larger systems, and seeing what older and more experienced programmers did.

Basically, it's a lot easier to be a worker bee for a little bit before striking out on your own. You learn so much more that way.

Maybe the answer is that I should join a corp. But here Eve's reputation works against it. It is a notoriously unfriendly community. That makes the whole corporation thing seem even more daunting, especially if you're just playing casually and know you will be unreliable.

[Pandaria Beta] Cleanse and Holy Radiance

I want to take a quick look at a couple of Holy spells that are slightly changing in Pandaria: Cleanse and Holy Radiance.

Cleanse is getting an 8 second cooldown, but will dispel all magic (for Holy), poison, and disease debuffs on a target.  So basically cleansing multiple targets becomes a lot harder, and there's a window between cleanses where a debuff can do damage. But at the same time, you only need to spend one GCD to wipe away all debuffs. It's an interesting trade-off and it will be intriguing to see how this plays out.

For example, in PvE, you might have a boss toss out exactly two debuffs at the same time. Then you have to triage and pick one to cleanse and one to heal. It should make debuff management more interesting.

One nice touch is that if you Cleanse someone without any debuffs, it does not invoke the cooldown. So you can quickly recover from a Cleanse error, the error only costs you mana and a GCD. Good work by the Blizz team to put this in.

Holy Radiance has changed too. Instead of putting a short HoT on people, it instead heals the target for a certain amount, and heals people around the target for half that. If the target is healed for 1000, everyone around her is healed for 500 each.

One thing about the old version is that if you cast it twice in a row on the same target, the HoT did not stack, so you lost a lot of the healing. But if you cast it on different targets, the HoT would stack. So the optimum way to use Holy Radiance was to rotate your target. If you did not know exactly how the HoTs stacked, you might have been far less effective with your Holy Radiance.

The new version also encourages you to switch targets, but it's a lot more forgiving if you cast it on the same person.  For example, if Anna and Beth have both lost 1500 health, and you cast HR for 1000 on Anna twice, Anna is healed for 1500 (500 overheal) and Beth is healed for 1000. But if you switch targets, both are healed for 1500.  Switching targets is better, but casting twice is not as bad, you only overhealed a little bit, and not as much as you would have with the old HR. In fact, if both targets had been at lower health, you wouldn't have any wasted healing at all.

I really like the new design of Holy Radiance. It accomplishes the same goal of rotating your target as the previous version, but in a far more obvious and elegant manner. Excellent work by the class design team.

[Pandaria Beta] First Look at Holy and Retribution

This beta build is pretty buggy, so I'm just going to talk about paladin changes in broad strokes.

There's been some cleanup of the UI, our Auras are gone, and the Seals now appear in their place. Hand of Reckoning has finally been stripped of the "Hand of" part, and is just named Reckoning. It only took three years.

I only got to look at Holy and Retribution, because changing specializations is broken.

For Holy, single-target healing is more or less the same as the previous edition. The only significant difference I saw was that Cleanse now has an 8s cooldown, but dispels all relevant debuffs.

AoE-healing seems to have a lot of tweaks, but I don't think it has fundamentally changed. It still follows a Holy Radiance-Holy Shock-Light of Dawn pattern, but there are little changes. Holy Radiance currently heals the target and then does 50% of the heal to surrounding players. A bit of the healing also transfers back to the Beacon of Light target. It also causes Holy Shock to behave much the same way. Light of Dawn may no longer be a directed cone, but that might be a bug.

For Retribution, it feels much the same as previous, i.e. all the same abilities. But the Holy Power cycle has been sped up. Basically all non-finishers now produce Holy Power, so you can use Templar's Verdict essentially once every 4 GCDs. The finishers also cost exactly 3 holy power, simplifying things a little bit. I generally liked the feel of Retribution, though many posters on the forums are saying that it feels too slow. Personally, I don't see their argument, it felt like I almost always had a button to press. But I don't play Retribution a lot and am not an expert.

Retribution also got a full-blown AoE rotation, with where you can use Seal of Righteousness instead of Seal of Truth, Hammer of the Righteous instead of Crusader Strike, and Divine Storm instead of Templar's Verdict.

Hopefully I will be able to take a look at Protection in the next build.

So far, it feels like paladin specs have been cleaned up a fair bit, but no fundamental changes to the way we play.  Which I think is pretty good. I thought paladins played fairly well in Cataclysm and am happy to see that continuing on into Pandaria.

[Eve Online] A Comedy of Errors

I must be the worst Eve Online player in the world.

With all the chatter about Eve Online lately, and being a bit bored, I decided to give Eve a whirl. Ironically, two hours after subscribing, my Pandaria beta invite arrived. I did try Eve a couple of years ago, but basically gave up after 5 minutes with the interface. This time I resolved that I would make it further in, and at least get to a different system.

The initial tutorial went mostly well, until I got to a mission requiring me to take some documents to another system three jumps away, that had some new agents. I made it to the destination system, and then realized that I didn't have the documents in my cargo hold.  So I had to go all the way back.

When I got back, I just could not figure out how to transfer goods from the station to my cargo hold.[1] After numerous clicking I accidentally clicked the "Quit Mission" button on the Tutorial Agent.[2]

Doing that reset the tutorial missions back to the very beginning. Nonplussed, I set out to do them again. The first mission involves you flying out and picking up a new ship. I did that, and exchanged my slightly-geared ship for a completely new ship. However, the next mission involved shooting pirates. When I did the mission the first time, I got a gun and some ammo. This time, the tutorial insisted that I had already gotten the gun. Which was true, except the gun was mounted on the other ship that I had left out in deep space.

So faced with a mission that involved killing pirates and no gun, I decamped to the new system three jumps away, hoping that one of the agents there had a mission I could do to earn some ISK to buy a gun.

Luckily, one of the agents had an introductory mining mission. She gave me a newbie mining laser and sent me out. Eventually I figured out how to find asteroids. Eve has an interesting relationship between the gameworld and UI. 90% of objects in space can be accessed through the UI. Which is fine and dandy until you need something like asteroids which don't appear on the UI.

But eventually I got that figured out, and mined 1000 units of Concentrated Veldspar and headed back to the station. On the station, I could not finish the mission. After scrutinizing the mission log, it turned out that the Agent wanted 1000 units of Veldspar, not Concentrated Veldspar. Apparently there were two different types of asteroids out there. So I unloaded the Concentrated Veldspar and headed back out, this time to seach the asteroids until I found regular Veldspar. I found some eventually, mined it, and returned back to the station.

And this time, I simply could not figure out how to complete the quest. I think, and I may be wrong, that I was supposed to mine in a specific spot, instead of any random asteroid belt. After much frustration, I clicked the Quit Mission button, hoping it would reset.[2]  Instead of resetting, the agent simply went silent and does not offer missions anymore.

I finally managed to do another mission, got some ISK and bought a gun and some ammo. Then I bought more ammo after I jumped into space and could not load the gun, and realized the first ammo was the wrong type.

Finally though, I was able to return to the original tutorial system, complete the tutorial missions and get back to the new system successfully. It only took me two days. Clearly I'm ready for null-sec.

[1] Though I did eventually figure out a way to load cargo, I'm probably missing something, as this seems like quite a complicated process for something that is done a lot. I imagined you open a window with the station items, then open a window with the cargo hold, and drag and drop. Or possibly an option in the context-sensitive right-click menu. Dragging and dropping onto a tab of a window seems ugly to me.

[2] This is the biggest lesson I've learned so far in Eve. Never click a Quit Mission or Refuse Mission button. Everything goes badly if you do that.

[Pandaria Beta] Initial Thoughts

I got in the Mists of Pandaria Beta with the latest wave of invites. I only played for about half an hour or so late last night. I rolled a pandaren monk and poked around a bit. Here are some quick thoughts:

• On the character screen, classes are shown in high-end armor. Guess what paladins are wearing? That's right, Judgement! I love how Judgement armor has come to symbolize the WoW paladin.


• The monk Chi resource is interesting. It's quite close to rogue combo points, but surprisingly plays quite differently. Fixed, and different, Chi costs for abilities end up making the monk play in a completely different manner. I find it very interesting how one tiny change to the resource system results in a completely different class.


• The initial monk attacks are a chi builder, a punch that costs 1 chi and does more damage if the enemy is over 50%, and a kick which costs 2 chi, is only usable below 35%, and refunds one chi if it kills the enemy. This means that my standard gameplay so far is to float with 2 chi in my pool, alternate the builder and punch, and then finish off the mob with a kick. It's a completely different rhythm than the rogue.


• The monk's use of weapons is also interesting. They stay sheathed most of the item, and are only brought out for specific abilities.


• So far, pandaren are reasonably serious. They aren't a joke race like goblins.


• The other interesting mechanic is abilities with a cooldown but multiple "charges". So far, the only ability like this is Roll. It has a 15 second cooldown, but 2 charges. That means that you can Roll twice in a row, but it then takes 15s for 1 charge to be restored, and another 15s for the second charge to come back. (This description isn't the greatest, but it's very intuitive when you see it.) I think this is an interesting design space to open up, as it allows abilities to used multiple times quickly, but still enforces the cooldown and overall rate of ability use. I'm looking forward to seeing what Blizzard does with this mechanic.

So those are my initial thoughts on the Mists of Pandaria beta. I'd like to copy Coriel over at some point and have a look at high level paladin abilities.

Is there anything else people would like to see discussed or tried out?

Warlock Tanks

One of the more exciting Pandaria Beta revelations was the existence of a glyph which allows Demonology warlocks to tank things.  Sadly, the hopes and dreams of many warlocks were dashed when Ghostcrawler declared that glyph was more of a fun item, that maybe would allow the warlocks to offtank mobs and maybe emergency tank for a short while.

That reminds me of paladin tanking back in Vanilla and early TBC. A gimmick tank. It made paladins very unhappy, and finally Blizzard gave us full tanking capabilities.

I would go so far as to say that this glyph is a bad idea. Allowing people to think that they might tank, but not actually letting them tank sounds like a recipe for failure.

In my opinion, if Blizzard wants to go down this path, they should embrace it fully. Make Demonology a proper tanking spec, and the Felguard into a pet which enhances your tanking (as opposed to one that tanks for you). I think it might be kind of cool, and would give warlocks an extra bit of differentiation from mages. Mages and warlocks are a bit too similar, and it might be nice to separate them a bit more.

Of course this means a lot more work for Blizzard, adding another tank spec to balance. Not to mention that existing demonology warlocks might be unhappy that they got turned into tanks.

But if Blizzard doesn't want warlocks to properly tank, they should remove the glyph. Half measures are just going to annoy everyone. The experience of early paladin tanks is evidence of this, and Blizzard should really avoid making the same mistake twice.

Artistic Integrity

So the news is that Bioware is looking at revisiting the ending of Mass Effect 3. A lot of people decry this as a lacking "artistic integrity".

Judging by the posts I've read, most of these people haven't actually played through the ending of the ME3. Seriously, read this PC Gamer article featuring other game writers, and tell me how many of them have actually beaten the game in question. Heck, most of them are too busy shilling their own game in their answer. So much for their vaunted artistic integrity.

In any case, there are two points I'd like to make about artistic integrity.

Artists Make Mistakes

Artists are human beings just like the rest of us. That means that they too can make mistakes, even when it comes to their own art. Their choices are not always the best choices. Sometimes, the artist can go back and fix those mistakes. Or, in the case of George Lucas, make new mistakes.

My favorite movie is Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. But the version I adore is not the same version as the one released in movie theaters. It is significantly changed. In fact, Ridley Scott has continued to tinker with the film. He has been fixing his mistakes.

Most mediums don't really allow the artist to easily fix their work. Plays and theater do, and playwrights have often adapted their works after initial runs. Sometimes movies can when new editions are released to take advantage of new mediums. I've read novels where the writer returns to her work (often the first book published) ten or twenty years later and updates it, editing it better, adding a couple scenes, and generally cleaning up and polishing.

Computer games are a medium where it is easy to make changes, to fix mistakes. None of us would blink an eye at a patch that fixed a mechanical imbalance. Why is fixing a story mistake so far beyond the pale?

DLC

There is an old story about Winston Churchill and a socialite:

Churchill: "Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?"
Socialite: "My goodness, Mr. Churchill... Well, I suppose... we would have to discuss terms, of course... "
Churchill: "Would you sleep with me for five pounds?"
Socialite: "Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!"
Churchill: "Madam, we've already established that. Now we are haggling about the price” 

Mass Effect 3 had such crass marketing ploys as Day-One DLC and a pop up during the ending urging the player to purchase more DLC. Those sorts of stunts already establish exactly what sort of company Bioware is.  And it is not exactly one brimming with artistic integrity.

A company cannot indulge in things like Day-One DLC and expect the audience to take claims of "artistic integrity" seriously. We already know that you're for sale, and we're just haggling about the price.

Conclusion

I regard the ending of Mass Effect 3 as a mistake. Unlike a lot of other artists, the medium Bioware works in offers them the chance to fix that mistake, to improve the work of art. As well, by choosing to indulge in marketing shenanigans, Bioware has already compromised its claims of integrity, and those claims are not likely to be taken seriously by the audience.

From either side, I find the excuse of "artistic integrity" to avoid changes to be very weak. But if Bioware honestly believes that their ending is the best possible ending, that on reflection it was not a mistake, then they should stand by that ending. That choice has consequences, as the audience is free to disagree, and re-evaluate the quality and skill of the artist and the work.

Note: The comment thread may contain spoilers for Mass Effect 3.

TERA Beta Weekend

I was in the Beta Weekend for TERA, an upcoming MMO. TERA is a bit of a cross between Asian MMOs and WoW/RIFT/SWTOR. It's still a theme park MMO, but a lot of the sensibilities are more reminiscent of Asian MMOs than Western ones.

TERA's main selling point is that it is more of an "action" MMO. The creature animations "telegraph" their attacks, and you can manually dodge or block the attack. As well, you can chain attacks together in combos, to produce something a little bit closer to an action game than a standard MMO.  You don't select a target, but rather attack what's in front of you.

TERA actually does a very good job with this. Combat is rather interesting, and a bit more interactive than standard MMOs. The real standout in TERA is the animations. They are superb.

There are also lots of other nice ideas. For example, harvesting a resource node gives you a small temporary buff for the next few minutes. There's this concept of "stamina" which slowly drains over half an hour or so. You replenish stamina at campfires, and you burn charms to give everyone near the campfire a long-term buff.

However, TERA is pretty shameless. It's the type of MMO where all the female characters wear high heels, and extraordinarily revealing gear. It's actually somewhat impressive at the sheer number of ways TERA's artists can make inappropriate gear.

One race even looks like prepubescent girls, which comes across as rather sketchy. I honestly don't think the developers mean it in a negative way (well, I hope not), as it's paired with another race of furry round badger type animals. But maybe it just loses something in translation. An archetype (lolicon?) which has a specific meaning in Asian culture, but not in Western culture.

As a result of the last two items, the audience TERA seems to attract is rather distasteful. Area chat is rude at best, and downright disgusting at worst. Regardless of the game itself, I would rather not play with those types of people.

Which is a bit of a shame. The game itself has a pretty decent core. The animations are excellent, the classes are interesting and varied, the combat is fun. Some of the subsystems like trading and crafting are a little confusing, and the game likes randomness a little too much. But when I turned off player chat, the game became surprisingly appealing.

Still, you live by the sword, you die by the sword. TERA chose high heels, skimpy armor, and lolicons. And thus they get the audience that is primarily attracted by high heels, skimpy armor, and lolicons.

[RIFT] Life at 50

I decided to go back to RIFT for a little while. When I last left RIFT, I had just levelled a cleric to level 50, the max level. So I've been working on the cleric since then. I've not really bothered with looking up information on the internet, mostly playing the game by itself.

It's an interesting experience, hitting endgame without being plugged into the external community. It is kind of daunting, and probably far from optimal.

Take something as simple as enchants. I have no idea if RIFT has enchants. I checked the AH for item enhancements, and there were enchants, but it looked like only for weapons. I'm not sure if there are enchants from other sources, like factions.

Speaking of factions, I'm earning reputation with them, but I have no idea where the quartermasters are, or even if they sell anything useful.

I've mostly been running dungeons. You need a certain gear level to get into Expert dungeons, and I finally managed that, and have done a few of them. They're more or less like WoW Wrath Heroics. Pretty easy at this point, with a few mechanics you have to watch for. The groups are pretty nice, but it's mostly an AoE fest.

One interesting thing is that the queue time for DPS is actually rather short. I sign up for dungeons as DPS or heals, and I'm about 50/50 on which role I get.

So far, RIFT at 50 is pretty fun. But the experience has illustrated to me just how large the gap between someone who is "informed" about everything, and someone who just relies on in-game hints or advice is.

Bubble-Hearth Returns!

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

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

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

Here are the other paladin minor glyphs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mass Effect 3: My Ending

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

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

Continued below the jump.

[SWTOR] Mass Effect 3 Fallout

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

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

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

Warning: Some of the comments contain spoilers.

Mass Effect 3: Endings (Spoilers!)

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

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

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

Flow and Fiero

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

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

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

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

And the description of fiero:

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

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

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

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

Mass Effect 3!

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

Companion Affection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are 10-man Guilds Too Small?

I've been in semi-large guilds for almost all of my MMO tenure. One of the advantages of large guilds is that whenever you log on, there's usually a critical mass of people online. Oh, not enough to raid, but usually enough so that you can start a 5-man, or there's some chat going on, etc.

Is this the case in 10-man guilds?  Or do 10-man guilds normally have 5 or fewer people online at non-raid times?  Or do 10-mans work best as small teams inside larger guilds?

It seems to me that this is one downside of the push towards smaller raid sizes. Larger raid sizes required larger guilds, making it more likely that one would log into a bustling community at any given time.

Good Players are Good Players

In a comment to a previous post, Spinks makes a comment that I think is illustrative of the divide between me and a lot of readers:

You seem to be thinking a lot lately about being able to measure how good someone is at PvE. But it's not going to work when you have one person who is amazing at stuff that involves interacting with the environment/ interrupts etc but can't get the pinpoint timing that you'd need to max dps output, or vice versa. Or someone who is a decent player but gets very very very stressed if they are asked to perform a raid-critical task.

Let's say that a good DPS player has four tasks:

1. Maximize DPS output
2. Movement
3. Interrupts
4. Utility Stuff

Further, let's say that you can measure the individuals performance on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being best.

If I am reading Spinks correctly, she believes that performance of these tasks are independent. That performance in one task is not indicative of performance in a different task. That you could have a player who is a 10 at maximizing DPS output, but a 4 at interrupting.

In my experience, this is not the case. Performance of the tasks is correlated. Scores for an individual will cluster around the same point.  A really good player might have stats of 10,9,9,8. An average player might be 6,7,7,5.

Now, performance is not absolute and innate. Things require practice. If you never interrupt, then you'll probably require some attempts to get the hang of it.  You can move all your scores up by learning new techniques and practicing more.

But in my experience, good players are good players along all dimensions. If they show skill in one task, they can pull their performance in all the other tasks to the same level.

Pandaria Stat Changes

Ghostcrawler has posted a Dev Watercooler about upcoming Stat Changes in Mists of Pandaria.  Here are some reactions.

Spell Resistance

No more spell resistance. Pretty much the culmination of many years of moving in this directions. In the beginning everyone had to collect Fire Resistance sets for Ragnaros. Then only the tank had to collect resistance sets. Then maybe only one or two pieces for one or fights. And now none.

I'll kind of miss it, even though it was a lot of running around for a single fight. And then, finally completing your tank's set and watching him leave for another guild was terribly annoying.

Paladins also lose our Resistance Auras. However, Aura Mastery has been changed to reduce elemental damage directly, so we won't see any great change.

Hit and Expertise

I really like the linear nature of increasing hit requirements. Previously, there was a large step between +2 levels and +3 levels, especially for casters. This invariably caused issues with people learning to raid.

I like the consolidation of spell hit and hit into one stat. It's a lot simpler and straightforward. Same with the normalization of Expertise.

Being able to dodge arrows is also a welcome change, and having Hunters being able to use expertise will make gearing them and shaman a bit easier.

Casters using Expertise to reduce spell miss is a little bit weird. But it does give them another stat to play with. It's interesting that there's a slight difference in Hit and Expertise between casters and physical. Casters need a combination of Hit and Expertise that adds up to 15%. Physical needs 7.5% Hit and 7.5% Expertise.

Block

The double roll is actually how The Old Republic handles block. This probably makes block a lot harder to cap out, especially with diminishing returns. It may also devalue block, depending on how it's calculated. If 20% block means that 20% of hits are blocked, compared to 20% of attacks being blocked, that means that as you add more dodge and parry, the number of blocks goes down.

Update: Theck has a really good critique of the new block, with actual math demonstrating the point above.

It's also interesting to note that abilities like Shield of the Righteous now guarantee that the next hit will be blocked.

Resilience

Resilience is now becoming two stats: a PvP Offense stat and a PvP Defense stat. It's interesting that they are explicitly calling out the stats as a PvP stat. I do hope it cuts down on the number of tanks in PvP gear.

This is somewhat similar to the The Old Republic model, only they use a single stat for both sides. Having two stats might make tuning a little easier. Like if Blizzard wants PvP to speed up, they can reduce the value of defense, or increase the value of offense. Plus it gives two stats to play with for gemming.

The two stats will also be free in terms of cost. But the PvP item will be a slightly lower ilevel than the PvE item. But the PvE item will lack the two PvP stats. So gear will look like this:

PvE Item
100 Str
100 Sta
100 Haste
100 Critical

PvP Item
90 Str
90 Sta
90 Haste
90 Critical
90 PvP Offense
90 PvP Defense

So the PvP item is strictly worse in PvE, but is pretty close, and not as bad as PvP stats are today. And the PvE stats lack the Offense and Defense stats to really function well in PvP.

Conclusions

I think the PvE changes are pretty good, smoothing out the game and making it more intuitive, while giving classes more stats to play with. As for the PvP changes, they look good, but we'll see how they turn out.

The problem with PvE/PvP gear is that Blizzard wants the low end to be able to use either armor in either setting, but wants the high end to strictly use the relevant type. That's a pretty hard goal to hit.

Carrying Players

I saw a blog post the other day--sadly, I've forgotten where--in which the blogger lamented that a raid could no longer "carry" one or two sub-par players anymore. Not like in Vanilla, where much of the initial content was so under-tuned that you could easily spare 5 to 10 slots in a 40-man raid.

I wonder if you could actually do this. If you could set up a system to make carrying players more viable, without lowering the difficulty of content for the better players.

Suppose you could measure a person's "PvE ability".  Then, for people with a low score, you could give them a buff that increases their damage and healing output, decreases their damage taken, and maybe even makes them immune to certain mechanics if the score is low enough. The buff would scale inversely with PvE ability. Very low scores would have a more powerful buff, while better scores might have a small buff or no buff at all. Then the buffed person would have their performance dragged upwards in a raid, towards the mean. They would be less of a dead spot.

Essentially, it would be the same idea as handicapping in horse races, only with boosting the weaker individuals, rather than penalizing the stronger individuals.

Of course, the hard part would be coming up with a way of measuring one's PvE ability, without lending it to exploitation, and accounting for increases in skill and gear. It would be fairly easy to do in PvP, as you could just go off a character's personal match-maker rating or similar. In PvE, you'd probably have to conduct analysis of previous fights somehow to assign a rating.

Such a system might even help with gearing. An under-geared character would end up with the buff, until her gear caught up to the rest of the raid.

I'm not really sure if such a system would actually work. But I think it's an interesting idea.

[SWTOR] Imperial Agent Trailer

I came across this nice player-made trailer for the Imperial Agent from beta. I think it does a good job of conveying the feel of the Agent storyline.



Bonus points for it being a Chiss Agent. The female Imperial Agent voice actor (not in video) is also very good.

Updates

So I'm mostly playing The Old Republic these days. I haven't logged into WoW for a few weeks now. I guess I'm probably just going to let WoW ride until the Mists of Pandaria beta, and then see what's what.

In The Old Republic, I'm mostly leveling a couple of alts: a Sith Inquisitor and a Republic Trooper. Ironically, I found out that my 50 Sniper is on one of the few Republic-dominated servers, which really hasn't helped any foray into endgame.

It's very interesting, playing in a transient fashion after playing in an extended structure for so long. There is a curious amount of freedom. You can come and go as you please, do other things if you want to. Yet, I think there's a hollowness to it. It's like being in a single player game with some occasional chat. I do miss working in a group towards a common goal.

And yet, I'm not sure if I miss it enough. Enough to make it worthwhile to find a new guild and adjust to a new schedule.

In other games, I'm looking forward to Mass Effect 3 and Diablo 3.  In MMOs, I guess we'll see what releases. Guild Wars 2 looks to be doing some interesting things, as does The Secret World.

A DPS Meter Fallacy

In a comment, Kring posted something that I would like to address:

Besides that it, again, encourages all the tricks to "cheat" Recount like
- not target switching
- dotting unimportant targets
- using AoE spells where not useful
- not moving our of fire
- not using non-dps abilities like decurse or spellsteal

In my view, the idea that one can "cheat" or "pad" the meters is something of a fallacy. It's technically, or hypothetically, possible. But in practice, it's extraordinarily unlikely.

If you are good enough to push yourself near the top of the meter by padding, you are good enough to top the meters through normal play.  

Topping the meters requires knowing and executing your rotation, using cooldowns appropriately, not dying, and casting as many spells as possible. Padding the meters is essentially executing the same steps, only substituting the "padding rotation" in place of your regular rotation. If you can't execute your normal rotation correctly, you won't execute your padding rotation correctly. If you aren't casting enough normal spells, you won't cast enough padding spells. If you aren't popping enough cooldowns in normal play, you won't pop enough cooldowns in padded play.

To reiterate, playing to pad the meters on a boss fight is the same process as playing normally. A player who is having trouble playing normally is going to have the same trouble when playing to pad.

The harsh truth is that DPS meters work!

The people who are consistently at the top of the DPS meters are your best DPS players. They will be the ones who are better at interrupting, at using utility spells, at moving successfully. The players at the bottom of the meters are the ones who need the most improvement, who will also be less likely to interrupt correctly, to use utility spells correctly, to move out of the fire.

There is a point where this is not true, where class and spec determines your position on the meters. That point is known as Paragon and the other Top 10 guilds.  For everyone else, position on the meters is determined by the quality of your play.

A Console MMO

I wonder when we will get the first truly successful console MMO. Personally, I think that the first game to get the "console" part correct will be the game that beats WoW's subscription numbers.

But I wonder what that game will look like, what will make it work? Will it be entirely voice-comm based? After all, Mass Effect is a console game, and The Old Republic is very similar.

I think the key element that needs to be worked out is multiple players in the same household. For computer MMOs, every player has their own computer. But that usually isn't the case with console games. Would the MMO have some sort of co-op mode, where if two players are in the same area, they appear on the same screen? And then seamlessly split screen if they split up?

I have no idea how it would work. But I'm sure there are game companies working on it, and it will be interesting to see what they come up with.

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.