A Disconnect on F2P

First off, check out this article by Klepsacovic. Money quote:

Sell a man a fish and you feed him for a day; offer a man a free fish and an inexpensive fishing class and he'll get really pissed off and starve to death instead.  Because he's stupid.

Brilliantly encapsulates a lot of the forum chatter about F2P.

I often think there is a disconnect between how players think F2P works, and how companies think F2P works. You can tell what a company thinks about F2P not by what they say, but by what they offer for sale.

Let's say that we have a subscription game. The earnings might look like:

• 100 subs * $15/sub = $1500

Now, let's take a F2P game. Judging by the forum rhetoric, players believe that the revenue works like:

• 300 players * $5/player = $1500

But if you look at what most game companies actually sell, it's pretty clear that they believe their revenue looks like:

• 25 paying players * $60/player = $1500

They sell some small items, but most of the store is targeted to people who are willing to spend a lot of money.

This is the real advantage of F2P. Rather than trying to scrounge up more subscribers, they remove the limit on how much the former subscribers can pay them. It's easier to chase a few whales than thousands of small fish.

For example, F2P in The Old Republic has roughly doubled revenues. However, I would wager that the majority of the increase in revenue comes from existing subscribers, and not the new players. That is why TOR focuses on Cartel Packs, because subscribers are willing to buy them.

But a lot of F2P players have not come to terms with this, and the forums often break into complaints that item X is too expensive. But the truth is that even if it was cheaper, most players wouldn't buy it.

Exclusivity

I've seen a lot of discussion lately about making content more exclusive, especially in light of Raid Finder and Flexible Raids. It occurs to me that everyone arguing for more exclusive content just so happens to be in a position to do that content.

Perhaps Blizzard should make more exclusive content. I suggest they start with a long, lore-filled questline with amazing rewards. However, you can only access this questline if your account, on any character, has never killed a raid boss in normal or heroic.  And if you do kill a normal or heroic boss afterwards, the rewards become unusable.

Let's see how long the calls for more exclusive content last after that.

Flexible Raiding

I'm really glad I got in that post on Variable Group Size instead of sitting on it for a while like I normally do.

So Blizzard is introducing Flexible Raids, which can have 10 to 25 players and scale in difficulty. This will be interesting to see. I think it will be a success, but I also think it will end up cannibalizing Normal mode raiding. Removing modes is never very popular, but I can see the next expac having Raid Finder, Flexible Raids (with a slight difficulty increase at the top end) and Heroic Raiding (with a slight difficulty decrease at the bottom end.

I think the administrative advantages of Flexible Raids will prove to be too tempting for Normal Mode guilds. After all, a Normal Mode guild has all the headaches of Heroic Raid roster management, but lesser gear and lesser prestige than Heroics. Another small step down is not much compared to not having to worry about rosters.

Flexible Raids will use the Raid Finder loot system. I think that's pretty good, because it scales. To be honest, I think if Blizzard announced loot being won to everyone in the group, people would be happier with the loot system. There would be tangible evidence that someone is getting loot whenever a boss dies, and it's not just you getting gold all the time. Plus you could congratulate others when they get lucky, and they could congratulate you.  Bosses would feel more rewarding because you would see that someone in your group won something and the group became stronger.

I also see a lot of chatter that everyone will be "forced" to do Flexible Raids. Since it has its own gear level, I don't think much of this concern. If people insist on killing themselves for lower quality gear, maybe it's time to just let them go their own way. I do think that a lot of this concern would be mitigated if Blizzard overlapped some of the item levels between tiers (the way The Old Republic does). That way people would already have upgrades from the previous tiers.

All in all, Flexible Raids a big step forward for PvE MMOs. Blizzard continues to raise the bar. It will be interesting to see how other upcoming MMOs (*cough* Wildstar *cough*) respond.

Eve Online, Women, and Avatars

You've probably seen the news that Eve Online is only 4% female. Naturally the blogosphere is brimming with reasons why this is so. In my mind, there's probably no one reason that contributes to the lack. There's probably several reasons, each chipping away at the potential audience.

For example, if the ceiling for female participation in an MMO is 40%, maybe Eve loses 5% because it's hard scifi instead of fantasy, 5% because it emphasizes PvP, 10% because of the horrible reputation of its players, 5% because it's boring, and so on.  (All numbers made up, just illustrating that a series of filters can reduce the audience greatly, even though no one reason is fully to blame.)

Another possible reason is the different cultures that play Eve. For example, a large number of Russians play Eve. Maybe much fewer Russian women play video games as compared to North American women. This imbalance might knock another few percent off.

However, I would like to discuss one potential reason that I haven't seen anywhere else:

Eve Online is the only major MMO without a humanoid avatar.

At least, an avatar that actually makes a difference in gameplay. All you really have is a portrait and an avatar that you can walk around with in the station. In Eve, your "real" avatar is your current ship. Even Star Trek Online has your captain as an avatar, and using your captain makes up a good half of the game.

There are a number of research indications that, in normal MMOs, women identify more with their avatars than men do. For example, less than 10% of women will play with a male avatar. In comparison, 30-40% of men play with female avatars.  It's possible that one of main reasons that women avoid Eve is that there is no avatar for them to identify with, just a ship. Maybe many women would rather play a character, rather than play a spaceship.

If you accept this idea as possible or true, it leads to an interesting perspective on the Incarna debacle of 2011. In Incarna, Eve introduced 3D avatars, as well as micro-transactions to outfit those avatars. The playerbase, lead by the CSM, revolted, mostly because they saw the avatars as a waste of time in their spaceship game, and because they thought Eve was getting greedy with $100 monocles or whatever. I think Eve ended up dropping the microtransactions, and didn't really do anything with the avatars, though they were left in.

But perhaps one of the reasons for Incarna was a subtle attempt to raise the proportion of women in Eve by providing an avatar that could be identified with. An attempt that wouldn't really affect the rest of Eve proper, the way attacking any of the other filters would have. Of course, the micro-transaction side of Incarna put an end to continuing this experiment in any meaningful way.

Defiance First Impressions

On the weekend I picked up Trion's third-person shooter MMO, Defiance. I gather it's tied into a television show, but I don't watch that show. I assume all the named NPCs are characters on the show. It's a Buy-To-Play game so far, but I'm not entirely sure what else is sold. Maybe some boosts, cosmetic items and new episodic missions.

Defiance is an excellent game, but with one significant flaw.

Mechanically, it's very sound. The game feels like a shooter, like you are in control of your actions, and it's more skill than stats. Now I don't play a lot of shooters, so keep that in mind. The weapons all feel very different. Latency is not an issue, and the game performs very well.

The graphics are pretty good. There's a fair number of facial sliders in character creation, though sadly I had my usual trouble making a good looking character. Though I ended up with a pretty decent one. There are no classes in the game, but you do choose a background which determines your starting weapon. You can use any weapon you find however.

The setting is a quasi-post-apocalyptic setting. Some alien refugees came to Earth, there was a war, and some areas got devastated, including the area the game is set in. The story is okay, nothing amazing, but decent enough.

In a lot of ways, the quest structure is similar to Rift. You have main story missions and side missions. You also run across "situations" very often. These might be things like "Rescue some hostages" or "Eliminate a raider camp", etc. They're the equivalent of small Rifts. Anyone can join in and help, and when the situation is resolved, everyone gets the xp reward.

Then there are "Arkfalls" which are the Zone Invasions from Rift. These are much larger events that attract a lot more players. There's usually one active on the map at any given time.  There are also special mission types like Time Trials and Rampages, which keep a leaderboard of the best times.

For missions, anyone can jump in and help. If two people are on the same mission in the same area, they both help out. Essentially, mission objectives are tied to the area, and not the people.  As well, if your health goes to zero, you are incapacitated and another player can revive you. It's the same system I loved in Guild Wars 2, and works excellently here.

For skills, there's a large EGO grid. There are 4 main powers: an invisibility cloak, a damage buff, a speed boost, and a decoy creation power. You pick a main power and then you can pick talents near it which unlock more of the grid. You can then equip X talents. It's a pretty nice system leading to some interesting builds that you can match to your playstyle. On the whole, the power curve feels fairly flat so far.

You also get a vehicle, an ATV, fairly early. The ATV handles more like vehicles in a racing game than mounts in a traditional MMO. Vehicles are actually a great deal of fun.

Actually, the entire game is amazingly fun. You do short bits of content while slowly improving your character, both through the weapons you find (a bit like Diablo) and as you unlock new talents. As you go from mission to mission, I find it fun to just clear all the situations I come across as I go.  It's also excellent if you find a small group of 2 or 3 others and you work together to clear things.

However, that leads to most significant flaw. Defiance is an exceedingly lonely game. No one talks in chat, no one talks to other people. Because grouping is implied and automatic, you just kill things silently with other people.

Honestly, if I played MMOs with one or two real-life friends, I would say that Defiance is the best MMO for that small group playstyle. And assuming that we all liked shooters, I would push to make it the regular game of choice. You can feel that it would be an amazing experience with two or three on voice-chat.

But I don't play with real-life friends. I'm a solo player. And even though I'm enjoying Defiance hugely at this point, I think the loneliness and quiet will get to me. I like grouping and watching people chat about silly stuff in general chat, and that lack makes the game feel very empty at times.

Fixing Dailies

By most accounts, dailies are the number one issue in Mists of Pandaria. Personally, I didn't have an issue with the dailies in Pandaria, mostly because I didn't really care about them and did them desultorily. I'm still not exalted with the Klaxxi, the Serpent Riders, or the Anglers.

I think the issue with dailies was not so much the actual dailies, or even the fact that you had to do dailies to earn reputation. I think the main problem was that Blizzard chose to make reputation the mechanism to deliver alternate raid gear.

I think that link between reputation and raid gear coupled dailies and raiding too tightly together. It would have been better if that link was not as strong. Previous expansions had epics, but it was usually only a single piece per faction.

If I was redoing reputation, here's what I would have done for the expansion launch reputations:

1. i450 blue gear at Honored. i463 blue gear at Revered. Cosmetic items at Exalted.

This moves dailies and reputation down in the chain. Instead of being on par with raiding or high end PvE, reputation is on par with dungeons and scenarios.

2. Items cost gold instead of Valor.

Valor and reputation made for a double gate that was somewhat unnecessary. Simplify things by going back to just gold. Valor could be saved for separate raid gear vendors, upgrading, or simply dropped all together.

3. At Exalted, sell a Bind-On-Account Tabard that allows you gain Rep from dungeons, scenarios, and raids.

This is to help alts out. Your first character has to earn reputation the hard way, but subsequent characters have more options in how they earn reputation, and can earn rep simultaneously with dungeon gearing.

4. When patch 5.2 came out, add i489 epic gear to Exalted on old Reputations.

This keeps the rewards coming for the older reputations, adding additional catchup mechanisms, and adding rewards for the pure solo player.

Essentially, I think that putting reputations on the same level as raiding was a mistake. Reputations would have functioned better one level down, on par with 5-man dungeons and scenarios.

Alliance vs Horde Storyline Favoritism

One of the current issues in WoW is the perceived imbalance between the Alliance and Horde storylines. The Horde story, the rebellion against Garrosh, is a more interesting and central experience. The Alliance storyline feels like more of an afterthought. On the various fan sites, many fans ascribe this fact to Blizzard favoring the Horde at the expense of the Alliance.

However, in my view, this story "imbalance" was an inevitable consequence of the Cataclysm decision to heat up the war between the Horde and the Alliance.

In 2009 I wrote a post on The Nature of War, where I said that the modern view of war is "the only moral war, the only just war, is a defensive war." Thus it would not be possible to start a war without one side being considered evil.

Now in Pandaria, we see the end result of that. One side had to go evil to make the war "fit" with modern sensibilities. Thus one of Garrosh or Varian had to go bad, and Garrosh was the one chosen.

That sets up two stories: a civil war within the Horde, and the Alliance attempts to finish Garrosh. Of those two stories, the civil war is always going to be the more interesting story.

It could have gone the other way. Varian could have been the one to go bad, and the Alliance be torn apart by civil war. Possibly with Anduin leading the forces against his father. (To be honest, this might have been a better story than the Horde civil war.)  But in this alternate future, the Alliance storyline would have been the more interesting one, and the Horde the ones left behind.

Ultimately though, the storyline would still be imbalanced. The modern view of war demands this outcome. Parity between Alliance and Horde stories can only come when the two factions are not directly focused on each other.

Should Diablo 3 Remove the Auction House?

As you know, I believe, in hindsight, that the regular Auction House in Diablo 3 is a mistake. There have been several comments by the dev team that indicate that they are leaning to this view as well. Not to mention the crazy inflation due to recent bugs.

Assuming that the dev team comes to the same conclusion, here's a question:

Should D3 remove the auction house in the inevitable expansion?

Now, obviously if the AH is a mistake, the game without the AH would be a better game. But on the other hand, the people who are still playing Diablo 3 are okay with the Auction House.  A significant number of them like it. (Some may be playing in spite of it.)

I think this is one of the hardest questions for MMOs and persistent games. Should you remove a feature that your current playerbase likes, if you think that it will lead to a better game and/or more subscribers? After all, as the saying goes, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

As well, if you can't remove a feature, does that make you less likely to add new features, realizing that you can't go back if they prove to be a mistake?

Perhaps for D3 specifically, the best idea would be to introduce a new "No-Market" game mode. Like Hardcore, characters in that mode would not share a stash with characters in other modes. And that mode cannot access the Auction House or trade items. But gameplay would be the same as Normal.

It will be interesting to see how Blizzard approaches the Auction House in the new expansion.

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.