Structure of Large and Small Guilds

Ratshag left a comment on the previous post on MMO decline, and I've decided to highlight his comment and my response:

I notice you done completely skipped over the change from 40-man raiding ta 10/25 what came in TBC. If'n yer arguements was correct, should there not have been a drop in subscriptions then? Afters all, it hit a lotta raidin' guilds hard, and hardest hit were the 15-or-so grunts what (accordin' ta conventional wisdom) was bein' carried. Leaders, not so much. So how's come the subscription numbers went up?

I also notice what you says 10-man raidin' came "into vogue" in mid/late-Rash. What does this mean? It started showin' up on magazine covers? I mean, 10-mans was more popular in terms of numbers of buggers startin' in Kara, and this never changed. 25-mans had better rewards all through the end of Rash of the Itch King, an' still offer a greater quantity. So is yer "in vogue" claim fer that point in time based on anythin' objective, or did ya fall inta a trap of "well, that's when subscriptions done peaked, so that musta been when 10-mans became more stylin'."?

I don't think that the drop from 40 to 25 really changed the "nature" of guilds. To put it another way, a 40-man guild is closer in structure to a 25-guild than a 25-man is to 10-man. A 25-man guild will maintain sub-groups like healers and tanks and ranged dps. But a 10-man generally only has the main group, with no subgroups. A 25 is far more likely to have formal loot structures, where a 10 will be mostly ad hoc.

Qualitatively, I would say that their is a point where a guild flips from "large" to "small" and that point is somewhere between 10 and 25. An interesting question might be 15-mans. Would they feel more like 10s or 25s?

Keep in mind that the guild needs more than the bare minimum. A 25-man guild is really more like 35 people, and a 40-man is closer to 50 or 60.

As for the timing, I don't think that Karazhan changed the nature of guilds. Everyone knew that future raids in TBC would be 25 man, so they temporarily bent their structure to accomodate Kara.

But I definitely think that around Ulduar, guilds started to internalize the idea that 10s were viable. Structure started shifting to accommodating 10s. Large guilds started forming subgroups, almost subguilds, that ran the 10s together.

In my view, it all comes down to structure. The structure of 40s is very similar to the structure of 25s. But that is different than the structure of 10s. Ulduar-ish was the time that guild structure started changing permanently, at least from my observations.

I just think the 40/25 structure was more conducive to retention than the 10 structure is.

Cross-Realm Zones

I love Blizzard. Their playerbase is busy arguing about pandas and their dances. Then out of left field, Blizzard goes, "Hey guys, cross-realm zones. And they're seamless."

Ahh, Blizz, raising the bar for everyone else. Never stop.

I think we are seeing the beginning of the end of sharded servers. An end to the time when specific servers corresponded to specific pieces of hardware. Rumor has it that Blizzard basically operates a cloud of servers now, like Google, and the servers are all virtual.

I was wondering how they managed to put a million people in the Pandaria Beta with only four Beta servers.

I strongly suspect that Titan, Blizzard's next generation MMO, will be a single world for all players. Or possibly a world for each language and ruleset combination. And if Blizzard makes that truly seamless, with minimal or zero load screens, it will be an impressive feat.

MMO Decline Caused By Move To Small Guilds

First, let's start with a caveat. The following theory is most likely not true. I doubt its validity, mostly because I would like it to be true, and that is always a dangerous sign. But I present it as a hypothetical for your delectation.

The modern MMO decline in subscriptions, as evidenced by World of Warcraft and The Old Republic, is being caused by the shift in the extended endgame to smaller groups and smaller guilds.

Let's look at at World of Warcraft. The decline in subscriptions starts in mid-to-late Wrath, when 10-man raiding starts coming into vogue. In Cataclysm, when 10-man raiding moved up to first-class citizen standing, the decline accelerated.

In The Old Republic, the primary endgame group size is 8-man. It is clear that the SWTOR has real trouble holding on to people at max level. Small guilds, built for a small group endgame, are just not sticky enough for significant player retention.

The one MMO which has shown continuous growth, even over the same time period, is Eve Online. And Eve bucks this trend in group size. Endgame in Eve trends toward larger and larger groups, with hundred-person fleets flying around.

If this idea is true, why would large raids, and the corresponding large guilds, be stickier than small raids?

First, and most importantly, there's a lot more room for "grunts" in a large guild. Grunts are average players who like playing the game, but don't really want to take on extra responsibility like the officers. If you take a 30-man raid size, and break it into 10-mans, I think you end up losing the bottom 10 players, just because there really isn't room for them in the subsequent guilds that form. I think a lot of people just want to play the game, and are perfectly willing to follow orders from someone more dedicated.

Second, larger guilds and sub-communities are more likely to have people playing during off-hours. They can feel less lonely, which contributes to people sticking around.

Third, turnover is more easily managed by larger groups. People leaving and joining is not as much of a big change to the group. A larger guild is also more likely to be able to absorb a smaller group of players. This is also true when a guild breaks up. It is easier for three or four 30-man guilds to each absorb a faction of players from the dead guild. In contrast, asking a 10-man guild to absorb 5 players strains the resources of that guild.

Fourth, the intra-guild bonds don't have to be as strong in larger guild, as they are in a smaller more tightly-knit group. They don't require the large effort to create, to maintain, and don't cause as much damage when they break. I think this is actually an advantage for a lot of players. They just want a casual, light relationship with their guild, not an intense one. I think this also makes it easier to apply to a new guild, and form bonds which are "strong enough".

Fifth, large group endgame requires a greater focus on technical performance by the developers. Does anyone believe that the SWTOR engine could handle 40-man raids? Whereas WoW could handle that 8 years ago. If 40-man raids had been a development requirement, SWTOR would have had to optimize earlier and harder. And that would have a lot of trickle-down performance improvements, especially for low-end machines and the performance of the levelling experience.

For these reasons, I think larger groups are just stickier and better for the extended game than smaller groups. Smaller groups are easier on the officers and the devoted, definitely. However, I think they cause a lot of the grunts to be unable to find a home at endgame, and thus they unsubscribe and fade away.

[SWTOR] Subscriber Drop

The big news today is that Bioware revealed that The Old Republic has 1.3 million subscribers, a drop of 400,000 from their previously announced count of 1.7 million. I feel a bit sad for Bioware. I rather liked SWTOR, and if I wasn't boycotting Bioware, I think I still would be playing it.

As an aside, it's really been an annus horribilis for Bioware. Dragon Age 2 was not received that well, there was unprecedented audience outrage over the Mass Effect 3 ending, and The Old Republic is hemorrhaging subscribers. Here's hoping the good doctors manage to regroup.

In any case, the internet is awash in acrimony. Since no one has hard data, we all agree that the subscriber drop was because of the aspects that we personally did not like. If only Bioware had listened to us, and fixed whatever element was most important to us, the drop could have been averted.

Here are a couple thoughts, in no particular order.

Alt-Based Design

It really looks like alt-based design is not a good strategy. The Old Republic greatly rewards playing alts, with eight different (excellent, in my opinion) class storylines and the entire Legacy system. And yet, judging by the timeline, I would wager that the largest group of people who quit only had one max level character, and the second largest only had two.

To me, this strongly looks like encouraging alts is a losing strategy. The better strategy for MMO design might be to assume that most people play a single character all of the time. I mean, don't go out of your way to stop people from playing alts, but just design the game assuming that everyone focuses on one character.

To further compound things, the Legacy system may have actively hurt SWTOR. Only characters on the same server share and contribute to the same Legacy. This might have discouraged people from rolling alts on more populated servers, leaving people feeling like they were stuck on low pop backwaters.

Launch

Managing launch seems to be the most important element for a new game, especially one with a lot of hype. In hindsight, it might have been better to stick with fewer servers and longer queues, rather than open too many servers and then see drastic population drops.

Thinking about it, I wonder if one of the major reasons of WoW's success happened to be what happened at launch. I only started playing WoW about six months after launch. This was because the game was completely sold out. Blizzard had literally not printed enough physical copies to meet demand. This was before downloading large games became common.

But what that meant for Blizzard is that six months after launch, when they finally got a second wave of copies out to stores, there was a new rush of pent up demand, injecting a lot of new blood into the system. Servers that were heavily populated stayed heavily populated. Medium populated servers became heavily populated.

Suppose Bioware had capped the initial launch population at 500,000. And then only sold an additional 200,000 copies each month. That strategy may have worked out better for them, with continuous waves of new players topping up existing servers. Obviously, though, they wouldn't have made as much money up front as they did. And, of course, everyone on the internet would be outraged at being excluded.

But no one would be saying anything about a dying game. This sort of artificial exclusion model might be a better model for a genre which relies on a minimum necessary population, and yet also experiences a lot of churn.

Further Thoughts

I have one more crazy, off-the-wall hypothesis (yes, even by my standards). But I'll leave it for tomorrow.

All in all, there's no way to spin this subscriber drop as good news for SWTOR, though EA is trying hard. But I do hope that the population stabilizes, and the game moves forward. It is a good game, with decent ideas, and I would like to see what Bioware does with it.

[TERA] Tanking

Lancer tanking in TERA is the best implementation of tanking in any MMO that I have played.

Now you should take that with a grain of salt, as my Lancer is only level 28, and that is far from endgame tanking. But I thought I'd take a look at the mechanics of tanking in TERA, and what makes it different from WoW-style MMOs.

The Lancer is a shield tank. Her signature skill is Stand Fast. When you press the Stand Fast button, the Lancer brings up her shield to block enemy attacks from the front. She braces in place and continues blocking for as long as the button is held down. Blocking the enemy's attack is guaranteed, and absorbs a fixed amount of damage--not a percentage--from every attack. As well, players behind the tank are also shielded from damage.

One thing I should add here is that blocking an attack looks and sounds awesome. The character gets rocked back a bit, and there is a very distinctive clang as the attack connects with the shield. If the monster does an charge attack, the tank gets pushed back while continuously blocking, and that just looks spectacular. Bluehole did a spectacular job of making tanking appealing on a purely aesthetic level.

The key element here is that the amount of damage blocked is extremely large. Almost all attacks, including boss specials, are fully absorbed. Essentially, while the Lancer Stands Fast, she takes zero damage.

However, while she is blocking, the Lancer cannot deal damage or gain threat or mana. She must drop the block, making her vulnerable, in order to attack the enemy. And threat matters. The Lancer needs to fight for threat to keep the boss from going after the DPS or the healer.

Those two mechanics produce a marvellous tension. The Lancer must block, or she will take too much damage and die. The Lancer must attack, or she will lose the boss's attention. As well, the boss telegraphs his attacks through his animations. So the Lancer can observe the boss and identify times when it is safe to drop the block and attack, and the times where she absolutely must block.

I think the key here is the absoluteness of defence. In WoW, the choice between threat and survivability always went to survivability, because every inch made the tank less likely to die, and lessened the burden on the healer. In TERA, you know that if you block correctly, your defence is absolute, and so you are free to spend resources on threat. It moves the threat/balance trade-off from gearing to gameplay.

For example, right now I'm spending all my specialization points on threat. This means that fewer attacks build the same amount of threat, and thus I can spend more time blocking, and have more room for error.

The last part is positioning. WoW tanks spend a lot of time and effort positioning and moving bosses correctly. In TERA positioning doesn't seem to matter as much, as the bosses seem to run around like monkeys anyways, and the other characters are agile enough to dodge out of the way.

Now, there are downsides to the TERA model. In particular, it can be very unforgiving. The first time I tanked an instance, I dropped my shield at exactly the wrong moment, and got nailed by a boss special, which killed me because I was already a bit damaged. Tanks are somewhat rare in TERA, so maybe this is a cause. (Though it might be just because there are so many DPS classes compared to the tank classes.)

Perhaps the secret to the success of TERA tanking design is that the tank has control over both threat and survivability during gameplay, and has to balance both. In vanilla WoW, the tank didn't really control her damage intake outside of long-term cooldowns. Instead that was a function of her gear. She spent all her resources on threat and positioning. In modern WoW, threat no longer matters. Instead, the tank will spend her resources on mitigation and positioning. Neither style has the enjoyable tension that TERA tanking does.

Or perhaps the secret is just making the tank more responsible for her health, and the healer less responsible. You still need a healer in TERA, as it makes life a lot easier. But losing a healer isn't always an immediate loss, not the way it often is in WoW, because the tank can play very defensively and dramatically reduce the damage she takes, buying time for the DPS to finish the fight.

Advice to New Bloggers

So there's a New Blogger Initiative making the rounds. I was thinking about writing some advice, but I remembered that I've pretty much written all the advice I can think of before:

• On Blogging, Part I - covers platform, focus, and content
• On Blogging, Part II - covers traffic, advertising, and comments

My advice is pretty basic. Keep things simple. Write steadily. Write for yourself.

For the write steadily part, I'm trying a new lifestyle technique for getting things done. It's called Don't Break The Chain, as advocated by Jerry Seinfeld. 

The idea is that you pick two or three activities that you want to improve on. For example, maybe cleaning/housework and blogging. Then say that you will spend 15 minutes every day on those activities, basically doing one small piece of the job. Then get a calendar, and every day you do the activity, you mark it off with a big red X.

The idea is to get into the daily habit, with the visual feedback of the calendar to spur you. Plus, it's only 15 minutes, which seems like a small amount of time. But you can get a lot done if you do those 15 minutes every day.

WoW Videos: Dragonwrath: A Legendary Musical

Here's a really nice video and song about the Dragonwrath questline. The storybook conceit is very nicely done.



Hats off to Nananea and Sharm.

You know, an awful lot of stuff happened on that questline. I wonder if the Rogue quest was similarly eventful.

[Eve Online] Plex and Cheating, Part III

This will be the last post on the PLEX issue.

I still think PLEX is unfair. All the arguments for PLEX have sidestepped the basic unfairness issue, and pointed to the good effects that PLEX has. But at it's heart, Eve permits one faction of players to skip content for real money, but does not do the same for other players. It weakens the fidelity of the economic simulation that is Eve Online.

However, as Voltaire said, perfect is the enemy of good.

PLEX has lots of positive effects. It induces liquidity in the markets, causing ISK to be spent instead of hoarded. It decreases the effect of unsafe third party RMT in Eve. It allows the producers to avoid spending money on subscriptions. It allows people who don't like the "work" of producing to concentrate on the fun, and keeps them in the game, and paying subscriptions. It provides excitement for piracy and shipping. Killing an enemy carrying PLEX seems to be one of the great delights of Eve PvP.

On net, PLEX is probably a necessary evil for Eve Online. But it still has a cost, and that cost is the basic unfairness.

To annoy Wilhelm, I will make yet another analogy. PLEX is like the designated hitter rule in baseball, or shootouts in hockey. It's legal, it's in the rule book. It's popular, the crowds enjoy it. It might even be necessary for the continued health of the game. But baseball without the designated hitter is a purer form of baseball, as is hockey sans shootouts.

[TERA] Impressions So Far

I am really enjoying TERA so far. It's a great deal of fun.

I adore combat as a Lancer. Bringing your shield up to block at just the right time, taking no damage from a big hit, is awesome, especially with the visual feedback provided. Blocking a huge monster as it does some sort of bullrush attack, pushing you backwards as you take the hits on your shield, taking no damage, makes you really feel like a tank. Chaining combos together is also neat, and the animations make combat very visceral.

The thing I like about PvE combat in TERA is that it is very interactive. In WoW and most other MMOs, what your opponent is doing doesn't really matter, aside from maybe interrupting or stunning. You go through your rotation, and the mob dies. TERA really encourages you to pay attention to the mob, to watch for the tells and block or dodge.

The game also performs very well, and is very responsive. The game is colorful, and feels fun and full of whimsy.

I also find some of the design and art decisions hilarious.  Here's my Lancer with shield and lance at the ready. Looks pretty awesome, with a great shield design:

Now here she is showing her armor:

The armor is just hilariously bad. It's like it's giving the monster a target to aim for. But somehow, instead of being annoyed at the armor, it just amuses me greatly.

Now, TERA has it's downsides. The questing is very old school, and is just an excuse to kill a new set of mobs, rather than tell some sort of important or memorable story. The writing is not particularly good either. It's decent, and occasionally very funny (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, and sometimes it's hard to figure out if it's intentional or not).

Some of the subsystems are unnecessarily complex. For example, enchanting a piece of armor requires another piece of the same slot of roughly equal item level as a raw material. But for some reason, you can't put many items in your bank. So I'm carrying around a dozen chestpieces just in case I need to enchant a new chestpiece.

There are also some interesting design decisions as well. For example, gathering materials gives you a small random buff, rewarding you for making gathering part of your questing and combat routine. For some reason, I absolutely love this feature. It really does not make a big difference in questing, but it just works for me.

As well, I really like how they are handling the launch rush. There are queues on some servers. But TERA has server transfers implemented, and the transfers will be free for the first little while. So even if your preferred server has a queue, you can start a character on a different server and eventually transfer over once everything gets sorted out. This strikes me as a really good balance, allowing the population to flow from server to server in response to the changing conditions of launch, without heavy-handed dev intervention.

There's also an instance finder, but groups are also forming in area chat. So right now, you have the best of both worlds. I've done the first dungeon twice, once through instance finder, and once through a local group.

As well, for some reason area chat seems to be hopping. Maybe it's because it's the RP server, maybe because the chat box can display more than three lines, or there's less system spam. But whatever the reason, it's a very nice change from the quietness of most recent MMOs.

All in all, I'm really enjoying TERA. It seems to strike this nice balance of being "different enough" from most WoW-like MMOs, while not being too different.  I definitely recommend the game so far, and think it's well worth the initial box price.

Edit: Another small thing I like is that the quest tracker has a button to track or untrack by area. So you can easily swap up your quest tracking when you change areas.

Also, to continue the inappropriate armor screenshots, I got a blue armor piece from the end boss of the first dungeon. I really don't know how TERA will top this:

One thing I do like is that the character's hairstyle changed, to adjust to the new armor. That was a nice touch.

[Eve Online] PLEX and Cheating, Part II

I've been following Gevlon's comment thread, and I've realized that he and I are actually talking about two different aspects of PLEX.

PLEX versus Economic Simulation

From the outside, one of the main attractions of Eve Online is that it is this huge economic simulation with hundreds of thousands of actors. People harvest resources, refine resources, produce goods, trade, purchase and use those goods. Then you add on the player conflict overlaid on top of all that. It is a magnificent economic simulation and experiment.

It is amazing to realize that the ammo I purchase to shoot pirates was produced by another player, as is the ship I fly in and modules which the ship is outfitted in.

The thing about this economic simulation is that you can trace the flow of wealth, see how all the interlocking transactions combine into one harmonious whole. And each transaction makes sense within the universe.

But then, inside this beautiful simulation, you have some extremely large transactions that simply do not make sense within the context of the universe. Half a billion ISK transferred from one player to another, for no discernible rhyme or reason. That transaction weakens the economic simulation, warps it slightly, has trickle-down effects, and makes the whole thing less real than it could be.

PLEX as a Means of Skipping Content

Some people are producers. They enjoys earning ISK, either by harvesting resources or trading or producing goods. They do not enjoy being attacked by other players. But they deal with that inconvenience, and adjust their gameplay to defend or mitigate against that possibility.

PLEX buyers are consumers. They enjoy expending ISK, often on attacking other players. They do not enjoy earning ISK.

However, unlike the producers, the consumers don't have to deal with their inconveniences. They don't have to adjust their gameplay to compensate. They can spend real money to skip the part of the game they don't enjoy.

That is the part which is not fair. The situation is not symmetrical. One faction can skip the part of the game they do not enjoy, while the other faction cannot.

Consider the following hypothetical. Suppose CCP sold, for real money, an IMMORTAL module which rendered your ship immune to player attack (but disabled your weapons while installed). The module would have a lifespan of one month of real-time, after which it would self-destruct.

Would the Eve playerbase be okay with such a module? Or would using it be considered cheating?

After all, all it does is equalize the situation between producers and consumers. The consumer can buy PLEX to skip the parts of the game he doesn't enjoy. The producer can buy IMMORTAL modules to skip the parts of the game which she doesn't enjoy.

Yet I suspect that the Eve loyalists would howl if IMMORTAL modules were ever sold by CCP. But in many ways IMMORTAL modules are no different than PLEX in their effect on how an individual enjoys the game.

[Eve Online] Is PLEX Cheating?

Gevlon wrote a post saying essentially that PLEX was cheating. PLEX is essentially a a game card for 1 month of game-time, that is purchased from CCP for real money, but can be sold in game for virtual currency. Gevlon was promptly jumped on by Eve loyalists in the comments. However, I think he is sort of right.

Though, "cheating" is not precisely the right word.

Rather, I would say that PLEX is against the spirit of Eve Online. Eve is a sandbox game, a virtual universe inside which one builds a virtual existence more or less from scratch. Allowing outside transactions to affect transactions inside the virtual universe seems to cut against the whole sandbox idea.

It kind of comes back to the notion of inconvenience. It is certainly convenient for, as an example, PvP pilots to buy PLEX to fund their games. But there is a price for that. Those pilots don't have to work, to participate in the game economy, for those funds. If PLEX did not exist, they would have to do something, produce something of value, before they could get to what they think is the fun part.

Maybe they would take up mining, maybe they would become pirates. Who knows? But not having to do that does distort the economy in some small fashion. It weakens the notion of Eve as a self-contained sandbox universe.

But maybe PLEX is a necessary evil. Maybe its existence spices up gameplay, and makes the economy more liquid, with more and larger transactions moving around. Maybe the alternative is those players quitting Eve instead of continuing to play. Maybe it means that CCP would make less money, and not be able to fund development as Eve deserves. Maybe third-party ISK sellers would fill the void, leading to the same result, but with a lot more unfortunate side-effects.

Ultimately, inconvenience is what makes a world a world, and not just a game. PLEX is convenient, but makes Eve less of a world, and more of a game.

[Eve Online] A Weekend in Jita

Jita. The largest trading hub in Eve Online.  You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

At least, that's the case if you go by the local chat. Honestly, this was worse than Barrens chat, with multiple people spamming macros of repeated chat, ascii graphics, scams, and all other sorts of foolishness.

Like many others in Eve, I heard about the Goons attack on Jita this weekend and thought that I would go see it for myself. I'm just flying a Catalyst destroyer, so I figured that even if I died, I could replace my ship easily.

There were a lot of people in Jita, about 2000 or so. But nothing much seemed to be happening. Maybe I play at a different time than when all the events go down. There were a lot of ships flying around, and occasionally CONCORD (the NPC police) would blow someone up. I thought I would try and join the action, and targeted someone who was a yellow skull to me. But when I went to fire, I got a warning saying that CONCORD would attack me, so I didn't fire. I guess yellow isn't bad.

All in all, my time in Jita was pretty boring. I did like watching a fleet of about 30 Hurricanes set up some sort of interdiction net around the gate to the Perimeter system. That looked kind of cool.

But ultimately, after a couple hours in wandering around Jita, I got bored and went back to my usual mission-running systems.

After that, I thought I would make a mining alt. But when I started the alt, the game informed me that I could only learn skills on one character at a time. I wonder what the point of having multiple characters on a single account is with that restriction. Is it worth losing a month or so of skill time on your main to skill up an alt? It seems like I could just spend that month (or less because I already know some skills) and learn those mining skills on my main.

[TERA] Trials of a Knight-Errant: Miniskirt Edition

I was rather bored this weekend, so I decided to have another shot at TERA.  The thing about TERA is that I expect so little from it that the game is actually a great deal of fun. This time I chose to roll a character on the Role-Playing server, under the theory that the innuendo in general chat would at least be in proper English.

(As a complete aside, I rather wish there were Normal servers, but with the Roleplaying restrictions on names, chat, etc. A 'Polite' server ruleset, as it were. I have no interest in roleplaying, but I rather like being on a server with people who can write in full sentences, and no Arthasloldk in sight. But the roleplayers must get pretty annoyed that "their" server is overrun with people who don't roleplay at all.)

In any case, I rolled a female human Lancer, which is a lance-and-shield tank. Yeah, the first rule of TERA is not to question the logic behind anything, but just go with the flow. The lance telescopes somehow, automatically extending to full length when you enter combat. As expected, this leads to interesting commentary in general chat.

For some reason, TERA to me is symbolized by the following story. The female Lancer is very scantily-clad, which includes a miniskirt as part of her (theoretically heavy) metal armor. But as my female readers can probably attest, a miniskirt does not really go well with riding a horse. So what does any logical knight-errant do? That's right, she rides sidesaddle:

Coriel the Lancer, with mount. Note the telescoping lance on her back.

Somehow, this is just so perfectly TERA to me. Perfectly reasonable thinking, but from completely crazy starting points.

I'll talk more about tanking in a later post, because it's quite interesting, and quite possibly the perfect blend of tanking mechanics, of what Ghostcrawler calls "active mitigation".

Honestly, if you can get past the skimpy clothing, and the race that looks like little girls (who now wear shorts instead of tiny dresses), TERA is quite a fun and engrossing game, with some really intriguing mechanics and subsystems.

Bonuses for Mixed Gender Groups

Because I'm a fool, I'm going to comment on a gender-relations issue. One would think I would know better by now.

Syp at Biobreak finds an interesting idea from the developers of Prime World:

Prime World has an optional gender bonus: a shield which will automatically deploy if the health of a nearby player of the opposite gender falls below a certain level. This shield is cheap, is in the default talent set for all characters, and is designed to encourage players of opposite genders to fight together. Teams are thus more effective if they are composed of both male and female players. In addition, this bonus helps encourage beginning female players, who feel more helpful when fighting in a mixed group.

All the commenters on the post are pretty appalled at this notion. But is it really that bad of an idea?

Now, maybe the stated rationale for the move--helping beginning female players--is weak. Though maybe it isn't. In the reverse situation, a lot of men would be loath to attempt something that would make them look foolish or incompetent in front of women. Making that situation less likely might indeed make some beginning female gamers more willing to take a chance on a group.

Apart from that, there is a better reason to promote mixed gender groups. One of the greatest strengths and weaknesses of the Internet is that it allows like-minded individuals to find each other and form communities which reinforce each other. A lot of the time this is good. After all, most of us gamers get to participate in a far larger gaming community than we could have in real life.

But sometimes this is bad. There is a portion of the male gaming audience which is very misogynistic. The Internet allows them to find each other, and form all-male sub-communities that reinforce that misogyny, sub-communities which provide validation in the face of wider community disapproval.

A mechanic like the the one above pushes against the formation of deviant sub-communities. Mixed gender groups are mechanically optimal, and thus mixed-gender groups are more likely to form. I think it is harder to retain prejudice against someone when you're playing on the same team as they are. When the rest of your smaller sub-community values them as well.

Basically, if you have a poor opinion of women, and if you never play with women, I would think that you are more likely retain that poor opinion. Playing with good female team-mates forces one to readjust that opinion to match reality.

Another aspect to this situation is that women are often invisible in MMOs. Because the majority of players are men, and a lot of men play female characters, it becomes very easy to assume that every player you meet is male in real life. (What does GIRL stand for? Guy In Real Life.) A lot of women like this invisibility. They don't get hit on, or made uncomfortable, or in any way treated differently.

But there is a price for this invisibility. First, if everyone who meets a good female player assumes she is male, their prejudices can go unchallenged. Additionally, female players seem a lot rarer than they are in reality. If in every random 5-man group, one or two players were identifiably female, a female player would cease to be a novelty, and would be more normal.

Second, by choosing to be invisible, good female players cede defining the image of female players to those who are willing to publicly identify as female in-game. This often means the female players who are willing to trade on their feminity to get material concessions from male players, or to excuse poor play. Those women get to define female gamers, to the detriment of the larger female population.

You see much the same phenomenon with young players. There are a lot of teenage players who are competent, solid players. But they are invisible, and glide by on the default assumption of maturity. You only see the teenagers who are immature and cause drama. Thus all teenagers get tarred by the same brush, and many guilds institute age minimums.

A mechanic like the one proposed by Prime Worlds above might actually have positive effects on the game community as a whole. It nudges or pushes the players towards forming mixed-gender sub-communities as that is optimal mechanically. This makes it harder for misogynistic self-reinforcing sub-communities to form. It pushes women out of a comfortable invisibility, and forces male players to acknowledge them as female and as a significant portion of the community. The community definition of female gamers is more likely to match reality, rather than an unfortunate stereotype.

Between these two aspects, such a gender-based mechanic might actually foster a stronger, better community, despite the initial reaction of many people.

[WoW] Goblin Starting Zone

I don't really like the Goblin starting zone that was introduced in Cataclysm.

To me, the goblin backstory is "over-determined". For all the other races in WoW, your background before the starting zone is left very blank. You could be almost anything or anyone. But the goblin zone gives you a very defined place in goblin society. You have a job, a history, friends, and even a girlfriend or boyfriend.

It seems too pushy for an MMO. It might have been fine for a single-player game, but it seems really out of place in an MMO. I like having my character start out as a blank slate.

I think a better idea for the Goblin starting zone would have been to play out a twist.  When the goblins escape Kezan and their ship gets blown up, have a "dream fade" in to the next section. You know, one of those wiggly fades that indicates what came before was a dream. Then have all the NPCs treat you as more of a no-name goblin, like all the other starting zones.

So the goblin experience of Kezan becomes a dream or fantasy experience, which accounts for the over-the-top nature of that zone. This makes the true reality of events more obscure, and more in line with all the other starting experiences.

Community and Lobby-Like Gaming

In a comment to the previous post, Milady asks:

I was wondering what would you think about switching from an MMO to a game such as Diablo. You have said that D3 plays similarly to D2, yet the latter came out many years ago, when the community had not reached the stage of persistent world population, and the social ties that you could form were not as strong as in MMOs. Many people are migrating from WoW and other MMOs into D3 - would they like this step backwards into lobby-like gaming? 

Could you play without a persistent world, without a community?

There are multiple ways of looking at this question.

First, for me at least, Diablo is closer to a single-player game than a multiplayer game. Multiplayer is fun, but the first time I play any level, it will be as a single-player. You can go at your own pace, listen to all the voice-overs, experiment with different abilities, and ensure that every single barrel on the level has been broken before moving on. I suspect that the initial play-through for the majority of people will be similar, or maybe co-op with a real-life friend.

In this view, community really doesn't mean anything for a single-player game.

Second, if you play an MMO in a transient fashion, you will find that it is very similar to lobby-like gaming. You have to join the community in order to experience that sense of community. And a lot of people don't join the community. I know that I have never done so in any MMO other than WoW.[1]

So D3 would be just as persistent as my experiences in RIFT, Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings Online, etc. Of course, that may be the reason I never played for more than a few months.

However, I really think that the MMO literati gravely underestimate how many people actually play in this fashion, how many people are not part of the community.  In my opinion, what we think of the community in many of these games is actually a minority of the total playerbase.

Third, even transient games have an external community consisting of the forums and websites, where people can discuss the game, brag about stuff they done, and commiserate with others who have lost high-level hardcore characters. I suspect that the people who do end up playing Diablo for years tap into this community.

Fourth, the final view I can think of is that maybe Diablo becomes the equivalent of television for a lot of people. Log in, kill some monsters, get some loot, and log out. Maybe zerg a boss with some random people online. Mindless relaxation to unwind after work. In this view, community is really not important, and may even be detrimental as you don't really want to spend brain power and effort on that community.

Personally I don't think I could play Diablo for as long as I played WoW without the persistent world and community. But I also don't expect to play it for that long. It's a single-player game for me, with a little bit of random multiplayer after. I will probably play Diablo until the next interesting game comes along.

[1] Technically, I did join a guild in SWTOR. If I had made to the cap and started doing things with them, I might have become part of that community.

[Diablo 3] Open Beta Impressions

Diablo 3 is, well, pretty much Diablo.

Gameplay is pretty much the exact same as the previous version. About the only new element is monsters sometimes drop health globes. It's an interesting mechanic because it sort of shifts your relationship with health potions a little bit.

There's also no real mana potions anymore. Resources either regenerate with time, or specific attacks build resources and other attacks spend them.

A lot of stuff got streamlined. Town Portal is now an ability (with a long cast time) instead of scrolls. Items are automatically identified. You pick up gold automatically. All your characters share gold, the stash, and crafting professions.

The major area of change is how abilities are given out. I think Diablo 3 is the final nail in the coffin for talent trees, at least as far as Blizzard is concerned.

Instead you get a series of exclusive choices. I.e. you choose one of 5 primary attacks (left-mouse button), 1 of 5 secondary attacks (right-mouse button), 1 of 5 defensive abilities, etc. You can also modify each attack with different runes that alter the attack. Like the monk has a spinning kick secondary attack. The first rune adds some fire and a knockback, and the animation changes a bit.

All of these choices are unlocked as you level, and changing your spec up is painless. I'm generally a fan of the series of exclusive choices idiom. I think the total possible number of combinations is just as large as with talent trees, and the total number of viable combinations is much larger.

There's also some interesting innovations in multiplayer. For example, loot is generated separately for each player, so there's no ninja'ing.

It's interesting to look at D3 in light of future MMOs, and think about what will get carried forward. I think the individual player loot is one element that will show up in future MMOs. Indeed, Looking For Raid is going to work that way in Pandaria. As well, many elements are shared across your characters, including gold, your bank/stash, and somewhat surprisingly, your crafting progression.

As for classes, they're pretty straightforward. The witch doctor is a bit weird though. I'm not sure what class I will play. Normally I just go with the knight/paladin archetype, but D3 doesn't have one. Mechanically, the armored melee fighter is the barbarian, but it just doesn't feel the same. I was thinking about the Demon Hunter, but like Spinks, I'm not thrilled with the high heels. Boots would have been just as sexy, and far less stupid. But otherwise, the Demon Hunter looks good, so I'll probably end up going with that.

In the end, this is Diablo. It looks, feels, sounds, and plays like Diablo. It has the classic Blizzard polish, attention to detail, and excellent performance on even somewhat older systems.

Guilds for New Players

Syncaine of Hardcore Casual asks, "what excuse do [new] people have for not joining EVE University?"

That echos a lot of advice that Eve Online players have been giving me. In many ways, Syncaine's question is aimed squarely at me, as I'm in the exact position he's asking about. So here is my attempt to give a serious answer to that question.

The thing is that I don't like leaving guilds. I will leave if it becomes necessary. But ideally, it would never become necessary. And so I really don't like joining a guild that I know I will leave. And that's the case for newbie guilds like Eve University.

This even extends into all the themepark/leveling games I've played recently (hence the reason this post is not tagged with Eve Online). My experience in WoW has led me to believe that endgame guilds are structured the way they are for a reason, because that is the structure that is most conducive to success.

As a result, I really don't like joining all these leveling guilds that dream of one day raiding. I've seen guilds that tread that path, and it never seems to work out. I just don't have faith that a random guild will navigate the transition successfully. So to me there are three choices:

1. Join a leveling guild and try to raid - almost never works out, getting that critical mass of players willing to commit to raiding is hard for an adhoc group.

2. Join a leveling guild and then leave for a raiding guild at max level - I think this is unfair to the leaders of the leveling guild. They're trying to raid, and that's hard enough to learn, without people abandoning them

3. Level unguilded and then join a raiding guild - The least-worst option. But leveling is very lonely.

The other aspect is that I think it's important that I contribute to the guild's goals. Joining a guild should be a two-way street. The guild helps me, and I help the guild.

Guilds which are explicitly aimed at new players are all one-sided relationships. It's all take and no give on the part of the new player. And that feels less like a guild and more like charity. It may not be fashionable anymore, but I do have my pride.

These the two aspects of a newbie guild that give me pause: the fact that I know I will have to leave; and the fact that I think the guild-player relationship is overly one-sided. These are the reasons that I prefer not to join guilds like Eve University or even those random guilds which whisper you in Elwynn Forest.

[SWTOR] Free Time for Level 50s

Lots of buzz about Bioware giving current subscribers with Level 50s a month of free time. The long-time subscribers without level 50s are naturally unhappy, and so we'll see how that plays out. Personally, I thought SWTOR strongly encouraged someone to get to 50 before starting alts, so I'm not sure how common the above scenario really is.

But I'm not really interested in talking about that aspect. What's more interesting to me is the timing of this offer.

Bioware is giving end-game players a month of free time right when a major, heavily-advertised patch hits. Shouldn't the patch itself be a major attraction? Shouldn't people want to stay subscribed to explore the new patch and content?

To me this is like Blizzard giving every raider a month of free time right when Dragon Soul comes out. It's nice, but it's really unnecessary. Everyone would stay subscribed for a little while to poke around in Dragon Soul and LFR.

It seems like it would be much better to give out the free time a month or two after the patch has landed. To keep people from unsubscribing, to keep them playing a bit longer.

I don't know. Maybe Bioware needs to guarantee subscription numbers for a very specific date. Maybe there's something specific in their player habits that makes this idea useful. But I just don't understand the logic behind the timing of this offer.

[Eve Online] The Path From Here to There

By now, I think I have a reasonable handle on the Eve interface. It's not perfect, there's lots of small details that I just know there is a way to smooth out, but haven't yet figured out how to do it. For example, on the overhead display, I want to create a tab that just shows enemies. I managed to create a tab that shows stuff I can loot, and it's been an enormous help. But I just can't get one to show only enemies.

Ship-wise, I'm flying an Incursus, which seems to be the best Gallente faction frigate-class combat ship. So far, it's been pretty solid, and has allowed me to complete all the Level 1 missions I've been given.

Skill-wise, I've discovered certificates, which are groupings of related skills. Earning certificates is like a guide to what skills you should pick up. I'm going for what appears to be a standard fighter line, with things like Gunnery and Armor Tanking. Not really sure if this is the best route, but at least it's a direction.

The hardest thing in Eve, I find, is figuring out what goal to set for yourself. Or, if your goal is sufficiently advanced, figuring out the path from you to your goal, what sub-goals you need.  The truth is that I don't really know what I want to do in Eve, and as a result I log on, do a couple missions, and then log off.

This is the big advantage of the theme park games. My goal is to get to max level. My sub-goal is to get to the next level. My sub-goal below that is to finish the current quest I am on.

There is a path there that really is not present in Eve. In Eve, even questions like, "should I be moving on to a new solar system" are really hard to answer. How is this solar system really different from the one next to it?

I guess my next goal in Eve is to get and fly a cruiser-class ship. And I can see the skills I need to take to get to that point. What I don't really see is how to afford that cruiser. A level 1 mission pays like 100k ISK. The cruiser costs something like 100M ISK. Am I really to run 1000 missions? Or are there higher paying missions at some point? Or am I expected to take up mining or trading?

I find Eve is extraordinarily opaque when it comes to questions like this. But in some ways that's part of its appeal. Any answer could be the right answer.

I really feel the appeal of a corporation at this point in the game. At least in a corp, someone could give me orders and I could carry out those orders and feel that something is moving forward.

In a lot of respects, I feel the same as when I was a junior programmer. I understood the core concepts, how to program, and how to solve simple problems. What I didn't understand was the jump to large programs, and the larger architecture. That's something I really only learned while working on larger programs, getting a feel for larger systems, and seeing what older and more experienced programmers did.

Basically, it's a lot easier to be a worker bee for a little bit before striking out on your own. You learn so much more that way.

Maybe the answer is that I should join a corp. But here Eve's reputation works against it. It is a notoriously unfriendly community. That makes the whole corporation thing seem even more daunting, especially if you're just playing casually and know you will be unreliable.