AoE Damage is Hurting Trinity MMOs

I have a sinking feeling that dungeon gameplay in FFXIV is making the same mistakes that WoW did. There is increasing pressure for the tank to just run and grab everything, and the DPS proceeds to AoE everything down in the name of efficiency.

A random picture of AoE from Google Images

WoW has gone super crazy with this, especially with leveling dungeons. There's no strategy, no interesting gameplay. Just spam AoE.  But FFXIV is trending in the same direction, especially in the higher levels.

I've had dps and healers run ahead and pull packs back to me. It's really annoying, but the growing community consensus is that the tank should be getting as many packs as they can.

I think the major problem is that AoE is too good relative to single-target damage. AoE is generally better at 3 or more mobs, and that's the size of an average pack. So simply pulling two packs at a time is a complete win.

AoE also obsoletes tactics like Crowd Control. No point in sheeping something, it's going to get broken in the first few seconds. As well, tank AoE threat has to keep up to match DPS, and that in turn has made tanking very easy, and has removed a lot of the tank gameplay that Vanilla WoW or older MMO structures.

AoE should be significantly reduced in effectiveness, such that it only becomes viable at the 8-10 creature mark. Single-target gameplay should be the norm, except in situations which specifically call for AoE. Single-target trinity gameplay is far more interesting and fun than AoE gameplay, and so AoE damage should be kept under strict control.

SWTOR's Dark vs Light Event

The Old Republic is running a Dark vs Light event. Naturally, this event has produced a lot of angst in the community.

Companion rewards for the event

The basic event is clearly modeled after Diablo 3's Seasons. You start a new character and level it up over the course of the event. There are different tiers you work through, which roughly correspond to the sections of the game. Tier 1 is up to level 25, Tier 2 is up to 50 and requires the three low-level story-heavy flashpoints, etc.

The D3 Season model is a good one. It encourages you to try a different character and focus on that character for a period of time. Instead of just having "max-level" as a goal, it breaks it up into sub-goals which are achievable, and which guide you through all the content.

If this had been the entirety of the event, I think it would have been received positively by the community. But Bioware had to include a top level "Legendary" tier which requires you to level all 8 classes, and do most of the content in the game.

The Legendary tier is quite clearly aimed at the super-hardcore, a challenge for them. But I think the bulk of the community took it badly. For one thing, most people don't have 8 character slots free, requiring them to buy more. As well, if you only have to level one character, you can choose a story which you haven't done yet, or would like to try a different path through. This choice would be different for each player.

In many ways, this is a case of addition through subtraction. If Bioware had simply cut the top tier entirely, this event would be far more appealing. As well, they could repeat it next year, and people could try a different story. For example, in D3, I do one class a season. This season was Witch Doctor, last season was Barbarian. Next season will probably be Demon Hunter.

The lesson here is that you don't always have to challenge the hardcore. For time-limited events in particular, perhaps it's better to have an event that the majority of players complete, rather than one where only a few players get to the end.

Unintended Consequences of Anti-Toxicity Systems

Jeff Kaplan made an excellent post on the Overwatch forums about matchmaking. It's definitely worth the read. The most interesting part, however, was this section:

For example, we recently realized that “Avoid this player” was wreaking havoc on matchmaking. One of the best Widowmaker players in the world complained to us about long queue times. We looked into it and found that hundreds of other players had avoided him (he’s a nice guy – they avoided him because they did not want to play against him, not because of misbehavior). The end result was that it took him an extremely long time to find a match. The worst part was, by the time he finally got a match, he had been waiting so long that the system had “opened up” to lower skill players. Now one of the best Widowmaker players was facing off against players at a lower skill level. As a result, we’ve disabled the Avoid system (the UI will go away in an upcoming patch). The system was designed with the best intent. But the results were pretty disastrous.

Essentially, players took a system meant to avoid toxic players, and instead chose to avoid players who were simply more skilled.

Another issue with this system is that it didn't have a cost. I think time and again, games have shown that when an action does not have a cost associated with it, people will abuse it. Think vote kicks from MMOs. Then the action gets removed or hedged with excessive restrictions, such that it becomes fairly useless.

Imagine if avoiding a player cost 50 credits (the currency for the cosmetic items). The amount of people who abuse this system would drop drastically. But if there was a cost, everyone would complain that they had to pay "real" money to avoid the people harassing them. Yet the end result is that we lose the avoid ability entirely.

Low Level Notes from the PTR

I took a poke around the public test realm this weekend. Trying to avoid spoilers, I didn't do anything major. I made a few low-level characters and took them through the first few levels. Here are some observations:

• Classes now start with a specialization. Paladins start as Retribution, Druids start as Feral (and start the game in Cat form, no less), Hunters start as Beastmaster, etc. I think the other specializations unlock at level 10. Overall, I think this is a good idea. There's no forgetting to specialize, and no "generic" abilities which are only used in first 10 levels. You also don't get two abilities that don't synergize, because they are meant for different specializations.

• Judgment has a new animation. You throw a golden hammer at the enemy, and the hammer returns to you. It also sometimes chains to a nearby enemy, but I can't tell if that's intentional or a bug.

• I think the Hammer of Justice animation changed. A giant hammer drops from the sky on the enemy's head. I don't really like it. I miss the simplicity of the current spinning rising uppercut animation.

• The default nameplates have changed. They're cleaner, and enemy health is represented as a thin red line, instead of a fatter bar. There's also small health/mana/resource bars in the center of your screen under your character. These bars only appear in combat, and fade out otherwise. I really like these new nameplates.

• The quest helper minimap graphic has changed. It's now this transparent outline instead of a shaded area.

• There's a nice animated flair on the XP bar when you get a large amount of XP. It's snazzy.

• The initial class quests that send you to your trainer are gone. I guess it makes sense since the abilities have all changed. Still, it makes me a little sad. I liked that little nod to your class right at the start, with the notes expounding the philosophy of the class.

• Armor starts as the max armor type. Paladins get plate, hunters get mail, etc. The item still looks the same as previous, like mail or leather. This is a bit weird with mail armor that looks like leather (those night elf shorts you always get), but plate that looks like mail looks decent enough.

• Otherwise quests appear to be all the same as live. For low levels, it looks like only mechanics changes.

I didn't poke around a great deal, but these are some smaller impressions of what you can expect in Legion at low levels.

Which Players Should Be Mentors?

It's nice that FFXIV decided to mark all the jackasses in Duty Finder. They're the ones with a crown beside the name.

For those of you who don't play FFXIV, the crown denotes a "Mentor", a high-level player who is supposed to help new players. However, in my experience, people marked as Mentors are equally likely to be the people who are unpleasant in groups.

There's no denying that the Mentors are qualified players. FFXIV has quite high requirements. You need to have at least three classes at max level, a tank, healer and a damage dealer. You also have to have done a thousand dungeons, which is a crazy amount. As a result, Mentors are the top slice of people in the game.

However, I'm not sure if they are the best players to advise new players. Being edge players, they have a tendency to use and expect edge strategies. Giving too specific and complex advice instead of ensuring mastery of the basics.

Also, and this may be a skewed perspective, they also seem to be most impatient, especially on older content which is trivial for them.

In some respects, I think the people below the edge tier would make better mentors for new players. They would still be decent at the game, but would be closer to the new player experience, and better able to give advice from that perspective.

To put it into a WoW perspective, currently you need to be a Mythic raider to be a Mentor. It might be better if the Heroic raiders were Mentors, and Mythic raiders expressly prohibited from being Mentors to new players.

It's kind of like a university, where professors give high level lectures, but graduate students are the teaching assistants and help students with problems. A lot of time a professor is too far away from the student experience to really see the issue.

Heavensward Story Finale

The latest installment of FFXIV's main storyline came out today in Patch 3.3. This was the finale to the main expansion storyline involving Ishgard.

I thought it was an excellent and satisfying ending. The story was concluded well. The final boss fight was intense, and very well done. There were a number of callbacks to earlier parts of the story. FFXIV also spent a fair bit of time on the denouement/epilogue, winding down the story nicely.

This is actually an area where a lot of MMOs and videogames fall down. The climax comes right at the end of the game with a final boss fight, and then the games ends, maybe with an NPC congratulating you. I really like FFXIV's approach of taking its time to wind down, showing consequences and outcomes for the major NPCs.

All in all, Heavensward was an excellent expansion and storyline. I've mentioned this before, but it's ironic that it took a Japanese game to give us a classical story about knights and dragons.

Favorite Overwatch Heroes

Like everyone else, I've been playing a fair amount of Overwatch over the last week. I'm level 15, and I've only gotten one Legendary skin so far. However, it happened to be the one skin I actually wanted: Devil Mercy. So Lady Luck has smiled on me.

Heroes never die ... for a price!

Inspired by Syl's post at MMO Gypsy, I'm going steal her format and list my favorite heroes so far.

A) Heroes I feel confident playing

1. Mercy - highest playtime so far

2. Lucio - preferred for pushing the payload

3. Reaper - the one hero I can kill people with

4. Torbjorn - turrets have good aim

B) Heroes I’d like to get better at

5. Reinhardt

6. Winston

7. Junkrat

8. McCree

9. Bastion

C) Heroes that feel awkward

10. Symmetra

11. Roadhog

12. D.Va

13. Zarya

14. Soldier 76

D) Heroes I haven’t really touched

15. Mei

16. Widowmaker

17. Genji

18. Zenyatta

19. Hanzo

20. Pharah

21. Tracer

The biggest issue so far is that I don't really have a tank character that I understand and can play decently. I can put up Reinhardt's shield and walk to the objective. And sometimes Winston works well, but sometimes I just continuously die.

Otherwise, since I'm willing to heal, I don't get much of a chance to play offensive characters, especially the snipers.

So far Overwatch has been a lot of fun. The matchmaking seems to be working well. I have a good mix of wins and losses, and there have been many close and exciting games.

FFXIV's Murder Mystery Event

This post contains  major spoilers for the latest Gold Saucer event in FFXIV.

Apparently feeling that there wasn't enough seasonal holidays, especially in early summer, FFXIV added a new event centering around the Gold Saucer. The Gold Saucer is a casino with a lot of non-combat mini-games. Things like chocobo racing, Triple Triad card games and some arcade-style games.

The new event was a murder mystery. A customer was mysteriously poisoned. You had to search out clues and then create a theory of how the murder took place over several dialogue choices. It was an interesting try at creating a different type of content.

The biggest problem was the solution to the murder mystery. It turns out that the entire thing was staged, like a play that you attend. This does have some advantages. Since it's just a play, there's nothing wrong with getting the solution incorrect. There's just a bit of acting, and you get a chance to try again. You can replay the event and see the other endings if you accuse different people.

But I felt kind of cheated. Because it was staged, the solution was a bit contrived, and didn't feel natural. I think it would have been a far better experience if it had been a real murder you have to solve.

However, I have no idea how the game would handle getting the wrong solution in that case. Would an NPC simply point out the flaws in your theory until you came up with the correct theory? Would there be several possible theories so that whatever you came up worked? Neither of these two choices sound ideal to me.

In some respects, content is easier to create if you can assume that the players will be successful, if not on the first try, than at least eventually. But if there's the chance of permanent failure, it becomes very tricky for an MMO without saves.

Legendary Ring and Draenor Flying

Yesterday, in an unexpected coincidence, I managed to finish both my goals for Warlords of Draenor. I got my legendary ring, [Etheralus, the Eternal Reward]. I also finished [Draenor Pathfinder], unlocking flying mounts in Draenor.

I was a little surprised at the getting the ring. I was 31/33 for the tomes, but only had two bosses left for the week. But somehow Lady Luck decided in my favor, and a tome dropped for both bosses. I fully expected to be left with 32/33 and have to wait for next week.

As for the Pathfinder achievement, it was mostly a matter of finishing rep with the Order of the Awakened and finding enough rare monsters for the quest items. I still don't like the "blue bar" areas in WoD, but they're tolerable if you make or join a group in the LFG section.

There's still a lot of weird behavior in those posted groups that I don't understand. For example, I'd make a group. People would join and leave ten seconds later. For every person who joined and stuck around to work on the area, at least three people would join and leave. I don't know what they were looking for, as I was pretty explicit about what the group was for.

Now I'm not sure what to do with WoW. There are a couple quests to clean up, but I'm pretty much done until the pre-expansion stuff starts happening. I am leveling a mage, who's up to 45, so maybe I'll focus on that.

The Two Million Gold Mount

In Legion, Blizzard is introducing a spider mount that costs two million gold. This naturally has the forums up in arms. To give an idea of the scale, the maximum amount of gold I've ever had at one time is about 50k.



Is this mount a good idea?

It's pretty clearly a reward for "goblin" players. Players who like money-making and playing the Auction House. That's a playstyle that a significant number of players enjoy.

But just because a significant number of players enjoy a playstyle, that does not necessarily make it one that should be encouraged or rewarded. After all, a significant number of players enjoy ganking lowbies. If Blizzard introduced a mount that you got for getting 1000 kills of players half your level or lower, that would be a horrific mistake.

So first, do goblins benefit the game? In general, they do. Goblins generally "smooth" out the market. The vast majority of them make money by buying cheap items and relisting them at the market equilibrium price. The presence of goblins means that normal players probably won't be able to find bargains on the AH, but there will always be a supply of items available for purchase. It's fairly unlikely that the AH will be sold out of anything entirely.

As well, it means that normal players can guarantee sales simply by listing the item at a discount from the market price. A goblin will pick it up and relist it. Sometimes it is more important to have liquid cash than wait for the best price.

Second, does the goblin playstyle require skill or dedication, some characteristic worth rewarding? I suppose it does. The factors that give me pause is that the risk is much lower than other playstyles. I mean at least in a game like Eve you can get shot down while transporting something. The other issue is that it is a playstyle which is heavily automated. There are mods which can do amazing things for you. Of course, you have to be fairly savvy to get the most out of those mods.

Third, can the requirements be gamed? The big element here is gold-sellers and gold buying. Legitimately, you can buy 10 WoW tokens a week. If we say it's 50k gold per token, that's 4 weeks and $1200 USD. I'm really not sure that introducing a mount that can be legitimately purchased for $1200 is a good idea.

There's also the illegal gold sellers. But in a way, because the amount needed is so high, the mount can act as bait. There should be relatively few sold, so examining each account that buys the mount for gold-buying can be viable.

Fourth, will the game be hurt by incentivizing this playstyle? Ironically, adding more goblins probably makes it harder on all of them, There are more people hunting the bargains, competition becomes fiercer, and profit margins become thinner. So overall, the AH experience for normal players should be even better.

Finally, is the playstyle already rewarded enough? In general, there isn't really a great advantage to having huge amounts of gold. The one exception is the Black Market Auction House. It is a bit unfair that the other playstyle rewards can be purchased for large amounts of gold, while the spider mount remains exclusive. But then again, I've never liked the BMAH. Honestly, I think Blizzard should take the opportunity of these new rewards to drop the BMAH entirely.

All in all, the two million gold spider will probably work out fine. Though Blizzard should increase the price to eight million, one million for each leg. That's a far more aesthetically pleasing price, and also increases the time required for purchase via WoW tokens and real money to four months.

Ashran

I gave Ashran a try last week. Ashran is Blizzard's "world PvP" style zone for WoD. It's been through a couple different iterations and fixes. The current version is pretty fun, and does feel a lot more like World PvP used to.

The basic structure of Ashran is that there is one "road" connecting two bases. To get to the enemy commander you have to push your way up the road, capturing each node in sequence. Then there are 5 "off-road" events that take place in the other parts of the map. The main Ashran quest requires to win 4 events and kill the enemy commander once.

So the basic cycle of play is to skirmish at the current border in the road until an event pops, then both sides rush off to the event and contest it. Eventually one faction will win four events. That faction then makes a concerted push to get to and kill the enemy commander.

By and large, it's pretty fun. The different events give a feel of having several different battles within the larger battle. There's also mechanics like giving each class a new Ashran-only ability. The paladin ability allows you to judge people and send them to a jail in your base, which is greatly amusing. There's also items you can turn in to summon NPCs to aid your side.

There's really only two problems with Ashran. First, it desperately needs a catchup mechanic. If the other team is more organized or stronger, the weaker team simply loses event after event. As well, part of your honor gain comes from artifact fragments that you loot and turn in. But if you die, you lose half the fragments you've collected. And the weaker team dies a lot more.

My fix would be to give the side that loses an event a stacking buff that boosts them by 10% or so. If they win an event, their buff count drops by one. That should be enough to even out the sides.

The second problem with Ashran is that there is no point in defending your leader. If the other side is making a concerted push to kill the leader, the best thing to do is get out of their way and get a jump on the next event.

This problem is probably much harder to solve. I think any attempt at a real solution would just see the two sides explicitly collude and take turns killing the other leader.

It's ironic, but very often the best strategy in long-running PvP games is cooperation between the two enemy sides to maximize resource gain.

Legion Dev Update

Ion "Watcher" Hazzikostas did a Dev Liveblog today on Twitch, where he touched upon several of the topics we've been discussing recently. Wowhead has a nice summary. He also announced that Alpha is ending, and Beta starting shortly.

Every day when you log in, there is an emissary that asks you to do specific sets of world quests to aid a faction (eg all Dreamweaver faction quests in Val'sharah). Do four quests for the emissary and get an awesome chest. These emissary quests kind of work like Hearthstone dailies - they pile up for a few days, so you can catch up on ones you missed.

Legion will still have dailies, though these "world quests" seem more similar to Diablo 3 bounties. But they're adding a bit of a buffer, allowing you to save quests for a few days.

The leveling-up experience in classic zones is pretty broken right now and not well tuned. It's way too easy and it was neglected for a bit. Due to ability changes over the years, you basically feel invincible (even before heirlooms). You're running around more vs actually fighting. The pacing of the game isn't what it should be. They've been looking to fix this (even via hotfixes now).

As I remarked a few weeks ago, leveling is excessively easy with a very fast Time-to-kill. It's good to know that it's on Blizzard's list of things to fix.

As an aside, it's not all classes which are broken. I've been leveling a human Fire Mage, and that specialization feels surprisingly right while leveling. Admittedly, I'm only in quest rewards with no dungeon gear or heirlooms. Perhaps that spec is just under-tuned. It might be a function of not having enough critical strike, as Fire seems to want more critical strike rating to get off instant Pyroblasts. But I actually took First Aid to make bandages to keep my health up. Given my experience leveling a druid, that was completely unexpected.

In any case, there's a decent amount of interesting information on the major system changes coming in Legion. So far, it all sounds pretty good.

Alternatives to Daily Quests

There's a very good discussion in the comments of the last post. Shandren comments:

The problem with dailies is that they are... daily. You have to set time aside to do them every day or you will fall behind (yes i know it is not a lot, and likely doesn't actually matter, but the problem is how it feels to miss them, not what the actual outcome is). If you skip you dailies today,you will not be able to just do them twice tomorrow and catch up. Ergo you are "forced" to do them every day.

This is true to a degree, and I sympathize with this perspective. But the alternative to dailies isn't a game where you log in whenever you feel like it and complete tasks on your own schedule.

The alternative is a game where you grind like crazy the first couple of weeks, and then spend the next few months complaining that there is nothing to do. If you don't do the hardcore grind, you "fall behind", just as much as if you miss a day of dailies. This is especially true if the rewards are half-decent. It's only the grinds with trivial rewards which players feel free to work on at their own pace.

Of these two extremes, I prefer the dailies.

There's certainly room for improvement though. For example, suppose you could do 5 dailies per day. But you could "bank" up to 25 dailies. This would allow you to skip a day here and there, and make it up the next day.

FFXIV does something similar with its levequest allowance, though that is mostly used for leveling classes. In fact, FFXIV offers two types of leves: one type gives you, say, 100 XP per quest and costs 1 leve allowance. The other type gives you 500 XP per quest, but costs 10 leve allowances. So one is better XP per time, and the other is better XP per allowance.[1]

But overall, I think dailies were an improvement over very long grinds, especially those grinds with meaningful rewards.

1. To be honest, this is probably more complexity than is warranted. I think it also ended up confusing most players.

Yet Another Look At Garrisons

With all the various controversies in WoW over the last couple weeks, I decided to play it again for a little bit. My plan is to at least finish the Legendary ring on my character in preparation for Legion.

I mixed up my playing style a bit, and came to an interesting realization: Garrisons are really enjoyable as "winding down" content.

Basically, you log in and do whatever your main goal is. Join a raid, do a heroic dungeon, hit up Tanaan, whatever. You defer the Garrison stuff to the end of the play session. After you're done your main content and are thinking about logging out, you spend the last 5 or 10 minutes taking care of your Garrison.

I find this works really well. Garrisons don't take much effort, and there's a nice sense of tidying up before you log. It's perfect for the end of a play session. You log out while seeing your followers off on their adventures. As well, being at the end, I find myself more willing to ignore the parts of the garrison which are completely unnecessary. Like the herb garden, since I have no need for herbs.

A player named Torvald had an excellent post where he postulated that doing garrison stuff up front drains a player's "stamina" and enthusiasm for other content. I find that simply moving the garrison to the end of the play session eliminates that entirely. Maybe it still drains your stamina, but you were planning to log off anyways.

There are a couple problems with this style of play though. First, it's sub-optimal. Since missions are timed, you lose out on the time during your play session. Second, it requires you to defer some easy gratification, some easy rewards. And as we all know from various experiments involving children and marshmallows, deferred gratification is not an easy thing.

The thing, though, is that incentivizing the player to do the garrison stuff at the end seems very hard. They could remove some of the time pressure by making missions based on days, rather than timed, where they all finish at the same time at night.

But you're still faced with the deferred gratification problem. The marshmallow dangling in front of your face when you first log in. You can't put a timer on it, because the player might be logging in quickly just to do garrison tasks.

The only idea I had was that while your followers are hanging around your garrison, they give you a stacking buff which increases gold, xp, and valor gained by 1-2% per follower, up to 50% when you have a full complement of 25. That way you want to delay sending your followers on missions while you are doing content, but you're perfectly happy to send them off while you are logged off.

In conclusion, I think that garrisons are much more enjoyable when moved to the end of a play session. But I think actually nudging players into that playstyle will be hard sell.

Overwatch Open Beta Tips From a Bad Player

The Overwatch open beta starts this week. Early access is May 2 if you pre-ordered, and it fully opens up a couple of days later.

Overwatch is an amazingly fun game, and I'm a terrible FPS player. I wasn't in Closed Beta, but I was in the stress tests. So here are some tips from someone who is probably worse than you are.

1. Don't be afraid to solo queue.

Obviously, if you have friends, queue with them. But the solo queue is surprisingly balanced. It seems to quickly find your skill level. As well, matches aren't independent of each other. The players from the last match will be the same players in the next match. Only the teams are shuffled. So maybe there was an awesome enemy Pharah last game that kept killing you. This game, you might end up on the same team as her. This goes a long way to keeping the matches even and popping quickly.

2. Don't bother with AI games.

Maybe play one match to get the hang of things, but I would recommend jumping directly into matches with other players. Playing against the AI just isn't the same as playing against humans. If you want to figure out a hero's abilities, use the training room to see how they work, but then fling yourself against other players.

3. Try to focus on one hero from each category.

There are four categories of heroes: Offensive, Defensive, Tanks, and Support. You generally want a mixed squad, so if you're capable of playing at least one hero of each type, you can fill in for any missing element. Also, tanks and support can be a little more newbie-friendly as they are less reliant on aim and are often a little less fragile than the others.

4. Don't switch heroes too much.

You can switch heroes every time you die, but I recommend playing the entire match as the same hero, at least at the start. They do take some time to get used to, so they might feel frustrating at first until they click for you.

5. Stick with your team.

If you're all alone, it's better to retreat for a few seconds and meet up with the rest of your team, rather than throwing yourself at the enemy. Also remember that the game is about objectives, not a death-match, so emphasize pushing the objective.

6. Use ultimates aggressively.

Ultimate abilities charge quite quickly, so don't hesitate on using them. You have to fail with them a few times to figure out how to use them best.

7. The Kill Cam is your best teacher.

Whenever you die (and you will die a lot) a kill cam will come up showing your death from the opponent's point of view. This is the best way to learn. You can see what you did wrong, and see what your opponent did right.

I think Overwatch is an amazing game, and I strongly recommend that you all try it out. There are lots of different heroes with different playstyles, so I'm sure you'll find at least a couple you enjoy.

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.