WAR: Solid core with pieces of suck, but is there any hope?

Posted on July 16, 2009 by SynCaine

Out of all the recent MMOs I’ve played or been playing, by far the most frustrating one is Warhammer Online. Not because of anything related to bugs, crashes, or features/ui stuff, but because of how much the game changes from the early levels to end-game. Simply put, the game is amazingly fun in tier one and two, stalls somewhat in three, and just offers very little in tier four in terms of long-term, sustainable fun.

You would think that for RvR, tier one would be the one you want to leave asap, since your character is limited in terms of skills and abilities, and the entire mastery tree system has yet to start. Yet it’s this simplicity that really makes the game enjoyable, as the difference between winning and losing comes down to good communication among group members, rather than who gets the most CC/AoE off on the opponent. In a strange way, tier one in WAR is somewhat similar to PvP in DarkFall (which from a pure PvP standpoint, DF is far superior to WAR IMO), in that what you do is more important than what weapons/tools you bring to the fight. By the time you enter tier four, the winner/loser is often times pre-determined thanks to disparities in class/gear/mastery/RR/etc. That’s how the game works, you know that going into it, but it’s just strange how MUCH those factors affect the game in T4.

The only explanation that I can come up with is that once you reach T4, a lot of little factors add up to one big problem; it’s just not that fun. I don’t think its one major problem that Mythic can fix to turn T4 around (although population, both server and order vs destroy is a big issue), and while making changes to CC and such helps, it’s not like once CC is under control the lights come on and bam, T4 is awesome. It will be better, yes, but I still don’t think it will be great. It will still be zerg vs zerg thanks to players being able to travel quickly to any area at will (which is why anyone arguing AGAINST travel times in games like this is crazy). It still won’t really ‘matter’, as even a city siege at this point is somewhat meh in terms of impact, and the gear can now be gained through other means (a good change btw). And unless further changes to keeps are made, those battles will still be more about bashing a door than bashing other players (an issue Mythic really needs to address soon, as I believe the basic idea of fighting in/around a keep is solid in WAR).

LotD, which was the much-hyped major addition set to spice up T4, is IMO an utter failure, one that I’m okay with comparing to Trials of Atlantis in DAoC. Much like ToA, LotD more or less killed T4 RvR activity thanks to its lockout system of fail. If you want people to fight each other, why in gods name are you keeping one side OUT of the area for an extended amount of time, and the method for which that side gets back in is tied to fight whose inside in the standard T4 areas. A child could have pointed out why this won’t work, especially when half the servers (or more) are already having population issues in T4. The sad part is lockout method aside, LotD is actually rather decent content, and would be one hell of a zone to fight over if you know, Mythic actually let you fight more than 10 minutes every two hours or so. The ‘fun’ of trying to organize dungeon groups when you don’t know if you can even enter or not is also a rather glaring oversight. Imagine if in WoW, whenever your guild tried to enter a raid the game would randomly assign a wait period of up to two hours, and your entire raid got to sit around and wait to get in. Yea, that would go over REALLY well, and I’m sure plenty of raiders would just love to have that much time wasted…

So does WAR suck and everyone should mass quit? No, because at its core it’s a good, fun RvR game. It’s just that the core gets massively bogged down by little nagging issues that pile on and ultimately, by the time you get to T4, overwhelm the fun with suck. The good news is that removing each piece of suck (like overpowered CC) is very doable, and Mythic at least seems to get it. The bad news is that they have a long list of issues to get to, and Mythic seems to be going at a two steps forward, one step back pace (or one giant leap back when you factor in LotD).

Now, image the game with most of the little issues addressed and the launching of a paid expansion (3rd faction included) being announced. Yea, that might generate some legitimate hype, no Paul B needed.

Posted in Dark Age of Camelot, MMO design, Warhammer Online | 16 Comments

Why is the B-team messing with your AAA product?

Posted on July 15, 2009 by SynCaine

I’m a bit late on this one, but Eric from ElderGame has a long and detailed breakdown of why WoW is currently being run by the B-team, adding his own experience as a former dev on AC2. It’s a great read and is a nice look behind the curtain of MMO development.

It also got me thinking about what other MMO titles saw the ‘B-team’ effect. UO-R comes to mind, as many regard that expansion is the point where UO fundamentally changed from the game it launched as in 1997. Another somewhat obvious release would be ToA for DAoC, which Mythic has admitted as being a total disaster (glad you repeated it with LotD, but that’s another post). SWG of course had its NGE, which might be the biggest mistake in MMO history, at least in regards to how it was received by the fan base at that time. And I’m sure more examples exist, as the MMO genre is ripe with ‘epic fail’ moments.

What confuses me somewhat is WHY a company would place its B-team to take over a successful MMO. I understand from a personnel aspect people want to work on something new, but if I’m Blizzard, would it not make more financial sense to keep those 5 million people subbed to WoW (and bring back the countless millions who have quit over the years) than to risk that at the expense of getting the next MMO in top shape? I mean, best case scenario is Blizzard’s new MMO is as big as WoW right, and I doubt even Blizzard really thinks their next game is going to hit the level of success WoW has. Since those 5 million customers today are paying just as much as those in 2004 (or more given all the extra fluff you can now buy), why would you drop the level of service/quality and basically start the games decline?

One possible reason is that regardless of how great a game is, at some point people simply want something/anything different. As great as WoW is/was for PvE questing, even huge PvE fans eventually want something different just for a change of pace, so no amount of expansions or content increases is going to satisfy them, even if that content is developed by the original A-team that made the game great. But total burnout aside (and the genre has shown that people have a VERY high tolerance for ‘more of the same’ before true burnout sets in), what other reason would a company have to move on from something currently successful and on to something that is always going to be a gamble? (SOE and everyone else thought EQ2 was going to be a sure-fire hit, and we know how that initially turned out)

As with many design-related questions, one answer always lies within EVE. As the only MMO with significant continual growth over a five year period, EVE is a good model on how to keep people interested for a long time, and how best to design in order to stem burnout. All three of EVE’s aspects (PvP, PvE, Econ) are both separate and yet interrelated, which along with its one-world setup keeps everyone connected. Econ guy profits from PvP destroying ships, PvE guy has the money to spend on the market, and the PvP crowd controls the highest-value territory in the game. They might not clash head-to-head often, but each side affects the other at all times, and as each aspect is itself a game within the game, a player can go from being a PvP pirate to a market mogul and find a completely different game while still paying his $15 a month to CCP. For their part, CCP continues to develop EVE as fast today has they did back in 2003 (if not faster), and someone who was big into PvE in 2007 will find 2009 PvE in EVE a totally different experience, again slowing the overall burnout rate.

While WoW is a totally different beast than EVE, I’m sure the A-team that created vanilla Azeroth could create SOMETHING to keep people interested in 2010, without the need to launch a totally different game. How many people would return to WoW if Blizzard updated the graphics engine to DX10 standards like EVE did? How many would return if a 3rd faction was added with a brand new 1-80 experience? Both are more than doable even at Blizzard-dev speed, so why is Blizzard (and all the other companies that move the A-team off a successful MMO) sending in the B-team to initiate a slow death/decline of a game in a genre that is all about longevity?

Posted in Dark Age of Camelot, EQ2, EVE Online, MMO design, Ultima Online, Warhammer Online, World of Warcraft | 28 Comments

DarkFall is here, again.

Posted on July 14, 2009 by SynCaine

DarkFall has launched in the US. Forums seem happy so far, which is rare for that crowd. Guess it’s time to slot the game back between Blood Bowl, WAR, EVE, and DDO. Anyone want to fill in for me at work while I get to all this gaming? Thanks.

More on the launch itself ‘soon’.

Posted in Darkfall Online, Site update | 21 Comments

Dummies like dummy games

Posted on July 13, 2009 by SynCaine

My fiancé currently prefers WAR over DDO because DDO got hard.

I prefer DDO over WAR because DDO is an enjoyable challenge rather than the insta-win that is general MMO PvE.

I consider myself an MMO gamer; she is the casual player playing with me to play something. EVE is hard, 300k users. WoW is easy, 5 million users. Just sayin’…

I know, beyond oversimplified, but still telling IMO.

Posted in DDO, Dungeons and Dragons Online, EVE Online, MMO design, Warhammer Online, World of Warcraft | 57 Comments

It’s Curt in the car up next, hi Curt.

Posted on July 10, 2009 by SynCaine

Have you ever listened to local sports radio, and heard callers suggest beyond ridiculous trades? You know, the one that goes something like “We get their star players, and we give them three of our bench guys that are underperforming with bad contracts”. And once everyone stops laughing, they always ask the guy “why would the other team make that trade”, which is usually meet with silence, blabbering, or the caller hanging up?

That’s kinda what happens when the blog-o-sphere talks about payment models for MMOs. We all understand you would rather pay $2 than $15 for WoW, or that instead of that flat $15 you would rather only buy the content you want, which in your mind would be less than $15 a month. You would rather pay less than more, we know. Now comes the follow-up question; why would the company want you paying less? Why would any company making a profit go “You know, we’ve noticed gamer Bob is not playing enough to justify that $15 we are charging him, let’s give him an option to pay less”? Unless your new payment method includes ‘the company makes more money this way’, it’s a stupid idiotic thing to say (bonus points to the first person to get the reference).

Now, one COULD argue that if you drop your price from $15 to say $5 a month, you would attract 3x+ more subscribers which in turn leads to higher profits (assuming of course your costs don’t increase significantly due to the 3x+ population increase, but let’s keep things simple), or that instead of a subscription model you go F2P and bleed dry or nickel and dime those who buy all the way in. But regardless of the solution, your reasoning can’t consist of “I want to pay less”, unless you balance that out with “someone else pays more”.

Posted in MMO design, Rant, RMT | 40 Comments

F2P MMOs: The land of ‘just good enough’.

Posted on July 9, 2009 by SynCaine

One of the common complaints against the subscription model is that if you only play that MMO sparingly (whatever that may be for you), you are not really getting your moneys worth compared to those who play more. The perceived plus for a F2P MMO is that you (ideally) only pay for what you want, be it content or fluff, and you control how much you spend based on how much you play/invest in that game.

While the above is true, I never see people talk about what happens when you really like a F2P game, enough that it becomes your main or even only MMO. Assuming a F2P MMO is of that quality, now you are no longer the casual jumping in from time to time, but the hardcore player logging in often and experiencing more/most of the game. When that happens, you will wish your new favorite MMO was a subscription game, as you will be paying FAR more for the F2P MMO monthly than you would for a subscription.

That after all is the F2P model, those who play for free/little are supported by those who play and pay far above the average. I believe the reason more people are not up in arms over having to pay MORE per month to play a quality MMO is that simply put, most F2P MMOs are at best average, games that might do a few things well or unique while the rest of the content is cut/paste stuff you have seen 100 times before, usually done better. In other words, if WoW used the traditional F2P model (and each patch brings it a little closer), a lot of people would be paying out the nose to play it because WoW is the main/only MMO for so many. On the other side of the coin, my guess is most adults playing Free Realms do so with their kids, or jump in to take a look before move back to a ‘real’ MMO. The issue facing FR is that if it was a sub game, I doubt SOE would be putting our press releases announcing that 18 billion people have glanced at an image related to their game since its release, and so a sub model is not much of an option.

Aside from being little more than a money trap for the hardcore, the F2P model also influences game design. Tobold has a post talking about his reason for leaving Luminary, a game he originally enjoyed due to its unique selling points but later found those same selling points as negatives due to F2P business model influence. His experience mirrors my experience with Atlantica Online, a game I ultimately wished was a subscription game and not F2P. Just like Luminary, what I initially found appealing in AO was later a negative not due to design, but due to the business model.

This ultimately is, IMO, the major crutch of the F2P model, it only really ‘works’ for those who drop in and out, spending a few dollars on a quick purchase and move on. Those that don’t spend anything are just leeching bandwidth/space, and unless you become truly addicted (plenty of those stories from the East btw, Google is your friend), a hardcore player will find more value in a subscription game than a F2P one, especially now when most (all?) AAA MMO titles are sub-based. It would take a truly exceptional MMO to pull the hardcore away from current AAA MMOs and into a F2P game that they will need to spend MORE per month to play, which is somewhat of a risky gamble on the part of the developer. By that logic, the ‘ideal’ F2P MMO is what we currently have; games just good enough to downloading and keeping on your desktop, but not anything that becomes the main/only focus of an MMO gamer. The true junk titles get deleted, and those that get near the AAA status go subscription (Aion for example).

Posted in Aion, Atlantica Online, DDO, Dungeons and Dragons Online, FreeRealms, MMO design, RMT, World of Warcraft | 12 Comments

DDO Hirelings: Nicely done Turbine!

Posted on July 8, 2009 by SynCaine

Last night I tried out the somewhat new hireling system in DDO when my fiancé and I ran into a tough level 3 quest and came away very impressed. It’s not exactly like having a real player, but its close enough, and adds another activity to manage during the dungeon crawl that adds to the enjoyment of the overall experience.

Since I’m currently playing DDO as a duo with my fiancé, the ability to bring two hirelings along is great, as a party of four is the ‘recommended’ number of players to complete an instance on the normal setting. (DDO vets correct me if I’m wrong on that, but I believe I’ve read that someplace) In addition to just providing the right number of players, the fact that you can pick from a selection of classes also solves the “we need a healer/tank/dps” issue that can arise. Since the fiancé is a fighter, and I play a rogue, we can grab a cleric and a wizard and bam, perfect group. Or we can mix it up and go heavy on the dps, bringing say a wizard and sorcerer, or go all melee with a paladin and barbarian. Point being, it adds more variety to the game, and since you control your hireling through a pet-like hotbar addition to your UI, what class you hire determines what abilities you control from that bar and how you should direct your hireling. The fiancé was having a great time just watching the spell effects from her hireling wizard fly, and managing my cleric allowed my rogue to also have access to healing when the group needed it.

The AI for the hirelings is good enough. When you set them to ‘attack’ mode, they will use their abilities to their best judgment, so while a wizard will cast some spells, he won’t mana-dump as fast as possible. In defend mode the hireling will follow after your character and if a mob attacks them they will fight back as normal. On the pet-like hotbar you also get access to four of the hirelings skills and can use them as you would your own. So for the cleric, I simply select someone and click the Heal spell, and my cleric casts away. Very handy, very easy to use, and again a nice layer on top of everything else going on. What’s really nice is if a battle gets really hectic, you can put your hireling on attack mode and forget about them. They won’t be perfect (but then again PUG players are far from perfect as well), but they will do a good job and hold their own. An interesting side bonus, it seems hirelings will move to any area technically reachable by ‘floating’ up to it, so if you have a mob on a ledge that would normally require you to jump 2-3 times to reach it, the hireling will float up and attack the mob. (Not sure if this is intended, but it happened last night, and I figure it’s the solution implemented to prevent the hirelings getting stuck on tougher jump areas or falling down a ledge and becoming unusable)

In any other game the addition of hirelings would be a nice but overall meh improvement, but in DDO’s group-only environment it just opens up the game for those unable to field a full party, and makes what would previously be an uphill battle possible and more deep/entertaining. A great addition to what has so far been a really enjoyable experience.

edit: My only concern with hirelings is their cost. I’ve yet to do the math, but I’m not sure if buying one or two hirelings per instance (the contract is a one use / one instance only item) is feasable long-term. If it’s not, we might get into a situation where we first try to 2 man something, fail, and then hire help. That could lead to some frustration on the longer missions. The counter to this is that as a duo, perhaps we can attempt ‘hard mode’ on shorter quests after completing them on normal, which would yield more gold to pay for future purchases. Currently at level 4 I have just over 2000 platinum, so I’m not hurting for money atm, but it’s something to keep an eye on.

Posted in DDO, Dungeons and Dragons Online, MMO design | 11 Comments

Bring back the gimps!

Posted on July 7, 2009 by SynCaine

At some point during the transition from MMORPG to just MMO, the ability to create a ‘gimped’ character was removed. In UO you could hit the skill cap and have a horrible character. In AC you could spend all your point in the run skill and create the fastest gimp in the game. Even in EVE, it’s possible to train skills that won’t help you much, and your 20 million skill point pilot could be less effective in combat/mining/industry as someone with 3 million points, although since you can always train more, in EVE it’s not permanent damage. In WoW at 80 every mage is exactly the same save talent points, and those can be reset at will. Same deal in WAR, resets are cheap and it comes down to how you use those skills rather than what skills you have.

DDO, being a bit ‘old school’, allows you to create a gimp character. A horribly, horribly gimp character that only a reroll will fix. No amount of tweaking or ability respecs are going to save your 6 strength fighter, sorry. Even things as simple as picking spells or what feats you start with are critical, and due to how DDO is structured (all group-based instances), you can’t easily grind past tougher content to out-level it like you could in other games, nor do equal-level NPCs just roll over and die from auto-attacks like they do in more traditional games.

So the ability to create a gimp character makes an MMO awesome, is that my point? Yes, but not exactly. If you are able to make a gimp character, it also means you can make a highly specialized or more custom-tailored character as well. The reason you can make a gimp is because you have choices that actually matter, which is the same reason you can make something better or “better for you”. If you go check the DDO class forums, you will see various builds, but each one comes with the disclaimer of “this is the intent behind this build, I want to be able to do X Y Z”. If you check the Elitist Jerks rogue forum, the topic revolves around one thing and one thing only, dps, and even that comes down to ‘get top tier raid gear, allocate talents here, and use this hotbar rotation’. Ever rogue in WoW can, theoretically, achieve this, regardless of any choices you made prior to hitting 80, which sums up exactly how little control you really have over what you do or the impact it has.

It’s the ‘safer’ way to design, but it also robs the players of a chance to create a more customized character, and that is a huge pillar of RPG design. Not only do you play the hero, but it’s YOUR hero, so when things go well you feel just a little bit more connect and responsible for it. To go back to WoW, your raiding guild beat raid boss X because you brought so many warriors/rogues/mages/priests, and we all know each of those characters was more or less ‘the same’ as every other raiding guild before and after. This is why stories of how YOUR guild killed Onyxia are boring, because my guild killed her the exact same way you did, using the same ‘heroes’, give or take a dps character or two. So while the ability to better customize your character won’t make the Onyxia encounter super unique (you would still need fire resist gear, a tank, some healers, dps), at least the guy tanking her might succeed/fail because of the decisions he made at level 1, or 10, or 50, rather than because his clone meet the strict pre-reqs for success. With more character attachment, you develop more game attachment, and that’s what MMOs (even the RPG kind) are all about.

Posted in Asheron's Call, DDO, Dungeons and Dragons Online, EVE Online, MMO design, Ultima Online, Warhammer Online, World of Warcraft | 30 Comments

Blood Bowl: Multiplayer goodness.

Posted on July 6, 2009 by SynCaine

A few days ago I commentated on Blood Bowl (BB) from the single player aspect, found here. Now that I’ve played a decent number (30?) of games online, I wanted to talk about that and how it differs from the single player game.

The actual online client for Blood Bowl is serviceable, but it certainly won’t win any awards. Aside from random errors (usually solved by logging out/in), it’s overall somewhat slow when compared to say Battle.net or other services, and the layout/design is a bit crude. It gets the job done, but it has lots of room for improvement, the first being an auto-matchmaking feature. All that said, it DOES get the job done, and 95% of the time it gets me into a game with another player, and 95% of the time that game gets finished without a crash or a disconnect. In other words, while future patches will hopefully add on to what BB currently offers, what is there works and won’t impede your online gaming.

The online interface aside, BB online plays basically like BB single player in terms of game flow and rules, with the obvious difference being that the other team is controlled by a player rather than the AI. In a true showing of great game balance (BB the computer game is just a copy/paste of the rules from BB the table game, with its years of player testing and balancing), online play is not who comes up with the cheap combo to insta-win like other RTS/Strategy games (WC3, Civ, HoMM), but who has the better overall strategy. Oh, and who gets lucky, as BB is 50% strategy and 50% luck. It’s that 50/50 split (if not more towards luck TBH) that might, depending on the player, drive people crazy. You might have your best player in the best possible situation, but if the dice gods are not with you, what should be an easy score might turn into a tragic death for your star.

It’s because of this somewhat random nature that makes playing online BB a huge test of deal with adversity. Your team might be coming along nicely, with key players picking up key abilities, and in one game 2-3 might get injured or die and your entire team reduced to little better (or even worse) than a fresh starter team. You can curse the gods all you want, but that truly is the nature of BB, and part of the fun is learning to accept the bad breaks and roll with the punches. BB is anything but ‘serious business’, and if you play it as such, you won’t have fun with it regardless of your skill level. But when approached with the right attitude (something that took me 3 teams to accept), BB is not only a challenging strategy game, but a damn entertaining one as well. As often as luck will ruin your plans, it will also swing in your favor and help you pull off an upset.

Due to how random the game can be (even upgrading players is in part random, as you roll dice to determine if you can select a stat increase or just certain skills), I’ve found that generally online players have adapted and take each game for what it is; a game. I’m sure the ‘power gamer’ types are out there and will do anything to win, and if things don’t go there way make a fuss about it, but overall my games with others have been pleasant, with both of us joking over incredibly bad streaks of luck one way or the other. (I had one game against a goblin team, and the guys two Trolls rolled 1s for their stupidity check almost every turn, which must have been infuriating)

It’s also important to remember that while the games score determines the winner, a huge part of gaining player levels is causing injuries, so it’s only natural for everyone to try and cause as much damage as possible. The other guy is not trying to destroy your team because he hates you; he is simply trying to improve his team as best he can, and in BB that means beating the snot out of you both with touchdowns and elbow drops.

As I said in my previous post, Blood Bowl is a surprisingly entertaining strategy title, with tons of humor and charm. As an online game, it also delivers due to its somewhat random nature in any given game, but also because if you play well, you WILL win more often than not as over the long haul the luck will even itself out. Highly recommended for anyone looking for some turn based, fantasy sports themed fun.

Posted in Random | 8 Comments

Everything you wanted to know, and more.

Posted on July 6, 2009 by SynCaine

Randolph Carter at “Grinding to Valhalla” recently interviewed me. He asked a great set of questions, and hopefully everyone finds the answers interesting. Feel free to follow up on anything either here or over at his site.

Thanks again to RC for the interview!

Posted in Site update | 4 Comments