Upgrading Gear in 5.2 and Beyond

Green Armadillo at Player Versus Developer takes note of the fact that Blizzard has removed the Upgrade Vendor NPC from the 5.2 PTR. This is the NPC who allows you to upgrade your gear for Valor. He sees this as an failure of Blizzard's part, a signal that they have over-emphasized the importance of item level in the current game.

That's one plausible interpretation. However, I'd like to offer a different--and perhaps simpler--explanation.

Perhaps Blizzard is removing the Upgrade Vendor NPC in 5.2 so that they can bring him back in 5.3.

See, the thing is that--given Blizzard's current goals for patches--5.3 is probably not going to include a raid.  I imagine that it will be a patch very much like 5.1 was. A new reputation, a new storyline, lots of random side-events. Those sort of activities only ever reward sidegrades. They won't offer true upgrades a tier higher than the current raids.

Of course, character progression is still important. I think Blizzard still believes that a patch without any way to improve your character will not be popular with their playerbase. That position could very well be correct.

Bringing back the Upgrade Vendor in 5.3 allows people to continue improving their gear at that point. You continue raiding to fill out missing pieces and earn Valor to improve your current gear.

This is a much more likely plan for Blizzard. Upgrading gear probably required a significant amount of tech to implement, and it is very unlikely that they did not foresee any mechanical issues (with scaling, etc.) that would result.

So I think the plan looks more like:

• In 5.2, players upgrade their gear by doing the new Thunder King raid and getting new items.
• In 5.3, players upgrade their gear by spending Valor on the gear they earned in the previous tier. All the non-Royalty guilds will also still be progressing through the Thunder King raid, and earning new gear that way. And of course, filling things out with sidegrades from the new non-raid content.

That's more plausible than Blizzard suddenly deciding right now that the entire concept of upgrading gear was a mistake.

Update: Looks like I was right! Post from Bashiok:

Even Ethereals need a vacation, and the item upgraders (Voidbinders), are no exception. They’re saying they need to go home to take care of business arrangements, but … I’m not convinced. I think they’re just homesick for their ‘space mummy’ families. 

Ok ok, fourth wall broken, we’re actually just temporarily removing them from the game for 5.2 due to the new raid tier. The idea with the item upgrade system is that it’s a way to spend currency on upgrading items when buying new items isn’t the clear path. Either you’ve bought everything, or at least most of them, and then spend currency to get that extra *oomph*. With a new raid tier coming, we don’t want to create a trap where people are wondering what’s more lucrative: spend currency on new items, or on the new gear appearing on vendors? (Hint: It’s the new gear on vendors.) To help ensure we’re not indirectly encouraging anyone to spend their currency somewhere they probably shouldn’t, the item upgraders will be taking a break. 

Right now we’re planning for them to return in 5.3, which will not have a raid tier, and offer upgrades again as people will have likely have some currency to burn. We’re not sure yet if we’ll continue this cycle of having them take a break for raid patches and then come back in non-raid patches, but we’ll continue evaluating as we go, absorb feedback, and let you know how these plans evolve.

The Old Republic Expansion

The Old Republic is releasing a mini-expansion, Rise of the Hutt Cartel. It costs $10 for subscribers, and $20 for non-subscribers.  It has 5 levels and a new planet.

Sadly, the class stories are not continued, with only two storylines, Empire and Republic being offered.

The real question, in my mind, is how will this mini-expansion interact with the current endgame. TOR has built up a fair chunk of PvE endgame by now, and I can't imagine that this small piece of content can totally replace that.  At best, I expect one or two flashpoints, and one operation. That doesn't sound like enough.

Maybe the power curve will be very flat, allowing the current endgame, or at least the latest two operations to stay relevant.

Still, this will be an interesting experiment.

Looking For Raid, Pandaria Edition

My computer was having a lot of trouble with Looking For Raid in Pandaria. It would crash often, on pretty much every fight. Given that it would occasionally crash at other times, I finally bit the bullet and got a new machine. Ah well, the old one served effectively for almost five years, so I guess it was just time.

So in the past couple of weeks, I've actually gotten to try out the new raids in Mists of Pandaria, if only the LFR versions.  Here are some thoughts.

I like pretty much all the raids in this tier. They're a lot of fun, with interesting mechanics. By and large the difficulty seems appropriate for LFR. It's doable, but you do need at least some of your group to pay attention.

Skill-wise, LFR seems pretty much the same. There doesn't appear to be any completely terrible people, but there's the standard not-switching targets or killing adds issue that always plagues LFR. I can usually count on having at least 4 of 6 healers being competitive on the meters.

I've switched away from Eternal Flame to Sacred Shield. In LFR, raw HPS is pretty much the only thing that matters, because you can't "trust" your other healers in the same manner as in a normal raid group. So raw raid healing with cooldowns on the tanks is more likely to help the group survive.  That means heavy reliance on Holy Radiance and Light of Dawn.

Loot System

So the big controversy with LFR this time around is the loot system.  I have mixed feelings about it. On the whole, I think I get loot at the same rate as in previous tiers.  And per-character loot definitely solved the drama issues with LFR loot in previous tiers.

But now, killing a boss seems like a big letdown. Previously, you killed the boss, and there was a cascade of purples. Maybe you personally wouldn't get anything, but there was plenty of treasure for the group. But now, most of the time it seems like just a small amount of gold, which is a disappointment.

I don't know. It's like before, the treasure definitely existed. If you didn't get an item, then someone else did. You saw rogues get cool daggers, and hunters get bows, and enthused with everyone else when they got their items. But now, it seems like 80% of the time there is no treasure at all.

Also, not being able to get off-spec gear is a bit disappointing. Especially since rep gear costs Valor, that precludes reputation as a source of off-spec gear. But on the other hand, it's better than people taking off-spec gear over main spec players.

This is especially reinforced with the Greater Charms of Forture. You pop a Charm, and 80% of the time is just gold, again. Blizzard should have just tripled the cost per Charm, and only allowed you get one per week, but made it guarantee a drop.

I don't really see a decent solution for the loot issues. Maybe announcing the winners of items to the raid, since you can't change anything, would be enough to get the old feel back. This system is good enough, though. I just feel sad that the previous system wasn't able to work, that it died in a tragedy of the commons.

The Case Against Cross-Server Raiding

Big Bear Butt had a post last week decrying Blizzard's stance against cross-realm raiding in the current tier. Ghostcrawler tweeted that Blizzard was worried "about what it would do to guilds".  BBB generally disagreed with Ghostcrawler, and felt that cross-realm raiding would generally be good for the game.

Well, I'm here to outline the future where cross-realm raiding goes badly.

If you look at BBB's post, there's an underlying, unstated assumption. He assumes that if you need a raider for that last spot, you would pull from your guild, then pull from your cross-realm friends list, and lastly pull from trade chat on your server. That there is a priority list that goes:

1. Guild
2. Friends
3. Strangers

Now suppose that assumption doesn't hold. Suppose with the advent of cross-realm raiding, the priority list becomes:

1. Friends
2. Guild
3. Strangers

I.e. you pull from your friends list before you pull from your guild.

This would do immeasurable damage to WoW in the long run. If you're someone new to end game, how would you break into raiding? Right now, the path is you apply to a guild, and the guild takes you on runs. The application and acceptance does not require an existing friendship. Both sides understand that they are taking a chance on strangers.  

A lot of people don't like guild apps because they are impersonal, but that distance sometimes makes things easier. The guild app process provides a path where strangers can become friends through raiding together. Every new app is a stranger to the guild as a whole, not yet a friend.

In contrast, breaking into someone's circle of friends will be very hard. They'll be raiding with their friends, so you can't play with them. The barrier to entry for raiding could become much larger, and the barrier between strata of raiders could become even higher. If you're a Royalty raider, is it better to raid with another Royalty raider from a different server, or take an effective stranger from your current server?

Now, you could say that this future isn't likely, that no one will prioritize Friends over Guild. (Though, wouldn't many people say you should prioritize Friends over Guildies?) But one never knows how people will react. I would have never predicted everyone rolling Need in LFR, and subgroups funneling loot to their own members. And obviously, neither did Blizzard. But that happened.

As well, prioritizing Friends over Guild does provide two distinct advantages. First, you get to play with friends, as opposed to people who are still strangers. Second, your pool of friends is often higher quality (and a known quality) than new guildies.  If you're friends with someone in Paragon, bringing her alt is more likely to lead to success than taking your latest guild recruit. And as we've seen time and again, WoW players always take the short-term success, even if that leads to issues in the long run.

So that's the case against cross-realm raiding in the current tier.  If it goes badly, it has the potential to seriously damage the method through which people get introduced to serious raiding, as well as one of the major methods by which strangers become friends in the game. It has the potential to see the raiding stratas become very tight cliques, which become harder and harder to break into.

Raiding needs new blood to keep going, and anything that has the potential to damage or block that intake should be looked at with great trepidation.

Preview: City of Steam

Last Monday, Andrew Woodruff from Mechanist Games gave me a little tour of their upcoming MMO, City of Steam.



City of Steam is a browser-based game. But it doesn't match traditional notions of a browser-based game. It's a fully 3D game, with pretty decent graphics, and is very responsive. Mechanist Games is focusing on making as easy to jump in and play as possible, with very fast loading times.  It's actually quite an impressive technical feat, in my opinion.

The setting is a more steampunk-ish, Victorian or Industrial Age fantasy. There are humans, elves and orcs, but the orcs and goblins form the working underclass. It's similar to Troika's Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura.

Mechanics-wise, it looks to be a themepark MMO using the trinity. The main classes are Gunner (ranged dps), Warder (melee dps/tank), Arcanist (mage), and Channeler (healer).  Gameplay is quest driven to start, but there are lots of dungeons. Also interesting is that the dungeons have challenge modes, which change the objective of the dungeon. One challenge mode might be to kill 200 enemies in 5 minutes, or break 100 barrels, or make it to the end before the timer.

I tried out a Gunner for a bit. The animations were nice, and the early part was fun. I didn't get very far, and only got a peek at the customization options, which look very extensive and looks like complicated fun. People who enjoy tweaking their characters should enjoy this aspect.

Somehow, even though it is a 3D over-the-shoulder perspective, I got a very "Diablo II" vibe. I'm not sure entirely why that is so, it may just be how the UI is laid out, and the fact that there's lots of barrels and crates to break. But that's probably a good sign.

In keeping with the extremely accessible theme, City of Steam is going to be a F2P game.

All in all, City of Steam looks like it will be an interesting game. It's definitely worth checking out, especially to see how far the brower can be pushed, and how quickly you can just jump in and start playing. It really drove home just how much more powerful modern computers are.

Leadership and Effort

In a comment to my review of The Guild Leader's Companion, Bearness writes:

The book sounds helpful and thorough...and very disenchanting. I feel intrigued and disgusted at the same time. At what point did running a gaming guild become so business-like? I understand that a guild, especially a big one, has a lot of social dynamics and requires some leadership and organization to run properly. But, I feel like it can be done without dehumanizing guild members into "human resources".  

I do appreciate certain efficiency in my gaming. If I play for x amount of hours, I'd like to have something to show for it. At the same time, it's just a game, which means the main purpose is to have fun. For me, even if I didn't kill the boss or get that "phat" loot, if I had a good time hanging out with fellow gamers, mission accomplished. But, I guess everyone has different expectations.

Making things look effortless requires a lot of effort.

No matter how you slice it, leading a guild is work. You have to recruit people, deal with drama, keep things running, and keep people happy.

If anything, one could argue that running a serious raiding guild is easier because the expectations of people are much more concrete. Everyone expects to log in and raid at time X, that loot will be distributed according to the system, and the goal is to kill bosses. You're all on the same page.

A casual guild, on the other hand, can't really count on any of its members to show up for anything. Some of them might, some of them might not. And that is even more soul-destroying to a guild leader who's trying to make the game fun for her guildies.

Maybe this is an outdated idea, but I've always felt that the point of organization is to make life easier, to make it run more smoothly. Which ends up allowing you to have "more fun". You can concentrate on having fun, and the rules and structure take care of the necessary elements.

It's kind of like money. Sure, you can go through life running on the edge, using a credit card or borrowing money to pay for stuff and then paying it back. Heck, I've done that before. But it's astonishing how much easier a small cushion of savings makes your life. Even just a couple months of living expenses stashed away makes a radical difference in how smoothly your life can flow. It may even just be a psychological benefit, not having to worry about things as much.

That's the same role that good rules and good structure plays in a guild. Ultimately, it makes life easier, and allows you to have more fun.

Agency and Failure

Milady wrote a really interesting post last week about Agency and Powerlessness. She contends that gaming narratives are immature in part because the hero always succeeds.

I agree and disagree with Milady. Gaming narratives are often immature because the hero is always successful, sometimes verging on omnipotence. However, Milady attributes this to the general maturity level of the gaming industry, suggesting that the gaming industry prefers adolescent fantasies. I disagree with this view. I think gaming narratives are the way they are because of the fundamental structure of games.

Failure in games is different than failure in novels and movies. In novels and movies the writer controls both the protagonist and the challenges she faces. Thus the writer can have the protagonist fail, and the audience considers it a valid failure. Similarly, in real life it is person versus the world, and if the person fails, that failure is valid.

But games are innately adversarial, either player versus the rules, or player versus the game writer/designer. For failure to be considered valid, the player must fail because of a choice she made. Failure that is simply imposed by the rules or game designer is not considered valid, not considered fair. Every situation the game puts the player in must have a solution.  If a player fails to find the solution, that is a fair loss. But if no solution exists, the game is flawed.

To put it another way, Kobayashi Maru situations are innately bad game design. The audience instinctively understands this, and when James Kirk reprograms the simulator, they applaud his ingenuity.

It is fundamentally a question of the balance of power in gaming. It is trivially easy for the game designer to make a no-win scenario. Thus it is bad form for one to actually do so. You see this in tabletop RPGs. The Game Master can easily wipe out the player characters whenever she feels like it. But a GM who actually does this is considered a bad GM, and accused of "railroading".  Failure must come from the players' actions, because the GM has all the power.

So from this we see the problem that games have. All situations the game puts the player in must contain a path to success to be considered fair, valid, and good game design. But, especially in an age of saving and reloading, the player can take all successful paths, and end up with a narrative where the hero is effectively omnipotent.

Sometimes games get around this by offering paths which are partial successes and partial failures. For example, in Mass Effect there is a choice on Virmire. The player can either save Ashley or Kaiden. She cannot save both. So that situation is one way of making the player fail in a "fair" manner.

Similarly the game can make the player fail by having the player make the choice to fail. Where failure is actually the right choice. But this is extraordinarily hard to do without making things feel artificial and forced. Of all the games I have ever played, only Planescape: Torment and Bastion have ever come close to this.

A Solution

My solution to this issue is a gamist solution. The problem is caused by the nature of game mechanics, and thus it must be fixed by game mechanics, not narrative ones. We desire a narrative game where the player does not always succeed. But the player's failure must come from the choices the player makes.

My solution is to have narrative success constrained by a resource the player controls.

You always hear political pundits declare that "the president must spend his political capital" as if political capital was an actual resource that is accumulated and then cashed in. So let's borrow that idea.

The narrative game should have a resource called Influence. The player earns Influence in some manner, and can spend Influence to adjust the outcomes of situations. But the player does not have enough Influence to affect the outcomes of all situation. She must chose which situations she must win, and which situations she can afford to lose.

This sets up a game where every given situation has a solution, but not all solutions can be taken. The player will fail sometimes, but she always fails because of her own choices. Either she spent the necessary Influence on other problems, or she chooses not to spend Influence on this problem, that she can live with the default outcome, and saves Influence for a future problem.

Games are not like other works of art. Failure must be handled in a form true to gaming. It cannot just imposed from above in order to create a mature narrative.

Review: The Guild Leader's Companion, 2nd Ed

Adam 'Ferrel' Trzonkowski of Epic Slant sent me a review copy of his latest book, The Guild Leader's Companion. This is the second edition of that book, but I had not read the first one so it is entirely new to me.

Preliminary Observations

I read The Guild Leader's Companion in electronic (epub) format, so I'm not really sure what the paper version looks or feels like. The electronic version was good enough, with a detailed table of contents.

The Guild Leader's Companion is well written. It is written in a more conversational style than most non-fiction guides, with Ferrel using first-person a fair bit, and drawing on his personal experiences as a guild leader. Interestingly enough, Ferrel's experience comes from Everquest 2 and Rift, not WoW. Everything is more or less the same, though as all three games have a very similar style.

For the content, I am in basic agreement with Ferrel about almost everything. I may spend more time on the things I disagree with in this review.

One small thing I would have liked is a summary section at the end of each chapter. It does seem a little superfluous, but I've always liked summaries in other non-fiction that I've read.

Chapter 1 - Human Resources

Ferrel goes over the major categories of individuals in a guild and discusses them: the Leader, the Officers, Team Leaders, Franchise Members, and regular Members. I particularly like the discussion on Franchise Members, as they are a very important part of the guild which is not often given much ink.

Ferrel introduces an acronym, STAFF, which stands for Serenity, Transparency, Availability, Flexibility, and Fairness. These are the virtues that Ferrel believes leaders should espouse. There is a good discussion about these virtues. In particular, Ferrel has convinced me of the necessity of Serenity and Availability as essential leader attributes.

This chapter also discusses Recruiting, Punitive Actions, Organizational Longevity, Burnout, Leading vs Management, and Social Interaction. In particular, the section on Recruiting is quite good, with much detailed and concrete advice.

Chapter 2 - Organization Structure

In this chapter Ferrel discusses Purpose, Founding Documents, Written Rules, Hierarchy, Culture and Community. The chapter is a solid mix of specific advice and more general discussion.

In particular, the notion of detailing 'outs' in the rules, specifying when and how rules will be changed or explicitly giving the leader authority in unclear situations, is well done. If, during play, one of the rules turns out to be a bad rule, the founding documents should specify how the situation is handled.

It's something that seems obvious, but that many guilds don't really consider, until they're faced with the situation, and then they panic and make hasty and unwise decisions.

The only thing I would quibble with in this chapter is that Ferrel is a bit too narrow in his vision of ranks as a hierarchy of authority, as in the military. He does not really acknowledge the notion of ranks as 'tags' specifying specific attributes, rather than the flow of authority.

Chapter 3 - Public Relations

This chapter talks about Branding, Forum Behavior, Website Behavior, Dealing with Developers, Meetings, and Alliances. I rather imagine that Dealing with Developers is not really something that most guilds have to worry about.  Again this chapter has a lot of solid advice.

Chapter 4 - Applying Leadership Skills to Content Types

This is an interesting chapter. Here Ferrel goes through different types of content such as Small Group, Raids, Competitive Raiding, PvP, Crafting, and Roleplaying. He offers specific advice for each type of content.

The advice is generally well thought out. However, this chapter does discuss everything from the point of view of extended gameplay. I think some thoughts on how a guild interacts with automatic group creation, such as Dungeon Finder and Raid Finder, would be worthwhile.

Chapter 5 - Data Accounting and Resource Management

This chapter is really about Loot Distribution, with a small discussion on meters thrown in. I'm not really a big fan of Ferrel trying make things more universal by talking about Resources instead of Loot. It did make this chapter a little harder to read than it should have been.

However, Ferrel is strongly in the "Loot as Investment" side of things, and this discussion proceeds almost entirely from that. This approach is defensible. Indeed, most high-end guilds follow the same path. But it does leave one blind to problems that a "Loot as Reward" outlook would anticipate.

I haven't read a treatise on Loot Distribution that I have been totally satisfied with. Ferrel's discussion comes close, and is a quite solid discussion on several specific loot systems. However, it is missing several major ones (Shroud, Suicide Kings, Gold DKP, Wishlist). I also think it would benefit from a lower level discussion, specifically about the trade-offs involved.

Heh, maybe one of these days I'll write my own guide to loot distribution.

Finally, a small quibble, but Compound Interest is the wrong name for a problem Ferrel describes, where members use points that are built up from previous content to win items from current content. This section was really confusing until I realized what he was talking about.

Chapter 6 - The GLC2e in Practice

Here Ferrel talks about the ideas that he has put into practice with his two guilds from EQ2 and Rift. He details problems that his previous guilds ran into, and solutions that they came up with.

Final Observations

There is one major element of guild leadership that Ferrel is missing: Time Management. Time Management is a crucial aspect of running a guild, and really should be pulled out and examined on it's own. But that's really the only section which is missing.

The Guild Leader's Companion is an excellent guide to running guilds in MMOs. Most guild leaders will find that this book contains useful and specific advice that can be applied to any guild.

Currency Conundrum

So in Patch 5.1, Blizzard converted [Lesser Charm of Good Fortune] into currency. Then they gave us [Domination Point Commission] as an item drop.

One step forward, one step back. Sometimes Blizzard's logic is hard to fathom.

Indians and Gaming

A lot of feminist gamers decry the fact that gaming companies are almost totally male. Personally, I've never felt this was an entirely fair accusation. To me, gaming companies are mostly male because computer science and engineering programs are mostly male. When the pool of talent you hire from looks like X, it's hard not to end up looking like X, especially when you pay below-market wages.

Of course, there is a bit of chicken-and-egg going on here. A lot of men go into Computer Science because they are gamers, and the idea of maybe joining a gaming company after graduation lingers in the back of their minds. (Then they find out about the hours and pay, and decide to go into business programming.)

But something about the above formulation troubled me. Then I realized that it is wrong. Game company demographics do not quite match CS demographics. Oh, they more or less match according to gender, but they don't match according to race.

Specifically, the Indian population is missing from gaming.

If you drop into a CS program, you will notice that there are three significant racial groups: White, Asian, and  Indian. (I am ruthlessly compressing several cultures into each category. Painting with broad strokes.) But the gaming industry is almost totally White and Asian.

Indeed, I would argue that geek and gaming culture is mainly White and Asian. It is rather interesting that Indians are missing, given that all three cultures share enough similarities to make Computer Science a common goal.

Now, I'm not ascribing the difference to racism or anything like that. Rather, I would say that the geek/gaming culture carries many White and Asian people into CS, and the gaming companies recruit from that stream. Meanwhile, the large presence of Indians in CS is a effect of Indian culture's esteem for engineering, and seeing engineering-like careers as desirable.

I've been musing about this lately because (as you may have guessed from my name) I am Indian by ancestry. But when I was young, my parents moved to a town that was almost entirely White. (The actual story is a little more complicated than this, but it will suffice.) So in many ways I am White by culture, and part of that is that I fell into the geek/gaming subculture. It's pretty much what White people of my temperament and talents do: read sf and fantasy, rhapsodize about Star Trek, and play video games. It was what all my (White) friends did, and since I was like them, I did the same.

Then I went to university and encountered that divide I discuss above. I went to a very techy university with tons of fellow geeks. But even though there was a large Indian presence at university, it was almost non-existent in geek circles, even though those circles pulled people from the same classes.

It was, and still is, slightly disconcerting. Growing up, I had made the assumption that I was the only Indian geek I knew because there was a bare handful of Indians in the town's population. Then I went to university, met a large Indian population, and realized I was still pretty much the only Indian geek I knew.

I'm sure there are others out there, but it has always seemed odd to me that there isn't a larger Indian presence in gaming and geekdom, given the fact that there are so many Indians in CS and engineering.

Opposite Gender Avatar Study

I got an email from  Amalia Badawi about a psychology study at Charles Darwin University in Australia about people who may or may not use characters/avatars of the opposite sex. I thought I would pass it along for your delectation:

We are conducting an Internet based psychological study at Charles Darwin University [in Australia] and are seeking male and female participants who are over 18 years of age, are able to read and write in English fluently and who use avatars. The study will examine participants' identification with their avatars as well as explore why people may use, or not use an avatar of the opposite sex. The study will examine psychosocial functioning in the real world, personality factors as well as sex role identification of the participants' and their avatars. Please go to http://cduhes.asia.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_brQ0uYKeagINqo4 for more details. You are not required to provide any identifying information in order to participate. All information given will be anonymous and protected. Ethics approval has been obtained for the conduct of this study. Thank you.”

Randomness in Raiding

Tobold is calling for more randomness in raiding. I disagree with this idea. Here are my reasons:

1. Randomness has been disliked in the past.

Historically, fights featuring a high degree of randomness have been disliked by the playerbase. Prince Malchezzar and Faction Champions are the prime examples here. Both of them were fights which led to a high degree of grumbling.

I don't really see the point in adding more randomness, when the evidence shows that randomness is unpopular.

2. Randomness encourages "fishing".

Often, a fight with random elements contains one set of elements which is significantly easier or significantly harder than the others. This encourages guilds to reset the encounter until the "easy" combination shows up, or wipe it early if a hard combination appears.

My guild did this with Heroic Twin Valkyries back in Trial of the Grand Crusader. Twin Valks used one of four random abilities every minute or so. My guild used a very specific strategy that relied on rotating cooldowns to mitigate enough damage to survive.  However, there was one combination of elements which that strategy could not handle because the cooldowns didn't line up correctly. For all other combinations, the strategy was easier to heal, but that one was a guaranteed wipe. So we fished. We just trusted in the odds, and took the wipe if it came up.

Honestly, though, it was kind of silly. We should have mastered a strategy that would allow us to always beat the fight, even if it took more time.

3. Execution is not trivial.

There is an unfortunate tendency in the geek subculture to regard thinking as hard, and execution as the easy part, the part to be left as a trivial exercise for the reader. I deeply disagree with this. Many times, execution is the hard part, and mastering the execution is the challenge.

It's like writing a novel. Sure, you can tell someone how to write a novel, come up with characters and a plot. But that's easy. The hard part is actually sitting down and writing out the novel, polishing page by page.

Mastering execution simply scratches a different itch for us. It's like learning to play a new song. Sure, one could say that it should be easy, because you've already got the music in front of you. But learning to play the song is still a challenge, still worth doing.

Joel Spolsky talks about trying to hire people who are smart and who get things done. In my view, smart people are a dime a dozen in our subculture. People who get things done, on the other hand, are exceedingly rare.

That's what raiding is aimed at. It's all about execution and getting things done. And it's still difficult, and still challenging. Just because you can't show off how smart you are, doesn't mean it is automatically an inferior activity.

Updates

The last few weeks have been pretty crazy for me in real life. I've barely had time to play games, let alone write about them.

Hopefully life has stabilized and I will be able to write more soon.

The Old Republic

TOR launched it's F2P shop and a new companion quest. I haven't bought anything from the store. The thing is that I just don't care about cosmetic gear. My entire bank is filled with moddable rifles and gear, but I'm just wearing the latest gear I have.

I haven't finished the new companion quest yet. I've done the first part, which includes an entire "puzzle" segment aboard a ghost ship, with almost no combat. Instead it's like an adventure game. It was pretty fun, and very atmospheric.

World of Warcraft

I haven't played WoW very much either. No time, really. As well, I have some sort of crash issue that comes up randomly on fights. It happens very often in LFR, once or twice on a boss fight in a dungeon run, and very rarely at other times. It's actually really annoying, because it is so inconsistent. All my drivers are updated and everything.

Maybe it's a sign that it's time to upgrade my computer.

Brawlers Guild Invitations

The latest mini-controversy in WoW is invitations to the Brawlers Guild. Unlike most content which unlocks immediately, invitations to the Brawler's Guild are being passed out virally, from other players. The initial set of invitations are being auctioned off in the Black Market Auction House. Which, of course, riles everyone else.

As I am a great fan of experimentation, I'm generally in favor of Blizzard trying this out. It's content that is completely new, that no one is invested in yet. So it's a perfect ground for trying something new.

However, let's analyze things further. First, let us separate idea from implementation.

Idea

The central idea of the Brawler's Guild invitation is to have a content gate that depends on other players. This is very different from most content gates in WoW. Most content gates are independent of other players. Whether or not your character is attuned to an instance really doesn't depend on anyone else. It solely depends on your own efforts and those of your guild.

A content gate that depends on other players has been tried once before: the opening of the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj. That too was an interesting experiment, and is remembered by Vanilla players. It was memorable, but maybe not entirely successful.

However, unlike AQ, this gate is not all or nothing. Rather, it is set up to spread virally throughout the population, a la Gmail. Perhaps this will prevent large population spikes or activity that hurts the servers. Maybe this will have positive benefits, or maybe artificially preventing some people from the content will be negative.

Either way, I think the idea behind the invitations is interesting, and worth experimenting with.

Implementation

Now, the specific implementation of the Brawlers Guild Invitations is to sell them on the Black Market Auction House. Many people instinctively rebel at giving the "rich" people initial access to content. However, there are some advantages to this method.

First, everyone who buys an Invitation wants an invitation. They are deliberately purchasing the item, not picking it up by accident. That means that there are no "wasted" invitations, and the number of invitations is strictly known.

Second, this method allows a consortium of people to band together and purchase a set of Invitations.

Third, this method is not random. It is guaranteed, while still limiting the number of available Invitations.

Fourth, this method does not disrupt the rest of the economy or the playstyles of people not interested in the Brawlers Guild. Imagine if daily quest mobs had a chance to drop the invitations. People farming the mobs for invitations would conflict with people who just want to do their dailies. As well, there would be a large influx of farmed materials like cloth, which would temporarily depress prices in the regular markets.

Now, there are other ways Invitations could have been handed out. You could hand out invitations to people who could kill a heroic raid boss. Or maybe the PvP's who win the most arena matches each week. But this too is just as elitist as giving it to the rich people. And these people already get first crack at new content.

It could be purely random, but that would just encourage people to farm futilely, or have some invitations be wasted.

You could put the item on powerful rare spawns. But then there would be intense camping of those rares. And how would you deal with raid groups that killed the spawn? Look at the competition for things like Loque when it first came out, and imagine it a thousands times worse because killing the spawn actually unlocks new content for all classes.

To my mind, selling the Invitations on the BMAH might not be the best possible idea, but it might be the one with the least side-effects, and thus, the least-worst idea. All the other ideas I can think of are either too baroque, or will negatively impact people who are not interested in the Brawler's Guild.

Plus, you know, this method hasn't been tried before. Killing bosses and the like has been done before. I think it's worth experimenting on something relatively low key like the Brawlers Guild.

Eternal Flame Blanketing

A quick post for Holy Paladins running Heroics in Mists. I'm using a new technique, Eternal Flame blanketing, and it is working out really nicely, even with minimal non-raid gear.

The basic idea is to cast Eternal Flame for one Holy Power on the non-tank players in the group. So Holy-Shock on cooldown, put a small EF on someone. And keep doing this to make sure that all five players have an Eternal Flame on them. With Beacon of Light, half the heal transfers to the tank, so the tank is getting a constant stream of small heals.

As well, Eternal Flame keeps renewing and building your Mastery shield on the players. It constantly ticks, so the shield timer renews and does not expire, and the shield can build up to quite a significant value. This greatly blunts the occasional damage that non-tanks take in heroics.

As well, it's extremely mana-efficient. HS-EF costs pretty much nothing. So you can do a great deal of healing for very little mana. I've done entire Heroics where I have not dropped below 80% mana, and that's without any raid gear other than quest boots from Sha of Anger.

As well, EF blanketing works very nicely with Blessing of Sacrifice as the shield and HoT on you will take care of a lot of the sacrifice damage. With Divine Plea, you'll occasionally get free 3-pt Eternal Flames that you can roll on people, which makes life even more stable.

Of course, when damage starts being serious, you will have to step up with larger spells. But I've found that EF blanketing makes everything feel more stable, and not as immediate. Frankly, it makes healing heroics significantly easier.

Now, is this a good idea for raids? I rather doubt it. You really cannot roll EF on more than five or so people, and the HoT is only 1-point, so it is somewhat weak in comparison to real HoTs. In a raid, if you use Eternal Flame, I think it would be better to build to 3-point Eternal Flames and keep them running on the tanks. Let the druids blanket the raid in HoTs. That's their strength.

But for Heroics, where you're the only healer, EF blanketing can make life a lot easier, dampening the incoming damage, and allowing you to leverage your strong Mastery on the non-tanks who only take damage sporadically.

Fatty Goatsteak and Golden Lotus Dailies

Fatty Goatsteak

If there's one Tillers daily that generates a lot of ire, it's Fatty Goatsteak. Personally, I pull one goat at a time, and see something like a 50% drop rate. AoE'ing an entire group seems like overkill as well being annoying to everyone around you.

What I would like Blizzard to do is give the goats a buff that, when in close proximity, significantly increases the knockback on their attack. So if you pull an entire group, you get flung back into Karasang Wilds. I think that would "encourage" people to share the goats, as well as provide a great source of amusement for the rest of us.

Golden Lotus Dailies

For the most part I like the various dailies. But I think that Blizzard repeated the error of the Molten Front when it comes to the Golden Lotus dailies. Like the Molten Front, you have to go through the Golden Lotus quests in the same order everyday. Every single day you start off at the stairs, and have to kill 12 mogu.

It would have been far better if you could access all two or three mini-hubs at the same time. Maybe the base hub has three quests, one for each mini-hub. That way you could do whichever hub you wanted to, or are not bored of yet.

The mistake is compounded because Golden Lotus is the key reputation in the "serious" reputation chain, as it unlocks two other reputations. That means that you absolutely have to do that stairs hub again and again.

The most disappointing thing though, is that this is a repeated mistake. That Blizzard did not learn the lessons from the Molten Front that they should have learned.

SWTOR F2P Model Thoughts

The Old Republic is releasing more details on its Free-2-Play option. It looks like they are setting up a three-tier system:

1. Subscribers - people who predictably pay money
2. Preferred Status - people who have paid money in the past, and therefore might do so again in the future
3. Free To Play - people who have never paid money and/or gold seller/scammer/suspicious accounts

The last tier is heavily restricted, but a lot of the most annoying restrictions are lifted as soon as a bit of money is spent.

Now, you all know my position on F2P. I think the amount of money Bioware will get from the second tier will be negligible. Most gamers are just talk and don't put their money where their mouths are. The real money will come from people they convert to subscribers, and the extra money that dedicated subscribers will spend.

That being said, this doesn't seem that bad. Once you get to Preferred Status, the restrictions are not crippling, and are minor annoyances. There's a lot of cosmetic gear that looks kind of interesting. 

Most hilariously, there's a chestpiece for male characters which is transparent. I guess that matches the female bikini armor. Equality for the win?

One other thought: I don't think a lot of people complaining about restrictions on the forums really understand how much a gold seller or hacker could do with free accounts. Just imagine what someone could do with a thousand accounts all slaved together. Even simple things like the /who command could bring a server to its knees if invoked simultaneously by everyone.

Or the credit boxes from Slicing. That profession is credit-positive, so you could just set up all the accounts to continuously run slicing missions and generate tons of credits, and feed it to a main character. Massive inflation, anyone? So Bioware has locked away the credit box missions behind a paywall, and F2P players can only use the Slicing missions which generate augment parts. Lots of people are upset about that restriction, but to my mind, it's a very necessary one.

Ah well, this will be an interesting experiment. Personally, I really enjoy The Old Republic, and recommend it to all my readers. I think it is a very good themepark MMO, especially if you like story and group PvE.  Imperial Agent is the best story line, possibly the best RPG storyline I've played in the last couple years. Most of the others are quite good too, with many people voting for the Jedi Knight and Sith Warrior story lines.

Farming

It's odd, but for me, the killer feature of Mists is your farm at Halfhill.

I've played games which had player housing, and similar cosmetic structures, and I've never really done anything with them. I've bought the land or house, maybe added one decoration, and then never bothered with it again.

So why is Farmer Yoon's farm so different?

I think it's because the farm is useful.

I like logging in and harvesting vegetables to level cooking. Or planting crops for various quests. Or planting crops to get raw materials for professions or even Motes of Harmony.

It's like you don't need to farm mats anymore, you can just "farm" them. Very zen.

I like upgrading the farm, and making it more useful. I like that there's a "rhythm" to the farm. Log in, harvest today's crops, plant tomorrow's crops. Simple, and yet feels just right.

I even like getting the cosmetic features like the dog. It's like player housing, but making it actually useful instead of just cosmetic was the element that put it over the top.

Excellent work on the farm and the Tillers, Blizzard.

I hope the next expansion sees an expanded farm system, maybe near Stormwind, that is more integrated into the game as an evergreen feature, rather than just an expansion-only feature.

Categorizing Payment Models

The Old Republic released its vision of Free2Play, and naturally all the forums are in an uproar over it. The big issue is that there is no common definition of F2P, so everyone believes that "true" F2P is something different.

I thought it would be interesting to categorize F2P models. However, I realized that the inverse, categorizing payment models, is actually more illuminating.

First, let's stipulate that all MMOs must be paid for in some fashion. At the end of the day, someone has to hand money over to the devs so that they can eat. One would assume this is obvious, but judging by a lot of the forum rhetoric, it isn't.

Here are the payment models that I can think of:

1. Box - a large initial payment when the game is first obtained. Not really optional.
2. Access - a fee must be paid for access to the game for a given time. Not really optional. 
3. Content - a fee is paid for access to specific pieces of content. Not really optional.
4. Cosmetic - can purchase items which have no effect on gameplay. Optional.
5. Convenience - can purchase items which allow players to skip hurdles. Optional.
6. Power - can purchase items which directly increase a player's power, and cannot be obtained elsewhere. If the item or equivalent can be gained in-game, it's more accurately a convenience item. Kind of optional, playing with or against other players might make it effectively required.
7. Advertising - the game sells advertising space to other companies
8. Sponsor - the game is sponsored by an organization for a specific purpose. Example is America's Army.

You can use these categories to describe the payment models used by different games:

• WoW - Box, Access, Cosmetic (minor)
• LotRO - Access or Content (have to pick one), Cosmetic, Convenience
• TSW - Box, Access, Cosmetic
• GW2 - Box, Cosmetic, Convenience
• League of Legends - Essentially content with specific champions, Cosmetic, Convenience

And so on.  TOR is proposing Access or [Content (temporary), Convenience, and Power] (have to pick one of the two groupings), and Cosmetic. I think a lot of people are unhappy with the temporary part of Content, and some of the Power items (epic gear licence, ability bars) if you don't subscribe.

Most players who are proponents of F2P seem to feel that the maximum allowable categories are Cosmetic and Convenience. That anything more is excessive. I would say that most games don't think that is enough to support them, and they require at least one more category.

Edit: Spinks reminds me that the method of sale is important as well. Two types here: direct and lottery. Direct is the default way. You pick item X and you buy it. The other way is lottery, where you buy a random item that contains something from the categories above. The method influences the behavior of the player, and adds randomness and rarity to the equation.

There's possibly a third method where you purchase a category above with the intent of selling it to another player. Eve PLEX and so on. One person buys Access, and sells that Access to a second player. Let's call this method "agent".

A Disconnect on Valor Gear

After thinking about the dailies issue for a bit, I wonder if there is a disconnect between Blizzard's view of Valor gear in this expansion and the player's view of that same gear.

Perhaps Blizzard is viewing Valor gear as entirely optional in this expansion. That the best route for PvE players to get gear is to skip factions entirely and just run dungeons and raids. Meanwhile the players feel that capping out faction rep is the best path to gear.

I think the disconnect between the two views hinges on how both parties view randomness. I've mentioned before that I don't think raiders handle randomness particularly well, and I think this is yet another example of that.

If we just look at what gear is available and the timeline to acquire it, I suspect that gear that drops from instances will account for the vast majority of slots, and players will only have one or two pieces of valor gear, even if they cap out reputations as fast as they can.

But instance drops are random, and raiders tend to discount randomness. Or they expect the worst possible outcome of that randomness. But Valor gear is entirely under their control. They guarantee themselves a piece of valor gear, even if it is more probable that they will get enough gear just through random drops.

That difference between randomness and guaranteed result pushes the raider to focus her efforts on the guaranteed result, even if that path is far more work per item than purely running instances.