What If Paladins Had Stayed Alliance-Only?

I was thinking about the story imbalance between the Horde and the Alliance, and started wondering. What happened to all the Alliance paladins?

In a lot of ways, the story of the Alliance in Warcraft is the story of their paladins. Uther, Turalyon, Arthas, Bolvar Fordragon. But all the major Alliance paladins are gone. The last one is Tirion Fordring, and he is now neutral.

Back in Vanilla, paladins were unique to the Alliance, while shaman were unique to the Horde. I think that class distinction added a great deal of character to the two factions. The paladins symbolized the civilization and law of the Alliance, while the shaman symbolized the wildness and more natural state of the Horde.

But when the two classes were opened up to both sides, I think the Alliance lost more of its identity than the Horde did. For example, the Order of the Silver Hand went neutral, and became the Argent Crusade. However, the Horde gained two paladin orders: the Blood Knights and the Sunwalkers. It seems odd to me that there is no Alliance paladin order, but two different Horde ones. A Horde paladin, Sunwalker Dezco, is playing a major role in the Horde storyline.

I don't think the parallel case of the shaman matches. Alliance shamans are pretty marginal in the lore. There are some in the Earthen Ring. But shamans, especially with Thrall, are still central to the Horde.

Personally, I think the classes should stayed faction-specific. In my mind, the balance issues were not that bad, aside from Blessing of Salvation. Had Blizzard just axed that one ability, I think the imbalance would have been easier to fix.

It's interesting to ponder an alternate timeline where the classes had remained faction-specific, and the mechanical divisions between the factions had been deepened instead of lessened.

For example, in Wrath, Tirion Fordring and the Argent Crusade might have remained Alliance. And this could have been balanced by making Death Knights a Horde-only class. Death Knights were always classic Horde units, and the theme of outcasts banding together fits in well with the Horde. Not to mention the natural relation with the Forsaken.

Then in Mists of Pandaria, Monks could have been an Alliance-only class. In my mind, the quiet, contemplative nature of the monks and pandaren fit in better with the lawful Alliance than the rough-and-tumble Horde.

So in this alternate timeline, we'd have a Horde with Death Knights and Shamans, and an Alliance with Paladins and Monks. The differences between the factions would have been more pronounced. I think this would have made it easier for the writers to craft stories that were unique to each faction.

Of course, I don't think this plan would have been okay with the players though. If the Death Knights had been revealed as a Horde-only class, with no Alliance class in Wrath, the howls of outrage would have been deafening.

First Impressions: Final Fantasy XIV

I decided to give the open beta of Final Fantasy XIV a shot. I don't really play FF games, so I'm not too sure what the backstory of this game is like. I did like the trailer very much.


I haven't played a lot, so these are very basic impressions.

Character Creation

The character creation is superb, the best I've ever seen. It offers a very nice balance of options, while still making it easy and not too complex. In particular, I like that you can save a character look, and reuse it.

I think you can download the character creator from the main site, if you just want to see that. The only downside for character creation might be that you cannot really change body types.

Initial Gameplay

The game seems very polished. The UI is clean and colorful.

Gameplay looks like the pretty standard tab-target hotkeys. The GCD seems a little high, it's 2.5s to start with, but I think that there is a stat which reduces it. Combat is decent, though the effects seem very "flashy", with lots of particle effects. It's pretty typical "kill 3 squirrels" stuff.

Talking to people feels very much like a console game, with the speech bubble you keep clicking through.

One interesting thing is that there are three starting zones, but your starting zone is determined by your initial class.

Setting 

The setting seems like a typical Japanese fantasy setting, with a melange of types. You know, different characters using very different accents, and the word choices and names are mixed in from all real-world cultures.

It's interesting how Western settings seem to emphasize far more cohesive cultures. There is a common culture and style to Ferelden in Dragon Age, for example, which is different from the other countries in that setting. I wonder if it is the influence of Tolkein, or just the structure of Europe in general.

Experiences

I first rolled a gladiator, which looks like a one-handed sword class, maybe with a shield. Unfortunately, I ran into a bug where the North American servers think that I am logged in, and won't let me log in again. I didn't even get to test out combat on the gladiator.

So I made a lancer, which is a spear-wielding character, on the Japanese servers.

I gather that a single character can take multiple classes, though the classes use different gear. The armory system seems a little complex. I'm not exactly sure how multiclassing works.

Conclusions

It seems like a good enough game. It's colorful, nicely polished, and seems to work well (aside from that nasty login bug).

But it's pretty much the same style of MMO we're all used to and have been playing for years. Indeed, it feels very old-school, closer to vanilla WoW and Lord of the Rings Online (and probably Everquest, etc.). If you're looking for something different, this is not the game for you.

Diablo III Expansion Speculation

Blizzard is starting to put out teasers for the D3 expansion. Here is the first teaser image: Reaper of Souls.

This means it's time to start speculating about the expansion. Here's my wish list:

1. Two new classes, including the Paladin

I'm biased of course, but I'd love to see the paladin come back. D3 could really use another class that emphasizes melee weapons and armor.

The second class could be the necromancer, or maybe the druid, or even something totally new to Diablo. Actually something totally new would be cool, so we'd have one returning class and one new class.

2. A No-Trade, No-AH mode

I'd like to see another game mode, like Hardcore with its separate stash, only without trading and the AH. I think the AH hurt D3, and I'd like to see what the game is like without it.

Introducing a new mode with the expansion also creates a new level playing field for everyone to compete in.

3. Allow Hardcore characters to transfer to Normal mode on death

This one is shamelessly stolen from Path of Exile. When a hardcore character dies, transfer it to Normal mode. That way the hours of work that was put in is not completely wasted. I think this might encourage more people to play hardcore mode.

On the other hand, part of attraction of hardcore is the "sting" of losing a character. Maybe reducing the risk will make hardcore less thrilling. Maybe having the character lose all her gear would be a good compromise. Or maybe it would be better to just leave it alone.

Those are the three (or two and a half) ideas I'd like to see in a D3 expansion. What would you like to see?

Thoughts on Garrosh Hellscream

Dacheng asks:

Why are the orcs turning on Garrosh? Isn't he the best warchief they ever had? Oh, I understand why the other species in the horde might not be so happy with him, but why would any real orc care about those wusses? Lok'tar Ogar, and all that.

If we're talking story, the orcs generally aren't turning on Garrosh. Which is why we're besieging Ogrimmar.

As for players, I think that Horde players see themselves first as Horde, and second as an orc, troll, tauren, etc. So they oppose Garrosh for damaging the Horde as a whole.

I saw an interesting question today: Why do players hate Garrosh, but like Sylvannas? You can make a case that Sylvannas is morally worse than Garrosh, what with the plague and the val'kyr. Yet Sylvannas is still a clear favorite with many players.

My first thought is that it is because Garrosh is a jock, and Sylvannas is a nerd. Garrosh is a thug, with lots of shouting and physical intimidation. Sylvannas is all cool and calculating. Since the playerbase draws extensively from the nerd/geek subculture, which is pretty hostile to the jock subculture, their sympathies are with Sylvannas.

What's sometimes lost is that Garrosh is pretty effective as a warleader. He's conquered most of Kalimdor. The strike on Theramore was tactically brilliant. He took out the main Alliance stronghold on Kalimdor, and killed many high-ranking Alliance officers. He almost took out Jaina Proudmoore, which would have been the one of the greatest Horde victories. Not to mention that if Jaina had been killed, Dalaran would have almost certainly fallen to the Sunreavers, as both Rhonin and Jaina would have been dead.

Yet if you asked the players which type of villain they would be like, the vast majority of players would choose the cool, calculating intellectual style of a Sylvannas. They look upon the rough, physical style of a Garrosh with distaste.

Still, the greatest crime of Garrosh is not Theramore, but the death of Cairne and the treatment of the other Horde races. It would have been interesting to see a Garrosh who took the exact same actions towards the Alliance, but chose to bind the Horde together instead of dividing it. A Garrosh who gave Vol'jin command over a theatre of war like Sylvannas, instead of attempting to assassinate him.

I think that if Garrosh did that differently, but everything else the same, including nuking Theramore and despoiling Pandaria, I think the great majority of the Horde would have been happier with him as Warchief, even supporting him over Thrall.

What to Talk About?

I'm drawing a blank on what to write about. We kind of seem to be in a waiting period in MMOs. There's some interesting stuff on the horizon, but nothing immediate.

We could rehash F2P, or the Trinity, or similar, but I'm a bit tired of those topics.

So I will turn to you, faithful readers. Anything worth writing about?

Musings on the Bench

Everything seems to be moving along steadily. My guild in The Old Republic is trying to move into Nightmare Modes. We've killed Writhing Horror on NiM, but absences have delayed attempts on Dread Guards.

The thing is that we have exactly 8 players on the team, all with solid performance and excellent attendance. This is great most of the time, as we move through content at a steady pace. But when one person is out, we fall to pieces.

I dunno, it's the same pattern I saw in WoW at this level. Progress is so good with a consistent core that everyone tries for that instead of maintaining a bench. Then absences cause significant setback. I just can't convince anyone that preparing for those absences is a good idea.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the increased performance from a smaller team is worth infrequent chaos around an absence.

This was also the problem with 25s and 10s. The performance gain from simply taking the 10 best and most consistent raiders was too high for many 25 guilds to ignore.

Destructible Terrain and Griefing

Another major element EQ Next is promising is destructible terrain. I think it's going to be an interesting experiment.

The immediate question, of course, is how long will it take for everything to be destroyed? What will the anti-griefing measures be like? For example, if a monster can destroy a city, I foresee someone kiting a monster to the city at every opportunity.

It's kind of sad how everything can turn into a tool for griefing. Destruction can lead to griefing. Creation can lead to griefing. For example, people can take up all the free space with buildings, making it hard for new players to start. Or they crowd out existing players.

I think there could be a lot more work to be done with costs in MMOs, especially non-linear costs. For example, maybe maintaining 5 buildings costs 1 resource per building, but maintaining 10 buildings could cost 2 resources per building. Or something where it's easy to destroy one piece of terrain, but gets harder and harder to destroy more terrain.

Stable PvE Strategies

Continuing the discussion on Trinity gameplay, I'd like to take a step back and survey the situation from a higher viewpoint.

So far, in my experience of MMOs, there are three stable strategies for dealing with PvE. The reason I call these "stable", is that all other schemes I've seen are "unstable". These unstable strategies always break down and devolve into one of the stable strategies.

The stable strategies are:

1. Zerg - The enemy's target cannot--or it is not worth the time to--be calculated ahead of time. Whichever player is targeted is reactively healed or protected, or forces the enemy to turn away, or just takes the hits until death.

2. Kiting - The enemy's target cannot--or it is not worth the time to--be calculated ahead of time. Whichever player is targeted proceeds to run away, out of attack range or utilizing line of sight, forcing the enemy to chase after. The chasing enemy does minimal damage, while the other players can attack the enemy. When the enemy switches targets, the new target runs away.

3. Tanking - The enemy's target can be identified ahead of time, and the situation manipulated to force the enemy to attack a specific, hardened target. While the enemy is focused on the hardened target, the other players attack the enemy freely, while the hardened target is healed and protected.

Of these three strategies, Tanking is the most interesting, the structure capable of the most variation. Zerg and Kiting are far less fun if they are the major strategy in a game.

I do not think these are the only stable strategies in existence. But I have not yet seen an MMO that has successfully executed a fourth strategy.

A "rock, paper, scissors" strategy might be stable. The classic "infantry, artillery, and cavalry" is one example. Artillery destroys the slow-moving infantry before the infantry can reach it. Calvary moves too fast for the artillery, but gets broken upon the defenses of the infantry. But "infantry, artillery, and cavalry" generally requires a great difference in movement speed, which I don't think will work in a single-character MMO .

A game that is entirely ranged might have a strategy based on cover and firing lanes. This is typical of shooter games. This strategy is rarely suitable if melee is an important part of the game.

If you want to convince me that a non-Trinity PvE MMO will work, you have to outline a fourth stable strategy. You can't simply assume it exists. Describe it, and show that it will not devolve into Zerg, Kiting, or Tanking.

Revisiting the Trinity

Once again everyone is hyped up for another game which promises to do away with the Trinity of tank-healer-dps. This time the game is EQ Next. I am deeply skeptical of this claim. I'm not saying that the Trinity is necessarily the best system for PvE. But so far, no one has demonstrated a better system.

I've seen various people saying that EQ Next will feature complex AI, which will obsolete the idea of the Trinity. In my view, if the system does not work at the simple level, making it more complex is not going to improve things.

Let's take the very simplest PvE scenario. We have a knight with sword and shield and a barbarian wielding a two-handed greatsword. Both characters are fighting an ogre in melee combat.

Who does the ogre attack?

This is the simplest decision the AI has to make. The knight's shield improves her defense. The barbarian's greatsword improves her offense.

Logically, the optimum path is for the Ogre to attack the barbarian. Generally, the rule of thumb is that you first want to kill the highest offense or the weakest defense. The barbarian meets both those criteria. And indeed, this is what will happen in PvP.

But the archetypes of fantasy demand that the Ogre attack the knight, to take the sub-optimal path. That is the very point of the shield, to take the blows. The shield is a pointless choice if no one is attacking you.

So no matter what, to stay true to the soul of the fantasy archetypes, the ogre has to attack the knight. Trinity systems do it very simply by introducing the concept of threat, which is linked to--but not equal to--damage. You could also do it by having the knight "intercept" attacks made against other characters. Or perhaps by turning the knight into a source of debuffs strong enough that getting rid of the knight first becomes optimum.

Another path might be making the knight do the highest damage, making the choice harder. This probably won't go over too well with the barbarian, though. And it doesn't match the archetypes.

It is trivially easy to make a more competent AI than the Trinity system. The harder task is making one that leads to fun gameplay and yet stays true to the fantasy genre.

Group Dynamics in Raid Finder

I had an interesting experience in a Raid Finder group yesterday.

We had killed the first boss and were clearing trash to the second boss. One DPS player called out one of the tanks for not pulling fast enough. The other tank spoke up in support of the tank in question. Other people in the group chimed in saying that everything was fine.

The DPS player persisted in his comments. Then he got vote-kicked out of the group.

If this is a trend in WoW, it's a good one. Vote-kicking people who cause drama will make Raid Finder groups more pleasant. But most people would say that this is unusual behavior, and that normally the "elitists" hold sway.

So what made this group different?

I think it was the vocal support of the other tank. Followed by the agreement of a couple other players. In my experience, Raid Finder groups follow the lead of the first few people who speak up, and of the "skilled" people. I think there is a majority of people who don't like the "elitist" rhetoric, but they will keep their heads down and defer to the tanks and the top healers and top dps who do express an opinion.

Which leads to two conclusions. If you want to promote a positive Raid Finder group, you have to be:

• Vocal. You have to make your voice heard early, when the first sign of conflict occurs. You can't let the elitists hold sway, and attempt to reclaim the group later.

• Competent. No one questions you if you are the top dps or top heals or a strong tank. Maybe it is unfair, but as far as WoW groups are concerned, "might makes right". This is, of course, because the presence of a strong player makes the run more likely to be successful. Deferring to their wishes means they are more likely to stick around and shoulder much of the burden.

The thing I've found about many of the people who complain about the quality of WoW groups is that they don't put enough effort into the second requirement, into being skilled.

If you want to contribute to a better environment in WoW, you have to be competent. Otherwise your voice is discounted. Maybe this is unfair, but it is remorselessly practical. A tyranny of skill.

Resets on Player or Game

Clockwork at Out of Beta has an interesting post on questioning whether timers should reset based on the individual player's cooldown, or on a fixed schedule.

I think the general rule of thumb should be that if the timer can involve multiple people, it should reset based on a fixed schedule.

To see what I mean, imagine dailies had a personal cooldown of 22 hours.  Anna logs in a 4pm and does here dailies. Betty logs in at 10pm and does her dailies. The next day they both log in at 6pm and want to do the dailies together. Only they can't, because Betty's dailies reset at 8pm. In these types of situations, fixed schedule resets are better.

In contrast, personal abilities generally work better when they are tied to the player.

The intriguing situation comes when personal abilities are tied to the group. For example, in-combat resurrection. These ability cooldowns started off tied to the player, but more and more they are shifting to be tied to the group. In WoW, abilities with a cooldown greater than 5 minutes reset when a raid encounter ends. In SWTOR, using an in-combat res puts a debuff on the group for 5 minutes, preventing more in-combat rezes.

It's an interesting shift in how cooldowns and timers are handled.

Short, Pyschopathic Races

Wildstar released details of their latest race, the Chua. The Chua are a short, psychopathic, technologically-inclined race.

This seems to be a little bit of a trend in MMOs lately. WoW had the Goblins, Guild Wars 2 had the Asura, and now Wildstar comes up with the Chua.

I confess that I don't really understand the appeal of these races. They just come across as caricatures, with no nuance, depth, or grace.

These races seem to be an MMO-only phenomenon. I don't recall seeing anything similar in single-player games, books or movies. An odd coincidence, don't you think?

Frankly, the Chua have given me a bit of a distaste for Wildstar. I strongly hope that Wildstar doesn't overuse the Chua, thinking that they are "cool".

Small Decisions, Part II

In the comments to the last post, Talarian references Sid Meier's quote, "A game is a series of interesting choices."

Not all choices are made equal, though. Some choices are hugely important, some are less so. Some seem important at the time, but in hindsight were not. Some choices are difficult to make, others are easy.

My question is: Are small choices better than no choices?

The thing about removing all these small choices is that they really were not replaced with anything else. Or were replaced with a large choice that comes far apart in time.

Consider talent points. You used to make one small choice every level. Then that got replaced with one large choice every 15 levels. I've argued before that this was not a good change for the leveling game. The frequency of choice is also important, not just the magnitude of the choice.

A lot of other commenters brought up the point that these small choices were what added immersion to the world. I confess that I didn't consider immersion at all. But it is true. A lot of what we spend our time with in the real world is trivial (for example, choosing a drink at Starbucks), but that trivia adds texture. It is logical that minor choices would do the same thing for a game world.

Another common comment was that these choices are "no-brainers" and because they were not difficult choices, they were not necessary. I am not sure that I agree with this point of view. Some choices should be easy. Some choices should have a high success rate.

I think this is especially important for newer or less competent players. They need choices to make and be successful with. Small successes lead to larger successes. There's a reason that every guide in the old days emphasized taking enough reagents to the raid. This was something small and easy you could do, that made you a better player than you were before. A hunter that kept her pet fed was a better hunter than one who ignored the pet.

And of course, we all remember the people who failed these choices. If the choice was truly a "no-brainer" why did people keep failing on it?

I think the idea that all choices in a game should be hugely difficult is wrong. A good game needs a variety of choices, including some simple and obvious (to experienced players) choices. These small choices instill confidence in new players, and guide them to the more difficult choices. They make the game more interesting than having no choice at all.

Small Decisions

I've been thinking about reagents and arrows lately. They're basically gone from the modern game. They were seen as trivial and obvious, an inconvenience to be smoothed away. However, I'm wondering if we lost something in doing that.

Arrows and reagents were a small test of ... skill, I guess. A good hunter kept her stock of arrows up, and refreshed it regularly. Same with reagents. I remember keeping three stacks of the reagents for Blessings on me at all times. This wasn't a very hard test, of course. Most people did this. (Though there were a few who didn't, who never had enough reagents.)

Reagents were a "small" decision. You had to make the decision to restock every so often, had to evaluate your supply against the demands on your time. It wasn't a difficult decision at all, but still a decision that all players had to make.

There were many of these small decisions in Vanilla. Soul shards, poisons, feeding your pets, talent points, etc. Even going back to a trainer when you leveled was a small decision. You had to decide whether to stop questing and get the new abilities right away, or wait for a natural break.

Most decisions in WoW now are "big" decisions. Choosing a specialization, choosing talents, using the correct abilities. There are fewer small decisions and more big decisions.

Was there value in having those small decisions?

I think that it was part of mastering your class. You get the small decisions down before having to tackle the larger ones. Almost everyone got them right, and it was the first thing to learn when playing.

To a good experienced player those small decisions are obvious and trivial. The only interesting decisions are the big ones. But big decisions are rare. Fewer decisions make for a less interesting game. You can see this in WoW leveling. All those small decisions that you used to make while leveling have been smoothed away. But a game with few decisions to make is not interesting at all.

Firefall: First Impressions

Firefall went into open beta recently. I downloaded it and gave it a whirl.

Firefall is a third-person shooter, done in an animated cell-shaded manner. The class system is bound up in these battleframes, which your character can equip. Example battleframes are the medic, recon, assault, etc. You can change your battleframe fairly easily. Each battleframe gains experience separately, and is upgraded separately. So it's like being every class, but you can only equip and level one class at a time.

The setting is a somewhat post-apocalyptic setting, in the lush jungles of South America. Firefall gives your character jumpjets, and the game plays a lot with this. There are large cliffs to scale, and fights often involve you jumping while shooting.

The game that immediately jumps to mind as a comparison is Defiance. But the differences are instructive. Defiance has the vehicle game, Firefall has jump jets. Defiance features dropped loot, while in Firefall you accumulate resources and then craft loot. In fact, I think Firefall takes a lot of its gear and crafting inspiration from Eve Online, more than anything else. Except you can't trade, so it's like an Eve where you had to mine and craft everything yourself.

I tried the medic for a bit, but switched to the recon after a while. The recon seemed to be a much simpler playstyle, so I decided to use that while learning the game.

The game is very open, you can go anywhere and attempt anything. In combat, when you're at an event, the game is a lot of fun.

My current issue is that I seem to be having a hard time "finding the fun" in the game. I open my map, see an event or mission I would like to try. So I jump my way to area, running into cliffs and having to backtrack and find my path to the area. Then I get there, and the mission has been finished or is almost over. Then it's time to repeat the process.

Or they have these "melding tornados" large-scale events. I've joined two of those, but they ended abruptly, and everyone disappeared, and I didn't get any rewards. I'm still confused by the everyone disappearing bit. There must have been 20 people at the event, then the tornado disappeared and there was only me and one other guy there.

I see other bloggers raving about the game, and how they moved from event to event, getting stuff done. I think that I must be missing something.

I can't help but compare it to Defiance. In Defiance, events were very dense. You couldn't swing a cat without hitting something to do. In Firefall, events seem very sparse, and I seem to spend more time traveling than actually doing something.

All in all, Firefall is a pretty good game. Its combat is fun and handles well. I like the progression with the crafted gear and the different battleframes. I just need to figure out how to "get to the fun" faster.

Metacritic

UnSubject has an excellent post on Metacritic. I strongly recommend reading it.

The most interesting thing about Metacritic these days--and what makes it more controversial than all the other review aggregators for other media--is that some game publishers are tying bonuses to the game's Metacritic score.

This seems a little odd to me.  UnSubject's explanation is that royalties are tied to Metacritic because “it’s a quantitative measure of game quality, popularity and helps forecast sales”. I don't think this is the full explanation.

For one thing, Metacritic scores are a weak proxy for what publishers really want to learn: how much money did this game make? But publishers don't need a proxy to figure out how much money a game made, they have direct access to the sales figures. It would be more sensible to base bonuses directly off gross revenue, rather than an indirect measurement such as Metacritic.

The only theory I have is that gross revenue or sales can be thought of as a function of both game quality and marketing (and the sheer fickleness of the audience). However, marketing is traditionally the responsibility of the publisher. It seems unfair to pay or withhold bonuses if the publisher did a good or bad job on the marketing.

In theory, reviewers should not be affected by marketing. Metacritic scores should filter out marketing's contribution to gross revenue, and only represent the developer's contribution.

Of course, the fact that Metacritic tends to correlate well with popularity and sales generally means that this extra indirection is unnecessary. It would be interesting to see what games are outliers. Games where the Metacritic score did not predict sales or revenue; either a poorly-rated game selling many units, or a highly-rated game selling fewer units.

The State of Healing

I saw this post by Vixsin on The State of Healing, and I wanted to comment on the general subject. Please note that I'm not really doing organized raiding this expansion, so you should take my thoughts with a grain of salt.

I think there has been a general problem healing this expansion, and perhaps taking a step back, a general problem in the design of healing since TBC.

The problem this expansion is that there is too much "ambient" healing. Compared to previous expansions, there's lots of aoe heals, lots of hots, and lots of absorbs that kind of buffer the entire raid. There seems to be a lot less triage and healing assignments.

The problem with this is that boss damage needs to balance out healing. Lots of ambient healing leads to lots of ambient damage. This means if the ambient, background healing ever dips down, then all of a sudden the damage can seem overwhelming. Second, and you see this in LFR a fair bit, healers that do not heal in an ambient style do far less healing than they should.

Now, the problem with healing development in general is a bit more subtle. It seems that when Blizzard is looking at the healing classes, the thought process is, "X is pretty cool, let's make more use of X". So they use X a lot more and the game breaks.

The obvious example this expansion is absorbs. Power Word: Shield is a cool spell. It does something slightly different than all the other spells, and wasn't too broken on its own (at least when it was more restricted). Blizzard saw that PW:S was good, and spread it around when they needed new spells and abilities. Paladin mastery, spirit shell, etc. And then the game broke.

It's not just absorbs. Cooldowns and AoE spells have followed the same pattern. Rare at first, with only one or two specs with access to a version that usually had a significant downside. Then everyone got access and the healing game became unbalanced.

Older paladins will remember that critical strike and Illumination did something similar. The original Illumination made critical strike interesting, but crit was a rare stat for paladins. Then Blizzard saw that paladins were chasing crit, embraced it, and ended up breaking Holy paladins.

In my mind, healing works best when it is fairly basic. A couple direct heals, a signature heal, and weak (non-spammable) AoE heal is all you really need for a good healing environment. Making healing more complicated, in some sort of arms race, just leads to less fun healing environments. Damage has to keep up with healing. The more powerful healing is, the more powerful boss damage is, and the healing environment becomes less forgiving and less fun.

Proving Grounds

The new Proving Grounds coming in 5.4 look pretty neat. I think teaching players how to tank and heal without throwing them into a live group will be a good change.

I'm rather amused that,  for the healer challenge, Blizzard included a hunter who stands in the fire and a mage who yells for heals. Good preparation for actual group content.

There's been some concern that the Proving Grounds will be the new "requirement" for guilds or pick-up groups. I think that it will actually be good for the game if Proving Grounds become the new requirement.

The current credentials required tend to be a catch-22. Usually PuGs are asking for people who have already done the instance, or have gear from the instance. So you require the help of the group to get the credential that will allow you to join the group.

In contrast, Proving Grounds are a credential that you can earn on your own. That makes it a much better credential for people looking to start raiding.

Pugs will always require some sort of proof that you are skilled enough to be successful at the group. Proving Ground completion is in some ways a superior form of proof to the two current methods. Thus, I actually hope that Proving Grounds become required by PuGs, supplanting gear and instance achievement checks.

To put it another way, if you're looking for your first job, and everyone requires 2 years of work in the same field, you're going to have trouble finding a job. But if employers are willing to substitute a degree or certification requirement, that can make it a lot easier to break into the field.

(Of course, you're going to run into problems if employers don't feel that the degree or certification matches actual ability. Then it's just a waste of time and money.)

The End of MMO Blogging?

Always fond of navel-gazing, the blogosphere has been discussing why there are so few new MMO bloggers these days. I see a lot of calls to make a better community. However, I don't really see why new bloggers need so much hand-holding. The previous generation managed just fine without artificial "communities", just by linking and writing steadily.

Here's my theory:

The current generation of bloggers grew up and moved on to more important things. The next generation which should have replaced them is functionally illiterate.

I am exaggerating for comedic effect. But I do think that there is a difference between the previous generation (late 20s, 30s) and younger people. A generational gap between people who came to the internet after elementary school, and those who have grown up with the internet. Young people seem to have real problems with long form writing.

I don't know why this is. Perhaps it was the experience of actually writing material out by hand. Or perhaps that before the internet, one had to read books, so there was an assumption that written material should be longer than 140 characters.

To look at it another way, the teenage experience of my generation's internet was Livejournal, where people composed long angsty screeds. The current teenage experience is a picture with a caption that is marginally funny.

That's my theory. MMO blogging is dying because the young players--who should be the new bloggers--simply don't write content of moderate length anymore.

Throwing in the Towel on F2P

With the news that WoW is looking at an expanded cash shop, I guess that's the last nail in the coffin for those of us who prefer pure subscription games.

I'm not too happy about this, but I'm resigned to it. I don't really see that it produces better games. If anything it just seems like a low-grade annoyance, making the game slightly worse.

Take yesterday's "event" in The Old Republic. It was the 10th anniversary of the release of Knights of the Old Republic. To celebrate, for 24 hours TOR allowed you purchase a title, "Revan's Heir", for the low, low price of 10 cartel coins.

10 cartel coins is very cheap, it's pretty much nothing. But it was so cheap that you have to ask yourself, why even bother selling it? If this had been a sub game, everybody logging in would have gotten the title.

It was to get people to use the cartel store. Like a drug dealer, the first hit is (almost) free. But now that people have used the cartel market, maybe they'll buy more stuff.

It's just so corrosive. Yesterday should have been a celebration. Instead, the entire thought process is "How can we monetize this?"

In the end, though, I blame gamers. Penny-wise, pound-foolish. It doesn't matter how bad our games get, so long as someone else pays for them. We'll just complain about it on the forums.