Jedi Knight Complete!

Over the weekend I finally finished a second Star Wars: The Old Republic class story line. This time I played a Jedi Knight with the Sentinel advanced class. The sentinel is a melee class that wields two lightsabers.

The story was quite good, but a lot more "straightforward" than the Imperial Agent. It's often said that the Jedi Knight story is the equivalent of Knights of the Old Republic 3, and that's very true. But on the other hand, it plays out almost exactly like you would expect it to play out.

I did play Light Side again. I guess I'm just not one for the Dark Side.

I can't really talk about about the story line much without spoilers. However, I do like that Bioware did not shy away from making significant changes to the game world in the various story lines. The Jedi Knight (and Agent to a lesser degree) had "world-shaking" events happen in them, and the other story lines in the game reflect those changes.

My next class in TOR is the Sith Inquistor. This time I'm going with a healer character, to see how leveling with a healer is. I don't know if I'll end up Light or Dark. I started out Light Side, mostly rebelling against the Sith, but then other characters started annoying me, and the Shock conversation options became too tempting. So now my Inquistor is pretty neutral.

Wildstar Settlers

The hype machine for Wildstar has been gearing up.  From Reddit, here's some info about the Settler path which looks rather interesting.  I'm especially interested by the idea that almost everything a Settler builds is unphased. Will that result in a landscape overrun with buildings?


Settler Path

• Meant for socializers and also "builders"
• Tasks include mending broken or degraded equipment such as a farmer's fence which, due to the breakage, is letting all his cows escape. Such tasks are separate from questing. This is internally called "minfrastructure"
• True infrastructure tasks include building a new shop, new vendor or a bus station.
• Smaller "projects" helps gather resources for bigger "projects"
• Can unlock Settler powers that allow you to "free-farm anywhere"
• There are goals when building -- raise a town's value or utilize your abilities
• Increasing value to a certain extent allows special things to happen like bigger rewards
• Bigger, more meaningful projects will take multiple settlers to complete while smaller projects can be done solo
• If structures aren't maintained, they will decay
• You can get a lot of path XP by running around and building everything by yourself but less from social tools like campfires
• almost everything Settlers do is unphased
• Settlers have utility in dungeons such as being able to make a resurrection station next to a boss -- can use resources that can be found in the dungeon. Random chance whether many of these resources will appear
• Settlers will be useful when placing structures next to harder areas in the world
• While there are static locations that can be built on, there are also free form structures you can freely place
• Settlers will get more housing equipment(FABKits) than other paths
• Housing dungeons mentioned explicitly after being asked the question "What sort of perks will Settlers bring to player housing?" I would not bet on housing dungeons being exclusive to Settlers, however.
• Settlers get increased XP the more their structures are built (campfire, for example)
• Speculation: in a video segment about settlers, a player is seen swinging a sword to cut down trees
• Can build quest givers with really good loot
• Video demonstrated the building of a jail which opened up quests for the area and had a warden that could give players a buff
• Can build taxi vendors to allow rapid travel through area
• Can make outposts with guards in an area to help you fight mobs (not just in towns)
• There is somewhat of a meta where you have to decide where to place structures to get optimal use. For example build an outpost in the wilderness and choose to put your campfire there. You can put structures like a campfire in major areas, but then you are competing with everyone else doing that. We can expect that if there are two fires placed immediately on/next to each other, only one settler is going to get credit for a player standing within reach of both fires.
• Mission types: Expansion(improving towns), Supply cache, Public ServiceTasks for the greater good), Civil Defense(combat, I think), Infrastructure (builds hospitals, taverns, spaceports, etc)
• Can make puzzles appear

Patch 5.3

Patch 5.3 came out today. I am actually way behind in WoW. I haven't beaten Lei Shien yet in LFR, I have 0 Secrets for the Legendary Quest, and I just hit Revered with the Klaxxi.

I did the first scenario, Blood in the Snow. Pretty good scenario, and I do like what Blizzard is doing with Moira.  I must admit that I ignored the NPC telling me not to attack the big group of trolls, and promptly marked one to be shot. Well played, Blizzard, well played.

Don't really have a lot else to say about patch 5.3 so far. The PvP changes are interesting. It occurs to me that PvP gear has evolved a lot. When resilience was first introduced, better PvP gear made you harder to kill. Then better PvP gear made you harder to kill and better at killing others. Now everyone is equally hard to kill, but better PvP gear makes you better at killing others.

How was your Patch Day?

Levelling and Talent Trees

For background, please read Talent Trees.

Leveling in Mists of Pandaria is definitely missing something. There are too many dead levels, levels where nothing interesting happens. As well, there is a distinct lack of choice, of the feeling that you are crafting your character as you level. In previous expansions, the mechanic that accomplished this were the talent trees. Every level or so, you got a talent point, you had a choice where to place that talent point, and you slowly improved your character.

Now, from a endgame point of view, the talent tree system wasn't very good. There was no real choice, and all comparisons being implicit made it hard to offer meaningful options. The current explicit choice system is much more interesting at endgame.

But the current system is much less interesting while leveling. You only get a choice every 15 levels, which is an eternity. Often, the choice isn't really relevant to leveling gameplay. For the purposes of leveling alone, talent trees were a superior mechanic.

Here's my proposal: Bring back talent trees, but have them only be used for leveling.

Have one tree structure for each spec. Each spec tree contains all the active and passive abilities that a class would get while leveling. But each tree consists of exactly 81 points. With a point per level after 10, that means a max level character has filled out the tree entirely.

Thus talent trees become a leveling mechanic only. It becomes the way abilities are delivered while leveling, rather than automatically gaining those abilities. Players can choose the path through the trees, making a difference in how you choose to level. Maybe you'll get Holy Radiance early, maybe you'll make a run at the cooldowns, or go for important passives first.  While leveling, the order in which you gain abilities is important. But it's still a temporary choice, because leveling is a temporary state.

Since all talents will eventually be taken, the design of the tree can be as intricate as you desire. You can have lots of prerequisites, multiple paths, even arrange the tree to form a pretty picture.

At max level, you can just assume the tree is filled in. Switch specs, and the new tree is already filled in. A max level character has all the abilities she requires for endgame, just like the current system for Mists.

Talent trees would make leveling a little more interesting. It would add some more choice back into the early game, and allow you some agency over how your character developed.

Variable Group Size

In my opinion, the next big challenge for PvE MMOs is creating interesting content for a group that varies in size. Right now, good PvE content is built for groups of a very specific size, be it 5, 10, or 25 people. As we all know from the past few years, this leads to all sorts of complications where groups have to maintain a bench. Where people have to sit out in order to guarantee that future attempts will have enough people.

I believe this is the one true strength of Eve Online. There is always room for one more in an Eve Online fleet. This makes participating much more fun. You always get to go with the group. You never have to sit on the bench.

The few attempts in the themepark MMOs to allow a variable group tend to fail for a few reasons. Very often the content just becomes a zerg, where you just throw bodies at it. If the content difficulty is fixed, the maximum group size becomes the "accepted" size. We saw this in Vanilla, where dungeons were capable of being done in a 5-man, but everyone insisted on taking 10 people.

Ideally, the size of the group would scale from n to 2n -1.  So if you wanted content for about 10 people, you could go with 7 to 13 people.  This allows the group to divide into two smaller groups that can still do the content.

There needs to be some difficulty scaling involved. If there is no scaling, everyone will insist on taking 13 people always.

But scaling things appropriately will be a significant challenge. I am not sure that a game with variable group sizes can offer such a tuned experience as WoW does.  However, variable group size would make organized grouping much easier, and smooth out a lot of the current social issues with grouping.

F2P and Conversation

In some ways, the worst part about Free-2-Play is that it poisons all the conversation around the game.

If you look at forums about a subscription MMO, the vast majority of posts are discussing the game. Oh, they may be complaining about lots of things, but they are at least complaining about game mechanics.

For a F2P game, on the other hand, it seems like every conversation about the game ends up devolving into an argument about the payment model. Is it Pay2Win, is it being too greedy, etc. It just seems so much harder to find a place to talk about the game itself.

The two main F2P MMOs I'm following are Neverwinter and The Old Republic. Discussions on these two games follow the same pattern. Mechanics get discussed for a little bit, then a payment model argument breaks out.

It's getting to the point where I'm looking at the WoW forums fondly. There people are theorycrafting, joking, insulting others, and calling for everyone else to be nerfed. But at least most people aren't constantly whining about the subscription.

Neverwinter First Impressions

Cryptic and Perfect World's latest Free-To-Play MMO, Neverwinter, recently had its soft launch. I gave it a whirl, and here are some impressions.

Mechanics

Neverwinter is billed as a Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition game. It uses a lot of the 4E Forgotten Realms setting. However, mechanics-wise, it is not a conversion of the 4E rules. It would be better to say it is "inspired by 4E". A lot of the mechanics have a nod to the pen and paper game, but are really more standard MMO mechanics.

It actually feels a lot like a third-person Diablo game. You have two "at-will" abilities bound to the left and right mouse buttons. Then there are up to three "encounter" abilities with 10-20 second cooldowns. Finally, you have a "daily" special which can only be used when you've built up enough action points. Targetting is reticule-based, where you aim with the mouse and move with WASD. There's also some dodging mechanics.

On the whole, the base mechanics are pretty fun, and work decently enough.

Character Creation

It's odd, but I've noticed that if a game uses sliders to control character creation, I have a hard time making an attractive character. Perhaps I can recognize an attractive character when I see it, but I can't really identify the specific elements that make that character attractive.

Neverwinter falls into that trap for me. Lots of sliders and options, but I had a really hard time making a character that I was happy with.

There are several D&D races, including humans, elves, half-elves, dwarves, half-orcs, halflings, and tieflings. There are also Drow (dark elves) but I think you have to buy them.

There are some nice RP-ish elements where you pick a background and a god that you worship. I made a half-elf cleric of Torm the True, who was a former Purple Dragon from Cormyr.

Finally, let me reiterate my love for Cryptic's naming convention of "characterName@accountName", where the character name is what is displayed most of the time. It is so nice to be able to name your characters whatever you want, rather than fighting "That name is already taken" errors.

Classes

There are five classes so far: Guardian Fighter, Great Weapon Fighter, Devout Cleric, Trickster Rogue, and Control Wizard. I find the classes to be very hit-and-miss. I like the Devout Cleric and the Trickster Rogue, but the others just felt awkward to me.

The cleric is pretty interesting. It's very support-based, and uses debuffs on enemies as well as reticule targeting to heal. You still do a fair bit of damage-dealing while healing.

Monetization

Neverwinter is a Free-To-Play game. The monetization scheme is a bit interesting. There are three currencies: gold, astral diamonds, and zen. Gold is what we all know and love. Zen is currency that you purchase with real money. Astral Diamonds are an in-between currency. You can purchase diamonds with zen, or you can earn them at a slow-ish rate. Most non-basic items in the game seem to cost diamonds.

To make an analogy, it's as if you could buy Valor points in WoW with real money.  You can still earn them normally, but the standard weekly cap applies. However, you can ignore the cap if you use real money.

In general, there seems to be a pretty explicit trade of money for time. I don't know if you would consider this pay-to-win. If something takes 6 months of real-time to earn, but you can skip those six months with real money, is that over the line?

Questing and the Foundry

The default questing is pretty standard MMO questing. There are a lot more dungeons in the game, and they have traps and levers and all those fun elements.

However, the Foundry is the most intriguing aspect. Players can make their own adventures, and release them for everyone to try. These adventures automatically scale to your level. Treasure and experience are handled by the game, so you can't write an adventure that consists of 100 treasure chests. Of course, people have made adventures which are designed to maximize the efficiency of leveling.

I've played one Foundry adventure, that seemed to be rated highly. In the adventure, you were tracking down someone and some mysterious cultists interfered. It was a pretty decent adventure, and the author tried to make a good non-combat encounter where you had to talk to people at an inn and figure out which room you needed to enter. The author provided a couple different options of how you could finish this encounter.

I wouldn't say that it was amazing. It was very verbose, and the author wrote with a lot of unnecessary verbiage. As well, the author made the mistake of telling you how your character felt and reacted, instead of just describing the world. Ironically, more than anything else, this felt like D&D to me, with a decent but not-great DM.

The other neat thing about the Foundry is that at the end of the adventure, you can review it, and you can tip the author some Astral Diamonds if you want. Writing a popular adventure might turn out to be pretty lucrative.

Conclusions

On the whole, I would say that Neverwinter is a B-grade MMO. The game looks decent enough. The character models aren't the best. Classes are hit and miss. The mechanics are decent enough, but nothing amazing. The UI is a bit cluttered. It just doesn't have that layer of polish that you expect from the top tier of MMOs. As well, the monetization scheme has the potential to be very annoying.

However, the Foundry is the wild card here. The Foundry has vast potential. But it remains to be seen if that potential will be realized.

Social Fabric

Pyschochild wrote a post on social fabric and multiplayer that has been bouncing around the blogosphere. His thesis is that "MMOs need to focus back to the multiplayer foundation", in order to improve the social fabric that binds people to these games. He feels that the lack of social fabric is what keeps modern MMOs as "three-monthers", where people come in, play for a bit, and then fall away.

I am not entirely convinced of his argument. But let us say that it is correct. What can games do to improve their social fabric?

Let's start from the basics. What is social fabric, at least in games?

I would define social fabric as: Social fabric is the bonds created by repeated, positive interactions between the same set of people.

Key elements here are repeated, positive, interactions, and same set of people. After all, the various group finder activities are repeated and positive, but they don't create social fabric because you never see the people in them again.

My first thought is that the best and most useful element to build social fabric around is the guild. But guilds are very optional in the modern MMO. I think the first step in strengthening the social fabric is to make guilds more central to the player experience.

Consider the following changes:

1. Players can only group with people in their guild.
2. Players can only trade with people in their guild.
3. Guilds are limited to 100 unique accounts.

What this does is create a very small subset of people that you can interact with. This means that all your group interactions occur within the guild, with the same people. It makes joining and belonging to a good guild a meaningful affair.  There is a cap on guild membership so that you are interacting with the same set of people, and to prevent the formation of mega-guilds.

Now, of course, this is very restrictive. It is not very convenient. But rather than allowing players to form very transitory bonds through dungeon finders, local chat, or an auction house, it focuses all those interactions on the same small set of people.

If a game wants to create a strong social fabric, I think it must necessarily limit the scope of player interactions. I think limiting the scope of interactions to the small guild level is the best path for creating the strong fabric that a lot of older MMO players desire.

Edit: This just came to me, how to explain my thoughts in a different fashion. Whenever this topic comes up, a lot of people say that people need to interact more. They need to group more, to trade more, have more interactions in general. I think that we don't necessarily need to have more interactions, we need to have what  interactions we do have with fewer people, in order to create more repetition, and stronger bonds when we do end up interacting.

Rise of the Hutt Cartel

The Old Republic launched it's mini-expansion, Rise of the Hutt Cartel, last weekend. It includes a new storyline revolving around the Hutts and the planet Makeb. It has 5 new levels, and an assortment of new mechanics and quests.  By and large, I think it's a solid addition to the game.

Sadly, the class stories did not continue. There's only an Empire storyline and a Republic storyline, about 9 to 10 hours long. Though oddly enough, I found that the Empire story felt like an Agent story. Not sure if some of the dialogue was deliberately shaded towards that (since I was playing my Agent), or if the story was just more "Agenty" than the other classes.

One thing I do find funny is that, in earlier chapters, my character was the grunt carrying out the dangerous missions under orders from superiors. Now, my character is a power in the Empire and is in command of the operation. Yet she's still the one carrying out the dangerous missions.

There are some interesting changes to daily missions in this expac. In particular, the new planet has this "staged" mission concept. You have to do 3 Stage 1 Missions, which you can pick from a pool of about 7. The pool does include a couple group mission. Then you do an intermediate mission, and a pool of new Stage 2 missions open up. That's as far as I have gotten. The overall stage mission is a Weekly mission. It's a nice blend of repetition and dailies that you can pursue throughout the week.

There's also a couple new types of activities. One is macro-binoculars, which seem to be a bunch of puzzle missions. So far there's been some "hunt for pixels", some jumping puzzles, and a maneuvering through a laser maze puzzle. I find it a bit odd that the spiritual successor to the old point-and-click adventure games is occurring in MMOs like TOR and The Secret World.

The other new mission type is seeker droid missions, which is essentially TOR's version of archaeology. Very similar hot-cold mechanic as in WoW.

The only other thing to note is that the Marksman Sniper rotation changed significantly. It used to be a very strict "Enabler - Followthrow - Filler - Filler" rotation.

Now it's pretty much just alternating Enablers and Followthrough. However more abilities enable Followthrough, and there are interactions between the abilities. I rather like the change. It's simpler, with a couple less buttons, but does feel right.

Overall, Rise of the Hutt Cartel is a solid expansion and well worth the price. I wonder if Bioware could have gotten away with not raising the level cap. Personally, I wouldn't mind paying another $10 or so for the next chapter, another 10 hours of story content, in a few months. But I think raising the level cap yet again would be annoying. I wouldn't mind a story expac that just happened at 55.

Raid Finder: Determination and Queues

Determination

I really like the Determination buff in Raid Finder. Every time you wipe, you get an extra 5% buff that stacks up to 50%, until the boss dies.

I don't know if it causes less turnover in raids. People still seem to leave almost randomly.

However, I think it has greatly improved the atmosphere in Raid Finder. The buff gives hope that the next attempt will go better, or that eventually we will overpower the boss. There seems to be far less acrimony and finger-pointing on failed attempts.

Last year, I proposed PvE Handicapping. In some ways, Determination is an attempt at that, using wipes to determine the handicap.

Queues

I wonder if it is time to consolidate the Raid Finder queues. Currently you have to pick which wing you want to attempt. That means that there are 7-8 separate queues right now. If you pick the wing that no one else wants right at that moment, your wait might be much greater than normal.  You could have things like 4 healers in one queue, and 2 healers in a different queue, and that would be enough to actually kick off one raid if only they were in the same queue.

If you look at the Dungeon Finder, everyone is thrown into the same queue for a random dungeon, shortening queue times as much as possible.

And a lot of the time, you don't care which Raid Finder wing you actually get, so long as you get an instance with bosses that you haven't done that week. As well, in 5.3, we will get the ability to choose which spec we get loot for. That means you may as well sign up with your preferred raiding spec for everything, and change your "loot spec" on a boss-by-boss basis.

Of course, the logic involved in a consolidated Raid Finder would be more involved than that of the Dungeon Finder. You would have to avoid putting people in a raid which only contains bosses they have already killed.

I still think it would result in better performance. You can look at the current system as a worst case scenario of the consolidated system, if you assume that you manually sign up primarily for wings you have not done yet.

Drumuru in LFR

Drumuru in the latest wing of LFR is an interesting boss. On LFR particularly, his mechanic seems very harsh.

First off, funny story in our LFR. We wiped on Drumuru something like six to eight times. On the kill attempt, we were down to 2% with only the tank and a couple dps alive. One of the dps, who we'll call Dave, had been a bit of jackass on earlier attempts. At the 2% mark, Dave wrote "This carry has been brought to you by Dave". Then he promptly died, to the jeers of the rest of the raid. Luckily the tank and the other dps finished off the boss.

The problem with Drumuru is one of his abilities. He covers the platform in some purple fog, but there is a path in the purple. You have to get on the path and follow it. This ability seems incredibly hard for people to deal with. On every attempt we lost more than half the raid.

We've seen mass death effects like this before in LFR. Think of the ice walls in Hargara. The thing about the ice walls, however, is that everyone died to it on the first attempt, but on the second attempt they were able to understand the mechanic and work towards mastery. An early LFR Hargara would go like: first attempt, 15 people died. Second attempt, maybe 8 people died. Third attempt, 4 people died and there was a kill.

On LFR Drumuru, there is no improvement, no indication that people are mastering the mechanic. They're just dying.

I think that the major reason this is so is due to the graphics chosen. The fog is a mixture of writhing purple lines and emptiness. I found it difficult to tell where the path was, even when I was on it. Not to mention that the room is already darker than normal.

I was able to survive this mechanic about half the time, but I felt it was a bit random whether I did or not. Even though I knew where to go, and what to look for. Heck, one time I ran to where I was sure the path was, and instead fell off the edge of the platform. At least I was right that there was no fog there.

If the fog had been more solid, more filled-in, I think people would grasp the mechanic sooner. Or perhaps if it was a color with a stronger contrast.

All in all, though the rest of the fight is good, this one mechanic is too punishing for LFR. It's an insta-kill that too many people are finding too hard to understand and master. In my opinion, this is entirely due to the choice of graphics used.

Scarlet Blade Impressions

On a whim yesterday, I decided to try out Scarlet Blade, a new Free-2-Play MMO from Aeria Games. Here are my impressions.

First of all, if you are at all concerned about the depiction of women in video games, Scarlet Blade will probably cause an apoplexy. This game is absolutely shameless. It makes TERA look like something made by Puritans. There are no pictures in this post because pictures would probably make it Not Safe For Work.

You can only play female characters. More accurately, each class corresponds to one female model/body type, though you can change the facial features and hair styles and colors. There are six classes: Defender (tank with a sword), Medic (healer with some sort of gun), Shadow (melee dps with claws), Whipper (melee AoE with a whip), Punisher (ranged dps with rifle), and Sentinel (ranged dps with dual pistols).

The game is a set in a futuristic, somewhat post-apocalyptic setting with an anime vibe. The female models are pretty much built for looks. To be fair, though, the game's lore does make this somewhat understandable. I'll go into more detail a bit further down. Of course, the fact that their clothing (if you can even call it that) is as skimpy as possible is just shameless pandering. There's also a lot of innuendo tossed around.

Edit: Just to illustrate what this game is like, the F2P cash shop actually sells an item that allows your character to run around naked. It's somewhat amusing how they went about this. By default, your character wears stat-less underwear/lingerie which cannot be removed. However, later in the game (after level 17 or so) different underwear/lingerie drops which actually has stats. So you have to purchase this Seal Remover in order to switch. But once you've used the Seal Remover, you can also just remove the underwear entirely. Voila, a nude patch for sale with a (literal?) fig leaf to justify it.

Combat is the standard hot-key combat, combined with basic theme-park questing. The interesting part of the mechanics is that abilities follow the Diablo 2 model. There are no default abilities other than the basic attack. You have to invest points gained as you level into different abilities. Points can be spent to upgrade old abilities or unlock new ones. So basically, you choose exactly which abilities your character has. If you want heals or buffs, you have to forgo improving dps abilities. If you want DoTs, snares or AoEs, that takes points away from your other abilities. There are also passive abilities that you can invest in.

It actually works quite well, at least while levelling. Endgame with fixed builds might end up in the standard straight-jacket.

One thing to note is that even though there are two factions, questing is the exact same on both sides. Only the name of the faction changes. There may be faction-specific content later on, but I didn't encounter any.

By now, you're probably coming to the conclusion that Scarlet Blade is another themepark MMO pandering to the lowest common denominator of adolescent males. And you'd mostly be right. But there is one element which is possibly worth taking a second look at: how the game treats the relationship between player and avatar.

In most MMOs, indeed most games, the character on screen is assumed to be an independent entity as far the rest of the game world is concerned. The player does not exist, the player is the character.

In Scarlet Blade, however, the female character on screen is an Arkana: a genetically engineered or modified being designed for combat. The player is the Commander of the Arkana, the one who controls it. It's sort of the equivalent of a drone being flown by a pilot back at base.

Except the drone is sentient.

Scarlet Blade runs with this setup. A lot of the quests come in the form of your Arkana talking with you about the situation she is in. NPCs talk to both your Arkana and you. A lot of NPCs don't consider the Arkana to be human at all. One of the questlines for the Punisher involves an NPC Arkana who was forced to come over to your side when her Commander defected.

I find it very interesting that the game is set up this way. It does justify why each class maps to a specific body type, and why there are multiples of that body type running around. I wonder if a lot of men find it more palatable to play as a man controlling a female character, than to play as a female character. I know it more closely maps to how I think of my characters in other MMOs. I am not them, they are my chosen weapons.

As well, it raises a lot of interesting issues. Slavery, mind-control, autonomy, the morality of sentient weapons, remote-control of weapons from a safe location, even gender issues related to control and objectification. I've always been interested in the intersection between player and avatar--as in Slashdance's masterpiece Frame of Mind--and this is one of the few games I've seen tackle that area.

In the hands of a less purient company, this would be an extraordinarily fertile design space. One that is an ideal match for video games. In a lot of respects it is a shame that Scarlet Blade co-opts this idea merely to have an excuse for having scantily-clad female avatars running around.

On the other hand, a more respectable company would have never come up with this scheme in the first place.

An Amazing LFR Group

I just got out of the best LFR group I've been in for a long while. It was a true LFR group, with people from several servers. It didn't seem to be a quasi-guild group.

It was for the first 3 bosses in Throne of Thunder. Jin'rokh - one shot, only one death. Horridon - one shot, one death. Council - one shot, zero deaths.

No one behaving badly in chat. No elitism or stupidity. No fighting over strategies. People doing what they were supposed to. Just clean and efficient execution.

I'm still ecstatic over that run.

More Hearthstone Thoughts

Ted A comments:

And now we bring you this 'blast from the past'. A blog post from September 4, 2001, just days after Blizzard Entertainment announced its new game, an MMORPG called World of Warcraft.
"The colors and graphics make it look fun and colorful. I will happily try it out. But I wonder if, in their attempt to smooth out all the inconveniences, Blizzard will fail to capture the unique richness of a game like Everquest."

Heh, quite true. One can never count out Blizzard, or discount making things more convenient.

Dawn Moore of WoW Insider had an interview with the Hearthstone team, which contains this nugget of information:

A secret is a card that you play into the play field that is hidden from your opponent and will trigger based on a certain set of circumstances. A simple version of that would be a card that says, "Counterspell: when your opponent plays a spell it's countered." It would sit there as a question mark in front of your opponent and they'd think, "I wonder if that's Counterspell, or Ice Block, or maybe Ice Armor?"

This is quite an intriguing game element. It actually points to one of the main controversies running around in paper Magic these days: how to handle automatic "triggers" (in a tournament setting)? A trigger is an ability which occurs (or triggers) when something else happens. A trigger might be optional, or it might be mandatory. The question in Magic is what do you do about an automatic trigger that was missed. Do you penalize one side? Do you back the game up? If you notice that an opponent's trigger should happen, and you don't say anything, is that wrong?

Optional triggers are easy, you just assume that the player chose not to do anything. But the best path for mandatory triggers is very unclear. A complex game state might have 10 or more triggers, making it very possible that one could be overlooked. The overlooked trigger could have changed the game radically.

In contrast, computer games handle automatic triggers exceptionally well. The computer makes sure that each ability that must occur actually does occur. So there's a lot more room to play with triggers because the computer takes care of the bookkeeping for you.

As well, making the information secret, but must trigger on the right condition is very interesting. For example, with the Counterspell, the opponent might have to "bait" the secret with a spell she doesn't care about.

This is quite beautiful design, in my opinion. Something simple and elegant, ideally suited for computer play. In fact, this mechanic makes me far more interested in seeing how the rest of Hearthstone plays out.

Hearthstone Gameplay

Blizzard unveiled a new online Collectible Card Game this weekend: Hearthstone. This video illustrating gameplay has been making the rounds, and pretty much all my gameplay observations in this post are based on it:



The gameplay looks like a very stripped-down Magic: the Gathering. There is only a single type of resource, mana crystals. The resource is a net-gain resource like land in magic, in that the total resource available increases each turn. However, the increase looks automatic, and there are no land cards. So there's no such thing as being mana screwed or mana flooded. There also looks to be an ability to trade a card on the initial draw, leading to even smoother draws.

Creatures and the player seem to be the same type. A spell that can hit a creature can also hit the player. You can attack a creature just like the player. As well, like players, creature health does not regen to full after each turn. Instead it looks like you can whittle down a creature over several turns.

Combat seems different as well. There doesn't seem to be a single combat step, exactly. Instead your attacking creature can attack another creature or player, and that combat is resolved. Then you can attack with another creature. It looks like you can attack any creature or player. The only exception appear to be creatures with Taunt, which I guess means that they must be attacked first.

However, that leads into what looks like the biggest difference. There does not seem to be a "stack". In Magic, you can respond to abilities. "Coriel Shocks (deal 2 damage) Elisandra's Elf.", "In response, Elisandra Giant Growths the Elf, making it big enough to survive."  This ability to respond to actions is in many ways the core of Magic.

In Hearthstone, it looks like there is no option to respond. Instead each ability is cast, and then it immediately resolves. This does solve one of the major problems with Magic Online. 90% of the time when you can respond, you don't really want to. But 10% of the time, that response is vital. In physical play, you just speak up when response is important. But in computer play, it becomes a lot more complicated. You have to pass manually every time, or set up "stops" when you want to respond.

Hearthstone doesn't look to have this issue. Gameplay should be smoother as a result. But responses are what makes Magic interesting. I wonder if Hearthstone will end up being first side punches, then second side punches, and each player's turn will essentially be a solo affair, without interaction from the other side.

Hearthstone definitely looks interesting. The colors and graphics make it look fun and colorful. I will happily try it out. But I wonder if, in their attempt to smooth out all the inconveniences, Blizzard will fail to capture the strategic richness of a game like Magic.

F2P and Crafting

A while back I noted that, unlike other professions, crafting armor and weapons was in conflict with content rewards. Today I realized that for F2P games, crafting is very often in conflict with main monetization scheme.

A lot of games sell cosmetic armor and weapons. In a subscription game, these might have been one of the items that crafters could make. But a F2P is going to try and reserve as many of these as it can for the store. Cosmetic armor is something that sells, and is also something that is clearly not power, so you don't get grumbles about Pay2Win.

This is especially true in The Old Republic. In TOR, armor is composed of a shell and modifications can be inserted into the armor. The shell is entirely cosmetic, and all the power comes from the modifications. Naturally, TOR has taken this opportunity to sell a lot of cosmetic armor in its F2P offerings.

But that has diminished the armor and crafting professions. These professions can still make one type of modification, but their potential range of products has greatly diminished since the introduction of F2P.

For example, Armortech can only make Aim/Cunning armorings and augmentations, while Cybertech can make any type of enhancement and general mods, as well as earpieces.

In subscription games, armor and weapons crafting is very often in conflict with rewards from content, often making them a bad choice. In F2P games, these crafting professions are often in conflict with the F2P market. This marginalizes those professions even more, and makes them even less attractive.

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.