Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World

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

Guild Wars 2

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

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

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

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

The Secret World

Here's four requirements for a successful MMO:

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

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

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

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

Also, I'm still unhappy about Dreamfall.

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

TERA Updates

I've pretty much been "Diablo'd out", so I've gone back to TERA. I'm still chugging along the lower levels, up to 38 now. Here are some thoughts, in no particular order.

• Sometimes the quest text can be very funny. There's a magic academy, a la Harry Potter, at some point, and bad magic has taken over. You have to go in and clean things up. Here's the turn in text for one of the early quests:

• Since the Lancer is a tank class, questing can be slow. However, I found a quick guide on the forums that has helped enormously. The basic steps, if any other Lancers are having difficulty:

1. Don't block unless you have to, which is pretty much only red flash attacks.
2. Use health regen and mana regen crystals.
3. Alternate between the Shield Barrage - Shield Barrage - Spring Attack combo and a basic Combo Attack.
4. Use Second Wind on cooldown to keep your health up.

• One of the things I really like about TERA is that there is a lot of zone chatter. For some reason, a lot of newer MMOs have felt extraordinarily quiet. I attribute it to the design of the chatbox, or something, but TERA seems to have that magic where people actually talk. Or maybe it's just because I'm on the RP server.

• There's even an LFG channel which has sort of morphed into a general chat channel simultaneously. But I don't seem to mind the chatter on the channel. It somehow has hit the right note between talkative and spammy. I think one of the reasons it works is that you can only send a message to the channel once every 60s. I think this prevents one or two individuals from dominating the channel, allows many people to chime in, and also reduces the total messages sent to that channel. I think this cooldown might even be a general quality-of-life improvement for any public chat channel.

• If you'd like to try out TERA, there seems to be two options:


1. Instant Demo - I have no idea how this works, but it's some sort of streaming demo which does not require a download. Some people say they have had good results, but you might need a higher quality internet connection.


2. Seven Day Trial - The standard download and play for seven days. I think you can get up to level 23, which is enough to do the first dungeon and the BAMs (Big Ass Monsters - monsters which require a group and have lots of special moves).

Both of these options are for the North American version of the game. The European version is run by a different company. (Frogster, I believe.) I've heard that the latency for Europe to NA is not that bad, at least for a trial. Of course, if you make characters on the NA servers during the trial, they won't exist if you sign up for the Euro version.

• Finally, the section you've all been waiting for: the latest Inappropriate Lancer Armour:




The one on the left is really terrible, but the one on the right is surprisingly not bad. Though maybe my standards have just been battered down.

Competition and Collaboration

I came across an interesting theory on team dynamics by a commenter on Reddit:

With competition, you must advertise your strengths and downplay your weaknesses. The reason is so that you can maintain an edge over your teammates. The team functions like a poker competition. The competition resolves which member has the strongest set of skills so that the most difficult work can be assigned to the one with the greatest skill. This minimizes the risk of failure. 

With collaboration, you must advertise your weaknesses and downplay your strengths. The reason is so that the difficult high-risk work can be assigned or divided efficiently among the group. It ensures the difficult work is assigned away from those with the least skill, which is another way to minimize the risk of failure. It's also a demonstration of honesty for the purpose of establishing trust. Trust is critical for fostering an environment for collaboration.

I'm not sure I fully agree with this breakdown, but it is a neat way to look at the issue.

The key problem is that you want tasks to be assigned to people to match skills. But skill is an unknown and must be "discovered". Collaboration sounds better, but what if competition is actually more accurate at skill discovery?

The big problem comes when their is a signalling mismatch. If someone's ability to signal strength outdoes their actual strength in competition, or someone's ability to signal weakness overstates their weakness.

The actual comment comes up in a discussion of gender approaches to teamwork (guess which gender is assumed to use which model!), but I think the gender angle is unnecessary. I think the two models are worth looking at on their own.

Thoughts on the Trinity

It has become fashionable among the MMO literati to denigrate Trinity-based gameplay for PvE, which are games with a group composition of tank, healer, and damage dealers. I disagree with this view. I consider the Trinity-based system to be strongest group system for MMOs presented thus far, especially for the fantasy genre.  Here are some thoughts on the Trinity system.

A Digression on Magic

A few years ago, according to Mark Rosewater, the Magic: the Gathering design team conducted an experiment. They stripped Magic down to its fundamentals, playing "vanilla" games with basic land, basic creatures without abilities, and basic spells. The simplest game of Magic you can think of.

They found that--far from being boring--these vanilla games were surprising fun and intricate. They didn't need the crazy complex spells to make the game interesting. The basic skeleton of Magic was more than fun enough to sustain gameplay.

They also discovered that a lot of the fun came from the interaction between attacking and blocking creatures. This did not happen as often in the Magic of that time period because cheap removal spells had made it a lot easier for players to clear a path, or evasion abilities to avoid being blocked.

Because of this experiment, Magic R&D cut back significantly on complexity in future expansions, especially on non-rare cards, made removal scarcer and creature combat more important. They moved Magic back towards its vanilla nature.

This approach has made Magic enormously successful, with current sets setting new sales records, and outselling previous sets. An outstanding achievement for a game that is approaching 20 years of age.

The lesson here is that, for a game system, the very basic game system around which everything else is built should be fun in and of itself. You should not rely on complexity to add fun.

Relevance to MMOs

The above anecdote crystallized some of my thoughts on the Trinity. In my view, the very basic Trinity gameplay is a tank tanking a monster, the damage dealers killing the monster, and the healer keeping the tank up. This very basic, very vanilla, gameplay is fun. You don't need to have all the crazy, wacky abilities. Those extra abilities add spice and interest. But I think the Trinity skeleton is strong enough to sustain itself.

You don't need things like coordinating cooldowns or excessive dancing to make Trinity games fun.

This is in sharp contrast to all the non-Trinity gameplay I've played. The vanilla skeleton of those games is usually just a zerg, with the monster switching attacks at random. I don't think the zerg is fun. It contains none of the teamwork of the Trinity, none of the sense of the group being stronger than the individual components.

The Third Role

That's not to say that the current Trinity is perfect. But the real issue with the Trinity is that one role, damage dealing, is far more popular than the other two roles. The problem is not with Trinity gameplay, the problem is constructing the Trinity in the first place.

Here's an idea: what if the third role was not damage dealing? What if it was something else, like debuffs, or interrupts, or crowd control?

This would immediately allow the game company to equalize damage across all three classes. That would mean that healers or tanks could do as much damage as the other role. This would make soloing much easier, and would make tank and healer classes more attractive. It would also mean that you could do something like requiring a group of five to need one tank, one healer, one debuffer, and two others. That would give more flexibility for group composition.

Threat

A lot of Trinity games, especially WoW, have made threat a non-issue when tanking. And yet, when we look at the vanilla Trinity gameplay, I think threat is actually important. It's a large part of the interaction between damage dealing and tanking.  I think basic threat is a large part of what makes the Trinity gameplay tick.

That means that the modern move away from threat is working against the natural skeleton of the Trinity. That it might be better to re-emphasis threat, to cut away the elements that make threat excessively pointless.

To re-emphasize threat means a couple changes would have to be made. The tank losing threat cannot always be an auto-loss. The tank needs to regain threat quickly, but the group should be able to survive the mob switching targets temporarily.

In my opinion, one really sees how this works when tanking in TERA. There, the trade-off between threat and reducing damage is explicit. I think it emphasizes something that WoW tanking has lost.

Conclusions

Those are my thoughts on Trinity gameplay. The basic skeleton is fun and engaging. In my opinion, vanilla Trinity is far more fun than any other proposed vanilla system, especially the zerg.

However, I am not sure that the third role in the Trinity should be damage dealing. It might be better to equalize damage across all three roles, and have the third role take care of a different function.

Finally, I think the move away from threat is a mistake. Threat is an important part of vanilla Trinity gameplay. However, I think that the complexity of modern fights has masked that factor. Trinity MMOs might be better served by reducing complexity, but re-emphasizing threat.

Upcoming Changes to SWTOR

Amid all the angst over The Old Republic's performance (or lack thereof), there were a couple of interesting tidbits about future developments.

Level Cap Increase

This is interesting because Bioware did not announce an formal expansion, which is the traditional place where the level cap gets increased. So it's very speculative as to what exactly Bioware means by increasing the level cap and what are the ramifications for existing endgame content.

One thought I had is what if it is a very small increase, only one or two levels. So the new level cap could be 52 instead of 50. That would mean that end game content is still valid for capped characters. But increasing character level is a valid way of gaining power, not just getting new gear.

But maybe Bioware is going for a mini-expansion, like DLC. This would be an interesting turn of events, especially if it came with some amount of paid time.

A Dungeon Without Combat

In an interview with Massively, Daniel Erickson tosses out that in the pipeline there is "a new dungeon that basically is an adventure game with no combat".

That sounds particularly intriguing. I wonder what it will be like, what it will include to encourage replayability. Puzzles? Conversations? Will there be randomness?

I think its good to see Bioware continuing to change things up, to try out new ideas. Hopefully, subscriptions will stabilize for them, and The Old Republic will continue improving.

Spirit as the Primary Healer Stat

Currently in WoW, healer and caster gear overlap. Both roles use Intellect as the primary stat. Intellect + Hit gear is considered caster-only, Intellect + Spirit gear is considered healer-only, and other Intellect gear can be used by both roles.

What if healers got their spell power from Spirit, rather than Intellect?

That would make Spirit a primary stat, not a secondary stat. It would make the division between healers and casters more obvious, and would have them chase their own unique gear.

From an aesthetic standpoint it would be nice, as each "attribute" is now a primary stat. Instead of having four of them be primary, and one secondary, which seems weird. It would be a lot easier for Blizzard to control healer mana regen, as both spell power and mana regen would key off the same stat.

It would prevent mistakes like when a healer takes a hit piece of gear, or a caster takes Spirit gear. It also wouldn't be that hard to adjust current gear, as a lot of healer gear has Spirit already.

Spirit gear would also balance melee gear. Right now, melee gear has a hard split between Strength and Agility gear, while caster/healer gear has a soft split. A hard split would make the number of people vying for each piece more equitable. Compare the number of people in a raid who want an Agility ring to those who want an Intellect ring. Usually there's twice or more people gunning for that Intellect ring. That means that the Intellect ring has to drop more often to keep things even.

There are several downsides to this idea, however. The biggest is that it does create several new categories of "single-spec" gear: Intellect leather (balance druid); Spirit mail (resto shaman); and Intellect mail (elemental shaman). As well, paladins would no longer be able to use caster swords. Druids and Shaman would need to collect separate DPS and healing sets.

It's probably too big of a change for Pandaria. But it might be a worthwhile change for the next expansion, especially if we get a new spell casting class that wears mail.

New Ability Challenge for Diablo 3

Lately I've been making lots of alts in Diablo 3. You know, D3 classes have a *lot* of abilities, especially when you count runes. I've been trying a new system for choosing abilities, and it's oddly fun and challenging.

Rules:

1. Non-elective mode.
2. When you level, always switch to the latest runes or abilities that you gain.

It's interesting because you are forced to use every rune as they come up. You'll use runes and abilities that you would never touch normally. You'll lose abilities and runes that you consider staples.

As well, sometimes your current abilities are terribly non-synergistic, and you just have adapt and deal with it. Each character level gives you a bit different gameplay.

Obviously this is a terrible idea for Inferno or other difficult content. But it's lots of fun while levelling.

ELO and Planeswalker Points

One of the more interesting things to happen recently in the world of competitive gaming is that Magic: the Gathering gave up its ELO rating system for a new system called Planeswalker Points.

To recap, ELO is the system where you have a personal rating and that rating increases when you beat higher-rated players, and decreases when you lose to lower-rated players. It's effectively the same system WoW uses for Arena rating and competitive PvP.

Planeswalker Points are a purely cumulative point system. Every time you win a game, you get 3 points, with a multiplier for the type of event you are attending. More prestigious events have a higher multiplier. The big difference is that you cannot lose points, at least during a season. Points are reset to zero when a new season starts.

The reason Wizards of the Coast introduced Planeswalker Points was to encourage players, especially highly rated players, to play more. The thing about ELO is that once you achieve a certain cutoff rating, it becomes better to stop playing and sit on that rating for as long as you can.

For example, in WoW, let's say you needed a 2200 rating to get a new weapon. You've finish your 10th game and end up with 2201 rating. Are you going to play an another game? More often than not, you'll sit on that 2201 until you get the new weapon, even if it means not playing. You can't risk your rating dropping below 2200.

ELO also discourages players from taking risks, especially at more casual tournaments. A high-ranked player who beats a low-ranked players gains very few points, but if she loses, she stands to lose a lot of points. This makes life harder for lower-ranked players to climb the ladder, because they need to find and beat those higher-ranked players to gain more points. Often the top ratings become very static.

But if the Planeswalker Points never decrease, then--following Coriel's First Law of Skill--does that not mean we are measuring time, not skill?

The key here is that WotC controls the amount one can play. You can only play Friday Night Magic once per week. There are only so many Grand Prix. The difference between the amount of time spent by the average competitive player and the edge competitive player is not that large. And the multipliers reward winning at the more prestigious events. That makes attending smaller events more optional. Not to mention that there are no points for losing, only for winning.  It is not like the old PvP system where the Grand Marshals simply played for hours on end.

One could also argue that the real metric is the ratio of earned Planeswalker points to total possible Planeswalker points at time T. And that ratio can decrease. Planeswalker points are biased towards players who play regularly, rather than a player who plays rarely, but always wins. But that is by design, a desired property of the system.

There are other differences between WoW and Magic. The biggest difference is that Magic never used ELO for match-making purposes. It was used solely to determine invites to high-end tournaments and as an overall ranking system. Match-making in Magic is done using the Swiss system on a per-tournament basis. For each round of a tournament, you are matched to an opponent of similar record. The 3-0 guys play each other, the 2-1 players play each other, and so forth.

There are disadvantages to the Swiss style of matching. For example, a poor player will often end up with a losing record all the time. They might go 1-5, 0-6, 2-4 in successive tournaments, dampening their enthusiasm for continuing to play in new tournaments. Whereas if a poor player is matched with someone of similar ELO rating, they can eventually expect a 50% win rate.

But there are disadvantages to ELO as well. Ratings can be manipulated, such that your rating, especially of an alt, does not reflect your real rating. But in Swiss or Planeswalker Points, your results are your rating, so manipulation is pointless. And as mentioned above, often the best way to maintain a good ELO rating is to simply stop playing.

Still, it's interesting to note the differences, and the different imperatives that push each system. Vanilla WoW swung way too far to the "playing for hours and hours" side of things, whereas modern WoW might swing too close to the "play only the minimum games" side of things. It would be an interesting exercise to design a system like Planeswalker Points for an MMO, given the constraints that people do not play in scheduled tournaments.

[Eve Online] Final Thoughts

The other day, I realized that I had not logged into Eve Online for a while. In fact, I was avoiding logging in. So I canceled my subscription. These are a couple of assorted thoughts on Eve.

Type of Thought

Eve's greatest strength--and greatest weakness--is that it "scratches a different itch" than the other MMOs. Eve is much more cerebral and strategic than most MMOs.  This is great if that is the type of game you are looking for, and not so great if it is not.

It kind of reminds me of my work. I'm a programmer/software dev by trade, and Eve sort of reminded me of programming. Not so much in terms of actual mechanics, but in terms of the type of thought that Eve takes. Which is fine, I do enjoy programming. But one of the things I found is that after coming home after eight hours of coding, I really preferred to do something else.

To be honest, I'm sort of surprised that Tobold doesn't like or play Eve. This strategic/tactical thinking and gameplay is what he is always espousing.

Graphics

You often see Eve partisans boast that Eve has great graphics. This statement has always bothered me. It is true ... and it is false.  I've finally figured out how to articulate my thoughts on this issue.

Eve does have good graphics. Your ships look very nice, and the stellar backdrops are excellent.

But if you look at most games, you have your character, other characters in the foreground, and the background. Eve only has your character and the background. The vast majority of the time, there is nothing truly visible in the foreground. Instead you're looking at the UI to identify and interact with elements in the game.

Like if you're in combat, in a game like TERA you'd be interacting with a giant monster and watching its animations. In Eve, you're shooting at a white box on your screen because the other ship is not really visible.

So Eve has good graphics, but those good graphics are irrelevant at the same time. The UI layout is far more important than the graphics engine in Eve. I rather think that Eve would be playable if the UI was on top of a completely black screen.

There are times when objects do come into the foreground. Like when you're docking at a space station, or when you pass by a fleet of ships at a jump point. Eve is extraordinarily pretty at those times. But those times are not normal.

Conclusions

I did like Eve. It was an interesting game and experience. If you are growing disenchanted with the current crop of WoW-like MMOs, and are looking for something different, I would give Eve a try.

[Diablo 3] Elective Mode is a Mistake

Elective Mode in Diablo 3 is a design mistake. Further, Blizzard knew it was a design mistake, but they caved in to the whining of the hardcore, and thus weakened the game as a whole.

First, a quick explanation. In D3, you have six categories of abilities. Each category has 3 to 5 abilities within it. For example, the Demon Hunter has Primary Attack, Secondary Attack, Defensive, Hunting, Devices, and Archery categories. Under the default settings, you can only pick one ability per category.

However, if you go into Options, you can turn on a setting called Elective mode. In Elective mode, you are no longer restricted to one ability per category. Instead you can take multiple abilities from the same category, like two Defensive abilities. You are still restricted to 6 abilities in total.

Elective mode is more powerful than the default setup. This is obviously true because all default builds are a subset of elective mode builds.

The reason elective mode is bad is that it destroys any semblance of exclusive choices, which is the major advantage of Blizzard's new series of explicit choices model. Instead, it replicates the worst feature of talent trees. As I wrote about talent trees:

The lack of explicit choices means that all talents within reach are compared to each other and ranked accordingly. And this has lead to some awkwardness. For DPS, damage talents always outweigh survivability talents. For tanks, survivability talents always outweigh damage talents. So for a final build, the only choice is between a few talents that you don't really care about, that aren't really important to your role. 

In a talent tree, it is extraordinarily hard to make someone choose between two good choices. Most of the time the player will take both, and drop a third, less important choice.

This same pattern occurs in Elective mode. Trying to choose between two good Defensive talents? Don't make the hard choice. Turn on Elective mode and take both.

Restrictions breed creativity. Restrictions make games interesting. If you don't have access to both good Defensive talents, you have to choose one and adjust your play-style to match. You have to get the most value out of a weaker ability in a different category.

However, the hardcore players hate being restricted. They hate having to make choices. All they see is that it lessens their power. Thus they will whine and moan until the game developers give in.

This is one of the most important responsibilities of the game developers. To tell the playerbase that they need to deal with weaknesses, to work around the weaknesses with new tactics. Instead of watering down the game by erasing the restrictions that make the game interesting.

Blizzard knew elective mode was a mistake. It's not the default system in Diablo 3. The option to turn it on is buried in the menus where, realistically, only the hardcore will find it. The default system with the different categories produces far more interesting builds, in spite of--or maybe because of--the fact that default builds are weaker.

Blizzard gave in to the hardcore players who hate restrictions and weakened the game. The default ability system produces far more interesting and varied builds than elective mode. Unfortunately, good elective mode builds are far more effective in practice.

[Diablo 3] Auction House

I haven't really purchased anything on Auction House on my Demon Hunter, other than selling off extra rares. However, I started a hardcore Barbarian. Being nervous about hardcore difficulty, which I never tried in D2, I began to purchase rares for all slots on the Auction House.

Rare gear, especially low-level gear is extraordinarily cheap. It must be even cheaper on the normal AH. Since gear doesn't degrade, the supply is huge. As well, because you can only have 10 auctions, the system pushes you to under-price items, in order to maintain turnover. I made the mistake of overpricing my auctions, and now I have a backlog of items just taking up space in my stash while I wait for the auctions for clear.

Outfitting your character through the Auction House really changes the game, at least in the beginning. The difficulty becomes much lower. I'm just rampaging through stuff with my Barbarian, and am really not playing it as if it is hardcore. I play more cautiously and defensively on my softcore Demon Hunter.

Second, in general the items you can buy on the AH are better than the items you are picking up from defeating enemies. That means that a lot of the thrill of getting new items has disappeared from the game. You're picking up items solely to sell them. Then you buy new items from the AH. It's actually rather boring.

I've gotten the Barbarian up to level 11, but I'm sort of at a crossroads as to which which way I want to. Should I go back to the old way of only using gear I find? Should I start a new Barbarian from scratch? Should I continue buying rares? After all, stopping buying rares does increase the chance of death, which is permanent in hardcore mode. Will later difficulty modes be balanced around people purchasing AH gear?

Lots of questions, but no real answers.

[Diablo 3] Updates

I'm still slowly going through D3 with my Demon Hunter. I'm in Act III and am about level 30. Here's the build I'm currently using:

Hungering Shot (Cinder Arrow)
Multishot (Fire At Will)
Caltrops (Hooked Spines)
Vault (Action Shot)
Smoke Screen (Lingering Fog)
Companion (Bat Companion)

Passives: Steady Aim, Cull the Weak, Archery

It does a pretty good job so far, I think. Hungering Shot for single-target and building Hatred. Multishot for AoE. Caltrops, Vault and Smokescreen for kiting and defensive play. The Bat Companion to build extra Hatred. And the passives are just damage increases.

In Normal Mode, the only thing I've really died to is the boss of Act II. It took me three tries to kill it.

I've also started a Hardcore Barbarian, and took him to level 10 before I stopped playing him. I'll write more about him tomorrow.

[Diablo 3] Battletags and Invisibility

A lot of people want the ability to go "invisible" with the Battletag system. That is, to appear offline to everyone else, but be able to see who's online.

I sympathize with this desire. Sometimes you just want to play by yourself in peace. But it feels socially awkward to request that solitude when other people can see you online. As well, a lot of people don't respect the Busy status. They figure that means you are Busy to other people, and that you'd be fine if they contacted you.

However, does no one remember ICQ and the late 1990s? The arms race that was "I am invisible to most people, but these specific people can see me if I'm invisible, unless I'm really invisible." Honestly, the entire concept of invisibility just made things overly complex.

The thing is that in an ideal world we want things to be asymmetric. We want perfect opaqueness for ourselves, and perfect transparency for others. But this cannot work, because applies to everyone. There's no point to a friends list where everyone is invisible.

I think that a better option, instead of invisibility, is to allow the option to "go dark" as a status. No one can see that you are online, but you can't tell if any of your friends are online either. To others you would appear offline, and everyone in your list appears offline. This would preserve the symmetry of the Battletag relationship. It gives you incentive to appear online as the default so you can see if your friends are online. But it would also allow you to play privately by yourself in peace.

[Diablo 3] Release

Diablo 3 was released last night. I actually got home pretty late, so I decided to stay up for a little bit longer and see if I could get started at midnight.

I got the infamous "Error 37" for about half an hour or so, but eventually I was able to log in and play. I'm starting off with a Demon Hunter, mostly because I think she has the best voice. It's really too bad there's no knight/paladin archetype in D3.

I got to level 5 before deciding to go to sleep. The cutscenes are very nice. The game does seem a little harder than it was in beta, at least starting in the cathedral. But that might be because the first group I ran into was a pack of champion bats, with a couple harvesters mixed in, so maybe it's just a skewed first impression.

I am thinking about trying Hardcore mode, maybe even from the start. But I'm not sure I'm the type of person who can restart and replay from scratch when my character dies. I rather think I'd just end up playing something else instead. So maybe Hardcore isn't the best idea for me.

How were your Diablo experiences?

[TERA] Looking For Group

One of the interesting things about TERA is that--even though it has a cross-server instance finder--transient dungeon groups often still form via the old method of asking in local chat. It seems sort of odd, given the experience in WoW, where the Dungeon Finder has completely displaced asking in chat.

So why does local chat still work for forming groups? I have several theories:

1. First, TERA's LFG has no rewards associated it. Using the instance finder has no innate bonus other than letting the system find a group for you.

2. Dungeons are located near people questing. So far, all the dungeons are in roughly the same area as the bulk of people at the correct level. This means that local chat is likely to contain all the people who might be interested. This is in contrast to WoW, where dungeons are often in a different zone, and especially SWTOR, where the dungeons were all back at Fleet.

3. Queue times for non-tanks are very long. TERA only has one tank class, Lancers, who are eligible for the Instance Finder. Thus the queue times for the other classes can be very long, up to half an hour for healers, and one to two hours for DPS. This makes it worthwhile for a non-tank class to start a local group.

However, tank classes have instant queues. So why would a tank class go with a local group, rather than jumping in the Instance Finder?

I think that part of it is the idea, maybe caused by WoW, that local groups are superior to random groups, which lack accountability. Personally, I don't see this in practice, in either WoW or TERA, but it is a very common belief.

However, I think another part of it is that local chat can get tanks who are beginning to tire of their current leveling activity. Because queues are instant, the choice as a Lancer is very binary. You either run the dungeon or you go questing. But maybe after doing a few quests, you're sort of wavering between continuing questing or going for an instance. Seeing a request for a tank can tip you over to one side, and might even allow you to feel altruistic for helping out an existing group.

Either way, it's an interesting phenomena. I am still not really sure why local chat and the instance finder coexist.

[WoW Videos] Scarlet Toy

This is one of my favorite videos. Greyfoo does really good work, and this is one of his best.

It's interesting, because he did this video for the Rise To Power contest, and that contest produced a *lot* of really good videos. Yet another example of the idea that restrictions breed creativity.

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.