Shadow Realms Cancelled In Favor of SWTOR

Interesting news from Bioware Austin. They cancelled Shadow Realms, and explicitly stated that they would be focusing resources on SWTOR:

But the biggest focus for our team in BioWare Austin will be on Star Wars™: The Old Republic™. As every Star Wars™ fan knows, this is a massive year in the Star Wars universe. We have some great plans for expanding this epic game this year, and look forward to sharing the news about those plans with our players in the coming weeks.

I can't wait to see Syncaine's reaction.

It does make sense that Bioware will try to use the new Star Wars movie as an opportunity to attract more people to TOR. If it doesn't suck horribly, a new Star Wars movie will bring in a lot of fans who want to play a Jedi or Sith (or maybe even a non-force user if there is a character as good as Han Solo).

In the Producer's Road Map, also released today, Bioware reiterated that they would be focused on story going forward (as opposed to last year when they released Galactic Starfighter and Housing):

Some of you might remember before launch, we talked a lot about the “four pillars” of RPGs – combat, exploration, progression and story. Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ is an MMO, but it’s also a BioWare game. Three years ago, we set out to deliver a product that contained the best of two worlds – the immersive story experience from a single-player RPG and the vast array of systems and social connection from an online multiplayer game. Since launch, we have mainly focused on the latter, adding Galactic Strongholds, achievements, legacy perks, reputation tracks, and Galactic Starfighter. But with the success of the Shadow of Revan expansion, we think it’s time that we return to our roots and what truly makes our game unique: story. 

Shadow of Revan was just the beginning. In 2015, we are committed to bringing you more character-driven adventures in the Old Republic universe. You’re going to see a unified story, with a focus on themes that unite our eight classes – everyone is a veteran from the Galactic Civil War with a complicated past and an uncertain future. You’ll see a greater emphasis on your character’s personal history, and on the choices you make. I don’t want to say too much more since we are still in the midst of development, but what we have planned really gets back to the Star Wars™ fantasy at the heart of our game.

The part I am not thrilled about is the "unified" story. That strongly implies that the story will be the same for both Empire and Republic. I'm sort of resigned to not having class stories any more, but I really hope that at least the Empire experience is different from the Republic experience.

Edit: I forgot to mention the most important part of the new Star Wars movie. The Cartel Market will probably sell a cross-hilt lightsaber!

Shadow of Revan from the Republic Side

I finished the Republic story of Shadow of Revan with my Jedi Knight. Shintar was right, the Republic version does make a little more sense than the Imperial version. Things are explained a little bit better in the Republic dialogue.

It's still not a very good story, but at least it's logical now.

I did find it interesting how, even though the missions and cutscenes are the same on both sides, the dialogue is different. For example, on Rishi, the pirate faction you belong to is different. Imperial characters belong to the Howling Tempest, while Republic characters belong to a different gang who everyone thinks are cannibals.

So even though the stories are the same, they must have recorded at least twice as much dialogue as scenes.  You always hear that voice acting is the big cost in SWTOR, but maybe this means that it's really the missions and cutscenes which are expensive, rather than voice actors.

Overall, I don't think I approve of the way this Bioware team handled Revan. Revan was the signature character of Knights of the Old Republic. He deserved a better ending than being a random crazy Force-user boss. In some ways, I feel the current Bioware team was disrespectful of the KotoR Bioware team in their handling of Revan in this expansion.

I think this expansion was a missed opportunity in terms of story. I mean, why not spin a story around the Revanites recruiting the main character? After all, why wouldn't Revan want to ally with Jedi or Dark Council member, or character of similar status? Such an ally would only help his plans. And then, there's a lot of places you can go from there. I think a story like that would be a far more suitable Chapter Five story than what we got.

Massively OP and BlizzardWatch, Part III

More and more interesting things keep happening in the saga of Massively Overpowered (formerly Massively) and BlizzardWatch (formerly WoW Insider). In some ways, it's a microcosm of the issues faced by all media in the Internet Age. It's especially interesting that each site is pursuing different strategies for funding.

BlizzardWatch is relying on Patreon, where individuals pledge a small amount every month. They get less money upfront, but in theory they have a somewhat reliable income every month. They started out aiming for $8000 per month, and currently have about $13,000 per month pledged.

MassivelyOP opted for a Kickstarter to raise $50,000 upfront. This seed capital will go towards the site and give them time to actually generate income.

Both methods have advantages and disadvantages. I think MassivelyOP is betting, that as a more general site, it can generate enough revenue from advertisers, from all the different companies looking to make MMOs.

BlizzardWatch, on the other hand, really only has Blizzard and maybe a few other related companies as potential advertisers. So they are trying to be primarily supported by reader contributions.

In some ways, it is similar to the situation between public broadcasters like PBS versus the major networks like NBC. (Only the government isn't involved at all.) In television, the ad-supported networks basically won, having the largest number of viewers and the most content. The public broadcasters do survive, and often put out unique and different shows.

Of course, that's a very different medium. While MassivelyOP is more general than BlizzardWatch, they're still both very niche. The outcome here might be entirely different.

WoW Videos: Phantom of the Battleground

This video came out in 2013, but it came up when I was surfing YouTube recently. It is still excellent. The lyrics, video, and voices are just amazing. Using The Phantom of the Opera was inspired. The video is by Roghar, the male singer is Kavo and the female singer is SilverLetomi.

This is probably the best "parody" style WoW video I have seen.

The Underlurker in Temple of Sacrifice

My raid team finally finished the Story Mode versions of the two raid instances in Shadow of Revan in TOR. We were stuck on the third boss of Temple of Sacrifice, the Underlurker, for several weeks. We finally beat it by having tank switch to a DPS character, as well as having geared up more.

It's interesting, because this fight fails for a very simple reason: target-switching is a lot harder for lower-skill groups than you would predict.

During Underlurker, three adds will spawn and do an AOE attack. After a few seconds, rocks will drop from the ceiling and the raid has to hide behind the rocks. Then there's a mechanic where the boss has a cross telegraph appear under him, and the raid needs to put a certain number of people in each arm of the cross (1 in front, 1 in back, 3 on each side) before it activates. This cycle repeats about 5 times before enrage.

When you first do the fight, you think the cross mechanic is the difficult part. But--save when it was very buggy upon first release--the cross isn't the hard part. The hard part is getting down the three adds while still dealing enough damage to the boss that you can kill it before enrage.

That is entirely about target-switching and bursting the adds down. Which is something that lower-skill groups have a lot of troubles with, resulting in a fight which is unusually difficult for its placement.

The best solution is to reduce the health of the adds and boss in Story Mode, to give more leeway for time lost to switching targets.

WoWInsider and Massively Updates

WoW Insider

WoW Insider has reincarnated as Blizzard Watch. They set up a Patreon fund, and currently have abou $12,000 pledged monthly. We'll see how much of that is real, and how much evaporates 3 months from now.

But still, it's an impressive job by the Blizzard Watch team and the community. The new site is pretty nice as well. I also under-estimated how much they needed to run the site. I was expecting it to cost more.

Massively

The Massively crew has announced plans to return as Massively Overpowered. They don't have a site up yet, but they have a Twitter account. I wonder if they will do as well as Blizzard Watch. It's possible that Blizzard Watch has stolen a march on Massively, and sucked up a lot of the community dollars. I guess it would depend on the audience overlap of the two sites.

I must confess that I don't really like the new name. I know what they're trying to get at, but Massively Overpowered is such a "gamist" name. It kind of brings to mind people arguing about their classes on forums. It feels like gamer bravado to me, more than anything else.

The original, just plain "Massively", always invoked the word "multiplayer" for me. It highlighted that these games were about building worlds and large communities. It evoked a very positive, forward-looking perspective, with a larger sense of scale.

Adding the word "Overpowered" cuts against that sense of scale, and drags the perspective back to that of trolls slinging mud on the forums. It's gamer slang, with negative connotations, and thus evokes negative gamer behavior.

Varied Intensity

I saw a thread on a forum asking if you would play an MMO which only had raiding. My immediate answer was "No".

Now, I like raiding. But for me, raiding has too intense a pace to sustain long hours. It's good to raid a couple nights a week. But I like having a wide variety of activities with different intensities. Sometimes you just want to log on and do something that doesn't require a lot of thought.

Thinking back on it, I believe this is where Wildstar went wrong for me. The base of level of intensity required for normal questing was just too high. Killing a regular mob required a lot of running around and dodging telegraphs.  I don't mind jumping up to that level every so often, like say a dungeon. But having that being the standard gameplay was very tiring.

In fact, I think this is a problem with "action combat" games in general. They dial up the action a bit too much, and that ends up tiring out a lot of the players. In contrast, tab-target games usually start from a lower baseline, and ramp up the intensity for specific moments or specific fights.

Interestingly enough, if you look at Tera, even though it's action combat, the baseline pacing is actually rather slow.

You often see calls for the developers to make activities like fishing more interesting or more active. But perhaps the allure of fishing for a lot of people is precisely the fact that it's not very intense or very active. It's a good activity for times when you just want to do something that doesn't require a lot of effort.

For me, I would say that FFXIV has my ideal baseline intensity. It's a bit slower than WoW, especially modern WoW which is rather faster than Vanilla was. Admittedly, paladins used to only have 2 actions every 15 seconds or so (Judge/Seal), which was way too relaxed.

What game represents your ideal baseline intensity?

Crowfall: Eternal Heroes, Dying Worlds

Apropos of the last post [1], Crowfall offers their first look at how they propose to make PvP work:

What if characters are persistent/permanent – but the Worlds are not? 

What if your character exists outside of any given Campaign, and can join new matches once a match is over? 

This opens up a whole new world of design possibilities.

• Characters are permanent, and advance over the course of many Campaigns.  This gives you the feeling of persistence that we’ve come to expect from MMOs. 

• Campaigns, though, aren’t permanent.  They still be “persistent” between game sessions – but they don’t last forever. 

• How long should the last?  As long as the game is still fun!  And they don’t all have to be the same duration.  Some Campaigns could last 1 week, or 1 month.  or 6 months.  or 1 year.

• These Campaigns aren’t just “instances”, though -- they are fully populated, continent-sized, seamless zone MMO servers.  The only thing they have in common with an “instance” is that they are time-limited.

• Because each Campaign is marching towards an end condition, this means that the World doesn’t have to be static anymore. We can break the Campaign into different “phases”, and adjust the rules of the game change during each phase.  We can allow the players to fundamentally change the world, without fear of the long term problems this might create.

• Why not make each Campaign unique?  Why can’t each one have a completely unique world map (mountains, forests, lakes, castles, villages, quarries, mines, mills – you name it)?  The “exploration” phase of the game can be different in each Campaign.  The world will never be stale.

• To that point: since each game is a stand-alone event, we can even change the rules (and win conditions) of each Campaign.  We can experiment with different rules, to see which ones are more popular – and keep the game continually fresh.

This is really interesting. In some ways, it's in-between lobby games, and fully persistent MMOs. It's not transient gameplay, because the "Campaigns" last for a long time, maybe even months or years. But it's not fully permanent, either.

The universe is persistent as a whole, but not individual worlds.

In particular, it also gives the devs a lot of leeway to experiment with rulesets and conditions. This part might prove to be unexpectedly powerful. It's entirely possible that the devs could randomly hit upon a new ruleset that becomes very popular and the format for future MMOs.

However, the problem might still be that people will flock to the winning teams. They'll just do so before each Campaign starts. You might be able to do something where people commit to Campaigns at the guild level. I.e. The guild chooses a world, and that's the campaign that people in the guild are committed to until the end. Since it's on a long timescale, new Campaigns can start while previous ones are still in progress, creating new boards where none of the existing "winning" teams can participate. Which will in turn create new winning teams.

Honestly, I have no idea how successful this will be. But it is really exciting to see someone trying something bold. I strongly hope that the Crowfall devs pay as much attention to responsiveness and technical quality as they are to design quality. It would be a terrible waste if this game ended up failing because combat was sluggish or an abundance of bugs.

1. The comments on the last post were just excellent. Well worth reading if you haven't.

The Flaw in Extended PvP

As Gevlon astutely points out in the comments on the last post, there is a basic flaw in Extended PvP (PvP carried out over multiple game sessions). Players will defect to the winning team. PvPers often talk about looking for good fights. But when you look at their behavior, they'd rather join the best side and steamroll the opposition, rather than do their best and lose narrowly. Sometimes it's even a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everyone believes X will win, and thus everyone joins X, leading X to win.

Transient PvP doesn't really have this problem. Since teams are formed anew at the start of each game or play session, matchmaking and randomness can generate teams with a reasonably equal chance to win. Or if a player finds themselves on a bad team, well, next game or session might be different.

So then the question becomes: How do we incentivize players to stay on losing teams, or even join the losing side? Can we also do this without incentivizing people to lose on purpose?

Perhaps we can do something with the reward structure. Maybe the faction with a losing record gets a higher number of guaranteed points win-or-lose, and an even greater number of points when they win. The problem with schemes like this is that you have to be very careful, or there will be an optimum point where below you want to win, and above you want to lose.

The only other idea I had was the winners automatically absorb the losers. Like if Faction A defeats some of Faction B in battle, those Faction B players become part of Faction A. Of course, this might lead to a positive feedback loop, where Faction A becomes quite large and ends up winning everything. So you'd have to build in some incentive for A to "split" apart.

Multiple faction games can make the equilibrium more stable. But there's still a possibility that one faction will end up overwhelming the others if enough people defect. As well, there's also the issue that the factions may opt for stability, rather than trying to defeat the others. Arguably, Eve Online has fallen into this state. The major players all have their own empires, and are fairly stable apart from minor skirmishes along the borders.

What other possibilities are there to keep teams or factions balanced in Extended PvP, while still keeping things from stagnating?

Crowfall: More Information on Combat and Worlds

(Sorry if this is turning into All Crowfall All The Time. Not much to write about in my other games, and Crowfall is doing some interesting things.)

Crowfall released some more interesting tidbits. Combat will be less tab-target, and more directional attacks. This sounds like Wildstar. I wasn't a big fan of Wildstar combat, but this is a PvP-focused game, so people are running around in circles anyways.

The other interesting thing is that they are not using the Trinity. But the element they are cutting out is healing. This is very intriguing. For one thing, it makes the game more like FPS games, in a way. Here's what Crowfall has to say on the subject:

We have characters that are more offensive. We have characters that are more defensive. We have characters with support powers. But we made the game purposefully light on in-combat healing, to make it more deadly. ... 

Combat healing effectively adds a multiplier to each combatant’s effective hit points. A defender isn’t just managing one health bar, his “effective” health pool is = his personal health bar * powers driven by the mana pool of every healer actively supporting him. This makes a lot of sense for games that focus around PvE combat where the monsters have thousands of hit points – especially raids.  It makes less sense in a game focused on skill-based player-versus-player combat.

Crowfall is also explicitly ruling out instanced PvE content.  On the one hand, this may turn off a lot of players. But on the other hand, it's good to see the game taking aim at exactly what it wants to be.

They also released more information on the "worlds". It looks like worlds will have different rulesets. On one world, PvP is guild vs guild. On a different world, PvP is faction-based. You can travel from world to world, and there are restrictions on what type of gear you can bring into or out of a specific world. This way you can avoid the styles of PvP that you don't like (for example, Free-for-all) while still dipping into different types every so often.

Some pretty nifty ideas. And there is a nice balance between focusing on exactly what type of game they want, while still offering some variety in rulesets. It's more about gradations of PvP. I think that might prove to be more unifying than the eternal tension between PvE and PvP.

Holiday Events and the Cash Shop in FFXIV

As you know, I'm not a big fan of cash shops in MMOs. Even less in subscription games. But FFXIV has an interesting approach. One that I am not sure if I approve of or not.

It starts with holiday events. Unlike other MMOs, FFXIV's holiday events are completely new every year. For example, last New Year was a story about a group trying to introduce horses as a replacement for chocobos, which did not go over well with the citizens of Eorzea. This New Year was a story about weaponizing sheep to use in warfare.

(Yes, FFXIV holiday events are rather weird.)

The Holiday events feature a new quest and story line, as well as new rewards. For example, last year's Valentine's Day event had a special outfit as a reward. This year the reward is some rather snazzy chocobo barding (it has a top hat!).

What Square does is that after a holiday event is over, the rewards are then placed in the cash shop. So if you miss the event, you can buy the rewards for extra money.

Now, it's not like the rewards are hard to get. This isn't WoW where there's a 0.1% drop chance of getting the rare mount or pet from a holiday boss. If you do the Holiday Event story in FFXIV, you'll get all the rewards.

Is this a good and/or fair use of a cash shop in a subscription game? As much as I dislike cash shops with subs, these are time limited items. They're not particularly hard to get when the event is running. The reason you can't get those particular items in future events is because the future event is all new. That seems like a pretty reasonable balance to me.

Bans, Warriors, and Pyrolysis

Here's a roundup of what I've been up to.

The Old Republic

I logged in today and there was only one other person online in my guild. Apparently there was a bug with the last boss on Ravagers, that allowed you to exploit and get loot multiple times. Bioware handed out temporary bans today, and apparently it hit a ton of people in my guild.

Silly rabbits. Exploits are for slackers.

FFXIV

I've done all the story quests for the latest patch. They made some big changes in the story, and are clearly setting up for the expansion. The Hildibrand questline also came to a close, with an outstanding ending. When the four Warriors Gentlemen of Light made their appearance, I almost died laughing.

I've been leveling up my Warrior. Amusingly, the only reason I'm doing this is because I made one of my retainers a Warrior, and then realized her max level was 5 levels below my Warrior level. The obvious solution was to level Warrior.

Diablo 3

Blizzard has been posting "Play Your Way" posts where they feature interesting builds that don't require a lot of gear. My seasonal wizard had been left at 70, so I tried out this featured Pyrolysis build. It's actually fairly good, and is a great deal of fun.

It's also a very "pretty" build, with the Hydra spewing fire all over the map and Arcane Torrent and lightning bolts flying all over.

MMO Journalism

Rumour has it that AOL is planning to shut down Joystiq and related sites. This will probably hit two major sites dedicated to MMOs: WoW Insider, and Massively.

I will be sorry to see them go. I haven't always agreed with their perspectives, but they've always been interesting. They had a good handle on the "pulse" of their respective communities, and could be counted on to cover almost anything of interest that happened.

There is talk of some of the veterans of these two sites attempting to launch their own site dedicated to MMO journalism, perhaps funded by Kickstarter or subscriptions. I rather think that such a venture will probably end in failure. I mean, MMO gamers don't want to pay for the games they play. How much less likely are they going to want to pay for writing about those games?

They might be able to do something with advertising, but if AOL can't draw enough advertising to cover costs, I'm not sure that an independent site would be able to.

Still, I'll miss WoW Insider and Massively if they go. Best of luck to the current staff.

Crowfall: Centaurs Confirmed!

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you vital news: Crowfall has centaurs!

Not only centaurs, but centaurs based on the Roman Empire!

The tactic Crowfall is taking towards races is interesting. They look to be tying class and race together. All Knights are human, all Legionnaires are centaur. It's interesting because that means that the races don't need to be necessarily balanced as a baseline, so long as the Race+Class combination is balanced.

According to their FAQ, humanoid classes will allow both genders, while monstrous classes will be single-gendered. I imagine this is to cut down on the amount of time needed. It probably means that there will be a monstrous female class as well, maybe Lamias, Medusas, or Harpies.

The other interesting thing that people noticed earlier was that races had a Hunger Resistance stat. This naturally led into all sorts of speculation about role food would play in the game. Would you have to eat every so often to keep your stats up?

However, the Legionnaire write-up seems to imply that the Hunger are some sort of enemy. So that stat is closer to Demon Resistance, rather something related to food. I found that to be an amusing outcome to the speculation.

Rationing Loot

Most games ration the top tiers of loot in some fashion. They do this to draw out the process of gearing up, and to give people an excuse to log in and continue to play.

For example, WoW uses raid lockouts combined with a random chance of items dropping. You can only do a boss once per week, and you have X% chance of your item dropping. This method is exciting, but can be streaky.

The percent chance can be for the entire group or for the individual, as in the case of WoW's personal loot system. I think the entire group method is better, as it is more apparent that the reward is for the entire group. As well, in a good group, very little loot is wasted. Unfortunately, as LFR proved, you can't trust a random group of strangers to distribute loot reasonably.

The other common method is an end-game currency where the amount you can earn per week is limited. Thus, you know an item costs exactly Y points, which will take you exactly Z runs. This method is perfectly deterministic, but rather boring.

Of all the rationing methods in the MMOs I've played, I like the system used by FFXIV's 24-man raids the best. A separate item drops for each 8-player group within the raid. If it's for your role, you may roll Need. Otherwise you can only Greed. But you can only win one piece from the instance per week. You can do the instance as often as you want. You can fish for a specific item or just take the first item for your class that drops. You can roll for your alternate specs if you want, but if a main-spec in the raid wants the item, they will win.

This "one item per week" restriction is a very blunt instrument. It's very meta as well. There's no real in-game rational for it at all. But it just works. People only roll on items they want, since there is a significant cost to winning. The tank gets the tank item if she needs it. There's no chance of a damage dealer winning the item over the tank. The item drops for the group as a whole, and people who win stuff get congratulated. It feels like a team working for a common reward, which is something that WoW's LFR has lost.

Of course, FFXIV also has an alternate raid currency. So even if you don't win anything that drops during a run, you accumulate the raid currency and can buy gear that way.

Verified Identities and Archeage

One of the major MMO stories of last year was the launch of Archeage in the West to a reasonably welcoming audience. However, Archeage was overrun by spammers, hackers, and bots to such a degree that many people gave up on the game.

Many commentators pinned the blame for this on Trion, the western publishers. Trion in turn, said that they required help from the developers, XLGames, to combat these problems. Most commentators seemed to feel that this was just Trion trying to cover up for their mistakes.

But what if Trion was right? Most MMOs these days need to build in anti-spam, anti-hacker, and anti-bot defenses. What if Archeage didn't have these defenses that we in the West take as normal?

From my quick research, Archeage Korea requires three extra items to create an account:

1. A Korean IP Address
2. A Korean mobile phone
3. A Korean Social Security Number (some sort of number assigned by the South Korean government)

These three external requirements tie the Acheage account to a very specific person. What if Archeage in Korea doesn't need built-in software defenses? What if these external requirements are enough to reduce spam, hacking, and botting to acceptable levels, or eliminate it entirely?

Perhaps companies in the west need to come up with a way to create a verified identification before allowing account creation. Of course, the problem is that there are multiple countries, all with different identification documents and numbers, and legal restrictions on how those identifiers can be used. You might be able to do something with a dedicated third-party company, which the game companies support.

Rather than a software arms race between spammers, hackers, botters and the game devs, verified identities might be a more successful strategy to pursue.

Crowfall

I saw some teasers for an upcoming MMO, Crowfall.

It's just the barest of teasers so far, but they look to be creating something in the vein of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. Trying to get back to "world" aspect of MMOs.

For example, in an interview at mmorpg.com, they say:

There are a ton of lessons to be learned looking at games like Star Wars Galaxies and EVE Online which had and still have success with their crafting and economic loops. From a very high altitude, crafters need to be able to: craft unique items, explore new recipes and profit from the results of this exploration, and create customized items for all styles of play. Crafters must have an audience to buy their goods. The loop between crafter and combatant has to exist! And, ideally, crafters need to be able to “mark” their product so that they can build a social reputation and a following. 

The very concept that players can and will lose their items at some point is required, otherwise the game loop breaks. It is a very controversial topic for those who don’t like the potential of losing their items, and we understand that.  But sometimes you have to embrace ideas that may not be popular at first glance, because they open up amazing areas of gameplay that are otherwise not accessible.

That's a pretty bold statement, but it might very well be correct. Inconvenience drives sandboxes.

The dev pedigree is also somewhat impressive: J. Todd Coleman, Gordon Walton, Raph Koster. We'll see what they come up. There are many ways an MMO can screw up, and these devs aren't exactly known for prioritizing performance and responsiveness.

Still, I'm kind of interested in Crowfall, and it's mostly because of a single picture:

That Templar just looks good to me. It's clean, attractive, in solid, functional armor that still has a surprising amount of detail. It's stylized, avoiding uncanny valley effects, while still retaining proper human proportions.

I just really like the design intent as exemplified by this Templar. If the rest of the game matches this aesthetic (and performance/responsiveness is strong!), Crowfall just feels like it will be a blast to play.

Elder Scrolls Online Goes Buy-2-Play

The other recent news was that Elder Scrolls Online announced that they were switching to a buy-2-play model (with an optional subscription).

I've seen some people saying cynically saying that this was the plan all along. That ESO was just trying to milk as much as money out of subscribers as possible before switching. As Azuriel points out, F2P has the unfortunate side-effect of engendering cynicism among the players.

This imputation is probably unfair to the devs behind ESO. If anything, B2P would have been the backup plan. If ESO had stabilized at a high number of subscribers (0.5 million, 1 million, whatever), they would have been more than happy to stick with being a subscriber-only game.

Oh well. It will make life easier on the console, though.

I'm not sure if I will take another look at ESO. My problem was with the combat, and I don't know if that has improved or not. If any readers are still playing ESO, feel free to chime in on the state of the game.

Melee Builds and Treasure Goblins in Diablo 3

My current Crusader build in Diablo 3 is a Holy build. It's a build that has a relatively large amount of ranged damage. However, the Crusader archetype is a sword-and-shield melee fighter. So for a few Paragon levels, I tried out a build focused around melee skills and blocking, with lots of things like thorns (reflective damage).

This melee build was actually a lot of fun, and effective against enemies. It was especially fun with large packs of enemies, as you just wade into the packs, get surrounded, and then everything around you blows up as you block all the damage.

However, there was one mechanic in D3 which made this melee build extremely frustrating: Treasure Goblins. Treasure goblins are enemies which have a large amount of loot. But they don't attack you. Instead they run away from you and attempt to open a portal through which they escape. Currently there's an event where the Treasure Goblins can be found in pairs or packs.

Treasure Goblins were supremely disappointing with a melee build. While chasing down one goblin, the others made their escape. I was basically only able to kill half a pack of goblins. In contrast, the ranged Holy build can usually get all of them.

It was very frustrating because Treasure Goblins are somewhat rare, and very rewarding if you kill them. So despite the fact that the melee build was fun and performed well everywhere else in the game, I switched back to ranged. After all, the ranged build dealt just as well with regular enemies, and had the advantage of making it much easier to kill Treasure Goblins.

This illustrates how hard it is to balance melee against ranged in these sorts of games. Melee classes or builds have a fundamental weakness built into them. Ranged classes or builds need a similar weakness. When they don't have that weakness, the balance tilts too heavily towards the ranged classes and builds.

Paying for Access in a F2P Game

Is it okay to charge for access for a Free-2-Play game?

Blizzard is offering a $40 bonus pack for Heroes of the Storm. It has some heroes, some skins, and most importantly, Beta Access. If you didn't get an Alpha invite, this is pretty much the only way to get into Heroes of the Storm.

I got an Alpha invite, and I've played a little bit of Heroes. MOBAs are not really my cup of tea. I've never actually played League of Legends or similar. So I can't really tell you much about the gameplay.

But in my opinion, the label "Beta" is a misnomer. Heroes is pretty much ready for launch. Any company other than Blizzard would have launched already. I'm sure they're going to add more heroes, and do the occasional balance tweak. But that's par for the course for a modern online game.

One could say that Heroes is launching. It's just going to cost $40 for the first couple months and then go free. Essentially, you're paying to play it at "launch". If you're willing to wait, the game will eventually become free.

I don't think this is a bad thing. The Old Republic does this with early access for features for subscribers. Books have traditionally done it with expensive hardcovers coming before cheap paperbacks. Heck, one could say that games do it with sales, especially the eventual Steam sale. The only real difference is that at the end, the company offers the game for free, instead of a nominal $5 or whatever the Steam sale price is.

I also think these types of schemes have other benefits. It rations everyone into the game slowly. Rather than have a massive rush of players at launch, you have several generations. New blood comes in to refresh the community as people start to leave.

In fact, consider a scheme like the following: For the first month after launch, the game costs $60. The second month, the game costs $50. The third month, $40. In the seventh month, the game becomes fully Free-2-Play. I think such a scheme would be straightforward and beneficial, rather than masking the current state by calling Launch "Beta".