Dungeons versus Scenarios, Part II

On the last post, Kring comments:

The question is, now that they scarified [Ed: sacrificed?] dungeons, how long will they continue to make new raids during an expansion? 

Scenarios are nothing else then PvE-battlegrounds. Will they continue to produce new raids or will they take the simple route there too and replace raids with bigger scenarios, with PvE-battlegrounds.

I think Blizzard will continue making raids. Specifically, Looking for Raid overlaps with dungeons. It's transient, formal Trinity group content. The ratio of tanks to dps is more likely to match what is played. Plus, raids are the expected method of increasing gear level. There's a pattern there, and the playerbase expects raids to be obsoleted as time goes.

Admittedly, there is a difference as dungeons are small group versus the large raid group. But I think that Blizzard is making an effort to include more small group options out in the regular world. It's probably a lot easier from an art creation perspective to throw a few elite mobs out there.

Plus, and I think this is very important, they get a 2-for-1 with the raid artwork. The same amount of artwork produces both transient group content and extended group content. So I think raiding still fits in the game where 5-man dungeons start getting squeezed out in later patches.

I may not have mentioned this before, but I think that art asset creation is the "blocker" in modern game development. The amount of new artwork an idea requires often determines whether or not it is actually implemented.

RJ comments:

While I don't disagree with your assertion, and it makes logical sense, I throw in another suggestion:

Compared to the development work that goes into your typical dungeon (including the various difficulty levels), I imagine that Blizz could make a bunch of Scenarios for the same time, effort, and money it takes to make a single "second tier" dungeon. 

Loot aside, what would you prefer? 2~3 new dungeons, or 5~10 new Scenarios?

Ah, but as above, I don't think they're funneling that effort into scenarios. Sure, they're making a couple new scenarios each patch. But I think the lion's share of art and content dev time is going into the new raids.

Look at this patch. We got a 13-boss tier following a 16-boss tier. Has Blizzard ever done two consecutive raid tiers with that many bosses?  Especially in the given time frame?

I certainly would rather have another 15 or so raid bosses in 5.4 rather than a 6 boss raid and a couple 5-mans.

Dungeons versus Scenarios

Blizzard devs mentioned last week that--unlike previous expansions--there would be no new 5-man dungeons in Mists. However, there will be a few new scenarios. It is interesting to compare scenarios with dungeons. Why can Blizzard make new scenarios but not dungeons?

I think the key is rewards. One interesting thing about new scenarios is that the rewards are not better than old scenarios. Blizzard makes a new scenario, and throws in the group finder rotation. It doesn't obsolete the previous scenarios.

Indeed, scenarios have no intrinsic rewards, or rewards unique to a particular scenario. The only reward is what you get from the launcher, valor and the random loot bad. If Blizzard wants to improve rewards for scenarios, they improve all scenarios.

Meanwhile, a new tier of dungeons would be expected to have new and better loot. But this instantly obsoletes the older dungeons. We get into situations where we run the same 2 Zul dungeons over and over, or the same 3 Icecrown dungeons.

I wonder if the player base would accept a new dungeon with the same item level rewards as the previous dungeons. After all, we now have Looking for Raid to take care of gear progression for transient players. So a new dungeon would simply be new content, new achievements, and a new challenge mode.

But somehow I don't think the player base would be happy with this. The expectation is that new dungeons bring better gear. But simply obsoleting that much old content is not a good choice either. So maybe Blizzard's choice to not make new dungeons, but focus on scenarios and raids, is the "least-worst" solution.

The End of Google Reader

Like everyone else, I am saddened by the news that Google Reader will be shuttered. Ah well, you get what you pay for, I guess.

The real lesson here is that Google was unable to make any money from advertising on the RSS feeds. In fact, one might argue that they lost money because people were not going onto the sites to view the regular ads.

I wonder if this will be the start of a greater shakeout in the internet, as all these site/places that can't cover their costs start closing. It would be kind of sad, but at the same time, it would be nice to get rid of the "everything on the internet should be free" expectations that so many people seem to have.

Hmm, I wonder if I should be concerned about Blogger getting shut down.

Oh well, time to look for a decent alternative RSS reader.

TOR's New F2P Reputation

Ah, The Old Republic. Can't have a patch without a Free-To-Play controversy, now can we. Anyways, the latest controversy concerns this patch note:

Players may now gain reputation with the Contraband Resale Corporation, a group loosely affiliated with the Hutt Cartel! Reputation Trophies for this organization are now available in new Contraband Packs, and a new vendor has been added to allow players to capitalize on this reputation.

There is no actual content attached to this reputation. Instead, items which give you CRC rep appear in the cartel boxes, you increase your rep, and you can buy cosmetic items from this reputation vendor. You can buy and sell these rep items on the Auction House, I believe.

I don't really see the big concern about this idea. To me, it's roughly the equivalent of those old promotions where you cut out a bunch of UPCs from cereal boxes and mail them to the company for a prize.

These cartel packs need "common" items. Something to add filler along with the rares which everyone prizes.  Things like XP potions, or minor unlocks. These CRC rep items make good fillers.

The one thing that I do think they might have changed is to use a different mechanism other than reputation to achieve roughly the same effect. All the other reputations in the game are content, and having one reputation be different is a bit jarring. The packs could have contained a new type of currency, and the vendor sells items for that currency.

Though, this is one of the things I dislike about F2P. So much effort spent on innovating monetization, much less time being innovative on the game.

There's an old piece of advice about looking for work. You want to work for a division which generates profit directly, not for a division which is a cost center, no matter how important that cost center is. The cost centers are the divisions that first get cut and squeezed. That's why a lot of people recommend avoiding IT work in non-IT firms. In F2P games, more and more it's looking like the monetization team is the profit-generating division, and the actual game is nothing more than a cost center, and company policy follows accordingly.

Reconciling PvP and PvE

Unrelated to this post, but Power Word: Dinosaur is the greatest spell introduced into WoW.

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At least for me, Blizzard's expansion of Valor has worked out pretty well. Last week I capped out on Valor by doing:

• 2 Isle of the Thunder King rares
• 4 Raid Finder wings
• 2 Scenarios
• 1 5-man dungeon
• 5 days worth of Isle of the Thunder King dailies
• 5 days worth of the farm rep quests

Notice that I never did the maximum in any activity, but rather did some of pretty much everything. Meanwhile, in The Old Republic, I pretty much only log in to raid recently.

I think that spreading Valor around has worked out pretty well. However, I was wondering about PvP.

You know, back in Vanilla and TBC, I used to PvP casually. I got my Knight-Captain rank and [The Unstoppable Force], like everyone else. But then I just stopped. And to be honest, I'm not really sure why. I think it's mainly looking at the path in front of me, and realizing it's easier to just stay on the PvE path rather than attempt to do both.

I know there's a lot of people who are very vocal about needing PvP to be completely divorced from PvE. Not sharing gear, not sharing reward systems. And that is the path that WoW and pretty much every major themepark game has taken.

But I wonder if this was the best path? Would it have been better if the two systems used the same type of gear, offered the same rewards? It would make it a lot easier for people to drop in and out. To do a battleground or two here and there. Maybe it would have led to more intermixing between the PvP and PvE communities.

The big issue back in the day was that it was too easy to earn gear in PvP compared to PvE, especially with bosses like Kael'thas and Lady Vashj. But the modern PvE has Raid Finder, and normal modes, and it is expected that everyone moves into the latest tier pretty soon after it is released. The pace of gear more closes matches that of PvP now.

Of course, the edge PvP/PvE people will complain, saying that maybe a certain piece from the other side is BiS for their purposes. But you know what, screw the edge players. If you want to be hardcore, you do what it takes to be hardcore. I think the large middle section of WoW would benefit from the reconciliation of PvE and PvP, as it would be far easier to dip in and out of each segment.

SimCity

The issues with the latest SimCity release are pretty interesting. I personally have not purchased SimCity. City building games don't really interest me. As well, after the experience with ME3, it will take an absurdly amazing game to make me install EA's Origin again.

However, one common complaint seems to be unfair to me. Many people are complaining about how EA/Maxis is making people go online for a single player game. But after reading a couple of reviews, and following a forum thread for a bit, I think EA/Maxis has made something more interesting than a mere single-player game.

It seems to me that you don't really build cities in this new game, but that you build neighborhoods or boroughs instead. The maximum city size is fairly small, but each city trades with its neighbors. One city may have lots of jobs, and the city next door has lots of people, so the people go to the city next door for work.

Or you trade utilities or resources. It seems to me more a game where you have to specialize and harmonize with your neighbors.

To put it in terms of my city, instead of one single person building Vancouver, instead one person builds the West End, one builds Downtown, one builds North Vanouver, one builds Kitsilano, etc. Each neighborhood exists on its own, but each has a different character, and relies on the others.

In a lot of ways, this is a far more interesting and ambitious design than the single-player game where one person builds an entire city.

Though, I will have to admit that I was greatly amused by the guy complaining that the main export of one of his neighbor was criminals. Ah, online gamers, so true to form.

This design is very intriguing. It's almost enough to make one take another chance on Origin. But not quite enough.

Privileges, Part 2

On the previous post, Stubborn comments:

I completely agree, but since it would take an incredibly larger amount of effort on the dev's part to generate a) what should be a privilege, b) what the requirements for gaining access to the privilege are c) what should cause the privilege to be revoked, and d) actually monitor those systems, there's no way they'll actually do it. 

Throwing gigantic rules blankets over the whole population is so, so much easier.

I don't agree. Sure, having one simple rule for the entire population might be easier. But that rule doesn't stay simple for long. It gets hedged about with exceptions and special cases. And that makes the whole system more brittle and prone to unexpected error.

From a programmatic standpoint, privileges or permissions are not that hard to implement. It is simply a different way of looking at the problem.

In fact, it is a very common technique in operating systems or business software. Can you read, change or delete a file on your computer? Rather than trying to apply a single rules heuristic, it's just handled by the permissions on that file. The OS doesn't really care how you got those permissions, but only that you either have permission or you don't.

Business software and operating systems have a mental conception of users that fit into different groups, which is why privileges feel natural to them. It is only gaming software that tries to pretend that all its users are the same.

As well, permissions don't have to be calculated in real time. The game generates logs, and those logs can be parsed at a later date by bots looking for patterns. Indeed, if you come up with a new and better pattern recognition bot, you can rerun it on old records.  A simple example might be a bot that looks for people who swear in public channels. All chat logs are saved, so a bot can traverse those records at its leisure, spit out results, and those results can set chat permissions which apply in the future.

RJ comments:

But you yourself just laid out a number of what you consider the perfect cases for it being a privilege that cannot be strictly programmed in; else you get systems like we already have! 

Example: If you designed a new game that had a vote-kick system, what would your programmatic patterns of abuse be? The guy kicks a lot of people? How does the program know that it's not legit? 

Example: If a person is needing a lot on gear that's actually wearable by them and offered to him by the game, how do you know he's not just making a legitimate use of the game system?

Here's the thing. I believe that abusers of rules exhibit very different patterns of behavior than regular users. Take vote-kick for example. I almost never vote-kick anyone, and I pretty much only run LFR/LFD at this point. I just don't see that anyone can possibly justify a high vote-kick rate in dungeons. I think the problem more likely lies with the vote-kicker.

Same with Need/Greed. Alright, maybe in your first instance run, you have a higher than average amount of need rolls. But if you keep that up, that's a clear sign that you are behaving badly.

These patterns should be identifiable. Obviously, you do need some history, to let the Law of Large Numbers start to kick in.  But if you were presented with a player's history, I think it would not be hard for you to determine if a player is exploiting the rules or not.  And if you can see the pattern, then a bot can be built or trained to see the same pattern.

Take a player in a battleground. If you look at the players's history, and see one battleground with zero damage or healing, well, maybe he was defending a node which never got attacked. But you start seeing more and more of them, the odds that this player afks or is a bot increases dramatically.

Privileges or Rules?

Consider the difference between privileges and rules. Ideally, rules are for everyone. Everyone has to obey the same rules. Privileges on the other hand, might be specific to individuals. A privilege usually must be earned in some fashion, and can be revoked if the person proves unworthy.

When it comes to player interactions, privileges might be a better model that one-size-fits-all rules.

Over the course of an MMO's lifespan, we see the same pattern. There are simple rules which govern player interaction. They work well for 95% of the time. Then someone figures out how to exploit those rules. The developers have to modify those rules, making them more complex, more onerous and more inconvenient for the rest of the players.

Instead of rules, perhaps structuring interactions as privileges is a better way to frame the situation. Then you can use a player's past behaviour to control whether a privilege is granted or revoked.

For example, take vote-kicking. The basic vote-kick system worked well for all the people who used it judiciously. Then people started abusing it, and the devs had to include more and more safeguards. You can't vote-kick in combat, or for a bit after combat. All of this makes it harder to vote-kick someone when you need to actually kick.

Maybe the better model is to think of vote-kicking as a privilege, not a rule. If you abuse vote-kicking, or vote-kick too much, your ability to vote-kick is simply taken away. Other people's vote-kick privileges can remain intact and untouched.

Or take the latest rule change, the removal of /follow in battlegrounds. It's a rule change made to target bots. But it does remove an option for players who are not abusing it.

As well, take the old Need/Greed loot system in Raid Finder. Perhaps it would have worked out better if rolling Need was a privilege instead of rule. If you rolled Need too much, you could lose the ability to roll Need, and/or lose the ability to trade gear.

Another example could be talking in general chat. Right now there are restrictions on how fast you can reply, which came in because of spammers. Maybe freely talking on general chat channels is a privilege that should be earned.

A final example might be ganking. The ability to kill players lower level than you should be a privilege and can be revoked if you kill too many, or exhibit a pattern of corpse camping. Revoking a ganker's ability to kill lowbies shouldn't affect people who rarely gank.

Of course, the hard part here is determining patterns of behavior that should lead to a privilege being revoked. However, I think that if you look at play patterns, people who show restraint will have very low incidences of negative behavior, allowing even a moderately low bar to avoid false positives.

To sum up, I think that one-size-fits-all rules that govern player interaction have proven to be overly restrictive and vulnerable to exploitation. I think player interaction in MMOs would be better modeled as a series of privileges that need to be earned and can be revoked for those who abuse them.

First Impressions of the Isle of Thunder

Wow, it's crowded. And mobs respawn very fast.

It appears to be a quest hub like the Golden Lotus, except that all three sites are open immediately, so you can do them in any order.  The quests all seem to be pretty traditional daily fare so fare.

The unlocking is an interesting idea. However, I do wish that it was more transparent and granular. For the AQ gates, there was a total number of items required, and each time you turned in something, you could see the count decrease. The unlocking for Isle of Thunder just shows a percentage.  The link between you doing something and the bar increasing is tenuous.

The rare chase is interesting. Thank god you can share them. I killed one rare mogu with a lot of other people. But people were calling out spawns and coordinating in general chat.

I also claimed the Sunsong Ranch. I like the new work order system. If you don't have anything specific you want to plant, it gives you something to do.

All in all, a pretty good start to the patch. The real attraction is the raid though, so we will have to see how it goes later.

5.2 Tomorrow!

Or rather, by the time you read this, today!

I'm looking forward to this patch. I really liked the storyline of 5.1, and it will be interesting to see what happens in 5.2.

Since I am raiding primarily in LFR, I won't get to see the new raid until next week. Blizzard is touting it as the "new Ulduar", and that is a very high bar. It will be interesting to see what happens.

There aren't really a whole lot of changes for Holy paladins this patch. Mostly changes aimed at PvP, increasing cast time of various crowd control abilities. Hand of Purity does get a straight buff, and Eternal Flame gets a buff when you cast it on yourself.

What are you looking forward to in this patch?

The Decline of Rogues

As Cynwise notes, the rogue population at endgame has been steadily decreasing pretty much since Vanilla. This is interesting because rogues haven't really changed as a class since Vanilla. There have been small changes here and there, but by and large the rogue class is still the same as it was at creation. Instead, the game has changed around it.

I've always thought the rogue was well-designed. In fact, if you look at the other classes, more of them have moved towards the rogue model than otherwise. So why then has the rogue population dropped?

I think that it's not one major reason, but several trends. The cumulative weight of all these trends has been to push the rogue population down.

1. Non-rogue melee dps specs became viable.

In Vanilla, pretty much the only melee dps at endgame were the rogues. Warriors tanked. Druids, Shamans, and Paladins healed. Sure, you may have had one or two offspecs running around, but the heart of your melee dps in Vanilla was your quintet of rogues.

Now, of course, all these melee classes can dps. Many of them dual-wield as well, occupying a lot of the rogue style in melee. As well, they also offer more options than the pure DPS class. They can tank or heal if necessary.

2. The new classes overlap with the rogue.

Both monks and death knights are melee dps. Indeed, both of them can dual-wield. Again, the overlap in kit causes the rogue class to bleed players to these new classes.

3. The other pure DPS classes lost a lot of their weaknesses.

Hunters lost their dead zone. Mages and warlocks improved their mobility, cut down on long casts, and gained more instants. Meanwhile, the rogue's fundamental weakness, melee range, has not changed.

4. Stealth has been marginalized.

The signature non-combat ability of rogues is stealth. However, because no other class (save feral druids) uses stealth regularly, it has become a mostly unused ability. The major use of stealth these days is to launch an opener, more than anything else. It is not really used in group play at all.

Think about this in terms of crowd control. In the past, rogue stealth/sap was the only crowd control which did not start combat. So sap had a lot of uses. Now though, all the ranged crowd control is easier to use and does not start combat, while having the advantage of not requiring the caster to get close to the mob.

This devaluation of stealth becomes really obvious if you play The Old Republic. TOR has 2 of 8 classes able to stealth, and that includes tanks and healing specs. Stealth is really powerful in group play, because many packs have one member that, if sapped, will allow the group to avoid the pack. This includes the non-stealthies in the group. Running an instance with a good stealther is a hilariously awesome exercise in avoiding as much combat as possible. In WoW, this type of gameplay is only possible if the entire group is composed of rogues and druids.

Stealth is also the only method to avoid running back from a wipe in TOR. The stealther can vanish if everyone is dead, and then res a healer who resses the group. Between these two elements, stealth remains relevant to group play in a way that it does not in WoW.

Conclusions

Those are the four reasons that I believe are causing the rogue population to decline in WoW. I don't think it's really possible to do anything about the first three reasons, mostly because it would make the other classes howl.

However, a concerted effort to make stealth more useful in group play might be possible. As well, I think the next new class should be a ranged stealth class. Making stealth more common gives a reason to make it more useful, while a ranged class would avoid cannibalizing rogues even further.

Diablo 3, the Auction House, and Efficiency

I've been thinking a fair bit about Diablo 3 lately. Unlike a lot of the gaming community, I thought D3 was quite a good game. In particular, I think the ability and rune system was inspired. However, I think Blizzard made one major mistake: the Auction House.

The Auction House is an understandable mistake, though. Diablo 2 had a lot of issues with people selling items on eBay, with all the attendant scams and customer service issues that entails. As well, just regular trading was a big hassle and not easy to undertake.

Blizzard basically had two choices: introduce a mechanism for secure trading; or disallow trading entirely. They went for the first option in the AH. More and more, I think they should have gone for the second option, and just not allowed trading. They already made loot drops from monsters be separate for each individual player. Banning trading would have only been one step further by not allowing others to see the items you drop.

The Auction House had a lot of negative effects. It made the game much too easy. D3 isn't that hard, but the difference between a character with only random drops, and one outfitted from the AH is huge. It devalued the whole blacksmith subsystem. I think that without the AH, D3 would have had far more longevity than it did.

The central fun in Diablo is making your character stronger. After you do the campaign once to see the story, the point is to kill more bosses and outfit your character with better and better gear. The AH allows you to "shortcut" that central fun, all in the name of efficiency.

Too much efficiency is not fun. Players will always argue for more and more efficiency. However, I think it's important for developers to stand firm against this trend.  It is especially dangerous to offer shortcuts to whatever your "central fun" is. For example, if the central fun in your game is leveling, I don't think you should offer items that make leveling faster or easier.

For example, looking at WoW, I'm not certain if heirlooms, valor points, or tier tokens have really improved the game at all. They've all made the game more efficient, certainly. But I think that they've caused character progression to become too efficient, too easy. And I think Blizzard agrees with this stance to a degree. In 5.2, they're introducing rare Thunderforged gear, which makes gearing up fully much harder, and a less efficient, longer process.

Disengaged

I really haven't been writing much lately. A lot of that is due to the fact that I just don't feel engaged in anything I am playing. I have TERA, The Secret World, The Old Republic and World of Warcraft installed.

TERA - My lancer is 45 or so, now. It's still fun, but, I don't know, something is missing. As you go higher in levels, it feels harder and harder to get a full group to kill things.

The Secret World - I restarted playing this when it went F2P. I haven't gotten out of the first zone yet. For some reason, I'm finding the regular gameplay very difficulty. I'm not sure if it's because my builds are bad, or for some other reason.

The Old Republic - Still in my guild, we're still spinning our wheels a bit. I think we're hovering around our skill level, and aren't really progressing. It's not really helping that the raid makeup doesn't seem very stable as people are constantly bringing in alts and similar shenanigans.

As well, I dislike the Section X daily zone. It's very annoying, some quests have abysmal drop rates, and it feels like you have to wade though heaps of useless enemies to get to your real objectives.

World of Warcraft - I finally got my weapon, and then haven't logged in since then. I still have to do the legendary quests. The issue is that I'm in my old guild, and I'm the only person in that guild. I think the cure here is to find a new guild and raid with them instead of running LFR. But I'm not sure if I actually want to do that.

Maybe I need to focus on one game. Choose one and concentrate on it.

Fake Gamers

Ophelie over at Bossy Pally has a post on the somewhat recent phenomenon of labeling people (mostly female) as "fake gamers". Penny Arcade did a comic on this a couple weeks ago as well. I wrote a comment on Ophelie's post, and thought I'd repost it here.

Heh, this topic reminds me of Ferraro, the fake female paladin from a couple years ago. She was a popular blogger and forum poster who was later revealed to be using pics of someone completely different. Kind of a pity, actually, as whoever was writing as Ferraro had some interesting points and insights. In any case, I’m pretty sure that Ferraro was a fake gamer.

Back on topic, I think a lot of the animus comes from certain male producers of secondary content like blogs and podcasts. They see female content producers zoom past them in terms of audience. These men feel that the work the women are producing is of lower quality. Thus the feel that the audience is entirely a result of being female. These men then label the women as "fake" gamers, implying that their audience is disproportionate to their skill or insight as gamers, and instead inflated by their gender.

And to bend over backwards to be fair, there is a point. A number of female bloggers/podcasters make the fact that they are female a central point in their blog/podcast identity. Think of how many female blogs use “grrl” or similar in their title. A lot of men see this as the women trading on the fact that they are female in order to attract an audience.

Personally, I think it is just that being female seems to be central to some women's identity in a way that being male just isn't for men. Male identity seems to be less about what you are, and more about what you do. This is better in some ways, and worse in others. Something like losing your job ends up cutting at the core identity for a lot of men.

In any case, I think that a lot of this issue isn't really about game players. It is really about the relationship between secondary content providers and their audience.

The Pandaren Starting Zone

I recently created a pandaren monk and went through the new starting zone. Here are some thoughts and observations. There will be spoilers if you haven't done the zone.

By and large the zone is very good. It's fun, gets across a lot of the themes, and gives a small taste of what Pandaria will be like. The ballon ride is a particular high point.

However, in my mind, there is one major problem with the zone: Aysa Cloudsinger. With Aysa, Blizzard falls into the trap of "telling, not showing". Everyone comments about how amazing Aysa is, but she never actually acts amazing. I think she meditates while you kill stuff, and that's the high point of your interactions.

Whereas Ji Firepaw actually solves problems. Admittedly his solutions are a little crazy, but he is shown doing stuff. As well, Ji is never outright wrong. He's supposed to represent taking action rather than thinking about things. But the downside of taking action rapidly is that sometimes things go wrong. But this is never fully shown.

What's really weird is that Blizzard did not take the obvious route at the very end. Ji uses explosives to get rid of the ship in the turtle's side, which causes the turtle to start bleeding rapidly. This almost gets across the idea of making a bad situation worse, which is the drawback of Ji's philosophy. However, Ji is the one who thinks of using all the healers to staunch the wound.  So Ji solves one problem, creates another problem, and then solves that problem too.

I don't really understand why Aysa is not the one who comes up with the idea of using the healers. It's the logical, obvious solution to balancing out the two factions, making them equal.

Also, the way Aysa is written at the end of zone, she is very reminiscent of an unfortunate female archetype: that of the nagging wife. Honestly, for the entire last part of the zone all she does is verbally criticize Ji. She does not come up with any ideas or solutions of her own.

In some ways this male vs female dichotomy is further reinforced by the Horde/Alliance NPCs. The Horde representative is male, like Ji. The Alliance representative is female, like Aysa. So the final choice has a very strong male vs female vibe to it. And in my view, the female Alliance side comes off very badly in the comparison, being the side which didn't actually do anything useful, just complained. I think is an unintentional error on Blizzard's part.

By and large the pandaren starting zone was very good. Aysa should have just done something in the final sequence, justifying the idea that she is a competent person. Again, "show, don't tell". If you want players to think of Aysa as competent, you have to show Aysa being competent. As well, Ji should have been shown at least once as being obviously wrong. And finally, I think the genders of the Horde/Alliance NPCs should have been switched to weaken the link between gender and the dueling philosophies.

Frontiers and Force Projection

There is a debate in Eve Online circles about the role of small, independent corporations in null-sec. To wit, there really isn't one. Null-sec has come to be dominated by large empires. To move into null-sec, a small corporation must sacrifice their independence, and generally bow down to one of the major powers.

I think this issue is not specific to Eve Online. Almost every sandbox game ends up with a similar problem. People want to be out on the frontier, to stake a claim, and watch that claim grow. It's very much the myth of the American West. But inevitably, these games run out of frontier.

But Eve has hundreds of star systems. At first glance, it seems that surely a frontier can still exist. The problem in Eve is that it is too easy for an empire to project force anywhere in its claimed space. If at any given time, the empire can bring its entire force to bear without repercussions, then warfare essentially becomes about who is larger. And the empire will always win that battle against a small corporation.

Let's say you have a large null-sec empire. A small corporation takes one star on the border. What happens? The empire drops its entire fleet on that star. There is generally no real downside to doing that.

But imagine there was a downside. Let's say it takes two weeks of real-time travel to get from the heart of an empire to its border.  Now, the empire cannot send the entire fleet, because if another empire invades, it would take the fleet over a month to get back. Instead the empire has to send just enough ships to deal with the small corp. And the resulting battle might actually be won by the smaller corp, if the empire miscalculates.

The empire has to be able to be stretched "too thin" for smaller corporations to be able to exist alongside it. But so long as it is easy to project force, so long as distance does not really matter, the empire cannot be stretched too thin.

To be honest, I don't think this problem can be solved without significant travel time that lasts longer than a single play session. Significant travel time introduces logistics, supply lines and military strategy, as opposed to just military tactics. But significant travel time is highly inconvenient. I really doubt that anyone really wants to take two weeks or more to reach their destination.

But without significant travel time, it becomes a numbers game, and then a game of covert actions to influence that numbers game.

Frontiers cannot exist without meaningful distance. If you want your game to have a frontier, the price is the inconvenience of distance. And I don't think that players will accept that price.

New Ilum: Genius or Madness?

I can't decide if the new PvP area in Ilum in The Old Republic is genius or madness. All I know is that it is pretty hilarious.

To recap, the latest patch introduced a new area with dailies on Ilum. All rewards are cosmetic, aside from the fact that you unlock new bosses at some point. I believe the bosses drop gear from existing raids. There are 6 dailies in total, 4 in the PvE area, and 2 in the PvP area. So the PvP dailies are reasonably optional.

(At least as far as I am concerned. But there are a lot of people who disagree with me.)

The PvP area is interesting. It's a free-for-all zone, so you can attack your own faction. Only 4-person groups are permitted in the area. Larger raids get disbanded automatically.

The PvP objects respawn somewhat slowly. So there is significant advantage to killing other groups, because you remove your competition, and get your dailies done faster. As well, it gives the PvP groups points over which to fight.

It's really funny because people in chat are trying to get the factions to work together, and groups are instead randomly slaughtering each other.  Area chat is hilarious.The Imperial side is convinced that the Republic is working together as a team, while the Imperials are attacking each other. Ironically, this seems very true to form, and totally in-character for each faction. I blame the Sith.

(Though the Republic side is probably saying the same thing.)

The design of the new area is quite well thought out, in my opinion. Free-for-all keeps things balanced on servers with unbalanced factions. Small teams only keeps the feel of multiple forces running around, prevents raids from stomping everyone, and gives tanks and healers a place in combat. The quest objects and respawn timers give people something to fight over, rather than simply ganking. Plus, it's only 2 of 6 quests, so it is pretty optional if you absolutely hate PvP.

The final interesting note is that this is a temporary event, though it will be repeated in the future. By making it temporary, it means that when the event appears again, everyone will flock to it again. This keeps the numbers high and many people involved, which is essential for good PvP.

All in all, this looks like a winner for the SWTOR dev team.

Overlapping Offensive Cooldowns

Should offensive cooldowns stack?

Right now, there is a common complaint in Retribution Paladin circles that Ret burst dps is too high, while Ret sustained dps is too low. One of the major reasons this happens is that Ret can combine at least 3 strong offensive cooldowns together (and then trinkets, potions, etc.). There is a short 20-second window when the burst dps is very high indeed.

As a general rule of thumb, you always want to stack offensive cooldowns together. This is because subsequent cooldowns magnify the effect of the previous cooldowns.

As a simple example, say you do a baseline of 100 dps. Cooldown A increases damage by 20% for 10s, and Cooldown B increases damage by 30% for 10s.  If we take a 20s window, we have:

Situation A: Stacking Cooldowns

[10s * 100 d/s * 1.20 * 1.30] + [10s * 100 d/s] = 1560 d + 1000 d = 2560 damage

Situation B: Non-Overlapping Cooldowns

[10s * 100 d/s * 1.30] + [10s * 100 d/s * 1.20] = 1300 d + 1200 d = 2500 damage

Stacking cooldowns gives more damage.[1]  Notice that stacking cooldowns also greatly increases the burst. Situation A has a window where the player is doing 156 dps, while in Situation B, the player maxes out at 130 dps. The "burst" dps is much closer to baseline dps.

Burst damage has always been a problem in WoW, especially in PvP. Blizzard is constantly making adjustments to reduce burst. As well, it generally contributes to an "unfun" feeling of play. 10% of the time, you're a god. 90% of the time, you're weak. An opposing player that runs into that 10% buzzsaw is going to be very unhappy. On the other hand, getting stunned or otherwise prevented from acting during your 10% window is devastating to you.

Perhaps a blanket rule that an offensive cooldown cannot be used while another offensive cooldown is active would go a long way to smoothing out gameplay. This would include things like on-use trinkets and potions, which you can control, but not uncontrollable procs. You'd probably also have to exempt Bloodlust, since trying to coordinate the entire raid would probably be a little excessive. And admittedly, saving one of your cooldowns for Bloodlust is a little bit of good gameplay.

It would also ease designing offensive cooldowns. The designers wouldn't have to worry about the combination of cooldowns, they would only need to consider base rotation/damage plus cooldown. Adding new offensive cooldowns, or shortening existing cooldown timers would become less dangerous, and more predictable, than it is currently.

All in all, I think a blanket rule preventing offensive cooldowns from overlapping would go a long way to smoothing out some of the gameplay and balance problems in WoW.

1. Excepting edge cases that generally involve hitting the haste hard cap with Bloodlust.

A Good LFR Experience

Since we usually hear stories about how terrible Looking For Raid is, I thought I'd mention a good experience I had last Sunday. We were on Amber-Shaper Un'sok. Both tanks were new to the fight, as were several other people.

And we wiped.

But people didn't start whining and complaining. Instead the fight was explained, especially the mechanics of the construct. Some people cycled in and out, but by and large the raid stayed together.

And we wiped again. But we did better.

The fight was re-explained, and the specific thing we were failing on was pointed out. Again, no raging.

And we wiped again, but came fairly close to finishing.

Still no complaints, and we tried again.

This time the boss died. And we finished the instance. Four attempts on the boss, each time getting better and better, until we got a kill. No whining and complaining, just explaining the strategy.

I think a great deal of this is due to the first person who spoke up after the wipes. He or she was very positive, focusing on mechanics, and the things that need to improve. Without insulting or denigrating the others in the raid.

I think the first person to be vocal sets a lot of the tone for the group. If that person is hateful and elitist  then others feel like they have permission to be hateful and elitist. So the lesson here is not to stay quiet. If you want a pleasant experience, you should speak up first, and set the example for the group.

---

Then of course I ran into my standard loot luck. The only non-epic I have is my i450 weapon. I was hoping to get the Sha-Touched mace from Empress. Instead, I got a tier chest, which I already have. I popped a Greater Charm and got ... another tier chest!

Lady Fortune mocks me.

PvP Reward Changes

Last year, I noted that Magic: the Gathering had dropped its ELO system for a pure point system.  Last week, we saw the latest ripples of that change as Blizzard followed suit.

Blizzard announced that they would drop rating requirements on PvP. Instead, there is a point "threshold" for the best gear and weapons:

Gear will be available in four tiers:

• Dreadful Gladiator’s gear will be crafted. (5.2)
• Malevolent Gladiator’s gear, including weapons, will be purchased with Honor Points. (5.2)
• New tier of PvP items: Tyrannical Gladiator’s gear will be purchased with Conquest Points. (5.2)
• Tyrannical Gladiator’s gear can be purchased for Honor after 27,000 Conquest Points are earned for the season. (5.3)
• Elite Tyrannical Gladiator’s gear can only be purchased with Conquest Points after 27,000 Conquest Points have been earned for the season. (5.2)
• Conquest Point weapons can only be purchased after 7,250 Conquest Points have been earned for the season. (5.2)

Blizzard is not dropping rating entirely. It will still be used to matchmake, and will govern the maximum amount of points you can earn each week.

This is an excellent change, in my view. It encourages everyone to cap out on Conquest Points each week. Good teams will still earn gear faster, but all teams have the possibility of getting the best gear. It's unlikely that a poor team will be able earn very much Elite Tyrannical gear, but it's better than having it out of reach forever.

However, the caps on Conquest will prevent people from playing 24/7, like in the High Warlord system. There's also a catch-up mechanism that increases the caps as the season goes on for people who haven't earned a lot of Conquest (either because they have lower ratings, or because they were not playing.)

It's interesting how the pendulum swings. In the old High Warlord system, the problem was that people played too much, and that weaker players were completely shut out by time requirements. In the second iteration, where your rating determined how many points you earned, the problem was that people played too little, and that weaker players were completely shut out by the skill requirements. The third iteration pushed people to play more with conquest caps, but rating requirements still locked people out of gear progression.

This new system tries to split the difference, pushing people to play for a medium amount, while leaving weaker players with an upgrade path all the way to the best gear. I think this looks like a solid system, so kudos to the Blizzard PvP team.