Experiments

As long-time readers know, I am a proponent of experiments, of trying new ideas out and seeing what problems result, rather than trying to predict everything that will happen in advance. The best knowledge comes from previous experiments. We know unlimited PvP is not popular, because of the Felucca/Trammel split in Ultima Online.

There are lots of experiments I would like to see MMO companies try, even if most of us think they would end badly. Of course, it's hard for an MMO to wildly experiment when the cost of a failed experiment is the loss of many subscribers. I'm sure Blizzard has regrets about some of the experiments they carried out in Cataclysm.

One experiment I would like to see is the release of new content without increasing item level. A new raid tier is released, with new loot, new item sets, but the exact same item level as the previous tier.

Now, I think that we're all in agreement that this would go over like a lead balloon. But none of us are absolutely sure. It's possible that the audience would be fine with it, maybe for a little bit.

The thing is that if the audience is okay with new content at the same item level, that would help enormously with some problems in endgame. You wouldn't have this constant ramp up of power levels. You could introduce more tiers, or space out content in a cleaner fashion, without impacting the power level. You wouldn't need as many catch-up mechanisms.

Admittedly, it's unlikely that keeping the item level the same would be popular. But we don't know for certain.

Another experiment I'd like to see is not having raid content available on release. Open it up three months afterwards, and make sure that everyone knows this is the plan. I think there is a much greater pressure to blow through leveling content among veteran MMO players. Perhaps giving those players time to digest the leveling experience, to stop and smell the roses, would be beneficial in the long run.

What experiments would you like to see an MMO try?

Inconvenience

Distance is measured in time, not space.

That's not literally true, of course. But it does seem to map to how we think of distance. I live half an hour from work. The grocery store is a 5 minute walk away. The big city is four hours away.

So when you apply this to virtual worlds, geography needs to take into account travel time. Uldum is right next to Stormwind, despite being on another continent. This is because the portal is there. The portal is a convenience, but it also makes the world seem less like a world. Without the portal, the game would be more inconvenient.

I was reading the debates between theme parks and sandboxes, and it occurred to me that inconvenience is a very important factor in making the virtual world behave like the real world.

Take the entire concept of trade, for example. At one level, you buy items where they are cheap, transport them to where they are expensive, and sell them for a profit. But this entire transaction works because of inconveniences. Resources are distributed unevenly. The markets in the two different areas are not connected. There is a limit to how much weight one can carry. The transit takes time. The transit might be dangerous.

There are a lot of elements in a modern MMO that would need to be stripped away to model this type of trade. No common auction house, weight restrictions, and a long travel time to get from area to area.

The theme park MMOs are all moving towards smoothing away as many inconveniences as they can. And the playerbase demands it. Look at the outcry when portals were removed from Dalaran.

And yet, for sandboxes to truly work, I think they won't work despite inconveniences, they work because of those inconveniences.

But inconvenience is, well, inconvenient. Maybe sandboxes can never work, because the required inconvenience to truly simulate a virtual world will just drive players away.

Cataclysm, In Review

I find Cataclysm is a hard expansion to really pin down. The thing is that there were no "unambiguous wins" this expansion. It seemed like every element was "one step forward, one step back".

Compare that to Wrath of the Lich King. Lich King had, in my mind, at least two moments of awesome: the Wrathgate ("Did you think we had forgotten? Did you think we had forgiven? Behold, now, the terrible vengeance of the Forsaken!" - best speech since original Ragnaros); and Ulduar. Maybe the Lich King fight counts as a third moment, I'm not sure about that. Cataclysm, in contrast, didn't really have anything to match those highs.

The Good:

• Choosing specializations at level 10 - I thought this worked remarkably well. It made choosing your path a lot cleaner and simpler.
• Class balance in general - I really liked class balance this expansion. While there were a few issues at the very high end, for the most part almost all specializations were balanced against each other.
• The new healing model - Maybe it's because Holy paladins were one-button spam for so long, but I greatly enjoyed healing this expansion. Using many different spells, watching your mana, triage. The basic process of healing was interesting again. It did break down a bit near the end, admittedly.
• Twilight Highlands - Dwarven wedding! The best zone of the expansion.
• Mylune - You know you love her.
• Looking For Raid - excellent job on making a transient version of raiding.

The Mushy Middle:

• 10-man raiding - Pro: 10-man raiding became a first-class activity. Con: 25-man raiding was gutted.
• Guild levels - Pros: was fun to level up your guild. Cons: loss of perks made guilds too sticky, I thought. Also, the setup of cauldrons and feasts was terribly annoying, and done just to preserve the perk.
• T11 and Firelands - Pro: solid, interesting fights. Con: very static difficulty, gave rise to "dancing" claims, also possibly too difficult at the start
• Firelands dailies - Pro: Interesting quests, liked the storyline. Con: because of phasing worries, actual process was excessively grindy. Unlocking areas every single day was annoying. Blizz should have just had it unlock once and not worry about the phasing.
• Heroics - Pro: difficult and challenging. Con: difficult and challenging. To be honest, I still think these could have worked if the endgame had been structured differently. Take a look at how TBC heroics were placed in the attunements for raids
• Hyjal - Pro: good quests, interesting storyline. Con: excessively linear.
• Deepholm - Decent zone, nothing too interesting though.
• Uldum - Pro: quests with the cat people: Con: quests with Harrison Jones
• Old World Revamp - Pro: Lots of interesting new quests. Con: Loss of the old stories and common experiences. Many veterans felt it was too easy.
• Dragon Soul - I don't think I can look at this raid objectively. My feelings are coloured by the dissolution of my guild.
• Archaeology - Pro: neat items and very flavorful. Con: Very grindy. Fly a lot, survey, survey, survey, fly to the next area.

The Bad:

• Vash'jir - Underwater sucked. Was way too long and linear. Trapped a quartermaster midway through.
• Only 5 levels - Questing was too short, endgame came too fast. I much preferred the 10 levels of the previous expansion.
• Deathwing - Pretty boring villain. No style. Didn't appear often enough to feel like a true Big Bad. It felt like Blizzard thought they overexposed Arthas, and tried to pull back with Deathwing. But the problem wasn't that Arthas appeared too much, it was that Arthas always lost, and so started to come off as a paper tiger.

So that's what I thought of Cataclysm. The class mechanic changes were good. But all the content (except for Twilight Highlands) was all in that middle zone of quality. No moments of awesome.

[SWTOR] Improving Companion Gameplay

Companions are a fun and interesting part of The Old Republic, especially when leveling. For the most part, the system Bioware has in place works pretty well. Here are some suggestions or tweaks that I think would improve companion gameplay.

1. If a quest rewards companion gear, give the gear for all the companions as a reward.

Right now, if a quest rewards companion gear, you have to pick one piece for one companion. This method strongly encourages the player to only gear up the current companion, while the other companions lag behind. As well, if your current companion doesn't need the gear, it's a bit of a hassle to figure out which companion needs the gear the most.

There's also some issues when you need a specific companion at certain times, and not keeping their gear up to date can make fights harder than they should be.

On the other hand, if you simply got gear for all your companions at the same time, it would make life a lot simpler. All your companions get upgrades, keeping their gear up to date, at least with green items. If a specific companion has better gear, you can just sell that companion's piece for a few credits. There's no, "oh, I made a mistake, I should have gotten Kaliyo's helmet instead of Vector's".

Plus, you get to see the changing looks for all your companions as you level. I think this would greatly simplify companion gearing while leveling, without really overpowering anything.

2. Rearrange companion ability bars so "stances" show up in the 4-button bar.

Right now, the default companion UI shows four buttons: Attack, Passive, and the first two abilities. The bar can be temporarily expanded to show all abilities, but it overlaps one of your regular bars. For some reason, you cannot rearrange companion abilities on the bar, though you can toggle abilities on or off.

Each companion also has two stances, like a DPS stance or a tank stance. Or single-target versus AoE. A lot of times these stances are on the very right.

It would make life a little easier if the stances were on the left, so they showed up in the small 4-button bar. Then that bar would be: Attack, Passive, Stance 1, Stance 2. This way you could more easily swap companion stances as appropriate.

3. Not use AoE when Crowd Control is active.

Right now, companions are very good with not interrupting crowd control when they use their single-target abilities. But if you enable AoE abilities, odds are that your crowd control will get broken by their AoE within seconds of applying it.

It is a significant hassle to keep expanding the companion ability bar and turn on and off AoE fight by fight. On all my characters, I've gotten into the habit of just turning all the AoE off. It's so much easier to use crowd control abilities when you're confident that the companion won't break them.

A simple rule where the companion simply doesn't use AoE abilities when any enemy is under a crowd control would go a long way towards making companion AoE abilities useful all the time. You could just enable the AoE abilities, and be confident that your crowd control is not going to be broken.

To be clear, I'm not asking that the companion calculate if its AoE will hit a crowd controlled enemy. That is probably excessive. A simple check if anything is controlled or not is enough, regardless of where the enemy is.

4. Integrate companions into the healing/operations UI.

It is extraordinarily annoying to try to heal someone else's companion. Especially in two person groups for the small heroics.

All I would like here is for companions to show up in the operations UI. That UI is the best for healing. Just have the companion health bar show up as if it was another player. All health bars are in one place, and healing companions becomes just like healing other players in the group.

5. Improve conditions when companions start attacking someone.

There are two situations I've encountered where the companion does not start attacking as you would expect. First, is Imperial Agent Sniper. For some reason, most of the main abilities used by the Sniper don't cause the companion to attack. But other abilities do. It would be a lot easier if all Sniper abilities caused the companion to attack.

The second situation is if you are the healer in a group. Your companion only attacks enemies which attack you, or which you attack. That means a lot of the time you have to micro-manage your companion to keep him attacking. Otherwise he might kill one enemy, then stop attacking and just stand there. It's very annoying when you are busy healing, especially as you are trying to fight the UI as described in point 4.

I would suggest that your companion starts attacking when anyone in your group attacks someone or when anyone in your group gets attacked. This would make managing your companion while healing a lot easier, as easy as it is when you are dealing damage or tanking.

Conclusion

For the most part, companions work well and are an enjoyable element of questing. But I think the five improvements above would smooth out a few of the rough edges of companion gameplay.

Legendaries

Legendary weapons are interesting items in WoW. Right now, there are three expectations for a legendary weapon:

1. They will be rare. Not every character who can use a legendary will get one.
2. They will be very powerful. A legendary is not expected to be replaced until the next expansion, while most weapons are expected to be replaced in the next tier.
3. They will have a significant quest or lore attached to them.

In the past, these three elements have caused issues with each other. Rare and very powerful means that guilds who can recruit multiple legendaries have a significant advantage. Conversely, guilds who lose their legendary feel resentful and unhappy. There is also significant conflict over who gets the legendary first, because the people later in line may not get one at all.

Legendaries being Best-In-Slot for an entire expansion also means that they can only show up in the last or second last tier.  As well, classes which don't receive legendaries do feel slighted.

The quest attached causes three problems. First, only a small fraction of players will see the quest. Not all rogues will see the daggers quest line. It's restricted to raiding rogues who get the legendary. That seems like a very large set of restrictions.

The second problem is that the questline is a very long grind, because that is how Blizzard limits the supply of legendaries. I suppose it's better than the random chance method that previous legendaries used.

The third problem is that classes and specs which are not in line to get a legendary will not get an epic quest.

I like the quests and lore attached to these weapons. But I really wonder if the first two points are worthwhile. On balance I think those two points have caused more trouble than they are worth.

Can we have weapons with quests and lore without having them be very rare and very powerful?

I think we can. There is precedent here: [Benediction] and [Rhok'delar]. Both those weapons are fondly remembered by their respective classes because of the quest chains attached to them. I'd wager than the vast majority of characters who got those weapons back in the day still have them banked. 

Both those weapons were good weapons, best for that tier. But they were still replaced in the next tier. If all your priests had Benediction, it didn't unbalance the raid. They weren't super rare, but were still worthwhile to get.

I think [Benediction] and [Rhok'delar] are the better model for quest and lore-driven loot. Solid, well-loved weapons, with interesting questlines, but without the unbalancing effects of rarity and power that current Legendaries have.

It would be easier for Blizzard to add more of these, even for more obscure classes and specs. For example, [Fandral's Flamescythe] might have been a very nice questline weapon, even if it isn't as powerful as a Legendary.

In my view, legendary weapons cause more trouble than they are worth. It seems to me that we can get almost as much mileage out good epic-level quest-driven weapons modeled after [Benediction], without the drama and unbalancing effects of legendaries.

Player or Character as Central Entity

In WoW and most other MMOs, the character is the central entity in the design around which everything revolves. But players have multiple characters. And there are a lot of game play elements which are fun the first time around, but are not so much fun the second time around.

The quintessential example here is reputation grinds. Working on rep is reasonably interesting on your first character. But it's excessive on your second character, especially if the reputation is necessary for endgame. Right now, WoW gets around this limitation by making important items Bind-on-Account, which allows you to transfer them to characters who don't have the necessary rep yet.

But, what if reputation was tied to the player account, not the character? Once you're exalted with the Argent Dawn, you're exalted on all your characters. You could have the long reputation grinds and chains once again, because a player only needs to do them once.

There are a lot of other elements which could be moved from the character to the player. Reputation, Achievements, Pet collections, and Mount collections are the straight-forward ones. But what about some less obvious elements?

Friends - We're already moving towards this with Real Id and Battletags. I predict that eventually the Friends Lists will exist at the account level, and consist of other accounts, rather than characters. Same thing with the Ignore List.

Gold - Gold could work at the player level. All your characters would have access to, and contribute to, a central gold stockpile.

Currencies - To extend gold, why not all currencies, including Valor and Honor points?

Inventory - This might sound a little odd, but does each character need a unique inventory? Could the same set of bags be used for all characters. There would be issues here, of course, but how necessarily unique are inventories?

Bank - A bank might work better at the player level, shared between all characters. Certainly would be easier than using the mail system all the time.

Guilds - There are probably a lot of objections to having players belonging to a guild, rather than individual characters. But there are also a lot of requests for being able to belong to multiple guilds at the same time. If we did have a multi-guild system, it certainly would be easier to have the account belong to the different guilds, rather than individual characters.

Attunements - I liked long attunement chains, especially for the first tier of content. But again, once you've unlocked something, it should be unlocked for all your characters.

PvP Matchmaker Ratings - Really, shouldn't a player's rating be consistent across all her characters? As far as I see, having ratings be character-based just allows people to game the system.

Areas like Molten Front - Similar to attunements, areas like the Molten Front would be better if you only needed to unlock it once. You could even make the process longer and more intricate, confident that each player only needs to do it once.

Lockouts - Possibly the most controversial element I can think of. But consider the idea of having 2 lockouts per account per week. You could do two raids on the same character, or raid with two different characters. There are also some shenanigans with alts at the very high end which this might cut down on.

When we look at the original design of most modern MMOs, almost all gameplay elements are unique to each character that is created. But I think that perhaps a better design might see the player as the central element, with all her characters sharing many elements.

[SWTOR] Imperial Agent Done!

I got my Imperial Agent up to level 50 and finished the class storyline and also the main quest storyline. The Imperial Agent storyline (especially Light-side Imp Agent, in my opinion) was very, very good. Very spy-like, lots of twists and turns, betrayal, double/triple agents, etc. The main theme of the storyline, of how the non-Sith exist in an Empire ruled by the Sith, was really interesting.

I was expecting a lot of the traditional spy stuff, and that was there in spades. At one point, I was pretty sure I was a quintuple agent, which in retrospect makes no sense, but indicates the level of paranoia that was going on. But I was not expecting story elements to be based on Isaac Asimov's work. It was brilliant, and well thought out.

For tactics, I played Marksman Sniper. It worked fine for the most part, though it is rather weak until you get to about level 30 or so. At that point you get two abilities (one from talents, one trained) which are a core part of the rotation, and damage starts flowing.

The difficulty level is interesting too. In general, class quests were slightly easier than regular story quests, which does make class balance seem slightly questionable. Overall though, most fights were roughly the same difficulty, save two.

These two fights are significantly harder than all other fights, and it does seem rather odd. The first fight is the class fight at the end of Chapter 1. It doesn't help that it's pretty buggy. But the entire fight is based around interrupting, using any ability that can interrupt, including knockbacks.

The second hard fight is main quest boss at the end of Voss. When did pillar-humping become an acceptable PvE tactic? This fight is literally pillar-humping as you use two pillars to break line-of-sight while keeping dots up and the occasional instant.

Oh well, those two fights do seem a little out of character.

But now the question becomes what should I do? Should I start a new character and check out a new story? Should I try and do instances? Lots of choices here.

Nerfs and Listening to the Hardcore

Kurn wrote a good post about the upcoming Dragon Soul nerfs. She is unhappy with the nerfs. I am on the opposite side of the issue. However, I want to address two specific points in her post.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — I like a challenge. I loved attunement quests, no matter how crappy they were to do (doing Jailbreak twice in a single night for Majik because he was a dumbass and died? Not fun.). I loved working out strats for encounters in Burning Crusade raids, which, at the time, were incredibly punishing (Vashj, Kael, Bloodboil all come to mind off the top of my head). We were nowhere near server first, we were over a year behind in most cases. But we persevered and worked through it. The only nerfs we took advantage of were attunement removals (except the BT one, because we needed the necks for shadow resistance) and the 3.0 nerfs because, dangit, we weren’t ready to stop raiding yet. (Still, we were 4/5 Hyjal and 5/9 BT when 3.0 dropped.) By and large, Vashj was pretty similar an encounter when we downed her (on June 2nd, 2008) as when SSC opened up in 2007. There had been no 20% zone-wide nerf. No stacking 30% player buff. Nothing of the sort. 

There was a measure of pride there. I still wear my Hand of A’dal title because of what it took for us to kill Vashj and Kael and finish the Vials of Eternity quest.

I remember Lady Vashj too. What I remember about Lady Vashj was that she broke the guild I was in. We went 3/4 TK and 5/6 SSC, but we broke on Vashj. Maybe she was beyond us, maybe we should have improved, maybe we should have practiced more or been better players.

Really hard bosses break guilds. Vashj, Kael'thalas, Vaelastraz, Ragnaros.  These bosses are known as guild-killers.

Broken guilds are not good for the game, in my view. Guilds that get stuck on a hard boss, with no respite in sight, die. These nerfs keep guilds from getting stuck. Small, steady nerfs keep people moving forward, keep them from being completely stuck forever.

To me, the choice seems to be between guild-killer bosses, or nerfing. I choose nerfing.

I’ve long felt that Blizzard is ignoring its population of older players. I have been playing WoW since October of 2005. This doesn’t grant me any in-game advantage, and that’s okay, but those things that I “grew up” with, like attunements, like keys, like epic class quests, like epic instances without the novelty of a “heroic” mode… those are the things that kept me interested in the game. Those are the things that helped grow the game to 11 million players. Precious few of those mechanics and concepts remain. Is it any wonder why people are quitting? Is it any wonder why I now believe this to be my final expansion? The game is unrecognizable. The playerbase is maddeningly lazy and unwilling to put forth the effort that so many of us old-timers did and their laziness is affecting us.

Honestly, when has listening to older players ever helped Blizzard?

Blizzard listened to us at the start of Cataclysm. "Wrath was too easy," we said. "Make heroics hard like in TBC!" "Bring back crowd control!" "Make raiding hard again!"

Blizzard listened to us, and was rewarded with a significant drop in subscriptions. It's obvious from their subsequent actions that their internal numbers were telling them that the drop in the subscribers was coming from the people who found endgame too hard.

Consider the idea that ignoring the older players is the right thing to do. That they are merely a vocal minority. In my view, all the evidence points to that conclusion.

I am obviously not the type of player they want playing their game. And that’s what’s so very shocking to me. I am a good player. I am a community asset. I am a guild leader, a raid leader, a healing lead. I write a blog dedicated to the game that has had hundreds of thousands of visitors and pageviews since December 31st, 2009 (and more before then, but I don’t have any data before 12/31/09). I co-host and produce a podcast dedicated to the game.

Kurn loved the original Cataclysm heroics. So did I. We both wrote multiple blog posts extolling the experience.  Many, many other bloggers out there did the same.

And what was the result of the best efforts of these "community assets"? Two million lost subscriptions.

Our set is not as important as we think we are. We are loud, but occupy a small, tightly bound niche. There is no reason that Blizzard should give our concerns any extra weight. If anything, the evidence is proving that our concerns should be given less weight.

[SWTOR] Dungeon Finder

The Old Republic doesn't have a dungeon finder.  A lot of bloggers seem to be applauding this.

I don't know. Maybe they're right. Maybe a dungeon finder does damage the community and make running instances less fun.

All I know is that my highest level character, a 42 Sniper, has only seen the first three flashpoints, and only the first two were done at the appropriate level. The third flashpoint I did when I was 15 levels higher than the recommended level. I have not finished a [HEROIC 4] group quest since the second planet, at about level 16.  I have done some of the smaller [HEROIC 2+] quests though.

I have a whole set of outdated quests in my log, pointing to the flashpoints I just have not been able to do.

Now, maybe it's my fault for choosing to play a DPS character instead of a tank or healer. Maybe I should have found and joined an active guild with people at the correct level. Maybe I should be more willing to spend hours on the station looking for a group, instead of continuing on my quests.

Maybe I should have stuck with the player-made global Looking For Group channel, despite the fact that everyone was using it as a general chat, and it was worse than Barrens chat.

I did try for the third flashpoint when at the correct level. I spent an hour looking for people, but only found one other person, at which point I gave up.

I really enjoy doing small group content at the correct level. I don't like being carried by higher level players. But as far as I can see, that's pretty much not an option for me in The Old Republic.

I guess I'll get to see the flashpoints when I'm at max level, and there's nothing better to do but hang out at the station and scan the chat.

Maybe the dungeon finder makes running instances less fun. But at least with a dungeon finder, I can actually run the instances.

[SWTOR] Through a Glass, Darkly

The Old Republic has an interesting mix of zones. There are zones unique to each faction, like the starting planets and the capital planet. There are "shared" planets, like Hoth, where both sides quest (and gank, if on a PvP server) together.

And then there is Taris.

Taris is a city planet, destroyed by planetary bombardment by Darth Malak back in Knights of the Old Republic. It's now infested by rakghouls, a vicious bunch of monsters who infect their victims and turn them into more rakghouls.

Taris is a level 16-20 zone for Republic and a level 30-36 zone for Empire. But Taris is not a shared world!

Both zones use the same geography, and the same planet, and the same concern with the rakghouls. But on the Republic side, the Republic holds Taris and is attempting to reclaim it from rakghouls and pirates. On the Empire side, the Empire holds Taris and chasing the remnants of the Republic off it.

It's as if the two Tarises exist side-by-side in parallel universes. In one universe the Republic is dominant, and in the other universe the Empire is ascendant.

It makes me wonder if SWTOR is a shared universe between the two factions. In World of Warcraft, it's obvious that the two factions share the same world. You can go and visit the home cities of the other side.

But SWTOR seems to be running two parallel universes that only occasionally overlap. Which is really odd at first, and seems quite unusual. But there are advantages. With two separate universes, the storyline can unfold differently for each side. One side can "win" without the other side suffering a "loss".

Still, this quite caught me by surprise. I'm so used to the shared world, that other setups seem hard to grasp.

Is Diablo 3 Gambling?

Tobold asks if Diablo 3 is gambling and concludes that it is:

And thus the question whether the randomized way in which the player acquired the Sword of Uberness is a form of gambling is valid.

I disagree with this interpretation. Wikipedia's definition, which I think is a good one, states:

Gambling is the wagering of money or something of material value (referred to as "the stakes") on an event with an uncertain outcome with the primary intent of winning additional money and/or material goods.

The wager is the important part of gambling, and that's the part that Diablo 3 is missing. When you go to kill a boss to get a random drop, you don't bet anything. And you don't lose anything. Sure the reward is random, but there is no loss, and no initial bet.

You have to be able to lose your stakes based on the random event for the activity to be considered gambling. In a lottery, you have to purchase a ticket, and that's your stake. Losing that stake, tiny as it is, is what makes a lottery gambling.

Where you can lose money is in the buying and selling of items. But that's trade, and it's not random. Sell at the price the market will bear, and don't purchase over-priced items. In fact, if you never buy an item, and always sell at below market prices, I don't see how you can actually lose money in D3. You may end up only making a tiny amount, and the amount per hour will be orders of magnitude less than a real job, but there's no actual loss.

But without the wager, without the bet, without the possibility of loss, there is no gambling. Diablo 3 doesn't make you put down wagers on what the random loot will be, and thus is not gambling.

The Tyranny of Skill

In a lot of ways, World of Warcraft raiding is an extreme meritocracy.  The better a player is, the more highly skilled, the more weight her voice carries. All the guilds I've been in follow this general pattern. The players who are listened to are the ones who can perform the best. For this reason, it's very important that officers in a serious raiding guild be among the top half of the players.

In my experience, this pattern even holds in PuGs. I have never been treated badly in a PuG or LFR. It is really hard to argue with a person decked in high end gear, or topping the meters.

And yet, the high skill players are not always right. I mentioned in the previous post that:

There is a type of person who believes that all failure is caused by people playing badly. That skill is everything in this game. That the only response to any problem, any difficulty, is to tell people to play better, or recruit better people to replace the failures. That you must always take the "best" raiders you have to a raid to ensure success.

The people who espouse this view are always really good players. Of the players I've known with this view, the vast majority of them were far better than I am. Indeed, it is highly possible that they are this good because they hold themselves to this standard.

Not all of these players yell or are unpleasant. Many of them are nice and rational. They simply believe that all failure is a failure of personal responsibility.

A lot of the time these players are right. Enforcing standards makes people live up to those standards. Sometimes you'll encounter players who just will not live up to the necessary standards for the level you play at.

But sometimes these players are wrong. All my raiding experience leads me to believe that this style of play, where the only important thing is personal accountability, is brittle. When you get a good group going you can progress exceptionally fast. But sooner or later you lose people just through normal attrition, and have to recruit more and that leads to uneven progress. Or you hit a wall, and relations become acrimonious over who's failure it is.

But the problem is that all these highly skilled players just cannot see that. Suggestions that weigh any other considerations get met with comments that such suggestions are akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. That the only thing that will lead to progress is the individual players stepping up and improving their play. Or under-performing players being replaced by ones who can perform.

And because they are highly skilled, their voice carries a lot of weight. And that is the part that is very hard to combat or argue against.

Edit: Copying this response to Kalon in the comments, because it may make things a little more clear.

Or there's a third option - that you lose people through attrition and instead of accepting recruits that are perhaps subpar you always recruit for the best and do not settle.

But then you don't actually raid. Because you don't always have the numbers to raid.

Part of this--which I left out because I though it was tangential, may have been wrong--is that this style of play is very hostile to maintaining a bench.

If you are always taking your 25 best raiders to new content, then your bench doesn't get to raid. And quality players will not hang around a mid-Aristocracy guild if they only get to raid 1 of 3 days at best. Maybe they'll feel that's okay in a Royalty guild, but not at my level.

And to be honest, that's my main issue with this playstyle. Personal accountability is a secondary priority. The first and greatest priority is maintaining a full raid force, with a deep enough bench that you are always able to raid with a stable group.

Basically, the personal accountability folks felt that because people didn't perform, we didn't progress fast enough in order to attract quality recruits.

I felt that because we couldn't retain people (especially people who were on the bench), we couldn't put together a consistent raid in order to progress consistently.

In the Wake of a Bad Merger

You guys have probably noticed that I haven't been writing a lot over the past two months. And that most of my posts have been about Star Wars. Well, there's a reason for that. Looking back on it, I think I've been playing so much SWTOR not only because it's the new hotness, but also to avoid logging into WoW. Which is somewhat ironic if you take the view that people often play WoW to avoid real life.

When I last talked about my guild in the beginning of November, I mentioned that we had gone through a split, had moved to a more populated server, and were looking at merging with another 10-man guild to get back up to 25s.

That merger turned out to be the worst mistake in the history of our guild.

There is a type of person who believes that all failure is caused by people playing badly. That skill is everything in this game. That the only response to any problem, any difficulty, is to tell people to play better, or recruit better people to replace the failures. That you must always take the "best" raiders you have to a raid to ensure success.

There is a degree of truth in this.  But in my view, there usually there are a lot more elements that you can look at before you conclude that the problem is solely due to bad play. Sometimes the strategy is not quite right. Sometimes people misunderstand the plan. Sometimes people just make mistakes. Sometimes you just need practice, to wipe a few nights before everything clicks. Sometimes you just have to go with the army you have, rather than the army you wish you had.

In any case, the merging guild was entirely made up of people who held the first view. They were all very good players, at least pure skill-wise. But their response to any wipe, any failure, was to yell at people, to point fingers and berate them.  Sometimes the yelling would start before the attempt even finished, while we still attacking the boss.

It was the worst raiding experience of my life.

And of course we started hemorraging members. In two weeks we went from 35 raiders online to barely 25. We lost some essential people from our old guild before the merger.

The final blow came last week. We only had 23 raiders on, so it was decided to take the 10 "best" people and down some Heroic bosses for progression.  Apparently that team had trouble and drama blew up, with lots of yelling and finger-pointing, and the upshot was that the entire group of merged people left the guild.

So we're back down to maybe a 10-man worth of people, minus those people who left earlier. I'm not really certain what will happen. A lot of the people who remain sound rather "shell-shocked", with their confidence in their ability to tackle Heroics broken.

[SWTOR] Chat Box

So far, the single biggest mistake Bioware has made is their default chat filters. It's a simple mistake, but I think it has surprising large ramifications.

Now, this is a hobbyhorse of mine, so maybe I'm overstating the impact. Especially since every recent MMO has made the same mistake, in my view. Heck, maybe it's a sign that I'm wrong.

By default, system messages are sent to the general chat box. And there are a ton of system messages. When you hit level 25 and unlock your Legacy (shared XP pool and last name between your characters on a server), you start getting a Legacy XP message every time you earn normal XP. That's two lines in your chat box for every XP event. Which is every time you kill a mob. And the default pull is pack of three to four mobs.

Basically, the spam of system chat messages makes your chat box useless for its primary purpose. SWTOR is an extraordinarily quiet game, which is surprising for such a new game, and one that gets quieter as you increase in levels. This is very unfortunate, because you need the chat to organize groups to take on the heroics.

Go into the game, and turn off system messages in the general tab of your chat box. Turn it on in the Other tab (may actually happen automatically). All of a sudden, the general chat becomes usable once again, and you still have the Other tab if you need to recall a system message.

Of all the changes Bioware could make in their next patch, I strongly urge them to turn off system messages in the default chat box. I think it would make a world of a difference community-wise.

The Guild as a Nexus of Contracts

If you look at the Guild Relations Forums, there are a lot of posts of (ex-)Guild Masters decrying the new Guild Takeover mechanisms. This is where, if a GM does not log on for an entire month, the next highest ranked officer can take over the GM position, demoting the original GM. A lot of the GRF regulars are responding that:

1. This was the policy all along, it just required a Help ticket previously.
2. You can't really be a good GM if you don't log on for a month.
3. If you are going to be gone for a month, you should promote someone trustworthy to the second-in-command rank.

These points are all correct, but I feel that they are missing something. Something about how the relationship between guild and the individuals in guilds has changed over WoW's history, and something about the nature of ownership.

Background

Ownership is complicated concept. To own an item implies that one has a great deal of control over that item, often absolute control. If I own a chair, I can sit on it, move it around, paint it, disassemble it, burn it, chop it to pieces, sell it, give it away, or any other myriad options.

Conversely, if there exists an object to which I can do all of the actions above, then for all intents and purposes, I "own" that object.

In common parlance, a corporation is "owned" by the shareholders. But that relationship is not the same relationship as my ownership of my chair. In fact, it is so different that several academics declare that using the word "own" is wrong and misleading. As Professor Stephen Bainbridge of UCLA puts it:

Ownership implies a thing capable of being owned. To be sure, we often talk about the corporation as though it were such a thing, but when we do so we engage in reification. While it may be necessary to reify the corporation for semantic convenience, it can mislead. Conceptually, the corporation is not a thing, but rather simply a set of contracts between various stakeholders pursuant to which services are provided and rights with respect to a set of assets are allocated. 

Because shareholders are simply one of the inputs bound together by this web of voluntary agreements, ownership is not a meaningful concept in nexus of contracts theory. Someone owns each input, but no one owns the totality. Instead, the corporation is an aggregation of people bound together by a complex web of contractual relationships.

Application to Guilds

The above description does sound a lot like World of Warcraft guilds. Sure, the contracts are implicit rather than explicit, and there's very little money involved, but the basic concept of a "web of voluntary agreements" holds.

But when WoW first started, in practice Guild Masters held such mechanical power over the guild that it could be said--with accuracy--that a Guild Masters "owned" her respective guild. A GM could disband her guild, kick people out, promote people, prevent individuals from talking in guild chat, etc. And there was really nothing a non-GM could do. Because of this power, a lot of GMs felt a true sense of ownership.

However, this ownership did not really matter. Mechanically a guild was nothing more than a glorified chat channel and a tag over your character's head. If the GM abused her authority or disappeared for months, the other guild members simply left and reformed with a new name, with no major loss, save for particularly stylish guild names.

As the years have passed though, the guild entity has taken on more and more "real" weight. First we had common guild banks, then shared repair costs. Then with Cataclysm we got the entire system of guild perks, and automatic guild contributions.

Now, regular members have a higher stake in a guild. If you have to leave, you lose all the perks, all the stuff in the guild bank, etc. Thanks to automatic contributions, everyone in the guild has contributed to the guild's current state. Even if everyone in the guild but the guild master leaves and reforms, there is still significant loss.

Basically, the idea that a guild is a nexus of contracts has gotten more and more important.  Finally, in Patch 4.3, we got the ability to dethrone guild masters in specific circumstances. This is a recognition that the balance of power in a guild is too far weighted on the guild master's side, and some of the power needs to come back, especially in the situation where the guild master simply disappears.

This re-balancing of powers makes perfect and necessary sense if you think of the guild as a nexus of contracts between current players. But it also conflicts with a lot of guild masters' sense of "ownership". To this type of GM, she created the guild, she got the signatures, she did all the work, she has all the power. In a sense, she is merely letting other people play in "her" guild.

In the past, such views would have been perfectly correct, and still are correct. How can you say that a Guild Master does not own a guild if she can kick everyone else out of it?

To this GM, the takeovers are nothing less than theft. The theft of the property she "owns", that she has worked to build up. And thus she has a very visceral reaction to that theft.

That reaction is far more understandable than most of the GRF regulars are willing to admit. And I think it is a somewhat valid reaction. I think that Guild Masters have an understandable sense of ownership of their respective guilds, and the entire lifespan of WoW up to the last few months has encouraged that sense of ownership.

I am not certain that Guild Takeovers were the best option possible in light of the way power is balanced in a guild. But on the other hand, because of that power balance, a GM who disappears for over a month can cripple a guild, and the Guild Takeover becomes necessary.

[SWTOR] Crafting

The crafting profession subsystem in SWTOR is very different than the one in WoW, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Background

A character in SWTOR can have up to three professions or "crew skills". There are three types of skills: crafting, gathering, and special professions. So the obvious pattern is to take a crafting skill and then take the gathering and special skills that compliments it. The gathering skill gives the materials to make green items, while the special skill gives the materials to make blue or purple items, as well as gifts for your companion. There is an additional special skill, Slicing, which essential gives money and schematics.

Crafters can reverse engineer the items that they make and that gives them a chance to learn to make the higher rarity version of the item, as well as some of the raw materials. For example, reverse engineering a green item gives a chance to learn the blue version. The blue version is better than the green version and has the same level requirement, and uses the same type of material to create.

For example, my Imperial Agent has Cybertech as her crafting skill, with Scavenging as the gathering skill, and Underworld Trading as her special skill. Scavenging gives the materials required to make green mods (items like gems). For example, I can make and use Green Skill Mod 10. Reverse engineering Green Skill Mod 10 gives a chance to learn Blue Skill Mod 10.  Blue Skill Mod 10 probably has the same stats as Green Skill Mod 12, but Skill Mod 12s require level 29 to use, and I'm not at that level yet. Blue Skill Mod 10 also requires some materials from Underworld Trading.

So if you keep your crafting up to date, you gravitate towards using the blue mods in your personal gear, and making green mods to level up. If you're behind on crafting though, you'll probably just make green mods to catch up.

Key Innovation

In any case, the key innovation in SWTOR's crafting system is the introduction of a new material: Time. It takes a certain amount of real time to craft an item. At the beginning, it's only a minute or so, but the time keeps rising. Right now, it takes me 15 minutes or so to craft an item, and I imagine that the time will increase to hours or possibly even days.

I've mentioned before that there are four elements to crafting: gathering knowledge, gathering raw materials, transmutation, and using the created item. In WoW, transmutation is a negligible element. In SWTOR, transmutation is a vital element that has to be taken into account.

The way this works is that your companions who remain behind craft for you while you adventure with your regular companion. You tell your droid to go make a skill mod, continue questing, and then the droid announces his success or failure 15 minutes later.

The reason this is so important is that it puts a significant constraint on the supply of items. As well, it's very hard in WoW to make a profit in crafting because the buyer often supplies her own materials, and the crafter is expected to make do with just a tip.  Or have guild crafters who do all the crafting for free.

For example, after my raid the other night, I did enchants for four or so people and cut gems for another person. It took maybe 10 minutes to do all that, and most of the time was coordinating the trade as they gave me mats, and then I gave them the enchant.

In SWTOR, it's literally impossible to do that. Even if they gave me mats, I'd have to queue up the crafting, and it might take several hours for it to all finish. This means that the buying and selling of crafted items will move entirely to the Auction House (or Galactic Trade Network) marketplace. Which means that people only purchase finished items, not raw materials, and that prices will float and a profit can be made from crafting.

It is a very intriguing system and I am greatly looking forward to see how this all plays out.

Major Weakness

But it does bring us to the greatest weakness of the SWTOR crafting system, and that is the fact that the Auction House interface is pretty terrible. It's worse than WoW's default AH. Something as simple as a price check for an item you want to sell takes like five steps. Select category, select subcategory, search, type in the name of the item, then filter the search. Repeat all the steps for each item you want to sell.

The SWTOR crafting systems needs a fully functional Auction House to reach its full potential. If I had one suggestion for the SWTOR crafting devs, it would be to take a look at the WoW AH mods that the serious goblins use, find the one with most usability, and copy that. Pretty much anything will be a significant upgrade over the current interface.

[SWTOR] Character Personalities

I'm rather enjoying SWTOR. I'm slowly making my way up. My Imperial Agent (Sniper) is level 27, and has been a lot of fun.

This blog is probably going to have a lot of SWTOR posts in the near future, mostly because it's the new hotness and because--for all that it is a WoW clone--there are some very interesting differences between the two games.

Normally, I don't roleplay at all in MMOs. In fact, I've gone on record as saying that roleplaying is irrelevant to MMOs. But I find myself assigning personalities to the characters I make in SWTOR, and using that to determine which choices I make in conversations. I'm usually Light-side, but it's interesting how much variation there can be.

Imperial Agent - pure Light-side for the greater good of the Empire. Absolutely loyal to the Empire, but feels that Light-side choices brings order to the Empire, as opposed to the chaos of the Sith. This works astonishingly well with the Imperial Agent storyline so far.

Sith Inquisitor - mostly Light-side. Is snarky and insulting towards the pompous, arrogant Sith, but respectful to those Sith worthy of respect and to the lower orders of the Empire.

Republic Trooper - again, mostly Light-side, but will go Dark Side to foil the Republic's enemies, both foreign and domestic.

Jedi Knight - la belle dame sans merci. Again, Light-side for most choices, but does not show mercy to defeated enemies, and kills them instead. Follows the principle that Batman should have killed the Joker, rather than imprisoning him in Arkham Asylum, as the Joker will inevitably escape and kill more innocents.

It's actually kind of surprising how many Dark-side points the last will get you. I'm running about 2-to-1 Light-side to Dark-side points.

[SWTOR] Shared Reality

I find SWTOR's use of phasing to be fascinating.

The world changes. NPCs do different things and even die.  But the areas where the changes occur are cordoned off from the rest of the world, and are explicitly marked off using red and green force fields. If you enter one of these areas, there's an explicit note on the UI, telling you who controls this reality. It's generally the first person in the group who enters the area.

To put this in WoW terms, imagine if all the changes to the throne room of Stormwind in WoW's history still existed.  Bolvar and Lady Prestor start there. When Onyxia is revealed in the Great Masquerade, it phases to become just Bolvar. Then when Varian returns, the phase changes again. But the throne room would have an explicit entrance. When you enter, you get put in a specific phase, and you know who's phase you are in.

WoW uses what I call "seamless" phasing. The world changes, and you really cannot tell where the change starts, or who's reality you are seeing. Or more accurately, you are always seeing your own personal reality.  Two people in the same group can be in the same area, but be out of phase with each other.

By having the explicit entrance to the phased area, SWTOR has its phasing be less seamless and more like instances. Which makes it seem more gamist and less world-like. But this system has the advantage of making things clearer for group play.  And parts of the world still change in response to events.

The problem with phasing has always been, given a group of two players with different states, determining which player's reality should hold for the group. I have seen many algorithms and strategies proposed, and they all have some flaws.

SWTOR chooses to delegate the decision on which reality to use back to the players. It is a very interesting strategy. It is a lot easier to deal with, at the price of making the world less "world-like" and more "game-like".

Looking For Raid

I rather enjoy Looking For Raid.

It's quick, it's pretty easy, but it also "feels" like regular raiding.  The large group, the controlled chaos. It's tuned almost perfectly, I think. It does feel like the group needs to do things correctly, but there's definitely a lot of slack.

The way Blizzard has handled people dropping and joining groups is perfect too. It's seamless, and almost invisible to the group participants.  It is gloriously transient, and I think, pitched perfectly at that demographic.

What I've found is that so long as the group has one person who looks like they know what they're doing, one leader, people will follow.  Most of them anyways. For some reason, target switching seems to be very hard for people. It's one thing to switch late, or not as fast as you could, but to never switch at all?

It's also interesting to see what mechanics Blizzard changed, in order to make the fight possible. The one mechanic that has caused the most problems in my LFR experience is the ice walls on Hargara. Almost every time, the first attempt sees half the raid dead. Oddly enough, the second attempt usually goes well, as most people get the hang of it.

But that's pretty much the only "Do X or die" mechanic. Everything else is healable, and the healers can basically carry the group if there's a decent tank and a few decent DPS. Ultraxion is especially funny, because every special, you can see the people who should have died, but that you can heal up in LFR difficulty.

Loot-wise, the current system is "good enough". To my mind, it just illustrates the difficulty of loot distribution, especially when you have to take off-specs into account.

I wonder if all the people who confidently predicted that this would be a total failure are willing to reconsider. In my view, Looking For Raid is another bold success for Blizzard.

Edit: I was thinking about it, and LFR really reminds me of raiding Molten Core, back in the day. It just has the same sensibility as the raids back then.

[SWTOR] Queue Troubles

I got into the head start of SWTOR on Wednesday. But Wednesday is our raid night, so I decided to just play for bit after the raid night. I rolled an Imperial Agent on a server, did the first couple of quests, and got to level 3. Then I logged off for the night.

On Thursday evening I log in, excited to get a good stretch of playing time in, and was confronted with a 30 minute queue.

Personally, I can't stand queues, so I ended up rolling characters on different servers. I tried a Jedi Knight, but found it to be boring. So then I rolled a Sith Inquisitor and ended up taking her to level 10 and finishing the starting area.

So now I have a bit of conundrum. Should I continue with the Inquistor, or try for the Agent? My initial plan was to have the Agent as my main.

In hindsight, maybe I should have just stuck out the queue. I wonder what I'm going to do if both servers have a queue tonight.

How do you deal with queues?