The Latest in Anti-Bot Techniques

Archeage has a pretty cool anti-bot program. There's an ability you can use to report a bot. This ability costs 25 Labor. Trion checks the report and squashes the bot. If it is a bot, you get 50 Labor back, for a net profit of 25 Labor.

Since Labor is scarce for F2P players, this has encouraged a number of them to take up bot hunting as a sport for fun and profit.

This is clever because it utilizes humans for the computationally difficult task of differentiating bots from regular players. This is a task that humans are quite good at, and are especially good at continuing to identify bots as their behavior changes. Botting, as Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography, is something that "I know it when I see it".

It's also quite meta, in that it makes a mini-game out of removing bots, which is highly appropriate in a game.

Well done, Trion. Let's just hope that this doesn't go to the next stage:

Shortly before the Patrician came to power there was a terrible plague of rats. The city council countered it by offering twenty pence for every rat tail. This did, for a week or two, reduce the number of rats—and then people were suddenly queuing up with tails, the city treasury was being drained, and no one seemed to be doing much work. And there still seemed to be a lot of rats around. Lord Vetinari had listened carefully while the problem was explained, and had solved the thing with one memorable phrase which said a lot about him, about the folly of bounty offers, and about the natural instinct of Ankh-Morporkians in any situation involving money: “Tax the rat farms.”
- Terry Pratchett, Soul Music

Day One Pricing for the Base Currency

Pretty much all MMOs have a base currency: gold, credits, gil, etc. This is the currency that the most transactions use, as well as the currency used between players. It's also the currency which is the most constant from the beginning to end. Here's something I've been wondering about base currency lately:

If the game offers something purchasable for base currency in an update, must it be affordable on Day One?

Both FFXIV and TOR offered player housing for what seemed to be exorbitant amounts of base currency. There were a lot of complaints that the prices were not affordable. But I did not think they were completely out of reach. It might have taken a few weeks, but I think everyone could earn the necessary amounts.

However, there seems to be an expectation that if something is offered for gold or credits, you should be able to buy it as soon as it comes out. This is in stark contrast to the other currencies. If an item costs 5000 Valor, no one bats an eye that it will take you a few weeks to earn enough Valor to purchase the item. But have the item cost 500,000 gold, and players will howl.

Not to mention that these items with exorbitant prices sell. In FFXIV, many of the servers have sold out of the limited personal housing supply. That strongly implies that the prices were not high enough.

Why do players treat the base currency so differently than the other currencies?

A Queue System Design

Archeage Queue Issues

The major news from the Archeage launch are the queues. The queues are very long at the moment, especially for F2P people. I have not been able to play my first character for several days as the queues are always upwards of a thousand players. I made a second character, an archer, on a newer server. Since the server seems to be primarily made up of F2P people, the queue times for me as a patron are negligible.

Still, it's interesting to see how Archeage's game design has interacted with the queues. There is one significant design element which is making the queues much worse than they should be. For all non-combat activities in Archeage, there is one primary resource: Labor. All crafting and gathering activities cost Labor, which regenerates over time. Labor is shared across the entire account, not per character.

However, for F2P accounts, Labor only regenerates when you are online! So that provides extra incentive for people to stay online. Not only do they avoid the queues, but they get the resource needed to play the game. So naturally Archeage is now full of people AFKing and making macros to avoid being kicked off. This, of course, makes the wait time for the people in the queue longer.

In some ways, Archeage would be better off right now if this design had been reversed: if F2P people only regenerated Labor when they were offline. That would give people incentive to log off, and let new people onto the server.

The problem here is that the queues are temporary, for the launch rush. For general play, when the population is at a steady state, it's better that the F2P players have an incentive to stay online to provide content for the paying players.

Finally, because Archeage is an open world where players can obtain property, Trion cannot use the "normal" method of opening up extra servers or extra instances and then merging them together. Merging claimed property would be a nightmare.

My Queue System

Here's my design for a queue system for a game:

1. A queue to enter the game always exists, and players always go through the queue when first connecting to a server. Of course, if the server is not full, going through the queue is pretty much instantaneous.
2. When a player reaches the front of the queue, the game assigns the player a "window" of X hours, and lets them log into the game proper. If you reach the front of the queue at 6pm, your window might be from 6pm to 8pm.
3. If you disconnect and reconnect anytime during your window, you bypass the queue and automatically enter the server.
4. When your window closes:
1. If there are people waiting in the queue, you are logged off the server and re-enter the queue at the end.
2. If there are no people in the queue, you are issued a new window of X hours and can continue playing. You are not logged off in this case.
5. If the server goes down for Y minutes, all current windows are extended for Y minutes.

I think this is a reasonably fair queue system. It guarantees that you get to play for X hours once you sit through the queue. You can log off for a few minutes, and then log back on. But after you've played for a bit, you have to log off and let someone else play. It's like taking turns on the playground.

Because everyone has a window at all times, even those who logged in when there were no people in the queue, people start getting logged off naturally once a queue forms.

The major issue with this system that I can see is that the number of people who are currently logged into the server is now different from the number of people who could be logged into the server. For example, if you play for an hour, then log off and go to sleep, the system doesn't know that you are not coming back. It has to make the assumption that you could come back. Thus you have to be careful when determining how many active windows you can have, and the length of a window. But those are variables which can be tuned.

Parity of Time

Azuriel has an interesting post on Parity as Entitlement. He's discussing entitlement, F2P, money and time. At one point his discussion touches on the different amounts of time people have available:

Perhaps this disagreement comes from differing definitions of parity. Tobold in later comments suggests no MMORPG features parity because different people have different amounts of time to spend playing the game. This is not a dilemma to me – as I mentioned previously, the both of us have the same 24 hours in a day in which to allocate our time. I have zero issue with you receiving greater rewards (etc) for having spent more time playing the game than I. In fact, it sort of boggles my mind that this is even a point of contention. Is that not how any activity should inherently work? “You spent more time reading a book and got farther into than I did… unfair!”

Many players and MMO developers do not agree with this perspective. If it was feasible to enforce parity of time, many games would do so.

Existing MMOs have many mechanics which push towards parity of time. The most blunt example is raid lockouts. Play a little or play a lot, you can only do the latest raid once per week. WoW even tried limiting attempts per boss. It didn't go so well, but they did try.

Often there are extra rewards for the first instance you run per day, or the first X instances per week. This pushes towards parity of time by front-loading most of the reward onto the first few hours. You still get more reward as you play more hours, but the majority of the reward is concentrated in the first few hours.

The Old Republic does something similar with daily quests. The daily quests can be done each day, but there's also a weekly quest that requires you to do each daily once. The presence of the weekly makes the first set of dailies more rewarding.

Pretty much every currency after the base currency has a cap. Maybe you can only earn 1000 Endgame Currency a week, and can only bank 3000. Again this plays into parity of time. After a threshold, playing more hours simply does not help you.

Finally, there's rest XP. If someone plays fewer hours, the hours they do play become more valuable than the hours played by high-playtime player. The value per hour played effectively scales with the number of hours that are not played.

Far from players and developers accepting the disparity in time played, they actively add mechanics to mitigate that disparity. It is unfeasible to enforce true parity of time, but that doesn't mean that devs and players see the disparity as desirable.

(Admittedly, it would be pretty funny to see a game try to enforce true parity of time. Imagine a game which limited you to 10 hours per week. It would be interesting to see the audience's reactions.)

Archeage Impressions

Archeage headstart was this past weekend. Recalling that I had (perhaps foolishly) bought a Founder pack, I decided to join the fun.

The launch hasn't been the smoothest launch, but it also hasn't been the worst launch either. There are pretty long queues at the moment, but I think they will die down after the initial rush.

There's a somewhat similar situation with land. Archeage is a "sandboxy" game, with crafting and farming right in the world. It's a non-instanced world too, which is something I have greatly missed. In any case, the open world means that land is valuable and can be used up. Right now, it's almost impossible to find space for a small farm in first few zones.

On the one hand, that's a bit annoying. But it does make the world feel more like a world. Land also has taxes that need to be paid, so I'm fairly sure some plots will start to be freed up in a few weeks.

Personally, I decided to skip the crafting, farming, and trading. I just focused on the questing. This may have been the wrong decision. The non-combat parts of the game are what make Archeage special.

The questing is decent enough. It's very clearly an Asian import. The main story, at least the Nuian one, is actually kind of interesting so far.

Combat feels good. It's tab-target, not action. But a lot of abilities put debuffs on mobs, and then have combos if a debuff is present. So you can figure out and set up chains of abilities, each combo-ing off the last one. It feels quite impressive when you find a decent chain.

The skill system is similar to Rift's, but without classes. Instead you pick three trees from a set of 10 or more. Then you spend skill points to pick up abilities in each tree. Each combination of three has a special name. I went Battlerage + Defense + Vitalism, giving me a class of Paladin (naturally!). I'm using a charge, a filler, and a whirlwind attack from Battlerage, an HP buff and a shield bash from Defense, and a Heal-over-Time from Vitalism.

You can spend gold to change your trees, so you can try many different builds on one character.

Still, though, there's nothing super amazing about Archeage's questing and combat. If you've played any MMO since WoW, you've probably seen these mechanics.

Other than that the only interesting things so far are your mount, a boat, and a glider. The mount levels as you ride it places, and unlocks abilities so you can fight from horseback. As for boats, you get a small rowboat at level 10 or so. It handles well, and feels like a small rowboat. The glider is pretty interesting too. Gliding is fun, though it's annoying when you're trying to glide to a specific location and you're still too high up when you reach it.

As I noted above, it's the non-combat aspects which are the main hook for Archeage, and unfortunately, it's the part of the game that I haven't really gotten to try out. On the whole, Archeage is worth trying. However, if a player doesn't get hooked by the crafting and farming, or possibly the PvP around those activities, I don't think she will stay. So far at least, the PvE alone isn't enough to satisfy.

Upcoming Schedule for Warlords of Draenor

Warlords of Draenor is being released in a few months. Since I'm not actually playing WoW these days, I've lost track of exactly when things are occurring. So I thought I'd list all the upcoming events that I know about.

Date	Event
Oct ??	Patch 6.0 released. No formal release date yet, but it's usually about a month before the expansion proper.
Nov 7-8	Blizzcon
Nov 13	Warlords of Draenor released.
Nov 21 - Jan 6	WoW's 10th Anniversary. Remastered Molten Core (for level 100) and Southshore vs Tarren Mill (for level 90-100).
Dec 2	Rated PvP season starts.
Dec 2	Normal and Heroic Highmaul raid opens.
Dec 9	Raid Finder and Mythic Highmaul opens.

I'm really happy that raids are not being opened right away. At least there will be a few weeks so people can take their time levelling.

It seems like a short time between the start of the expac and the 10th Annversary. However, you only have to do the content once to get all the rewards, so that should make it a lot easier. As well, Blizzard does have data on how fast people normally level.

Still, the holiday season occurs at the same time. I expect that Blizzard to be monitoring what percentage of the playerbase has done the anniversary content. My guess is that they will extend the availability of the content to the end of January.

The Old Republic: Forged Alliances and Conquests

Forged Alliances

Patch 2.10 for Star Wars: The Old Republic came out today. It contained the third part of the Forged Alliances story, which turns out be a prelude to the next expansion.

The tactical flashpoint was well done. It seemed a little bit easier than the previous flashpoint, but felt like the correct difficulty for a tactical (no Trinity). The previous Manaan flashpoint was a touch too difficult.

The upcoming expansion storyline looks to be very interesting. It's actually pretty hard to talk about without spoilers, and as this is Day One of the new patch, I'll avoid them.

Conquests

All in all, TOR is good shape these days. Since the introduction of Conquests and decorations, we've been doing a lot more random stuff as a guild, including flashpoints and old operations. Today we did a random guild run of the Story Mode Karagga's Palace operation, just because it was worth 4000 conquest points.

It's sort of odd though. Conquests are just a list of existing activities with points and a leaderboard attached. Yet that's enough to get us doing things we never did before. Having the list of activities rotate from week to week was an excellent design.

As well, because the guild earns points for the leaderboard, the competition is guild versus guild, and that encourages the formation of guild groups.

Perhaps people want to group up, but just "to have fun" is not a good enough reason. Perhaps all that's really needed from the devs is just an excuse to do stuff.

Wildstar Woes

Apparently Wildstar isn't doing too well. It's losing players at a rapid rate and is switching to a single megaserver.  There's a 700+ comment thread at Massively discussing the issue. Massively blames it on the focus on raids and very difficult endgame content.

It's interesting to watch this from outside. I was in the Wildstar beta, but did not get the game at launch.

However, I'm not so sure that raiding and endgame are to blame, precisely. Sure, it's where a lot Massively readers--who are core MMO gamers--washed out. But my rule of thumb is that there are people who are ten times better than you are, and people who are ten times worse than you are. If the core MMO gamer group washed out at endgame, where do you think the casuals washed out?

I think the basic leveling game was too difficult. I actually wrote a post on the Beta forums when I was just level 15 or so, saying "I don't think I'm good enough for the game you are making." I found that just basic leveling quests in the Wildstar beta required a lot of intensity and avoiding telegraphs. I think having that reaction--for a fairly experienced gamer--at level 15 was a bad sign, because the game would only get harder.

Personally, I think it's instructive that two of MMO success stories of the past decade, WoW and FFXIV, have featured very simple leveling.

I also think Wildstar suffers from the "veto" problem. Let's say that you have a group of friends who want to go out for lunch. You have to find a place which all of you can agree to, or at least a place that no one cares enough to veto. I think Wildstar was different enough--both in tone and mechanics--that many groups had one individual feel strongly enough to veto it. And that means that the entire group falls away from the game.

Of course, though, this is just my view as an outsider and beta tester. Perhaps those of you who played the game at launch or over the last few months have a different perspective.

Log Horizon

There are many shows and books about people trapped in a virtual reality: Sword Art Online, Tad Williams' Otherland, The Matrix, many Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes about the holodeck, etc. Most of the time these stories share a common element: if you die in the virtual reality, you die in the real world. Thus the story usually revolves about the protagonist trying to avoid the dangers of the virtual world.

Log Horizon is different. It is about a bunch of people trapped in an MMO, but with all the MMO mechanics intact. This includes resurrection when people die. This immediately removes the default danger of stories like this, and results in a far more unique show.

The basic plot is that on the eve of the latest expansion of the MMO Elder Tales, which has been running for eight years, all the players wake up in a world which is identical to the world of Elder Tales. They wake up as their characters, and can access all their abilities. They're just physically "in" the world, and have no way to leave.

The protagonist is Shiroe. He's an Enchanter, a non-healer support class that specializes in control, buffs, and debuffs. The show follows him and his group as he comes to terms with the new situation, and as he and others attempt to build a society in this new world.

The thing about this show is that the writer clearly plays MMOs. For example, one plot thread involves several newbies. In Elder Tales, characters below level 30 get an XP potion each day to help them level. So one guild tricks a bunch of newbies into joining them. They then imprison the newbies and force them give up their XP potions each day, and spending their days crafting. The guild then sells the XP potions to the highest level characters who are rushing to get to the new level cap.

When I saw that plot thread, I knew that the writer understood the MMO gamer subculture.

Another element the show does very well is showing how MMO players are different from one another, through the guilds. There are the crafting guilds, the merchant guilds, the small elite guilds, the large zerg guilds, and the small friends & family guilds. Guilds are a very important part of MMOs, and are a very important part of this show.

The final major element in Log Horizon are the NPCs. The NPCs, called the People of the Land, are the real inhabitants of the world. They're like normal people, who live and die. But now they have to contend with these immortal (and bored) adventurers.

The key thing about this show is that it is not about a virtual reality, but is about an MMO. The game mechanics are important, especially the Trinity and group mechanics. In fact, I rather think Log Horizon uses the Trinity as a metaphor for how society should work.

Now then, Log Horizon isn't a perfect show. It's low-action, though there is some. It has a lot of dialogue, and can be fairly slow. It's also Japanese anime, which means its sensibilities are slightly askew from Western ones. The pacing is a little bit off, especially in the last three or so episodes.

However, overall Log Horizon is a very good show, and nails the MMO subculture in a way that no other show or book has.

Log Horizon is available at Crunchyroll. You can watch it for free (with ads). A second season will be airing in the Fall.

Letting Go?

Green Armadillo has a good post on Scott "Lum the Mad" Jennings' talk about the lifecycle of the MMO player.

I think I'm with Green Armadillo in not really understanding what Jennings is trying to get at. Yes, people will get tired of your game and move on. But I'm not sure what advice he is offering the developers. Is it just emotional advice? Don't take it to heart when a player quits after several years? Assume your MMO will die after 4-5 years and plan accordingly?

The only other interpretation I can make is that Jennings is telling devs to avoid doing excessive work, or avoid trying for "Jesus features", which you think will keep people playing.

Maybe he is trying to say that an MMO developer should concentrate on their core gameplay. For example, if your game is about PvE group content like dungeons and raids, maybe you should stick to dungeons and raids, even if you know that people will eventually tire of it and move on. Maybe he's saying that you should not spend time and effort developing new gameplay modes like Pet Battles or Galactic Starfighter to reignite a player interest.

I don't know if that is what Scott Jennings is saying. I don't know if avoiding new gameplay modes is a good idea or not. Or if Jennings is trying to get at something completely different.

If I could give gamers, programmers, and developers one piece of advice when it comes to talks and posts, it is to be blunt and obvious. Assume that we the audience are stupid and hit us over the head with your thesis. Don't allude to it or try to be clever.

More on Gevlon's "4 fun ppl" Theory

A couple of commenters expressed skepticism about Gevlon's "4 fun ppl" theory. I thought I'd elaborate on what I find most compelling about it, compared to Penny Arcade's GIFT theory.

The first different part is "normal people" versus "basement dwellers". In the GIFT formula, everyone is a potential bad guy. This means that there is no hope of removing the bad element, because you'd have to remove everyone. But if Gevlon is correct, it is a specific subgroup of people who are cancerous. That means that you can target that subgroup specifically. As well, instead of binding the entire player base with rules, you can set specific privileges for specific groups.

For example, let's take vote-kicking. Under GIFT, we have to hedge vote-kicks with lots of defensive rules, because any normal person might abuse it. But under 4FP, it's only a tiny subgroup of people who abuse vote-kicking. So a better solution might be to have a broadly available vote-kick, but certain people are simply not allowed to vote-kick at all.

The second different part is "anonymity" versus "lack of clear rules/authority". Under GIFT, to clean up the internet, we have to remove anonymity and link virtual identity with real world identity. But a lot of people like anonymity and even feel safer with it. It is very unlikely that we will get rid of anonymity on the Internet anytime soon.

Under 4FP, anonymity isn't an issue. 4FP is perfectly fine with pseudo-anonymity. As well, removing anonymity is no guarantee that people will behave. I think Gevlon massed enough evidence that some people behave badly even when they are not anonymous.

However, I do think there is a partial link between anonymity and lack of rules. Very often, anonymity signals that a lack of clear authority exists.

I admit that I like Gevlon's 4FP theory because I believe in Broken Windows theory and the idea that people respond to their environment and push the edges of that environment. By setting the bounds of acceptable behavior closer than the absolute maximum required by law, I think it's more likely that the resulting community will be acceptable.

Gevlon's "4 fun ppl" Theory

Gevlon has posted a very interesting, and quite insightful, take on PA's GIFT:

Let me offer the "4 fun ppl theory", which explains the widespread horrible behavior and the recent research:

Those we consider trolls are people with honest intention to positively socialize, but their extremely low social skills cause them to post hurtful or annoying things instead.

My formula is "basement dweller + audience + lack of clear rules or authority = total f..wad".

In some ways it is both a narrowing and a broadening of the GIFT formula.

In my opinion, this is the most interesting thing that Gevlon has ever written. It's unfortunate that it's posted to a small MMO blog. It deserves a wider audience than will read it.

Heh, the part I find most interesting is that Gevlon is famous for his "no-holds-barred" approach to "Morons and Slackers". Yet his diagnosis is almost charitable. A muscular charity, though, to be certain, with a hard-nosed approach to solutions.

Loyalty Rewards

Massively asks: How do you feel about Loyalty Rewards?

For the most part, I think loyalty rewards are unnecessary. The reward for subscribing is getting to play the game itself. If a game is good, it does not need external rewards to keep people subscribed.

That being said, there is one situation where loyalty rewards are useful.

As a general rule of thumb, you never want to make a customer feel stupid for purchasing something from you. Suppose a store sells you an item, and next week has a sale on that item. Many stores will allow you to get the discount if you bring in the receipt. Of course, most do it quietly, and some do it just to avoid the process where you return the first item and buy an identical item. But the basic logic is sound. You don't want the customer to regret purchasing the product early instead of waiting.

When it comes to MMOs, very often companies will offer marketing deals and special offers to entice new players or win back returning players. These offers are not available to current subscribers. Sometimes, if the offers are good enough, it can make a current subscriber feel like what they should have done is unsubscribed earlier instead of sticking with the game. That they made the wrong choice and now regret continuing to subscribe.

Loyalty rewards can balance this. Sure, the current subscriber doesn't get the special offer that the new or returning player gets. But the current subscriber gets the various loyalty rewards instead.

That's my position on loyalty rewards. If you are never going to have a special offer for new or returning players, you don't need loyalty rewards. But if you are going to have those special offers--and you almost certainly will--it's probably best to have a small loyalty rewards program to balance.

You don't want your customers to regret subscribing, or to avoid subscribing until the best possible deal comes along.

Warlords Cinematic

World of Orcraft recently unveiled the cinematic for the Warlords of Draenor expansion:



Still not as good as the Lich King cinematic:



(Whoops, wrong video. Real trailer is is here.)

In some respects, I wish Blizzard had not switched styles for the Lich King trailer. The next few expansion cinematics have all attempted to do the same thing and reach the same heights, and they have all failed.

Technically, the Warlords trailer is superb, as always. The graphics are outstanding.

The problem comes in the content. First, this is a very lore-heavy trailer. It shows the point where the timeline splits, when Grom, guided by Garrosh, chooses not to drink the demon blood. As well, a lot of the imagery is a direct reference to the death of Mannoroth in Warcraft III, only with Garrosh saving Grom. I really wonder how much someone who is not super-familiar with the Warcraft lore will understand.

The second problem can be explained with the question: Who are the heroes, and who are the villains, in this trailer? The trailer very heavily pushes Grom and Garrosh as the heroes. After all, they choose freedom over slavery, and are the ones who kill the demons. And indeed, if you go back to the original video in Warcraft III, Grom and Thrall are the heroes in that video.

But Grom and Garrosh are the villains of the expansion. The ones the heroes will be pitted against and ultimately defeat. Anyone who is heavily into the lore will know that. So you have a trailer which can only be understood by Warcraft fans, and at the same time pushes an emotional arc which contradicts what those fans know. That dissonance significantly weakens the trailer for the hardcore fans.

As for the non-hardcore people, the dissonance doesn't occur now, but will when they start playing the expansion. I think that will cause issues, unless Blizzard is setting up some crazy twist where we bring Grom and Garrosh back to the good side.

Hunts in FFXIV

For a very long time Blizzard has not allowed ordinary quests to be done in a raid group. When asked, they've always said that they feared everyone always joining large raids to steam roll content. In a lot of ways, it looks like FFXIV is proving this stance correct.

In the last patch, FFXIV introduced Hunts. Throughout the world, there are named monsters running around. The monsters have different difficulties: Rank B is roughly tuned for a 4-person group. Rank A is an 8-man group target, and Rank S are rare and require multiple groups.

However, SE did not include tagging with these mobs. Anyone who gets a few hits in gets credit for the kill and the reward.

So the etiquette that has developed is that if you find a Hunt mob, you announce it to the zone, wait for everyone to assemble, and then zerg it down. Doing this has made Hunts into the optimum method of getting endgame rewards, which has pushed even more people into doing them. You can actually see the effect on queues for instances and dungeons, as they are much longer than before.

Of course, since so many people are gathered in the zerg, there is no challenge. Interestingly enough, people who play late at night or early in the morning report that Hunts are a lot more fun when done in small groups, closer to how SE intended them to be done.

The obvious solution is to enforce tagging. Yet that might lead to uncooperative gameplay. I joined a guild group that was going after a Rank A in one zone a couple nights ago. We advertised in zone chat, and ended up with a full 8-man group and 2 others. It was nice that those two others could still participate and get rewards, rather than be left out.

SE could also greatly reduce the rewards. But then doing Hunts "as intended" is no longer a decent experience.

The other idea I've seen is to make Hunt rewards a "once a week" thing. You can only get rewards from a given named mob once per week. This is probably the best solution. It doesn't stop the zerg entirely, but it does thin it out.

All in all, FFXIV's Hunts are a cautionary tale for MMO devs looking to make world content for small groups.

10 Years :: 10 Questions

Alternative Chat is running a survey in advance of WoW's upcoming 10th anniversary. Here are my answers.

1. Why did you start playing Warcraft?

I was always interested in the idea of MMOs, though I hadn't really started playing any. Since Blizzard made WoW, I decided to try it out. However, it was actually sold out in stores, so I didn't get it until a few months after launch.

2. What was the first ever character you rolled?

My university roommate and I rolled characters on a PvP server. I made a Male Undead Warrior, and he made a priest. He stopped playing after a few months, but I kept going. I remember being a terrible warrior, because I didn't really understand the concept of threat, and so had a very hard time tanking.

I made it to about level 42 with that warrior. Then Blizzard introduced the PvP honour system. At that time, you got honour points for killing enemy players within a certain range of your level. At 42ish, I was just in range of the level 50s. The next couple of weeks were a constant barrage of ganks from level 50s.

I deleted that warrior in a fit of rage. I then created Coriel, my Female Human Paladin, on a PvE server. I think I made her because I had recently read Elizabeth Moon's Paksennarion and was inspired by the best and most hardcore paladin in all of fantasy! She's been my main ever since.

3. Which factors determined your faction choice in game?

My friend wanted to play Horde, so that's where we started. My second character was Alliance to see the other side.

As well, I love the Alliance paladins and their lore, so that's why I've stuck with that faction.

4. What has been your most memorable moment in Warcraft and why?

Doing Scarlet Monastery for the first time with a group of complete newbies. We were utterly shocked by Whitemane's "Arise, my champion!"

5. What is your favourite aspect of the game and has this always been the case?

I like questing and large-group raiding. I like seeing all the stories that Blizzard comes up, and I generally prefer to have done every quest before starting on endgame.

For raiding, I much prefer the larger raids, the 20-40 man ones. I like having specific responsibilities for different parts of the fight, and then seeing the entire team come together to accomplish a goal.

6. Do you have an area in game that you always return to?

No, I tend to move with the flow of the game and the expansions.

7. How long have you /played and has that been continuous?

I'm not currently subscribed, so I don't know my /played. Until now, I've been subscribed pretty much since the beginning, maybe with lapses of one or two months. However, I unsubscribed at the end of 2013, and haven't resubscribed since then.

8. Admit it: do you read quest text or not?

I read quest text. In fact, when expansions came out, I would turn Scrolling Quest Text back on to prevent the temptation of skipping it. I rather miss that option.

9. Are there any regrets from your time in game?

Yes. No. Maybe.

I wonder about this question a lot. Perhaps there's a universe where I didn't play MMOs and did something useful instead. But in reality, I probably would have just ended up playing other games or watching TV.

10. What effect has Warcraft had on your life outside gaming?

In some ways, not a lot. I do have this blog, and I've really enjoyed writing and thinking about things in more detail.

However, I do think it has affected me politically and philosophically though. I think that I am a lot more conservative because of my experiences in WoW. WoW is, for the most part, a level playing field. You can be anyone, you can be anything. And yet so many of us choose to behave badly when the restraints of normal society are lifted. I have come to a far more Hobbesian view of the world since I started playing MMOs.

Sandbox PvP: What to do with the Losers?

Last week, I posted a story from the Mittani detailing how Goonswarm  beat Test, not specifically on the battlefield, but by breaking them as an institution.

While it's a clever and effective tactic, one has to wonder if it is a good tactic for the game at large. One thing I've noticed is that when a guild or group breaks from drama, a significant percentage of players just quit the game outright. I would imagine that something similar happens in Eve when a guild breaks because of meta-game tactics.

Even generally, though, what should a PvP sandbox do with the losers of a PvP war? For the sandbox to be meaningful, they must lose. But for the long term health of the game, they should not be pushed to quit.

Perhaps the winning side should have an incentive to absorb the losers. There's a lot to be said for this approach. For one thing, it pushes the winning side to be more "gentle" in their tactics. If you pursue warfare by any means necessary, the losers won't join you after the fight is done, and that weakens your long term position.

For example, maybe in Eve there could be something where every planet has a governor. Only one planet per account, and the governor has to continue to keep the planet in health. So if an alliance conquers more planets than it has members, it needs people to maintain those planets. Simply absorbing the current governors into the winning alliance structure gives you people.

For the losing side, well, you lost the war. But now you are on the winning side, so maybe you keep playing with new people.

Of course, the issue with this is that it's a case of the "rich getting richer". An alliance which wins a war due to superior numbers has even more numbers after the conflict finishes. That could set up a positive feedback loop which pushes the alliance to dominate the game.

Spycraft in Eve Online

I came across this story from the Mittani (leader of Goons in Eve):

THE WOES OF TEST RECON IN FOUNTAIN 

Two interesting comments popped up on my Update Dance piece:  

One of the greatest troubles TEST faced during the war was information overload. There was so much to organize and so many channels of communication were dead as people went afk. 

Night after night it was a hairpull trying to find structures to bash. Just from alliance chat, we'd get 40-ish people in bombers with blops easy; getting someone in recon to provide the location of an SBU was the hard part. 

Also:  

I was in White Van during that war. The number of early mistakes the CFC made in not IHUBing captured systems, or letting me follow folks SBUing... After week three I gave up, my reports and scouting went nowhere... asked for jobs, got none. 

This was because the GIA had compromised the spreadsheet that TEST Recon used to record all their scout information on. We wouldn't alter the spreadsheet in a flagrant way, just adding slight errors throughout it which were always written off as user error or incompetence. POS locations would remain on the right planet, but slip a moon or two to the left; key tower reinforcement timers would be adjusted by an hour too soon or too late. Because we were subtle, this 'incompetence' resulted in a ton of redundant and replicated work as the same targets had to be scanned and rescanned. Eventually the whole org collapsed under the strain, and without functional recon you cannot win - or even stay afloat - in a bloc war. 

That's the kind of thing that happens in the first few weeks of a war with the CFC, when our enemies are usually yowling to anyone who will listen about how we're 'not winning fast enough' or otherwise completely stalemated: we assault the people and the institutions of a hostile org first, and the actual sov is an afterthought. Watching your foes tear each other apart as they blame one another for errors your agents seeded is an added bonus. 

I don't know if this really happened, or if the Mittani is just sowing dissension and playing head games with his current enemies. The comments on the post seem to indicate that it really happened.

DPS Feedback Idea - Historical Meter

As you know, I am of the opinion that the reason of lot of DPS players play badly is not because they don't care, or are innately bad. Instead it is because they lack the required feedback necessary to improve.

Currently, the best tool for feedback is DPS meters. But while DPS meters work, they are a very blunt instrument. They don't account for differences in gear, or fights, or even tell what number you should be aiming for.

I think a better DPS meter could be made, but it would probably require the game developers to implement.

Currently, DPS meters compare you to the other players in the current fight. It would be better if the DPS meter compared you to the overall historical performance of people with your item level.

Let's start by recording everyone's performance on individual boss fights. Note the boss, DPS done, and the item level of the player. Once you aggregate all the records, you can tell for a given boss and item level, what the top DPS was, or what the median DPS was.

That gives you a target number. If the top DPS on Boss A at i500 is 10k, you can tell the player after Boss A: "You did 6k damage. The top DPS was 10k." That is concrete feedback. The player can't blame her gear or the fight mechanics.

Of course, using the top DPS mark is probably bad, because it would be a very lucky parse and probably individuals doing something excessive to hit that mark. A better target number would be something like one standard deviation above the median. Or possibly target the range between the median and one standard deviation.

The advantage of using this mechanism, which looks back at the history of all the people doing the fight is that it nullifies variables and fight mechanics. Because the amount of data collected is large, a few lucky parses or exceptional players do not skew the results. It provides a viable target number that people know for a fact is within the capabilities of the class and gear.

As well, this doesn't necessarily involve the entire raid. You aren't being compared to other people you know, but to the entirety of the WoW community.

If feedback is vague, you can always make excuses as to why you don't need to improve. For the DPS to improve, they first need unequivocal proof that improvement is necessary. This Historical DPS Meter would provide that feedback.

Subsystem Depth

I was thinking over how I currently play MMOs, and how I used to play MMOs. I noticed a small and unusual pattern.

Back in Vanilla, I used to PvP. Not a whole lot, and not with any great degree of skill. But I did battlegrounds and eventually got Knight-Captain rank in the old PvP system [1]. Then in later expansions, Blizzard expanded on PvP, adding ratings, PvP gear, arena teams, etc. PvP used to be pretty shallow, and Blizzard made it deeper. I tried the new system for a little bit, but ultimately my response was to stop playing PvP.

Before Mists, I used to collect minipets. Again, not hardcore, but I liked trying to get minipets and seeing my collection expand. Then Blizzard added Pet Battles, a deep system that greatly expanded gameplay around minipets. I tried Pet Battles for a little bit, but ultimately my response was to stop bothering with minipets.

In WoW, I used to craft a bit. I got my professions to max, and liked collecting recipes. FFXIV has a much deeper and more complex crafting system. I tried the FFXIV crafting system for a little bit, but ultimately my response is not to touch crafting at all.

I'm not sure if there are other examples (perhaps Challenge Mode dungeons, or maybe Galactic Starfighter in SWTOR). But in each case, the developers added depth to the subsystem, made it a more interesting and deeper experience. But my response to that increased depth was to stop bothering with that subsystem, even if I enjoyed it before.

Paradoxically, as more developer effort was put into all these different facets of the game, the "area" of the game that I participated in grew smaller and smaller.

I would say that adding depth also increased the barrier to participation at a decent level for these subsystems. My focus was on raiding and PvE, and I was perfectly happy to play with these other shallow subsytems. To PvP a little bit, to collect a few minipets, to craft a little bit. In the current game, all I do is the raiding and PvE, and that is a lesser experience than it was before.

Of course, the flip side is that for people who want to focus on PvP, or on Pet Battles, or on crafting, the new deep subsystems are a lot more fun for them.

Is it better for an MMO to have several equally deep facets, or is it better to have one or two deep facets and several shallow ones?

1. I maintain that I stopped at Knight-Captain because it was clearly the best named rank for paladins.