Magic: Universes Beyond

Magic: the Gathering is introducing "Universes Beyond", a new initiative to go heavily into cross-overs with other franchises. The first new products will be Warhammer 40k and Lord of the Rings.

Here's the announcement.

Such cards will be mechanically unique, look exactly like regular Magic cards and will be tournament-legal, at least in the non-rotating formats. Wizards did this last year with a special package of 5 cards from the television show The Walking Dead.

Needless to say, the enfranchised fans on in the internet are not happy.

I don't know, maybe it will work out for Wizards. Maybe they'll get more new people to buy in on the strength of the external IP, and most enfranchised players will stick with it.

Personally, though, this feels to me like the moment Magic jumps the shark.

A funny comic from Cardboard Crack:

 

Thoughts on Wildstar

I've been in the Wildstar beta since December, though I haven't really played it in the last month. I didn't really like Wildstar, for several reasons. I never got particularly far in the game either, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

First, you know how everyone in PvP runs around in circles like a madman? Wildstar is bringing that to PvE. I don't see this as a positive.  Maybe I'm just getting old, but going nuts with the telegraphs like Carbine did made it a very tiring game.

And to a degree, Wildstar is a more difficult game than I think people will accept. I look at their dungeons, and I have zero desire to throw myself at that. In some respects, I think I'm just not skilled enough for Wildstar, so I may as well stick with more forgiving games.

Second, I never found a class that I enjoyed. I'm not really sure why. Just none of the classes seemed to have that factor which made me want to play them. The closest were the stalker and the engineer, but even they were missing something.

I don't really know how to explain it, but it feels very much like the classes in Warhammer Online. Those were well-crafted classes mechanically, but they just left me cold. Perhaps it is a matter of archetypes, of not having literary characters that match up to the class. Perhaps I play paladins because of Paksennarion, Michael Carpenter, and Uther, and not because of the mechanics associated with the class.

Finally, this is a very small thing, but in some ways it was the straw that broke the camel's back. I really, really do not like to be sworn at. It's just a reflexive distaste. So when the level up effect involves profanity, it just puts me off completely.

As well, if you think swearing is necessary, at least have the courage to swear. Bleeped swearing is a poseur's game. All it says is "we're trying to be edgy, but not too edgy." If you have to bleep your swearing, you really should just rewrite your content to avoid profanity.

So those are the main reasons I disliked Wildstar. I did not like their combat system, their classes left me cold, and the swearing on level up was a complete turn off.

Wildstar does have several good points. The graphics are colorful and cartoony. The game performance was good. The factions were reasonably interesting. The questing was pretty decent.

I also really liked the Settler path. I really enjoyed upgrading each quest hub with buff stations and building up the fences, and generally making the camp look better. The other paths were okay, but didn't really have the pull of the Settler path.

So those are my thoughts on Wildstar. I did not like the game, but it is not a bad game. If you like the combat, and find a class you enjoy, it will be a fun ride.

Warhammer Online Closes

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

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

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

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

First Impressions of Guild Wars 2

I picked up Guild Wars 2 late last night, and gave it a whirl. Why exactly was this game hyped up? Admittedly, I've only played for a day or so, but I've seen nothing yet that would warrant the fervor of the GW2 partisans. There are lots of nice, small touches, but nothing amazing.

Character Creation

There are five races and eight or so classes. Character creation has lots of sliders and buttons. I would have really liked a "reset to default" button, though.

The human females generally "need a sammich", as the saying goes. There didn't really seem to be any equivalent of SWTOR's body type 2 or WoW's human female. Either too much on one side or the other.

I did like the Sylvari art, the use of leaves and plant forms for hair and ears. That was very clever.

I also liked the use of additional choices to flesh out the character, like what god the character followed, or what spirit animal, or even greatest regret. I do wonder if those choices were orthogonal enough though. Sometimes it seemed like there were obvious choices for the magic users, and obvious ones for fighter types.

I also like the history for the races, especially humans being a race in retreat. Very different from the standard "humanity waxing" storylines.

I ended up creating a Human Guardian.

Oh, I should mention something about names. I think names have to be unique across the entire GW2 universe. So your regular name is probably taken. I know 'Coriel' was. But GW2 allows you to put spaces in the name, so you make a last name, and the combination is very likely to still be available. I named my Guardian "Coriel De Rohan". I really like this solution. It's a solid mix between uniqueness and availability.

Main Quest Line

The main quest line seems decent enough. The writing and voice acting is okay. Better than TERA, but not up to SWTOR or TSW. There was an investigation-style quest where you had to question different parties and accumulate evidence against a powerful noble that I thought was rather neat.

Hearts

A main conceit in GW2 is that there are no "side" quests. Instead of quest hubs, you have a "heart" on the map.

In a quest hub, you would have four or so NPCs. One would give a quest to kill 10 boars. Another would give a quest to collect 15 trinkets. Another would give a quest to search through poop. And the last would tell you to kill 20 bandits and their leader.

In a GW2 heart, these are not discrete elements. Instead of you have to (all numbers made up) accumulate 100 points, where you get 5 points per boar, 2 points per trinket, 10 points per poop, and 6 points per bandit. And you can do any combination of things that add up to 100 points.

So if you really hate killing boars, you can avoid that entirely. Or you can just do stuff until you hit the required total.

What I find is that this lacks context, lacks those small stories that weave together. For example, in Elwynn Forest in WoW, I really enjoy the Young Lovers questline. It's nothing amazing, you take a note from Maybell Maclure to Tommy Joe Stonefield, get Grandma Stonefield to direct you to her old suitor, the alchemist William Pestle, kill some mulocs for ingredients for an invisibility potion, and give the potion to Maybell so she can elope. Nothing amazing, just a short little story. But I guess I'm a romantic at heart, so I always enjoy doing that questline.

The thing is that, so far, the hearts in GW2 really lack that. They're just a bar on the screen to be filled with repetitive tasks. And the tasks don't really build on each other to form a story, except in the vaguest, most general sense. (There are bandits attacking the farm. You kill the bandits. The farm is saved.) It's also very UI-driven. At least normal questing has a semblance of interacting with the people in the world.

Now, in the end, maybe normal questing is just the same. That the stories of side quests are just an illusion, a fig leaf over reality, and it's all about filling up many smaller bars instead of one bigger bar. But it turns out that I like--and maybe even need--that illusion.

GW2 Hearts are quests for people who think that skipping through instant quest text is too much work.

Events

Events are basically a cross between public quests from Warhammer Online, and rifts from Rift. They're a public quest which is not always available. Instead, they sometimes "activate" like a rift and appear on your map. Then you do the event, and get some rewards. They differ from rifts by being more varied and not just monsters spilling out from another plane.

Sometimes it's an escort quest, sometimes it's a quest to kill a special monster, sometimes waves of monsters are attacking a certain point, etc.

Because the starting point is unknown, events are something that you don't really plan for. Instead you do them when you come across them.

They do make the world seem a bit more dynamic, and break up the questing a bit. But they do repeat, and if you stick around in the same area, you'll see the same event pop over and over.

I like events. But they're not revolutionary, they're evolutionary. A better Warhammer Online public quest.

Combat, Crafting, Skills

See this post.

Initial Conclusions

GW2 is an okay game. But not one that deserves anywhere near the hype it is getting. To be honest, so far it really feels like a better Warhammer Online.

Heh, it occurs to me that GW2 is the game where the "bears, bears, bears" promise from Warhammer Online was finally fulfilled.

Again though, this is early impressions. I haven't gotten very far, and I haven't been able to try out this WvWvW, as I've been on overflow servers most of the time.

Character Progression in The Secret World

The character conceit of The Secret World is that you are a normal person who suddenly gains "powers" and is then recruited and trained by one of three secret societies: the Illuminati, the Templars, and the Dragon.

Character creation is reasonably good, you have a fair amount of options when it comes to your face and starting outfit. I created a female, Coriel, and joined the Templar faction. The Illuminati are far and away the most popular society, and I don't know anything about the Dragon other than there is a bit of oral sex in the Dragon introduction.

The Secret World does not have classes or explicit levels. However, it does have roles and implicit levels. It is a fair bit different from most MMOs, and does take a little getting used to.

What abilities you get depends on your weapon, and your training with the weapon. Weapons are central to characters. The idea is that you channel your powers through your weapon. There are 3 weapon categories: guns, magic, and melee weapons. There are 3 weapons in each category: pistols, shotguns, rifles, chaos magic, blood magic, elemental magic, swords, hammers, and claws.

The basic idea is that you must have a rifle equipped to use a rifle ability. As you earn experience points you gain Ability Points that you can spend to unlock passive and active abilities in each weapon. Costs tend to follow a pattern where the first few abilities are very cheap, and then the cost steadily rises. However, the most expensive abilities appear to be more specialized, rather than strictly better damage.

The key element here is that you are only allowed 7 active abilities and 7 passive abilities at any one time. But you can wield two weapons. So you spend Ability Points to gain abilities with the two weapons you have chosen, and mix and match abilities to create a useful set of 7.

Actual combat is very similar to other MMOs. You target creatures and use abilities. The general pattern is combo point generators and finishers. However, there are some subtleties. Guns generate combo points on the target. Magic generates combo points on the character. Melee also generates points on the character, but I think the points are automatically gained with time (when in combat), without necessarily needing to use generators.

Certain weapons adhere to certain roles. Healing can be found in rifles, blood magic, and claws. Tanking is swords, hammers, and chaos magic. Most other trees have support abilities in addition to damage. As well, different weapons prefer or create different conditions, so it's up to you to use two weapons which synergize.[1]

The thing is that Ability Points do not increase character power directly, they only give you more abilities. Character progression is governed by gear. Gear has "Quality Levels", and you are more powerful with better gear. But you can't just wear any gear.

In addition to Ability Points, there are Skill Points. Skill Points are earned 1 every 3 Ability Points. You invest Skill Points into each weapon and gear type. Each level of skill costs increasing points, but also gives you a bonus with that weapon. You can't equip weapons or gear which are more than one level higher than your skill. So this is the aspect which creates the implicit levels.

Monsters and missions essentially take your current gear into account when determining if something is easy or hard. You'll see people asking for groups by QL. For example, people like QL3 for the first dungeon (which I didn't get to).

So basically, there is a short steep vertical progression, but also a fairly broad horizontal progression. There are twelve or so default builds given in the game, so you can just follow those builds if you are at a loss. I think you even get some cosmetic outfits if you complete a default build.

Gear is essentially amulets and trinkets, in addition to your weapons. Clothing is separate and cosmetic, and I guess must be bought or given as mission rewards.

The thing about The Secret World is that missions are repeatable if you want, they have a cooldown of a day or so after you finish them. So you are never stuck without a way to earn XP. There's no such thing as "respeccing" because you just earn more AP and SP. In theory, one could eventually unlock every single weapon ability and every single skill level.

For example, I figured Coriel would play as a healer, so I chose my first weapon as a rifle. After a while I put a couple of points into pistols for my second weapon. But I didn't like pistols, so I went to elemental magic instead. I have one elemental attack, and one elemental passive that puts a small DoT on the mob when I crit, even with a rifle attack.

Gear is role dependent. Tank gear has more health and less attack power. Healing gear has +heal instead of +attack, which does not boost your damage abilities. This may cause some people to shy away from healing and tanking roles. But it's not a permanent choice.

However, The Secret World also has my favorite UI element: a defensive and offensive target, as in Warhammer Online. Thus a lot of the healing abilities, especially with rifles, are really "leeches" which convert damage to healing.

I think that's a reasonable overview of character progression. The key points are weapons being the focus through which everything flows and determining playstyle, Ability Points to unlock usable abilities, a restricted set of passive and active abilities that can be used at any given time, and Skill Points to govern the quality of gear that your character can use.

1. I was looking on the forums, and some of the theorycrafters were talking about a concept called "bridge passives" which are passive abilities from a third weapon tree that could be used to get two non-synergistic weapons to play nicely with each other.

Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World

I haven't really posted anything about a couple of anticipated MMOs: Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World. This is because I'm not really enthused about either of them, but for different reasons. Also, I may just have New MMO Fatigue.

Guild Wars 2

I find the hype and advocacy for this game a little off-putting. It might be really good. But the atmosphere and situation really reminds me of Warhammer Online, and we all know how that turned out.

I'm also not a fan of F2P and cash shops. Game devs need to eat, and invariably game design ends up pushing you towards the cash shop. In a subscription game, the necessary monetary transaction is taken care of up front, rather than needing to push the players into it. As well, I don't like how F2P games end up relying on a narrow slice of the player base. Sub games end up resting on the shoulders of the entire player base. I think that is more fair, and more likely to lead to good results for everyone.

As well, there just hasn't been any element that has jumped out and grabbed me. There are several elements that look somewhat interesting, but nothing seems worth getting up for.

Finally, it's a non-Trinity game. I don't see what the replacement basic game skeleton is, and so I assume it's going to end up as a zerg. I'm not a fan of zergs.

The Secret World

Here's four requirements for a successful MMO:

1. Responsiveness [1]
2. Lack of Bugs
3. Polish
4. Low System Requirements

I do like Funcom's willingness to try new things. I thought Age of Conan broke a lot of new ground in mechanics, as did Anarchy Online back in the day. I am sure that The Secret World will continue that tradition.

But I was there for the launch of Anarchy Online and Age of Conan. Those four requirements above are the antithesis of Funcom's modus operandi. I would be absolutely shocked if The Secret World met any single one of those requirements, let alone all four.

I guess I just don't have the patience to work through buggy messes any more, even if they are highly innovative buggy messes.

Also, I'm still unhappy about Dreamfall.

1. Responsiveness is the lack of delay between pushing a button and the action occurring. WoW is still the gold standard here.

Healing and Default UIs

Coop pointed out in the last post that one of the troubles with healing in SWTOR is the UI. But it's not just a SWTOR problem. Almost every MMO I've played has featured a DPS-centric default UI.

Which is rather odd if you consider the fact that healers are the one role which interacts with the UI the most. One would think that the default UI should be optimized for healing. A healing-centric UI would still be functional for the DPS and tanks.

Here are three elements that a good healing UI needs:

1. All the friendly health bars in one place.

Almost all health bars put your own health bar in a different location than the other friendly players. SWTOR puts the companion health bar in a completely different place too. This is the first thing which is fixed by every single healing mod. All relevant health bars are collected together in one compact location.

2. Minimize target-switching.

I would love to see a default UI implement mouse-over casting for friendly spells out of the box. It makes healing so much easier and cleaner.

I also rather liked having Warhammer Online's use of one friendly target and one hostile target, that could be switched independently. You can kind of work around this with focus targets, but it's a lot easier to keep an eye on enemies with true dual-targets.

3. Emphasize relevant debuffs and buffs.

This is the hardest element to get correct for a default UI. But simply displaying all buffs and debuffs on a target is just not good enough. A healer needs to know when important debuffs are on the target, especially for dispelling. As for buffs, in general you only need to know when your short term buffs like HoTs and shields have worn off a friendly target.

Conclusion

I strongly recommend that any new MMO design the default UI with healers in mind. In fact, I'd go so far as to insist that the default UI designer be a full-time healer. Healers are the class which will interact with the UI the most, and thus the ones who suffer the most with a badly-designed UI.

Difficulty of Automatic Transient Content

Alright, you guys are probably getting as tired of Tank Time/Call To Arms as me, so hopefully this will be the last post on the subject for a while.

Maybe this Call To Arms issue is showing us the upper limit of difficulty for transient content.

Maybe transient content can only be so difficult before we start seeing problems in the system, such as lack of critical roles. I know I complained that rifts in RIFT are nothing more than zergs, with no skill or strategy involved. But perhaps that's the way it has to be. It's entirely possible that if those pieces of transient content were too difficult, the system would break down. Arguably, that's what happened with Warhammer Online Public Quests, they got too difficult unless you had the numbers.

Perhaps Blizzard would be better off saying: here's easy content, and here's hard content. You get a Dungeon Finder for the easy content, but anything difficult requires you to build your own groups. Maybe difficult content needs to be reserved for extended forms of play, such as raiding, where you are involved with the same group over multiple days.

Or if the 5-mans are hard enough, it might would be better to leave them off the Dungeon Finder, signalling to the playerbase that you need to find your own groups, or that you should be doing them in-guild. But even long Dungeon Finder queues might be preferable to that alternative.

Again, a lot of qualifiers for this idea. It might be completely wrong, and we are still well below the "difficulty ceiling" for transient content. I think the real test of this proposition is coming in 4.1. By all accounts, the new troll instances are harder than the current heroics. So they will stress the automatic group creation system even more.

Rift: First Impressions, Part II

Played a little bit more yesterday. Got a couple levels with my Warrior, and tried a Defiant Bladedancer/Nightblade/Assassin Rogue. Still very low level with both of them.

More on Abilities

The soul trees are pretty interesting. Generally, each tier has about 5 "soul-specific" talent points, and 5 "generic" talent points. That way, if you don't use the soul-specific abilities, you can still climb the tree by investing in the generic talent points.

So far, what I've found is that about 70% of the abilities I use come from the primary soul, about 30% from the secondary soul, and I use one buff or one ability from the tertiary soul.

AoE looting

AoE looting is amazing! You loot one dead mob, and all the surrounding dead mobs you can loot are looted at the same time. All the items appear in one window, and is essentially treated as one transaction.

This change is definitely worth stealing.

Rifts

Rifts are random events that occur fairly often. A portal opens, and enemies spew out. There are several waves, and the UI tracks your progress much like a Public Quest in Warhammer. There's a little contribution meter that tracks your participation, and when the rift is closed, you get a loot bag containing some random items. Mostly special currency to purchase gear, but also crafting items and some sort of trophy items that you collect sets of. Don't really know what you do with the trophy items.

As well, when you first enter the rift area, there's an option to join a public group, and you get dropped into a raid with other people.

I rather like the rifts. They're random, which makes them a nice break from solo questing. You do your quests, see a rift form near you and join up and beat down the rift. Then you go back to questing. It's a nice change of pace that doesn't require a lot to set up or even a great deal of commitment.

I think it might also make healing and tanking a little more attractive. You get a small dose of group content every so often, which is your main purpose as a healer or tank, and you don't really feel the pressure to go DPS to make questing easier.

Now the downsides of rifts is that, so far, they are essentially a giant zerg. There's not a lot of tactics or strategy involved. But then again, this is low-level, and things can change at higher levels.

Rift: First Impressions

I took a look at the Rift Open Beta yesterday. Here are my impressions. I didn't get very far, only to about level 7 or so.

Rift is very similar to World of Warcraft and similar quest-driven fantasy MMOs. Trion has deliberately made the interface very familar to WoW players, using much the same hotkeys and layout. This is a positive, in my view.

Class System

Rift's major innovation is its class system. You start by picking a fundamental archetype: Warrior, Cleric, Mage, or Rogue. Then you pick up to three sub-classes, called souls, which focus on different aspects of the base archetype.

It's an interesting system, and in a lot of ways is opposite to the direction that WoW has taken. WoW characters focus on a specific specialization: Holy Paladin versus Retribution Paladin. In contrast, Rift is aiming at the combination of souls taken.

We will see how successful they are. WoW's drive for specialization was driven by the playerbase, because it produced optimal results.

I created a Malthusian (human) Warrior. I choose the Paladin/Warlord/Void Knight souls, pretty much creating a sword-and-shield tank.

Abilities

Gaining abilities in Rift depends on your souls. Each soul is like a talent tree you can invest talent points in. But each talent tree also has a "root" line of abilities. As you invest points in the talent tree, new abilities are unlocked along the root line. So if you put more points in the Paladin tree than the Warlord tree, you unlock more Paladin abilities than Warlord abilities.

Abilities themselves are pretty standard MMO fare so far. Some have cooldowns, debuffs, buffs, reactive abilities etc. Warrior use a combo-point system with generators and finishers.

All in all, it's a very clean system. However, there are a few issues. First, you still have to buy ranks in each ability, so you have to go to a trainer every so often. It seems like this is just extra complexity. Unlocking abilities through talent points was enough, and I think it would work better if your abilities just automatically scaled with your level.

Second, there's a lot of front-loaded complexity. Each soul comes with starter abilities. For example, I have 3 different basic combo-point generator at level 7, and about 5 different buffs. I'm using the Warlord generator and a paladin finisher, and just dropped the other two off my bars. But the sheer number of buttons available at level 7 is a bit overwhelming.

Finally, warriors theoretically have a resource bar, called Power. But so far, Power seems to regenerate faster than I can spend it, so you're really limited by the global cooldown and ability cooldowns. The resource doesn't seem to matter.

Graphics

First, the game is very responsive. No input lag or discontinuity between pressing buttons and results. Animations are solid and fun to watch.

The graphics are pretty decent, but they draw from the green/brown/gray "realistic" palette and thus are not very vibrant or crisp.

As well, apparently Trion belongs to the camp that believes that female plate armor does not need to cover vital areas like the chest or stomach. At least they aren't in high heels, though.

In-game, the performance is very good. I'm not 100% certain that I have the graphics set right, but I set them to Good and everything plays well with a decent framerate.

Oddly though, my system can't seem to handle the cutscenes. I get massive framerate stutters during cutscenes. It's really weird considering that in-game performance is excellent.

Conclusions

Rift seems like a pretty decent game. It's pretty polished and plays well so far. I haven't really gotten into the Rifts part, which seem to be like Warhammer's public quests, or instancing or anything really advanced.

If you're looking for something majorly different than WoW, than Rift is probably not for you. But personally, I'm a fan of choosing one thing to change and then doing a great job with that single change, and that is what Trion is aiming for with their class system.

Group Content and Group Creation

First, let us stipulate that there are two types of group content: transient; and extended.

Transient group content is content that is expected to be completed in a single session of play. The group is formed, the group completes the content, and then the group is disbanded. In WoW, group quests, battlegrounds, and 5-man dungeons are transient group content.

Extended group content is content that is expected to be completed over several sessions of play, and where the group is composed (more or less) of the same individuals throughout. In WoW, raids and PvP arena are extended group content.

Lately, I've come to the conclusion that transient group content is crippled without automatic group creation.

I've been playing a game (Age of Conan) which doesn't have a Dungeon Finder for groups. You have use a Looking For Groups channel, like in the old days. And it is terrible. It literally takes hours to form a group. I have never appreciated the Dungeon Finder as much as I do now. I remember having a lot of the same issues when I was playing Lord of the Rings Online. In fact, I stopped playing that game because I rolled a group healer and yet I found grouping to be too hard.

As well, because group creation is so hard, people seem to feel free to take advantage of the group with long afks, or generally do their own thing while the rest of the group waits for them. I remember that this used to happen a lot in WoW in the pre-Dungeon Finder days, but has since been eradicated from the game. Whatever the faults of the "gogogo" culture, at least they aren't wasting my time.

Without automatic group creation, the amount of time spent forming the group is excessively long, and makes grouping an unattractive proposition. I think this group creation time is really what keeps people from grouping up, more than any other concern such as rate of experience gain.

Other games have sort of approached this, while still leaving humans in control. For example, Warhammer Online had "open" groups, where you could just join a group instead of needing to be invited. While that was better than the old system, it still isn't as good as a fully automatic system.

It's interesting that the PvP side has always seemed ahead of PvE when it comes to this. Battlegrounds featured automatic group creation long before PvE. Perhaps it is because of a lot of the formative ideas for MMO PvP came from the First-Person Shooters and Real-Time Strategy world, where automatic group creation is the norm. While PvE grouping was stuck with the idea that it was important to let people choose their own groups.

Of course, automatic group creation is probably a bad fit for extended group content, if only because play sessions for the group need to match. In transient content, you know the play session matches because everyone is already online.

But it's also possible that I am wrong about extended content, that I am too used to the old system of making guilds, and I overweight the problems, and underestimate the convenience.

Perhaps an automatic matching system would be a good improvement for extended content. For example, a Guild Finder. Guilds could post what their schedules were like, or what type of guild they were, and players could do the same, and the system would automatically add people to guilds.

I think the bar has been raised for future MMOs. If an MMO has transient group content, it had better have automatic group creation for that content. As well, WoW needs to implement a system for group quests, as that is the last piece of transient content without an automatic group creation system. And group quests are noticeably the hardest content to find a group for.

The Nature of War

In a game like Civilization, most of us have launched a war for the purpose of expanding our nation's territory and power, or to weaken a rival nation. In this, we are following Carl von Clausewitz's observation that "War is merely a continuation of politics." In the context of such a game game, and indeed much of human history, such a strategy of conquest was not considered wrong or immoral.

However, the modern world is moving away from Clausewitz's statement. It is moving towards a view that the only moral war, the only just war, is a defensive war. And this is causing an interesting reaction between game players and developers.

Consider the current plot lines in World of Warcraft. Blizzard wants to heat up the simmering conflict between Alliance and Horde. From a gameplay perspective, war is more interesting than peace. It gives players more things to do. To that end, Blizzard has introduced the characters of Garrosh Hellscream and Varian Wrynn, who are pushing the Horde and Alliance towards a war.

However, these two characters are not very popular with WoW players. I believe that the failure of these characters has more to do with the changing nature of war, than by their actual characteristics. If the only just war is a defensive war, then an aggressive leader is necessarily worse than a leader who is mostly peaceful (for example, Thrall).

As well, whichever faction starts the war is the aggressor, and in the wrong. And Blizzard definitely wants to avoid painting one faction as the bad guy. One of the strengths of WoW is that both the Horde and the Alliance have their good points and bad points.

Other games avoid this in a variety of ways. Often one side is clearly labelled as the bad guys, rendering morality moot. For example, in Warhammer Online, the Chaos faction are the bad guys and clear aggressors. Other games have the war between factions being more of an "eternal war", one that has no real beginning and no real end.

But how do you start a war between two good factions, when starting a war is considered wrong? This would be possible in the times when the Clausewitz dictum held, but I think is all but impossible now.

Warhammer Online: Spread Too Thin

I think WAR should have cut the elves.

Seriously, no elves would have meant that there were only four main areas: Dwarf, Greenskin, Empire, and Chaos. This would have increased the concentration of players in each area. That would have lead to better PQs and PvP. I think that WAR is a game which really needs a minimum number of other players to really work.

As well, Mythic could have spent more time on those four areas and eight classes, adding more polish.

The elves would have also made a really good first expansion pack.

It seems like a lot of video games make this same mistake, attempting too much, spreading themselves too thin and doing a substandard job.

Third Year Mark

It's been about three years since I started writing this blog.

I think I'm a lot happier with WoW than I was last year. I've sort of made peace with the whole specialization issue. It's not ideal, but it's okay. It helps a lot that Protection and Retribution are very viable. Going Holy is closer to an actual choice, rather than being forced into it. Have to give Blizzard props for making that happen.

The biggest difference between now and previous years is that I am unguilded. To be honest, it's sort of nice not being in a guild. You log on, and do whatever you feel like. As well, there's something to be said for experiencing content in the proper order. I did every single quest before starting heroics. I haven't done any raids yet. But that means that I don't outgear the content yet. It's kind of nice, seeing a blue drop and realizing it's an upgrade for me rather than pure disenchant fodder. I just got to Revered rep with Wyrmrest today, and picked up multiple upgrades.

It's been really pleasant to have been able to go through the content in order, to consume it at leisure and not be rushed, rather than skipping all over the place. However, I'm coming to the end of what you can do solo and I do miss the experience of working on harder content with a team that sticks together.

I think I'm going to take a vacation from WoW for a few weeks before jumping into raiding, though. Cleanse the palate, if you will.

This past year I also tried some other MMOs. Age of Conan was terrible. Wizard 101 was quite good. If you're at all interested in a different MMO experience, give Wizard 101 a shot. The client and the first few zones are free.

Warhammer Online was decent, but I just couldn't get into it. I actually tried resubscribing a month ago to try the new tank class. Mythic has made some significant improvements. Of the five issues I identified, they've made amazing progress with the responsiveness of combat and polishing of systems like the chat interface. I still couldn't get into any of the classes, but if you were on the fence regarding WAR, you might want to take another look. Of course, I never made it past level 11, so I have no idea what endgame is like.

Warhammer Online: Contribution Shocker!

According to Wizards & Wenches, Warhammer players have figured out how contribution in public quests and keep sieges is measured:

Now we know how contribution is calculated. It’s so shockingly simple, so obvious we wonder why we didn’t figure it out a long time ago. It isn’t.

See, instead of actually measuring all the data players do during Public Quests to find out who contributes the most every player is making a roll when they enter a zone, and that roll is your contribution that appear. It doesn’t weight all your healing, all your damage, all your buffing, or everything that make you more worthy of a reward than a player standing AFK in a corner. It’s just random. The roll remains until you zone so you will get the same contribution in both Keeps unless you relog or someone with higher roll enters the PQ area.

Wow. Honestly, I'm speechless. What do you say to something like that? The evidence presented in threads on the discussion forums looks solid to me.

This is a blunder on par with Age of Conan's "females do less dps than males because their animations are slower" bug.

Warhammer Online: Final Thoughts

I've pretty much decided that I'm going to drop WAR, at least after the first month runs out. It's a good game, with superb PvP and some interesting design decisions. A lot of the game mechanics are very well thought out. But I'm just not enthusiastic about logging in. There are several reasons why:

1. Starting the game makes me angry. Mythic, take a long hard look at the time from clicking the desktop icon to actually playing. Then take a look at WoW. In WAR, it's: login screen (which does not have focus for some reason), launcher, splash screen, splash screen, splash screen, intro movie, splash screen, EULA (!!), main character screen. (Why is there an extra button press if you want to pick another character? Why not go straight to the character select screen?)

In WoW, it's: launcher, login screen, character select. So much shorter, and it gets you into the game so much faster. It's like, "Hey, I want to play WoW" and then I'm in the game actually playing. Blizzard understands that when I click the desktop icon, I actually want to play the game, not fight my way through splash screens, movies, and EULAs.

Just starting a game of WAR is a hassle, and I find I'm always logging in slightly annoyed at the whole process.

2. Combat is not responsive enough. There's a distinct disconnect between pressing a button, the effect happening in game, and the animation on the screen. It's really bad on casters with long cast times, but it's noticeable even on melee characters. On my Witch Hunter, hitting an Execution (finishing move) has no relationship with firing my pistol. Often I end up firing my pistol at a dead body, as the Execution deals damage long before the animation actually happens.

3. A lot of basic functionality needs polish and basic fixes, especially the chat system. This is an MMO. It's defining characteristic is being able to play with other people. The chat system should be as close to perfect as possible. As it is, the chat system is mostly useless, and the game feels very quiet and lonely. There's lots of other subsystems with similar problems, like mail, etc.

4. Trade skills seem excessively complex and unintuitive. I don't think I like the design that requires multiple characters to function. I like being self sufficient to a degree. Even games with more intricate crafting, like A Tale In The Desert, allowed you to create things by yourself. Sure, it was a lot of work, but there's something deeply satisfying about constructing something all by yourself, from gathering the raw materials to producing the finished product. (And shuffling materials between a network of alts does not count.)

5. Probably the biggest reason is that I just haven't found a character class that grabs me. Mechanically, they're all quite well done. I really like the warrior priest mechanics, for example. But in a weird way, it might be because the WAR classes have *really* strong flavor. They're very specific: Human Witch-Hunter, Dark Elf Disciple of Khaine, etc. While WoW classes tend to be more general, more archetypical. Even paladin is a pretty generic class, with lots of room for interpretation. A rogue can be assassin, spy, thief, scout, swords, daggers, maces, dwarf, gnome, etc. But a Witch Hunter is a Witch Hunter.

You can see this in the armor. Looking at the first three paladin raid sets, you have Paladin as Golden Knight, Paladin as Dark Inquisitor, and Paladin as Gundam (not exactly a traditional paladin interpretation, but sometimes Blizzard is just weird).

I kind of like the freedom of the generic archetype. I like playing a Paladin, I'm not sure I like playing a Warrior Priest of Sigmar. Even though the mechanics of the Warrior Priest are superior to the mechanics of a Paladin.

But maybe I just haven't found the right class for me yet. Perhaps I'll check back in when Mythic adds the Knight of the Blazing Sun.

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Anyways, this is not to say that WAR is a bad game. It's actually quite a good game, with lots of intriguing ideas and solid PvP. If you're thinking about trying it, I strongly urge you to give it a go. Even just playing it for only the first month is worth the money in my opinion. You might find it' s the perfect game for you. I just don't think it's the game for me.

On Posting Lately

Aaron comments:

I'm seeing more and more Warhammer posts and less Warcraft posts. realise it's a new game, but is this trend going to continue? I used to read your blog as a great source of paladin information, but lately... Might be time to unsubscribe.

I want to say something about "unsubscribe" but everything I try to write is coming out too snarky. So I'll just leave it alone.

The reason I'm not posting a lot about WoW and paladins is that nothing much is happening with them. Ret and Prot are pretty fun to play in Beta. Blizzard just needs to fix a couple of bugs (Art of War, mainly), and tune the numbers slightly, and those two trees are good to go.

About the only major change I'd want Blizzard to consider is to stop proccing Seals off special attacks, and then adjust the numbers. This might also allow Blizzard to dial Seal damage up a bit (revert the 20% nerf?) and that would make soloing as Holy easier. Seriously, soloing as Holy is something like three times slower than Ret. It's not so bad for the other healing classes, as healing gear now doubles as dps gear for them and they have the necessary tools to solo effectively. A resto shaman can still pump out Lightning Bolts and Shocks. A druid still has Moonfire and Starfire. But Holy lacks the tools that the other specs have.

Healing as Holy is still boring. But it's too late to significantly change Holy, and Blizzard seems happy with with the tree. Further proof that none of the designers play a Holy paladin.

Besides which, it's not going to matter. Blizzard is still intent on balancing raids around large numbers of healers. Most raiding paladins are going to be forced to heal, just because there won't be enough healers. Our Blessings are still in non-optimal state, meaning that PallyPower is going to be a required raid mod. All in all, I don't think I'm really looking forward to raiding in Wrath of the Lich King, at least not as a Paladin.

For now, at least WAR offers something new and different.

Warhammer Online: Public Quests, Redux

Warhammer Online: Defender's Dilemma

I was playing Warhammer Online with my Witch Elf the other night. I was doing the Tier 1 Elf scenario Khaine's Embrace.

Khaine's Embrace is pretty neat. There are two standards. If your team captures both standards, a horn sounds, and there is a giant explosion, killing everyone in a large radius around the standards. Then your team gets 75 points, and the standards reset. I like the map, though possibly mostly for the horn sound and explosion graphics.

Anyways, it's early in the match, Order has their standards, but we're pressing them hard. All of a sudden, our standard gets captured, and we fall behind. It turns out not a single person is defending, so a lone Order player was able to sneak by and cap.

So I start defending. It's terribly boring, but I do kill several Order players who try the sneak again. Our flag is never captured again, and we win handily.

The problem is that I ended up getting the lowest renown and rewards from that fight. And that has really soured me on WAR. I'll be honest, I basically won that map for my side. The zerg didn't accomplish anything, but they got to rack up kills and renown.

This is the problem with systems that try and track contribution, and hand out rewards based on contribution. Sometimes contribution is very hard to track. Defense in particular is hard to judge. Not to mention that it's far more boring than being on the attack with the front line.

Edit: Not to mention that you can apparently leave your Scenario group and not share any Renown/XP with the other players. Ahh, Mythic, did you not learn anything from WoW?

Warhammer Online:The Chat Box

If you play Warhammer Online, you'll soon notice some odd behavior, at least compared to other MMOs: No one talks on the public chat channels.

It's very weird, everything being so silent. There are plenty of other players around. And it's so unlike the other MMOs I've played. In WoW, you can't get people to shut up, especially in the Barrens. Even Age of Conan, people talked a lot, if only to complain that their systems couldn't handle the game. But people are always chatting or complaining about quests or classes or Chuck Norris, and it's extremely disconcerting not to have that. Heck, there's more talking in Wizard 101, and that game was trying to prevent conversation.

I think the problem resides solely with Mythic's implementation of the WAR chatbox. There are three main reasons why it fails:

1. The font is too large, and the box is too small

A large font means that less information can be conveyed. It means that fewer lines of text can be shown, and a smaller history of the conversation is preserved. It also means that a lot of messages which should only take up one line wrap into two lines, further wasting the limited chat space.

2. Too many useless messages

In particular, the NPCs talk a lot, and quite frankly spam your chat box. This is very annoying, especially those which have long speechs, or multiple NPCs interacting. I think you can turn this off, but it was a mistake to include it in the default settings.

(As a complete aside, ever notice that text in the NPC speech bubbles has quotation marks? That seems weird and redundant to me.)

The other big contributor to this problem is transaction messages when buying or selling items. Again, multiple lines are taken up with each item, making harder to have a conversation with people.

The golden rule of chat boxes is that chat boxes should be reserved for communicating with other players. If at all possible, messages from the game to the player should be handled by the rest of the UI. Only messages that absolutely have to be in the chat box history should show up. Otherwise players will quickly learn to ignore the chatbox, as nothing useful ever shows up.

A further problem here is that general chat appears to be the same colour as game messages, making it even easier to ignore.

3. Lack of feedback when changing channels

Load up WoW, and type "/1 " (with the space). See what happens? The chat channel immediately changes to General, so you know what channel you are sending your message to.

Do the same thing in WAR. Notice that nothing happens. There's no indication that you are sending your message to the right channel. If you keep typing, "/1 test", that will send the message "test" out on the general channel. But the lack of feedback, I think hampers people from figuring out how to talk, makes it less intuitive, especially since no one else is talking.

To my mind, this whole issue indicates the importance of the small stuff. The three concerns I've outlined are minor. The default chat box certainly looks functional on paper. But I think these small issues have kept people from talking, and have made the experience very different from other MMOs. As well, I think this silence is negative. We play MMOs to play with other people, and it's nice to see people talking. Many people have called MMOs "glorified chatrooms", and I think that's a part of their appeal.