A Counter-Intuitive Idea For Tanks in LFR

One of the major problems with LFR is the lack of tanks. Queue times for non-tanks can be very long. Losing a tank can cause your group to wait for a long time to get another tank, which often leads to a cascade of other people leaving.

First, let's acknowledge all the things which have been done in an effort to attract more tanks to the game. Threat has been nullified as a meaningful mechanic. Multiple new tank specs have been introduced. Extra rewards have been given out to tanks. The number of required tanks per raid has been reduced. And yet, all of these have not really solved the problem. At best we can say that maybe the problem would have been a lot worse without these actions.

So here's my idea for improving tanking in LFR:

Increase the number of tanks in LFR from 2 to 4.

This seems counter-intuitive. How can increasing the number of required tanks improve our experience?

Here's my theory. Whenever you ask about why people don't tank, they talk about the pressure, about the visibility of the role. There is a lot of truth to this. When you look at LFR, tanks are the only role where there is no "slack", no room for error. Raids are designed around 2 tanks, and usually both tanks have to perform at a high level to be successful.

If you look at healers in LFR, you can usually get by if four of the six are decent. For DPS, 10-12 decent dps are usually enough. Both these roles have slack, room for players who are less skilled. In contrast, the tanking role has no room for slack. On most LFR fights, both tanks have duties that they need perform successfully.

If we moved to four tanks, but left fights designed around two, there would be slack in the tanking role. Maybe instead of having a tank swap and having the current off-tank pick up adds, you could have two tanks dedicated to the tank swap, and two tanks on adds full-time. If one tank dies, the others can compensate. Instead of two tanks having to be perfect on a tank swap, you could have three tanks swapping. This would mean that it's okay if a tank misses a taunt.

For an inexperienced tank, it's far better to be the fourth on the roster, and maybe have one dedicated duty, rather than have to pull the full weight of a co-equal tank.

This plan wouldn't work in normal raiding, because the group controls the number of tanks, and always reduces the tanks to the minimum in order to add more DPS. But in LFR, the game controls the number of tanks. The game can throw in four tanks each time. As well, this ratio is closer to the ratio required for 5-man dungeons.

An LFR with 4 tanks, 6 healers, and 14 dps would have a larger margin for error in each role. One weaker tank will not doom the raid, any more than a weaker healer or a weaker DPS will. This will make it easier for people to start tanking and may lead to more tanks overall. Spreading out the load among more tanks should reduce the pressure on each individual tank.

Galactic Starfighter and Payment Models

The Old Republic unveiled its latest expansion: Galactic Starfighter. I'm looking forward to this. I absolutely loved X-Wing and TIE Fighter back in the day. TIE Fighter in particular is in my Top 10 Best Games Ever, maybe even Top 5. If Bioware can capture a fraction of the magic of those games, I think they'll be very successful.

The most interesting thing about this expansion is how Bioware is releasing it.  It's completely free for everyone. However, subscribers get access significantly earlier, about 6 weeks, than Preferred Players. Subs are also the only people who get access over the Christmas break. Then it's another month or so until F2P players get it. That's a lot longer than most early access programs.

It's also a good strategy to reduce server load. Only a portion of the playerbase will be able to try out the new content when it is first released. Then, perhaps when interest among the subscriber set is waning, there will be a rush of new blood.

It's interesting to see The Old Republic pivot back to emphasizing subscriptions. The Hutt Cartel expac is now free to subscribers. Now this new perk of time and exclusivity.

It's interesting that Bioware doesn't seem to be worried about people picking up a sub for 2 months and then dropping back to Preferred. Or maybe they feel that $30 is roughly the price of an expansion, and is $30 they might not have gotten otherwise. Plus they might get away with reporting that subscriptions jumped by a significant number for the last quarter, and then neglect to say anything when they fall back down.

In any case, as a subscriber I'm pretty happy with this method of release. It's a solid perk that makes subscribing worthwhile, but Preferred and F2P players will still get the content eventually. A perk that does not need to be maintained forever.

An Alternate Explanation for Gender Bias in Healing and Tanking

Milady at Hypercritism has an interesting post on The Politics of Tanking and Healing. Milady notes that women are more likely to be healers than tanks and feels that this is due to traditional gender roles:

In our social setting, many women see the role of healer as natural, appropriate, expected. And men are equally conditioned as wanting to fill the role of the protector as well as the leading actor.

This is quite possibly true. In fact, among Asian WoW players, the gender differences are even starker, perhaps reflecting a society where the traditional gender roles are stronger.

However, I'd like to propose an alternate explanation. Note that Milady does not consider the DPS classes. But there is a gender divide in the DPS classes. Female players are more likely to play ranged dps classes such as warlocks, mages, shadow priests, etc. than melee classes like rogues and warriors.

If you add the ranged/melee split to the tank/healer split, I think there's a stronger factor present than gender roles: range.  Healers and ranged dps operate at a distance from the enemy, while tanks and melee dps have to get up close.

So why choose stay at range? One possible explanation is risk-aversion. As a group, women are normally more risk-averse than men. So it makes sense that female players would gravitate to the classes that can stay away from the enemy the longest. Even healers fit into this scenario better. If you want to avoid dying, what's better than a class which can restore health?

Sadly, we don't really have access to good data that identifies the gender of the player. There are some interesting questions that we could look at. For example, among female DPS shaman, what proportion plays Enhancement (melee) as opposed to Elemental (range)? The same question could be asked for Druids: Feral or Boomkin?

What about Monk healers? Do female Mistweavers "fistweave" or do they heal in the traditional style?  Are women who tank more likely to tank on their second character, once they have a better handle on the game and the risks involved?

If we just looked at the healers, is the proportion of female paladins higher or lower than the norm for the other classes? Perhaps risk-aversion thesis should predict lower paladins, because paladins are traditionally melee. Though I suppose this is countered by the whole hard-to-kill vibe with the bubble and plate armor. I'm not entirely sure if a risk-averse person would be attracted to paladins or not. Plus, we'd have to account for the general awesomeness of paladins.

In any case, either theory might be true. Women and men might be responding the social pressures corresponding to traditional gender roles. Or women may be attracted to classes which appear to be less risky and more likely to survive. Or maybe both theories are in play, with different individuals having different motivations.

However, I prefer the risk-aversion theory over traditional gender roles because it also explains the bias in DPS class choice, and not just the tank/healer split.

Oricon

The Old Republic launched patch 2.4 last week, unveiling the new planet/moon base of the Dread Masters, Oricon.

There's a daily area and two new operations. I really liked the small questline that introduces you to Oricon. It's well written and I like how it tied back into or referenced the class storylines. Oricon makes me want to level my alts to 55 just so I can see the references for each class.

For new character or alts, completing the storyline will give you a full set of entry-level purple gear, positioning you nicely to work on endgame.

The new operations are quite good as well. I've only done them in story mode, and haven't yet killed the very last boss, but they're lots of fun. There's one fight where you send one team into the past and the other into the future. The future team has to relay information from the future back to the past team so that the past team can fix the future. It's quite inventive and very well done, if a bit confusing to explain.

Ever since Thorim, I've loved fights where the raid splits into small subteams to accomplish different goals. I think it's a mechanic that could be used more often. It always seems to result in elegant, inventive fights.

All in all, I think this patch was an excellent one by Bioware.

Updates

Interview

Matticus interviewed me for his site! Go have a look.

Nalak

Thanks for the advice about Nalak. I managed to find a group of people who were pulling Nalak for giggles. I tagged Nalak with the lance and lasted long enough to finish the quest. Now on to the collecting Runestones portion of the quest.

Twitter

I've signed up for Twitter. You can follow me if you really wish at @rverghes.

I haven't actually tweeted anything yet. To be honest, I rather doubt I will. But we'll see how it goes.

Compartmentalizing

Twitter and the New Blogger Initiative have me contemplating how we compartmentalize our lives. A lot of MMO bloggers have given the advice that you should use a pseudonym when blogging, and I would expect that to extend to things like Twitter.

I am undecided about whether this is a good thing or not. If you were writing about a subject like running, would you bother with a pseudonym. I don't think you would, I think you'd just be okay with people finding out that you are a runner. I'm not really sure it is good to hide the fact that you are a gamer.

Of course, on Twitter it is a little weird to see tweets from multiple areas mixed together. Politics mixes with WoW mixes with regular news. And even if you can separate these into separate streams, what do you do with the other people who don't choose to compartmentalize?

Nalak?

I'm at the point in the Legendary questline where I need to throw a lance at Nalak. (Yes, I've been slacking this expansion.)

However, no one seems to be killing Nalak anymore. There were some suggestions on Wowhead for soloing this stage of the questline. When I tried though, everything kept despawning on me.

I'm at a bit of a loss now. Any suggestions on what to do at this point?

Trust, Reputation, and Impersonation

It's interesting that CCP chose this issue of impersonation as its "hill to die on". When you look at all the terrible things that Eve players have done, why is this issue the one that CCP moves to squelch?

I think it is because this issue has the greatest potential to break down trust in the game. Now, most people in Eve say "Trust no one." In reality, however, many of them do trust others. Trust is only way a group of people, a society, can build something larger. And Eve is very much about building things. It is very important for Eve to foster trust.

In a world where many of the "civilized" social norms do not apply, trust has to be earned. Trust can only be earned by building up a reputation over time. However, to take advantage of a reputation, an individual must be identifiable as the one who built that reputation. If someone else can easily pretend to be that individual, then you cannot rely on reputation and therefore cannot trust anyone.

If two players cannot trust each other, they have to interact through a third-party that they both trust. But if no player can be trusted, then players are forced to rely on the one third party which they can trust: the game itself.

We see this a lot in MMOs. Most trading is done through automated markets or auction houses. Thus neither player on both sides of the transaction need to trust each other. In WoW, when LFR came out, it soon became apparent that players could not trust each other to distribute loot fairly. Thus Blizzard had to step in, and implement a game system that could be trusted.

The less players trust each other, the more the game company has to intervene. The game company has to mediate the interaction and dictate how the interaction works.

And this is unfortunate, especially for sandbox play. If all interactions occur through game systems, the emergent behavior we prize never has a chance to develop. The games become less interesting and more static.

It would be interesting to see a game with even fewer system that act as a buffer between players. Consider a system where mail had to be delivered by other players. Or a game without automated markets. It would certainly be inconvenient. But this game is also more likely to give rise to unexpected styles of play.

Another interesting experiment would be a game system which cannot be trusted. For example, an unreliable Auction House or NPC merchants who sometimes steal the money from a sale. What systems would players evolve to cope? Maybe they would make many small orders and just take the expected loss. (More likely they would just quit and go to another game, though.)

MMOs need to foster a certain level of trust between their players. The less trust in the system, the more the game company itself has to intervene to reduce the necessity of that trust, and the less likely that interesting or inventive emergent behavior will evolve.

An Asymmetry of Justice

Eve Online recently changed its Terms of Service and made pretending to be another player a bannable offence. Naturally, this being Eve, there is an uproar over the issue.

This issue is very interesting. Once you start examining the situation in detail, it leads to a lot of different places and different ideas.

One thing this illustrates is that there is a real "asymmetry of justice" in online games. The bad player can scam you, but you cannot punish her. In the real world, a scammer can be caught and lose their liberty or life. But in most online games, players cannot effectively punish other players. They cannot jail them, they cannot permanently kill them.

Even ostracism is very hard to pull off. As a simple example, you cannot prevent a player in Eve from trading with you, because the markets are implemented with an in-game system.

Of course, players punishing other players might lead to more griefing, which is why everyone stays away from it. But this leaves the game company as the only entity capable of punishment, capable of enforcing laws.

In a sandbox game, the game company should enforce the "laws of nature" of the world. How the world works, the nuts and bolts of physics. Ideally they would not enforce the "laws of man", leaving that up to the players. But other than A Tale In The Desert, no game has made that distinction. And even ATITD still had the game company be the enforcer of the laws.

The other problem, of course, is that of alts. In a way, alts are not really different characters. They are masks or disguises that a single character wears. And these masks are virtually impenetrable to other players. Once again, only the game company is capable of penetrating the disguise to the character underneath. And the mask can be discarded and thrown away if necessary.

Again, that makes it very hard for players to enforce laws or punish those who break them.

Eve takes pride in it's "Wild West, anything goes" atmosphere. But another way of looking at it is that Eve deliberately coddles the outlaws, denying the sheriffs the necessary tools to impose law and order.

Money Is Not Time

There is an argument among Free-2-Play advocates that "money is equal to time". The argument goes that some players are time-rich and cash-poor, while other players are time-poor and cash-rich. MMO design usually favors the time-rich players. These F2P advocates argue that F2P levels the playing field, allowing cash-rich but time-poor players to use money to make up for their lack of time.

I think that Diablo 3 has shown that this is not correct. Money is not a substitute for Time.

This is because games are emotional experiences. Only, the emotions evoked are not the standard ones, but flow and fiero. The emotions of engaging in an activity, seeking to defeat it, and the payoff from defeating a hard challenge, or finishing a long task.

But these two emotions require time. You have to spend time to get into the flow. And fiero is very often related to how long you spent working on the activity.

When you substitute money for time, there is no flow, and no fiero. There is no emotional attachment to the event, or to the payoff. And that makes the game itself less compelling.

Warhammer Online Closes

Warhammer Online is shutting down in December.  I played it for a bit when it first came out, and actually wrote a fair bit about it on this site.

WAR had several good ideas, most notably Public Quests. Having both an offensive and defensive target is one of my favorite UI innovations. I think that WAR has been quite influential on the design of the MMOs that came after it.

But ultimately WAR was a failure. I think it was a failure because, while it reached for new heights, it didn't get the basics correct. Chat was a nightmare, and the latency and performance were pretty bad. And who can forget the contribution bug. Not to mention that just logging into the game meant wading through a morass of splash screens and opening movies.

The real lesson of Warhammer Online is that cool design will generate hype. But polish and performance, the basic grunt work, are vital to success.

Blizzard Shutters Diablo 3 Auction House

The big news today is that Blizzard announced that they will be removing both the Real Money Auction House and the gold Auction House on March 18, 2014. (Gee, I wonder when the expansion will be released.)

As you know, I am not a fan of the AH in D3. I still didn't think Blizzard would remove it entirely, though. Props to them for being willing to reverse course as needed. I think the major turning point was probably the release of the console version of D3, which did not have the AH. The console version has been very well received.

That being said, there are some people attacking Blizzard for putting the AH in the game in the first place. I think this is misguided. It wasn't an obvious mistake at first. The AH was put in to solve the problem of third-party scams, and by all accounts it did a very good job at that.

What I think will be most interesting is to see what measures Blizzard puts in place to stop the inevitable third party sales, scammers, and spammers.  Will there be some sort of secure trading? Will trading be disabled entirely?

By and large, I believe the console version doesn't have issues with trading because you trade primarily with local players in your living room. As well, the different networks are segregated and more controlled. But I think that free trading on the PC will lead to the same problems as D2.

But perhaps that's the better outcome. The positives gained by removing the Auction House might outweigh the negatives of spammers and scams.

Proving Grounds

Until 5.4, I never realized just how much I resented the way Mists of Pandaria was turning out. I play a healer, and it just seemed like so much of Mists was healer-unfriendly. There was all this neat new content and game modes, and I had to switch to Ret to do most of it.  Brawlers' Guild, dailies, scenarios, Battlefield Barrens.

On top of that, it was so hard to gear up my offset, which made doing all this new content even more painful. The loot system in LFR makes you focus on your main spec, so you can't pick up scraps like in a regular raid. All the reputation gear used to cost gold in previous expansions, so I could have bought both main and offset. But now it cost Valor, a much scarcer currency, so all my Valor had to be dedicated to my main set.

Let's put it this way: I entered 5.4 with two i437 green trinkets in my Ret set. And that mishmash was still better than Holy for soloing.

But 5.4 has introduced Proving Grounds, and they are amazingly fun for healers!

My first attempt went pretty badly. Went through Bronze, but wiped out on Silver 5. Then I realized I was healing like an idiot, and decided to play properly. This time I beat Silver, and then wiped out on Gold 5. I spent the next couple of attempts refining strategy, and got up to Gold 9. That's where I stopped for the night.

I really enjoy it. It's not exactly like raid healing, but it is very PvE healing with a little more responsibility for the healer. You want to add a little more damage, stun a little bit, maybe even try to interrupt. As a paladin, you need to use your cooldowns, including Sacrifice.

The thing is that even if Proving Grounds don't teach you to raid heal, they teach you to heal, and to adapt your techniques to different damage patterns (damn rabbit bleed!). If you can do that, learning to raid heal is not all that difficult.

The NPCs are pretty funny, and play just badly enough to make it interesting. They miss some interrupts, don't stack, and stand in the fire. The comments on the healer threads are amusing. Some of the priests were complaining that if they Lifegrip the hunter out of the fire, sometimes he'll manage to Disengage back into it.

I've noticed some interesting conversations on whether guilds should require Proving Grounds for their raiders. I think that requiring Gold is excessive for a normal/Flex guild, but any decent player should be able to handle Silver. Requiring a Proving Grounds achievement is still better than requiring gear or raid achievements. I would break down the levels like so:

Bronze - for people completely new to healing. After this you should be able to do normal dungeons and LFR.
Silver - If you can do Silver, you're ready for Flex or normal
Gold - If you can do Gold, you're ready to try Heroic content
Endless 30 - Probably good enough to hang with the Royalty crowd

I think Proving Grounds is an excellent feature. I hope it encourages more people to try out the group-centric roles of tank and healer. Before Proving Grounds, you had to learn how tank or heal by getting tossed into real situations with other players. While there's something to be said for learning through trial by fire, a lot of people did their best to avoid that harrowing experience.

Giving Up Your Unique Points

In the last patch for The Old Republic, Bioware added two new flashpoints (4-man instances). The Czerka instances and boss fights are reasonably decent. The role-less story mode is excellent. However, the flashpoints are missing something.

All the other flashpoints in TOR have a light/dark choice. Most of them have conversations. The entire group goes through the conversation, everyone picks a choice, and the game randomly chooses a choice to play out the storyline.

The new Czerka instances are missing that element. They play like a pretty normal dungeon from WoW or similar games.

I think Bioware has listened to all the speed runners who urge people to "spacebar" through the conversations. Now there is no conversation to spacebar through. Admittedly, I only listen to the conversations the first few times I run an instance. Afterwards, I spacebar through them.

But those conversations are what made TOR flashpoints unique. I enjoyed them. Some of the conversation and choice-heavy instances are the best part of TOR.

Basically, if I wanted to run a straightforward, linear instance without conversations and LS/DS choices, I'd play WoW. I think giving up your unique points for the sake of end game efficiency is a mistake.

The Czerka flashpoints are good MMO instanced content. But they are not good TOR flashpoints.

5.4 Holy Paladin Changes

Patch 5.4 comes out tomorrow, and there are a fair number of changes for Holy Paladins. Here is a quick rundown of the major changes as I see them.

• Tier 3 talents are rebalanced - Mastery no longer affects the Eternal Flame HoT. The HoT does tick for more healing. Sacred Shield can be maintained on 3 targets. Selfless Healer will give you a Holy Power charge when you Judge (but Judgement increased in cost) and you can get free, instant Divine Light and Holy Radiances. I like the new Sacred Shield. Selfless Healer looks powerful, but you have to change your playstyle.


• Mana changes - Seal of Insight no longer gives back mana. Divine Plea now has no drawback. You should use Divine Plea on cooldown as soon as you have spent some mana. There is no reason to melee anymore.


• Holy Shock improvements - Holy Shock became cheaper and the cooldown is now affected by Haste. Combined with the change to Eternal Flame, Haste might become the new stat of choice.


• Guardian of Ancient Kings - cooldown is lowered, but only heals the target, not multiple people.


• Glyph of Blessing of Sacrifice - removes the drawback on Sacrifice. This is now a must-have.


• AoE Heals - had their mechanics changed to improve performance during raids. They should still heal for the same amount, but they now heal in a slightly different style.

There's probably a couple other minor changes. I'm probably going to switch to Sacred Shield. I may also try a Haste build and see how that plays. I did like the faster Holy Shocks with T14, and the new changes may bring that style of play back.

There is also lots of new content. I am very interested in seeing how Proving Grounds and Flex Raids turn out.

The Next Warchief

In 5.4, Garrosh Hellscream will be deposed, and a new warchief chosen to lead the Horde. Who do you think the next warchief will be?

I think that Blizzard will not pick someone obscure. They will pick someone with a lot of name recognition, who makes sense to the average, casual Horde player. With that in mind, here are my rankings:

Front-runner - Vol'jin

Vol'jin has gotten a lot of screen time, including a full novel. He's also the driving force behind the rebellion, and has been a racial leader for all of WoW. That makes him the obvious choice.

Contender - Lor'themar

Lor'themar has also gotten a lot of screen time in MoP, and has been developed into an admirable, competent leader. However, the big negative is that he is a blood elf. The Horde's motif in Warcraft is to be the "monstrous" faction, the outsiders. Having a pretty-boy blood elf be the Warchief cuts against that, and cuts against the Horde's identity in a major way.

Contender - Thrall

Thrall was the previous Warchief, and he has very high name recognition. But he's also the one who left the Horde, and it might seem weird to just waltz back into leadership. However, the orcs will still need a racial leader. Thrall is pretty much the most important orc left, and is likely to be the orc racial leader. Having Thrall be leader of the orcs--but not Warchief--may seem odd.

Dark Horse - Sylvannas

It's Sylvannas. Massive name recognition and popularity, and cunning enough that her ascension could seem plausible. However, she's been on the sidelines for most of Mists, so it would be odd for her to come out of nowhere and grab the throne. Plus, what would she really do as Warchief? She has her kingdom and her armies over in the Eastern Kingdoms. Taking on leadership of the entire Horde seems like it would gain her a lot of trouble and not many advantages.

I would expect her to use this opportunity to throw out the Kor'koron Overseers in the Undercity. That seems like a very Sylvannas-like move to me.

Conclusion

That's how I see the race for Warchief. I think Blizzard is going to pick Vol'jin. He's the one they've been setting up, the one who's story arc leads to the mantle of Warchief. To be honest, picking anyone else really seems like deliberately making a twist ending, just for the sake of having a twist. That rarely works out well.

FFXIV: Launch Woes

Final Fantasy XIV has been out for a week or so. There have been two experiences with the game. The first, the actual game itself, is very good and a lot of fun. The second, trying to actually log into the game, is very unfortunate.

The problem is FFXIV was not prepared for the amount of interest. The producer has said that, since it was a relaunch of a failed game, they predicted that it would start slow, and slowly grow through word of mouth. This may have been a reasonable assumption.

I think that they got a lot of last minute sales. I don't think the vast majority of the audience realized it was a relaunch. The 1.0 launch slipped under the radar for a lot people, including myself. As well, there are so many FF games that it is sometimes hard to remember exactly which number the series is on.

In any case, the servers have been swamped. Character creation has been locked on most servers. Most NA/EU servers are full, and you cannot even log into them. Personally, I've been experimenting with random characters on the Japanese servers.

Now, there are some technical flaws that make the situation worse. The log-in queue system is not very good, it seems to only handle a few people. Most of the time, attempting to log into a server is met with a flat rejection, rather than a queue. This encourages people to spam the login, hoping to catch the small window when someone leaves the server.

The second issue is that there is no auto-logout if someone has been AFK for a while. People are logging in, and simply never logging off. As we have seen time and again in MMOs, gaining personal advantage trumps behaving in a way that would benefit the group as a whole.

Tomorrow, Square is planning to add more servers. While this will be good, I hope they don't go overboard like The Old Republic did. Overly full servers now are better than half-empty servers in a couple months. I can see a lot of people trying this game and deciding that it is not for them. It is a slower, more old-school experience, with all the inconvenience that implies.

The real lesson is that these server-based games should start limiting sales. With physical sales, you could match your copies printed to your server hardware. With digital sales, the temptation is to just sell an infinite number of copies. As pretty much every major launch in the last few years proved, that creates an unhappy launch environment. The artificial scarcity (assuming that the game is good) might even help the sales, by creating more interest and more anticipation for new sales.

General Chat

I got into a bit of an argument on FFXIV yesterday. There were a couple of people having a random conversation in general chat (or shout, which is FFXIV's zone channel). Then a third person, Octavia, got upset with those two, and told them that general chat was for people to find groups and sell stuff. Octavia said that the other two were "making general chat like that of WoW".

I felt that was incorrect. I don't want to see general chat to be a list of "LFG, LFG, LFG, WTS". I like seeing random conversations.

But then again, random conversations often make LFG messages disappear if people are talking a lot. That can be frustrating to someone who is looking for a group. Also, conversations that touch on hot topics such as politics and religion are annoying. Seeing variations of "Trudeau/Harper is a meanie"[1] makes me want to turn off general chat.

That's not even to mention getting into barrens chat and the Chuck Norris or even less savory spam.

I don't know. Trying to restrict conversation, to move the conversational norms to just WTS and LFG seems excessive to me. At the same time, I see the attraction of it.

[1] In some alternate universe where Canadian politics is debated in MMO chat.

First Impressions: Path of Exile

It all starts with Diablo 2. Diablo 3 took one path, streamlining and simplifying systems. Path of Exile takes the opposite path, dialing complexity up to eleven.

Path of Exile is a Diablo-style action RPG. There are six classes: Warrior, Duelist, Ranger, Shadow, Witch, and Templar. Each class is locked to a specific gender and model. Like most action RPGs, you wander around the zone killing things for randomly dropped loot, upgrading your gear as you level. However, many of the systems are very different from the standard.

For starters, abilities do not belong to the class. Instead they are gems. All gear has sockets. Sockets are red, green, or blue. You match the ability gem to the socket. Let's say that you have a Templar and you find a Glacial Hammer blue gem. You put that gem in your weapon or armor piece with a blue socket and you can now use the ability. Any class can use any ability, only some classes are more suited to the ability than others. While you have the ability gem equipped, the gem accrues XP and levels up.

Then there is the talent tree. I urge you to go take a look at it. It is the ultimate talent tree, with hundreds of talents.  All six classes are embedded in the same tree, but talents closer to the class are more suitable. For example, if you wanted to make a necromancer, the major minion talents are close to the Witch's starting location. But you could still reach those talents from another class, it would just take longer.

I believe the development studio is from New Zealand. This gives the game a unique flavor. The accents are New Zealand or Australian. The native warrior is based on the Maori, I believe, rather than the typical Norse or African. It just feels very different from the norm.

There are other interesting touches. There doesn't seem to be any gold. Instead people trade using scraps of Scrolls of Wisdom, which allow you to identify magical items, and other bartered items. This is a very interesting idea, getting across the idea that this is an uncivilized land without even basic luxuries like coinage. Health and mana potions are gear items which can have stats. The potions refill as you kill monsters.

Path of Exile is also big into "leagues", which are modes of play where you start a new character. Each league often has specific rules. A simple example is the Hardcore league where you can only die once, and then your character transfers to the regular league. But leagues can get a lot more complicated. For example, there's a league which starts at a given time and lasts for 12 hours or so. Every few minutes, the lowest level character is kicked out of the league. The last character standing wins a prize.

There is really only one thing I dislike about Path of Exile, but unfortunately it is a major element. I do not like the graphics. It's all from the "realistic" palette, all dark greens, dark reds, greys and browns. I just find it unpleasant, and even hard to identify elements on the screen. I much prefer more "cartoony" graphics which "pop" on the screen. But this is very much personal preference. Other people may like this graphics style better.

Mechanically, Path of Exile is a very intriguing game. It's Free-2-Play, so it's easy to check out. It's complex, but if you feel that D3 went in the wrong direction, you'll probably enjoy the complexity.

Subscriptions Strike Back!

The latest news is three up-and-coming MMOs (Final Fantasy XIV, Wildstar, and The Elder Scrolls Online) are going to try for subscriptions rather than Free-2-Play.

Reactions seem to mostly mirror existing biases. The people who think F2P is the future, feel this is going to fail hard, or that it is just a money grab before the inevitable F2P conversion. The people who champion subscriptions want to believe that the tide has turned, and that super-aggressive monetization is falling out of fashion.

The only real conclusion I am drawing is that, given a choice, most developers would prefer subscriptions. The steady income without the need to constantly hawk the latest items in the store must seem a more enticing proposition to the devs.

I think the key is the target number of subscribers. If any of these games are targeting a million subs, I think they're going to fail and end up as F2P. But if they're targeting 100,000 steady subs, I think that's within reach for all three games. In between those two targets is a great deal of uncertainty.

Wildstar and C.R.E.D.D.

In addition to going subscription, Wildstar is copying the Eve Online PLEX model. CREDD is worth a months subscription and can be traded for in-game currency. It does cost a bit more than a month's subscription, though, which is odd.

I'm not really sure how successful this will be. Eve has a much stronger economic simulation. In Eve, the people who earn enough to purchase PLEX are heavily involved in producing and trading the goods that make Eve work.

Wildstar, on the other hand, looks to be more like a regular themepark game where the economy is secondary to boss drops.

Second, Eve does boost the trade in PLEX because they effectively only have one character per account. That means that many players have multiple accounts, increasing the income per player, and increasing the market for PLEX. Someone who is perfectly fine paying $15/month for one account might decide to purchase PLEX to fund a second or third account. That means the market for PLEX is larger and more liquid.

I don't really see that happening in Wildstar. But I don't know for sure. It is certainly an interesting experiment.

Do More Tanking Options Lead to More Tanks?

A couple of commenters mentioned on the previous post that having paladins be Alliance-only would mean that the Horde would have fewer tanks.

Has having more tank classes led to more tanks, though?

Vanilla only had 2 tank classes: warriors and bears.  Now we have five.  Yet it seems like the proportion of tanks out there is still the same. It's still very hard to find a tank, just as hard as it was in Vanilla. I am suspicious of the idea that death knights, monks, and the emergence of pally tanks has lead to more tanks overall.

Of course, it's also possible that there are more tanks now, but that Dungeon Finder and LFR introduced a larger population of DPS into regular grouping, which has swamped the increase in tanks.

But I don't think that is true. I think the number of people willing to be tanks is just rather low, regardless of the different ways one can tank.  Introducing more tank classes just increases the diversity of tanks, but not the overall total.