Holy Paladins in Legion

Blizzard has started releasing Class Previews. Here's the Paladin preview. They say that are aiming going back and strengthening the core fantasy of each of the specializations. Here's what they plan to do for Holy paladins:

We love the unique identity of the Paladin healer and are modifying the gameplay to better support it. Single-target healing from Beacon of Light remains their marquee ability, but other abilities and talents have been adjusted to encourage Holy Paladins to be near the people they want to heal—including melee characters, when necessary. This is incentivized by Lightbringer, a new Mastery, which increases healing on allies near you. This is further reinforced by the addition of a row of Aura talents that provide a variety of localized beneficial effects, and refinements to some spells, such as Light of Dawn returning to being a cone.

It looks like Paladin healing will remain roughly the same, but with a bit more emphasis on positioning. That's pretty good, I've always enjoyed spells like Light of Dawn and the old Holy Radiance. As well, Auras were a core part of the Vanilla paladin, and it's good to see them come back.

Of course, for this plan to work, holy paladins can't be targeted by range effects. We'll see if their encounter design team actually remembers this.

Talents will also provide players with options to incorporate offensive capabilities while healing. When allies are in need, Light of the Martyr allows the Holy Paladin to rapidly heal them by sacrificing personal health. Finally, we’re addressing gameplay restrictions caused by Holy Power—in which players often feel forced to use abilities in specific orders or ratios—by removing it in favor of making Mana the primary resource.

That's good. Healing works best when it is fairly simple resource-wise. Holy Power didn't really add much to the healing experience.

To give you an idea of the Holy Paladin in action, here’s a basic look at their core combat abilities: 

Holy Light
2.0% Mana, 40 yd range, 2.5 sec cast
A slow but efficient spell, healing a friendly target for a moderate amount. 

Flash of Light
4.0% Mana, 40 yd range, 1.5 sec cast
A quick but expensive spell, healing a friendly target for a moderate amount. 

Light of the Martyr
2.5% Mana, 40 yd range, Instant
Sacrifices a moderate amount of your own health to instantly heal an ally for a moderate amount.
Cannot be cast on yourself.

Light of the Martyr is an interesting spell. Divine Intervention is always cited as a defining paladin ability, but it has proven too difficult to bring back. Light of the Martyr aims to get some of that same flavor back. It's should be especially interesting in PvP, as it is instant but with an important PvP cost. I'm not sure it will be much use in PvE, even though PvE damage is more predictable, making the spell safer to use.

Light of Dawn
4.0% Mana, 1.5 sec cast, 12 sec cooldown
Unleash a wave of healing energy before you, healing up to 5 injured allies within a 15 yd frontal cone for a moderate amount. 

Holy Shock
1.5% Mana, 40 yd range, Instant, 10 sec cooldown
Instantly trigger a burst of Light on the target, dealing moderate Holy damage to an enemy, or moderate healing to an ally.
Holy Shock has double the normal critical strike chance. 

Infusion of Light
Passive
Your Holy Shock criticals reduce the cast time of your next Holy Light by 1.5 sec or increase the healing of your next Flash of Light by 50%. 

Beacon of Light
0.5% Mana, 60 yd range, Instant, 3 sec cooldown
Place a Beacon of Light on a friendly target.
Your heals on other party or raid members will also heal the Beacon of Light target for up to 50% of the amount healed. Your Flash of Light and Holy Light on the Beacon of Light target will also refund 40% of their Mana cost. 

Mastery: Lightbringer
Proximity to your target causes your spells to heal for up to 30% (with Mastery from typical gear) more.

The mastery is pretty interesting. One suggestion I would make is to rename it to Devotion Aura and make sure there is a buff on affected parties. This makes it more like the Auras of old, and I think is a small cosmetic change that would make it a lot more appealing.

I'm not entirely sure if Blizzard intends the bonus to scale depending on the distance between you and the target. For example, 30% if you're right on top of each other, 15% at 5 yards, 0% at 10 yards. I hope they don't do this, and have a flat bonus for everyone within a certain range, especially as you will never be right on top of the tank.

Additionally, to provide a glimpse at how some talents may build upon this, here’s one example of a Holy-specific talent: 

Beacon of the Lightbringer
Passive
The maximum bonus from Mastery: Lightbringer is increased by 24%, and it now increases your healing based on the target's proximity to either you or your Beacon of Light, whichever is closer.

An interesting talent, allowing you to add a second Mastery circle to the raid, and compensate for positioning. Since Beacon will be on the tank, this Mastery circle should cover both the tank and the melee groups, if the Holy paladin does not want to stand in melee.

All in all, the changes to Holy Paladins look good. The changes for the other classes and specs are also looking very good, with some classes (Shadow Priests, for example) seeing significant overhauls.

Legion Cinematic

The Legion Cinematic was released at Blizzcon this past weekend. As is traditional, we note that it is quite good, but not as good as the Wrath cinematic. The explicit call out to the Wrath cinematic at the very start is nice.

Again, technically the cinematic is very well done. In particular, the Blizzard cinematic team did an excellent job with Varian. He may very well be the best CG human I have seen. They nailed the look and feel of an aging warrior king, one who has been fighting all his life.

The trailer has no orcs! It's kind of sad that is now a good thing, and shows how much Blizzard overused the orcs in the last two expansions. Instead the Horde side is represented by Sylvannas, who is always good to see. She also looks very good, like a proper undead banshee queen.

This cinematic has one really superb scene, where the skycarrier is crashing and Varian closes his eyes. It's the one moment where Blizzard is willing to do less, and it pays off. Otherwise the scenes are a touch too busy.

Still though, it's a great cinematic, and starts off Legion on a high note.

Has Final Fantasy XIV caught World of Warcraft?

The latest news is that World of Warcraft lost another 100,000 subscribers, and is now at 5.5 million subscribers. This is a pretty small loss compared to the previous quarters, and is somewhat unusual given the content drought WoW is going through.

That 5 million number has come up recently in another context, though. FFXIV announced it had over 5 million "registered accounts".

No one is quite sure what SE means by registered accounts, though. Last year, SE said FFXIV had 2 million registered accounts and 500,000 daily logins. With 500,000 daily logins, that 2 million number is almost certainly subscriptions. So if "registered accounts" were what we would call subscriptions last year, then I think it's reasonable to believe that they are subscriptions this year as well.

As well, consider the latest trailer FFXIV has put out for the 3.1 patch. The last frame explicitly says, "Join Over 5 Million Adventurers Worldwide". This again cuts strongly in favor of FFXIV having 5 million current subscribers or equivalents.

Of course, the distribution of subscribers is probably different. WoW probably has more NA/EU players, while FFXIV has more Japanese players.

But in my view, FFXIV is now roughly the same size as WoW. With a new FFXIV content patch coming next week, and no new content in sight for WoW, it's possible that FFXIV will actually surpass WoW and claim the crown of "largest subscription MMO" in the near future.

It certainly puts a different light on Blizzard's decision to stop reporting subscription numbers. It's one thing to report losses when you're still at the top. It's another to confirm that you've slipped to second place.

Quantum Link Remembered

David Wilding sent me a link to his article about Quantum Link, a online service from 1985 (30 years ago!). It's a very nice and thorough look at one of the forerunners of our current internet environment.

Quantum Link is about a decade before my time, but I remember connecting to BBSes in the 1990s, and playing Doom over modems. Good times.

Heh, here's a tidbit about PvP in Habitat, an early MMO that ran on Quantum Link:

At first, during early testing, we found out that people were taking stuff out of others hands and shooting people in their own homes. We changed the system to allow thievery and gunplay only in non-city regions.

PvP game designers encountering PvP players, something we've been able to count on for the last 30 years.

Edit: Pallais found a really nice paper on Habitat, written in 1990. It's an interesting read.

Blade And Soul Beta, Headset Issues

I tried the Blade and Soul Closed Beta test this weekend. I didn't get very far, mostly because of an odd headset issue. I'll give quick impressions below.

Headset Issues

I had an odd issue with my headphones this weekend. For some reason, I could not hear voices at all, but all background music and other sounds came through fine. At first I thought it was caused by the Blade and Soul beta, so I uninstalled that relatively quickly. But that didn't help.

After a lot of fiddling, I found that if I adjusted the Left/Right balance of my headphones, I could hear voices. Of course, now everything sounded odd. It looks like I'll just have to find a replacement headset.

Blade And Soul Impressions

Because of the above issue, I didn't really get that much time with Blade and Soul. I tried the first 3 levels or so with three or so classes. However, since the beta was a weekend-only thing, I didn't bother re-downloading it after uninstalling it the first time.

Blade and Soul is an action-y MMO from Korea, being brought over here by NCSoft. The character creator is very extensive with crazy amounts of sliders. Sadly, for me this just means that it is very hard to make a decent-looking character, and very easy to make something grotesque. I ended up doing my standard "drag every slider to the middle" technique.

The game plays a little like TERA, with somewhat similar controls. There are some interesting design touches, like several classes having a block-style ability. Successfully executing a block restores resources and empowers one of your attacks.

However, I am not a big fan of the interface. Most western games like to have the default interface on the edges of the screen, leaving the center area dedicated to your character and the world. Blade and Soul moves a lot of the important UI elements into that center area, impinging on your view of your character.

Of course, the flip-side is that this is very common practice among experienced players. Moving the most relevant information closer to the center is very useful for performance. I just did not like it here, though. It seemed like there was too much "UI" and not enough "game".

However, I really did not get any time to give more than the barest of impressions. Maybe next beta weekend I'll be able to give a better overview.

Fallen Empire: Alliances

I've finished the nine chapters of Fallen Empires that were released. Shintar makes a good point, when she describes the experience as "the borders between your personal story and the rest of the game are marked more starkly." The main story is very much a true single-player experience, the KotoR 3 that people have been asking for.

But after that come the more traditional MMO elements. Here, Bioware has done some interesting things. The main story of Fallen Empire is not complete yet. What's been released is more like Part 1. Where it stops, your character is setting up an Alliance to oppose the Zakuul Empire.

In some respects, it's like Garrisons from WoW. Only the focus is on recruiting new companions, and sending you out into the galaxy to accomplish things, rather than encouraging you to hang around your base.

One amusing element is that SWTOR now has a second conversation style. Bioware is touting it as a callback to KotoR, but it's real advantage is that your character is unvoiced. This allows Bioware to add these small pieces of content without calling in all 16 class voice actors.

In any case, there are 4 or 5 companions you can recruit through small missions or other tactics. For example, one companion requires you to participate in 20 PvP matches (wins count as 2 matches). Another companion requires you to hunt dangerous beasts, which you can do by killing World Bosses. Level sync makes that a lot more interesting. I like this because the only reward is a companion, of which you have plenty. So these missions are totally optional.

There are also Star Fortresses. Six worlds have Star Fortresses in orbit, and you have to do a mission on the ground to take out the shield protecting them. The Star Fortresses themselves are miniature instances, which can either be done solo or in a group of 2-4. It's pretty great content for just grabbing a friend and running through them.

Finally, all the planetary Heroic missions have been rebalanced and are available from your base, offering transport directly to the mission. This is essentially solo or duo content, and rewards lockboxes which you turn in to improve your base, and also gives you legacy cosmetic gear.

All in all, the Alliances seem like a strong and extensible system for solo and duo endgame content.

Knights of the Fallen Empire: Early Access

Yesterday SWTOR launched early access for its latest expansion, Knights of the Fallen Empire. The launch was smooth, with no real server issues.

There was an amusing bug where all companions were not wearing pants when you logged in. The companion gearing system has changed, with gear being cosmetic only. Therefore companions no longer have non-visible gear slots. All extra gear was sent to your inventory or mail. Amusingly enough, companion pants were also sent to inventory unnecessarily.

The story is quite good. I'm in the middle right now, so we'll see how it ends. It's very much in the vein of Mass Effect 2, with a time skip and rebuilding your companion roster.

The graphics also seem to have bumped up a notch in the expansion, especially the major NPC models.

The big question I have is if this is really enough content. Each chapter is about one hour in length, and nine of them were released yesterday. So pretty much every one is going to blitz through them fairly quickly. Starting in the new year, Bioware is planning on releasing one chapter every month. Is one hour of story content each month enough to keep people playing?

On the other hand, it's more content than we got previously, and people kept playing. So who knows.

The other interesting element was that there is a minimal gear increase. Playing through the existing story up to Ziost gives you item level 190 gear, and HM raiding gave 198 gear. So far, KotFE has only been handing out 190 gear (mostly for people who choose the instant 60), and it looks like group content will start with 200 to 204 level gear. That's a very compressed gear curve, which is fairly unusual for an MMO.

So far so good. We'll see how the story finishes, and what endgame content looks like.

SWTOR and Class Armor

One overlooked aspect of the new SWTOR expansion is that SWTOR seems to be moving away from class-based armor entirely. This is unusual for an MMO based on classes.

The primary stats (Strength, Willpower, Aim, Cunning) are being replaced with a single stat called Mastery. So all gear becomes interchangeable class-wise. There are still multiple secondary stats, including some role-specific ones like Defense or Accuracy. But no longer will an item drop and you can say that it is Warrior gear or Agent gear.

The other element is that most newer armor is "Adaptive". This means that if you're a class that uses Light Armor, the armor is Light Armor for you. If you use Heavy Armor, it's Heavy, and so on.

The link between armor and class in a class-based MMO is usually very strong. But with these changes, the link becomes very weak. I'm sure that there will still be gear with class-specific set bonuses. But outside of that, we're setting up for a situation where any class can wear any gear.

I'm not so sure that I like this change. I like having different armor for the different classes. I suppose that it can be annoying to wait for your one piece to drop, though. Still, it does feel like the game has lost something.

Maybe this is an inevitable result of selling cosmetic gear in a F2P game. You don't want to restrict costumes to different characters, so you sell costumes that all characters can wear. And then there's not much point in forcing the player to find a Strength mod compared to an Aim mod.

I am a bit surprised that SWTOR hasn't taken the next step and started dropping armor shells separately from the mods in instances. That would separate the cosmetic part of the armor even farther from the mechanics aspect. People who wanted the mods would roll specifically on them. People who wanted the costume could roll specifically on the armor shell.

Crowfall and the Metagame

It's been a while since I've written anything about Crowfall. Artcraft looks to be steadily making progress. Unfortunately most of their updates in the last few months have been in video format, so I've pretty much ignored them. Videos just take so long to get through compared to text, and text is so much easier to reread and pull out bits to chew on.

In any case, Artcraft seems to be toying with the idea of promoting a "metagame" as in Eve Online. Where people can be spies and scammers in other guilds, and betray them, etc. It's always a newsworthy part of Eve, so it's not surprising that it would be attractive to someone making another PvP MMO.

However, I think it's a bad idea. To be fair, I think it's a bad idea in Eve Online as well. The culture of spying, betraying, "awoxing", and generally being hard to trust is bad for the game. I think games where trust is easier are a lot more fun. But Eve has its own culture, and the people who play Eve are happy with it.

However, I think the "metagame" is an especially bad fit for Crowfall. Crowfall's signature element is that the game board resets. After a while, the campaign world ends, and players start fresh on a new campaign world.

A strong metagame cuts across that. When the board resets, the alliances and enemies made should also reset. I'm sure we've all played board games with people who hold a grudge from one game to the next. Or two people who will always attack each other. Or people in a relationship, where you can expect one of them to throw away her chance at victory to support her partner. These games are less fun than new games where everyone is attempting to win.

Crowfall will never get rid of all relationships between campaigns. For one thing, guilds will want to play together and support each other. But it's better if the game encourages relationships between guilds to reset, to treat each world as truly new. But that will require discouraging the Eve-style metagame of guild politics.

DPS Meters and Player Behavior

Whether DPS meters are good or bad is a hotly debated topic. I saw an interesting Reddit post by WitcherMog that approaches the question from a different angle.

In FFXIV, there are no in-game damage meters. However, you can run an external parser that reads your combat log and gives information for your group. FFXIV runs on a  "don't ask, don't tell" policy when it comes to meters, though. If you reference them in chat, it's considered harassment, and you get punished by SE. So meters are pretty much the province of individuals and high-end static groups.

WitcherMog ran 100 instances with his parser active and compared player behavior with parser results. He found that harassment of other group members for being slow or wiping uniformly came from low-dps players.

The negative behavior indulged in by high-powered players (as measured by gear level) was to slack off during fights. Of course, negative behavior in either case only occurred in a minority of runs.

This is not quite the same negative behavior exhibited in games with public meters. In WoW, any harassment is more likely to come from good dps towards the low dps.

The results do make sense. In a game without meters, a good dps makes the run faster and less likely to wipe. So really, she has nothing to complain about, as all visible outcomes are positive. Meanwhile the low dps player believes he is doing fine, believes that he is really a good player, so obviously any problems must come from the other players.

In a game with meters, on the other hand, the poor player cannot blame others for visibly bad outcomes, because each individual performance is quantified. However, even if the outcome is visibly good, a negative high-dps player can feel aggrieved that she is "carrying" the group, and incite harassment of the others that she feels are not playing up to par.

So it's really a choice of picking your poison. Without meters, runs that have negative outcomes like excessive slowness or wipes incur harassment from the very people who most likely cause the problem in the first place. With meters, a run that is successful might very well still see harassment, just because one player thinks another player is not living up to an arbitrary standard.

There's no obvious best choice here. Would you rather have poor players never realize that they're bad, or have good players hold others to an unnecessary standard?

Of course, we must reiterate that, especially in FFXIV, we are talking about a minority of outcomes. Most runs are successful and go just fine.

A Lull in the Storm

It feels like we're in a lull in the MMO sphere. There's stuff on the horizon, but nothing really interesting is happening right now. Well, I guess there was the Wildstar F2P launch, but I ignored that.

The Old Republic's Knights of the Fallen Empire expansion comes in a week. In a month, FFXIV will drop its 3.1 patch. Who knows when the next Warcraft expansion will come out. I honestly thought Blizzard would aim for a release around the end of the year. But with no beta in sight, that's looking extremely unlikely.

In the meantime I'm just casually cleaning up side-activities in TOR and FFXIV.

In TOR, I've levelled my Sith Warrior to 60, and am also looking to go through all the companion stories from the original game. I have 5 done, so only 3 classes to go.

In FFXIV, I've levelled White Mage to 59. I also have worked on pretty much all the other classes, gaining a level here and a level there. I really should pick one activity to focus on. But there's so many options I'm just bouncing around.

What are you doing in this lull?

Level Syncing

Last week The Old Republic revealed some of the game mechanic changes coming in Fallen Empire. The most controversial is that all planets will be level synced. That is, when you out-level a planet, your character and gear will be scaled back to the max level for that planet.

On the one hand, I can see why some people are unhappy. These games are about character progression, and level syncing undoes your progression. It's fun to come back to an old zone that gave you trouble and destroy it. What's the point of gaining levels if the game is going to arbitrarily roll them back?

On the other hand, because it's normal for a max level character to overpower old zones, the game never sends you back to those zones. Or if it does, it sets up a little max level area where the max level players go. It's harder to preserve challenge without level syncs.

Level sync makes it easier to add new content to old zones. For example, all holiday events in FFXIV are level 15 or 30. High level players will get synced down, and the low level requirement makes it easy for new players to join the event.

However, FFXIV only scales group content. Solo-content is pretty much left alone.

Another point is that level syncs also balance world PvP a bit better. Sure, a synced player is more powerful than a leveling character, but the disparity isn't as great any more. If world PvP starts up, the leveling players on the planet can join in.

In the end there is an unavoidable tension between maintaining character progression and preserving challenge. I think that FFXIV strikes a good balance for group content. I thought that Guild Wars 2 did a bad job maintaining character progression, as it was very aggressive about syncing levels, so you'd get scaled back even in the same zone. Games without leveling syncing basically give up on attempting to preserve a challenge in old zones.

We'll see how well TOR manages to balance both goals.

Starting Raiding In Warlords of Draenor

Atherne asks:

I've been thinking about this and have decided to try Raiding. I'll need to gear up an appropriately leveled character. Yours is the first Wow blog I ever read because I was looking for tips for my Paladin. My thought is, I always play Paladin, Shadow Priest and Warlock well in dungeons, so I should pick one of those for a first try. Any advice? Also, what Raid should I try first to see if I do well and like the format? Thanks!

I've decided to respond in a separate post so that I can get input from other people, especially people who are currently raiding in WoW.

I would suggest picking the character and specialization that you like the best and are most comfortable with. The only hard position is tanking, as tanks are generally held to a higher standard than everyone else.

The way I see it, there are three paths you can take:

1. Looking For Raid

Just sign up for LFR with your character. I would follow the Legendary quest, as it takes you through all the current raids in order.  It's pretty much like a dungeon run, only with a lot more people. You can read up on the fights in the Dungeon Journal, and that will give you a decent idea of what's going to happen.

If you sign up as DPS, your queue time will be fairly long. You can sign up for multiple wings to help with this.

This path is the easiest to get into. You can do it on your own time and on your own schedule. It's also the least rewarding path, though. However, you will see all the content and get your feet wet.

2. Pre-made Groups in the Group Finder

Here you would find a Normal Mode group for the raid you are interested in. Start with Highmaul if you can find it. You will probably need to watch some video guides, as it is expected that you will know the fights.

In some ways these might be the hardest groups to join, as these types of groups are often leery or unwilling to take completely new players. As well, most people are focusing on the latest raid, so it might be hard to find groups for the older raids.

The advantage here again is that you can do it on your own schedule. However, there's no guarantee that you'll find a group willing to take you on a specific day.

3. Find a Guild

Here you have to look for a guild which does Normal raids at a regular day and time where you can attend. You'll probably have to apply on their website, or at least talk to an officer in-game. Here you'll have to do whatever the group is currently working on.

From an organizational standpoint this is the most work. As well, you'll have to raid on a specific schedule. However, this is also the path which is most likely to be successful for a new raider. Because you are willing to commit to the guild, the guild is willing to commit to you, to invest in training you in how to raid.

This is also the most rewarding path, in my opinion. Working on mastering fights as a group is what raiding is all about to me, and this is the path which exemplifies that. But there's no doubt this is also the path which requires the most commitment from you.

The most important part here is to make sure you are compatible with the guild you choose. That your schedules match, and that you like the atmosphere in the guild.

Conclusions

Those are the options as I see it. LFR and Group Finder are easier schedule-wise, but does put a little more burden on you to learn fights and improve on your own. It's much easier to learn how to raid from an existing raid guild, and is also more rewarding, but the price is that your time is no longer fully your own.

Note that if you choose to look for a guild, you can still do LFR until you find one.

Thoughts and tips from other readers? What would you do if you were completely new to raiding?

Transistor Review

Transistor is the second game by Supergiant Games. Transistor is an isometric RPG-style game that's 4 to 6 hours long. Supergiant's first game was Bastion, which I loved. Transistor, though, I think I would have liked a lot better if I knew what the hell was going on.

Story

The best way to describe Transistor's story is that it is a technological noir crossed with an alien invasion. And then it gets weird.

You play Red, a singer who has her voice stolen for mysterious reasons. The game starts in media res, with Red standing over the body of a man who has just been stabbed by a giant talking sword, the eponymous Transistor. Red takes the Transistor and sets out to unravel the conspiracy that took her voice.

I'll leave it there to avoid spoilers, but the setting is very unique and weird. The story was decent enough, but it always felt like I didn't quite understand the setting, or what was really going on. It just felt like the author moved too far, too fast, and ended up leaving behind the people coming to this setting for the first time.

In part, this ended up leaving me cold, and I never really cared about any of the characters in the story.

Aesthetics

Transistor is a gorgeous game for all the senses. The artwork is stunning, the music and sound is outstanding. Along these dimensions, Transistor is truly a work of art.

Gameplay

The gameplay of Transistor is really neat. Basically, you "freeze time" and plan out your sequence of moves. Then when you start time up again, you execute your plan in a short burst. Next you wait for your ability to freeze time to recover, and your enemies attack you. You can generally move around during this period, but can't do much else. Once you get the hang of things, this is a really interesting system.

I adored the ability system. Each "ability" has an active, passive, and modifier effect. You have four active slots, four passive slots, and each active slot has two modifier slots. The passive and modifier slots start locked and you can unlock them as you level up.

The key here is you can only assign one ability to a slot. If you use the ability as a passive, you can't use it as a modifier or an active ability. It's a beautiful system that encourages you to use many abilities, and combine them in an interesting manner. For example, I used a summon ability with an AoE passive to give me a pet who did AoE attacks. I used the pet to clean up small attackers, while I focused the main attacks on bigger threats.

Transistor also includes a similar difficulty system as Bastion. You get Limiters as you level up. Limiters boost the enemies in specific ways, but also increase your rate of experience gain. You can choose exactly how you want to make the game more difficult. I didn't enable any Limiters, though.

Conclusions

Transistor is an ambitious game. It also falls short of those ambitions. Does that make it a failure? Maybe.

But these ambitious failures are often far more interesting than more pedestrian successes.

Eve Online Adds a DPS Cap Mechanic

Several years ago, I proposed a DPS Cap mechanic, in order to reduce the amount of optimization in DPS gameplay.

Surprisingly, Eve Online is going to implement a similar idea in their new Citadels expansion. The cap is on the target citadel, as there is a maximum amount of DPS that can be applied by attackers during a battle. Extra damage past the cap is just absorbed and disappears.

The intention here is to avoid requiring larger and larger fleets, and to stop an arms race between fleet size and citadel hitpoints. Instead, any fleet above a specific size will be "good enough" to take a citadel. Additionally, the DPS cap guarantees a minimum time that the citadel will be alive in a fight.

There are some other interesting wrinkles. For example, the citadel cannot be repaired or "healed" by friendly ships. I think it will start repairing itself after some time passes, though.

The DPS Cap mechanic is different than the one I proposed. It's on the defender, as a defensive mechanism. So from the attacker's perspective, it's a limit on the fleet, not on individual ships.

Still, I think this is an untouched area, and we will see more experimentation. I think this is especially true for world PvP games where there can be a large disparity between the two sides.

Earning Commendations as a Healer in FFXIV

There is a minor debate in the FFXIV community as to the proper way to play healers in random groups. FFXIV healing is not super-spammy. If you heal efficiently, you often have several free GCDs. So many good healers add damage during those free GCDs, as damage spells cost very little mana. Indeed, edge healers learn to go into the damage stance (Cleric stance - reduces healing, increases damage) at appropriate times in order to maximize the amount of damage they can do.

This has led to a discussion of the role of healers in random groups. Should you expect the healer in a random group to add damage? Or is a healer who solely heals--as is normal in many other MMOs--acceptable?

This in turn encouraged some good healers conduct experiments on random groups. They did several runs maximizing damage, while still keeping everyone alive. Then they did several runs where they did no damage, and just focused on keeping people topped off. Universally, it's been found that the pure healing runs yield more commendations from the other party members. This implies that the FFXIV community prefers the pure healing style.

This has caused some consternation among the edge healers. Why does the FFXIV community not recognize the optimum play-style?

I think that the answer is more psychological than anything else. In a random group, you don't know how much you can trust the unknown healer. So a healer who doesn't deal damage, but does keep everyone topped off creates a feeling of safety. That gives the other group members confidence and makes life easier for them.

Aggressively dealing damage as a healer generally means letting people drop in health a bit, and not topping them off right away. With an unknown healer, this can be a bit nerve-wracking for the other party members. Is the healer actually bad, and going to let someone die? Do I need to play more defensively to compensate?

So the best way to get commendations as a healer in random groups is to make your group feel utterly safe, and allow them to enjoy a smooth run without concern. In a group where everyone knows and trusts each other, this is not the best way to play. But in a random group, generating trust is often more important than strict performance.

Return to WoW Ends Ignomiously

Yesterday, I posted that I had decided to play WoW a bit more. By the end of the evening, though, I had cancelled my account.

The reason: I joined an LFR run, and it was absolutely atrocious. Tanks letting the mobs cleave into the group. People (non-tanks) running off and pulling extra packs in an attempt to clear things faster. Rushing ahead and starting the boss fight so that people get locked out.

It was such a bad experience that I asked myself if getting the Legendary ring was worth a couple more months of this. I decided it was not. Then I asked myself if getting flying was worth a couple months of grinding blue bars, and decided that was not worth it either.

The end result is that I cancelled my WoW account.

Now, I don't know if it will stick, or if I'll get bored and start playing again. I'll probably check Legion out, I guess.

Somewhere along the line, WoW lost its basic group gameplay "skeleton". Even though WoW is technically a trinity game, it no longer feels like a trinity game. It feels closer to a zerg than to anything else. And the zerg is simply not fun.

Grinding Blue Bars

I've been playing WoW a bit more lately. I decided that I'd like to at least get flying and the Legendary ring on my paladin.

I've come to the conclusion that the single worst mechanic in Warlords is the one where you fly to an area and then grind things until a blue bar is full. It's a terrible, terrible mechanic, and it is all over Warlords.

I hated this mechanic when it appeared in Guild Wars 2, and I hate it in WoW.

It's kind of interesting, because it's not that different from getting three daily quests to do in a specific area, at least in overall execution. But I think what makes it different is that the blue bar is just indiscriminate. You do everything you can as fast as you can.

Whereas the daily quests at least have specific targets. Part of doing dailies is a mini-optimization game where you learn how to complete the specific requirements in a minimum amount of time. As well, the daily quests can have a bit of story added in, and require specific targets like a boss.

Basically, for me, a structure like:

• Do 3 of Item A and 3 of Item B and 3 of Item C

just feels better and is more interesting in actual play than:

• Do 9 of [Item A or Item B or Item C]

Filling several smaller bars is better than filling one big bar. I strongly hope that Legion drops these blue bar areas and goes back to having different daily quests.

FFXIV Anniversary Event

FFXIV had it's second anniversary recently, and celebrated it with a pretty interesting in-game event.

The first part of the event was the standard low level FATE. Only the FATE involved defeating rapidly multiplying "bugs" and "regressions", in a nice nod to the challenges faced by the technical team.

In the second part of the event SE broke the fourth wall. A dream sequence sends you to the "Eighteenth Floor", which is a reference to the floor the FFXIV team occupies at SE. There several of the devs are present via in-game avatars but using their real identities. You can talk to each one, and they'll say something about their role and the game.

There's also some potential spoilers about future content.

At the end, the devs all gather around you. Yoshi-P apologizes yet again for 1.0 and promises to keep doing better and listening to the playerbase. And they wish you well.

It's a really sweet event. It's odd, but it's the sort of event that on paper doesn't sound that good, since it explicitly breaks the fourth wall. But it worked quite well even if it was a little hokey. Or maybe it worked because it was a little hokey. It's very nice to see such enthusiasm from the devs.

Gaming Updates

I thought I'd make a quick post about what I'm doing in various games.

The Old Republic

I took a fourth character, my Trooper, to 60. As well, in preparation for Fallen Empire, I've been trying to cap out my companions' affection and stories.

In operations, my group managed to kill Underlurker, making us 5/10 HM. We've killed him three times so far, but it's still pretty sketchy, and we haven't been able to get time on the next boss. The big issue is that we are continually missing one or two people each week and have to get a PuG.

As for the rest, it looks like the rest of the guild outside our 8-man group has disappeared. I'm not sure what we'll do about that.

Final Fantasy XIV

The issue I'm having in FFXIV is that I don't really have a new goal to concentrate on. My main class, paladin, is pretty much done unless I want to venture into the harder content, Extremes or Alexander. But at that level it does require some work in finding decent groups or a static team.

So I'm desultorily levelling Miner, White Mage, Monk, and Mechanist. I'm just bouncing between them with no real enthusiasm.

Others

I'm not really playing anything else. I did reinstall WoW, intending to at least get flying in Draenor, and see the new raid. But I haven't touched it for a couple of weeks. I think I'm just going to quit until the expansion.

I also reinstalled Diablo 3 to see the new patch. I got Kanai's Cube, but I don't really have any use for it. It seems to be aimed at the people who are more advanced in the D3 endgame than I am. I am only at Paragon 100 or so.

Player Bankers in SWTOR

I came across a neat emergent phenomenon in SWTOR: player bankers.

A non-subscriber in SWTOR has a credit cap of 350k credits. Once at the cap, any credits she gets above that amount go into an escrow account. She has to purchase escrow unlocks, either through the cartel market or on the auction house, to access any credits in the escrow account.

One method players have come up with to evade this restriction is player bankers. The banker is a subscriber, who can hold unlimited amounts of currency. When the non-subscriber approaches the cap, she deposits a significant sum with the banker, dropping her back below the cap. The banker keeps track of her account out of game, perhaps in a spreadsheet.

When the non-subscriber wants to purchase something expensive from the auction house, the banker acts as her agent. The banker purchases the item for her, and deducts the amount from her account. Usually the banker takes a fee at this point. Since the fee is less than the escrow unlock, the non-subscriber comes out ahead.

One thing about SWTOR F2P mechanics is that almost all unlocks are tradeable items, which can be bought and sold on the auction house. This is the feature which makes the banker a viable agent.

The transaction is also smoother. The non-subscriber doesn't need to juggle escrow unlocks, which come in specific sizes. She can make very large transactions just as easily as small transactions. I imagine that the banker can act as an agent for selling expensive items as well.

Of course, the downside is that the non-subscriber has to trust the banker. She has to trust him not to make off with the credits, but also to keep subscribing and keep showing up online. So most banker relationships occur through friend or guild channels.

I think it's an interesting phenomena throughout, and matches the historical emergence of banks to a degree. I also think that the more sandbox-style games can learn a lesson from this, and see that it might be possible to offload currency and monetary systems onto the players' shoulders, rather than insisting that it is handled by game systems.

PvP Changes in Legion

There are some very interesting changes coming for PvP in Legion:

• No PvP-specific gear - Heh, I actually talked about this last year, and I'm amused to see that Blizzard is actually trying for it. PvP will reward gear, but it will be just like PvE gear.

• Stats based on specialization - When you enter a PvP area, the stats from your gear are ignored. Instead you seem to get a set of stats based on your class specialization and item level. That template is common to everyone in your specialization. So if you have two Retribution paladins, one in Mastery gear and the other in Critical Strike gear, they will both have the same stats in PvP.  This allows you to just keep one set of gear on you at all times. This also gives Blizzard another knob they can tune which only affects PvP. For example, if Fire Mages are fine in PvE, but too weak in PvP, they can buff the Fire Mage PvP stat template.

• Item level scaling is lower than PvE - In PvE, 15 ilevels correspond to about a 10% increase in power. In PvP, 15 ilevels will correspond to a much lower number, maybe 3% or so. So while improving your gear does make you better in PvP, it's a much smaller increase. The gap between high and low end will be much smaller.

• Trinkets, set bonuses, and enchants do not work - Again, this eliminates much of the need to seek out specific pieces of gear.

• PvP talent track - PvP has a separate talent track. As you earn "PvP XP", you advance along the talent track. You get what looks like passives and improved variants of abilities.

• The talent track resets - Once you reach the end of the talent track, you can reset it, earning a cosmetic reward. I guess you can do this multiple times. Ideally, this means that people who PvP a lot don't have fixed advantage over other people. A full-time PvPer might actually be in the early part of track, working towards another cosmetic reward.

Overall, these changes look very interesting. A huge amount of experimentation, including a significantly reduced role of gear, something that PvPer's have been claiming they want for a long time.

There are some concerns of course. How will the talent track reset play with the serious PvPer crowd? If a maxxed talent track gives a significant advantage, wouldn't high-end PvPers be encouraged to avoid resetting it? That would probably make them unhappy, as they couldn't get any of the cosmetic rewards. Unless, of course, there are no rewards for getting a high rank or rating. But that seems just as weird.

How will Artifact Weapons interact with the PvP gear templates? Will your weapon become just a stat stick, or will it retain its power? How will that interact with your choices that you've made while leveling it?

Still, exciting times for PvP, and these changes should also make it a lot easier for PvE players to casually dip into PvP.

External Drive Enclosure, FFXIV Summer Faire

External Drive Enclosure

Thanks to the recommendations of gamingsf and Pallais in a previous post, I purchased an external hard drive enclosure from Amazon. It only cost about $30 CAD. It's a pretty simple device, shaped kind of like a toaster. You plug a hard drive into the slot, and you can use it like an external drive through USB.

It worked reasonably well, though it was a little finicky. I had to try multiple USB slots before it finally registered. But once Windows detected the device, it worked well, and I was able to pull data off both hard drives from old machine.

I managed to get my FFXIV settings, so now all my gear sets and macros are back in place. That's a big relief, as I was avoiding logging in and rebuilding everything.

FFXIV Summer Faire

The latest holiday event in FFXIV is the Summer Faire. It's a pretty simple event, with a couple quest lines and a bunch of Fates in Costa del Sol. One interesting change is that there are repeatable quests for Fishermen and Culinarians, which are an alternate way of getting the holiday currency for this event.

As normal, the rewards are mostly cosmetic. Swimsuits, for the most part. One change is that this event does also have some of the rewards from the previous holiday event (yukatas). Perhaps this will be another way to get old rewards, as FFXIV revamps holiday events every year. Before this, old rewards went into the cash shop. I thought that was a pretty fair way of handling old rewards, but this is a good method as well.

Ravenholdt or Riot

It always amuses me to compare the WoW player culture with Blizzard's WoW dev culture. A lot of the time they're the same. But sometimes there's a clearly inexplicable gap between the two.

Take the rogue class order hall, for example. If you asked the rogue community, they would all pick Ravenholdt Manor as the iconic rogue location. And with good reason. It has been the "rogue place" ever since Vanilla. Multiple class quests, as well as the legendary rogue dagger questline, have centered around Ravenholdt.

But Blizzard wants to put the Rogue order in the Dalaran sewers.

That is as pure an instance of tone-deafness on the part of the dev team as I can recall. First, no one really wants to end up in the sewers. Second, the Dalaran sewers used to be the PvP area, back in Wrath. That's what most people who were around back then associate with the location. Third, Dalaran is the mage city, and really has nothing to do with rogues.

Maybe if Ravenholdt didn't exist, the sewers would have been an okay choice. But it does exist, and it seems quite pointless to throw away all the history and resonance Ravenholdt has built up.

In any case, the Rogue community is trying to convince Blizzard to change course. Whether they'll succeed or not, I don't know. A lot of it might just come down to art time. If Blizzard has already finished the artwork and modelling for the Dalaran sewers, they may just stick with their decision.

Still, though, I take this instance as a caution against being too clever and dismissing bonds that the players have built up over the history of the game. Wherever possible, Blizzard should take advantage of those bonds, and allow them to do the heavy lifting.

Initial Thoughts on Legion

WoW's next expansion is Legion. I think it looks pretty interesting. A number of bloggers seem to think that it lacks a "game-changer", but I don't think a game-changer is really necessary.

Demon Hunters

The most interesting thing about demon hunters is that it is elf-only. This is pretty radical. For a while now, WoW has trended towards fewer restrictions. Classes have opened up to more races. For example, pretty much every race could be a monk or death knight. Demon Hunters represent a significant departure from that philosophy. Only high elves and blood elves can apply.

It's perfectly justifiable lore-wise. I think it's a better philosophy than the "all races can be all classes" ideal that WoW seemed to be heading to before.

The other interesting thing is that the Demon Hunter only has 2 specializations: one tank, one dps. Blizzard seems to be trying to move towards more distinctive specializations, and it will be interesting to see how the specializations for the other class weapons change.

Artifact Weapons

Taking a page from LOTRO's Legendary weapons and FFXIV's Relic weapons, Legion will introduce an artifact weapon for each specialization. This weapon looks like it will level up and improve over the course of the expansion, including cosmetic options.

Retribution Paladins will get the Ashbringer. It will be interesting to see weapons the other classes get. One neat idea I've seen is that Holy Paladins can use 2H maces, and Uther the Lightbringer's hammer was a 2H mace. That would be an outstanding artifact weapon for Holy Paladins.

Class Orders

After years of shying away from class quests and class-specific content, Blizzard is also reversing that stance and re-emphasising classes with class orders. Basically, each class gets a shared location where they reform an organization from the lore. It looks to be somewhat like the garrison, with followers or champions that you can recruit as well.

I strongly approve of this direction. Class lore is one of the strengths of Warcraft, and embracing it again is a great idea. Having a special location you share with others of your class is also good, and it will be interesting to see what locations are chosen.

Whatever is chosen, I expect the druid area to be a 24/7 dance party.

Story / New Areas

The story seems pretty solid. The Legion is one of the great enemies in Warcraft, and is always fun. There seems to be less emphasis on orcs (other than Gul'dan) which is good. The new areas all look interesting.

Class Changes

Legion seems to be bringing some extensive class changes. Blizzard has hinted that they want to try and differentiate the specializations more, and make them more focused around the class "fantasy". For example, Survival hunters are apparently becoming melee with a pet, which is pretty crazy. Beastmaster will be ranged with a pet, and Marksmanship will be ranged without a pet.

It will be interesting to see what they do with the other specializations.

Conclusions

Overall, I think the expansion looks pretty good. While there are no "game-changers", there looks to be lots of meat to delve into. If Blizzard can get the expansion out in a timely fashion, say November or December, I think they have a winner on their hands.

Client-side Settings

In the end I went with an ASUS Windows laptop. I had hoped that getting a machine which was somewhat aimed at gaming would cut down on the bloatware that came pre-installed. No such luck. I spent the first 30 minutes removing all the unnecessary programs. At least nothing looks malicious.

Then I set about the task of reinstalling software. It's actually kind of interesting what is saved client-side and what is saved on the server.

For FFXIV, pretty much all the settings are client-side. This includes things like gear sets and hot bars, in addition to all the UI and macros. I logged in to FFXIV, saw how much I would need to set up, and promptly logged out again. I'll have to tackle it a bit at a time.

For The Old Republic, at least the hotbars and key bindings are saved on the server. That saves a lot of work. The UI isn't saved, but I don't modify the base UI very much, so it shouldn't be that hard to set up again.

I think these long-term server-based games should strongly consider dividing the settings into machine-specific (graphics, sound) versus account-specific settings. And then saving the account settings on the server. It would cost some more space. But it really only needs to be downloaded at the start of the session, and saved at the end of the session.

Even just saving it as a giant blob of compressed text shouldn't be that bad. You could even take the hash of the settings and only change settings when the hash changes.

But it would make life a lot easier when moving between two machines.

Computer Troubles

It looks like my computer has died on me. There was a pop, the machine shut down, and I could smell the acrid stink of burning electronics. Amusingly, this is probably a common experience for those of us who game on PCs.

I'm trying to write this from my phone. My kingdom for a real keyboard. I don't really write a lot on my phone, so it is an interesting experience. It's actually kind of impressive how much of the load the auto-complete can handle.

In any case, I am trying to decide what I should do next. Should I get another Windows desktop, a Windows laptop, or a Mac laptop. A laptop might be nice, and would certainly take up less space and be more portable. On the other hand, the performance would be worse. As well, most Windows laptops tend to come with a lot of pre-installed junk.

A Mac laptop would be better in that case. However, I am a bit leery of gaming with it. There's Bootcamp, but I am not sure of the point of constantly switching between operating systems.

The default, of course, is another Windows desktop. Best value for money, a proper nVidia graphics card, and it's far easier to customize and get something with just Windows installed.

Suggestions from people who have been computer shopping recently are appreciated. I don't really pay attention to the hardware side of things anymore.

FFXIV: Heavensward Review

This post contains minor spoilers for the Heavensward storyline.

I've finished the main story in Heavensward, and am in the gearing up for endgame phase. So I thought it's a good point to review the expansion so far.

The main story quest is solid. It's pretty much what you want from a fantasy story. It's ironic, but it's the Japanese MMO known for catgirls which has given us a more classic western fantasy story about knights and dragons than any of the western MMOs. There are twists and turns, and the mythos of FFXIV is expanded on. It's very much a story for the fan of FFXIV, and builds on the story previously introduced.

Overall, I don't think I am a fan of the way the Ul'dah story was wrapped up, though. It's okay, but I think it was a missed opportunity. The main Ishgard story was much better.

The new zones are all good. Flying is well implemented, with a general principle of explore the zone and complete the main quests in the zone before you unlock it. FFXIV also has plenty of areas which are only accessible with flying. As well, once you have flying, quests are happy to make you wander all across the map.

There are three new classes introduced: dark knight (tank), astrologian (healer), and machinist (ranged support dps). Overall they seem interesting. However, it feels like SE erred on the side of caution, and started them off under-powered. Seeing two of the new classes in a dungeon run always makes me wince.

The dungeons and primals so far are fun and well done. I do think there should have been some minor changes in how the dungeons are distributed at endgame. Right now there are only two "expert" dungeons, but there is a third 60 story dungeon which does not have loot. It would be nice if that third dungeon was added to the expert category. On the other hand, this may be deliberate so that people can watch the cutscenes without pressure, in an attempt to avoid some of the mistakes of the original 2.0 release.

All classes got new abilities. I like the new Paladin abilities, which include two new combos for DPS, a heal, and an off-gcd move to force an automatic block

However, the paladin class story was very weak. It started off well, but then got really weird. One of the NPCs says, "This is the stupidest thing ever," and you really have to agree with him.

Heavensward is almost entirely for the max level player. The only thing a new player would get is access to the new Aura race. I would recommend that a new player wait until they hit level 50 before getting the expansion. Once you're level 50, you can get the expansion and it will allow you to earn experience and level while doing the 2.0-2.5 story.

All in all, Heavensward is "more of the same". It doesn't really make any major changes to how one plays FFXIV, just adds more of what the players like. If you liked FFXIV before, you'll like Heavensward. If you don't like FFXIV, well, it's highly unlikely you would have even gotten to the point where you can start the expansion.

I'm enjoying the expansion, and am looking forward to the next patch and continuation of the story.

SWTOR's Plans for Operations and Flashpoints

SWTOR released a post today, detailing the plans for Operations and Flashpoints in Fallen Empire. I am really not sure what to think.

For background, SWTOR is the only MMO that I am regularly raiding in. I've been raiding twice a week with the same group of people for about the last two years.

Flashpoints

A bunch of important story Flashpoints (Black Talon, Revan, Malgus flashpoints) are getting a Solo mode. There will be level-scaling so it's the appropriate difficulty. I'm not sure if there will be a GSI "Jesus" Droid or not, as that would pretty much remove all difficulty.

Many flashpoints are being converted to Tactical mode, where any four roles can group together, without needing a tank or healer. Everyone here will be bolstered to max level, so any levels can group together, starting from level 10. You get personal loot designed for your class and specialization.

Other flashpoints are Hard Mode, which require a tank and healer. They will be available at 50, with bolstering to max level, it looks like. Again, it looks like personal loot will be the normal, but the loot here is specifically called out as being the stepping stone to operations.

The flashpoint changes seem pretty reasonable. It's interesting that SWTOR has chosen to ignore the trinity until near max level, but I can't say that's entirely wrong. For someone who's just interested in the story and simple group content, sticking with the individual story, Solo Flashpoints, and Tactical Flashpoints will provide a good amount of content.

Operations

For operations, the key phrase is "however with Knights of the Fallen Empire there will not be any new Operations." Now, Bioware doesn't specify if that means no new operations at launch, or no new operations for the entirety of the expansion. If it's the former, that's pretty reasonable, especially with the other changes. If it's the latter, that's a huge change.

All operations will be re-tuned for max level (8-man and 16-man) and will have a Story Mode and a Hard Mode.  There will also be a Nightmare mode for some operations. Each day a different Story Mode operation will be available in Group Finder. It sounds like both Hard Mode and Story Mode operations will drop the same level of loot.

Each week, a different Hard Mode operation will be "highlighted". That operation will drop better loot. As well, Nightmare modes will also drop this better loot.

So loot-wise, the endgame progression as I understand it will look like:

• T0 - Hard Mode flashpoints
• T1 - Story Mode operations, non-highlighted Hard Mode operations
• T2 - Highlighted Hard Mode operation, Nightmare Modes

So I guess Bioware expects extended guilds to focus their raid nights on whatever the highlighted HM operation is. The edge guilds can tackle Nightmare Modes.

However, these are all old operations, just re-tuned. I don't know how well this will be received. Part of the draw of extended group content is demonstrating mastery over content. I'm not sure how well a forced rotation will work. If Bioware does introduce new operations, I'm not sure how they would work. Would they go into the rotation? Would they be a new tier T3?

Conclusions

To be honest, this system is probably great for the new players, solo players, or even group players who came to the game late. It's just not particularly attractive to the loyal group player who's been playing since launch, and has seen and beaten all these operations before.

There are other worries. One view of SWTOR's initial collapse is that story isn't enough to hold people. People did the story once, got to endgame, saw that it was lacking, and unsubscribed. Is this new plan simply repeating the same mistake that launch did?

Or will continuous delivery of new story be enough to keep people, such that this endgame gives them something to do while waiting for the next installment? Is Bioware better off by playing to their strengths, even if they lose many people who were mostly interested in raiding?

To be honest, as a long-time SWTOR raider--albeit one who is still struggling with the current Hard modes--these changes make me want to stop raiding. I might still stick around for the story, as I do enjoy that. But if I'm interested in doing proper extended group content, it might better to cut my losses, and go find a good group in WoW or FFXIV.

In some ways this is a pity. I've always liked SWTOR's operations. They've been interesting and inventive. It's unfortunate that they won't be making any new ones any time soon. I recommend that existing raiding games try to poach some of the ops designers from SWTOR.

Garrisons, Part III: Followers

I like the basic design of garrison followers. I liked recruiting them, leveling them up, and improving their gear. However, as with everything else, I think followers had some issues.

Mission Planning

Mission planning was just too complicated and tedious. There's a reason everyone used Master Plan, and that there was such an outcry when it stopped working with the 6.2 patch. Maximizing rewards by assigning followers to missions was an easy thing to automate, so it was automated.

I think Blizzard would have done better to make this simpler. For example, one thing they could have done is limit the number of available mission slots to match the number of characters you have. Thus you can't get 100% on all missions but must choose the missions you most want to win.

Or alternatively, perhaps at the beginning of the week you organize your followers into parties, with one tank, one healer, and three DPS. Then you are presented with 4 missions and you assign a party to each mission. By reducing the number of possible options, you greatly reduce the solution space, and make it much easier to do follower missions by hand.

Timed Missions

I don't think that timed missions were a good fit for MMOs. Timed missions might be good for mobile games, because your phone is always on you. But I don't think they match the rhythm of an MMO.

I think missions should have been more like dailies. They all complete at the same time each night. Then you can assign new missions sometime during the next day. I think that daily or weekly reset is a more natural fit for an MMO.

Follower Presence

Garrisons had a neat element where your followers would hang around your garrison and interact with you and other NPCs in small ways. Unfortunately, 99% of the time followers were out on a mission, so you rarely saw this element.

I think Blizzard should have just left your followers hanging around, even if they were technically assigned to a mission. Or possibly have the non-active followers hang around. (I don't actually know if this happens or not, I only have one inactive follower.)

Bodyguards

I like the follower bodyguard. I run with the draenei paladin tank. If I'm in a quest with Yrel, that's three paladins running around, delivering holy justice to the orcs. Good times.

However, the fact that you can click on the follower to bring up dialogue drives me nuts. It happens when I try to loot, and it happens an awful lot. Regular hunter and warlock pets don't have this issue, and I really wish Blizzard had thought more about this. The barracks should have just given a "Go Home" ability that you could put on your bars.

Conclusions

Overall, followers were a pretty good idea, and an interesting part of WoD. But the four issues above kept them from being great.

Garrisons, Part II: Professions

For the most part, the WoD professions design worked pretty well. Having a separate building for each profession, generating a limiting reagent through work orders, and allowing limited access to a profession you don't have, all worked reasonably well.

The major flaw with professions and the garrison were the mine and herb garden. Granting free access to these resources for everyone led to a lot of busywork. The mine and garden are the leading cause of the "chore" feeling of garrisons. This design also devalued the gathering professions.

By default, it would have been better if the mine and garden only provided extra automatic garrison resource generation, with higher values as you increased the building level. That would make it worthwhile for everyone to improve those plots, but otherwise they could be ignored.

Then add two new small profession buildings. A smelter and a nursery, or similar. Creating these buildings allows you to mine ore from the mine or get herbs from the garden, respectively. Then with the level 3 building, you could get Savage Blood or Felblight from mining and herbing. (You'd probably have to rename Savage Blood, though.)

Essentially, these buildings would make mining and herbalism the same as the other professions. If you were interested in those professions, you could choose the building. If you just wanted extra resources, it would cost you a small building space. But not everyone would be interested, and not everyone would feel pressured to collect their "free" resources.

The current design is deeply unfair to gatherers. They spent one of their two profession slots on the gathering profession, deliberately eschewing another crafting profession. It was really unfair of Blizzard to give that benefit to everyone else at no cost.

This would probably decrease the supply of herbs and ore, and material costs would have to be rebalanced across the professions.

Other than the mine and farm, Savage Blood is the only real issue with professions. Where ore and herbs are too plentiful, Savage Blood is too rare, and pushes crafters towards the Barn. Felblight is a better design, being spread to all the gathering professions.

Garrisons, Part I: Phasing

Garrisons are the signature mechanic of Warlords of Draenor. They are also a failure, and have hurt the game more than they have helped.

However, I don't think garrisons were that far from being a good mechanic. It feels like a few more iterations or tweaks could have brought garrisons to a much better place. As well, a lot of the problems with garrisons are long term problems that really only develop into serious issues after a few weeks of play.

In this series, I hope to take a look at different facets of the garrisons. To try to see where Blizzard went wrong, and what changes could have improved them.

Phasing

In my mind, the single biggest problem with garrisons is the way that they are phased. Each garrison is a personal phase for each player. this means that the player is always logging into an empty space. There are no other players around.

This very different from every previous expansion. Usually you log into a large city. In Pandaria, most people set their hearthstones to either the Shrine or Halfhill. So whenever you logged in you immediately saw other players running around. Even though Halfhill had a small phased area, it was set off from the main town.

I think this is hugely important for an MMO. Even though you may not explicitly group with other people, it's very important that the other people are present in your world. That's what makes an MMO an MMO.

In WoD, the first 10 minutes of every gaming session is spent alone, with no other players in sight. This makes WoD an intensely lonely experience. There is no "bustle", no energy, as in all the previous expansions. It's sort of the equivalent of once belonging to a large guild, but now you're the only player logging in. It's very dispiriting.

I think this is important enough to make a general rule. Players should always log in (and log out) in populated areas. A strong visual reminder that they are not alone is very important to this genre.

Solution

The best solution I can think of is to have a much more complicated phasing system. Something where common areas of the garrison, like the central courtyard are shared. Each plot would be shared with other players who have the same building on the plot as you.

So even though everyone has their own garrison, it looks like everyone is in the same garrison, and it is a bustling center with players running all over the place. Of course, this would probably be much harder to implement cleanly.

Another path would have been a system where there are multiple separate buildings in the garrison are owned by separate players. I.e. no real phasing, but an actual community. For example in a guild of 10 people, each person gets their own plot in a common guild garrison.

Of course, this system is crazy complicated, and there are lots of problems. What happens if someone leaves the guild and wants to move her plot elsewhere? What happens when people stop logging in and the plots become empty?

This system is more fit for sandbox games, I think. The complex phasing would have been a better fit for WoW.

A Better Community Through Natural Selection

It is becoming common wisdom that FFXIV has a better community than WoW. I'm not really sure how true that is. But I did have an interesting experience yesterday that is causing me to wonder, and connect the dots with other common complaints about FFXIV.

Ravana Primal Experience

A guildmate was at the Ravana primal 8-man fight. I play a tank, so queues are instant for me, and I had beaten the fight earlier. I grouped up with my guildmate and we queued up. We got into an instance where everyone except me and the other tank were new. The other tank seemed relatively hardcore. He took charge, gave quick instructions, and went in first. And we wiped.

Ravana has a add phase. The adds summon swords and need to be killed before they finish summoning. If they summon two swords, the group can survive Ravana's next special. But if they summon three or more sword, the group will wipe.

We get three swords on the first, second, and third attempt. The other tank reiterates the importance of killing the adds. On the fourth attempt, we get four swords. You could almost hear the tank's disbelief coming through the chat. I felt sure that this run would explode into acrimony and finger-pointing at the DPS for not pulling their weight.

Instead, the other tank took a deep breath, and assigned one healer to switch to DPS during the add phase, while the other healer concentrated on keeping the tank up. It worked well, and the fifth attempt would have been a kill except one healer got knocked off the edge and the other healer just couldn't keep up with the damage by himself.

The sixth attempt went smoothly, and we downed Ravana.

I realized that I've been conditioned by other MMOs to assume that automatic random groups will crumble when significant adversity is met. It still happens in FFXIV, but it seems more likely that the group will attempt to work through the issues.

Heavensward Accessibility Controversy

To flip topics for a second, there is a somewhat-common complaint about Heavensward. It's not actually coming from current players of FFXIV but from some lapsed or potential players. You see, you can't jump into Heavensward right away. You have to go through the entire 2.0-2.5 storyline, and all the associated trials and dungeons. A lot of people who were potentially interested in the expansion balk at that requirement

The current playerbase, by and large, is firmly on SE's side here. The story is important. Working through the content doesn't take that long. SE constantly sends higher-level players back to old instances, so that keeps the queues moving. Besides, if you haven't done the content yet, it's still new to you.

But there's no denying that the story requirement is a barrier to entry. For example, WoW dealt with this in the last expansion by giving out a free level 90, so you could jump straight into Warlords of Draenor.

Natural Selection of Players

To connect the two topics, consider the most common reasons people try FFXIV and then stop playing. The initial questing is slow, with lots of errand-running. Actually the entire game is filled with errand-running from one NPC to another. Combat is slower than normal, with the 2.5s GCD making it much more languid than the faster paced combat in other games.

Perhaps this slowness at the start of the game acts as a filter on would-be players. The impatient are quickly weeded out, so the the players which remain are more patient than average. A form of natural selection. And a playerbase of patient players is more likely to be considered a "better community" than one which is impatient, as my Ravana experience demonstrates.

The story requirement in Heavensward acts as a similar filter. Players who are too impatient to work through the older content don't sign up for the expansion.

There are arguably other filters in place. PvP is a minor thing, so the Killer archetype is discouraged. It's a subscription game, so players tend to be older and more dedicated. Progression mechanics seem to be aimed at the steady player, who works on new classes or relic weapon or gear "grinds" at a steady pace.

Perhaps the "better community" of FFXIV is a result of "survival of the fittest". Where the players most suited to the FFXIV environment are the type of players who create that "better community".

Meanwhile, games like WoW have chosen the other path, of catering to the impatient. Perhaps that is why their communities seem to be getting worse, because their players are more impatient than average (or at least, more impatient than the FFXIV average).

I should also mention that SE has introduced mechanics for community building. Things like commendations, or the massive XP/reward bonus you get when someone in your group has never done the instance before. It is an open question as to how much these mechanics contribute to the better community. They certainly don't hurt, though.

Of course, there is a price for this natural selection. Players drop the game because it is too slow or too inconvenient. That reduces the potential audience for the game. By not including a shortcut to Heavensward, SE is giving up on potential players. Maybe the community created by the remaining players makes up for that. But maybe if SE made the shortcut, had made the early experience more interesting, FFXIV would be a 10 million subscriber game.

On Steam

Steam is essentially reverse piracy. Instead of playing games you didn't pay for, you pay for games you'll never play.

 - Nemarus, from Reddit

FFXIV: Heavensward Early Access

Early Access for FFXIV's new expansion, Heavensward, started on Friday. I had put FFXIV on the back burner for the last couple months, but I jumped in and had a look around with my paladin.

I had already done the Main Story Quest from the 2.1-2.5 patches. FFXIV requires them to unlock pretty much everything in Heavensward, save for the new race. However, I believe they've added gear to the Main Story Line that prepares you for the expansion, so you can skip the gear grind of the 2.0 endgame.

I've mostly been going through the Main Story Quest. I've completed the first zone so far. So far, it's pretty much just FFXIV, just more. Same style of quests and small stories. I did the first dungeon and first new primal. Both were pretty nice and reasonably easy. Thankfully, I'm a tank, so queues are instant. I've heard that queues for the other roles are pretty long. On the other hand, mobs in the expac seem to have a lot of hitpoints, so questing does take longer as a tank.

Heavensward is also extending the Job class stories, and giving out new abilities. I'm running out of hotbar space, though, so I'm not sure how useful this is, exactly.

In addition to the new zones and new stories, there are three new classes: Machinist, Dark Knight, and Astrologian. I haven't tried any of them yet.

The game also got a DirectX 11 version. I'm using it and it seems good. Though honestly, I don't really remember the old graphics, so I cannot really compare. The water looks really pretty now. The DX11 performance is fine for me, and my machine is about 3 years old (GeForce GTX 660 Ti).

Heavensward also introduced flying in the new zones. However, their solution to flying is the same as WoW's compromise. Each zone contains Aetheric Currents which you have to find and attune to. As well, certain quests also reward Aetheric Currents, so you have to complete those. Essentially, you have to finish exploring and questing in a zone before you can fly in it. However, since FFXIV isn't a seamless world, you unlock flying in each zone separately.

If you liked FFXIV before, you'll enjoy Heavensward. It's basically more of the same. If you didn't like FFXIV, I don't think Heavensward will change your mind.

Legendaries Are The New Attunements

I just realized the other day that Blizzard brought back attunements in Mists of Pandaria. Only, in classic Blizzard fashion, they flipped them and made them driven by rewards, rather than by punishments.

The purpose of attunements is to provide a guide through content. Something that tells the player if she is ready for new content. In The Burning Crusade, that role was played by attunements. You couldn't go to Kara until you had done the quest chain, same with T5, and T6 required defeating the bosses in T5.

Now, you can jump ahead if you want, but if you follow the Legendary questline, it paces you through the content. First you do some 5-man dungeons, then you do Highmaul. You repeat Highmaul for a few weeks, and gear up as a side-effect. By the time you've done the Legendary stages of Highmaul, you're ready for Blackrock Foundry, and the process repeats.

The reward, a Legendary item, is a very strong motivator. Pretty much every guide says to start the Legendary quest line as soon as you can. That encourages you to stick to the quest line, which matches you to content that you should be geared for.

The modern Legendaries occupy the same design space as attunements. But rather than restrictions on players, they are seen as rewards. The carrot, not the stick. Players also have the freedom to skip ahead if they know what they are doing, and there are no issues with raid composition that previous attunements used to have.

I'm kind of bemused that I didn't see this before. It's excellent design work from Blizzard. And what's most amusing and impressive is that it's the same trick Blizzard always pulls.

Knights of the Fallen Empire

Bioware revealed the trailer and some details on the latest expansion for The Old Republic: Knights of the Fallen Empire.

The trailer is really good, and certainly presents an interesting story.

Some takeaways from the day's revelations:

• Bioware is doing a modified A Realm Reborn / Mass Effect 2. Essentially, they're making a sequel on top of the existing game. New players will have an option to create a level 60 and jump into the sequel right away. In the sequel, there will be a timeskip, which will reset a lot of the character state. For example, you will probably lose your existing companions, and have to recruit new ones, as in ME2.


• New emphasis on subscriptions. Note that Bioware is not offering any one-time price for the content. You have to subscribe. On the other hand, once you subscribe once, that content is unlocked permanently, even if you unsubscribe later. So I guess new content now effectively costs $15. In some ways you can consider the original game to be F2P, but the "sequel" is a subscription game.


• Single story. Much like FFXIV, or any of Bioware's single player games, it looks like there will be one single main story that all classes play through. This probably extends to common companions as well. This does cut the companion cast down from 40 to a more manageable number, possibly allowing the player to reject some companions.


• Faction Merge. It looks like both the Sith Empire and Republic factions will be merged post-60. The new faction in the game will be purely an NPC/enemy faction. This should improve things like PvP and PvE queues. But at the same time, it will be really weird not to be Empire vs Republic.


• Small level cap increase. The new level cap increases to 65. Five levels seems like a pretty small increase for the amount of content they are proposing. Possibilities:
• Each chapter is very short.
• Leveling will take a long time with 1-2 chapters per level.
• Most of the story content will come at max level.


• Big Question: How do we get from the current story to the expansion? This is the question all TOR players are asking themselves. In the current storyline, the current bad guy, the former Sith Emperor Vitiate, is in a position of strength. Will he be defeated by the new bad guys? Is he somehow involved with the new bad guys? It does seem weird that there would be two Immortal Emperors running around.

It's a really interesting expansion and experiment. In some ways, it's surprising that Bioware just didn't go ahead and make an entirely new game. I guess they didn't want to shutter the existing game entirely, and want to leverage the existing content. Additionally, it is easier to claim the game is F2P, while still trying to make it subscription-based.

Is The Old Republic pulling A Realm Reborn?

There was a leak on the Star Wars Fallen Empire site. It was promptly taken down, but not before an screenshot made it to Reddit.

It looks like a whole new game. Though I think they aren't getting rid of the old one, just starting from the top.

Depending on how they're counting content, they say they have nine chapters ready, and plans for at least seven more. The current game only has five chapters. Now, maybe each new chapter will be shorter, like one planet in length. Still that's a lot of content.

Also, they imply that the class stories are coming back. Though maybe that's just a reference to the 1-50 class stories.

Honestly, I don't know what to think of this. If this leak is true, EA/Bioware essentially decided to double down on SWTOR, and do what Square Enix did to FFXIV. I was not expecting that at all.

To be honest, the scope of the changes in this leak is rather unbelievable. It might just be Bioware excessively hyping a more normal set of changes or new content.

The Flight Compromise

Blizzard has compromised on flying in Warlords of Draenor. They will tie flight to a meta-achievement for outdoor world content:

You’ll earn this achievement in Patch 6.2 by mastering the outdoor environment of Draenor—exploring Draenor’s zones, collecting 100 treasures in Draenor, completing the Draenor Loremaster and Securing Draenor achievements, and raising the three new Tanaan Jungle reputations to Revered.

Basically, do all the outdoor content. The reward is a rylak mount and flying in Draenor for all your characters.

It's a pretty solid compromise. All content is initially experienced as the devs intend, but people will get flight eventually. It's all solo outdoor content, so it fits thematically. It only needs to be done once, so people with lots of alts get a break.

All in all, a pretty good resolution to the issue and a good model going forward.

Leveraging the Protestant Work Ethic or Elitism

One of the most interesting things about this solution is the way it harnesses a basic instinct of many gamers. I'm not sure if there's a specific term for this, but it's somewhere in-between the Protestant work ethic and elitism. Basically, for gamers, there is a link between reward and effort. Rewards should be earned. The greater the reward, the necessary effort to earn that reward must be great as well. There is a synchronicity when effort and reward match up perfectly.

The community has just spent the last few months insisting that flying is such a great reward that it cannot be removed. This creates space for Blizzard to set the bar high to earn that reward. And then the playerbase will defend that bar as correct and right. In fact, you can see a lot of this in comments to this compromise on the various forums. The people who think these requirements are too high are generally getting mocked.

Personally, I think Blizzard has nailed the effort-to-reward match-up with this compromise. It's a fair amount of work, but it's all doable solo, and nothing is too difficult. And the reward is really good. It really is the perfect amount of work for the reward. As such, they have sated that elitism/work ethic instinct of much of the playerbase. They have won themselves a lot more defenders than if the required achievement had been much harder or much easier.

Prison Games

From Azuriel, here are two hypothetical scenarios.

Scenario 1

The first one was this: you’re going to jail for ten years, but it’s a minimum security prison that will allow you to take one offline game (any DLC included) with you. But that will be the only game you get for those ten years. Which game do you pick?

I'd take something that had really good modding tools. Maybe the old Neverwinter Nights. That way I'd be able to continuously reshape the game.

Though I might just take a decent version of MS Visual Studio instead. A full-out programming language might be more interesting. Not sure if that counts as a game, though.

Scenario 2

The second scenario is similar, but this time it’s life in prison. For some insane reason, the Warden will allow you to take any three games and allow an internet connection. The parameters did not specify whether future DLC or microtransactions will be free for you, but let’s assume you can make enough money stamping licence plates to cover, say, $30/month. Which games do you pick?

This one is a lot more complicated. Life is a very long time. What games from 20 years ago are we still playing? What game do we expect to still be running 20 years from now? Also, if the company comes out with a sequel, does it count as the same game? For example, SE has FFXIV now, and is essentially sun-setting FFXI.

Heck, what game companies do I still expect to be around 20 years from now?

I almost want to choose the same games as the first scenario, just because I can guarantee those games or programs will still run.

I guess I'd pick WoW or Eve Online. They're among the oldest, and the most likely to still be in existence. I'd think about Everquest, but I'm not sure how stable the company Daybreak is. FFXIV might be a choice, but I think SE will eventually go the sequel route and bring out FFXX or something.

A FPS might be a decent choice, as I don't really care about MOBAs. But I'm not sure that any one FPS will live long enough.

Another good option would be an online casual game hangout. One which plays traditional games like poker or chess. Those games have stood the test of time, and you're really just hanging out to chat while you play.

So my choices would be WoW, a casual card or board game hangout, and an offline moddable game from Scenario 1 (or Visual Studio). That way I'd at least have a backup if the online games ceased to exist.

Cosmetic Versus Content Pricing

Hearthstone introduced a new Hero: Magni Bronzebeard. This is basically a replacement for the current Warrior, Garrosh. As far as I can tell, Magni is entirely cosmetic. The warrior ability is identical, as are all the existing cards. Magni just replaces the hero artwork and sound effects. Magni is being sold for $10.

I thought that this price was entirely reasonable. Magni is cosmetic, and is totally unnecessary. So why not charge a premium?

I was quite surprised when I saw the community reaction to Magni's pricing. Though honestly, when it comes to F2P games, I should just expect that the community will always complain, regardless of what the pricing actually is.

But seriously, isn't it better for the content that is sold to be cheap, and the cosmetics be expensive? Shouldn't a player on a limited budget be directed to content, like packs of cards or Arena, rather than pushing her towards unnecessary cosmetic items?

The problem, however, is that consumers look at the individual transactions, rather than the game as a whole. Content is considered to have more value than cosmetics, so inexpensive content is seen as a good bargain. Meanwhile expensive cosmetics is seen as poor value, and the consumer gets angry at the company for "gouging".

But pricing according to perceived value would have a negative effect on the F2P model. Content would be expensive, and cosmetics would be cheap. It would actually be very expensive to play the core game, becoming closer to the Pay-2-Win complaints. The base level of money needed to play would skyrocket, while the optional value extracted would be quite small. F2P games operate on the opposite principle, that the base level of money needed is low, while the optional value that can be extracted is high and variable. This is the very element that allows players to pay what they want and they can afford.

If a player has a budget of only $10, it's better that she buys 5 rounds of Arena, rather than 5 cosmetic items. In the long run, spending money on content will be more useful. Pricing cosmetics more expensively pushes the limited budget player towards content, as the better value matters more to her.

High profit cosmetic items allow content to be sold relatively cheaply. If you're a fan of F2P games, you should be applauding Magni's pricing. In the end, it's much better for all players that content is cheap and cosmetics are expensive, rather than the reverse.

STWOR: Class Story Comparison

This post contains significant spoilers for all the class stories in Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Overview

Having finished all eight class stories, I thought I would take a look at all the stories together. First, here are my overall scores, and links to each individual post. There were roughly four tiers of quality. Within each tier the order is pretty arbitrary, and mostly personal preference.

Score	Class
90%	1. Imperial Agent
80%	2. Jedi Consular 3. Sith Warrior 4. Jedi Knight 5. Republic Smuggler
70%	6. Sith Inquisitor 7. Republic Trooper
60%	8. Bounty Hunter

All the stories did succeed at a basic level. They all felt like their class was supposed to. The Smuggler story involved evading the law, making questionable deals and witty banter. The Bounty Hunter story was about hunting bounties. The Agent story was a spy story. So from that perspective all the class stories were a success.

Good Common Elements

These are two major patterns I noticed that made some class stories better.

1. Constant Supporting Cast

The better stories tended to have a constant supporting cast throughout the chapters. For example, Agents had Keeper and Watcher Two. Troopers had General Garza. The Jedi had Satele Shan and the Jedi Council. Having the supporting cast stay somewhat constant from chapter to chapter helped keep a feeling of continuity, as well as allowing the player to really become attached to some characters.

I think the Bounty Hunter was hurt the most by this, as the supporting cast completely changed from chapter to chapter.

2. Good Villains

By and large, the stories with better villains were at the top of the list. Darth Jadus, Hunter, Darth Baras, and the Sith Emperor were all excellent villains, and greatly enhanced their respective stories. On the other hand, Darth Thanaton, General Rakton, and Jun Seros were weak villains, and dragged their stories down.

Imperial Agent Excellence

In my view, the Imperial Agent story is the strongest. It does all the basics competently and had an excellent supporting cast and villains. It was also the only story to attempt to be "more" than just a Star Wars story.

If someone said "Give me a story about a Jedi Consular", you'd get the Consular story. Ditto the Sith Warrior and the Jedi Knight. These stories had themes, but the themes did not drive the story. Instead the "archetype experience" drove the story. The Knight story is the Knight story because that's what you'd expect the Knight's story to be about.

The Agent story, on the other hand, sought to answer a question. The United States Declaration of Independence states that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." The Agent story asks what happens if that is not true, what if some men are inherently more powerful (by orders of magnitude) than others. How do the powerless act?

The Agent story had some interesting answers, especially in Chapter 3. But every chapter, including the prologue, touched upon this theme in some fashion.

This theme is also not specific to the Agent. The Sith classes could have looked at the same theme from the other side. But starting with a stronger theme, and then wrapping the Agent "experience" around that theme, led to a stronger story in general.

Conclusions

That's a quick overview of what I thought of the class stories in SWTOR. They're all decent. But the Imperial Agent story is a cut above, being driven by a unique theme, as opposed to just the archetype experience.