A New Year

Happy New Year to everyone!

As the new year arrives, I find myself in a bit confused as to what direction I should go in. I'm currently playing 3 MMOs, but at a low and rather unsatisfying level. The big problem is that I'm not in any stable groups. I am essentially playing solo at the moment.

World of Warcraft

Most of WoD has been good. But 5-man Heroics are absolutely terrible this time around for me. They just don't feel right. The tanks are playing crazy, and healing feels terrible. It feels like Cataclysm Heroics, only instead of killing the DPS when they do something stupid or mechanics are ignored, they just take extra damage and strain the healer more.

It's just a bad experience entirely. I blame active mitigation.

LFR is pretty boring. So if I want to stick with WoW, I'll have to apply to and join a raid guild. Yet I'm not sure I want to do that again.

The Old Republic

I did not like Shadow of Revan. I thought the story was pretty terrible. I also realized after my last post that I don't really feel in control of my character during conversations anymore. If you play the original stories, every time your turn comes up in the conversation you get a choice. It's pretty rare that your character makes an automatic response. In SoR, it feels like your character makes more and more automatic responses, and you get fewer choices in the conversations.

Essentially, story-wise it feels like TOR has been drifting further and further away from the original design. But I liked that original design, and it was the main reason I was playing TOR. I don't really want to play "WoW with lightsabers and a few more cutscenes."

As well, TOR has had real problems with responsiveness since the expansion. To me, responsiveness is key. A game that responds badly simply makes playing an unpleasant experience. For example, my sniper has a channeled ability called Series of Shots. If Series of Shots finishes its entire channel, a second ability Followthrough is enabled. Lately, at least half the time there will be lag during the Series of Shots channel, and Followthrough will not trigger.

The upside to TOR is that it's the closest thing I have to an existing raid. It would be much easier to get into a steady operations group in TOR than in any other game.

Final Fantasy XIV

There's nothing really wrong with FFXIV. I just don't seem to be excited about it. I log in whenever there's new content, but don't really feel keen to work on my gear or Relic weapon or new classes.

Resolutions

Three resolutions this year:

1. Write about other subjects - I'd like to start a non-gaming blog, maybe write about programming or other random things.
2. Write more - I've been pretty erratic about writing this year, and I would like to write more often.
3. Be willing to write about controversial subjects - I usually shy away from controversial subjects. But I am not sure that is the correct approach. As well, the outlines of a controversial subject post often stay in my head, and keep me from thinking and writing about other topics.

In any case, I hope 2015 is a great year for all my readers.

Should Team Games Prevent Trash Talk?

These days, most competitive team games don't allow you to talk to the opposing team. Instead, you can really only communicate with your own team. The idea here is to prevent trash talk and make the game more civil.

But has this strategy really worked?

Sure, it has cut down on cross-team incivility, but sometimes it feels like that was replaced by incivility from fellow team members.

I think it feels a lot worse when people on your own team are berating you. There's a sense of betrayal when that happens. If the trash talk was coming from the other team, well, they're the enemy.

In fact, it might even be more helpful for team cohesiveness to be verbally attacked by the opposing team. It would strengthen the sense of "us versus them", instead of the enemy being faceless, robot-like opponents.

Obviously, the best case scenario would be for there to be no uncivil behavior at all. But from our common experience of random groups in online competitive play, that seems like an unrealistic fantasy. Given a choice between being taunted by the opposing team or being berated by a fellow teammate, I'd rather take the taunting.

Shadow of Revan

This post may contain spoilers for Shadow of Revan. I will try to avoid major ones though.

The Old Republic launched it's latest expansion, Shadow of Revan, last week. I've gone through the main story on my Imperial Agent. The servers were a little rocky and buggy, but overall the mechanical experience was decent. I did like the single player flashpoints that were part of the leveling experience.

However, the story was terrible.

First, the basic plot felt like something from the low level planets. Infiltrate a pirate gang, make nice with some natives. Really? The player is a Dark Council member, the Emperor's Wrath, the ghost of Intelligence, the Warden of the Jedi Order. And we're doing random pirate shenanigans? Then the standard "track down the big bad and kill him before he unleashes his superweapon" story to finish things.

It felt like a Chapter One story, not a Chapter Five.

This is further exacerbated by the fact that all the consequences are off-screen. In theory, Revan's plot has bad effects. In practice, they're happening somewhere out in space, while you are wandering around a paradise.

Compare to Makeb where the Imps are stealing valuable material from the Hutts, who are worthy villains. Then stabilizing and saving an entire planet. Meanwhile the consequences of not saving the planet are being visually demonstrated as the planet starts shaking apart with the ground quakes.

As well, every conversation in Shadow of Revan felt off to me. It was like they were each missing one or two lines, and overly abbreviated. The lines themselves were terribly cliche, especially anything Theron Shan said. To be honest, Darth Marr was the only character to redeem himself. I just don't think the dialogue was up to Bioware's previous standards.

The ending, while in theory should be exciting, didn't make much sense. The main villain was hoping for Event X to occur, and he has a plan to deal with it. Event X occurs anyways. The main villain does not execute his plan for Event X for no real reason that I could see.

Overall, I would hope that Shadow of Revan is an aberration for the TOR team, and that their future efforts return to their previous standards.

But then again, maybe the fate of F2P games is a spiral downwards as quality and effort slowly bleeds from real content to the fluff that people spend Cartel Coins on.

10th Anniversary Molten Core

I ran the new version of Molten Core the other day. It was a lot of fun and rather nostalgic.

It was pretty funny how similar it was to MC back in the day. Herding 40 people, with about 20 being competent and carrying the rest. Wiping on trash. Pulling trash and bosses at the same time. Begging the mages to remove curses.

Our first wipe happened because we pulled 2 corehound packs together, and the got caught in an eternal resurrection cycle. Otherwise it wasn't too bad, I don't think there was any more outright wipes, though there were a lot of deaths.

The bosses were fairly easy, probably easier than the trash. It was good to see Ragnaros again. Plus you get a helm and a mount.

All in all, the new Molten Core was a fun experience. It's worth gettting to i615 and trying it out before Blizzard removes it.

Nagrand, Initial Dungeons

Nagrand

So the triumphant conclusion to the Alliance storyline was a cutscene featuring two orcs duking it out. Outstanding, Blizzard.

Aside from that Nagrand was a pretty good zone. Lots of varied quests. I'm not so sure that having several final bosses run away with "See you in Highmaul" was the best of ideas. But it does tie the first raid to the zone.

Initial Dungeons

I did Silver Proving Grounds and my first heroic dungeon. It was the Grim Depot with the railway. A clever dungeon design, really.

However, something just feels wrong with WoW's small group content. I'm not sure what it is exactly, but it hasn't felt right for a couple of expansions now.

I think it has to do with how the exact makeup of the trash doesn't matter anymore. It feels like every trash pack is the same--even if they are made up of different mobs--and is dealt with the same tactics.

Also, as a healer, it feels like I am lacking in control. Which is an odd thing to say, because healers never really controlled anything. But I can't really describe it any better than that.

Level 100, Spires of Arak

Level 100

I finally reached level 100 with Coriel. I also upgraded my garrison to level 3, though it took all my gold. I haven't touched the max level dungeons yet. My plan is to finish questing in Nagrand and then see what I want to do.

I did do the Bronze Proving Ground for healing to get a decent healing weapon. It was fairly easy. I haven't tried Silver yet.  I did also craft my first i640 epic: a healing ring. The secondary stats are terrible, but whatever. I'll fix it after I craft the i640 necklace.

Spires of Arak

I liked this zone a fair bit. It did seem like a little bit of a side-trip, focusing on the Arrakoa instead of the Iron Horde. But I liked the mythology behind the Arrakoa gods, and also the legend of Terrok. As well, the followers of the Raven Mother were hilarious.

I disliked the goblin quests, but that's because I dislike WoW's whole take on goblins that appeared in Cataclysm. It's too anachronistic for my tastes. Gnomes are kind of similar, but they lean more to the steampunk vibe instead of modern corporatism.

I'm also not super-thrilled at what they did with Admiral Taylor. It feels like Blizzard saw the various complaints that Nazgrim was killed while Taylor was left alive, so they decided to balance it in the most ham-handed manner possible. At least Nazgrim got a good death, and sparked a fair bit of discussion and debate. Meanwhile Taylor gets killed off-screen by some random warlock. (And then becomes a ghost follower? Really?)

Cutscenes and Characters

I'm currently playing three story-based MMOs: WoW, SWTOR, and FFXIV. I've noticed one major difference between WoW and the two other games. In WoW, a lot of the time the NPCs dominate or overshadow the player in the story.  Take the intro to Warlords of Draenor, or as I like to call it, the Khadgar Show.

There is no real equivalent to anything like that in TOR or FFXIV. WoW wasn't always be like this, too. The NPCs really only came into prominence in Wrath and later expansions.

My theory is that it has to do with how each game handles cutscenes. In TOR and FFXIV, cutscenes are done within the game engine, and the player character is always in the scene. That allows TOR and FFXIV to make the player character the focus of the cutscene. Even in FFXIV, when two NPCs are talking to each other, the camera often cuts to the player character to get a reaction shot.

Doing this ensures that the player character is the center of storyline [1], and is not overshadowed by NPCs.

In WoW, though, the player character is not in the cutscenes. I'm not sure if this a deliberate choice, a limitation of the engine, or because the cutscenes are pre-rendered. But because the player character is not in the cutscene, an NPC must become the focal point. Thus all the final, pivotal moments in WoW are rapidly becoming the province of NPCs. Tirion and Arthas. Thrall and the Dragon Aspects at the end of Dragon Soul. Vol'jin and Varian at Ogrimmar. Compare that to endings of the class stories in TOR.

To be honest, I find WoW's practice here dissatisfying.

In some ways, I think Blizzard learned the wrong lesson from the Wrathgate. That was the first major use of an in-game cutscene. Despite the player not being in the cutscene, it was a huge success. But I think the Wrathgate was an exception to the general rule. The Wrathgate was a tragedy, and as such the player's role was witness, not participant. That is what made that cutscene work.

But in every other event after that, the player is a central participant, and should have equal billing with the NPCs. Instead the cutscenes, and then the game lore, diminishes the player's role.

This didn't happen in Vanilla and TBC, mostly because there were no cutscenes and everything was done in game. Take The Great Masquerade, for instance. If that event had been implemented in modern WoW, I think it would have been a cutscene focusing on Bolvar and Windsor. The player would be "offscreen". Because that option wasn't available, it was implemented in game, and the player was just as much a part of the event as the NPCs.

1. Well, maybe not in FFXIV's Hildibrand questlines. There the player's role is not so much main character as it is horrified spectator.

Talador, Leveling Dungeons, Tarren Mill vs Southshore

Talador

A welcome return to form after Gorgorond. This was a solid zone with some interesting quests and lore. It was very nice to see the contrast between WoD and TBC here. I'm up to level 98 now.

Heh, about a year ago I asked what happened to the Alliance paladins? It seemed to me that the Alliance story had lost a lot of its identity when the major paladins dropped out of sight during Wrath. This expansion we got a new Alliance paladin in Yrel, and the story picks back up. Coincidence? I think not.

Leveling Dungeons

I've done the first three leveling dungeons as Holy. They're okay. Short, quick dungeons with reasonably interesting bosses.

However, I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that--as a healer--I strongly dislike active mitigation. My job is to keep the tank up, and active mitigation makes healing a weaker (lower-skill) tank a much harder job than it really should be. All three tanks seemed very squishy to me, and I had to chain cooldowns constantly to keep them up.

You could tell it was playstyle, because after a wipe the tank suddenly becomes much easier to heal. Why they didn't play like that in the first place, or why they are chain-pulling like crazy, I don't know. It's incredibly annoying to see a tank's health falling rapidly and to know it's because the tank is playing improperly rather than anything I'm doing.

Honestly, I think Blizz is cruising for a Cataclysm-style unhappiness effect, at least from the healer perspective. The environment doesn't have the one-shots of Cataclysm, but I think healing will turn out to be unreasonably hard for random groups, and will need to be buffed. How they're going to do that without damaging the balance of pre-made groups will be interesting.

Tarren Mill vs Southshore

This is a temporary battleground for the 10th Anniversary. I've played it twice, and I think it's a lot of fun. It's very simple, just a straightforward zerg between the two towns. No unique mechanics to learn, which is very refreshing. I've won once, and lost once. The loss was very close, about 5 points.

The first time I played as Retribution, because I didn't realize you can't switch specs inside the battleground. Melee is at a bit of a disadvantage in these types of zergs, but I tried to pick off stragglers and run in, do some damage and throw a stun, and run and back out. The second time I healed.

I really like the catch-up mechanic. You start as a Private when you respawn, and every 10 kills you rank up and get a tiny buff to damage and healing. However, killing high ranked players nets you more points. The team in the lead usually has more higher-ranked players. This makes it easier for the team behind to catch up to them. It's an elegant, natural system. It's also a very nice nod to the old PvP ranks from Vanilla.

"This is EVE" Trailer

CCP put out a new trailer for Eve Online, and it is really good. Warning: this trailer has a lot of swearing.



As befits a sandbox game, the focus is squarely on the players. I really like that they included a middle section with non-fleet activities like transporting goods, industry, and mining.

It's interesting that CCP did not shy away from the strong language and Eve vocabulary. The focus is on the emotions behind the voices, and not really what the voices are saying. There is no real effort to make the video "accessible". I think this was a good call, as it adds to the authenticity of the video.

It's notable that the usually fractious Eve community absolutely adores this video. As well, it seems to be working for CCP, as new character creation in Eve is up significantly.

I also think this trailer taps into a truth: that we play MMOs over other games to play with other people. Lately it feels like the genre has forgotten that, that it is more important to "mediate" between players. That the default is that playing with others will be a bad experience, and all the new dev effort goes into systems to mitigate that bad experience. This trailer takes a bold stance against that line of thought, unabashedly declaring that playing with other people is fun.

Gorgrond Questing, Garrisons, Sub Numbers

Gorgrond Questing

I was out of town for most of last week, so I have not advanced much farther. I did finish Gorgrond. I'm not sure what I think about choosing one quest path based on which outpost you build. It felt like you only got half the story.

I chose the Sparring Ring and ended up being sent to the north. Overall, Gorgrond was decent but not really memorable. I did like seeing alternate-Rexxar and his animals.

Garrisons

I really like Garrisons. I like them a lot more than housing in other games. For me, I really like the way different parts of the Garrison work together to produce things. Housing very often feels so static me. You place a chair and then you are done. But with the garrison, the mine produces ore which feeds the jewelcrafter. Lumber gets turned into resources. NPCs are dispatched on various tasks. It's a lot more SimCity that normal housing, and I think that makes it more attractive.

I also really like how Blizzard brought back old NPCs to help populate your garrison. The best was seeing Maybell Maclure-Stonefield and Tommy Joe Stonefield. I've mentioned before that I love that quest from Elywnn Forest, and it was really well done to see the results.

Sub Numbers

So WoW is back up to 10 million subscriptions in time for the 10th anniversary. There's some pleasing symmetry to that. Also, no wonder the servers melted.

I wonder how much of a role Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar played in this. I think there were a fair number of players who were burned by both those games, and they may have retreated back to WoW, the comfortable, dependable game.

Warlords of Draenor Launch

Warlords of Draenor was released on Thursday. As is tradition, the servers promptly melted. Thursday and Friday were pretty bad. The few times I was able to get in, the lag was so bad it was nigh-unplayable. However, the server maintenance Saturday morning seems to fixed most issues. Aside from queues on the high population servers, everything seems to be going well now.

All in all, it just emphasizes that one should never take time off work for the launch of an online game.

My paladin, Coriel, is level 93 now, and I've done the first Alliance zone: Shadowmoon Valley. It was a pretty good zone with a decent story. I like the mix of quest-driven gameplay combined with more open "Timeless Isle"-style activities like rare monsters and treasures. It's the best of both worlds, and it's always exciting to see a skull pop up on your mini-map.

I must admit that I was caught off guard by how central the garrison is to the leveling experience. It's well done, and I think does a very good job of establishing your character's role in the expansion. I rather like how all the NPCs call you "Commander".

I really have no idea what I'm doing with the garrison, but hopefully it's working out. I like recruiting new people and sending them on missions. It's simple but very well done.

I also like the randomness as applied to quest rewards. It's neat that green quest reward can randomly upgrade to blue or purple. It's a very good use of randomness.

A very bad use of randomness, on the other hand, is the Draenor Perks system. My first Draenor Perk for Retribution was Improved Forbearance. As I predicted, this was very disappointing.

All in all, WoD is going reasonably well. Blizzard says that demand was much higher than they anticipated. Which I suppose is good for them. However, I can't help but think that the lesson that will be drawn is that "SAVAGE! Orcs, orcs, orcs!" is what the players want. And maybe that is what we want.

Mists of Pandaria, in Review

Overall, I thought Mists was a pretty good expansion. It never quite pushed over the line into "great" though. This was one expansion that I really did not do a lot in. I never raided seriously, and I ended up leaving WoW at the beginning of this year.

The Good:

• Initial questing - I thought all the initial zones were very well done, and quite interesting.
• The Pandaren - Everyone expected a joke race, but the pandaren turned out surprising well.
• Patch 5.1 - I really like the way the story was woven into the dailies in this patch.
• Thunder Isle - Another good zone.
• All Raid Instances - All the raids were pretty well done, I thought. There were no tiers that were distinctly disliked.
• Flexible Raiding - An outstanding innovation.
• Legendary Questline - I really liked this questline, and how it worked over the course of the expansion.
• The Farm - I really enjoyed building the farm and those series of quests and dailies.

The Mushy Middle:

• Dailies - I know that a lot of people would put this in the bad column, but I think that is excessive. The dailies were very optional, in my mind, and were fairly fun to do if you did a faction at a time or so.
• The Isle of Time - I didn't really like this zone, but it seemed like a lot of other people did. I just prefer zones with stories, rather than random wandering around. Basically, if I wanted self-directed gameplay, I'd play Eve or another sandbox.

The Bad:

• Pacing - Each of the early patches should have had an extra month, and the last patch should have been a couple of months shorter. The length of time Siege of Ogrimmar was current was way too long.
• Spoiling the End Boss - I think the biggest mistake Blizzard made was revealing Garrosh as the end boss before the expansion even began. They should have done their best to keep it a secret until 5.3/5.4. I think revealing it so early caused people to overlook Pandaria itself, instead focusing on the ultimate end.
• Excessive Focus on the Horde- Orcs, trolls, orcs. This expansion was too focused on the Horde side. There is a whole other faction, Blizzard.

There was a lot of stuff I didn't try this expansion. I didn't do any challenge mode dungeons, or any raiding other than LFR. Basically, I was super casual. But the Pandaria core of the expansion was lots of fun. However, the pacing and later focus on the Horde weakened the overall experience.

Jedi Consular Done!

This post contains significant spoilers for the Jedi Consular storyline in Star Wars: The Old Republic.

I finished the Jedi Consular story yesterday. I played as a Light Side female Jedi Shadow tank. I used the 12x promotion, so I leveled strictly by class missions.

When you see most rankings of the TOR stories, the Consular story is often near the bottom. I disagree with this. So far, the Consular story is my favorite Republic story. It's not as good as the Agent story, but it's solidly in that second tier with the Jedi Knight and Sith Warrior.

However, I can see why some people don't like the Consular story. It's focused inwards, on the Jedi and the Republic. It's all about healing and diplomacy. I actually liked it a great deal. I really liked the hints of history in Chapter One. And then slowly building your alliance and armies in Chapters Two and Three. Corellia was very well done too, as you got to see the payoff of your recruitment efforts.

As well, I do not think think that going Dark Side works with this story. It really feels that you have to be Light Side, to unironically embrace the Jedi code and philosophy.

There are other minor criticisms. Tharan Cedrax is an excellent character, but his "Did you know I'm a pacifist?" is excessively annoying. I know he's supposed to come off as somewhat annoying, but there is a line, and the overuse of that phrase crossed it.

The main villain was very predictable. But even so it was very well done, with a nice twist.

The story also does suffer slightly from early choices constraining the future. It would have been nice for some of the characters from Chapter One, especially Yuon Parr, to come back in later chapters. But because killing them is a Dark Side option, they don't appear again, even though you saved them if Light Side.

Those are pretty minor criticisms. Overall, I thought it was an excellent story. However, I also think that it is not the best story to do first. It works really well as a later story, because of the perspective it provides on some of the later planets, especially Belsavis and Voss.

Force Persuade

If Obi-wan Kenobi had not been the one to use Force Persuade in the first movie, do you think it would have been considered a Dark Side action?

After all, you're literally overriding the mind and will of your target, forcing them to obey you. If you had put a shock collar on them and forced them to obey by threatening shocks, there would be no doubt that is Dark Side. Is Force Persuade so much better?

Maybe Force Persuade is really a Dark Side action. That makes for an interesting perspective on Obi-wan, with him being a little more "gray" than he first appears.

Thoughts on Overwatch

At Blizzcon, Blizzard unveiled their latest game: Overwatch. This also marks the first new world from Blizzard in 15+ years. Thank God.



So here are some quick thoughts on Overwatch:

• The key element to take away from Blizzard's new world is that in the future, the moon will be populated by intelligent gorillas.
  
  
• This new world is not dark. It's fun, vibrant, maybe even joyful and hopeful. I think that's a very good approach to the FPS scene. Most FPS games are on the darker side. Even "funny" FPS games like Duke Nukem, Serious Sam, and Team Fortress 2 go for more cynical, mordant humor.
  
  
• I really like how Blizzard announces games with hands-on playable machines available. It's a really strong gesture of faith in their product. It's not empty hype or vaporware. Instead the hype is being generated by the regular people who actually got to play the game.
  
  
• As to actual mechanics, things look good. People seem to like the responsiveness and control, which are vital to the genre. The different heroes seem to play differently and synergize well. There also looks to be a hero for most every playstyle.
  
  
• The single most important design decision might be the mechanic Blizzard chose to leave out: an XP bar. Almost every game these days has some form of leveling or progression, or earning money to purchase weapons. Blizzard just goes old-school and eschews progression entirely.
  
  
• Will I play Overwatch? I will try it out. However, the last couple of first-person games I played made me motion-sick, so I've avoided those types of games for the last few years.

All in all, Overwatch looks like an impressive addition to the Blizzard family.

Sith Warrior Done!

This post contains significant spoilers for the Sith Warrior storyline in Star Wars: The Old Republic.

I finished the Sith Warrior storyline today. I did it without the class XP buff, so the old way with side missions. I played a female Juggernaut (tank) and went pure Light Side (except for two choices).

Overall, the story was excellent. The female voice actor, Natasha Little, was outstanding with a very rich, strong voice that perfectly matched the character. I also thought the story was very even, more than the other stories I've played. Each chapter was solid. It also was a superb story for the Warrior, demonstrating the rise through the ranks of the Sith.

The main villain was also good, and killing him at the very end (one of my two Dark Side choices) was very satisfying.

I also like the way Light Side worked in this story. Not so much a good person exactly, but more like a pure knight of the Empire, not spending time and effort on unnecessary and petty cruelties. I was wondering how the Emperor would react to a Light Side warrior, as you become his Wrath. But it was portrayed perfectly, as the Emperor simply did not care, was beyond the petty LS/DS conflicts of this galaxy.

The companions were mostly good. I especially liked the rivalry and contrast between Quinn, the smooth calculating officer, and Pierce, the rough frontline soldier. I used Jaesa most of the time, though.

So far, I would rank the story second, behind the Imperial Agent. It's close behind in quality, but the Sith Warrior story is just missing that final "something" which would have pushed it over the line into brilliance.

Sex and the Sith

Because Star Wars is a PG world, sexual depravity is not present, or is glossed over. The closest it comes is having omni-present "dancers" in the cantinas and as slaves.

You know that in an adult Star Wars, the Sith would be utterly depraved. Power structures specifically elevating the powerful over the weak. A code decrying peace and elevating passion. An entire aristocracy focusing on cruelty and power. It would be the worst of human aristocracies, without even the slight mitigations of chivalry and codes of manners.

But for the most part, this is not present in game. Relationships are almost entirely consensual.

Except for the female Sith Warrior romance.

Now, I haven't finished the full story line, but the initial relationship with Quinn is textbook sexual harassment. The superior--both in terms of rank and personal power--continually propositions her subordinate. The subordinate does his best to avoid or deflect her attentions, but he cannot afford--the cost might be his life--to outright reject his superior, and his dialogue reflects that.

It's very different from the Sith Inquisitor romance, where there was clear interest from both parties.

I found it really interesting that Bioware would include a "romance" like this. I cannot decide if it was the correct thing to do or not. On the one hand, a Dark Side relationship with undertones of imposed power seems appropriate to the class. On the other hand, it's much more deviant than I expected from the game.

The romance probably becomes more mutual as the companion story line progresses, though. We'll have to see.

Learning Content

Spinks has a interesting post up about learning content in MMOs:

I feel increasingly that random group content in MMOs is an anti-learning environment. If people zone in with someone who is learning the fight, they’re likely to be disappointed because it will take longer. They don’t want to take ‘the hit’ of being part of someone else’s learning experience.

This reminds me of one of the biggest differences between Japanese and North American culture in FFXIV. FFXIV has two forms of organizing group content with strangers:

1. Duty Finder - This is the random group finder. You sign up, and the game matches you with other people in the queue.
2. Party Finder - The leader lists her party, desired instance, and requirements. Other people apply to join. The leader can approve or disapprove of applicants.

My understanding is that in Japan, players use the Party Finder to form "learning parties". After they learn the fight, they use the Duty Finder to do the fight quickly with other experienced players.

In North America, it's the other way around. Party Finder is the province of experienced players, who usually require a applicant to have previously completed the instance. If you're new to a fight, you generally have watch videos and then sign up for Duty Finder and try and learn the fight on the fly. Too many new players in a given Duty Finder group generally leads to an unsuccessful run. Difficult fights (Titan HM before the patches) can be very hard to successfully complete in Duty Finder.

The Japanese system seems like a better experience to me. Expectations are clearly laid out in both cases. However, it suffers from two flaws. First, it is vulnerable to "cheaters". Someone who doesn't care about social opprobrium can just sign up as a newbie to Duty Finder and hope to be carried. 

Second, it requires that people be willing to form those "learning parties". I have seen NA players try to form learning parties. Their parties never fill, and just sit half-empty in the finder for hours. My personal theory is that the Japanese approach to schooling, with formal study groups and cram schools at an early age, makes this approach a lot more natural for Japanese players.

There are ways the NA devs could forcibly shift players towards the Japanese model. For example, suppose that you had to previously complete the instance before you could sign up for it in the random group finder. That would mean that you absolutely had to use the Party Finder system for your first kill.

I am not sure if such a requirement would fly with NA players. It might work. For example, running learning parties would be an astonishing recruiting tool for established guilds. If the easy path wasn't there, maybe individuals would step and start learning parties, and thus form stronger and better networks.

But on the other hand, maybe it won't work. Maybe we want to be anonymous and not bear any responsibility towards other people. If we end up with more failed groups, so be it. We can always just try the instance again, and get a new group of people. Maybe if this was a requirement, people would just quit or roll alts when they hit that point.

Dreamfall: Chapters?

The latest entry in The Longest Journey saga, Dreamfall: Chapters, was released yesterday.

I have mixed feelings about this. I absolutely loved The Longest Journey. It's on my Top 10 Games list, maybe even Top 5. But my reaction to the sequel Dreamfall was ... shall we say, strong?

So I'm really on the fence about picking this up. Not to mention that I still have a couple of other single player games I really should finish. And a Seasonal Wizard in Diablo 3 to get to 70.

Have any of you picked up Dreamfall: Chapters yet?

Women In Computer Science

This NPR story, When Women Stopped Coding, has been making the rounds in tech circles.  Its main thrust can be summed up with the following graph:

The given explanation by NPR is cultural. As they see it, computers started being marketed towards boys, driving the girls out. This is the pretty standard explanation whenever someone discusses the disparity between the sexes in computer science.

However, the data they use for the graph is essentially "percent of a percent". As you know, I loathe this type of data. So I went to see what the raw data from the National Science Foundation says:

In my view, the raw data tells a different, and perhaps more interesting, story.

Essentially, the story of computer science for both men and women is that there were two bubbles. One around the year 1980, and the other around the year 2000.[1] Which maps to what happened historically. Although women are always less represented, both curves follow somewhat similar shapes. The major difference though, is what happens around the peak of the bubble.

First, in the two or three years right before the peak, a lot more men jump into the program than women. More women enroll, but there are even more men who look to join in. Women seem a little less inclined to flock to the newly "hot" programs.

Second, and more importantly, the bust right after the peak absolutely devastates female participation in computer science. The first time, in the 1980s, female degrees drop to less than half of their high point, while male enrollment only falls by 30%. The second time is even more destructive for women. All the gains from the boom are wiped out, and female participation falls back to the steady state before the boom. Male participation drops, but again, it doesn't drop all the way back down.

My interpretation of the data is that less women participate in computer science not because of cultural reasons, but because of economic ones. My hypothesis would be that more women avoid industries that are perceived to be "unstable", or have significant economic downturns, even if the industry is lucrative during boom times.

To be fair, that's a reasonably sensible position. I was in university when the last tech bubble burst, and it was a terrible time to hunt for work. I can only imagine what a high school student is thinking when they see the obliteration of large tech companies like Nortel on the news.

[1] You choose your program roughly four years before you get your degree.

Proactive vs Reactive Stories

This post contains entirely predictable spoilers for the Sith Warrior and Sith Inquisitor stories in The Old Republic.

In both the Sith Inquisitor and Sith Warrior stories in TOR, there comes a point where your master betrays you. You survive the betrayal and ultimately defeat your master. This seems like a very traditional part of being Sith.

Except that's not quite how the Sith tradition goes. The apprentice is the one who betrays her master, not the other way around.

In the class stories, the betrayal is flipped. This is because the game cannot force the player to take action, to betray her master first. If you're playing Light Side, you might choose to be loyal. If the master forces you to take an unpalatable action, you might do it anyways if you are Dark Side.

Well, obviously the game could just not give you a choice. At point X, you betray your master, and that's that. But most players would be greatly unhappy with that.

Can a story-based game push the player into taking proactive actions? Or is the player always reacting?

Republic Makeb Thoughts

It's almost time for a new expansion in The Old Republic, so I've finally finished the Makeb story line on a Republic character. I completed it on my Jedi Knight (Sentinel).

The new GSI buff stations that boost your gear level make Makeb much easier. I once accidentally logged out in the middle of a mission far away from a station, and when I logged back in I did not have the buff. The rest of the mission was much harder. I had to switch from a dps companion to a healing companion to finish it.

It's pretty clear that the Republic story line should be done first. It comes earlier, and a lot of the mysteries are cleared up when you go through the Empire story line. The Republic story is also a lot more straightforward than the Imperial story, being a regular rescue mission. Albeit a rescue mission for an entire planet.

The only hard fight was the final battle, and that was mainly because I kept getting one-shot right at the start of the fight. Once I figured out that I had to start the attack from a different location, it went smoothly. Of course, this probably more due to the GSI buff than any skill on my part.

I would rate the Republic story lower than the Imperial story. The Imperial story was a bit stronger, the NPCs (especially Katha Niar) were more interesting, and the conclusion was stronger. Plus Darth Marr is just awesome.

I think the villains for both stories were a bit weak. For one thing, they didn't really have any personal contact with your character until the very end.

Overall, Makeb was an "okay" story. Nothing really amazing, but nothing really wrong either.