Blade And Soul Endgame

My Force Master reached the level cap of 45 and finished off the story so far. The ending of the story was quite interesting, and went off in a new direction. The set up for the next arc is fairly intriguing.

There appears to be a fair number of things to do at 45. Apparently I need to increase my faction PvP level a bit in order to unlock some of the more lucrative dailies. This system of Blade and Soul is pretty neat, as you have to equip your faction uniform to accept and do these quests. The quests are PvE'ish, but you can be attacked by the opposing faction (while wearing your uniform).

BnS also has an interesting system revolving around Prestige Coins. As you kill enemy faction people (players or NPCs) you accumulate Prestige Coins. If you are killed by an enemy player, you drop all your Prestige Coins and the enemy acquires them.  You turn your Prestige Coins into a vendor in exchange for faction influence. However, the exchange rate is determined by the number of Prestige Coins you have. If you have less than 10, you get 1 influence per Coin, 11-20 is 2 influence per Coin, and 21+ is 3 influence per Coin. However, the rate applies to all the Coins you are carrying. Thus if you have 20 coins, you turn them in for 40 influence, but if you have 21 coins, you would get 63 influence instead.

The system is designed to push you to carry larger amounts of Prestige on you at all times. The amount of Prestige you are carrying is visible, making you a more lucrative target for enemy players. I thought it was pretty clever.

Of course, this PvP system is fairly optional. There are tons of other pure PvE dailies, and 4-5 dungeons you can run. There's also Mushin's Tower, which appears to be a single-person dungeon consisting of 7 bosses of increasing difficulty. And there's the whole Arena system if you're into formal PvP.

So I'm a bit unsure of what I will do next. I think I will take a tour of the various options and then decide if I want to go with an alt, or move on to a different game.

Play Diary #3

Blade and Soul

I've been focusing on BnS the last couple of days. My Force Master is level 44, about half a level from the current cap of 45.

I did revise my opinion of the story. It's not that bad. It got more interesting at the end of Act 1. The English voice acting is still pretty bad, and the translation is a bit weak. But the actual story itself is like an entertaining B-movie, an old Kung Fu flick from the 70s. Also, I like the main villain, Jinsoyun. I'm not entirely sure what she's up to, but she has style and is reasonably competent.

Right now, I'm a bit stuck on gold. I need about 50% more money than I have to be able to afford the next step in upgrading my weapon. Upgrading weapons is interesting. At the start of the game, you're given a Hongmoon weapon which you can upgrade by consuming other weapons. Every five weapon levels, you need to consume a specific weapon in order to get to the next tier.

Apparently this was a catch up mechanic introduced after the Korean launch, the equivalent of heirloom weapons. I think it's a nice spin on heirlooms. Having to manually upgrade them is more interesting than having them automatically scale with your character.

The Old Republic

I have too many Light Side characters, and I wanted another Dark Side character. So I decided to remake my Jedi Knight, and tilt her to the Dark Side. I can't really handle full Dark Side, so I'm trying a middle path. This one is mostly good, but shows no mercy to enemies. Surprisingly, you get a lot of Dark Side points from the early Jedi Knight story by playing in this manner. But the side and planetary quests tend to have different LS/DS choices, so I find I'm getting DS points from the Knight story, and LS points from the planetary quests.

It will be interesting to see if this trend continues. I'm only on Corsuscant so far. The planetary quests also have a lot of "Dark Side for money" choices, where you do something bad because the NPC will reward you. There's a lot less "Dark Side for expedience, or total victory at a cost" style choices.

It's also interesting to see what missions are now deemed optional, and not shown by default. A lot of the more morally ambiguous missions, with more interesting DS/LS choices, are hidden. For example, the mission to steal documents from a Republic Senator who is an Imperial sympathizer; or the mission to dig up dirt on the Justicars by investigating the execution of the son of a prominent family. I'm not sure if this trend will continue on future planets, or if I'm seeing a pattern where none exists.

F2P Versus Subscription in Blade and Soul

Normally, if you asked me how to best spend money in a Free-2-Play MMO, I would tell you to buy a subscription. In most F2P MMOs I've seen, a subscription basically replaces the F2P structure. You subscribe, and everything unlocks. Most subscriptions even give you some F2P currency so you can indulge in some of the cosmetic items for sale. The idea here is that you can either go a la carte, and pick up exactly what you want in bits or pieces, or go for the one price which gets you everything.

In Blade and Soul, though, I'd tell you hold off on the subscription, or Premium, option. First, BnS Premium can't be purchased directly, you have to spend the F2P currency, NCoins, to buy it. Thus it doesn't come with a NCoin grant, because buying it for 2000 NCoins and getting 500 back would be silly.

Second, Premium doesn't actually unlock anything other than the wardrobe. Admittedly the Wardrobe, which stores costumes, is nice. Premium grants you a lot of bonuses: increased loot from mobs, increased XP, more spins on this Daily Dash login game, etc. But you still have to purchase extra character slots and inventory expansions separately.

I'm not saying not to spend money on BnS if you want to. Just don't fall into the trap of thinking that you can just buy Premium and you can ignore the cash shop, the way you can in SWTOR, for example.

Rather, if you're spending $15/month, or whatever your budget is, you should put your first purchases toward inventory expansion items, additional character slots, multiple skill specialization slots, etc. Unlock the full structure of the game first. Then in the second or third month or whenever you're satisfied with all the unlocks, you can purchase Premium if you want.

I guess this post is prompted by a bit of buyer's remorse. I picked up a month of Premium, simply because I'm in the habit of assuming that subscriptions are the best way to play this genre. I really should have spent that money on unlocks instead.

Still, it was an interesting look at a setup where the subscription does not replace the F2P elements, but just acts as an extra boost on your characters.

Knights of the Fallen Empire: Chapter X

Chapter X

Bioware released the latest chapter for The Old Republic last week. I did the content of Chapter X this weekend. This is the first chapter in the one-chapter-per-month cadence that Bioware is planning for this year.

Overall, the story was pretty decent. However, it really felt like a part of the Agent story line. Which was great for me since my main is an Agent. But I really wonder how a non-Agent character would find this story? Would it work for them, or would it fall flat? Normally, you'd think that the story would be roughly the same for all the classes, but maybe they just took extra care to personalize extensively for the Agent.

The biggest reservation is that the chapter took about an hour to play through. Is that enough content to keep people subscribed? I have no idea, and it will be interesting to find out if it is or is not.

HK-55

The other piece of "content" was giving a HK-55 companion to everyone who had been subscribed on January 10th.

I really don't understand these rewards. Making them a one-time reward for subscribing on a specific date seems excessively restricting. I thought they would simply give you the companion, and that would be that.

But Bioware actually added a little quest/scenario around recruiting HK-55 that was quite fun. You had to calibrate HK's targeting parameters for the times he was on his own (thus side-stepping the issue when you're actually using him as a companion). This was done by going through several scenarios. Things like a hostage crisis, escort missions, wildlife attacks, etc. You'd then go through the potential targets, and mark them as kill or avoid.

It was an interesting exercise, and a novel way of tapping into the morality aspect of TOR (without actually invoking Light/Dark choices). For example, my LS Agent side marked unknown civilians as avoid, but unknown droids as kill.

Which makes it all the more odd that future players won't be able to see this piece of content, even if they subscribe.

Sometimes Bioware's plans for this game are very opaque.

Play Diary #2

Blade and Soul

I popped on BnS for 15 minutes to try and get the Jangshi Stalker Hat from the wheel. Suprisingly, I got two hats! Sadly, they're character-bound, so I just threw the extra one into the wardrobe. Now my destroyer can move on to the rest of the game.

A couple forums I read have BnS threads. I just can't keep a straight face when Lyn Summoners discuss theorycraft. Here's a sample conversation:

From my reading, Rumblebees is better for bossing or for mobs that are on inclines, since sunflower doesn't work well there. But I've not tried it yet.  

You build photosynthesis stacks when you hit a target with sunflower twice that is either doom and bloomed, standing in nettles, or pinned by your cat. So you need to not doom and bloom then immediately nettle or you'll lose your stacks. I usually doom and bloom, lmb/rmb alternate until about 4-5s left on doom and bloom debuff, then drop nettles and continue lmb/rmb weaving. I ensure that my cat is either taunting or pinning right before I get my 5th stack of photosynth, and just hold rmb until the buff is gone. You can get about 5 free sunflowers that way, depending on ping. I just unlocked the hongmoon skill for sunflowers, which gives me 2 more seconds of overflow, and I've gotten up to 9 sunflowers cast in that time. 

A tip for Summoner dps rotation is opening with Doom 'n' Bloom and get 3 photo stacks then briar patch the target and build the 2 last stacks and nuke with Sunflower until the buff ends then end with Weed Whack and Thorn Strike. Just rotate this and remember to start with full focus. Pet rotation is Ankle Biter + Power Pounce after that Strike to daze the target then pop Crouching and just rotate.

I can't take these guys seriously at all. The juxtaposition of hardcore theorycraft with the Summoner ability names is just so terribly cute.

The Old Republic

Tonight was our second raid night of the week. Sadly we only had six people from our regular raid group, so we took two other guildmates. We didn't attempt Revan, but attempted Explosive Conflict. We wiped a couple times on Thoth and Zorn, but eventually killed them. We then attempted Stormcaller and Firebrand, but didn't have enough DPS, and hit enrage at 10% or so. So we went to Karagga's Palace to try and get some gear for the newer people. KP went quickly and smoothly.

After the raid I spent some time sorting out professions on my characters. Bioware reworked professions this patch, introducing a new tier of materials and craftables. However, they also included a temporary vendor where you can trade your old Grade 8 materials for Grade 9 ones. This was a very nice touch.

Play Diary #1

To get back into the habit of writing, if I can't think of a larger topic, I'm going to write a recap of what I've done in the various games I'm playing.

Blade and Soul

I killed the Stalker Jangshi a few times on my Destroyer. BnS has these loot wheels every so often. You get essences by killing a world boss that respawns fairly often, who everyone in the area can attack. Each wheel has a specific boss essence required. The Stalker Jangshi wheel is for levels 7-10. The wheels give you weapons, soul shields, and costumes at varying odds. I'm trying to get the entire Jangshi outfit (costume, hat, adornment) for this character. I've gotten about 5 costumes and 2 adornments (in addition to dozens of weapons and soul shield boxes), but no hat so far. Since this is just a low level alt, I've parked it at the wheel, and log in and kill the boss for 15 minutes every so often.

I also did a few quests on my Force Master, who is level 42. Slowly but surely progressing to the cap. The latest patch that dropped a couple days ago seemed to have a lot of buffs for the Force Master, as killing quest mobs suddenly became easier.

The Old Republic

Tonight was raid night in The Old Republic. A major patch dropped Tuesday, and it broke a lot of things, so there was another patch today. As a result we started late because people were still patching. One of our raiders had computer issues, so we ending up pugging an Aussie marauder to help out.

Explosive Conflict was the "highlight" Hard Mode operation this week, the one which gives i224 gear. But for some reason, everyone else in my guild hates EC. I'm not really sure why. I kind of like it, and we can beat the entire thing fairly easily. But instead we decided to clear Temple of Sacrifice through to Revan. Revan is the fight we are working on, though we are still in the first phase.

It was fairly straightforward, though the Underlurker was bugged in new and interesting ways. For some reason, this fight is very fragile, and seems to break after every patch. In this fight there are rocks which fall from the ceiling in random locations. You need to hide behind the rocks to avoid the boss's roar. Normally, the rocks have a green outline showing the "safe" place to hide. Today the green zones seemed completely random and totally unrelated to where you should be. So we just eyeballed it. We wiped several times, but eventually killed it.

We ended up killing all four bosses before Revan, so tomorrow we'll probably be practicing that fight for the full raid. Maybe we'll make it phase two cleanly.

Blizzard's F2P Model

The Overwatch beta returned today. This time they included more information on their progression and cash shop model. This is interesting because they have settled on the same system used in Hearthstone. So I thought I'd take a look at that model.

Here's a diagram of the system:

The first point is that the items are not sold directly. Rather containers containing a random assortment of items are sold. In Hearthstone, it's card packs. In Overwatch, it's loot boxes.

You can get the containers either through time and gameplay (levels in Overwatch, dailies in Hearthstone) or by spending real currency. This exact ratio of time to real currency can be changed. In Hearthstone, since it is fully F2P, it's weighted towards real currency. Overwatch is B2P, so it appears that levels through gameplay will be the main method.

The container contains several times, with pre-determined rarity. This is pretty much any collectible card pack system.

The most interesting part of Blizzard's model is how duplicates are handled. If you get duplicate items, you can convert them to a game currency (credits in Hearthstone, dust in Overwatch). You can then use the game currency to create specific items.

One key point is that you cannot buy specific items directly. Instead you have to go through the entire chain, and there is effectively loss when going from the random item to the specific item. You might have to get five random rares to purchase once specific rare.

There's also no secondary market involved. SWTOR and Magic:the Gathering has much the same system for the first part, but after you get the random items, you can buy and sell them on a secondary market. However, going through the secondary market means that prices vary with supply and demand. You can have two rares: one highly-sought and worth a large amount; and the other disdained, and can be picked up cheaply.

In contrast, in the Blizzard model, each rare is be broken down into the same amount of game currency, and each rare also costs the same amount of game currency to get directly. This maintains a minimum level of value for each item.

This system also gives Blizzard a lot of knobs to tweak:

• The cost of a container in real currency
• The cost of a container in time
• The number and distribution of random items in a container
• The amount of game currency generated by an converted item
• The amount of game currency needed to purchase a specific item

It also has a minimum number of products available to purchase, making the store very simple. It's also relatively fair, combining both the fun and excitement of opening random packs with a path to obtaining specific desired items for a known and expected price.

Updates, Blade and Soul Classes

I haven't written much lately. I need to get back into the habit. Especially when there's a lot of stuff that happened that I do want to talk about.

I've mostly been playing Blade & Soul lately. It's a little surprising how long it's lasted for me. The things I usually like in an MMO, the stories, are pretty terrible in B&S. But the base combat is really good. I especially like how the combat mechanics for each class really capture the flavor of that class.

I've tried three classes so far: Force Master, Assassin, and Destroyer. The Force Master is a fire and ice mage, with lots of freezing and control. It's a very even class. The Assassin really feels like an Assassin. You set up, and then it's like stealth, backstab, triggered slash, counter the enemies attack and automatically return to stealth behind them, backstab, dead. It's very fast and efficient, but requires a bit of time to set up properly. Destroyer is the big warrior with the axe, and it uses slow powerful attacks, with a lot of grabbing the opponent and throwing them around.

Another interesting thing is that each class usually has multiple "paths" in combat. If one set of cooldowns is up, you can use combo A, if not, use combo B. It's more chaining of combos, rather than executing a repeat rotation.

I'm still not sure how long I'll play it. But Blade & Soul is definitely worth trying if you're on the fence. Just treat the story as if it was a bad kung fu movie from the 70s.

More Blade and Soul Thoughts

I've been playing Blade and Soul over the last week. I purchased a weeks worth of Premium to avoid the queues. B&S has a few more interesting aspects.

Context-Sensitive Abilities

Abilities are very "context-sensitive". On my Force Master, using a Fire spell (left mouse button) puts you in Fire mode, and a lot of your abilities change to a Fire version. Using a Frost spell (right mouse button) puts you in Frost mode, and several abilities change to a Frost version. It's fairly easy to change contexts, to alternate between Fire and Frost.

There are other contexts as well. The FM has a "grip" ability that pulls and holds the enemy. While the enemy is gripped, several new variants of abilities are unlocked.

Talent Trees

This is then backed up by the talent tree system. Each ability (or more accurately each button), has it's own talent tree. The tree usually has 2-4 mutually exclusive branches that changes or enhances the ability in a specific fashion.

For example, that grip ability I mentioned can be changed into a snare which prevents people from moving. Another short-range ability can be changed into a variant that does less damage but has a longer range.

All in all, the ability structure of B&S is very interesting, and it's worth looking at to see how a large number of abilities and variations can be mapped onto a small number of keys.

1v1 PvP

The PvP devs of most MMOs have said that they do not balance around 1v1 PvP. B&S embraces 1v1, and has it being the central format of PvP. I've only tried one duel, and lost fairly quickly. But it was a pretty interesting experience.

Dueling has a long history in WoW. You can often find people dueling outside the gates of capital cities. After playing B&S, I am no longer certain that simply writing off 1v1 as unbalance-able was correct. Perhaps if 1v1 was balanced, that would simplify the balancing of larger groups, or classes in general.

Of course, B&S doesn't really have dedicated healers, which changes things significantly.

Health

In most modern western MMOs, health is a per-encounter resource. You start the encounter at full-health, and it's fairly easy to get back up to full-health afterwards.

In B&S, health regenerates far slower, but you generally take less damage during a fight. Resources to recover health are moderately scarce as well. So you generally deal with multiple pulls on one health bar, and only rest when your health gets low.

Conclusions

Those are some of the mechanical aspects of Blade and Soul which I found interesting. The queues have died down, so it's a decent time to check it out. Really the only issue is that the spammers are out in full force, and have overrun all chat.

PvE Endgame Difficulty Tiers

Judging by the main three PvE MMOs (WoW, SWTOR, FFXIV) that I'm following, the PvE endgame is gradually converging onto the same model.

Essentially, there are 3 difficulty tracks. We can call them softcore, midcore, and hardcore. Here's how each MMO handles the difficulty tracks:

	Softcore	Midcore	Hardcore
World of Warcraft	LFR, Normal	Heroic	Mythic
The Old Republic	Story	Hard	Nightmare
FFXIV: ARR	Crystal Tower (24), Hard Primals	Binding Coil (8), Extreme Primals	Savage Binding Coil
FFXIV: Heavensward	Void Ark (24), Alexander (8)	Extreme Primals	Savage Alexander

The softcore layer is also the layer that allows for random transient groups.

Each of these games have issues with the layers, though different issues.

WoW's major issue is that LFR is a complete joke. As well, it's essentially the same content repeated multiple times. Finally, because Mythic is a fixed size, and Heroic is not, the transition between Heroic and Mythic can be hard to navigate.

TOR's major issue revolves around Nightmare modes. In theory they were supposed to give better gear than Hard modes. However, there's been a "bug" which means they drop the same gear. Bioware has also announced that the fix is to give Nightmare a "chance" to drop better gear. This is primarily to people from getting the best gear too fast. But there is one highlighted Hard mode each week which drops guaranteed best gear. So TOR is in the awkward position of having a Hard mode instance guarantee better gear than the Nightmare version, which has the hardcore players unhappy.

Additionally, it's been over a year since a new TOR operation was released, so most players in the midcore and hardcore streams have done the current content a lot.

For FFXIV, in ARR, Binding Coil was out of reach for the softcore tier, which is composed of the largest number of players. In Heavensward, SE tried to fix that, moving the 8-man raid into the softcore tier. Unfortunately, that hollowed out the midcore content. The midcore are left with throwing themselves futilely at Savage, or just settling for the easier softcore content.

As well, the way loot was handled damaged this structure further. The current Extreme Primals had their rewards obsoleted really quickly.

Anyways, that's a look at the current state of endgame difficulty in PvE MMOs. I confess that I liked the FFXIV:ARR system the best. It struck a good balance between repeating content and making content exclusive. I've never actually done Binding Coil, but I think there was enough other content that it never felt necessary.

Blade And Soul Release Impressions

I talked a bit about Blade and Soul when it was in beta, but it has been released today. I'd consider waiting a few weeks if you aren't willing to subscribe, as the queues are insane at the moment. It's also overrun with gold spammers.

It's a very "Korean" MMO. If you don't like other Korean games like TERA, I doubt you will like Blade and Soul. The character creation is pretty amazing with a ton of sliders. The game tends to "skimpy female clothing" side of things.

The combat is pretty interesting. Lots of combos and abilities that change in response to other abilities. It does seem somewhat dependent on your internet connect, though.

The story and dialogue is pretty atrocious. I rather wish they had left in the Korean voice-acting, and just translated it with English sub-titles. However, I'm not very far in, so it may get better.

There are some interesting design decisions. For example, the default loot mechanism in random dungeons is Gold DKP. When an item drops, people bid gold. The highest bid wins and the gold is distributed to the other party members.

Personally, I think this is a great idea. It stops people from rolling Need on everything. If you don't win anything, at least you get a lot of gold to help you in your next run. It's a better solution than Personal Loot, as far as I'm concerned.

World PvP is enabled by equipping a special faction costume. Once equipped, you can attack people wearing the opposite faction costume. It's a very visual, in-game, approach to a PvP flag. However, there are also multiple pairs of factions, which might make things more interesting.

Truthfully, I don't really have a lot more to say about Blade and Soul. It's kind of fun. But I don't think it will hold me for very long.

Randomness in Hearthstone, Part II

A while back, we were discussing the randomness in Hearthstone, with several commenters saying that Hearthstone is much more random than Magic: the Gathering. I disagreed. I recently came across a post in the Magic sub-reddit making the same points:

The problem with Hearthstone is that it is too consistent. You always have your mana when you need it. As such, that five-drop of yours is coming down on turn five. In Magic, your five-drop may come down on turn five in one game, and then have to wait until turn seven on the next. Mana is too consistent in Hearthstone, so every game feels the same. On top of that, card draws are more consistent because you have 30 cards as opposed to 60 in Magic/Pokémon and 40 in Yugioh. And because you don't have to put lands in your deck (or mana crystals, whatever), you can cram more good spells into your deck, so your odds of getting a "good card" go up. Finally, the mulligan process in Hearthstone of being able to pick-and-choose makes opening hands more consistent, especially since there's no penalty for taking a mulligan (either in full or in part).

 It makes the point that the randomness in Hearthstone is just surface randomness built into a few cards. While the deeper deck construction is far more consistent in Hearthstone than in Magic.

Note too that this player thinks consistency at this level is a flaw in the game, not a positive. I've commented before on how the initial hand in card games (and subsequent draws) is a far more acceptable source of randomness to players than other sources.

A Game of Votes

Eve Online is having its yearly elections for the Council of Stellar Managment, an advisory body made up of players. There's lots of controversy this year because the last CSM apparently had a lot of drama. And of course, Eve being Eve, everything is part of the metagame, including the CSM.

Elections are run online, using Single-Transferrable-Vote, I believe. However, this is a pretty boring system for a game like Eve, and has already been gamed out by the various power blocs.

I have an idea for a more "entertaining" CSM voting system:

• Every account gets one vote.
• The vote is a virtual object attached to the first character who logs in once election season starts.
• The vote can be transferred from one character to another. It may not be stored or sold via the automatic trading markets.
• Characters can accumulate multiple votes.
• If your ship and pod are destroyed by another player, all the votes you hold are dropped into space and can be looted by another character.
• There is a special election station in a contested null-sec sector (maybe Providence sector?).
• A character who gets to the election station may turn in her accumulated votes, which are tallied and recorded.
• Votes may be turned in once and only once during the election season. If you turn in 40 votes and later accumulate 500 votes, your total is stuck at 40, and you cannot turn in the 500.
• The qualifying accounts with the top X totals at the end of election season are the winners.

You may need additional rules about not being able to jump directly into the election station system or surrounding constellation.

In any case, this should be a more entertaining system than the current one, ensuring that players elected to the CSM have the requisite amounts of skill and guile. You can have meta-game shenanigans where spies intercept votes and defect to other corporations with those votes. The big corps may spread out their votes via "bundlers" to avoid losing a lot of them at once.

It is an election far more in the style of Eve Online. And the most important thing is that it will be far more entertaining for the rest of us.

Knights of the Fallen Empire versus The Force Awakens

This post contains spoilers for both Knights of the Fallen Empire and The Force Awakens.

I was playing Chapter 4 of KotFE on my Jedi Knight recently. This is my second playthrough of KotFE, and the one after I saw The Force Awakens. It struck me that there were some unintentional parallels between Chapter 4 and TFA.

In Chapter 4, your two main companions are Koth Vortena and Lana Beniko. Koth is a black man, who was a former officer in the enemy Empire's military. He deserted when he was ordered to massacre civilians. That's a fairly strong parallel with Finn. Lana, meanwhile, parallels Rey to a degree, being a powerful white female force user.

Of course, there are differences. The two are balanced better, Koth being the pilot and mechanic. Koth and Finn are both more classic good guys. Lana is a ruthless but pragmatic Sith Lord, the former Minister of Intelligence. To be honest, I think she's a far more interesting character than Rey.

One important difference is that the KotFE characters are both older. They've lived more, and done more, than the characters in TFA. That history makes them more interesting.

I was just struck by the unintentional parallel between the two stories at this point. Yet KotFE managed to do a better job with it's two characters, and manages to balance them better as well.

Of course, the biggest difference is HK-55. I'm pretty sure that an HK unit would have livened up TFA immeasurably.

Belief and Outcomes

This  is not really related to gaming, but is something I've been contemplating lately.

Let's say that there is a statement X. You do not believe that X is true. You think it is wrong, that it does not describe the reality of the world.

There are other people out there who do believe in statement X. Who believe wholeheartedly, who believe that X describes a truth of the world. And because they believe in X, they act in a certain manner.

The issue is that because of the way they act, these people accomplish more than your group. They never prove X, and it is entirely probable that you are right about X. But still, in pursuit of X they do more, even make the world a better place, than your group does.

Should you join this other group, even if you don't believe in the fundamental principle which they do?

Perhaps believing X to be true might lead them down a wrong path someday in the future. But so far, other people believing in X has just resulted in outcomes which you like.

Underwater Environments

Syp at Bio Break expresses his disdain for underwater environments.

I generally agree with him in regards to full underwater zones. I hated Vash'jir in Cataclysm. I think that 3D is generally not suited for MMO movement. Underwater also feels like it punishes melee more than ranged, as melee depends more on moving than a ranged caster who can stand still and nuke.

However, I like having water in a regular zone. Like a lake, and a quest sends you to find something in the lake. It changes the rules of the game, but in an intuitive manner. You expect to be slowed down, to have drowning mechanics. The experience is short enough that it's interesting, but not long enough to outstay its welcome.

Alternate environments where the world "rules" change significantly are fun in short doses. I would love to see an outer-space, zero-G mission in SWTOR, for example. But like any good idea, alternate environments can be taken too far.

Holidays

I hope everyone had a happy New Year's Day, and will have a great 2016!

This past week, I was contemplating the difference in holidays between WoW, SWTOR, and FFXIV.

On one side, WoW and SWTOR both have somewhat grindy holidays. WoW used to have rare drop mounts, or collecting hundreds of eggs during Easter. SWTOR's Life Day holiday involves throwing hundreds of snowballs at people to collect the random parcels which are the currency.

In contrast, FFXIV holiday events are usually a short questline, maybe with a couple FATEs thrown in. If you complete the questline, which usually takes about an hour and can be done at low levels, you get all the rewards for the holiday. The grind is totally absent.[1]

Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but it feels like the games have different philosophies towards holidays. WoW and SWTOR both say:

It's a holiday, so you probably have a lot of free time. Here's a way for you to spend that time.

FFXIV, in contrast, says:

It's a holiday, so you probably have other plans. Here's a short piece of content that you can quickly do to celebrate in-game, before you go.

Truthfully, the WoW/SWTOR attitude is probably more accurate for many of their players. But I like FFXIV's attitude better.

1. And it's not like FFXIV has any objection to grinds, as the Relic weapon questline proves.

Empires or Nomads

One problem with PvP MMOs is that they can fall into stagnant states. Each major entity has their own empire. The empire generates enough resources to maintain that power. The empires are unwilling to fully engage other empires in war, because there's a chance they might lose. Instead they'll skirmish on the borders to relieve boredom.

In theory, new entities could challenge the existing empires. In practice though, long-standing empires are usually structured better than the challengers. The empires have been around longer, and have seen what works and what doesn't work. If a challenger does arise, they are usually beaten into submission quite quickly.

When you get into the stagnant state, the real threat to an Empire's survival is not other players, but internal drama. It's arguable that Eve Online has fallen into this state now.

Perhaps the problem is the very concept of empire itself. Once an empire is in a steady state, it usually stands until something major changes. Things like the emperor dying or succession struggles. But these sorts of events are unlikely in PvP games.

A better structure for PvP MMOs might be "nomadic tribes" rather than empires. Under the nomadic model, resources in a given area are consumed faster than they are generated. Thus when the resources run out, the nomads must move on to new regions.

That movement brings them into contact and competition with other tribes, making conflict and war more likely and more necessary.

Imagine that all the CFC's territory in Eve Online suddenly stopped producing resources. The CFC would have to move, and that would generate a huge amount of PvP.

But there is an attraction to holding territory, to claiming "your" space. I'm not sure that a nomadic game would have the same attraction that the empire games do.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

I will try to avoid major spoilers, but this is a discussion of the new movie. There may be spoilers, especially in the comments.

The Force Awakens is a competent but unimaginative movie. It's like Disney asked "What are the elements of a Star Wars movie?" and then went down the list and added in equivalents of each item.

The prequels were bad movies, significantly worse than The Force Awakens. But even they had a sense of vision that TFA lacks. Lucas was trying to tell a story, to tell something new. To add something to his universe. While watching TFA, I got the sense that this movie was so insistent on reminding you that it is a Star Wars movie, that it forgot to be its own thing.

As a result, TFA comes off as a pale copy, a second-rate Star Wars. That's true of many elements in the movie as well. The First Order is a second-rate Empire, Kylo Ren is a second-rate Darth Vader, Jakku is a second-rate Tatooine, BB-8 is a second-rate R2-D2. There are a lot more parallels, but that gets into spoiler territory.

But a second-rate Star Wars is still a pretty good movie.

There are many good things about TFA. The two new leads, Rey and Finn, are solid, engaging characters. Harrison Ford is Harrison Ford, and pretty much steals every scene he's in.

I think Finn is a bit of a missed opportunity. He's an ex-Stormtrooper, but the film went to great lengths to make sure you know he's a good guy and never did anything bad. He might have been far more interesting as a redeemed bad guy.

As for Rey, she's a decent heroine. The problem with Rey is that she is ... excessively competent.  (Though this is probably mandatory for a female lead in an action movie these days.) Compare her character to Luke Skywalker from the first movie. The problem is that she has no path to growth. I rather think the only way she'll become interesting is if she falls to the Dark Side.

I should note that complaints about Finn and Rey are minor at best. In many ways they were the best part of the movie.

But I keep returning to the part about "adding something". The really good works in an extended universe make that universe richer and more interesting. As an example, take Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy. Those books may not have been the greatest literature but they gave us Grand Admiral Thrawn and the Chiss, among many other elements. The Force Awakened really does not expand Star Wars in any direction.

As well, I think that I am not a fan of J.J. Abrams, at least his movies. So far, he tends to string together frentic action scenes instead of making an actual movie. It's like "action sequence, glue scene, action sequence, glue scene, repeat". It's not as bad as the atrocity which was Star Trek: Into Darkness. However, I think TFA would actually have been better with fewer action sequences.

To be fair, I think a lot of modern action and sci-fi movies have the same problem. I blame the extensive budgets of modern films. The the older films couldn't afford to make the entire film a special effects extravaganza, so they saved up for a few really key sequences. But now budgets are such that directors can and do go crazy, and I think the films suffer for it.

In any case, that's what I thought of The Force Awakens. It's decent enough, but unimaginative. If you were asked what a Star Wars movie "designed by committee" would look like, you'd probably come up with The Force Awakens.

Rotations as a Proof of Competence

Continuing on from the previous discussion of Proof of Competence, asking for spec is not the best question. It's a decent question. It's easy to answer and verify. And it does tend to give the information you're looking for. But there are better questions.

In particular, asking for rotation is a much better question. Someone who can rattle off the correct rotation is very likely to be a decent player.  (Rotation here also means ability priority list, not just strict rotation.) The problem is that asking for the rotation is a harder question to answer and verify. You can't just inspect the player and see their rotation.

But what if you could?

In WoW, there are a number of mods which will display the next ability you should use. Some also show the next few abilities of the optimum sequence. You still have to hit the right buttons, but these mods basically show you the best theorycrafted rotation as it happens.

What if this type of UI element, this "Rotation Helper", was part of the base game?

The idea here is that the game doesn't fill out the rotation on its own. Instead, you would have a screen where you could drag abilities into a priority list. Essentially construct your own rotation. The rotation you constructed would then be displayed, and you could hit your buttons to match.

Another player could then inspect you, and just like they see your gear today, they could see the rotation loaded in your Rotation Helper. And perhaps you could send and receive rotations from other players or third parties. If Sally is another Retribution paladin in your raid and is doing better than you, perhaps you can ask her for her rotation and compare it to yours, or replace yours with hers.

The hard part, though, is to construct a Rotation Helper which is simple enough to use, but also powerful enough to construct a decent priority list. A lot of abilities require things like "use when this buff reaches 4 stacks" or "use when this debuff is about to drop off". This kind of stuff is easy to do in code, in a programming language, but is harder to create in a GUI. A Rotation Helper is a non-trivial design problem.

This Rotation Helper wouldn't really help with reactive abilities like healing, or tank cooldowns, or interrupts. But it would significantly help with DPS.

Of course, there are concerns that this type of UI element is "playing the game for you". But such helper mods already exist, and a decent amount of high end players use them already. These type of mods help those players perform better, and would probably significantly help weaker players who don't know about them.