The MMO That Abandoned Raiding

My SWTOR raid group called it quits tonight. A bit sad, because we had a good run of about three years or so. I think we were all getting a little burned out. But it also has sunk in that SWTOR has given up on raiding. It has been about 16 months since the last operation was released, and looks very unlikely that any future operations will ever be made.

Back in the first few years of WoW, there was a huge debate between raiders and casuals. Casuals pointed out that raiders were a small minority of the player base, and that the devs spent too many resources on them. Raiders felt that they were the dedicated players, who made guilds and a community, made an MMO an MMO as it were.

WoW, and FFXIV to lesser extent, followed the path of trying to make raiding more accessible to the broader player base. It's perhaps not quite as successful as people would like, but that path has preserved group content.

With the release of the Knights of the Fallen Empire, SWTOR has gone in the opposite direction. All new content has been aimed at the solo player. The main story content does not work well with groups, even duos. The new side content is again mostly aimed at solos or duos.

SWTOR did re-tune a lot of the existing group content for KotFE, but did not create any new group content.

I'm not saying this is the wrong decision. Focusing on single-player content might be the right call for SWTOR. Maybe the casuals were right all along, and the raiders are superfluous. Maybe the number of people who want group content is not enough to justify the cost of creating it.

It is a bit of a pity, as Bioware did make good operations and flashpoints back in the day. I especially liked all the puzzle bosses.

Vanilla Servers, Part II

A lot of replies to the last post felt that I do not understand what attracts people to the idea of vanilla WoW servers. I, of course, disagree with that.

People who clamor for vanilla servers generally want two things:

1. Vanilla content - the quests, zones, and classes that existed at that time.
2. Vanilla "feel" - a return to an era where server community was important, where guild and reputation mattered, where the difficulty was slightly higher and required groups to interact more.

Of these two, I think getting the first one is extraordinarily unlikely. Blizzard would essentially be launching and maintaining a completely separate game. I think that the risk is too high. So given that this is basically not going to happen, I don't see much point in expending energy over it.

The second item, however, I believe might be possible. It would be a variant on the current game, and would be a lot easier to maintain. Fixes for the current game would hit both server types. It might even be good for the game by segregating the audience a little bit. The people who insist on increased challenge would have a home.

Of course, even maintaining server variants is more effort. There's already two variants in PvP/PvE. Another orthogonal variant makes four possibilities. But I think it's still less risky and less effort than a full vanilla server.

WoW Legends Server Idea

I think opening an actual Vanilla WoW server, with Vanilla quests, classes, talent trees, and other systems would be way too much work for too little reward.

However, I do think that, for a reasonably small amount of effort, Blizzard could make a version of the current game that reasonably approximated the original experience. I'll call such a server a "Legends" server.

A Legends server would have:

• A constant Legends debuff which reduced health, damage done, healing done, and XP gained by about 50%.
• Looking For Group/Raid disabled
• Heirlooms disabled
• No server transfers
• No cross-realm zones
• Battlegrounds/Arena disabled
• One character per account per server
• Pet Battle Queue disabled
• No Starter Edition accounts
• No Death Knights / Demon Hunters, classes which start at a higher level
• Black Market Auction disabled

I think that would be enough to create a Vanilla-like experience. You'd still have the same quests, classes and talents as the regular game. But a lot of the elements which Vanilla champions say hurt communities would be disabled. I also think that the amount of work required to create such a server would be relatively low.

You'll note that the one thing I did not add was a level cap of 60, or disabling access to expansions. I think that will be very buggy, and end up eating a lot of QA and bugfixing resources. It would also require class design to be tuned for a cap of 60. Raids at 60 would have be tuned again. As well, there is gear from the expansions available at 60 that outstrips raid gear, and trying to keep that gear out of the hands of capped 60s might be a lot of work.

I think trying for a lower cap is simply unfeasible. Better to simply have the same game as the regular servers, just with some added restrictions. The Legends debuff could be reduced at the real maximum level too, if that turns out to be an issue.

I think a compromise like this could worthwhile for Blizzard to experiment with. Personally, I think a lot of people would roll on the server, but most would soon go back to the regular game.

Vanilla Servers and Paladins

Vanilla Servers

I gather there was a little tempest over one of the Vanilla WoW pirate servers. So much so that people are calling for Blizzard to officially support Vanilla servers. Personally, I think the demand for Vanilla servers is overrated. I think that if Blizzard opened one, a lot of people would join, and then the vast majority would quit within three months.

Not to mention that it would be a pretty expensive undertaking. Unlike pirate hobby servers, Blizzard has to pay the people working on their Vanilla servers. People are expensive.

Maybe I'm a little cynical about gamers, but if there is this pent-up demand for a Vanilla-like experience, why don't people go and play one of the current MMOs that offer a similar experience? Games like RIFT or EQ2 or FFXIV? I'm sure the potential audience will always  have a reason why the option you have to pay for is not good enough.

The Vanilla Paladin

Azuriel has declared that a lot of the Vanilla and TBC design was garbage. That may be so, but he has singled out the paladin class as an example. Thus I am forced to defend it.

The vanilla Paladin was not badly designed. Rather, it was designed for a game that soon became obsolete. The paladin was designed for 5-man groups, where the make up was [tank, healer,  2x dps, paladin]. The paladin would back up the tank and healer at the same time.

That's why the vanilla Paladin appears to be so passive. Its combat is very passive. But that's so you could run up to a mob, Judge, Seal and then focus on your group. You'd throw out heals, cleanses, and Blessings as appropriate. The UI was designed for this, so that you could throw spells on groupmates without losing your main target, even without mouseovers. You could tank one mob, or small adds, when the warrior took the rest of the group.

Shamans were the opposite. Shaman support was passive, through totems mainly, but their damage was active. Paladins had active support, but passive damage.

The thing is that this system does not scale into raids. [3x tanks, 3x healers] is stronger than [2x tanks, 2x healers, 2x paladins]. And obviously solo play is fairly boring. Though honestly, I kind of liked it. It was very steady and relentless.

But the Vanilla paladin in 5-man groups is still my favorite MMO playstyle, across all the MMOs I've tried.

FFXIV Beast Tribes

Lately I've been working on the Beast Tribe quests in FFXIV.

The Beast tribes are an interesting part of FFXIV. They're sort-of monstrous, but generally the "civilized" people of Eorzea have been pushing into their territory, in some cases outright violating treaties. In response, the beast tribes summoned their gods as Primals. But exposure to Primals "tempers' a normal being, brainwashing them into slaves of the Primal. The beast tribe quests are handed out by a splintered faction of the tribe, who have avoided being tempered, and need your help to defeat or survive the remainder of their tribe.

It's an interesting dynamic, combined with the very different personalities of each tribe. For example, the Amalj'aa are a warrior tribe revering strength, the slyphs are playful and like to play tricks, the Vath are a breakaway sect of an insect hive mind who are now just discovering individuality.

So far, I've finished the Amalj'aa and Vanu Vanu stories. The Amalj'aa was a typical story of gaining strength to take revenge. The Vanu Vanu was ... kind of weird, really. It ended in an epic dance-off.

Here's a video of the ending from YouTube:

   

Mechanically, the Beast tribe quests are kind of like faction dailies in WoW. It's aimed at the solo player, and you earn reputation with the tribe. As your reputation increases more of the story is unlocked, as are new quests. Rewards-wise, you earn a little bit of endgame currency, pets, and a mount at max level. The beast tribe quests are also a way to progress on the Relic weapon quest.

The big mechanical difference between WoW's factions and the FFXIV beast tribes is that FFXIV has a very low daily cap on quests. You can do a maximum of 12 dailies each day. The tribes effectively only offer 3 quests per day (the original tribes offer more, but only 3 that give max rewards).

I actually like this low cap a lot. It's pretty easy to finish your dailies in about 30 minutes. If you can play for longer, you can then do a dungeon or whatever. But if you only have half an hour to play, you can still feel like you got everything done. Beast tribes are aimed at the solo, casual player, and they feel like they hit the perfect spot for that audience.

Diablo 3 Builds and Fun

I've been playing a bit more of Diablo 3 lately. I've been playing my regular Crusader and Wizard, rather than a seasonal character.

One thing I've found is that I'm not too happy with my Crusader. I cannot seem to find a build I enjoy. I'm currently running a 6-piece Akarat's Champion set with Blessed Hammer. It's good enough, but it's just not fun enough. It's a little hard to explain, but it doesn't really feel "melee" enough for me.

Meanwhile I'm running this Fire/Lightning Arcane Torrent with Hydras build on my Wizard and I find it hilarious. Stunning, fire, electricity, I really enjoy playing it, even if it's much lower power than my Crusader.

Any D3 players out there have suggestions for an interesting melee-ish Crusader build that's still reasonably effective? I did try a Thorns-build with the Invoker set, but this was before Blizzard revamped Thorns. I remember that it was decent, but annoying because I couldn't kill Treasure Goblins.

The Missing Element in Competitive Seasons

Overwatch has released its current plans for competitive ranked play.  Basically, it will have "seasons" that are one month long, as in Hearthstone. Everyone starts at the bottom rank, and you try to play your way up through the various divisions. At the end of the month, prizes or bragging rights are handed out, and the ranks are all reset.

The immediate reaction from the community is that the seasons are too short. That they would much prefer a season which was 3 or 6 months long, giving people time to come to their true rankings.

I am not entirely in agreement with this view. In an odd way, I think that the current season length is both too short and too long. The real problem, in my view, is that the competitive structure of many games is missing a crucial element.

The missing element is tournaments.

As an analogy, let's look at a sport like tennis. Tennis has matches between two players or teams. Tennis has a 52-week season where the entire pro community is ranked. But tennis also has intermediate structure of tournaments.

A tournament is different from a season, and has a lot of desirable properties. The time frame is much shorter. Only a subset of the community participates. Most players don't attend every tournament. Each tournament usually produces different winners and different results. Prizes handed out at the tournament level end up going to wider variety of players.

Overwatch wants a lot of these properties for its seasons. But a month is too long for a tournament. It's long enough that most players cannot skip it if they want. But it's too short to act like a true season does and produce definitive rankings.

My suggestion for Overwatch would be to actually break the current "season' into a tournament which runs weekly and a longer season of 3,6, or 12 months which aggregates the weekly tournament results. This way players have less pressure to participate in every tournament. There are more changes at the top, with different players placing in the Top 100 each week.

I do think that many games have this same hole in their structures. They have individual matches, and they have long seasons, but they don't do anything with the medium time-frame. The only games I can think of that significantly utilize this time-frame are Path of Exile and Magic Online.

For example, imagine that Overwatch you could join a league. Leagues start every hour and run for four hours. You are only matched with people in your league. When you get two losses, you are knocked out of the league. At the end of the time, the person who won the most matches without getting two losses wins the league.

I think that there's a lot of room for fun game play in this medium time-frame. Obviously, the time frame is long enough that not everyone will participate. It can't be the only option to play. But it could stand to be used a lot more than it is currently.

One Joke, Two Communities

Today is April Fool's Day, so the internet is useless as normal. However, I found one interesting thing. Both the Reddit Eve Online and FFXIV communities posted the same joke, and both were upvoted to the top of their respective pages.

The difference, though, is a little illuminating about the respective communities:

• Think I found the most awesome FFXIV player to date.

• Think I found the most embarrassing person in the whole of r/Eve (Link to comment history)

(The joke is that both these posts linked to the history of the current viewer.)

---

The best April Fool's joke I saw this year was also on Reddit, in the Overwatch page. The moderators made a small notification that sometimes appeared in the lower right corner and looked exactly like the Battle.Net notifications that appear on your desktop if you have the Battle.net app open. The notification said "Overwatch is now playable."

Understated, perfect for the target audience, and brilliantly cruel.

Intentional Concessions in Magic: the Gathering

There's an interesting controversy in tournament-level Magic these days around the concept of "intentional concessions".

Background

Tournaments in Magic follow a standard format: X rounds of Swiss, followed by a Top 8 playoff. In Swiss matching, players with the same record in the tournament so far are matched with each other. For example, for Round 4, the players who are 3-0 play each other, the 2-1's play each other, etc. So you're always playing an opponent who's done roughly as well as you are. The top 8 after the Swiss portion go to the playoffs.

In the past, in the last rounds of the Swiss portion, the players who are at the top often "intentionally draw". With the draw, both players' records are good enough to qualify for the Top 8. And they get to save some time and the possibility that a loss might knock them out of the Top 8. Though getting knocked out is pretty unlikely, due to the way tie-breakers work.

The intentional draw is regarded as a fact of life in tournament Magic. It may not be the best scenario, but it's equal on both sides and has a fairly neutral effect on the tournament on the whole.

Current Controversy

At the pro level, some players are now asking for intentional concessions in certain situations, where one player deliberately takes a loss, not just a draw. For example, say Alice is 8-0 coming into the final Swiss round, and she gets paired down with Bob, who is 7-1. A player will need at least an 8-1 record to get into the Top 8. So regardless of whether she wins or loses, Alice is a lock for Top 8.

Bob, on the other hand, must win this round. Even a draw, which will bring him to 7-1-1, won't be enough. Bob asks Alice to intentionally concede the match, since it makes no difference to her.

Now, the non-Pro community is strongly against Alice deliberately losing. It is completely against the spirit of competition. It screws over Carl, who ends up in 9th because Bob got a "free" win.

However, the Pro community is a bit more torn on the issue. To see why, you can think of them as being in an iterative Prisoner's Dilemma where they can co-operate or defect. The optimum strategy in these types of situations is to cooperate. After all, in next tournament, maybe Alice will want to ask someone to intentionally concede. If she defects first instead of cooperating, she can expect future partners to defect to punish her. And hardcore gamers are the type of people who will very strongly flock to the optimal strategy in a Prisoner's Dilemma game.

It's also really hard to outlaw intentional concessions. For example, there are good reasons to concede. Maybe you need to leave, so you concede the current match. And it's really hard to tell when someone is deliberately playing badly. Gamers are very good at obeying the letter of the law and completely evading the spirit.

Solutions

In my view, the main reason this is a problem is because seeding in the Top 8 does not really matter. It's really hard to predict who your first opponent in the Top 8 will be. Plus the 8th person's deck is only slightly worse than the 1st person. That difference would be swamped by the variance in the game of Magic itself.

If seeding mattered, Alice would be hurt, perhaps significantly, by taking a deliberate loss.

Right now, the Top 8 playoffs are a best-of-5 match. My suggestion would be to give the higher-seeded player a game in hand. So the higher seed only needs to win 2 games, but the lower seed would need to win 3 games to take the match and advance.

Of course, this significantly slants the matches in favor of the higher seed. But that in turn makes it vital to get as high a seed as you can in the Swiss portion of the tournament. Perhaps this solution could be toned down to only apply to the first round of the playoffs, essentially giving the Top 4 an advantage over the 5th-8th place.

Diablo 3 Season 5

I recently went back and finished leveling my Season 5 Barbarian in Diablo 3. That makes 5 of 6 classes done, leaving the Witch Doctor for Season 6.

The newest element in Season 5 are Set Dungeons. As you complete the goals of Season 5, you are rewarded with pieces from one of the class sets. For Barbarians, it's the Might of the Earth set. Each set has an associated Set Dungeon which requires you to complete tasks utilizing that set.

For example, the Might of the Earth set requires you to kill a Frozen enemy every 10 seconds for 1 minute. Now the only way a Barbarian can normally freeze an enemy is by using one of the Earthquake variants, which has a 60s cooldown. But the 4-piece bonus of the set has your Leap trigger an Earthquake when you land. So to fulfill that requirement, you have you take the Earthquake variant, and then Leap fast enough to kill enemies quickly.

There is another requirement as well which similarly takes advantage of the set's properties. The set dungeon is timed. 

One thing that wasn't clear is that you only need to meet one of the requirements to complete the dungeon, not both. I unnecessarily quit several times when I failed a requirement early. But in the end I decided to explore the whole dungeon, and it turned out that I was successful enough to finish the Set Dungeon and qualify for the season's rewards.

It was an interesting piece of content. To be honest, it's aimed at the crowd that runs a little higher than I do. I think I've only collected one other full set, on my Crusader.

All in all, though, it was a pretty enjoyable season.

Dippling a Toe Back Into WoW

Hearthstone has a promotion where you can get Lady Liadrin as a hero if you level a new character in World of Warcraft. Despite the fact that I am not actually playing Hearthstone, I decided to take the opportunity and level a new character. You can level to 20 without a subscription, making it very easy.

I created a Night Elf Druid, and mainly quested until 16, and then did a few dungeons to hit 20. Leveling to 20 was not a particularly fun experience. Here are the major issues as I see them.

Time-to-Kill

The Time-to-Kill for most mobs was really short. I didn't have any heirlooms, so I was just in quest greens. It's one thing to make the game easier for new players, but almost everything died in 2 global cooldowns. Very often only one if the first ability crit. It's actually kind of annoying because I was Feral, and it seemed very hard to get into the rhythm of using combos. Rake, Shred, and the mob would die before I could use a finisher.

It's one thing to have a short TtK in a game like Diablo, where you're pretty much spamming your mouse button. But in a game where you have an actual rotation where abilities work with each other, you really should at least get to use a full rotation before the mob dies.

If you want to make the game easier on new players, the better path would be to reduce mob damage, but keep a decent time to kill of at least 4-5 GCDs.

Heirlooms

I've said this before, but heirlooms are a mistake. One thing I didn't realize before, though, is that make group play for the non-heirloomed character singularly unfun.

I switched to Resto for the dungeons. The other players were in heirloom gear so they charged through the dungeon at max speed. I tried to heal, but my heals did so little because they had so much health and I had relatively few stats. But because they were pulling everything at once, they sometimes took enough damage to make things dangerous.

I think a lot of issues I have with group play in the current version of WoW have their genesis here. If people get into bad habits early, it's a lot harder to get them to "accept" proper play much later.

And that's not even getting into PvP, which I imagine must be horrific for the new player without heirlooms.

Stories

The revamp of the old world in Cataclysm was another mistake. It's been years since I played through Darkshore, and I don't remember the original zone very well. But the current Darkshore feels like it expects you to have played the old version. It feels like a continuation of that story, and it's kind of disconcerting to be dropped into the middle of things.

Conclusions

In some ways, the current early game of World of Warcraft feels hostile to new players, despite the fact that it's so trivially easy mechanically. You get all these neat abilities that combo together, and you can't get the satisfaction of executing a combo successfully, because the mob dies when you sneeze on it. Playing with other experienced players is like playing with cheaters because they're so far above you. And all the stories feel like you started reading a book in the middle rather than at the end.

First Impressions of The Division

I picked up Tom Clancy's The Division on the weekend. It's a pretty interesting game.

The Division is an RPG 3rd-person shooter. The setting is near-future New York, after a smallpox outbreak causes the city to descend into chaos and anarchy. The Division are a bunch of US government sleeper agents, who are activated for this emergency and sent in to restore order and fix New York.

The graphics are quite nice, and they did a stellar job with New York. It's laid out nicely, and feels like a real city in breakdown. There's garbage everywhere, thugs roaming the streets, wild dogs and rats, and civilians trying to survive. There's all sorts of atmospheric details.

The game is online-only, and is sort of multiplayer. Basically, it makes intensive use of phasing. Normally, you're in a separate phase by yourself, so it feels very much like a single player game. But safe houses and zones are a shared phase, so you see other players running around there.

You can also search for a group, either in general or for specific missions. If you do, you're pulled into the group's phase, and only your group exists there. I haven't grouped very much, but it's a nice system for beating a mission you're having trouble with.

Combat is pretty standard shooter fare, with lots of taking cover and moving from cover to cover. Only with results based on your gear and stats, as in an RPG. So far, I've found that if your weapon is decent, the game feels like a shooter. If you're behind the curve, it feels a bit weird to be emptying multiple clips into a normal hoodlum. And like RPGs, there's random loot with stats, as well as abilities you can talent into.

So far, The Division is a pretty decent game, with an excellent setting and production details.

Random Thoughts

• I'm pretty early in, but I find the entire concept of the Division (the organization) kind of weird. What's the point of embedding sleeper agents in your own cities? Why not just stick with the Army reserves or National Guard? The game makes a big deal out of Division agents possibly being someone you know, or "even your friends". I can't help but wonder if this a symptom of the widening gulf between social classes in the West. Maybe the university-educated gentry class finds it more likely that their sons and daughters would join a clandestine paramilitary organization, rather than joining the actual Army.

• Or maybe they just wanted an excuse for the characters to wear civilian clothes and have multiple civilian outfits.

• Most of the tech seems believable, if slightly in the future. But there's one element, which lets you build a holographic image of the past with sound, that seems really fantastical to me. I suppose it gives a very immersive sense of what happened to New York, but it just screams "magic" to me, and jars me out of the world they've created.

Play Diary #6: Ennui

I haven't actually been playing much over the last week.

Blade and Soul

BnS has been the game I've played most. The warlock patch came out, and they gave you a free character slot, and you get a costume if you level to max before the end of Mar. So I rolled a Blade Master, and have been leveling that steadily.

It's interesting playing a melee character focused on blocking. There's a lot less movement involved than with my Force Master. The Force Master relies mostly on kiting.

However, I think I'm nearing the end of my time with Blade and Soul, as I am starting to lose interest in the game. Still, it was an interesting experience, with a lot of interesting design choices.

The Old Republic

We have a few people on vacation right now, so raiding is curtailed for the next couple of weeks.

Truthfully, I kind of want to quit TOR. I think we're pretty much at the edge of my skill level. There's no new Operation content on the horizon. The current operations are accumulating bugs and becoming broken. For example, right now a bunch of bosses have visuals that no longer match what happens. For example, a death beam goes from Point A to Point B. The beam still goes from Point A to Point B, but visually looks like it is going from Point A to Point C.

Truthfully, I think Bioware has given up on group content almost entirely. They seem to want the game to be a "single-player" MMO, where you generally play by yourself or with a partner, but don't actually form groups as we traditionally think of them.

I don't know. Maybe it's time to cut my losses, acknowledge TOR's change of direction, and find a new game to focus on.

Black Desert Online

The new hotness seems to be Black Desert Online. Normally I'd at least give it a try, but I'm not feeling inclined to. It reads a lot like Archeage, up to the whole PvP'ish endgame. I really would like to see someone do a comparison and say why BDO is better or worse than Archeage.

The other barrier is that everyone seems to be discussing and complaining about the cash shop. There doesn't seem to be much talk about the game itself. I find that a little weird and off-putting.

FFXIV Patch 3.2: Gears of Change

FFXIV released its latest patch last week, and I took a look at the contents. So far, it's a pretty solid patch. The main story was good, including a epic duel with a notable character.

The introduction to the next Hildibrand story was pretty funny as well, especially some of the quest descriptions.

The two new dungeons are very nice, especially Lost City of Amadpor (Hard). The last two bosses of that one are just beautiful.

There was also a new Primal introduced: Sephirot of the Warring Triad. I only did this on Hard Mode, not Extreme. This is an excellent fight. All the mechanics combine beautifully for a super fun experience.

In my opinion, FFXIV has really nailed the "softcore" dungeon/primal experience. It's not hard, precisely, but you do have to do the fight properly. There's still a little room for error, but you can't just ignore mechanics. Heck, today I wiped on the old Moogle Mog Primal fight from level 50 because people didn't kill the mobs in the correct sequence. So people are doing the fight correctly as a team.  Personally, I think it's something WoW's LFR could learn. A fight doesn't have to be toothless to be done by a random group. People will learn and do the fight properly.

Other than that, I did try FFXIV's attempt at DPS meters. There's an area called Stone, Sea, or Sky. You sign up for a specific duty tied to a given fight, and have to kill this target dummy in three minutes. If you do so, you are considered "qualified" for the fight. It's not required or anything, but it's a good way of testing if your individual dps needs work. The dps required to beat the trial varies from class to class. I beat the basic endgame trial for a Paladin. However, I think the trial would have more meaning as a DPS class.

I have not tried the new "tutorial" instances. Apparently SE introduced a set of tutorials for level 15 classes that take you through basic dungeon mechanics. I've heard good things about these trials. For example, the first DPS tutorial is about dodging AoEs. Tank tutorials apparently discuss threat and holding onto multiple mobs. These sound very interesting, and it will be interesting if they improve the skills of the playerbase.

I also haven't tried the new Beast tribe dailies, or the new Alexander: Midas raid. Heh, I haven't even finished the last floor of Alexander: Gordias.

All in all, Patch 3.2 is an excellent patch for FFXIV.

Blade and Soul's 24-Person Zones/Raids

Blade and Soul has a really interesting variant on raids. It's not exactly a raid. In many ways it's a lot closer to WoW's Timeless Isle or blue-bar areas like Shattrath City or The Pit.

The zone can hold up to 24 people. It's group content, so you're expected to go in with a 6-person group. However, your group doesn't need to start with other groups, or even work together for the most part. So it's like a normal zone which just happens to have a few groups working inside.

The zone itself is not linear, but has many paths. There are also portals, and you can use windwalking and gliding abilities to quickly move around the zone.

There are essentially four classes of mobs inside the zone: regular mobs, lieutenants, captains, and the endboss (a vice-admiral). Regular mobs and lieutenants do not share tags between groups, but the captains and vice-admiral are shared. This pushes the groups to go their separate ways to guarantee they get credit for the regular and lieutenant kills, but also converge to kill captains and the vice-admiral together.

Vice-Admiral Poharan of the Blackram Marauders

There are a set of dailies at the start that cover the entire zone. Kill a bunch of regular guys, kill a couple of lieutenants from each section, kill each captain, and kill the vice-admiral.

Everything respawns after a bit, so the zone is essentially continuous in time. It is never "cleared". A captain spawns about every 5 to 10 minutes. The spawn is announced to the zone, and a marker appears on the map.  After several captain kills, the vice-admiral spawn is announced. The groups have 5 minutes to get to her area. Then the vice-admiral spawns and everyone kills her together.

This probably sounds relatively simple, but in practice I find it just works. A group goes into the zone and starts working on their dailies. When a captain spawns, the two or three closest groups make their way to it. After the captain is killed, one group will take one exit, and the other group will take a different exit. After a while the vice-admiral spawns and all the groups in the zone will converge on her location. Groups that finish all their dailies zone out, and new groups replace them.

The dailies provide natural direction to determine what the group does. They can't just sit and farm in a lucrative spot, they have to go around the entire zone to find the lieutenants and different regular mobs required. The tagging rules encourage the groups to spread out and not move as a giant zerg. But you still come together for boss kills. Finishing all your dailies gives you a nice stopping point, rather than grinding rares for hours.

I've complained about WoW's blue bar areas before, and I think BnS's raids are a further, better evolution of the general idea. I think they're a good model, especially the clever tagging rules, for producing interesting open-world group content.

Reprints and the Cartel Market

The Old Republic is having some drama around its Cartel Market. The Cartel Market follows a collectible card game pack pattern. Every so often Bioware releases a new "set" of item and sells packs. Items have different rarities, and opening a pack gives you a number of items based on that. When a new set is released, an older set is retired.

The problem Bioware is having is determining what to do with the items from older sets. There are a number of items which are highly sought, and which the regular market price is quite high. For example, a long time ago, I picked up the Xoxaan's set for my Sith Inquisitor. I got the entire 6-piece set for about 800,000 credits. Today, a single piece of Xoxaan's costs north of 1 million credits.

The solution Bioware came up with was the Grand Chance Cube, the "lockbox inside a lockbox". The GCC is an item which comes in the current set. It contains a random item from the older sets.

There are two problems with the GCC:

1. They have a very high chance to drop. For example, I think a current pack contains 2 items. There is a chance that both items will be GCCs. This obviously annoys the person who wants to get one of the new items from the current set.
2. They are somewhat indiscriminate in which old items are gained. Apparently there's a high chance of getting low-value items like emotes and pets.

In any case the backlash has been fairly strong against the Grand Chance Cubes. No to mention the amount of "Yo dawg, I heard you like lockboxes in your lockboxes" memes that get brought up whenever this topic comes up.

I think that TOR should have gone with straight reprints, like Magic does, or re-releases of old items. Make a commitment that the number of reprints won't exceed 50%, and that it will be at least a year before an item is reprinted. Then be more careful what what items are reprinted at what rarity.

This way, rather than relying on complete chance, Bioware could hype the return of valuable sets, at the proper rarity. People would be happy to know that Xoxaan's armor is coming back in the next Cartel Market set. There would be an increase in supply, and prices would drop to reasonable levels. Plus Bioware would know that people would be happy if they get that specific armor. It allows them to reprint the popular stuff, and not worry about reprinting the unpopular items.

Group Mechanics in Blade and Soul

Blade and Soul has an interesting approach to group mechanics. As I understand, it's not quite Trinity gameplay, but it's not quite a zerg either.

Threat exists in BnS. Blademasters and Kung Fu Masters are considered "tanks" and have higher threat output. Their damage is still roughly the same as the other classes. Threat also appears to decay fairly rapidly, which means the tanks have to keep up with consistent threat output. But DPS can stop doing damage and will drop threat reasonably fast, and then not pull threat immediately when they restart.

However, there are no healers in BnS. That part of the trinity is entirely missing. The tanks rely on active mitigation, blocks and counters, and some self-healing to keep themselves alive. The other classes also rely on their defensives, mobility and potions. There are some group defensive abilities. I believe Summoners can occasionally heal the group, and Force Masters can put up a defensive shell that protects people under it for a few seconds.

The end result is a quasi-zerg, where everyone is attacking the boss with their full potential. But it's a controlled zerg, as the boss is generally attacking the tank, rather than bouncing from person to person. This means that incoming damage is very controllable, and if you play well, you can do an entire boss fight with minimal loss of health.

It's reasonably fun, because you do function as a group, and the quality of your play matters. As well, no one is forced to play a low damage characters. The tank classes generally have blocking and countering being central to their damage combos, so they want the boss to attack them. However, they don't have a taunt, and they don't really "control' the fight the same way a trinity tank does.

This structure is better than straight zerg or kiting. However, I don't think it's quite as good as Trinity gameplay. In particular, I don't think it can provide the variety of encounters that the Trinity structure can.

Play Diary #5

The Old Republic

Second raid night, but we only had 5 people on. So we pugged 3 people and we did an alt run of Scum & Villainy HM. I switched to my Sorc healer, who was somewhat undergeared. I didn't even realize I still had a i186 weapon.

The run went fairly well, though one of our pugs had never done S&V HM before, and the second tank had only done the first four bosses. Our newbie decided to be "helpful" on Operations Chief, and threw out a heal on someone in a different group.

Operations Chief is a really neat boss. You have to sneak through a city, avoiding patrolling droids and get to 4 guard teams. The raid breaks into 4 groups of 2 people, and each group takes a separate guard team. You have 6 minutes to take out all the guards and get to the chief guard. In HM, you absolutely cannot interfere with another group in any way or you wipe, which is unfortunately what happened.

(You know, writing that fight's description makes me sad about TOR's current lack of raiding. Their raid design team made some excellent boss fights.)

But aside from that, the run went fairly well and we killed the first 6 bosses. We didn't really have enough time, dps or heals for Styrak, so we called it after that. It was a pretty good run for being alts and pugs.

Play Diary #4

The Old Republic

Raid night again. This time Ravagers was the highlighted HM operation, so we tried that. We went with two melee, which was not entirely successful. For Sparky, the melee didn't really help with adds, so I managed to get 100 stacks of the add debuff before the 25% soft enrage even started. Surprising I stayed alive for a fair bit, much to the credit of the healers, but died at around 10%.

Bulo was messy as well, but we killed it. Then we wiped on Torque for the rest of the night. I think we've beaten Torque once, but we don't do Ravagers very often, so we are out of practice.

As well, I think we would benefit from precisely choreographing the tank's movement to avoid certain hazards. But the standard guides just say "avoid fire", so we're left to wing it. We also have a couple of high skill players who prefer to stick to the guides and the standard strategies at all times. And who knows, maybe they're right and the precise movement plan won't work.

Blade And Soul

I didn't do much in Blade and Soul. I did a couple of the low level PvP dailies to increase my Faction rank and become eligible for the higher level dailies. I then tried the higher level PvP dailies, but got killed several times by the opposing faction.

So I gave that up and ran two of the level 45 blue dungeons. I really should write a post on BnS dungeons. They're a zerg, but they're not quite a zerg. I'm not even sure how to describe it. They somehow work, but I'm not exactly sure why I find them fun when I deeply dislike all other zergs in other MMOs.

Blade And Soul Endgame

My Force Master reached the level cap of 45 and finished off the story so far. The ending of the story was quite interesting, and went off in a new direction. The set up for the next arc is fairly intriguing.

There appears to be a fair number of things to do at 45. Apparently I need to increase my faction PvP level a bit in order to unlock some of the more lucrative dailies. This system of Blade and Soul is pretty neat, as you have to equip your faction uniform to accept and do these quests. The quests are PvE'ish, but you can be attacked by the opposing faction (while wearing your uniform).

BnS also has an interesting system revolving around Prestige Coins. As you kill enemy faction people (players or NPCs) you accumulate Prestige Coins. If you are killed by an enemy player, you drop all your Prestige Coins and the enemy acquires them.  You turn your Prestige Coins into a vendor in exchange for faction influence. However, the exchange rate is determined by the number of Prestige Coins you have. If you have less than 10, you get 1 influence per Coin, 11-20 is 2 influence per Coin, and 21+ is 3 influence per Coin. However, the rate applies to all the Coins you are carrying. Thus if you have 20 coins, you turn them in for 40 influence, but if you have 21 coins, you would get 63 influence instead.

The system is designed to push you to carry larger amounts of Prestige on you at all times. The amount of Prestige you are carrying is visible, making you a more lucrative target for enemy players. I thought it was pretty clever.

Of course, this PvP system is fairly optional. There are tons of other pure PvE dailies, and 4-5 dungeons you can run. There's also Mushin's Tower, which appears to be a single-person dungeon consisting of 7 bosses of increasing difficulty. And there's the whole Arena system if you're into formal PvP.

So I'm a bit unsure of what I will do next. I think I will take a tour of the various options and then decide if I want to go with an alt, or move on to a different game.

Play Diary #3

Blade and Soul

I've been focusing on BnS the last couple of days. My Force Master is level 44, about half a level from the current cap of 45.

I did revise my opinion of the story. It's not that bad. It got more interesting at the end of Act 1. The English voice acting is still pretty bad, and the translation is a bit weak. But the actual story itself is like an entertaining B-movie, an old Kung Fu flick from the 70s. Also, I like the main villain, Jinsoyun. I'm not entirely sure what she's up to, but she has style and is reasonably competent.

Right now, I'm a bit stuck on gold. I need about 50% more money than I have to be able to afford the next step in upgrading my weapon. Upgrading weapons is interesting. At the start of the game, you're given a Hongmoon weapon which you can upgrade by consuming other weapons. Every five weapon levels, you need to consume a specific weapon in order to get to the next tier.

Apparently this was a catch up mechanic introduced after the Korean launch, the equivalent of heirloom weapons. I think it's a nice spin on heirlooms. Having to manually upgrade them is more interesting than having them automatically scale with your character.

The Old Republic

I have too many Light Side characters, and I wanted another Dark Side character. So I decided to remake my Jedi Knight, and tilt her to the Dark Side. I can't really handle full Dark Side, so I'm trying a middle path. This one is mostly good, but shows no mercy to enemies. Surprisingly, you get a lot of Dark Side points from the early Jedi Knight story by playing in this manner. But the side and planetary quests tend to have different LS/DS choices, so I find I'm getting DS points from the Knight story, and LS points from the planetary quests.

It will be interesting to see if this trend continues. I'm only on Corsuscant so far. The planetary quests also have a lot of "Dark Side for money" choices, where you do something bad because the NPC will reward you. There's a lot less "Dark Side for expedience, or total victory at a cost" style choices.

It's also interesting to see what missions are now deemed optional, and not shown by default. A lot of the more morally ambiguous missions, with more interesting DS/LS choices, are hidden. For example, the mission to steal documents from a Republic Senator who is an Imperial sympathizer; or the mission to dig up dirt on the Justicars by investigating the execution of the son of a prominent family. I'm not sure if this trend will continue on future planets, or if I'm seeing a pattern where none exists.

F2P Versus Subscription in Blade and Soul

Normally, if you asked me how to best spend money in a Free-2-Play MMO, I would tell you to buy a subscription. In most F2P MMOs I've seen, a subscription basically replaces the F2P structure. You subscribe, and everything unlocks. Most subscriptions even give you some F2P currency so you can indulge in some of the cosmetic items for sale. The idea here is that you can either go a la carte, and pick up exactly what you want in bits or pieces, or go for the one price which gets you everything.

In Blade and Soul, though, I'd tell you hold off on the subscription, or Premium, option. First, BnS Premium can't be purchased directly, you have to spend the F2P currency, NCoins, to buy it. Thus it doesn't come with a NCoin grant, because buying it for 2000 NCoins and getting 500 back would be silly.

Second, Premium doesn't actually unlock anything other than the wardrobe. Admittedly the Wardrobe, which stores costumes, is nice. Premium grants you a lot of bonuses: increased loot from mobs, increased XP, more spins on this Daily Dash login game, etc. But you still have to purchase extra character slots and inventory expansions separately.

I'm not saying not to spend money on BnS if you want to. Just don't fall into the trap of thinking that you can just buy Premium and you can ignore the cash shop, the way you can in SWTOR, for example.

Rather, if you're spending $15/month, or whatever your budget is, you should put your first purchases toward inventory expansion items, additional character slots, multiple skill specialization slots, etc. Unlock the full structure of the game first. Then in the second or third month or whenever you're satisfied with all the unlocks, you can purchase Premium if you want.

I guess this post is prompted by a bit of buyer's remorse. I picked up a month of Premium, simply because I'm in the habit of assuming that subscriptions are the best way to play this genre. I really should have spent that money on unlocks instead.

Still, it was an interesting look at a setup where the subscription does not replace the F2P elements, but just acts as an extra boost on your characters.

Knights of the Fallen Empire: Chapter X

Chapter X

Bioware released the latest chapter for The Old Republic last week. I did the content of Chapter X this weekend. This is the first chapter in the one-chapter-per-month cadence that Bioware is planning for this year.

Overall, the story was pretty decent. However, it really felt like a part of the Agent story line. Which was great for me since my main is an Agent. But I really wonder how a non-Agent character would find this story? Would it work for them, or would it fall flat? Normally, you'd think that the story would be roughly the same for all the classes, but maybe they just took extra care to personalize extensively for the Agent.

The biggest reservation is that the chapter took about an hour to play through. Is that enough content to keep people subscribed? I have no idea, and it will be interesting to find out if it is or is not.

HK-55

The other piece of "content" was giving a HK-55 companion to everyone who had been subscribed on January 10th.

I really don't understand these rewards. Making them a one-time reward for subscribing on a specific date seems excessively restricting. I thought they would simply give you the companion, and that would be that.

But Bioware actually added a little quest/scenario around recruiting HK-55 that was quite fun. You had to calibrate HK's targeting parameters for the times he was on his own (thus side-stepping the issue when you're actually using him as a companion). This was done by going through several scenarios. Things like a hostage crisis, escort missions, wildlife attacks, etc. You'd then go through the potential targets, and mark them as kill or avoid.

It was an interesting exercise, and a novel way of tapping into the morality aspect of TOR (without actually invoking Light/Dark choices). For example, my LS Agent side marked unknown civilians as avoid, but unknown droids as kill.

Which makes it all the more odd that future players won't be able to see this piece of content, even if they subscribe.

Sometimes Bioware's plans for this game are very opaque.

Play Diary #2

Blade and Soul

I popped on BnS for 15 minutes to try and get the Jangshi Stalker Hat from the wheel. Suprisingly, I got two hats! Sadly, they're character-bound, so I just threw the extra one into the wardrobe. Now my destroyer can move on to the rest of the game.

A couple forums I read have BnS threads. I just can't keep a straight face when Lyn Summoners discuss theorycraft. Here's a sample conversation:

From my reading, Rumblebees is better for bossing or for mobs that are on inclines, since sunflower doesn't work well there. But I've not tried it yet.  

You build photosynthesis stacks when you hit a target with sunflower twice that is either doom and bloomed, standing in nettles, or pinned by your cat. So you need to not doom and bloom then immediately nettle or you'll lose your stacks. I usually doom and bloom, lmb/rmb alternate until about 4-5s left on doom and bloom debuff, then drop nettles and continue lmb/rmb weaving. I ensure that my cat is either taunting or pinning right before I get my 5th stack of photosynth, and just hold rmb until the buff is gone. You can get about 5 free sunflowers that way, depending on ping. I just unlocked the hongmoon skill for sunflowers, which gives me 2 more seconds of overflow, and I've gotten up to 9 sunflowers cast in that time. 

A tip for Summoner dps rotation is opening with Doom 'n' Bloom and get 3 photo stacks then briar patch the target and build the 2 last stacks and nuke with Sunflower until the buff ends then end with Weed Whack and Thorn Strike. Just rotate this and remember to start with full focus. Pet rotation is Ankle Biter + Power Pounce after that Strike to daze the target then pop Crouching and just rotate.

I can't take these guys seriously at all. The juxtaposition of hardcore theorycraft with the Summoner ability names is just so terribly cute.

The Old Republic

Tonight was our second raid night of the week. Sadly we only had six people from our regular raid group, so we took two other guildmates. We didn't attempt Revan, but attempted Explosive Conflict. We wiped a couple times on Thoth and Zorn, but eventually killed them. We then attempted Stormcaller and Firebrand, but didn't have enough DPS, and hit enrage at 10% or so. So we went to Karagga's Palace to try and get some gear for the newer people. KP went quickly and smoothly.

After the raid I spent some time sorting out professions on my characters. Bioware reworked professions this patch, introducing a new tier of materials and craftables. However, they also included a temporary vendor where you can trade your old Grade 8 materials for Grade 9 ones. This was a very nice touch.

Play Diary #1

To get back into the habit of writing, if I can't think of a larger topic, I'm going to write a recap of what I've done in the various games I'm playing.

Blade and Soul

I killed the Stalker Jangshi a few times on my Destroyer. BnS has these loot wheels every so often. You get essences by killing a world boss that respawns fairly often, who everyone in the area can attack. Each wheel has a specific boss essence required. The Stalker Jangshi wheel is for levels 7-10. The wheels give you weapons, soul shields, and costumes at varying odds. I'm trying to get the entire Jangshi outfit (costume, hat, adornment) for this character. I've gotten about 5 costumes and 2 adornments (in addition to dozens of weapons and soul shield boxes), but no hat so far. Since this is just a low level alt, I've parked it at the wheel, and log in and kill the boss for 15 minutes every so often.

I also did a few quests on my Force Master, who is level 42. Slowly but surely progressing to the cap. The latest patch that dropped a couple days ago seemed to have a lot of buffs for the Force Master, as killing quest mobs suddenly became easier.

The Old Republic

Tonight was raid night in The Old Republic. A major patch dropped Tuesday, and it broke a lot of things, so there was another patch today. As a result we started late because people were still patching. One of our raiders had computer issues, so we ending up pugging an Aussie marauder to help out.

Explosive Conflict was the "highlight" Hard Mode operation this week, the one which gives i224 gear. But for some reason, everyone else in my guild hates EC. I'm not really sure why. I kind of like it, and we can beat the entire thing fairly easily. But instead we decided to clear Temple of Sacrifice through to Revan. Revan is the fight we are working on, though we are still in the first phase.

It was fairly straightforward, though the Underlurker was bugged in new and interesting ways. For some reason, this fight is very fragile, and seems to break after every patch. In this fight there are rocks which fall from the ceiling in random locations. You need to hide behind the rocks to avoid the boss's roar. Normally, the rocks have a green outline showing the "safe" place to hide. Today the green zones seemed completely random and totally unrelated to where you should be. So we just eyeballed it. We wiped several times, but eventually killed it.

We ended up killing all four bosses before Revan, so tomorrow we'll probably be practicing that fight for the full raid. Maybe we'll make it phase two cleanly.

Blizzard's F2P Model

The Overwatch beta returned today. This time they included more information on their progression and cash shop model. This is interesting because they have settled on the same system used in Hearthstone. So I thought I'd take a look at that model.

Here's a diagram of the system:

The first point is that the items are not sold directly. Rather containers containing a random assortment of items are sold. In Hearthstone, it's card packs. In Overwatch, it's loot boxes.

You can get the containers either through time and gameplay (levels in Overwatch, dailies in Hearthstone) or by spending real currency. This exact ratio of time to real currency can be changed. In Hearthstone, since it is fully F2P, it's weighted towards real currency. Overwatch is B2P, so it appears that levels through gameplay will be the main method.

The container contains several times, with pre-determined rarity. This is pretty much any collectible card pack system.

The most interesting part of Blizzard's model is how duplicates are handled. If you get duplicate items, you can convert them to a game currency (credits in Hearthstone, dust in Overwatch). You can then use the game currency to create specific items.

One key point is that you cannot buy specific items directly. Instead you have to go through the entire chain, and there is effectively loss when going from the random item to the specific item. You might have to get five random rares to purchase once specific rare.

There's also no secondary market involved. SWTOR and Magic:the Gathering has much the same system for the first part, but after you get the random items, you can buy and sell them on a secondary market. However, going through the secondary market means that prices vary with supply and demand. You can have two rares: one highly-sought and worth a large amount; and the other disdained, and can be picked up cheaply.

In contrast, in the Blizzard model, each rare is be broken down into the same amount of game currency, and each rare also costs the same amount of game currency to get directly. This maintains a minimum level of value for each item.

This system also gives Blizzard a lot of knobs to tweak:

• The cost of a container in real currency
• The cost of a container in time
• The number and distribution of random items in a container
• The amount of game currency generated by an converted item
• The amount of game currency needed to purchase a specific item

It also has a minimum number of products available to purchase, making the store very simple. It's also relatively fair, combining both the fun and excitement of opening random packs with a path to obtaining specific desired items for a known and expected price.

Updates, Blade and Soul Classes

I haven't written much lately. I need to get back into the habit. Especially when there's a lot of stuff that happened that I do want to talk about.

I've mostly been playing Blade & Soul lately. It's a little surprising how long it's lasted for me. The things I usually like in an MMO, the stories, are pretty terrible in B&S. But the base combat is really good. I especially like how the combat mechanics for each class really capture the flavor of that class.

I've tried three classes so far: Force Master, Assassin, and Destroyer. The Force Master is a fire and ice mage, with lots of freezing and control. It's a very even class. The Assassin really feels like an Assassin. You set up, and then it's like stealth, backstab, triggered slash, counter the enemies attack and automatically return to stealth behind them, backstab, dead. It's very fast and efficient, but requires a bit of time to set up properly. Destroyer is the big warrior with the axe, and it uses slow powerful attacks, with a lot of grabbing the opponent and throwing them around.

Another interesting thing is that each class usually has multiple "paths" in combat. If one set of cooldowns is up, you can use combo A, if not, use combo B. It's more chaining of combos, rather than executing a repeat rotation.

I'm still not sure how long I'll play it. But Blade & Soul is definitely worth trying if you're on the fence. Just treat the story as if it was a bad kung fu movie from the 70s.

More Blade and Soul Thoughts

I've been playing Blade and Soul over the last week. I purchased a weeks worth of Premium to avoid the queues. B&S has a few more interesting aspects.

Context-Sensitive Abilities

Abilities are very "context-sensitive". On my Force Master, using a Fire spell (left mouse button) puts you in Fire mode, and a lot of your abilities change to a Fire version. Using a Frost spell (right mouse button) puts you in Frost mode, and several abilities change to a Frost version. It's fairly easy to change contexts, to alternate between Fire and Frost.

There are other contexts as well. The FM has a "grip" ability that pulls and holds the enemy. While the enemy is gripped, several new variants of abilities are unlocked.

Talent Trees

This is then backed up by the talent tree system. Each ability (or more accurately each button), has it's own talent tree. The tree usually has 2-4 mutually exclusive branches that changes or enhances the ability in a specific fashion.

For example, that grip ability I mentioned can be changed into a snare which prevents people from moving. Another short-range ability can be changed into a variant that does less damage but has a longer range.

All in all, the ability structure of B&S is very interesting, and it's worth looking at to see how a large number of abilities and variations can be mapped onto a small number of keys.

1v1 PvP

The PvP devs of most MMOs have said that they do not balance around 1v1 PvP. B&S embraces 1v1, and has it being the central format of PvP. I've only tried one duel, and lost fairly quickly. But it was a pretty interesting experience.

Dueling has a long history in WoW. You can often find people dueling outside the gates of capital cities. After playing B&S, I am no longer certain that simply writing off 1v1 as unbalance-able was correct. Perhaps if 1v1 was balanced, that would simplify the balancing of larger groups, or classes in general.

Of course, B&S doesn't really have dedicated healers, which changes things significantly.

Health

In most modern western MMOs, health is a per-encounter resource. You start the encounter at full-health, and it's fairly easy to get back up to full-health afterwards.

In B&S, health regenerates far slower, but you generally take less damage during a fight. Resources to recover health are moderately scarce as well. So you generally deal with multiple pulls on one health bar, and only rest when your health gets low.

Conclusions

Those are some of the mechanical aspects of Blade and Soul which I found interesting. The queues have died down, so it's a decent time to check it out. Really the only issue is that the spammers are out in full force, and have overrun all chat.

PvE Endgame Difficulty Tiers

Judging by the main three PvE MMOs (WoW, SWTOR, FFXIV) that I'm following, the PvE endgame is gradually converging onto the same model.

Essentially, there are 3 difficulty tracks. We can call them softcore, midcore, and hardcore. Here's how each MMO handles the difficulty tracks:

	Softcore	Midcore	Hardcore
World of Warcraft	LFR, Normal	Heroic	Mythic
The Old Republic	Story	Hard	Nightmare
FFXIV: ARR	Crystal Tower (24), Hard Primals	Binding Coil (8), Extreme Primals	Savage Binding Coil
FFXIV: Heavensward	Void Ark (24), Alexander (8)	Extreme Primals	Savage Alexander

The softcore layer is also the layer that allows for random transient groups.

Each of these games have issues with the layers, though different issues.

WoW's major issue is that LFR is a complete joke. As well, it's essentially the same content repeated multiple times. Finally, because Mythic is a fixed size, and Heroic is not, the transition between Heroic and Mythic can be hard to navigate.

TOR's major issue revolves around Nightmare modes. In theory they were supposed to give better gear than Hard modes. However, there's been a "bug" which means they drop the same gear. Bioware has also announced that the fix is to give Nightmare a "chance" to drop better gear. This is primarily to people from getting the best gear too fast. But there is one highlighted Hard mode each week which drops guaranteed best gear. So TOR is in the awkward position of having a Hard mode instance guarantee better gear than the Nightmare version, which has the hardcore players unhappy.

Additionally, it's been over a year since a new TOR operation was released, so most players in the midcore and hardcore streams have done the current content a lot.

For FFXIV, in ARR, Binding Coil was out of reach for the softcore tier, which is composed of the largest number of players. In Heavensward, SE tried to fix that, moving the 8-man raid into the softcore tier. Unfortunately, that hollowed out the midcore content. The midcore are left with throwing themselves futilely at Savage, or just settling for the easier softcore content.

As well, the way loot was handled damaged this structure further. The current Extreme Primals had their rewards obsoleted really quickly.

Anyways, that's a look at the current state of endgame difficulty in PvE MMOs. I confess that I liked the FFXIV:ARR system the best. It struck a good balance between repeating content and making content exclusive. I've never actually done Binding Coil, but I think there was enough other content that it never felt necessary.

Blade And Soul Release Impressions

I talked a bit about Blade and Soul when it was in beta, but it has been released today. I'd consider waiting a few weeks if you aren't willing to subscribe, as the queues are insane at the moment. It's also overrun with gold spammers.

It's a very "Korean" MMO. If you don't like other Korean games like TERA, I doubt you will like Blade and Soul. The character creation is pretty amazing with a ton of sliders. The game tends to "skimpy female clothing" side of things.

The combat is pretty interesting. Lots of combos and abilities that change in response to other abilities. It does seem somewhat dependent on your internet connect, though.

The story and dialogue is pretty atrocious. I rather wish they had left in the Korean voice-acting, and just translated it with English sub-titles. However, I'm not very far in, so it may get better.

There are some interesting design decisions. For example, the default loot mechanism in random dungeons is Gold DKP. When an item drops, people bid gold. The highest bid wins and the gold is distributed to the other party members.

Personally, I think this is a great idea. It stops people from rolling Need on everything. If you don't win anything, at least you get a lot of gold to help you in your next run. It's a better solution than Personal Loot, as far as I'm concerned.

World PvP is enabled by equipping a special faction costume. Once equipped, you can attack people wearing the opposite faction costume. It's a very visual, in-game, approach to a PvP flag. However, there are also multiple pairs of factions, which might make things more interesting.

Truthfully, I don't really have a lot more to say about Blade and Soul. It's kind of fun. But I don't think it will hold me for very long.

Randomness in Hearthstone, Part II

A while back, we were discussing the randomness in Hearthstone, with several commenters saying that Hearthstone is much more random than Magic: the Gathering. I disagreed. I recently came across a post in the Magic sub-reddit making the same points:

The problem with Hearthstone is that it is too consistent. You always have your mana when you need it. As such, that five-drop of yours is coming down on turn five. In Magic, your five-drop may come down on turn five in one game, and then have to wait until turn seven on the next. Mana is too consistent in Hearthstone, so every game feels the same. On top of that, card draws are more consistent because you have 30 cards as opposed to 60 in Magic/Pokémon and 40 in Yugioh. And because you don't have to put lands in your deck (or mana crystals, whatever), you can cram more good spells into your deck, so your odds of getting a "good card" go up. Finally, the mulligan process in Hearthstone of being able to pick-and-choose makes opening hands more consistent, especially since there's no penalty for taking a mulligan (either in full or in part).

 It makes the point that the randomness in Hearthstone is just surface randomness built into a few cards. While the deeper deck construction is far more consistent in Hearthstone than in Magic.

Note too that this player thinks consistency at this level is a flaw in the game, not a positive. I've commented before on how the initial hand in card games (and subsequent draws) is a far more acceptable source of randomness to players than other sources.

A Game of Votes

Eve Online is having its yearly elections for the Council of Stellar Managment, an advisory body made up of players. There's lots of controversy this year because the last CSM apparently had a lot of drama. And of course, Eve being Eve, everything is part of the metagame, including the CSM.

Elections are run online, using Single-Transferrable-Vote, I believe. However, this is a pretty boring system for a game like Eve, and has already been gamed out by the various power blocs.

I have an idea for a more "entertaining" CSM voting system:

• Every account gets one vote.
• The vote is a virtual object attached to the first character who logs in once election season starts.
• The vote can be transferred from one character to another. It may not be stored or sold via the automatic trading markets.
• Characters can accumulate multiple votes.
• If your ship and pod are destroyed by another player, all the votes you hold are dropped into space and can be looted by another character.
• There is a special election station in a contested null-sec sector (maybe Providence sector?).
• A character who gets to the election station may turn in her accumulated votes, which are tallied and recorded.
• Votes may be turned in once and only once during the election season. If you turn in 40 votes and later accumulate 500 votes, your total is stuck at 40, and you cannot turn in the 500.
• The qualifying accounts with the top X totals at the end of election season are the winners.

You may need additional rules about not being able to jump directly into the election station system or surrounding constellation.

In any case, this should be a more entertaining system than the current one, ensuring that players elected to the CSM have the requisite amounts of skill and guile. You can have meta-game shenanigans where spies intercept votes and defect to other corporations with those votes. The big corps may spread out their votes via "bundlers" to avoid losing a lot of them at once.

It is an election far more in the style of Eve Online. And the most important thing is that it will be far more entertaining for the rest of us.

Knights of the Fallen Empire versus The Force Awakens

This post contains spoilers for both Knights of the Fallen Empire and The Force Awakens.

I was playing Chapter 4 of KotFE on my Jedi Knight recently. This is my second playthrough of KotFE, and the one after I saw The Force Awakens. It struck me that there were some unintentional parallels between Chapter 4 and TFA.

In Chapter 4, your two main companions are Koth Vortena and Lana Beniko. Koth is a black man, who was a former officer in the enemy Empire's military. He deserted when he was ordered to massacre civilians. That's a fairly strong parallel with Finn. Lana, meanwhile, parallels Rey to a degree, being a powerful white female force user.

Of course, there are differences. The two are balanced better, Koth being the pilot and mechanic. Koth and Finn are both more classic good guys. Lana is a ruthless but pragmatic Sith Lord, the former Minister of Intelligence. To be honest, I think she's a far more interesting character than Rey.

One important difference is that the KotFE characters are both older. They've lived more, and done more, than the characters in TFA. That history makes them more interesting.

I was just struck by the unintentional parallel between the two stories at this point. Yet KotFE managed to do a better job with it's two characters, and manages to balance them better as well.

Of course, the biggest difference is HK-55. I'm pretty sure that an HK unit would have livened up TFA immeasurably.

Belief and Outcomes

This  is not really related to gaming, but is something I've been contemplating lately.

Let's say that there is a statement X. You do not believe that X is true. You think it is wrong, that it does not describe the reality of the world.

There are other people out there who do believe in statement X. Who believe wholeheartedly, who believe that X describes a truth of the world. And because they believe in X, they act in a certain manner.

The issue is that because of the way they act, these people accomplish more than your group. They never prove X, and it is entirely probable that you are right about X. But still, in pursuit of X they do more, even make the world a better place, than your group does.

Should you join this other group, even if you don't believe in the fundamental principle which they do?

Perhaps believing X to be true might lead them down a wrong path someday in the future. But so far, other people believing in X has just resulted in outcomes which you like.

Underwater Environments

Syp at Bio Break expresses his disdain for underwater environments.

I generally agree with him in regards to full underwater zones. I hated Vash'jir in Cataclysm. I think that 3D is generally not suited for MMO movement. Underwater also feels like it punishes melee more than ranged, as melee depends more on moving than a ranged caster who can stand still and nuke.

However, I like having water in a regular zone. Like a lake, and a quest sends you to find something in the lake. It changes the rules of the game, but in an intuitive manner. You expect to be slowed down, to have drowning mechanics. The experience is short enough that it's interesting, but not long enough to outstay its welcome.

Alternate environments where the world "rules" change significantly are fun in short doses. I would love to see an outer-space, zero-G mission in SWTOR, for example. But like any good idea, alternate environments can be taken too far.

Holidays

I hope everyone had a happy New Year's Day, and will have a great 2016!

This past week, I was contemplating the difference in holidays between WoW, SWTOR, and FFXIV.

On one side, WoW and SWTOR both have somewhat grindy holidays. WoW used to have rare drop mounts, or collecting hundreds of eggs during Easter. SWTOR's Life Day holiday involves throwing hundreds of snowballs at people to collect the random parcels which are the currency.

In contrast, FFXIV holiday events are usually a short questline, maybe with a couple FATEs thrown in. If you complete the questline, which usually takes about an hour and can be done at low levels, you get all the rewards for the holiday. The grind is totally absent.[1]

Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but it feels like the games have different philosophies towards holidays. WoW and SWTOR both say:

It's a holiday, so you probably have a lot of free time. Here's a way for you to spend that time.

FFXIV, in contrast, says:

It's a holiday, so you probably have other plans. Here's a short piece of content that you can quickly do to celebrate in-game, before you go.

Truthfully, the WoW/SWTOR attitude is probably more accurate for many of their players. But I like FFXIV's attitude better.

1. And it's not like FFXIV has any objection to grinds, as the Relic weapon questline proves.

Empires or Nomads

One problem with PvP MMOs is that they can fall into stagnant states. Each major entity has their own empire. The empire generates enough resources to maintain that power. The empires are unwilling to fully engage other empires in war, because there's a chance they might lose. Instead they'll skirmish on the borders to relieve boredom.

In theory, new entities could challenge the existing empires. In practice though, long-standing empires are usually structured better than the challengers. The empires have been around longer, and have seen what works and what doesn't work. If a challenger does arise, they are usually beaten into submission quite quickly.

When you get into the stagnant state, the real threat to an Empire's survival is not other players, but internal drama. It's arguable that Eve Online has fallen into this state now.

Perhaps the problem is the very concept of empire itself. Once an empire is in a steady state, it usually stands until something major changes. Things like the emperor dying or succession struggles. But these sorts of events are unlikely in PvP games.

A better structure for PvP MMOs might be "nomadic tribes" rather than empires. Under the nomadic model, resources in a given area are consumed faster than they are generated. Thus when the resources run out, the nomads must move on to new regions.

That movement brings them into contact and competition with other tribes, making conflict and war more likely and more necessary.

Imagine that all the CFC's territory in Eve Online suddenly stopped producing resources. The CFC would have to move, and that would generate a huge amount of PvP.

But there is an attraction to holding territory, to claiming "your" space. I'm not sure that a nomadic game would have the same attraction that the empire games do.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

I will try to avoid major spoilers, but this is a discussion of the new movie. There may be spoilers, especially in the comments.

The Force Awakens is a competent but unimaginative movie. It's like Disney asked "What are the elements of a Star Wars movie?" and then went down the list and added in equivalents of each item.

The prequels were bad movies, significantly worse than The Force Awakens. But even they had a sense of vision that TFA lacks. Lucas was trying to tell a story, to tell something new. To add something to his universe. While watching TFA, I got the sense that this movie was so insistent on reminding you that it is a Star Wars movie, that it forgot to be its own thing.

As a result, TFA comes off as a pale copy, a second-rate Star Wars. That's true of many elements in the movie as well. The First Order is a second-rate Empire, Kylo Ren is a second-rate Darth Vader, Jakku is a second-rate Tatooine, BB-8 is a second-rate R2-D2. There are a lot more parallels, but that gets into spoiler territory.

But a second-rate Star Wars is still a pretty good movie.

There are many good things about TFA. The two new leads, Rey and Finn, are solid, engaging characters. Harrison Ford is Harrison Ford, and pretty much steals every scene he's in.

I think Finn is a bit of a missed opportunity. He's an ex-Stormtrooper, but the film went to great lengths to make sure you know he's a good guy and never did anything bad. He might have been far more interesting as a redeemed bad guy.

As for Rey, she's a decent heroine. The problem with Rey is that she is ... excessively competent.  (Though this is probably mandatory for a female lead in an action movie these days.) Compare her character to Luke Skywalker from the first movie. The problem is that she has no path to growth. I rather think the only way she'll become interesting is if she falls to the Dark Side.

I should note that complaints about Finn and Rey are minor at best. In many ways they were the best part of the movie.

But I keep returning to the part about "adding something". The really good works in an extended universe make that universe richer and more interesting. As an example, take Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy. Those books may not have been the greatest literature but they gave us Grand Admiral Thrawn and the Chiss, among many other elements. The Force Awakened really does not expand Star Wars in any direction.

As well, I think that I am not a fan of J.J. Abrams, at least his movies. So far, he tends to string together frentic action scenes instead of making an actual movie. It's like "action sequence, glue scene, action sequence, glue scene, repeat". It's not as bad as the atrocity which was Star Trek: Into Darkness. However, I think TFA would actually have been better with fewer action sequences.

To be fair, I think a lot of modern action and sci-fi movies have the same problem. I blame the extensive budgets of modern films. The the older films couldn't afford to make the entire film a special effects extravaganza, so they saved up for a few really key sequences. But now budgets are such that directors can and do go crazy, and I think the films suffer for it.

In any case, that's what I thought of The Force Awakens. It's decent enough, but unimaginative. If you were asked what a Star Wars movie "designed by committee" would look like, you'd probably come up with The Force Awakens.

Rotations as a Proof of Competence

Continuing on from the previous discussion of Proof of Competence, asking for spec is not the best question. It's a decent question. It's easy to answer and verify. And it does tend to give the information you're looking for. But there are better questions.

In particular, asking for rotation is a much better question. Someone who can rattle off the correct rotation is very likely to be a decent player.  (Rotation here also means ability priority list, not just strict rotation.) The problem is that asking for the rotation is a harder question to answer and verify. You can't just inspect the player and see their rotation.

But what if you could?

In WoW, there are a number of mods which will display the next ability you should use. Some also show the next few abilities of the optimum sequence. You still have to hit the right buttons, but these mods basically show you the best theorycrafted rotation as it happens.

What if this type of UI element, this "Rotation Helper", was part of the base game?

The idea here is that the game doesn't fill out the rotation on its own. Instead, you would have a screen where you could drag abilities into a priority list. Essentially construct your own rotation. The rotation you constructed would then be displayed, and you could hit your buttons to match.

Another player could then inspect you, and just like they see your gear today, they could see the rotation loaded in your Rotation Helper. And perhaps you could send and receive rotations from other players or third parties. If Sally is another Retribution paladin in your raid and is doing better than you, perhaps you can ask her for her rotation and compare it to yours, or replace yours with hers.

The hard part, though, is to construct a Rotation Helper which is simple enough to use, but also powerful enough to construct a decent priority list. A lot of abilities require things like "use when this buff reaches 4 stacks" or "use when this debuff is about to drop off". This kind of stuff is easy to do in code, in a programming language, but is harder to create in a GUI. A Rotation Helper is a non-trivial design problem.

This Rotation Helper wouldn't really help with reactive abilities like healing, or tank cooldowns, or interrupts. But it would significantly help with DPS.

Of course, there are concerns that this type of UI element is "playing the game for you". But such helper mods already exist, and a decent amount of high end players use them already. These type of mods help those players perform better, and would probably significantly help weaker players who don't know about them.

A Few Good Raiders

Crimsonbreeze:

Son, we play the game that has tiers, and those tiers have to be guarded by men with an attitude. Who's gonna do it? You? Or intern Musco? Toxic players have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for loot, and you curse the Elitism. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what they know. That kicking the noobs, while tragic, probably saved lives. And their existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want hardcore players to explore the game, you need elite players. We use words like masterloot, knowfights, gear check. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent achieving something. You use them as a punchline. So I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of Cartel Market. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, gear and rise your skill. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to.

Jonax:

Colonel, did you order the vote kick?

Crimsonbreeze:

You're goddamn right I did!

Devilian First Impressions

Devilian is the latest game published by Trion. It's developed by a division of Bluehole, who made TERA. Devilian is a ARPG MMO, sort of like Diablo, only with more MMO aspects. It's the classic isometric perspective like Diablo, rather than the 3rd-person over-the-shoulder perspective of most modern MMOs. The design "asthetic" is very much like TERA.

The first thing that will turn off a lot of people is that classes are locked to a specific body type. The Evoker is a tall female, Cannoneer is a short female, Berserker is a brawny male, and Shadowhunter is a more slim male. You can change hair color, skin color, facial features, etc, but you are locked to the base body.

The game plays very well. Bluehole always gets this aspect right. The controls are crisp and well-done, and combat is very nice. The pace is slower than Diablo 3, but not excessively slow. Gearing is more like an MMO as well.

The leveling is very quest driven and linear. In fact, every quest literally has an auto-run which will automatically take you to the right location. This sounds excessive, but it works nicely for this style of game. Every few levels you come across a dungeon which you do with two others. There's no threat, so it's a bit of a zerg, but it plays well with just three. Group matching is automatic.

The game is polished, and feels high-quality. The story isn't anything amazing, it's on par with TERA and other imports. But there are a lot of nice touches all over. I'm only level 27 or so, and the cap is 55, so I have no idea what endgame is like.

There are some interesting aspects as well. For example, you have the standard gear (gloves, boots, hat, etc.) but you also have "talismans". Talismans are collectible cards featuring a person. Each card has attributes. You can equip up to five talismans. Some talismans belong to sets, and get bonuses if each card from the set is equipped. You can also merge duplicate cards together, making that talisman more powerful. You get talismans from boxes as rewards or that you can craft using materials from disenchanted magic items. It's actually a really neat alternate gearing system, with just the right amount of randomness, but even having "bad draws" be useful.

They're also trying some interesting things in the social realm. Every day you can send 10 gift boxes to people on your friends list. The game actually gives you a quest to invite 10 people as friends, and shows you a list of people at your level. So there's a lot of spamming strangers for invites around then. But I once defined social bonds as "repeated interactions among a set of people", so maybe sending gifts to each other will build bonds. Or maybe not. In any case, it's a neat idea.

The only thing I should note is that Devilian is a F2P game. There is a cash shop. Honestly, I'm not sure if it's cosmetic-only, or if you pay for power. I imagine that it will be like TERA's cash shop.

Personally, I think that, if you can get past the locked character classes, Devilian is worth trying. It plays well, and does a few new neat things. The talisman system in particular is worth stealing by other MMOs.

Proof of Competence

Once again we are discussing the issue of cookie-cutter specs created by theorycrafters and the high-end, and those specs being enforced by the playerbase at large.. An article on BlizzardWatch started the current issue, and Talarian offers his viewpoint.

I think that most of the comments are approaching this from the wrong angle. Everyone seems to assume that the players who insist on cookie-cutter specs are being irrational and "mean", denying other players the option to be creative. But what if the players insisting on cookie-cutter specs are entirely rational, and entirely correct in their reasoning?

So let's start there. Why do players insist on cookie-cutter specs?

Well, let's say you're a raid leader and you have two applicants: Chris and Sam. Chris' spec is drastically different from the accepted theorycraft, as are his secondary stats. Sam, on the other hand, is texbook cookie-cutter. Which of the two is more likely to be the better player?

You may not like to hear this, but 99% of the time Sam will be the better player. And it won't even be close. Sam will probably do twice the damage that Chris does. Adherence to the cookie-cutter spec is usually a sign the player has done outside research, who at least has read a guide and knows the best rotation.

Essentially what the raid leader is looking for is a "Proof of Competence". A cookie-cutter spec is one such proof. Yes, this is unfair to good players who want to experiment, but from the raid leader's point of view, she cannot infer that. The information she has is limited, and it's best to follow the Proof of Competence, even if she occasionally turns down a good player.

So how can we encourage a wider variety of specs? The answer to that revolves entirely around the Proof of Competence.

First, you could substitute something else as the Proof of Competence. Examples here are logs showing good performance, or achievements. These are often harder to obtain, though. Requiring a cookie-cutter spec is better than requiring people to have already beaten the fight you are working on.

Second, you can not allow the opportunity to view the Proof of Competence. For example, you could not allow inspection of specs. But that doesn't stop people from just asking questions. Another example is LFR, where the group is automatically put together. It's much easier to take a variant spec into LFR.

Third, you could make the spec matter a lot less. Throughput talents almost always have a "right" answer. If all talents were utility talents, most people would not care so much. For example, SWTOR talents are almost entirely utility talents, and no one cares what talents you take. However, the downside is that they require something different as a Proof of Concept. In SWTOR, pick-up groups usually require that you have already beaten the instance previously (by linking the achievement), which makes life hard for newer players.

Fourth, you could make content easier. Arguably LFR and Normal Mode in WoW are like this. People are less likely to insist on a Proof of Competence when success is likely.

Fifth, you can encourage extended groups such as guilds, and diminish the viability of transient pick-up groups. The thing about a Proof of Competence is that you only have to demonstrate it once, at the start of the relationship. Once the other players are confident in you, you have a lot more freedom. If the great mage in your group wants to experiment with a different spec tonight, the rest of the group is often happy to let her try. People in established raid groups have far more leeway to experiment with spec choices than people who run with pick-up groups.

In conclusion, players are being entirely rational when they insist on cookie-cutter specs. If you want to allow your players the freedom to choose their talents, you have to address the need to prove competence. From my point of view, cookie-cutter specs are actually among the least restrictive Proofs of Competence. Pretty much every other option is worse.