Warlords of Draenor: Itemization Changes

Blizzcon has come and gone. Lots of information about the next expansion, Warlords of Draenor, was released. Let's take a look at some of the changes.  WoD will see a fairly large overhaul of gear. Here's a summary of what's coming.

1. Armor with different primary stats is going away.

There will be no more "Strength" plate or "Intellect" plate armor. Instead, plate armor will have both Strength and Intellect. If you're a Holy paladin, you use the Intellect. If you're a Ret paladin or a warrior, you use the Strength. The same thing will happen with mail and leather (Agility/Intellect gear).  Set gear will use the bonuses for the current spec.

This is a brilliant solution to the Intellect plate problem. It makes armor usable by far more specs. It allows Blizzard to make lots of armor with different combinations of secondary stats. It makes life a bit easier for gearing up secondary specs.

All in all, a superb solution. A veritable Alexander's sword cutting though the Gordian Knot.

2. Hit, Expertise, Dodge, and Parry stats are going away.

Juggling the Hit and Expertise caps has long been an annoying problem. So these stats are being removed. I imagine that special attacks will always hit, while white attacks may have a small miss chance still.

The tanking stats are also being removed. It looks like tanks are going to focus on active mitigation. One thing to note is that it looks like there won't be "tank" armor or "dps" armor. Each spec might be prefer different secondary stats, but it won't be as obvious as it is now.

3. Reforging is being removed.

I called for the removal of reforging (and hit/expertise) back in 2011. I've never liked it. It's been an ugly hack, and I'm glad it's gone.

The only concern is that the differential between the Best-in-Slot piece and the second-best piece will be slightly larger. But everyone chases BiS anyways, and the game got along fine with this gap back in Vanilla/TBC.

4. Tertiary Stats

This seems very vague at the moment, but Blizzard is looking at putting new small unusual stats on items. Maybe things like movement speed increases. Possibly gem sockets will become rarer and less important.

I dunno, I wonder if one of these small stats will be overpowered and then everyone wants it. Somewhat like some procs on current gear. But I guess we'll have to see more concrete items to judge.

5. Item squish

It looks like all the numbers will be reduced in size, by at least an order of magnitude. It seems mostly cosmetic, with assurances that old content will still be soloable.

Concerns - Spirit?

All this looks pretty good. The only concern I have is with Spirit. I don't see how Spirit can go on armor. Since DPS and Tanks get nothing from Spirit, Spirit gear would be automatically tagged as healer gear, and then non-spirit gear is not for healers. This seems to cut against the whole reasoning behind combining armor types. Not much point in getting rid of Intellect plate if Spirit plate takes its place.

But if armor doesn't have Spirit, that means the total Spirit a healer can have is a significantly lower proportion than she has now. So I'm a bit curious as to how Blizzard will handle regen. Maybe they'll just tune mana regen for the lower amount of spirit.

Or possibly this is a signal that the devs are looking to reign in mana regen, and conservation and triage will once again be part of the healer vocabulary. I personally am in favor of this style of play, but it was a large part of the Cataclysm intro dungeon/raid debacle. I am not sure if the community will approve of making mana more important for healers again.

Warlords of Draenor Expansion Speculation

The major rumor running around pre-Blizzcon is that the next WoW expansion will be titled "Warlords of Draenor". The rumor is that we will go back to Draenor (last seen in The Burning Crusade) and end up time-traveling through the past to see Grom Hellscream.

Going back to Draenor seems like a legitimate topic for an expansion. Focus outward on the Burning Legion, bring back Alleria and Turalyon.

The time travel part of things seems a little more sketchy. I'd be more inclined to believe that there are a couple Caverns of Time dungeons focusing on Grom Hellscream or Ner'zhul and the rise of the Horde.

The biggest problem with a time travel expac is how would you explain all these different races showing up? A Pandaren in Outlands? The Caverns of Time handles it by putting us in disguise as the opposite faction as appropriate. But while that's fine (and even fun) for a single instance, having your character be a different model for an entire expac does not sound appealing.

Still, we'll see what happens at Blizzcon. Personally, I'm still holding out for Corgis Unleashed!

Namespaces

Star Wars is going to be reclaiming numerous character names on Nov 1. Essentially names of character who are under level 30, have not logged in for 3 months or so, and do not belong to current subscribers will be freed up. I think this is great news. Last time I tried to make a character, it was quite hard to come up with a name that had not been taken.

It's interesting to see what approaches new MMOs are taking to naming. Names have to be unique, so that you can uniquely identify the people you mail or interact with. But at the same time, the "good" names get taken early and players have to resort to more and more unusual names.

Cryptic tags character names with @account. So you can use any name for your character, but your account name has to be unique. The downsides here are that there is an explicit link between your characters and your account, which a lot of people don't like. And it does look kind of funny.

Some games like GW2 allow names to include spaces or punctuation (a common one is a period). This allows you to make names which are more complicated, but still easy to remember.

FFXIV makes you chose a first name and a last name. This allows you to vary a common first name with different last names, while still having everyone use your first name in conversation. As well, it seems to make people name their characters better.

Of the current methods, I like having a first and last name the best. It's simple and easy, and feels natural. I think that new MMOs should strongly consider using this model for their naming schemes.

FFXIV: A Realm Reborn - Review

I've been playing Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn for the last two months or so. I finally finished the main campaign and got a maximum level character. So it's about time for a review.

FFXIV is a themepark fantasy MMO in the WoW/EQ model. However, it has a very old-school feel to it. In a lot of ways it feels closer to Vanilla WoW than to modern WoW. The global cooldown is 2.5s, leading to a slower, more deliberate style of play. Rotations are simpler, usually being actual rotations where you go A-B-C, repeat, while throwing in some cooldowns.  A lot of people don't like the long GCD, but I rather do. I'm not a fan of the way haste has sped up WoW.

However, there is more emphasis on movement. Many mobs will do area attacks indicated by a red shape on the ground, which you have to move out of. I find that this works will with the slower pace of the game.

The setting and storyline are very Japanese/anime style. Personally I find it interesting because it is askew from Western sensibilities. For example, nations are divided by philosophy, not race. Each nation, even the bad guys, is composed of the same races as the others.  The story line is pretty decent as well, full of the anime tradition of bad guys philosophizing. (The bad guys are pretty awesome. There's one guy who dual-wields shields. With guns on them.)

The only problem with the storyline, in my mind, is that the final climax comes during an endgame dungeon. People farming the dungeon become very impatient as you watch the cutscenes. SWTOR had your main storyline be entirely single-player (though others could tag along) and it worked much better. You could watch the finale in peace without inconveniencing anyone.

The major mechanical attraction is the class system. A single character can level up in multiple classes. Each class has a specific weapon type. Switching to that weapon switches your class. This is a particularly elegant mechanic, especially with the built-in armor system. To qualify for advanced classes, called "jobs", you have to level up multiple classes. For example, my character's main job is Paladin. I had to level Gladiator to 30 and Conjurer (healing priest type) to 15. Paladin is essentially an advanced Gladiator, so leveling as a Paladin also increases my Gladiator level.

Each class can use some abilities from other classes. Some abilities can be used by any class, while others can only be used by closely related classes. For example, my Paladin pulls some abilities from Conjurer and Marauder.

Now, each class must be leveled up separately. You can grind mobs, kill specific mobs listed in a hunting log, do "levequests" (repeatable quests), dungeons, scenario-like "duties", or "FATES". FATES are essentially public quests like rifts in RIFT. They appear on the map, have an object, and then disappear when done. Regular quests can only be done once per character. Somewhat unfortunately, FATES are the best way of getting experience, and that's how most people end up leveling secondary classes.

The class system extends to crafting classes. Each crafting and gathering class is a fully realized class with 50 levels. You get xp by crafting or gathering. Crafting is kind of like combat. You use different abilities attempting to get as high a quality as you can without running out of durability. I actually like this system a lot. It's very interesting if you like crafting.

FFXIV is also rather group-centric. The main storyline requires that you do several dungeons. Dungeons are old-school. Threat matters a lot, as does marking and killing in order. Thankfully it seems like the people who do play can follow the rules. By and large, my grouping experiences have been excellent. Of course, I am playing a tank, so I do get to exert a fair bit of control over the run.

Endgame is also very old-school. Here is the current endgame in FFXIV:

The first raid is the very bottom of the chart. There's lots of grinding and work to even become raid-ready. It reminds me a lot of running dungeons in Vanilla, trying to get my class set.  As well, several fights in the list are supposed to be very difficult. People are already selling carries for HM Titan, among others. But there is a real sense of progression as you work your way through. The path is there, and I am on the path.

So would I recommend FFXIV?  I think it's worth taking a look at, if just to see the way the class system is handled, and to take a look at the crafting classes. If you're craving a more Vanilla-style WoW experience, but in a modern game, with several modern innovations, I would strongly recommend checking out FFXIV.

Will I continue to play FFXIV? I'm not sure. Truthfully, I'm not really a fan of grinding for experience or currency. I've seen the story, which was my main motivation. I suspect that I will play for a bit longer, maybe take a look at a couple of the harder fights, but will ultimately drop it.

A Counter-Intuitive Idea For Tanks in LFR

One of the major problems with LFR is the lack of tanks. Queue times for non-tanks can be very long. Losing a tank can cause your group to wait for a long time to get another tank, which often leads to a cascade of other people leaving.

First, let's acknowledge all the things which have been done in an effort to attract more tanks to the game. Threat has been nullified as a meaningful mechanic. Multiple new tank specs have been introduced. Extra rewards have been given out to tanks. The number of required tanks per raid has been reduced. And yet, all of these have not really solved the problem. At best we can say that maybe the problem would have been a lot worse without these actions.

So here's my idea for improving tanking in LFR:

Increase the number of tanks in LFR from 2 to 4.

This seems counter-intuitive. How can increasing the number of required tanks improve our experience?

Here's my theory. Whenever you ask about why people don't tank, they talk about the pressure, about the visibility of the role. There is a lot of truth to this. When you look at LFR, tanks are the only role where there is no "slack", no room for error. Raids are designed around 2 tanks, and usually both tanks have to perform at a high level to be successful.

If you look at healers in LFR, you can usually get by if four of the six are decent. For DPS, 10-12 decent dps are usually enough. Both these roles have slack, room for players who are less skilled. In contrast, the tanking role has no room for slack. On most LFR fights, both tanks have duties that they need perform successfully.

If we moved to four tanks, but left fights designed around two, there would be slack in the tanking role. Maybe instead of having a tank swap and having the current off-tank pick up adds, you could have two tanks dedicated to the tank swap, and two tanks on adds full-time. If one tank dies, the others can compensate. Instead of two tanks having to be perfect on a tank swap, you could have three tanks swapping. This would mean that it's okay if a tank misses a taunt.

For an inexperienced tank, it's far better to be the fourth on the roster, and maybe have one dedicated duty, rather than have to pull the full weight of a co-equal tank.

This plan wouldn't work in normal raiding, because the group controls the number of tanks, and always reduces the tanks to the minimum in order to add more DPS. But in LFR, the game controls the number of tanks. The game can throw in four tanks each time. As well, this ratio is closer to the ratio required for 5-man dungeons.

An LFR with 4 tanks, 6 healers, and 14 dps would have a larger margin for error in each role. One weaker tank will not doom the raid, any more than a weaker healer or a weaker DPS will. This will make it easier for people to start tanking and may lead to more tanks overall. Spreading out the load among more tanks should reduce the pressure on each individual tank.

Galactic Starfighter and Payment Models

The Old Republic unveiled its latest expansion: Galactic Starfighter. I'm looking forward to this. I absolutely loved X-Wing and TIE Fighter back in the day. TIE Fighter in particular is in my Top 10 Best Games Ever, maybe even Top 5. If Bioware can capture a fraction of the magic of those games, I think they'll be very successful.

The most interesting thing about this expansion is how Bioware is releasing it.  It's completely free for everyone. However, subscribers get access significantly earlier, about 6 weeks, than Preferred Players. Subs are also the only people who get access over the Christmas break. Then it's another month or so until F2P players get it. That's a lot longer than most early access programs.

It's also a good strategy to reduce server load. Only a portion of the playerbase will be able to try out the new content when it is first released. Then, perhaps when interest among the subscriber set is waning, there will be a rush of new blood.

It's interesting to see The Old Republic pivot back to emphasizing subscriptions. The Hutt Cartel expac is now free to subscribers. Now this new perk of time and exclusivity.

It's interesting that Bioware doesn't seem to be worried about people picking up a sub for 2 months and then dropping back to Preferred. Or maybe they feel that $30 is roughly the price of an expansion, and is $30 they might not have gotten otherwise. Plus they might get away with reporting that subscriptions jumped by a significant number for the last quarter, and then neglect to say anything when they fall back down.

In any case, as a subscriber I'm pretty happy with this method of release. It's a solid perk that makes subscribing worthwhile, but Preferred and F2P players will still get the content eventually. A perk that does not need to be maintained forever.

An Alternate Explanation for Gender Bias in Healing and Tanking

Milady at Hypercritism has an interesting post on The Politics of Tanking and Healing. Milady notes that women are more likely to be healers than tanks and feels that this is due to traditional gender roles:

In our social setting, many women see the role of healer as natural, appropriate, expected. And men are equally conditioned as wanting to fill the role of the protector as well as the leading actor.

This is quite possibly true. In fact, among Asian WoW players, the gender differences are even starker, perhaps reflecting a society where the traditional gender roles are stronger.

However, I'd like to propose an alternate explanation. Note that Milady does not consider the DPS classes. But there is a gender divide in the DPS classes. Female players are more likely to play ranged dps classes such as warlocks, mages, shadow priests, etc. than melee classes like rogues and warriors.

If you add the ranged/melee split to the tank/healer split, I think there's a stronger factor present than gender roles: range.  Healers and ranged dps operate at a distance from the enemy, while tanks and melee dps have to get up close.

So why choose stay at range? One possible explanation is risk-aversion. As a group, women are normally more risk-averse than men. So it makes sense that female players would gravitate to the classes that can stay away from the enemy the longest. Even healers fit into this scenario better. If you want to avoid dying, what's better than a class which can restore health?

Sadly, we don't really have access to good data that identifies the gender of the player. There are some interesting questions that we could look at. For example, among female DPS shaman, what proportion plays Enhancement (melee) as opposed to Elemental (range)? The same question could be asked for Druids: Feral or Boomkin?

What about Monk healers? Do female Mistweavers "fistweave" or do they heal in the traditional style?  Are women who tank more likely to tank on their second character, once they have a better handle on the game and the risks involved?

If we just looked at the healers, is the proportion of female paladins higher or lower than the norm for the other classes? Perhaps risk-aversion thesis should predict lower paladins, because paladins are traditionally melee. Though I suppose this is countered by the whole hard-to-kill vibe with the bubble and plate armor. I'm not entirely sure if a risk-averse person would be attracted to paladins or not. Plus, we'd have to account for the general awesomeness of paladins.

In any case, either theory might be true. Women and men might be responding the social pressures corresponding to traditional gender roles. Or women may be attracted to classes which appear to be less risky and more likely to survive. Or maybe both theories are in play, with different individuals having different motivations.

However, I prefer the risk-aversion theory over traditional gender roles because it also explains the bias in DPS class choice, and not just the tank/healer split.

Oricon

The Old Republic launched patch 2.4 last week, unveiling the new planet/moon base of the Dread Masters, Oricon.

There's a daily area and two new operations. I really liked the small questline that introduces you to Oricon. It's well written and I like how it tied back into or referenced the class storylines. Oricon makes me want to level my alts to 55 just so I can see the references for each class.

For new character or alts, completing the storyline will give you a full set of entry-level purple gear, positioning you nicely to work on endgame.

The new operations are quite good as well. I've only done them in story mode, and haven't yet killed the very last boss, but they're lots of fun. There's one fight where you send one team into the past and the other into the future. The future team has to relay information from the future back to the past team so that the past team can fix the future. It's quite inventive and very well done, if a bit confusing to explain.

Ever since Thorim, I've loved fights where the raid splits into small subteams to accomplish different goals. I think it's a mechanic that could be used more often. It always seems to result in elegant, inventive fights.

All in all, I think this patch was an excellent one by Bioware.

Updates

Interview

Matticus interviewed me for his site! Go have a look.

Nalak

Thanks for the advice about Nalak. I managed to find a group of people who were pulling Nalak for giggles. I tagged Nalak with the lance and lasted long enough to finish the quest. Now on to the collecting Runestones portion of the quest.

Twitter

I've signed up for Twitter. You can follow me if you really wish at @rverghes.

I haven't actually tweeted anything yet. To be honest, I rather doubt I will. But we'll see how it goes.

Compartmentalizing

Twitter and the New Blogger Initiative have me contemplating how we compartmentalize our lives. A lot of MMO bloggers have given the advice that you should use a pseudonym when blogging, and I would expect that to extend to things like Twitter.

I am undecided about whether this is a good thing or not. If you were writing about a subject like running, would you bother with a pseudonym. I don't think you would, I think you'd just be okay with people finding out that you are a runner. I'm not really sure it is good to hide the fact that you are a gamer.

Of course, on Twitter it is a little weird to see tweets from multiple areas mixed together. Politics mixes with WoW mixes with regular news. And even if you can separate these into separate streams, what do you do with the other people who don't choose to compartmentalize?

Nalak?

I'm at the point in the Legendary questline where I need to throw a lance at Nalak. (Yes, I've been slacking this expansion.)

However, no one seems to be killing Nalak anymore. There were some suggestions on Wowhead for soloing this stage of the questline. When I tried though, everything kept despawning on me.

I'm at a bit of a loss now. Any suggestions on what to do at this point?

Trust, Reputation, and Impersonation

It's interesting that CCP chose this issue of impersonation as its "hill to die on". When you look at all the terrible things that Eve players have done, why is this issue the one that CCP moves to squelch?

I think it is because this issue has the greatest potential to break down trust in the game. Now, most people in Eve say "Trust no one." In reality, however, many of them do trust others. Trust is only way a group of people, a society, can build something larger. And Eve is very much about building things. It is very important for Eve to foster trust.

In a world where many of the "civilized" social norms do not apply, trust has to be earned. Trust can only be earned by building up a reputation over time. However, to take advantage of a reputation, an individual must be identifiable as the one who built that reputation. If someone else can easily pretend to be that individual, then you cannot rely on reputation and therefore cannot trust anyone.

If two players cannot trust each other, they have to interact through a third-party that they both trust. But if no player can be trusted, then players are forced to rely on the one third party which they can trust: the game itself.

We see this a lot in MMOs. Most trading is done through automated markets or auction houses. Thus neither player on both sides of the transaction need to trust each other. In WoW, when LFR came out, it soon became apparent that players could not trust each other to distribute loot fairly. Thus Blizzard had to step in, and implement a game system that could be trusted.

The less players trust each other, the more the game company has to intervene. The game company has to mediate the interaction and dictate how the interaction works.

And this is unfortunate, especially for sandbox play. If all interactions occur through game systems, the emergent behavior we prize never has a chance to develop. The games become less interesting and more static.

It would be interesting to see a game with even fewer system that act as a buffer between players. Consider a system where mail had to be delivered by other players. Or a game without automated markets. It would certainly be inconvenient. But this game is also more likely to give rise to unexpected styles of play.

Another interesting experiment would be a game system which cannot be trusted. For example, an unreliable Auction House or NPC merchants who sometimes steal the money from a sale. What systems would players evolve to cope? Maybe they would make many small orders and just take the expected loss. (More likely they would just quit and go to another game, though.)

MMOs need to foster a certain level of trust between their players. The less trust in the system, the more the game company itself has to intervene to reduce the necessity of that trust, and the less likely that interesting or inventive emergent behavior will evolve.

An Asymmetry of Justice

Eve Online recently changed its Terms of Service and made pretending to be another player a bannable offence. Naturally, this being Eve, there is an uproar over the issue.

This issue is very interesting. Once you start examining the situation in detail, it leads to a lot of different places and different ideas.

One thing this illustrates is that there is a real "asymmetry of justice" in online games. The bad player can scam you, but you cannot punish her. In the real world, a scammer can be caught and lose their liberty or life. But in most online games, players cannot effectively punish other players. They cannot jail them, they cannot permanently kill them.

Even ostracism is very hard to pull off. As a simple example, you cannot prevent a player in Eve from trading with you, because the markets are implemented with an in-game system.

Of course, players punishing other players might lead to more griefing, which is why everyone stays away from it. But this leaves the game company as the only entity capable of punishment, capable of enforcing laws.

In a sandbox game, the game company should enforce the "laws of nature" of the world. How the world works, the nuts and bolts of physics. Ideally they would not enforce the "laws of man", leaving that up to the players. But other than A Tale In The Desert, no game has made that distinction. And even ATITD still had the game company be the enforcer of the laws.

The other problem, of course, is that of alts. In a way, alts are not really different characters. They are masks or disguises that a single character wears. And these masks are virtually impenetrable to other players. Once again, only the game company is capable of penetrating the disguise to the character underneath. And the mask can be discarded and thrown away if necessary.

Again, that makes it very hard for players to enforce laws or punish those who break them.

Eve takes pride in it's "Wild West, anything goes" atmosphere. But another way of looking at it is that Eve deliberately coddles the outlaws, denying the sheriffs the necessary tools to impose law and order.

Money Is Not Time

There is an argument among Free-2-Play advocates that "money is equal to time". The argument goes that some players are time-rich and cash-poor, while other players are time-poor and cash-rich. MMO design usually favors the time-rich players. These F2P advocates argue that F2P levels the playing field, allowing cash-rich but time-poor players to use money to make up for their lack of time.

I think that Diablo 3 has shown that this is not correct. Money is not a substitute for Time.

This is because games are emotional experiences. Only, the emotions evoked are not the standard ones, but flow and fiero. The emotions of engaging in an activity, seeking to defeat it, and the payoff from defeating a hard challenge, or finishing a long task.

But these two emotions require time. You have to spend time to get into the flow. And fiero is very often related to how long you spent working on the activity.

When you substitute money for time, there is no flow, and no fiero. There is no emotional attachment to the event, or to the payoff. And that makes the game itself less compelling.

Warhammer Online Closes

Warhammer Online is shutting down in December.  I played it for a bit when it first came out, and actually wrote a fair bit about it on this site.

WAR had several good ideas, most notably Public Quests. Having both an offensive and defensive target is one of my favorite UI innovations. I think that WAR has been quite influential on the design of the MMOs that came after it.

But ultimately WAR was a failure. I think it was a failure because, while it reached for new heights, it didn't get the basics correct. Chat was a nightmare, and the latency and performance were pretty bad. And who can forget the contribution bug. Not to mention that just logging into the game meant wading through a morass of splash screens and opening movies.

The real lesson of Warhammer Online is that cool design will generate hype. But polish and performance, the basic grunt work, are vital to success.

Blizzard Shutters Diablo 3 Auction House

The big news today is that Blizzard announced that they will be removing both the Real Money Auction House and the gold Auction House on March 18, 2014. (Gee, I wonder when the expansion will be released.)

As you know, I am not a fan of the AH in D3. I still didn't think Blizzard would remove it entirely, though. Props to them for being willing to reverse course as needed. I think the major turning point was probably the release of the console version of D3, which did not have the AH. The console version has been very well received.

That being said, there are some people attacking Blizzard for putting the AH in the game in the first place. I think this is misguided. It wasn't an obvious mistake at first. The AH was put in to solve the problem of third-party scams, and by all accounts it did a very good job at that.

What I think will be most interesting is to see what measures Blizzard puts in place to stop the inevitable third party sales, scammers, and spammers.  Will there be some sort of secure trading? Will trading be disabled entirely?

By and large, I believe the console version doesn't have issues with trading because you trade primarily with local players in your living room. As well, the different networks are segregated and more controlled. But I think that free trading on the PC will lead to the same problems as D2.

But perhaps that's the better outcome. The positives gained by removing the Auction House might outweigh the negatives of spammers and scams.

Proving Grounds

Until 5.4, I never realized just how much I resented the way Mists of Pandaria was turning out. I play a healer, and it just seemed like so much of Mists was healer-unfriendly. There was all this neat new content and game modes, and I had to switch to Ret to do most of it.  Brawlers' Guild, dailies, scenarios, Battlefield Barrens.

On top of that, it was so hard to gear up my offset, which made doing all this new content even more painful. The loot system in LFR makes you focus on your main spec, so you can't pick up scraps like in a regular raid. All the reputation gear used to cost gold in previous expansions, so I could have bought both main and offset. But now it cost Valor, a much scarcer currency, so all my Valor had to be dedicated to my main set.

Let's put it this way: I entered 5.4 with two i437 green trinkets in my Ret set. And that mishmash was still better than Holy for soloing.

But 5.4 has introduced Proving Grounds, and they are amazingly fun for healers!

My first attempt went pretty badly. Went through Bronze, but wiped out on Silver 5. Then I realized I was healing like an idiot, and decided to play properly. This time I beat Silver, and then wiped out on Gold 5. I spent the next couple of attempts refining strategy, and got up to Gold 9. That's where I stopped for the night.

I really enjoy it. It's not exactly like raid healing, but it is very PvE healing with a little more responsibility for the healer. You want to add a little more damage, stun a little bit, maybe even try to interrupt. As a paladin, you need to use your cooldowns, including Sacrifice.

The thing is that even if Proving Grounds don't teach you to raid heal, they teach you to heal, and to adapt your techniques to different damage patterns (damn rabbit bleed!). If you can do that, learning to raid heal is not all that difficult.

The NPCs are pretty funny, and play just badly enough to make it interesting. They miss some interrupts, don't stack, and stand in the fire. The comments on the healer threads are amusing. Some of the priests were complaining that if they Lifegrip the hunter out of the fire, sometimes he'll manage to Disengage back into it.

I've noticed some interesting conversations on whether guilds should require Proving Grounds for their raiders. I think that requiring Gold is excessive for a normal/Flex guild, but any decent player should be able to handle Silver. Requiring a Proving Grounds achievement is still better than requiring gear or raid achievements. I would break down the levels like so:

Bronze - for people completely new to healing. After this you should be able to do normal dungeons and LFR.
Silver - If you can do Silver, you're ready for Flex or normal
Gold - If you can do Gold, you're ready to try Heroic content
Endless 30 - Probably good enough to hang with the Royalty crowd

I think Proving Grounds is an excellent feature. I hope it encourages more people to try out the group-centric roles of tank and healer. Before Proving Grounds, you had to learn how tank or heal by getting tossed into real situations with other players. While there's something to be said for learning through trial by fire, a lot of people did their best to avoid that harrowing experience.

Giving Up Your Unique Points

In the last patch for The Old Republic, Bioware added two new flashpoints (4-man instances). The Czerka instances and boss fights are reasonably decent. The role-less story mode is excellent. However, the flashpoints are missing something.

All the other flashpoints in TOR have a light/dark choice. Most of them have conversations. The entire group goes through the conversation, everyone picks a choice, and the game randomly chooses a choice to play out the storyline.

The new Czerka instances are missing that element. They play like a pretty normal dungeon from WoW or similar games.

I think Bioware has listened to all the speed runners who urge people to "spacebar" through the conversations. Now there is no conversation to spacebar through. Admittedly, I only listen to the conversations the first few times I run an instance. Afterwards, I spacebar through them.

But those conversations are what made TOR flashpoints unique. I enjoyed them. Some of the conversation and choice-heavy instances are the best part of TOR.

Basically, if I wanted to run a straightforward, linear instance without conversations and LS/DS choices, I'd play WoW. I think giving up your unique points for the sake of end game efficiency is a mistake.

The Czerka flashpoints are good MMO instanced content. But they are not good TOR flashpoints.

5.4 Holy Paladin Changes

Patch 5.4 comes out tomorrow, and there are a fair number of changes for Holy Paladins. Here is a quick rundown of the major changes as I see them.

• Tier 3 talents are rebalanced - Mastery no longer affects the Eternal Flame HoT. The HoT does tick for more healing. Sacred Shield can be maintained on 3 targets. Selfless Healer will give you a Holy Power charge when you Judge (but Judgement increased in cost) and you can get free, instant Divine Light and Holy Radiances. I like the new Sacred Shield. Selfless Healer looks powerful, but you have to change your playstyle.


• Mana changes - Seal of Insight no longer gives back mana. Divine Plea now has no drawback. You should use Divine Plea on cooldown as soon as you have spent some mana. There is no reason to melee anymore.


• Holy Shock improvements - Holy Shock became cheaper and the cooldown is now affected by Haste. Combined with the change to Eternal Flame, Haste might become the new stat of choice.


• Guardian of Ancient Kings - cooldown is lowered, but only heals the target, not multiple people.


• Glyph of Blessing of Sacrifice - removes the drawback on Sacrifice. This is now a must-have.


• AoE Heals - had their mechanics changed to improve performance during raids. They should still heal for the same amount, but they now heal in a slightly different style.

There's probably a couple other minor changes. I'm probably going to switch to Sacred Shield. I may also try a Haste build and see how that plays. I did like the faster Holy Shocks with T14, and the new changes may bring that style of play back.

There is also lots of new content. I am very interested in seeing how Proving Grounds and Flex Raids turn out.

The Next Warchief

In 5.4, Garrosh Hellscream will be deposed, and a new warchief chosen to lead the Horde. Who do you think the next warchief will be?

I think that Blizzard will not pick someone obscure. They will pick someone with a lot of name recognition, who makes sense to the average, casual Horde player. With that in mind, here are my rankings:

Front-runner - Vol'jin

Vol'jin has gotten a lot of screen time, including a full novel. He's also the driving force behind the rebellion, and has been a racial leader for all of WoW. That makes him the obvious choice.

Contender - Lor'themar

Lor'themar has also gotten a lot of screen time in MoP, and has been developed into an admirable, competent leader. However, the big negative is that he is a blood elf. The Horde's motif in Warcraft is to be the "monstrous" faction, the outsiders. Having a pretty-boy blood elf be the Warchief cuts against that, and cuts against the Horde's identity in a major way.

Contender - Thrall

Thrall was the previous Warchief, and he has very high name recognition. But he's also the one who left the Horde, and it might seem weird to just waltz back into leadership. However, the orcs will still need a racial leader. Thrall is pretty much the most important orc left, and is likely to be the orc racial leader. Having Thrall be leader of the orcs--but not Warchief--may seem odd.

Dark Horse - Sylvannas

It's Sylvannas. Massive name recognition and popularity, and cunning enough that her ascension could seem plausible. However, she's been on the sidelines for most of Mists, so it would be odd for her to come out of nowhere and grab the throne. Plus, what would she really do as Warchief? She has her kingdom and her armies over in the Eastern Kingdoms. Taking on leadership of the entire Horde seems like it would gain her a lot of trouble and not many advantages.

I would expect her to use this opportunity to throw out the Kor'koron Overseers in the Undercity. That seems like a very Sylvannas-like move to me.

Conclusion

That's how I see the race for Warchief. I think Blizzard is going to pick Vol'jin. He's the one they've been setting up, the one who's story arc leads to the mantle of Warchief. To be honest, picking anyone else really seems like deliberately making a twist ending, just for the sake of having a twist. That rarely works out well.

FFXIV: Launch Woes

Final Fantasy XIV has been out for a week or so. There have been two experiences with the game. The first, the actual game itself, is very good and a lot of fun. The second, trying to actually log into the game, is very unfortunate.

The problem is FFXIV was not prepared for the amount of interest. The producer has said that, since it was a relaunch of a failed game, they predicted that it would start slow, and slowly grow through word of mouth. This may have been a reasonable assumption.

I think that they got a lot of last minute sales. I don't think the vast majority of the audience realized it was a relaunch. The 1.0 launch slipped under the radar for a lot people, including myself. As well, there are so many FF games that it is sometimes hard to remember exactly which number the series is on.

In any case, the servers have been swamped. Character creation has been locked on most servers. Most NA/EU servers are full, and you cannot even log into them. Personally, I've been experimenting with random characters on the Japanese servers.

Now, there are some technical flaws that make the situation worse. The log-in queue system is not very good, it seems to only handle a few people. Most of the time, attempting to log into a server is met with a flat rejection, rather than a queue. This encourages people to spam the login, hoping to catch the small window when someone leaves the server.

The second issue is that there is no auto-logout if someone has been AFK for a while. People are logging in, and simply never logging off. As we have seen time and again in MMOs, gaining personal advantage trumps behaving in a way that would benefit the group as a whole.

Tomorrow, Square is planning to add more servers. While this will be good, I hope they don't go overboard like The Old Republic did. Overly full servers now are better than half-empty servers in a couple months. I can see a lot of people trying this game and deciding that it is not for them. It is a slower, more old-school experience, with all the inconvenience that implies.

The real lesson is that these server-based games should start limiting sales. With physical sales, you could match your copies printed to your server hardware. With digital sales, the temptation is to just sell an infinite number of copies. As pretty much every major launch in the last few years proved, that creates an unhappy launch environment. The artificial scarcity (assuming that the game is good) might even help the sales, by creating more interest and more anticipation for new sales.

General Chat

I got into a bit of an argument on FFXIV yesterday. There were a couple of people having a random conversation in general chat (or shout, which is FFXIV's zone channel). Then a third person, Octavia, got upset with those two, and told them that general chat was for people to find groups and sell stuff. Octavia said that the other two were "making general chat like that of WoW".

I felt that was incorrect. I don't want to see general chat to be a list of "LFG, LFG, LFG, WTS". I like seeing random conversations.

But then again, random conversations often make LFG messages disappear if people are talking a lot. That can be frustrating to someone who is looking for a group. Also, conversations that touch on hot topics such as politics and religion are annoying. Seeing variations of "Trudeau/Harper is a meanie"[1] makes me want to turn off general chat.

That's not even to mention getting into barrens chat and the Chuck Norris or even less savory spam.

I don't know. Trying to restrict conversation, to move the conversational norms to just WTS and LFG seems excessive to me. At the same time, I see the attraction of it.

[1] In some alternate universe where Canadian politics is debated in MMO chat.

First Impressions: Path of Exile

It all starts with Diablo 2. Diablo 3 took one path, streamlining and simplifying systems. Path of Exile takes the opposite path, dialing complexity up to eleven.

Path of Exile is a Diablo-style action RPG. There are six classes: Warrior, Duelist, Ranger, Shadow, Witch, and Templar. Each class is locked to a specific gender and model. Like most action RPGs, you wander around the zone killing things for randomly dropped loot, upgrading your gear as you level. However, many of the systems are very different from the standard.

For starters, abilities do not belong to the class. Instead they are gems. All gear has sockets. Sockets are red, green, or blue. You match the ability gem to the socket. Let's say that you have a Templar and you find a Glacial Hammer blue gem. You put that gem in your weapon or armor piece with a blue socket and you can now use the ability. Any class can use any ability, only some classes are more suited to the ability than others. While you have the ability gem equipped, the gem accrues XP and levels up.

Then there is the talent tree. I urge you to go take a look at it. It is the ultimate talent tree, with hundreds of talents.  All six classes are embedded in the same tree, but talents closer to the class are more suitable. For example, if you wanted to make a necromancer, the major minion talents are close to the Witch's starting location. But you could still reach those talents from another class, it would just take longer.

I believe the development studio is from New Zealand. This gives the game a unique flavor. The accents are New Zealand or Australian. The native warrior is based on the Maori, I believe, rather than the typical Norse or African. It just feels very different from the norm.

There are other interesting touches. There doesn't seem to be any gold. Instead people trade using scraps of Scrolls of Wisdom, which allow you to identify magical items, and other bartered items. This is a very interesting idea, getting across the idea that this is an uncivilized land without even basic luxuries like coinage. Health and mana potions are gear items which can have stats. The potions refill as you kill monsters.

Path of Exile is also big into "leagues", which are modes of play where you start a new character. Each league often has specific rules. A simple example is the Hardcore league where you can only die once, and then your character transfers to the regular league. But leagues can get a lot more complicated. For example, there's a league which starts at a given time and lasts for 12 hours or so. Every few minutes, the lowest level character is kicked out of the league. The last character standing wins a prize.

There is really only one thing I dislike about Path of Exile, but unfortunately it is a major element. I do not like the graphics. It's all from the "realistic" palette, all dark greens, dark reds, greys and browns. I just find it unpleasant, and even hard to identify elements on the screen. I much prefer more "cartoony" graphics which "pop" on the screen. But this is very much personal preference. Other people may like this graphics style better.

Mechanically, Path of Exile is a very intriguing game. It's Free-2-Play, so it's easy to check out. It's complex, but if you feel that D3 went in the wrong direction, you'll probably enjoy the complexity.

Subscriptions Strike Back!

The latest news is three up-and-coming MMOs (Final Fantasy XIV, Wildstar, and The Elder Scrolls Online) are going to try for subscriptions rather than Free-2-Play.

Reactions seem to mostly mirror existing biases. The people who think F2P is the future, feel this is going to fail hard, or that it is just a money grab before the inevitable F2P conversion. The people who champion subscriptions want to believe that the tide has turned, and that super-aggressive monetization is falling out of fashion.

The only real conclusion I am drawing is that, given a choice, most developers would prefer subscriptions. The steady income without the need to constantly hawk the latest items in the store must seem a more enticing proposition to the devs.

I think the key is the target number of subscribers. If any of these games are targeting a million subs, I think they're going to fail and end up as F2P. But if they're targeting 100,000 steady subs, I think that's within reach for all three games. In between those two targets is a great deal of uncertainty.

Wildstar and C.R.E.D.D.

In addition to going subscription, Wildstar is copying the Eve Online PLEX model. CREDD is worth a months subscription and can be traded for in-game currency. It does cost a bit more than a month's subscription, though, which is odd.

I'm not really sure how successful this will be. Eve has a much stronger economic simulation. In Eve, the people who earn enough to purchase PLEX are heavily involved in producing and trading the goods that make Eve work.

Wildstar, on the other hand, looks to be more like a regular themepark game where the economy is secondary to boss drops.

Second, Eve does boost the trade in PLEX because they effectively only have one character per account. That means that many players have multiple accounts, increasing the income per player, and increasing the market for PLEX. Someone who is perfectly fine paying $15/month for one account might decide to purchase PLEX to fund a second or third account. That means the market for PLEX is larger and more liquid.

I don't really see that happening in Wildstar. But I don't know for sure. It is certainly an interesting experiment.

Do More Tanking Options Lead to More Tanks?

A couple of commenters mentioned on the previous post that having paladins be Alliance-only would mean that the Horde would have fewer tanks.

Has having more tank classes led to more tanks, though?

Vanilla only had 2 tank classes: warriors and bears.  Now we have five.  Yet it seems like the proportion of tanks out there is still the same. It's still very hard to find a tank, just as hard as it was in Vanilla. I am suspicious of the idea that death knights, monks, and the emergence of pally tanks has lead to more tanks overall.

Of course, it's also possible that there are more tanks now, but that Dungeon Finder and LFR introduced a larger population of DPS into regular grouping, which has swamped the increase in tanks.

But I don't think that is true. I think the number of people willing to be tanks is just rather low, regardless of the different ways one can tank.  Introducing more tank classes just increases the diversity of tanks, but not the overall total.

What If Paladins Had Stayed Alliance-Only?

I was thinking about the story imbalance between the Horde and the Alliance, and started wondering. What happened to all the Alliance paladins?

In a lot of ways, the story of the Alliance in Warcraft is the story of their paladins. Uther, Turalyon, Arthas, Bolvar Fordragon. But all the major Alliance paladins are gone. The last one is Tirion Fordring, and he is now neutral.

Back in Vanilla, paladins were unique to the Alliance, while shaman were unique to the Horde. I think that class distinction added a great deal of character to the two factions. The paladins symbolized the civilization and law of the Alliance, while the shaman symbolized the wildness and more natural state of the Horde.

But when the two classes were opened up to both sides, I think the Alliance lost more of its identity than the Horde did. For example, the Order of the Silver Hand went neutral, and became the Argent Crusade. However, the Horde gained two paladin orders: the Blood Knights and the Sunwalkers. It seems odd to me that there is no Alliance paladin order, but two different Horde ones. A Horde paladin, Sunwalker Dezco, is playing a major role in the Horde storyline.

I don't think the parallel case of the shaman matches. Alliance shamans are pretty marginal in the lore. There are some in the Earthen Ring. But shamans, especially with Thrall, are still central to the Horde.

Personally, I think the classes should stayed faction-specific. In my mind, the balance issues were not that bad, aside from Blessing of Salvation. Had Blizzard just axed that one ability, I think the imbalance would have been easier to fix.

It's interesting to ponder an alternate timeline where the classes had remained faction-specific, and the mechanical divisions between the factions had been deepened instead of lessened.

For example, in Wrath, Tirion Fordring and the Argent Crusade might have remained Alliance. And this could have been balanced by making Death Knights a Horde-only class. Death Knights were always classic Horde units, and the theme of outcasts banding together fits in well with the Horde. Not to mention the natural relation with the Forsaken.

Then in Mists of Pandaria, Monks could have been an Alliance-only class. In my mind, the quiet, contemplative nature of the monks and pandaren fit in better with the lawful Alliance than the rough-and-tumble Horde.

So in this alternate timeline, we'd have a Horde with Death Knights and Shamans, and an Alliance with Paladins and Monks. The differences between the factions would have been more pronounced. I think this would have made it easier for the writers to craft stories that were unique to each faction.

Of course, I don't think this plan would have been okay with the players though. If the Death Knights had been revealed as a Horde-only class, with no Alliance class in Wrath, the howls of outrage would have been deafening.

First Impressions: Final Fantasy XIV

I decided to give the open beta of Final Fantasy XIV a shot. I don't really play FF games, so I'm not too sure what the backstory of this game is like. I did like the trailer very much.


I haven't played a lot, so these are very basic impressions.

Character Creation

The character creation is superb, the best I've ever seen. It offers a very nice balance of options, while still making it easy and not too complex. In particular, I like that you can save a character look, and reuse it.

I think you can download the character creator from the main site, if you just want to see that. The only downside for character creation might be that you cannot really change body types.

Initial Gameplay

The game seems very polished. The UI is clean and colorful.

Gameplay looks like the pretty standard tab-target hotkeys. The GCD seems a little high, it's 2.5s to start with, but I think that there is a stat which reduces it. Combat is decent, though the effects seem very "flashy", with lots of particle effects. It's pretty typical "kill 3 squirrels" stuff.

Talking to people feels very much like a console game, with the speech bubble you keep clicking through.

One interesting thing is that there are three starting zones, but your starting zone is determined by your initial class.

Setting 

The setting seems like a typical Japanese fantasy setting, with a melange of types. You know, different characters using very different accents, and the word choices and names are mixed in from all real-world cultures.

It's interesting how Western settings seem to emphasize far more cohesive cultures. There is a common culture and style to Ferelden in Dragon Age, for example, which is different from the other countries in that setting. I wonder if it is the influence of Tolkein, or just the structure of Europe in general.

Experiences

I first rolled a gladiator, which looks like a one-handed sword class, maybe with a shield. Unfortunately, I ran into a bug where the North American servers think that I am logged in, and won't let me log in again. I didn't even get to test out combat on the gladiator.

So I made a lancer, which is a spear-wielding character, on the Japanese servers.

I gather that a single character can take multiple classes, though the classes use different gear. The armory system seems a little complex. I'm not exactly sure how multiclassing works.

Conclusions

It seems like a good enough game. It's colorful, nicely polished, and seems to work well (aside from that nasty login bug).

But it's pretty much the same style of MMO we're all used to and have been playing for years. Indeed, it feels very old-school, closer to vanilla WoW and Lord of the Rings Online (and probably Everquest, etc.). If you're looking for something different, this is not the game for you.

Diablo III Expansion Speculation

Blizzard is starting to put out teasers for the D3 expansion. Here is the first teaser image: Reaper of Souls.

This means it's time to start speculating about the expansion. Here's my wish list:

1. Two new classes, including the Paladin

I'm biased of course, but I'd love to see the paladin come back. D3 could really use another class that emphasizes melee weapons and armor.

The second class could be the necromancer, or maybe the druid, or even something totally new to Diablo. Actually something totally new would be cool, so we'd have one returning class and one new class.

2. A No-Trade, No-AH mode

I'd like to see another game mode, like Hardcore with its separate stash, only without trading and the AH. I think the AH hurt D3, and I'd like to see what the game is like without it.

Introducing a new mode with the expansion also creates a new level playing field for everyone to compete in.

3. Allow Hardcore characters to transfer to Normal mode on death

This one is shamelessly stolen from Path of Exile. When a hardcore character dies, transfer it to Normal mode. That way the hours of work that was put in is not completely wasted. I think this might encourage more people to play hardcore mode.

On the other hand, part of attraction of hardcore is the "sting" of losing a character. Maybe reducing the risk will make hardcore less thrilling. Maybe having the character lose all her gear would be a good compromise. Or maybe it would be better to just leave it alone.

Those are the three (or two and a half) ideas I'd like to see in a D3 expansion. What would you like to see?

Thoughts on Garrosh Hellscream

Dacheng asks:

Why are the orcs turning on Garrosh? Isn't he the best warchief they ever had? Oh, I understand why the other species in the horde might not be so happy with him, but why would any real orc care about those wusses? Lok'tar Ogar, and all that.

If we're talking story, the orcs generally aren't turning on Garrosh. Which is why we're besieging Ogrimmar.

As for players, I think that Horde players see themselves first as Horde, and second as an orc, troll, tauren, etc. So they oppose Garrosh for damaging the Horde as a whole.

I saw an interesting question today: Why do players hate Garrosh, but like Sylvannas? You can make a case that Sylvannas is morally worse than Garrosh, what with the plague and the val'kyr. Yet Sylvannas is still a clear favorite with many players.

My first thought is that it is because Garrosh is a jock, and Sylvannas is a nerd. Garrosh is a thug, with lots of shouting and physical intimidation. Sylvannas is all cool and calculating. Since the playerbase draws extensively from the nerd/geek subculture, which is pretty hostile to the jock subculture, their sympathies are with Sylvannas.

What's sometimes lost is that Garrosh is pretty effective as a warleader. He's conquered most of Kalimdor. The strike on Theramore was tactically brilliant. He took out the main Alliance stronghold on Kalimdor, and killed many high-ranking Alliance officers. He almost took out Jaina Proudmoore, which would have been the one of the greatest Horde victories. Not to mention that if Jaina had been killed, Dalaran would have almost certainly fallen to the Sunreavers, as both Rhonin and Jaina would have been dead.

Yet if you asked the players which type of villain they would be like, the vast majority of players would choose the cool, calculating intellectual style of a Sylvannas. They look upon the rough, physical style of a Garrosh with distaste.

Still, the greatest crime of Garrosh is not Theramore, but the death of Cairne and the treatment of the other Horde races. It would have been interesting to see a Garrosh who took the exact same actions towards the Alliance, but chose to bind the Horde together instead of dividing it. A Garrosh who gave Vol'jin command over a theatre of war like Sylvannas, instead of attempting to assassinate him.

I think that if Garrosh did that differently, but everything else the same, including nuking Theramore and despoiling Pandaria, I think the great majority of the Horde would have been happier with him as Warchief, even supporting him over Thrall.

What to Talk About?

I'm drawing a blank on what to write about. We kind of seem to be in a waiting period in MMOs. There's some interesting stuff on the horizon, but nothing immediate.

We could rehash F2P, or the Trinity, or similar, but I'm a bit tired of those topics.

So I will turn to you, faithful readers. Anything worth writing about?

Musings on the Bench

Everything seems to be moving along steadily. My guild in The Old Republic is trying to move into Nightmare Modes. We've killed Writhing Horror on NiM, but absences have delayed attempts on Dread Guards.

The thing is that we have exactly 8 players on the team, all with solid performance and excellent attendance. This is great most of the time, as we move through content at a steady pace. But when one person is out, we fall to pieces.

I dunno, it's the same pattern I saw in WoW at this level. Progress is so good with a consistent core that everyone tries for that instead of maintaining a bench. Then absences cause significant setback. I just can't convince anyone that preparing for those absences is a good idea.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the increased performance from a smaller team is worth infrequent chaos around an absence.

This was also the problem with 25s and 10s. The performance gain from simply taking the 10 best and most consistent raiders was too high for many 25 guilds to ignore.

Destructible Terrain and Griefing

Another major element EQ Next is promising is destructible terrain. I think it's going to be an interesting experiment.

The immediate question, of course, is how long will it take for everything to be destroyed? What will the anti-griefing measures be like? For example, if a monster can destroy a city, I foresee someone kiting a monster to the city at every opportunity.

It's kind of sad how everything can turn into a tool for griefing. Destruction can lead to griefing. Creation can lead to griefing. For example, people can take up all the free space with buildings, making it hard for new players to start. Or they crowd out existing players.

I think there could be a lot more work to be done with costs in MMOs, especially non-linear costs. For example, maybe maintaining 5 buildings costs 1 resource per building, but maintaining 10 buildings could cost 2 resources per building. Or something where it's easy to destroy one piece of terrain, but gets harder and harder to destroy more terrain.

Stable PvE Strategies

Continuing the discussion on Trinity gameplay, I'd like to take a step back and survey the situation from a higher viewpoint.

So far, in my experience of MMOs, there are three stable strategies for dealing with PvE. The reason I call these "stable", is that all other schemes I've seen are "unstable". These unstable strategies always break down and devolve into one of the stable strategies.

The stable strategies are:

1. Zerg - The enemy's target cannot--or it is not worth the time to--be calculated ahead of time. Whichever player is targeted is reactively healed or protected, or forces the enemy to turn away, or just takes the hits until death.

2. Kiting - The enemy's target cannot--or it is not worth the time to--be calculated ahead of time. Whichever player is targeted proceeds to run away, out of attack range or utilizing line of sight, forcing the enemy to chase after. The chasing enemy does minimal damage, while the other players can attack the enemy. When the enemy switches targets, the new target runs away.

3. Tanking - The enemy's target can be identified ahead of time, and the situation manipulated to force the enemy to attack a specific, hardened target. While the enemy is focused on the hardened target, the other players attack the enemy freely, while the hardened target is healed and protected.

Of these three strategies, Tanking is the most interesting, the structure capable of the most variation. Zerg and Kiting are far less fun if they are the major strategy in a game.

I do not think these are the only stable strategies in existence. But I have not yet seen an MMO that has successfully executed a fourth strategy.

A "rock, paper, scissors" strategy might be stable. The classic "infantry, artillery, and cavalry" is one example. Artillery destroys the slow-moving infantry before the infantry can reach it. Calvary moves too fast for the artillery, but gets broken upon the defenses of the infantry. But "infantry, artillery, and cavalry" generally requires a great difference in movement speed, which I don't think will work in a single-character MMO .

A game that is entirely ranged might have a strategy based on cover and firing lanes. This is typical of shooter games. This strategy is rarely suitable if melee is an important part of the game.

If you want to convince me that a non-Trinity PvE MMO will work, you have to outline a fourth stable strategy. You can't simply assume it exists. Describe it, and show that it will not devolve into Zerg, Kiting, or Tanking.

Revisiting the Trinity

Once again everyone is hyped up for another game which promises to do away with the Trinity of tank-healer-dps. This time the game is EQ Next. I am deeply skeptical of this claim. I'm not saying that the Trinity is necessarily the best system for PvE. But so far, no one has demonstrated a better system.

I've seen various people saying that EQ Next will feature complex AI, which will obsolete the idea of the Trinity. In my view, if the system does not work at the simple level, making it more complex is not going to improve things.

Let's take the very simplest PvE scenario. We have a knight with sword and shield and a barbarian wielding a two-handed greatsword. Both characters are fighting an ogre in melee combat.

Who does the ogre attack?

This is the simplest decision the AI has to make. The knight's shield improves her defense. The barbarian's greatsword improves her offense.

Logically, the optimum path is for the Ogre to attack the barbarian. Generally, the rule of thumb is that you first want to kill the highest offense or the weakest defense. The barbarian meets both those criteria. And indeed, this is what will happen in PvP.

But the archetypes of fantasy demand that the Ogre attack the knight, to take the sub-optimal path. That is the very point of the shield, to take the blows. The shield is a pointless choice if no one is attacking you.

So no matter what, to stay true to the soul of the fantasy archetypes, the ogre has to attack the knight. Trinity systems do it very simply by introducing the concept of threat, which is linked to--but not equal to--damage. You could also do it by having the knight "intercept" attacks made against other characters. Or perhaps by turning the knight into a source of debuffs strong enough that getting rid of the knight first becomes optimum.

Another path might be making the knight do the highest damage, making the choice harder. This probably won't go over too well with the barbarian, though. And it doesn't match the archetypes.

It is trivially easy to make a more competent AI than the Trinity system. The harder task is making one that leads to fun gameplay and yet stays true to the fantasy genre.

Group Dynamics in Raid Finder

I had an interesting experience in a Raid Finder group yesterday.

We had killed the first boss and were clearing trash to the second boss. One DPS player called out one of the tanks for not pulling fast enough. The other tank spoke up in support of the tank in question. Other people in the group chimed in saying that everything was fine.

The DPS player persisted in his comments. Then he got vote-kicked out of the group.

If this is a trend in WoW, it's a good one. Vote-kicking people who cause drama will make Raid Finder groups more pleasant. But most people would say that this is unusual behavior, and that normally the "elitists" hold sway.

So what made this group different?

I think it was the vocal support of the other tank. Followed by the agreement of a couple other players. In my experience, Raid Finder groups follow the lead of the first few people who speak up, and of the "skilled" people. I think there is a majority of people who don't like the "elitist" rhetoric, but they will keep their heads down and defer to the tanks and the top healers and top dps who do express an opinion.

Which leads to two conclusions. If you want to promote a positive Raid Finder group, you have to be:

• Vocal. You have to make your voice heard early, when the first sign of conflict occurs. You can't let the elitists hold sway, and attempt to reclaim the group later.

• Competent. No one questions you if you are the top dps or top heals or a strong tank. Maybe it is unfair, but as far as WoW groups are concerned, "might makes right". This is, of course, because the presence of a strong player makes the run more likely to be successful. Deferring to their wishes means they are more likely to stick around and shoulder much of the burden.

The thing I've found about many of the people who complain about the quality of WoW groups is that they don't put enough effort into the second requirement, into being skilled.

If you want to contribute to a better environment in WoW, you have to be competent. Otherwise your voice is discounted. Maybe this is unfair, but it is remorselessly practical. A tyranny of skill.

Resets on Player or Game

Clockwork at Out of Beta has an interesting post on questioning whether timers should reset based on the individual player's cooldown, or on a fixed schedule.

I think the general rule of thumb should be that if the timer can involve multiple people, it should reset based on a fixed schedule.

To see what I mean, imagine dailies had a personal cooldown of 22 hours.  Anna logs in a 4pm and does here dailies. Betty logs in at 10pm and does her dailies. The next day they both log in at 6pm and want to do the dailies together. Only they can't, because Betty's dailies reset at 8pm. In these types of situations, fixed schedule resets are better.

In contrast, personal abilities generally work better when they are tied to the player.

The intriguing situation comes when personal abilities are tied to the group. For example, in-combat resurrection. These ability cooldowns started off tied to the player, but more and more they are shifting to be tied to the group. In WoW, abilities with a cooldown greater than 5 minutes reset when a raid encounter ends. In SWTOR, using an in-combat res puts a debuff on the group for 5 minutes, preventing more in-combat rezes.

It's an interesting shift in how cooldowns and timers are handled.

Short, Pyschopathic Races

Wildstar released details of their latest race, the Chua. The Chua are a short, psychopathic, technologically-inclined race.

This seems to be a little bit of a trend in MMOs lately. WoW had the Goblins, Guild Wars 2 had the Asura, and now Wildstar comes up with the Chua.

I confess that I don't really understand the appeal of these races. They just come across as caricatures, with no nuance, depth, or grace.

These races seem to be an MMO-only phenomenon. I don't recall seeing anything similar in single-player games, books or movies. An odd coincidence, don't you think?

Frankly, the Chua have given me a bit of a distaste for Wildstar. I strongly hope that Wildstar doesn't overuse the Chua, thinking that they are "cool".

Small Decisions, Part II

In the comments to the last post, Talarian references Sid Meier's quote, "A game is a series of interesting choices."

Not all choices are made equal, though. Some choices are hugely important, some are less so. Some seem important at the time, but in hindsight were not. Some choices are difficult to make, others are easy.

My question is: Are small choices better than no choices?

The thing about removing all these small choices is that they really were not replaced with anything else. Or were replaced with a large choice that comes far apart in time.

Consider talent points. You used to make one small choice every level. Then that got replaced with one large choice every 15 levels. I've argued before that this was not a good change for the leveling game. The frequency of choice is also important, not just the magnitude of the choice.

A lot of other commenters brought up the point that these small choices were what added immersion to the world. I confess that I didn't consider immersion at all. But it is true. A lot of what we spend our time with in the real world is trivial (for example, choosing a drink at Starbucks), but that trivia adds texture. It is logical that minor choices would do the same thing for a game world.

Another common comment was that these choices are "no-brainers" and because they were not difficult choices, they were not necessary. I am not sure that I agree with this point of view. Some choices should be easy. Some choices should have a high success rate.

I think this is especially important for newer or less competent players. They need choices to make and be successful with. Small successes lead to larger successes. There's a reason that every guide in the old days emphasized taking enough reagents to the raid. This was something small and easy you could do, that made you a better player than you were before. A hunter that kept her pet fed was a better hunter than one who ignored the pet.

And of course, we all remember the people who failed these choices. If the choice was truly a "no-brainer" why did people keep failing on it?

I think the idea that all choices in a game should be hugely difficult is wrong. A good game needs a variety of choices, including some simple and obvious (to experienced players) choices. These small choices instill confidence in new players, and guide them to the more difficult choices. They make the game more interesting than having no choice at all.

Small Decisions

I've been thinking about reagents and arrows lately. They're basically gone from the modern game. They were seen as trivial and obvious, an inconvenience to be smoothed away. However, I'm wondering if we lost something in doing that.

Arrows and reagents were a small test of ... skill, I guess. A good hunter kept her stock of arrows up, and refreshed it regularly. Same with reagents. I remember keeping three stacks of the reagents for Blessings on me at all times. This wasn't a very hard test, of course. Most people did this. (Though there were a few who didn't, who never had enough reagents.)

Reagents were a "small" decision. You had to make the decision to restock every so often, had to evaluate your supply against the demands on your time. It wasn't a difficult decision at all, but still a decision that all players had to make.

There were many of these small decisions in Vanilla. Soul shards, poisons, feeding your pets, talent points, etc. Even going back to a trainer when you leveled was a small decision. You had to decide whether to stop questing and get the new abilities right away, or wait for a natural break.

Most decisions in WoW now are "big" decisions. Choosing a specialization, choosing talents, using the correct abilities. There are fewer small decisions and more big decisions.

Was there value in having those small decisions?

I think that it was part of mastering your class. You get the small decisions down before having to tackle the larger ones. Almost everyone got them right, and it was the first thing to learn when playing.

To a good experienced player those small decisions are obvious and trivial. The only interesting decisions are the big ones. But big decisions are rare. Fewer decisions make for a less interesting game. You can see this in WoW leveling. All those small decisions that you used to make while leveling have been smoothed away. But a game with few decisions to make is not interesting at all.

Firefall: First Impressions

Firefall went into open beta recently. I downloaded it and gave it a whirl.

Firefall is a third-person shooter, done in an animated cell-shaded manner. The class system is bound up in these battleframes, which your character can equip. Example battleframes are the medic, recon, assault, etc. You can change your battleframe fairly easily. Each battleframe gains experience separately, and is upgraded separately. So it's like being every class, but you can only equip and level one class at a time.

The setting is a somewhat post-apocalyptic setting, in the lush jungles of South America. Firefall gives your character jumpjets, and the game plays a lot with this. There are large cliffs to scale, and fights often involve you jumping while shooting.

The game that immediately jumps to mind as a comparison is Defiance. But the differences are instructive. Defiance has the vehicle game, Firefall has jump jets. Defiance features dropped loot, while in Firefall you accumulate resources and then craft loot. In fact, I think Firefall takes a lot of its gear and crafting inspiration from Eve Online, more than anything else. Except you can't trade, so it's like an Eve where you had to mine and craft everything yourself.

I tried the medic for a bit, but switched to the recon after a while. The recon seemed to be a much simpler playstyle, so I decided to use that while learning the game.

The game is very open, you can go anywhere and attempt anything. In combat, when you're at an event, the game is a lot of fun.

My current issue is that I seem to be having a hard time "finding the fun" in the game. I open my map, see an event or mission I would like to try. So I jump my way to area, running into cliffs and having to backtrack and find my path to the area. Then I get there, and the mission has been finished or is almost over. Then it's time to repeat the process.

Or they have these "melding tornados" large-scale events. I've joined two of those, but they ended abruptly, and everyone disappeared, and I didn't get any rewards. I'm still confused by the everyone disappearing bit. There must have been 20 people at the event, then the tornado disappeared and there was only me and one other guy there.

I see other bloggers raving about the game, and how they moved from event to event, getting stuff done. I think that I must be missing something.

I can't help but compare it to Defiance. In Defiance, events were very dense. You couldn't swing a cat without hitting something to do. In Firefall, events seem very sparse, and I seem to spend more time traveling than actually doing something.

All in all, Firefall is a pretty good game. Its combat is fun and handles well. I like the progression with the crafted gear and the different battleframes. I just need to figure out how to "get to the fun" faster.

Metacritic

UnSubject has an excellent post on Metacritic. I strongly recommend reading it.

The most interesting thing about Metacritic these days--and what makes it more controversial than all the other review aggregators for other media--is that some game publishers are tying bonuses to the game's Metacritic score.

This seems a little odd to me.  UnSubject's explanation is that royalties are tied to Metacritic because “it’s a quantitative measure of game quality, popularity and helps forecast sales”. I don't think this is the full explanation.

For one thing, Metacritic scores are a weak proxy for what publishers really want to learn: how much money did this game make? But publishers don't need a proxy to figure out how much money a game made, they have direct access to the sales figures. It would be more sensible to base bonuses directly off gross revenue, rather than an indirect measurement such as Metacritic.

The only theory I have is that gross revenue or sales can be thought of as a function of both game quality and marketing (and the sheer fickleness of the audience). However, marketing is traditionally the responsibility of the publisher. It seems unfair to pay or withhold bonuses if the publisher did a good or bad job on the marketing.

In theory, reviewers should not be affected by marketing. Metacritic scores should filter out marketing's contribution to gross revenue, and only represent the developer's contribution.

Of course, the fact that Metacritic tends to correlate well with popularity and sales generally means that this extra indirection is unnecessary. It would be interesting to see what games are outliers. Games where the Metacritic score did not predict sales or revenue; either a poorly-rated game selling many units, or a highly-rated game selling fewer units.

The State of Healing

I saw this post by Vixsin on The State of Healing, and I wanted to comment on the general subject. Please note that I'm not really doing organized raiding this expansion, so you should take my thoughts with a grain of salt.

I think there has been a general problem healing this expansion, and perhaps taking a step back, a general problem in the design of healing since TBC.

The problem this expansion is that there is too much "ambient" healing. Compared to previous expansions, there's lots of aoe heals, lots of hots, and lots of absorbs that kind of buffer the entire raid. There seems to be a lot less triage and healing assignments.

The problem with this is that boss damage needs to balance out healing. Lots of ambient healing leads to lots of ambient damage. This means if the ambient, background healing ever dips down, then all of a sudden the damage can seem overwhelming. Second, and you see this in LFR a fair bit, healers that do not heal in an ambient style do far less healing than they should.

Now, the problem with healing development in general is a bit more subtle. It seems that when Blizzard is looking at the healing classes, the thought process is, "X is pretty cool, let's make more use of X". So they use X a lot more and the game breaks.

The obvious example this expansion is absorbs. Power Word: Shield is a cool spell. It does something slightly different than all the other spells, and wasn't too broken on its own (at least when it was more restricted). Blizzard saw that PW:S was good, and spread it around when they needed new spells and abilities. Paladin mastery, spirit shell, etc. And then the game broke.

It's not just absorbs. Cooldowns and AoE spells have followed the same pattern. Rare at first, with only one or two specs with access to a version that usually had a significant downside. Then everyone got access and the healing game became unbalanced.

Older paladins will remember that critical strike and Illumination did something similar. The original Illumination made critical strike interesting, but crit was a rare stat for paladins. Then Blizzard saw that paladins were chasing crit, embraced it, and ended up breaking Holy paladins.

In my mind, healing works best when it is fairly basic. A couple direct heals, a signature heal, and weak (non-spammable) AoE heal is all you really need for a good healing environment. Making healing more complicated, in some sort of arms race, just leads to less fun healing environments. Damage has to keep up with healing. The more powerful healing is, the more powerful boss damage is, and the healing environment becomes less forgiving and less fun.

Proving Grounds

The new Proving Grounds coming in 5.4 look pretty neat. I think teaching players how to tank and heal without throwing them into a live group will be a good change.

I'm rather amused that,  for the healer challenge, Blizzard included a hunter who stands in the fire and a mage who yells for heals. Good preparation for actual group content.

There's been some concern that the Proving Grounds will be the new "requirement" for guilds or pick-up groups. I think that it will actually be good for the game if Proving Grounds become the new requirement.

The current credentials required tend to be a catch-22. Usually PuGs are asking for people who have already done the instance, or have gear from the instance. So you require the help of the group to get the credential that will allow you to join the group.

In contrast, Proving Grounds are a credential that you can earn on your own. That makes it a much better credential for people looking to start raiding.

Pugs will always require some sort of proof that you are skilled enough to be successful at the group. Proving Ground completion is in some ways a superior form of proof to the two current methods. Thus, I actually hope that Proving Grounds become required by PuGs, supplanting gear and instance achievement checks.

To put it another way, if you're looking for your first job, and everyone requires 2 years of work in the same field, you're going to have trouble finding a job. But if employers are willing to substitute a degree or certification requirement, that can make it a lot easier to break into the field.

(Of course, you're going to run into problems if employers don't feel that the degree or certification matches actual ability. Then it's just a waste of time and money.)

The End of MMO Blogging?

Always fond of navel-gazing, the blogosphere has been discussing why there are so few new MMO bloggers these days. I see a lot of calls to make a better community. However, I don't really see why new bloggers need so much hand-holding. The previous generation managed just fine without artificial "communities", just by linking and writing steadily.

Here's my theory:

The current generation of bloggers grew up and moved on to more important things. The next generation which should have replaced them is functionally illiterate.

I am exaggerating for comedic effect. But I do think that there is a difference between the previous generation (late 20s, 30s) and younger people. A generational gap between people who came to the internet after elementary school, and those who have grown up with the internet. Young people seem to have real problems with long form writing.

I don't know why this is. Perhaps it was the experience of actually writing material out by hand. Or perhaps that before the internet, one had to read books, so there was an assumption that written material should be longer than 140 characters.

To look at it another way, the teenage experience of my generation's internet was Livejournal, where people composed long angsty screeds. The current teenage experience is a picture with a caption that is marginally funny.

That's my theory. MMO blogging is dying because the young players--who should be the new bloggers--simply don't write content of moderate length anymore.

Throwing in the Towel on F2P

With the news that WoW is looking at an expanded cash shop, I guess that's the last nail in the coffin for those of us who prefer pure subscription games.

I'm not too happy about this, but I'm resigned to it. I don't really see that it produces better games. If anything it just seems like a low-grade annoyance, making the game slightly worse.

Take yesterday's "event" in The Old Republic. It was the 10th anniversary of the release of Knights of the Old Republic. To celebrate, for 24 hours TOR allowed you purchase a title, "Revan's Heir", for the low, low price of 10 cartel coins.

10 cartel coins is very cheap, it's pretty much nothing. But it was so cheap that you have to ask yourself, why even bother selling it? If this had been a sub game, everybody logging in would have gotten the title.

It was to get people to use the cartel store. Like a drug dealer, the first hit is (almost) free. But now that people have used the cartel market, maybe they'll buy more stuff.

It's just so corrosive. Yesterday should have been a celebration. Instead, the entire thought process is "How can we monetize this?"

In the end, though, I blame gamers. Penny-wise, pound-foolish. It doesn't matter how bad our games get, so long as someone else pays for them. We'll just complain about it on the forums.

Weird Ideas: Travel Time

I think that travel time is a really important factor in making an MMO feel like a world instead of a game. However, travel time is highly inconvenient. So I was musing about ways to incorporate travel time into an MMO, and came up with the following design.

Goal: An MMO where travelling between two towns takes one week of real time, without boring the player to death.

1. Have the actual travel be tied to an NPC that continuously moves, rather than the PC.

Having the player get on a horse and travel in a straight line for hours is just not going to work. So we need to have something do the traveling for the player.  My basic idea is a caravan. The caravan starts at the first town, Antwerp, and travels to the second town, Brussels. The player signs up for the caravan at Antwerp, and the caravan takes seven days to travel to Brussels.

Whenever the player logs in, she logs in with the caravan, and can adventure in the area around the caravan's current location.  The player moves much faster than the caravan, but the distance between towns would still require hours of travel time if you went directly.

2. Have the travel be tied to the guild level, not the individual.

One of the problems with long travel times is that it is easy for a group to get separated, and then be unable to play together. So the easiest thing to do is to move as a guild. Here, instead of the individual players signing up for the caravan, a guild officer signs the guild up, and the entire guild moves together.  That way, even players who haven't logged in for a while still log in near their guild.

I think these two ideas would go a long way towards making travel time more palatable. You still log in and can easily group with your friends. You aren't spending all your play time riding a mount in one direction. But you still move steadily. Movement time for everybody is the same, regardless of playtime.

But moving, and travel time is a big deal. It's something you prepare for, and don't undertake lightly. A caravan bringing a guild with goods from another town might be very important economy-wise, if resources are not distributed equally. I think it would go a great deal towards making location important again.

Battlefield Barrens

I finally finished the Battlefield Barrens weekly quest and got my Hordebreaker title. I am not sure if I liked the process or not.

When I started the quest, I saw that you needed 150 of each commodity, and mobs were dropping only 1 commodity per mob, so I gave up rather quickly. Not to mention that early on it was pretty buggy because of phasing or cross-realm zones.

But today I decided to just finish the weekly, and actually got a bit caught up in it. It was fun killing orcs until a champion spawned, and then flying from champion to champion. Or escorting a random caravan every so often.

It felt very old-school, this farming. No quests, no rigid guide-rail to hold your hand. I think it would have been very nice in a small group. Trying to heal while I was solo was a bit annoying.

I don't think I'd want to do this all the time, but doing it once was an interesting change of pace.

I did like the way the rewards were structured. You do it once, and you get a pet. If you like farming, you can farm more and get gear or other items.

Choosing Statistics to Evade the Argument

Gryphonheart at The Lion Guard posted about a tweet by Ghostcrawler regarding LFR.

@Ixidane Most of the players doing LFR just didn't raid at all before. They were never really eligible for recruitment.
— Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) June 6, 2013

I've seen this tweet before, and it annoys me. Even though it seems like GC is rebutting Ixidane, both statements can be true at the same time.

To see this, imagine a population of 100 players. Before LFR, 20 of them participate in regular raids. We'll call these 20 players Raiders, and the other 80 players Casuals.

Then LFR comes out. 10 Raiders switch to LFR, along with 30 Casuals.  So the following statements are both true:

1. LFR has significantly damaged normal raiding. Normal raiding lost 50% (10 of 20) of its players.
2. The majority of people in LFR didn't raid before. 75% of raiders in LFR (30 of 40) didn't raid before.

I'm not saying that Ixidane's contention, or statement 1 above, is true. It might very well be false. I don't have the numbers to verify, though the various progress sites are showing a significant reduction in normal raiding guilds and raiders.

 But GC's rebuttal is deliberately misleading, spinning numbers in a way that appears to refute the argument, but really does not.

I think this bothers me because I see it more and more on the internet. Getting people to give straightforward numbers in favor of their arguments is like pulling teeth. Numbers are always phrased to be slightly misleading, shown as a percentage when the denominator is not exactly what you would expect, or is correct to use. Or the number is normalized in some misleading fashion, and the normalization is waved away.

Lately, I get highly suspicious anytime I see "average, "percent", "most" or "majority" in support of arguments. These statistics never seem to be the expected or obvious statistic. It's always a statistic deliberately chosen to prop up one side of the argument. Raw numbers showing the totals and breakdown into each category are always to be preferred, but are rarely shown.

A Twist on Story Mode Instances

The upcoming patch for The Old Republic has an interesting twist on the standard dungeon or instance. The patch contains two new flashpoints (4-man instances). The Hard Mode version is the standard flashpoint, with a tank, a healer, and 2 dps.

However, the Story Mode version of the flashpoint will be designed for any group of four people, with no Trinity required.

I think this is a really clever idea. A easier version often has issues because no one runs it, preferring to run the harder version for better rewards. But the Trinity-less version offers extremely fast queue times, as all you need are four bodies.

This might set up an equilibrium, as some DPS move from the HM to the SM queue, decreasing times across the board.

As well, difficulty seems more appropriate. In my view, the Trinity is a stronger skeleton for combat, allowing you to make fights more intricate and involved. Hard Mode requiring a tank and healer, while Story Mode not requiring these, feels intuitive and right.

Finally, this makes very good use of the art assets, netting a 2-for-1. As I've said before, I think art asset creation is the blocker in modern video games. Any time you can reuse the same art for multiple types of content is a win.