The Clunky New Retribution Rotation

The new Retribution paladin is getting lambasted on the forums, and rightfully so. The new rotation is extraordinarily clunky. It just feels bad and frustrating to play. I imagine that it most players will just end up using an add-on to tell them which button to press.

Here's my analysis of the new rotation, and why it just doesn't work. There are four main pieces to the rotation:

• Blade of Justice - 10.5s cooldown, +2 holy power
• Crusader Strike - 4.5s cooldown, +1 holy power, 2 charges
• Judgment - 12s cooldown, +20% damage to holy power spenders for 8s
• Templar's Verdict - costs 3 holy power

To the previous paradigm of generating and spending holy power, Legion adds this concept of a Judgment "window". You want to Judge and then squeeze as many Templar's Verdicts in those eight seconds as you can. The Ret paladin mastery emphasizes this as well, increasing the damage done by spenders in that window.

The first problem is that there are simply too many levels to Ret now. You have to track your cooldowns, your total holy power, and the Judgment window.

The second problem is that the cooldowns for Blade of Justice and Judgment are slightly off. Judgment is 8 GCDs, and Blade of Justice is 7 GCDs. So they never quite line up, and are always changing position in the rotation relative to each other. This makes it impossible to really get into a rhythm.

The third problem is that Judgment changes its traditional position in the rotation. Ever since Vanilla, paladins open the fight with Judgment. It's the only ranged ability as well. But now you want to delay judgment until 5 holy power has been generated. It's not really an issue on long fights, but it's very annoying to have to hold off on the ranged ability when going to attack something new.

Even Holy's combat rotation is better, simple as it is. There the Judgment window improves Holy Shock and Crusader Strike. So you Judge as you run towards the mob, Shock, and CS as you get into melee range. It works intuitively and smoothly. (Also, you get to use Consecrate as a regular part of the rotation, which is always fun.)

I gather Blizzard is enamored of the Judgment window, seeing as it's also the new Mastery. My suggestion would be to smooth out the cooldowns by increasing the Blade of Justice cooldown to 12s (increasing the damage done to compensate). The heart of the Retribution rotation would become Judgement - Spender - Blade of Justice. That common piece would anchor the rotation, giving it a regular rhythm that you always return to.

This simplifies the cooldown level, and allows the Ret paladin to focus on Holy Power and using spenders in the Judgment window.

The new Retribution rotation reminds me of one of the Jedi Sentinel rotations in SWTOR. It had the same concept of cooldowns, generating and spending resources, and a damage window. But it simplified the cooldown and resource levels, allowing the player to focus on the damage window.

Legion Beta Impressions

I got into the Legion Beta last Friday. I was debating trying it, because I don't really want to be spoiled. But in the end, I rolled a blood elf priest and gave it a whirl. Some thoughts:

• The level 100 boost and initial sequence is really nice. You start out in a tutorial that goes through your basic spells one by one, and you use them on enemies. Priests start as Discipline, so the tutorial went through Shadow Word: Pain, Penance, Smite, Psychic Scream, Power Word: Shield, and Plea. It's really well done.

• I do wonder if they are going to end up making new tutorials for every expansion.

• Regarding spoilers, they come fast and furious. Legion starts off with a scenario, and crazy stuff happens. It's good to see Blizzard putting the main story back into the game, and having important events happen in-game, rather than in a novel or other tie-in.

• After the scenario, the next part that happens is the Artifact Weapon questline. It's a pretty fun quest that sends you to different parts of the world and ends in a nice scenario that makes use of class abilities. For example, as a Discipline Priest, I had to kill things, heal things, use Levitate and even take control of an enemy with Dominate Mind.

• After you get your weapon, you're introduced to the Class Hall. It's really nice to see a space with just other people of your same class. It feels like an exclusive club, and much better than an empty garrison. It's also nice to see all these NPCs of your class.

• After that starts Legion questing proper. You get a choice of 4 zones to start with. I guess this is their new scaling technology so that it doesn't matter what level you are. I started one, but then decided I didn't want to spoil the experience any more, and so stopped.

• It feels like Blizzard put in a lot of work to avoid bottle-necks at Legion launch. You start off in an instanced scenario. Then the Artifact Weapon quest scatters specializations to different parts of the world. Finally, four starting zones scatter everyone further. I guess we'll see if it works.

• I did also try the Demon Hunter initial experience. It's quite good. It puts a different spin on what happens when players did the Black Temple back in TBC. The demon hunter class feels pretty good. With a dash, double jump, and a glide ability, it also feels very mobile.

I think I'm actually going to uninstall the beta and wait for Legion to launch. Initial impressions are very good, though.

AoE Damage is Hurting Trinity MMOs

I have a sinking feeling that dungeon gameplay in FFXIV is making the same mistakes that WoW did. There is increasing pressure for the tank to just run and grab everything, and the DPS proceeds to AoE everything down in the name of efficiency.

A random picture of AoE from Google Images

WoW has gone super crazy with this, especially with leveling dungeons. There's no strategy, no interesting gameplay. Just spam AoE.  But FFXIV is trending in the same direction, especially in the higher levels.

I've had dps and healers run ahead and pull packs back to me. It's really annoying, but the growing community consensus is that the tank should be getting as many packs as they can.

I think the major problem is that AoE is too good relative to single-target damage. AoE is generally better at 3 or more mobs, and that's the size of an average pack. So simply pulling two packs at a time is a complete win.

AoE also obsoletes tactics like Crowd Control. No point in sheeping something, it's going to get broken in the first few seconds. As well, tank AoE threat has to keep up to match DPS, and that in turn has made tanking very easy, and has removed a lot of the tank gameplay that Vanilla WoW or older MMO structures.

AoE should be significantly reduced in effectiveness, such that it only becomes viable at the 8-10 creature mark. Single-target gameplay should be the norm, except in situations which specifically call for AoE. Single-target trinity gameplay is far more interesting and fun than AoE gameplay, and so AoE damage should be kept under strict control.

SWTOR's Dark vs Light Event

The Old Republic is running a Dark vs Light event. Naturally, this event has produced a lot of angst in the community.

Companion rewards for the event

The basic event is clearly modeled after Diablo 3's Seasons. You start a new character and level it up over the course of the event. There are different tiers you work through, which roughly correspond to the sections of the game. Tier 1 is up to level 25, Tier 2 is up to 50 and requires the three low-level story-heavy flashpoints, etc.

The D3 Season model is a good one. It encourages you to try a different character and focus on that character for a period of time. Instead of just having "max-level" as a goal, it breaks it up into sub-goals which are achievable, and which guide you through all the content.

If this had been the entirety of the event, I think it would have been received positively by the community. But Bioware had to include a top level "Legendary" tier which requires you to level all 8 classes, and do most of the content in the game.

The Legendary tier is quite clearly aimed at the super-hardcore, a challenge for them. But I think the bulk of the community took it badly. For one thing, most people don't have 8 character slots free, requiring them to buy more. As well, if you only have to level one character, you can choose a story which you haven't done yet, or would like to try a different path through. This choice would be different for each player.

In many ways, this is a case of addition through subtraction. If Bioware had simply cut the top tier entirely, this event would be far more appealing. As well, they could repeat it next year, and people could try a different story. For example, in D3, I do one class a season. This season was Witch Doctor, last season was Barbarian. Next season will probably be Demon Hunter.

The lesson here is that you don't always have to challenge the hardcore. For time-limited events in particular, perhaps it's better to have an event that the majority of players complete, rather than one where only a few players get to the end.

Unintended Consequences of Anti-Toxicity Systems

Jeff Kaplan made an excellent post on the Overwatch forums about matchmaking. It's definitely worth the read. The most interesting part, however, was this section:

For example, we recently realized that “Avoid this player” was wreaking havoc on matchmaking. One of the best Widowmaker players in the world complained to us about long queue times. We looked into it and found that hundreds of other players had avoided him (he’s a nice guy – they avoided him because they did not want to play against him, not because of misbehavior). The end result was that it took him an extremely long time to find a match. The worst part was, by the time he finally got a match, he had been waiting so long that the system had “opened up” to lower skill players. Now one of the best Widowmaker players was facing off against players at a lower skill level. As a result, we’ve disabled the Avoid system (the UI will go away in an upcoming patch). The system was designed with the best intent. But the results were pretty disastrous.

Essentially, players took a system meant to avoid toxic players, and instead chose to avoid players who were simply more skilled.

Another issue with this system is that it didn't have a cost. I think time and again, games have shown that when an action does not have a cost associated with it, people will abuse it. Think vote kicks from MMOs. Then the action gets removed or hedged with excessive restrictions, such that it becomes fairly useless.

Imagine if avoiding a player cost 50 credits (the currency for the cosmetic items). The amount of people who abuse this system would drop drastically. But if there was a cost, everyone would complain that they had to pay "real" money to avoid the people harassing them. Yet the end result is that we lose the avoid ability entirely.

Low Level Notes from the PTR

I took a poke around the public test realm this weekend. Trying to avoid spoilers, I didn't do anything major. I made a few low-level characters and took them through the first few levels. Here are some observations:

• Classes now start with a specialization. Paladins start as Retribution, Druids start as Feral (and start the game in Cat form, no less), Hunters start as Beastmaster, etc. I think the other specializations unlock at level 10. Overall, I think this is a good idea. There's no forgetting to specialize, and no "generic" abilities which are only used in first 10 levels. You also don't get two abilities that don't synergize, because they are meant for different specializations.

• Judgment has a new animation. You throw a golden hammer at the enemy, and the hammer returns to you. It also sometimes chains to a nearby enemy, but I can't tell if that's intentional or a bug.

• I think the Hammer of Justice animation changed. A giant hammer drops from the sky on the enemy's head. I don't really like it. I miss the simplicity of the current spinning rising uppercut animation.

• The default nameplates have changed. They're cleaner, and enemy health is represented as a thin red line, instead of a fatter bar. There's also small health/mana/resource bars in the center of your screen under your character. These bars only appear in combat, and fade out otherwise. I really like these new nameplates.

• The quest helper minimap graphic has changed. It's now this transparent outline instead of a shaded area.

• There's a nice animated flair on the XP bar when you get a large amount of XP. It's snazzy.

• The initial class quests that send you to your trainer are gone. I guess it makes sense since the abilities have all changed. Still, it makes me a little sad. I liked that little nod to your class right at the start, with the notes expounding the philosophy of the class.

• Armor starts as the max armor type. Paladins get plate, hunters get mail, etc. The item still looks the same as previous, like mail or leather. This is a bit weird with mail armor that looks like leather (those night elf shorts you always get), but plate that looks like mail looks decent enough.

• Otherwise quests appear to be all the same as live. For low levels, it looks like only mechanics changes.

I didn't poke around a great deal, but these are some smaller impressions of what you can expect in Legion at low levels.

Which Players Should Be Mentors?

It's nice that FFXIV decided to mark all the jackasses in Duty Finder. They're the ones with a crown beside the name.

For those of you who don't play FFXIV, the crown denotes a "Mentor", a high-level player who is supposed to help new players. However, in my experience, people marked as Mentors are equally likely to be the people who are unpleasant in groups.

There's no denying that the Mentors are qualified players. FFXIV has quite high requirements. You need to have at least three classes at max level, a tank, healer and a damage dealer. You also have to have done a thousand dungeons, which is a crazy amount. As a result, Mentors are the top slice of people in the game.

However, I'm not sure if they are the best players to advise new players. Being edge players, they have a tendency to use and expect edge strategies. Giving too specific and complex advice instead of ensuring mastery of the basics.

Also, and this may be a skewed perspective, they also seem to be most impatient, especially on older content which is trivial for them.

In some respects, I think the people below the edge tier would make better mentors for new players. They would still be decent at the game, but would be closer to the new player experience, and better able to give advice from that perspective.

To put it into a WoW perspective, currently you need to be a Mythic raider to be a Mentor. It might be better if the Heroic raiders were Mentors, and Mythic raiders expressly prohibited from being Mentors to new players.

It's kind of like a university, where professors give high level lectures, but graduate students are the teaching assistants and help students with problems. A lot of time a professor is too far away from the student experience to really see the issue.

Heavensward Story Finale

The latest installment of FFXIV's main storyline came out today in Patch 3.3. This was the finale to the main expansion storyline involving Ishgard.

I thought it was an excellent and satisfying ending. The story was concluded well. The final boss fight was intense, and very well done. There were a number of callbacks to earlier parts of the story. FFXIV also spent a fair bit of time on the denouement/epilogue, winding down the story nicely.

This is actually an area where a lot of MMOs and videogames fall down. The climax comes right at the end of the game with a final boss fight, and then the games ends, maybe with an NPC congratulating you. I really like FFXIV's approach of taking its time to wind down, showing consequences and outcomes for the major NPCs.

All in all, Heavensward was an excellent expansion and storyline. I've mentioned this before, but it's ironic that it took a Japanese game to give us a classical story about knights and dragons.

Favorite Overwatch Heroes

Like everyone else, I've been playing a fair amount of Overwatch over the last week. I'm level 15, and I've only gotten one Legendary skin so far. However, it happened to be the one skin I actually wanted: Devil Mercy. So Lady Luck has smiled on me.

Heroes never die ... for a price!

Inspired by Syl's post at MMO Gypsy, I'm going steal her format and list my favorite heroes so far.

A) Heroes I feel confident playing

1. Mercy - highest playtime so far

2. Lucio - preferred for pushing the payload

3. Reaper - the one hero I can kill people with

4. Torbjorn - turrets have good aim

B) Heroes I’d like to get better at

5. Reinhardt

6. Winston

7. Junkrat

8. McCree

9. Bastion

C) Heroes that feel awkward

10. Symmetra

11. Roadhog

12. D.Va

13. Zarya

14. Soldier 76

D) Heroes I haven’t really touched

15. Mei

16. Widowmaker

17. Genji

18. Zenyatta

19. Hanzo

20. Pharah

21. Tracer

The biggest issue so far is that I don't really have a tank character that I understand and can play decently. I can put up Reinhardt's shield and walk to the objective. And sometimes Winston works well, but sometimes I just continuously die.

Otherwise, since I'm willing to heal, I don't get much of a chance to play offensive characters, especially the snipers.

So far Overwatch has been a lot of fun. The matchmaking seems to be working well. I have a good mix of wins and losses, and there have been many close and exciting games.

FFXIV's Murder Mystery Event

This post contains  major spoilers for the latest Gold Saucer event in FFXIV.

Apparently feeling that there wasn't enough seasonal holidays, especially in early summer, FFXIV added a new event centering around the Gold Saucer. The Gold Saucer is a casino with a lot of non-combat mini-games. Things like chocobo racing, Triple Triad card games and some arcade-style games.

The new event was a murder mystery. A customer was mysteriously poisoned. You had to search out clues and then create a theory of how the murder took place over several dialogue choices. It was an interesting try at creating a different type of content.

The biggest problem was the solution to the murder mystery. It turns out that the entire thing was staged, like a play that you attend. This does have some advantages. Since it's just a play, there's nothing wrong with getting the solution incorrect. There's just a bit of acting, and you get a chance to try again. You can replay the event and see the other endings if you accuse different people.

But I felt kind of cheated. Because it was staged, the solution was a bit contrived, and didn't feel natural. I think it would have been a far better experience if it had been a real murder you have to solve.

However, I have no idea how the game would handle getting the wrong solution in that case. Would an NPC simply point out the flaws in your theory until you came up with the correct theory? Would there be several possible theories so that whatever you came up worked? Neither of these two choices sound ideal to me.

In some respects, content is easier to create if you can assume that the players will be successful, if not on the first try, than at least eventually. But if there's the chance of permanent failure, it becomes very tricky for an MMO without saves.

Legendary Ring and Draenor Flying

Yesterday, in an unexpected coincidence, I managed to finish both my goals for Warlords of Draenor. I got my legendary ring, [Etheralus, the Eternal Reward]. I also finished [Draenor Pathfinder], unlocking flying mounts in Draenor.

I was a little surprised at the getting the ring. I was 31/33 for the tomes, but only had two bosses left for the week. But somehow Lady Luck decided in my favor, and a tome dropped for both bosses. I fully expected to be left with 32/33 and have to wait for next week.

As for the Pathfinder achievement, it was mostly a matter of finishing rep with the Order of the Awakened and finding enough rare monsters for the quest items. I still don't like the "blue bar" areas in WoD, but they're tolerable if you make or join a group in the LFG section.

There's still a lot of weird behavior in those posted groups that I don't understand. For example, I'd make a group. People would join and leave ten seconds later. For every person who joined and stuck around to work on the area, at least three people would join and leave. I don't know what they were looking for, as I was pretty explicit about what the group was for.

Now I'm not sure what to do with WoW. There are a couple quests to clean up, but I'm pretty much done until the pre-expansion stuff starts happening. I am leveling a mage, who's up to 45, so maybe I'll focus on that.

The Two Million Gold Mount

In Legion, Blizzard is introducing a spider mount that costs two million gold. This naturally has the forums up in arms. To give an idea of the scale, the maximum amount of gold I've ever had at one time is about 50k.



Is this mount a good idea?

It's pretty clearly a reward for "goblin" players. Players who like money-making and playing the Auction House. That's a playstyle that a significant number of players enjoy.

But just because a significant number of players enjoy a playstyle, that does not necessarily make it one that should be encouraged or rewarded. After all, a significant number of players enjoy ganking lowbies. If Blizzard introduced a mount that you got for getting 1000 kills of players half your level or lower, that would be a horrific mistake.

So first, do goblins benefit the game? In general, they do. Goblins generally "smooth" out the market. The vast majority of them make money by buying cheap items and relisting them at the market equilibrium price. The presence of goblins means that normal players probably won't be able to find bargains on the AH, but there will always be a supply of items available for purchase. It's fairly unlikely that the AH will be sold out of anything entirely.

As well, it means that normal players can guarantee sales simply by listing the item at a discount from the market price. A goblin will pick it up and relist it. Sometimes it is more important to have liquid cash than wait for the best price.

Second, does the goblin playstyle require skill or dedication, some characteristic worth rewarding? I suppose it does. The factors that give me pause is that the risk is much lower than other playstyles. I mean at least in a game like Eve you can get shot down while transporting something. The other issue is that it is a playstyle which is heavily automated. There are mods which can do amazing things for you. Of course, you have to be fairly savvy to get the most out of those mods.

Third, can the requirements be gamed? The big element here is gold-sellers and gold buying. Legitimately, you can buy 10 WoW tokens a week. If we say it's 50k gold per token, that's 4 weeks and $1200 USD. I'm really not sure that introducing a mount that can be legitimately purchased for $1200 is a good idea.

There's also the illegal gold sellers. But in a way, because the amount needed is so high, the mount can act as bait. There should be relatively few sold, so examining each account that buys the mount for gold-buying can be viable.

Fourth, will the game be hurt by incentivizing this playstyle? Ironically, adding more goblins probably makes it harder on all of them, There are more people hunting the bargains, competition becomes fiercer, and profit margins become thinner. So overall, the AH experience for normal players should be even better.

Finally, is the playstyle already rewarded enough? In general, there isn't really a great advantage to having huge amounts of gold. The one exception is the Black Market Auction House. It is a bit unfair that the other playstyle rewards can be purchased for large amounts of gold, while the spider mount remains exclusive. But then again, I've never liked the BMAH. Honestly, I think Blizzard should take the opportunity of these new rewards to drop the BMAH entirely.

All in all, the two million gold spider will probably work out fine. Though Blizzard should increase the price to eight million, one million for each leg. That's a far more aesthetically pleasing price, and also increases the time required for purchase via WoW tokens and real money to four months.

Ashran

I gave Ashran a try last week. Ashran is Blizzard's "world PvP" style zone for WoD. It's been through a couple different iterations and fixes. The current version is pretty fun, and does feel a lot more like World PvP used to.

The basic structure of Ashran is that there is one "road" connecting two bases. To get to the enemy commander you have to push your way up the road, capturing each node in sequence. Then there are 5 "off-road" events that take place in the other parts of the map. The main Ashran quest requires to win 4 events and kill the enemy commander once.

So the basic cycle of play is to skirmish at the current border in the road until an event pops, then both sides rush off to the event and contest it. Eventually one faction will win four events. That faction then makes a concerted push to get to and kill the enemy commander.

By and large, it's pretty fun. The different events give a feel of having several different battles within the larger battle. There's also mechanics like giving each class a new Ashran-only ability. The paladin ability allows you to judge people and send them to a jail in your base, which is greatly amusing. There's also items you can turn in to summon NPCs to aid your side.

There's really only two problems with Ashran. First, it desperately needs a catchup mechanic. If the other team is more organized or stronger, the weaker team simply loses event after event. As well, part of your honor gain comes from artifact fragments that you loot and turn in. But if you die, you lose half the fragments you've collected. And the weaker team dies a lot more.

My fix would be to give the side that loses an event a stacking buff that boosts them by 10% or so. If they win an event, their buff count drops by one. That should be enough to even out the sides.

The second problem with Ashran is that there is no point in defending your leader. If the other side is making a concerted push to kill the leader, the best thing to do is get out of their way and get a jump on the next event.

This problem is probably much harder to solve. I think any attempt at a real solution would just see the two sides explicitly collude and take turns killing the other leader.

It's ironic, but very often the best strategy in long-running PvP games is cooperation between the two enemy sides to maximize resource gain.

Legion Dev Update

Ion "Watcher" Hazzikostas did a Dev Liveblog today on Twitch, where he touched upon several of the topics we've been discussing recently. Wowhead has a nice summary. He also announced that Alpha is ending, and Beta starting shortly.

Every day when you log in, there is an emissary that asks you to do specific sets of world quests to aid a faction (eg all Dreamweaver faction quests in Val'sharah). Do four quests for the emissary and get an awesome chest. These emissary quests kind of work like Hearthstone dailies - they pile up for a few days, so you can catch up on ones you missed.

Legion will still have dailies, though these "world quests" seem more similar to Diablo 3 bounties. But they're adding a bit of a buffer, allowing you to save quests for a few days.

The leveling-up experience in classic zones is pretty broken right now and not well tuned. It's way too easy and it was neglected for a bit. Due to ability changes over the years, you basically feel invincible (even before heirlooms). You're running around more vs actually fighting. The pacing of the game isn't what it should be. They've been looking to fix this (even via hotfixes now).

As I remarked a few weeks ago, leveling is excessively easy with a very fast Time-to-kill. It's good to know that it's on Blizzard's list of things to fix.

As an aside, it's not all classes which are broken. I've been leveling a human Fire Mage, and that specialization feels surprisingly right while leveling. Admittedly, I'm only in quest rewards with no dungeon gear or heirlooms. Perhaps that spec is just under-tuned. It might be a function of not having enough critical strike, as Fire seems to want more critical strike rating to get off instant Pyroblasts. But I actually took First Aid to make bandages to keep my health up. Given my experience leveling a druid, that was completely unexpected.

In any case, there's a decent amount of interesting information on the major system changes coming in Legion. So far, it all sounds pretty good.

Alternatives to Daily Quests

There's a very good discussion in the comments of the last post. Shandren comments:

The problem with dailies is that they are... daily. You have to set time aside to do them every day or you will fall behind (yes i know it is not a lot, and likely doesn't actually matter, but the problem is how it feels to miss them, not what the actual outcome is). If you skip you dailies today,you will not be able to just do them twice tomorrow and catch up. Ergo you are "forced" to do them every day.

This is true to a degree, and I sympathize with this perspective. But the alternative to dailies isn't a game where you log in whenever you feel like it and complete tasks on your own schedule.

The alternative is a game where you grind like crazy the first couple of weeks, and then spend the next few months complaining that there is nothing to do. If you don't do the hardcore grind, you "fall behind", just as much as if you miss a day of dailies. This is especially true if the rewards are half-decent. It's only the grinds with trivial rewards which players feel free to work on at their own pace.

Of these two extremes, I prefer the dailies.

There's certainly room for improvement though. For example, suppose you could do 5 dailies per day. But you could "bank" up to 25 dailies. This would allow you to skip a day here and there, and make it up the next day.

FFXIV does something similar with its levequest allowance, though that is mostly used for leveling classes. In fact, FFXIV offers two types of leves: one type gives you, say, 100 XP per quest and costs 1 leve allowance. The other type gives you 500 XP per quest, but costs 10 leve allowances. So one is better XP per time, and the other is better XP per allowance.[1]

But overall, I think dailies were an improvement over very long grinds, especially those grinds with meaningful rewards.

1. To be honest, this is probably more complexity than is warranted. I think it also ended up confusing most players.

Yet Another Look At Garrisons

With all the various controversies in WoW over the last couple weeks, I decided to play it again for a little bit. My plan is to at least finish the Legendary ring on my character in preparation for Legion.

I mixed up my playing style a bit, and came to an interesting realization: Garrisons are really enjoyable as "winding down" content.

Basically, you log in and do whatever your main goal is. Join a raid, do a heroic dungeon, hit up Tanaan, whatever. You defer the Garrison stuff to the end of the play session. After you're done your main content and are thinking about logging out, you spend the last 5 or 10 minutes taking care of your Garrison.

I find this works really well. Garrisons don't take much effort, and there's a nice sense of tidying up before you log. It's perfect for the end of a play session. You log out while seeing your followers off on their adventures. As well, being at the end, I find myself more willing to ignore the parts of the garrison which are completely unnecessary. Like the herb garden, since I have no need for herbs.

A player named Torvald had an excellent post where he postulated that doing garrison stuff up front drains a player's "stamina" and enthusiasm for other content. I find that simply moving the garrison to the end of the play session eliminates that entirely. Maybe it still drains your stamina, but you were planning to log off anyways.

There are a couple problems with this style of play though. First, it's sub-optimal. Since missions are timed, you lose out on the time during your play session. Second, it requires you to defer some easy gratification, some easy rewards. And as we all know from various experiments involving children and marshmallows, deferred gratification is not an easy thing.

The thing, though, is that incentivizing the player to do the garrison stuff at the end seems very hard. They could remove some of the time pressure by making missions based on days, rather than timed, where they all finish at the same time at night.

But you're still faced with the deferred gratification problem. The marshmallow dangling in front of your face when you first log in. You can't put a timer on it, because the player might be logging in quickly just to do garrison tasks.

The only idea I had was that while your followers are hanging around your garrison, they give you a stacking buff which increases gold, xp, and valor gained by 1-2% per follower, up to 50% when you have a full complement of 25. That way you want to delay sending your followers on missions while you are doing content, but you're perfectly happy to send them off while you are logged off.

In conclusion, I think that garrisons are much more enjoyable when moved to the end of a play session. But I think actually nudging players into that playstyle will be hard sell.

Overwatch Open Beta Tips From a Bad Player

The Overwatch open beta starts this week. Early access is May 2 if you pre-ordered, and it fully opens up a couple of days later.

Overwatch is an amazingly fun game, and I'm a terrible FPS player. I wasn't in Closed Beta, but I was in the stress tests. So here are some tips from someone who is probably worse than you are.

1. Don't be afraid to solo queue.

Obviously, if you have friends, queue with them. But the solo queue is surprisingly balanced. It seems to quickly find your skill level. As well, matches aren't independent of each other. The players from the last match will be the same players in the next match. Only the teams are shuffled. So maybe there was an awesome enemy Pharah last game that kept killing you. This game, you might end up on the same team as her. This goes a long way to keeping the matches even and popping quickly.

2. Don't bother with AI games.

Maybe play one match to get the hang of things, but I would recommend jumping directly into matches with other players. Playing against the AI just isn't the same as playing against humans. If you want to figure out a hero's abilities, use the training room to see how they work, but then fling yourself against other players.

3. Try to focus on one hero from each category.

There are four categories of heroes: Offensive, Defensive, Tanks, and Support. You generally want a mixed squad, so if you're capable of playing at least one hero of each type, you can fill in for any missing element. Also, tanks and support can be a little more newbie-friendly as they are less reliant on aim and are often a little less fragile than the others.

4. Don't switch heroes too much.

You can switch heroes every time you die, but I recommend playing the entire match as the same hero, at least at the start. They do take some time to get used to, so they might feel frustrating at first until they click for you.

5. Stick with your team.

If you're all alone, it's better to retreat for a few seconds and meet up with the rest of your team, rather than throwing yourself at the enemy. Also remember that the game is about objectives, not a death-match, so emphasize pushing the objective.

6. Use ultimates aggressively.

Ultimate abilities charge quite quickly, so don't hesitate on using them. You have to fail with them a few times to figure out how to use them best.

7. The Kill Cam is your best teacher.

Whenever you die (and you will die a lot) a kill cam will come up showing your death from the opponent's point of view. This is the best way to learn. You can see what you did wrong, and see what your opponent did right.

I think Overwatch is an amazing game, and I strongly recommend that you all try it out. There are lots of different heroes with different playstyles, so I'm sure you'll find at least a couple you enjoy.

The MMO That Abandoned Raiding

My SWTOR raid group called it quits tonight. A bit sad, because we had a good run of about three years or so. I think we were all getting a little burned out. But it also has sunk in that SWTOR has given up on raiding. It has been about 16 months since the last operation was released, and looks very unlikely that any future operations will ever be made.

Back in the first few years of WoW, there was a huge debate between raiders and casuals. Casuals pointed out that raiders were a small minority of the player base, and that the devs spent too many resources on them. Raiders felt that they were the dedicated players, who made guilds and a community, made an MMO an MMO as it were.

WoW, and FFXIV to lesser extent, followed the path of trying to make raiding more accessible to the broader player base. It's perhaps not quite as successful as people would like, but that path has preserved group content.

With the release of the Knights of the Fallen Empire, SWTOR has gone in the opposite direction. All new content has been aimed at the solo player. The main story content does not work well with groups, even duos. The new side content is again mostly aimed at solos or duos.

SWTOR did re-tune a lot of the existing group content for KotFE, but did not create any new group content.

I'm not saying this is the wrong decision. Focusing on single-player content might be the right call for SWTOR. Maybe the casuals were right all along, and the raiders are superfluous. Maybe the number of people who want group content is not enough to justify the cost of creating it.

It is a bit of a pity, as Bioware did make good operations and flashpoints back in the day. I especially liked all the puzzle bosses.

Vanilla Servers, Part II

A lot of replies to the last post felt that I do not understand what attracts people to the idea of vanilla WoW servers. I, of course, disagree with that.

People who clamor for vanilla servers generally want two things:

1. Vanilla content - the quests, zones, and classes that existed at that time.
2. Vanilla "feel" - a return to an era where server community was important, where guild and reputation mattered, where the difficulty was slightly higher and required groups to interact more.

Of these two, I think getting the first one is extraordinarily unlikely. Blizzard would essentially be launching and maintaining a completely separate game. I think that the risk is too high. So given that this is basically not going to happen, I don't see much point in expending energy over it.

The second item, however, I believe might be possible. It would be a variant on the current game, and would be a lot easier to maintain. Fixes for the current game would hit both server types. It might even be good for the game by segregating the audience a little bit. The people who insist on increased challenge would have a home.

Of course, even maintaining server variants is more effort. There's already two variants in PvP/PvE. Another orthogonal variant makes four possibilities. But I think it's still less risky and less effort than a full vanilla server.

WoW Legends Server Idea

I think opening an actual Vanilla WoW server, with Vanilla quests, classes, talent trees, and other systems would be way too much work for too little reward.

However, I do think that, for a reasonably small amount of effort, Blizzard could make a version of the current game that reasonably approximated the original experience. I'll call such a server a "Legends" server.

A Legends server would have:

• A constant Legends debuff which reduced health, damage done, healing done, and XP gained by about 50%.
• Looking For Group/Raid disabled
• Heirlooms disabled
• No server transfers
• No cross-realm zones
• Battlegrounds/Arena disabled
• One character per account per server
• Pet Battle Queue disabled
• No Starter Edition accounts
• No Death Knights / Demon Hunters, classes which start at a higher level
• Black Market Auction disabled

I think that would be enough to create a Vanilla-like experience. You'd still have the same quests, classes and talents as the regular game. But a lot of the elements which Vanilla champions say hurt communities would be disabled. I also think that the amount of work required to create such a server would be relatively low.

You'll note that the one thing I did not add was a level cap of 60, or disabling access to expansions. I think that will be very buggy, and end up eating a lot of QA and bugfixing resources. It would also require class design to be tuned for a cap of 60. Raids at 60 would have be tuned again. As well, there is gear from the expansions available at 60 that outstrips raid gear, and trying to keep that gear out of the hands of capped 60s might be a lot of work.

I think trying for a lower cap is simply unfeasible. Better to simply have the same game as the regular servers, just with some added restrictions. The Legends debuff could be reduced at the real maximum level too, if that turns out to be an issue.

I think a compromise like this could worthwhile for Blizzard to experiment with. Personally, I think a lot of people would roll on the server, but most would soon go back to the regular game.