Bubble-Hearth Returns!

A lot of Mists of Pandaria information has flooded the internet today. Here at BoK, however, we focus on only the truly vital and important elements for our discerning readers.  To wit: Bubble-Hearth is back as a Minor Glyph!

Glyph of Righteous Retreat: During Divine Shield, you can invoke your Hearthstone 50% faster.

Ahh, bubble-hearth. How we love thee. Things are looking up for Mists of Pandaria.

Here are the other paladin minor glyphs:

Glyph of the Falling Avenger: You slow fall during Avenging Wrath.
Glyph of Winged Vengence: You grow larger during Avenging Wrath.

Pretty neat. Wings give you slow fall and make you bigger.

Glyph of Bladed Judgement: Your Judgement spell depicts an axe or sword instead of a hammer, if you have an axe or sword equipped.
Glyph of Fire From the Heavens: Your Judgement and Hammer of Wrath critical strikes call down fire from the sky.

Axes and swords are cool, and adds a little customization. As for Fire From the Heavens, we'll have to see the graphic. Judgement and Hammer of Wrath are already flashy, adding fire might be overkill. Or it might be awesome. There is a fine line between the two, especially when it comes to holy fire.

Glyph of Mounted Kings: Mounting a paladin mount automatically casts Blessing of Kings on you.
Glyph of the Luminous Charger: Your paladin class mounts glow with Holy Light.

Mounted Kings is a bit odd. But hey, why not? And it might be good in battlegrounds where you can just mount up and have Kings cast on the raid. Luminous Charger should be awesome. Though paladin chargers already have a bit of glow. But maybe the glow is turned up to 11. Should be good times.

I'm thinking Righteous Retreat, Falling Avenger, and Luminous Charger for my three minor glyphs.

Excellent work by the Mists team. Paladin minor glyphs have been very lackluster up to now, and Blizzard is correcting that with a vengeance.

Mass Effect 3: My Ending

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the ending of Mass Effect 3.

A commenter suggested that I write my own ending for ME3. They may have been tongue-in-cheek, but I'm bored, so here's my ending.

Continued below the jump.

[SWTOR] Mass Effect 3 Fallout

I want to express my displeasure about the ending of Mass Effect 3 to Bioware in the strongest possible terms.

I know, it's not really fair to the SWTOR team. But they got the advantages of the Bioware name when times were good, so now they must live with the downsides of that name.

Edit: Just to clarify, this is me cancelling my SWTOR subscription. In my view, companies like EA will only care if protests have a monetary effect. Outrage on a forum or blog does nothing.

Warning: Some of the comments contain spoilers.

Mass Effect 3: Endings (Spoilers!)

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the ending of Mass Effect 3.

99% of Mass Effect 3 is amazing, beautiful, outstanding, and superbly-written. 1% is a horrific travesty. Unfortunately, that 1% is the ending.

(The rest is below the break to avoid spoilers.)

Flow and Fiero

Zac Hill, who is on the Development Team for Magic: the Gathering, wrote an excellent article the other day: Sculpting Flow and Fiero. It's written from a Magic perspective, but a lot of it applies to games in general.

Flow and fiero are the two emotions evoked by games. From Zac Hill's article, here is the description of flow:

The flow experience is one of the most universally euphoric experiences human beings enjoy. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defines it as "the satisfying, exhilarating feeling of creative accomplishment and heightened functioning." In fact, he dedicated almost a decade of his life to researching flow. Where can we find it? Why do we enjoy it so much? And what are the secrets to getting more of it?

Csikszentmihalyi found that central to the flow experience were three factors: clear goals, rigidly defined rules of engagement, and the potential for measured improvement in the context of those goals and rules.

And the description of fiero:

If flow represents the height of the human capacity to learn—and therefore to triumph—fiero is the payoff that happens once we do that. 

According to Dr. McGonigal, fiero is "possibly the most primal rush we can experience." It's the feeling we get when we conquer an obstacle that, for whatever reason, is emotionally important to us. It's the weird and surreal force that leads to touchdown dances, fist-pumps, and the compulsion to scream "GOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL" when someone scores in a Premier League football match. 

The harder the challenge, the more severe the payoff. We love, after all, to confirm our own narratives of exceptionalism. But the obstacles we overcome must feel genuine. If I've just taught someone Magic, something is wrong with me if I just relish the opportunity to bash in that player's face by playing every match like it's the finals of the Pro Tour. On the other hand, a masterfully sculpted game like the recent Kibler-Finkel semifinals feels like a well-choreographed dance, and the moments where we win such games feel viscerally like they mean something. The root of that meaning is the fiero impulse, which inspires optimism by evincing mastery—and mastery helps us feel capable of meeting the most intense challenges of our lives.

An excellent article, and these two concepts seem very important to MMOs.  The part that MMOs are struggling with is taking the flow and fiero, which exist on an individual level, and trying to evoke them on the group level.

Mass Effect 3!

Yeah, I wouldn't expect any real posts for like a week.

Companion Affection

Milady wrote an interesting post on the evolution of Bioware's romances on her site Hypercritism. I started to post a response, but then had to think about it some more. It seems to me that the real issue is not so much the writing of romances, so much as it is the underlying companion affection system.

The companion affection system reminds me of valor points in WoW. The connection is probably not obvious, but they're both systems which have been iterated on over time, and which may no longer serve their original purpose.

Think about why Bioware came up with companion affection. What problem was it intended to solve?

In the early Bioware/Black Isle games, your relationship with a companion was really independent of your actions in the game, independent of your character's nature. Really the only thing that mattered was your previous conversations with the character and your progress in the game. Those were the keys which unlocked subsequent conversations.

I think the original idea behind companion affection was that your character's personality--as revealed through her actions in the game--should matter to your companions. A good-aligned character should find it easier to get along with other good-aligned people, and harder with people who share different values.  I think this idea makes sense, and is a reasonable behavior to try and simulate.

So Bioware decided on a simple scale. If your character took an action or dialogue a party member agrees with, your affection with that character increases. If they disagree, the affection decreases.

The next hurdle comes when you have more companions that party slots, and the game has roles. If your character fulfills the same combat role as Alistair, you're not going to have him in your party. But that means that Alistair's affection does not change, and so you will never see Alistair's personal storyline.

So Bioware implemented gifts. Gifts allow you to increase the affection of companions you don't adventure with. In The Old Republic, gifts also allow you to increase affection if you don't quest, if you PvP or do space battles or group instances.

But if you think about it, gifts also invalidate the very purpose of the companion system. Your character's personality doesn't matter to the companion any more. Instead you just ply them with gifts until their stories unlock.

What the gifts do is turn the companion affection system from a simulation into a grind. Another xp/rep grind that you fill out for rewards or to unlock content. I bet many players in SWTOR will have all five companions with their affection maxed out.

The other part of this is that players, especially MMO players, don't really like making permanent decisions, especially decisions that close off content. Gifts allow you to circumvent the choices made during leveling. Your choices are no longer permanent.

I think that companion affection systems would work better with two changes. First, no gifts, no ways to circumvent the choices you make in the game. Your companions react to your character as revealed by the choices you make.

Second, changes in companion affection are not restricted to your current companions, but rather occur for all the companions. This means that you can't avoid the loss of affection by using a different conversation. Conversation and decisions trigger a reaction in all characters, so a decision might see a gain in affection for some characters, and a loss for others.

Of course, the downside of this is that you won't see the stories for all the companions. Maybe the companion affection system is entirely unnecessary, and the old way of unlocking stories as the game progresses was just better. Maybe trying to make your character's personality--outside conversations with companions--matter to your companions is not worth the effort, and has too many negative consequences.

Are 10-man Guilds Too Small?

I've been in semi-large guilds for almost all of my MMO tenure. One of the advantages of large guilds is that whenever you log on, there's usually a critical mass of people online. Oh, not enough to raid, but usually enough so that you can start a 5-man, or there's some chat going on, etc.

Is this the case in 10-man guilds?  Or do 10-man guilds normally have 5 or fewer people online at non-raid times?  Or do 10-mans work best as small teams inside larger guilds?

It seems to me that this is one downside of the push towards smaller raid sizes. Larger raid sizes required larger guilds, making it more likely that one would log into a bustling community at any given time.

Good Players are Good Players

In a comment to a previous post, Spinks makes a comment that I think is illustrative of the divide between me and a lot of readers:

You seem to be thinking a lot lately about being able to measure how good someone is at PvE. But it's not going to work when you have one person who is amazing at stuff that involves interacting with the environment/ interrupts etc but can't get the pinpoint timing that you'd need to max dps output, or vice versa. Or someone who is a decent player but gets very very very stressed if they are asked to perform a raid-critical task.

Let's say that a good DPS player has four tasks:

1. Maximize DPS output
2. Movement
3. Interrupts
4. Utility Stuff

Further, let's say that you can measure the individuals performance on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being best.

If I am reading Spinks correctly, she believes that performance of these tasks are independent. That performance in one task is not indicative of performance in a different task. That you could have a player who is a 10 at maximizing DPS output, but a 4 at interrupting.

In my experience, this is not the case. Performance of the tasks is correlated. Scores for an individual will cluster around the same point.  A really good player might have stats of 10,9,9,8. An average player might be 6,7,7,5.

Now, performance is not absolute and innate. Things require practice. If you never interrupt, then you'll probably require some attempts to get the hang of it.  You can move all your scores up by learning new techniques and practicing more.

But in my experience, good players are good players along all dimensions. If they show skill in one task, they can pull their performance in all the other tasks to the same level.

Pandaria Stat Changes

Ghostcrawler has posted a Dev Watercooler about upcoming Stat Changes in Mists of Pandaria.  Here are some reactions.

Spell Resistance

No more spell resistance. Pretty much the culmination of many years of moving in this directions. In the beginning everyone had to collect Fire Resistance sets for Ragnaros. Then only the tank had to collect resistance sets. Then maybe only one or two pieces for one or fights. And now none.

I'll kind of miss it, even though it was a lot of running around for a single fight. And then, finally completing your tank's set and watching him leave for another guild was terribly annoying.

Paladins also lose our Resistance Auras. However, Aura Mastery has been changed to reduce elemental damage directly, so we won't see any great change.

Hit and Expertise

I really like the linear nature of increasing hit requirements. Previously, there was a large step between +2 levels and +3 levels, especially for casters. This invariably caused issues with people learning to raid.

I like the consolidation of spell hit and hit into one stat. It's a lot simpler and straightforward. Same with the normalization of Expertise.

Being able to dodge arrows is also a welcome change, and having Hunters being able to use expertise will make gearing them and shaman a bit easier.

Casters using Expertise to reduce spell miss is a little bit weird. But it does give them another stat to play with. It's interesting that there's a slight difference in Hit and Expertise between casters and physical. Casters need a combination of Hit and Expertise that adds up to 15%. Physical needs 7.5% Hit and 7.5% Expertise.

Block

The double roll is actually how The Old Republic handles block. This probably makes block a lot harder to cap out, especially with diminishing returns. It may also devalue block, depending on how it's calculated. If 20% block means that 20% of hits are blocked, compared to 20% of attacks being blocked, that means that as you add more dodge and parry, the number of blocks goes down.

Update: Theck has a really good critique of the new block, with actual math demonstrating the point above.

It's also interesting to note that abilities like Shield of the Righteous now guarantee that the next hit will be blocked.

Resilience

Resilience is now becoming two stats: a PvP Offense stat and a PvP Defense stat. It's interesting that they are explicitly calling out the stats as a PvP stat. I do hope it cuts down on the number of tanks in PvP gear.

This is somewhat similar to the The Old Republic model, only they use a single stat for both sides. Having two stats might make tuning a little easier. Like if Blizzard wants PvP to speed up, they can reduce the value of defense, or increase the value of offense. Plus it gives two stats to play with for gemming.

The two stats will also be free in terms of cost. But the PvP item will be a slightly lower ilevel than the PvE item. But the PvE item will lack the two PvP stats. So gear will look like this:

PvE Item
100 Str
100 Sta
100 Haste
100 Critical

PvP Item
90 Str
90 Sta
90 Haste
90 Critical
90 PvP Offense
90 PvP Defense

So the PvP item is strictly worse in PvE, but is pretty close, and not as bad as PvP stats are today. And the PvE stats lack the Offense and Defense stats to really function well in PvP.

Conclusions

I think the PvE changes are pretty good, smoothing out the game and making it more intuitive, while giving classes more stats to play with. As for the PvP changes, they look good, but we'll see how they turn out.

The problem with PvE/PvP gear is that Blizzard wants the low end to be able to use either armor in either setting, but wants the high end to strictly use the relevant type. That's a pretty hard goal to hit.

Carrying Players

I saw a blog post the other day--sadly, I've forgotten where--in which the blogger lamented that a raid could no longer "carry" one or two sub-par players anymore. Not like in Vanilla, where much of the initial content was so under-tuned that you could easily spare 5 to 10 slots in a 40-man raid.

I wonder if you could actually do this. If you could set up a system to make carrying players more viable, without lowering the difficulty of content for the better players.

Suppose you could measure a person's "PvE ability".  Then, for people with a low score, you could give them a buff that increases their damage and healing output, decreases their damage taken, and maybe even makes them immune to certain mechanics if the score is low enough. The buff would scale inversely with PvE ability. Very low scores would have a more powerful buff, while better scores might have a small buff or no buff at all. Then the buffed person would have their performance dragged upwards in a raid, towards the mean. They would be less of a dead spot.

Essentially, it would be the same idea as handicapping in horse races, only with boosting the weaker individuals, rather than penalizing the stronger individuals.

Of course, the hard part would be coming up with a way of measuring one's PvE ability, without lending it to exploitation, and accounting for increases in skill and gear. It would be fairly easy to do in PvP, as you could just go off a character's personal match-maker rating or similar. In PvE, you'd probably have to conduct analysis of previous fights somehow to assign a rating.

Such a system might even help with gearing. An under-geared character would end up with the buff, until her gear caught up to the rest of the raid.

I'm not really sure if such a system would actually work. But I think it's an interesting idea.

[SWTOR] Imperial Agent Trailer

I came across this nice player-made trailer for the Imperial Agent from beta. I think it does a good job of conveying the feel of the Agent storyline.



Bonus points for it being a Chiss Agent. The female Imperial Agent voice actor (not in video) is also very good.

Updates

So I'm mostly playing The Old Republic these days. I haven't logged into WoW for a few weeks now. I guess I'm probably just going to let WoW ride until the Mists of Pandaria beta, and then see what's what.

In The Old Republic, I'm mostly leveling a couple of alts: a Sith Inquisitor and a Republic Trooper. Ironically, I found out that my 50 Sniper is on one of the few Republic-dominated servers, which really hasn't helped any foray into endgame.

It's very interesting, playing in a transient fashion after playing in an extended structure for so long. There is a curious amount of freedom. You can come and go as you please, do other things if you want to. Yet, I think there's a hollowness to it. It's like being in a single player game with some occasional chat. I do miss working in a group towards a common goal.

And yet, I'm not sure if I miss it enough. Enough to make it worthwhile to find a new guild and adjust to a new schedule.

In other games, I'm looking forward to Mass Effect 3 and Diablo 3.  In MMOs, I guess we'll see what releases. Guild Wars 2 looks to be doing some interesting things, as does The Secret World.

A DPS Meter Fallacy

In a comment, Kring posted something that I would like to address:

Besides that it, again, encourages all the tricks to "cheat" Recount like
- not target switching
- dotting unimportant targets
- using AoE spells where not useful
- not moving our of fire
- not using non-dps abilities like decurse or spellsteal

In my view, the idea that one can "cheat" or "pad" the meters is something of a fallacy. It's technically, or hypothetically, possible. But in practice, it's extraordinarily unlikely.

If you are good enough to push yourself near the top of the meter by padding, you are good enough to top the meters through normal play.  

Topping the meters requires knowing and executing your rotation, using cooldowns appropriately, not dying, and casting as many spells as possible. Padding the meters is essentially executing the same steps, only substituting the "padding rotation" in place of your regular rotation. If you can't execute your normal rotation correctly, you won't execute your padding rotation correctly. If you aren't casting enough normal spells, you won't cast enough padding spells. If you aren't popping enough cooldowns in normal play, you won't pop enough cooldowns in padded play.

To reiterate, playing to pad the meters on a boss fight is the same process as playing normally. A player who is having trouble playing normally is going to have the same trouble when playing to pad.

The harsh truth is that DPS meters work!

The people who are consistently at the top of the DPS meters are your best DPS players. They will be the ones who are better at interrupting, at using utility spells, at moving successfully. The players at the bottom of the meters are the ones who need the most improvement, who will also be less likely to interrupt correctly, to use utility spells correctly, to move out of the fire.

There is a point where this is not true, where class and spec determines your position on the meters. That point is known as Paragon and the other Top 10 guilds.  For everyone else, position on the meters is determined by the quality of your play.

A Console MMO

I wonder when we will get the first truly successful console MMO. Personally, I think that the first game to get the "console" part correct will be the game that beats WoW's subscription numbers.

But I wonder what that game will look like, what will make it work? Will it be entirely voice-comm based? After all, Mass Effect is a console game, and The Old Republic is very similar.

I think the key element that needs to be worked out is multiple players in the same household. For computer MMOs, every player has their own computer. But that usually isn't the case with console games. Would the MMO have some sort of co-op mode, where if two players are in the same area, they appear on the same screen? And then seamlessly split screen if they split up?

I have no idea how it would work. But I'm sure there are game companies working on it, and it will be interesting to see what they come up with.

Personal Traffic Light DPS Meter

I'd like to highlight a comment from Stubborn on the previous post:

How about borrowing something from a totally different genre of gaming, like my wife's Wii Zumba? When she's performing within 90% of max, her character is highlighted in green. When she's between 60% and 90%, shades of yellow, and below 60%, shades of red. There's absolutely no reason a similar, personal system couldn't be implemented to let each individual player know, based on the minimum dps requirements for the fight, how they're individually performing. That provides the feedback you need without the immediate consequence of creating a hostile environment.

This is a pretty cool idea. A simple green/yellow/red meter that was boss-dependent and displayed your personal DPS for that boss.  If all the DPS stay in yellow or green for the entire fight, the boss will die before the enrage.

Of course, the one thing that might cause issues here is DPS during the execute phase. Most DPS classes see their boss damage jump upwards during the last 20% or so. Accounting for that might be a little tricky. But not insurmountable.

You could make this pretty complicated if you wanted to. If you know the fight, you could draw a damage curve that accounts for phase changes, interruptions, and execute phase. Then just draw the players total damage as time goes on and compare to the curve to determine if the player is ahead of schedule or falling behind.

Still, it's a pretty cool idea, and be enough feedback without needing exact numbers, or revealing performance to everyone. Or maybe the red/yellow/green light should be revealed to everyone. After all, it's not players imposing arbitrary and unrealistic standards on each other. It's the game revealing the basic performance.

Enrage Timers and Meters

So, there's a little bit of a kerfuffle over DPS and enrage timers in The Old Republic hardmode dungeons. See Screaming Monkeys, Tobold, and Spinks.

The thing is that SWTOR doesn't have a combat log or DPS meters. So there's really no way for a DPS player to truly judge her performance. So we don't know if the enrage timers are actually tight, or the DPS players are simply not performing at a high enough level.

The variance between DPS can be huge. It's not like people are performing at 89% of theoretical max and they need to get to 90%. Very often, because of improper rotations and incorrect use of cooldowns, a decent player who isn't conversant with the best theorycraft might only be performing at 50% or less of the theoretical max.

And the DPS rotations in SWTOR are not trivial. I had a rotation for my Sniper that I was happily using. It seemed to be the best I could come up with. Then I went to sithwarrior.com and looked at their rotation. It was structured very differently than what I was using, and involved several abilities that I wasn't using. I switched, and I think my damage went up significantly.

Though, truthfully, because there are no meters and no combat log, I have no idea if what I'm doing now is better. It's better on paper, and seems to be better in game, but who knows.

Again, we hit a theme that I've hitting for years now. Good play requires feedback. Good dps requires feedback. And the best feedback for DPS is a combat log and damage meters.

But if you don't want damage meters, if you think they are detrimental, then you should not have DPS checks like enrage timers. Having strict enrage timers without meters strikes me as unfair to the DPS players.

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.

[SWTOR] Leveling as a Healer

Among other alts in The Old Republic, I'm leveling a healer Commando. My original plan was to run instances with this character, but I got bored of waiting in the fleet and went back to questing.

Leveling as a healer in SWTOR is interesting. I generally run with a DPS companion (Aric Jorgan at the moment). For normal pulls, I generally use the regular DPS abilities of the base class. But for strong and elite enemies, I do actually act as a healer. I let Aric kill the mob, and I keep him healed, with the occasional zero-dps attack if incoming damage is light enough.

I actually like it. Normally leveling as a healer means that you level as a very weak DPS and don't use your heals regularly. You only use them if you get into groups.

But healing a companion is very much like healing a regular player, and you get to practice your regular healing rotation.

It's probably slower than leveling as DPS, but it is nice to play solo as a healer, and still act like a healer. I do think that companions make life a lot easier for tanks and healers, allowing them to level with their preferred playstyle and get lots of practice with the correct abilities. It's a lot better than learning how to tank or heal on the fly in an instance.

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?