Stuck in easy mode.

Posted on March 13, 2008 by SynCaine

As I explore more content in TBC (Hellfire complete, working on Zangermarsh now) a new issue has arisen, or rather I’ve noticed an issue that has likely been going on since just after launch.

The better and smarter you play WoW, the easier it gets.

Now the above might seem obvious, but if you really think about it it’s somewhat strange. One enjoyable aspect of any game is overcoming a challenge and feeling good about it. Let’s take a game like Civilization for example. At first you are just learning the game, so you play it on an easy difficulty level. Since you are only learning, the game still offers a decent challenge, even though it’s limiting itself and not playing as well as it could. As you get better, you turn the difficulty up and are rewarded with a tougher challenge. The enemy will double cross you, tech faster, etc.

WoW and many other MMO’s are the exact opposite. Their peak difficulty is right at the start, when you don’t fully know your class, you don’t know exactly how to complete quests, and you don’t have access to a higher level character or an auction house full of gear. The better you understand your current MMO, the easier it becomes, yet unlike other games there is very little you can do to increase the difficulty in a natural way. Most games limit you in accepting higher level quests, and WoW makes it nearly impossible to kill anything 4 levels above you no matter your skill, due to hardcoded rules that apply a huge penalty.

My current situation goes a bit further. Due to being in a very solid and experienced guild (we are all former hardcore raiders), we regularly run the 5 man instances in Outland, usually whatever is 1-2 levels above us. As these runs are usually a success, we get a good amount of blue gear in a short amount of time, and generally can’t use that gear for a level or two. What this means is that when I hit say level 64, I already have 4-5 blue pieces of gear with a level requirement of 64, meaning I’m using it at its most powerful point. Add in fully available gems and enchants and the power scale goes up even more.

Given my situation, it’s no wonder that when I do a quest designed for a character my level, that quest is a joke in difficulty. The difficulty is not tuned to someone in near-perfect gear, but rather for the ‘average’ player, someone in a mix of greens a few levels below them. The problem is I can’t skip those quests and attempt tougher quests, as those are simply not available.

So my real problem is that until I hit level 70, and make the choice to get into raiding, there is little I can do to increase the difficulty. Would it be that difficult to implement a few difficulty levels for quests and instances? Something along the lines of heroics, but instead of just giving you a max level version, the difficulty scales for that level. So when we zone into Ramparts for example, we can select easy/normal/hard. The loot and quests would be the same, but maybe the experience gained would be higher the tougher setting you pick. Tune the difficulty to allow imperfect or under geared groups to succeed at easy mode, a balanced and reasonably equipped group to succeed in normal, and a near maxed group to enjoy hard mode. Simply adjusting a few damage modifiers or adding a mob or two would be enough to change up the difficulty.

Is this something that’s technically more difficult to implement than it seems, or is it simply an oversight by the current generation of MMO games?

Posted in MMO design, World of Warcraft | 13 Comments

Urge…to…play…EVE…rising…

Posted on March 11, 2008 by SynCaine

The lack of EVE-related posts here is mostly due to one factor; I haven’t been playing EVE much lately. I blame WoW mostly, along with The Witcher whenever the WoW bug has subdued long enough to play something else. I’m also not happy with this, as I really WANT to play EVE.

Granted my two accounts are still active (1 year subs ftw?), and I’ve been keeping up with skill training. The downtime has even helped in training those long skills that I know I needed, but hated to train while playing. I also quickly manage my industrial pilot once a week, updating his market orders and putting more items up for sale. The fact that I don’t have a huge need for the ISK right away lets me put up higher prices and deal with the longer timeframe to make a sale. Oddly enough in EVE, everything sells eventually, even if you price something 50% or more above the market average. Patience pays.

The reason I’m making this post now is because I’ve continued to listen to Warp Drive Active, and now also listen to The Drone Bay. Both are excellent podcasts focused on EVE, and are part of my ‘required listening’ for each week. Each time I listen, it drives up the urge to actually play EVE, which is saying something. I have no doubts that I will eventually return in a more active role, and when I do I will have two nicely trained pilots and a good stash of ISK to play with. At that time I will need to get serious about finding an active Corp, hopefully one that caters to both industry and combat. Given the size of the EVE universe, I’m not too worried about finding a good one.

So to my EVE readers, sorry for the lack of updates and discussion, but know that soon enough I’ll be back flying my internet spaceship, and will no doubt have plenty to say about it when it happens.

edit: I forgot to mention that in contrast to EVE, WoW podcasts do very little to raise the appeal of WoW for me. As excellent as The Instance is, I listen to it purely for entertainment value. It never makes me go ‘hmm thats interesting, I need to go log on and try that’, while basically every EVE podcasts has a moment or three like that in it. Just another example of how truly different MMOs can be, even in something as abstract as podcasts.

Posted in EVE Online, Podcast, Site update | 15 Comments

Giving some credit to Massively, and dumping on SL.

Posted on March 11, 2008 by SynCaine

Due to a combination of WordPress thinking I’m a spam bot and Darren not checking his spam filter, my comment on his post yesterday never showed up. No worries though, the world is not missing much, as it was basically just a short /signed remark.

That short little post got quite a few comments however, and somewhat surprisingly a few from the staff over at Massively.com. I say somewhat surprisingly because usually any ‘big name’ site won’t comment on another site, or will simply post some lawyer-talk say-nothing blabity-bla. Now how big Massively is I don’t know, but I’m guessing that they get a fair amount of traffic, and their business model relies on it, so it is nice to see them try to explain themselves over at Darren’s blog. I agree with him that Second Life gets way too much coverage, especially considering it’s a borderline MMO at best. One has to wonder where SL would be had it not become the play toy of CNN and other uninformed mass media sites, but that’s another topic.

As a frequent Massively reader, I do hope they tone down the SL coverage, or just create a ‘quasi-mmo’ section and dump it along with the other ‘look we are a game and are online, we are an MMO’ titles in and let the rest of us focus on actually MMO news. Oh and hire Tipa.

Posted in Random | 8 Comments

Don’t blame the Deathknight, blame the creator.

Posted on March 10, 2008 by SynCaine

Now that RMT promoter Tobold has returned (kidding), he linked some good blog posts about the upcoming Deathknight class, and what could possibly be done to implement them correctly without pissing off other classes, particularly warriors. All good reads, so head over and check them out.

My comment on the issue goes a little broader than talking about any one single class or skill tree. The main issue with WoW currently is that Blizzard is taking a PvE game and attempting to morph it into an e-sport PvP game. Warriors in a PvE setting were fine, as they were the optimal tank selection for raiding and the tougher 5 man stuff pre-BC. The reason this worked is that unless you went hardcore PvP and grinded out a high rank, all the best gear was only available though PvE. TBC changed all this, making top tier stuff available through PvP. Now anyone could solo their way into full epics without the need to join a guild or run any group content. Solo classes benefited most from this, while group dependent classes suffered; hence the abundance of hunters and warlocks and the shortage of tanks and healers.

As difficult as it is to balance PvP, it becomes impossible when you also have to consider PvE into that balance. The most successfully balanced PvP games (DAoC pre-ToA, EVE) succeeded more than most due in part to somewhat ignoring PvE balance. If PvP is your main focus, being overpowered compared to NPCs is a small price to pay. The NPC will never make a forum post complaining they are underpowered; they will happily respawn and get owned again and again. Blizzard continues to enrage both sides of their community by attempting to balance both PvP and PvE at the same time, and complicating the formula with a new class and more abilities won’t help.

Most curious to me is why Blizzard feels the need to pursue a PvP focus. They have clearly shown that they can craft a masterful PvE experience, and through that mastery gain 10 million customers. Do they sense the next ‘big thing’ is PvP, and feel that if they don’t adapt now they will get left behind when AoC and WAR hit stores? Are they switching up WoW now in preparation of a PvE-heavy World of Starcraft? It’s a very risky gamble to think they will retain more players based on WoW e-PvP than they would if they continued to cater to their core base, the casual PvE crowd.

Luckily for all MMO fans, should WoW turn into the looming disaster that is e-PvP, we have some promising looking options coming out shortly, ones that will hopefully cater to everyone disillusioned by Blizzards new direction. Does Blizzard have some big surprise coming that will make sense of this new direction, or has WoW simply run its course and is being prepared for the MMO cash cow pastures?

Posted in Dark Age of Camelot, EVE Online, MMO design, PvP, Warhammer Online, World of Warcraft | 4 Comments

Missed oppertunity in Hellfire Peninsula?

Posted on March 7, 2008 by SynCaine

Sorry for the slow updates recently, no major blogging topics have popped into my head lately.

One quick observation I had last night. Hellfire Peninsula has an alliance and horde town, basically across from each other separated by NPC enemies. The zone also has three capture objectives which are a daily PvP quest, supposedly to encourage a bit of PvP even on non-PvP servers. I think Blizzard missed an opportunity to really create something a bit more interesting by making a daily quest to kill the NPC leader of the other faction’s town. This would require a group effort by players to overcome the NPC guards, and any faction opposition, and would be generally harder than the daily we have now. Quest NPC’s could be marked as non-agro, so as not to disrupt those who want to just quest, but everything else would be fair game, and the daily itself would be rewarding enough to actually get players to form groups and tackle it. Good idea, or am I missing a major flaw?

Posted in PvP, World of Warcraft | 6 Comments

Fixing Alterac Valley.

Posted on March 5, 2008 by SynCaine

This will be the last post about AV for now, I promise. All previous commentary was based on the 51-60 bracket, and having finally hit 61+, I’ve experienced 61-70 AV. As bad as the 60 bracket was, the 70 bracket AV is a complete joke 99% of the time. Not only do both sides avoid each other, they also avoid the entire map as well. From the start, both teams rush towards the other side’s base, skipping all towers and graveyards. You then tag the final graveyard and towers, wait for those to cap, and go kill the final boss. First team to kill the NPC wins.

At least in the 60 bracket, both teams stopped to cap/burn everything along the way, and some form of defense was usually present. In the 70 bracket that’s just not the case. It’s so bad that last night, in my attempt to hit exulted with the main factions, I was having a great deal of trouble just turning in armor/crystals/marks at our base 5 minutes into the game, the reason being it was already overrun with horde and most of the NPCs were dead.

The total lack of strategy is so much worse in the 70 bracket than it was in the 60 bracket, and it would be fairly easy to turn that around. The very obvious reason both sides avoid each other and rush the final NPC is that the shorter the game is, the faster you grind out honor/marks. A slow win gets you less reward than a few quick loses, and since the alliance in my battle group seem to lose 90% of all AV games, they figure they might as well lose quickly. This was most evident in one game where our side put up decent resistance, and the 10-15 people that recalled to defend our base were getting flamed in chat by the offense; that side telling us to stop defending and delaying the game. The fact that we ended up winning that game by buying our offense enough time to actually kill the final NPC seemed to not matter.

The fix for this would be to greatly increase the amount of honor gained for actually winning, and lower the amount for losing. I believe Blizzard did this recently, but clearly not enough. And if we are going to increase the amount of honor gained, we would need to increase the length of games to compensate for this. Patch 2.4 will make killing the final NPC more difficult without burning the towers first, which will hopefully have that effect, but I worry that aside from slowing the two sides down a bit, it won’t solve the ‘avoid and rush’ game. I’m not saying bring back the 6 hour+ games of AV, but if the honor reward was balanced, would an hour long game of AV really be that bad?

The other disappointing change to AV since TBC is that what was once a dynamic and interesting battle due to NPC specials is now just a standard no frills game. The flying NPCs, the cavalry charge, the armor upgrades, and the Ice Lord/Forest Guy are never seen and have zero impact on a game, which in my opinion is sad. Seeing the Ice Lord plowing his way into a base, or seeing a pitched battle broken up due to a cavalry charge was great stuff and made AV unique as a battleground. It was a mistake to remove so much of the NPC factor from AV, and it’s very likely too late to add it back in completely. This can perhaps be fixed somewhat by increasing the resource number in AV from 600 to say 1000 or 1200, and along with the 2.4 change, this will increase the length of games. Blizzard should also reduce the amount of turn-ins needed to initiate the NPC specials, so that even a small dedicated team of collectors could quickly accomplish their goal and deploy the special attacks.

If nothing else it would bring back a little bit of strategy to AV, and I think make it overall more enjoyable and different from the other three BGs currently available.

Posted in Combat Systems, MMO design, PvP, World of Warcraft | 4 Comments

Fun with blog stats.

Posted on March 4, 2008 by SynCaine

Recently WordPress has upgraded their stat tracking page to show lifetime blog post views, which is quite nice and provides a better view of what drives traffic. Taking a glance at mine, I was a bit surprised which posts have gotten the most hits.

The top post is no surprise. “The love and hate game, WoW style” is my top post in terms of views with just under 17,000. The second most viewed post has 1500. The massive difference is due to a front page link from the BBC tech page directly to that post. The two day timeframe of that link is also responsible for over 25,000 visits to this blog, which is a decent chunk of overall lifetime traffic. While it’s nice to see big numbers, that post is a somewhat random occurrence brought about by a massive page linking me. Sadly most of those 25,000 viewers did not come back after that one day, at least according to the stats.

Moving on to more accurate numbers, the second post, “Screen shot comparison” continues to get decent traffic long after it was posted. While a decent enough post (IMO of course), I don’t consider it anything too special or revolutionary, nor is the post linked by any major site that continues to drive traffic. My only explanation for its popularity must be that it comes up frequently in Google searches, probably from people searching for either EQ2 or LoTRO screen shots, or people trying to compare the two games. A bit odd that a EQ2 related post is my second highest, considering the relatively short time I spent with EQ2 itself.

The post with the third highest traffic total is one that I do think brings at least something different to the table, “Looking in the mirror, the sickness that was WoW raiding” is my personal recount of my addiction to WoW and in particular the raiding end-game. While similar stories have been posted on forums and other blogs, telling my version of it was something I had wanted to do for a long time, and it felt good to finally get it all out and in writing. It is one of my favorite posts here, and one I personally re-read every now and then.

After those top three, the numbers decline a decent amount, and the next few posts are all close, almost all being huge hits the day they are posts, and then getting very little traffic after. I’m very curious to see which posts remain on top in a year or so, as by then I figure all the high day one posts will be eclipsed by those that get more steady traffic.

The one very valuable lesson I have learned from writing this blog is that you can’t force traffic. If you try to write posts that you think will be linked and drive hits, it will be ignored, and when you write something random and offhand, you might get a huge spike. The key, at least for me, is just to write whatever strikes you at the time, and not worry whether anyone is reading it. Worrying about upsetting people, or whether someone will find what you write interesting, is a great way to over think a blog and turn it into a job rather than a hobby.

Posted in Random, Site update | 5 Comments

A culture of losing; the WoW effect on PvP.

Posted on March 3, 2008 by SynCaine

Over the weekend I played a good bit of 51-60 Alterac Valley. Over the span of however many games I played, I noticed some interesting trends. The overall trend that I noticed is that PvP skill is highly lacking in AV, and in BGs overall, both in 1v1 situations and in overall strategy. Generally all players follow the mob around the map, regardless of where it is headed, and all too often you will see 3-4 players break off to chase one enemy halfway across the map. Players will also stop and fight when they see an enemy, even if the plan is to ride past and fight at a flag. It’s not hard to realize that if you kill an enemy at the halfway point, by the time you reach the flag they will have respawned and will be at 100% to fight you again. Letting them ride past you, or better yet chase you, will remove one defender from your intended goal.

The map itself is highly flawed, not in that it favors one side over the other, but in that it tricks the sides into playing poorly. For instance, knowing that both sides follow herd mentality, it would be all too easy to allow the main attack force to surge ahead and tag towers/graveyards. Logic would dictate that the attackers would wait for the tower/gy to finishing before moving on, but herd mentality insists as soon as something goes gray you rush to the next target. Knowing this, a smart group will simply wait for the masses to move on, recap a forward gy, and catch the attackers in the middle without a close gy to respawns at. The enemy gets tossed all the way back, joining the defenders slowly as your attack force pushes them farther and farther back. Sadly that never actually happens. Instead both sides simply herd rush, and whichever side provides the greatest resistance wins. By removing almost all of the NPC resistance, Blizzard only encourages herd tactics to generally work. Since the brainless ‘charge forward’ tactic works more often than not, it’s no wonder most WoW players never actually bother to stop and think about better strategy.

What’s really sad is that back before TBC, winning AV in a reasonable amount of time did actually involve some planning and team work. The ‘herd vs herd’ games would be standstills, but given good leadership and coordination victory could be achieved in a short and satisfying manner, usually by coordinating NPC special attacks with your teams own GY push. Those victories, and the encouragement for strategy they provided, were far more beneficial than the mindless grind AV is now, and I think that the blame should be squarely placed on Blizzard. By rewarding everyone and encouraging games to end as quickly as possible win or lose, they have created a culture that cares more about the next queue time than actual results. The fact that most PvP participants in WoW are simply there for the item grind does not help matters much. This is one of the greatest downfalls of rewarding everyone, in that actually winning is only slightly more beneficial than losing, especially if you lose quickly.

Going forward, and making the now standard comparison, one would hope Mythic is already well aware of the downfalls of ‘everyone wins’ and implements a system in Warhammer that encourages and actually favors winning. WoW gets away with it because it’s a PvE (for now at least) game at its core, and PvP is a tacked on as an afterthought. WAR is a PvP based game, and can’t afford its primary gameplay to turn into the sad excuse it is in WoW. History will tell us that it won’t, simply based on the gameplay we had in DAoC, but DAoC is a pre-WoW game, and we have seen since what that means. Just another interesting concept to track and watch for when WAR finally drops the NDA and we are all able to discuss it in detail.

Note: I realize Arena combat is a bit different, and that is clearly the direction Blizzard is heading with WoW, but like raiding, Arena’s are generally played by a small fraction of the population, and hence don’t really apply for the topic above.

Posted in Dark Age of Camelot, MMO design, PvP, Warhammer Online, World of Warcraft | 6 Comments

WoW progress update.

Posted on February 29, 2008 by SynCaine

After leveling at a moderate pace, my shaman finally hit 58 and is now ready to cross over to Outland, where I’ll get my first glimpse of TBC content. In my previous time with WoW (beta to a few weeks before TBC), I had experienced everything including Nax, and then promptly quit right before TBC was released. That character, an Orc Warrior, is still 60 and untouched today. Something about having 4 Onyxia bags full of 60 epics, all of which now have the value of a 62 green, is just too painful to continue with. He will happily remain retired in his current state, a sort of pre-TBC monument.

My elemental shaman, along with my gf’s frost mage, have been questing and running old world instances with many of my former raiding friends, all of us agreeing to come back to WoW (a few never left) and reroll fresh on a new server, playing Alliance. It’s been great fun so far, and I’m looking forward to hitting 70 and getting into arena combat and running heroics. Since we have more than 10 members in our guild, we will likely run Karazhan and Zul’Aman. It’s doubtful that we will run any of the 25 man stuff, unless we go out and recruit more members, something that has not really been discussed. While we are all former raiders, many of us have different time requirements now, and perhaps any serious raiding is beyond our availability. That plus many of us are somewhat burned out on raiding already, having done it so extensively before. I’m not sure we are really looking to get back into that whole grind, especially with all the easy epics WoW hands out now.

We do however have plans to run 2, 3, and 5 man Arena teams, and that should be interesting at least. While my time in WoW has taught me enough about WoW PvP to know it’s not exactly rocket science (aka EVE), it will hopefully be decent enough to hold us over until Warhammer is out. Plus running premades in the BGs, while again a simple task, is relaxing and fun with good friends.

Hopefully the Outlands instances and our PvP time will prove interesting enough to warrant a blog post or two. If nothing else, it’s new content, and that never hurts.

Posted in PvP, Site update, World of Warcraft | Comments Off on WoW progress update.

Stop playing World of Warcraft, go play Starcraft Worlds!

Posted on February 27, 2008 by SynCaine

This might be a stretch and totally off base, but that’s part of the fun in writing a blog. You throw stuff out there, people to tell you that you are an idiot in your comments, and you enjoy the ride.

The recent (how recent depends on what class you play, but yea) design changes by Blizzard, moving away from PvE balance and making PvP-focused changes, are a bit puzzling at first. Why would you risk your cash cow, the recent centerpiece of a major business deal, and mess with a proven formula? You are taking a game built on a solid PvE model and basically doing a 180, catering to the super-minority of the ultra competitive PvP crowd at the expense of your PvE base. Unless the two are completely separated, they can’t both be balanced. One always suffers at the expense of the other. Since day one, it has always been PvP suffering at the expense of PvE. Now Blizzard is doing the opposite, changing things to balance them in PvP at the expense of breaking them in PvE.

Does Blizzard really think the future of mass market MMOs lies in arena-style PvP combat? Just a guess, but I say no. The future, just like the past, is still firmly rooted in casual, accessible PvE content, and Blizzard knows this. It also knows that WoW is starting to age, both in technical terms and in simple ‘been there done that’ ways. No matter how great a game is, at some point people move on just to move on, to try something else.

Is it such a stretch to say that Blizzard sees this as well, and is preparing for it?

  • Step one: maximize profits from your current base of players (RMT e-sports)
  • Step two: disrupt your competition as much as possible (Warhammer Online)
  • Step three: transition that player base to your next game (Starcraft Worlds)

What I’m suggesting is that WoW will be tuned to cater as much as possible to the PvP crowd, while the casual PvE crowd will be sold on Starcraft Worlds. It makes sense for a number of reasons. First, your biggest future competitor, Warhammer Online, is aiming at the PvP crowd. Why not turn your massive PvE game into a direct competitor with your biggest enemy (EA vs Activision for 3rd party videogame supremacy), while also changing to not compete with yourself for the PvE crowd? Design Starcraft Worlds as a highly refined, very accessible PvE game, morph WoW into a PvP game, and you have the market covered. Market Starcraft Worlds as the next WoW, but with even better questing and everything else people fell in love with their first time in WoW. Those players wishing for old WoW will have a place to go, and those looking for better PvP will also have a place to go. Blizzard collects money regardless of your choice.

This would also explain the massive lack of info about WotLK. It’s entirely possible WotLK was a PvE-heavy expansion originally, but is now being re-tooled to cater to the PvP crowd. The new ‘pvp only’ zone might only be the beginning. Perhaps Icecrown Glacier is not a raid instance, but instead some super exclusive arena? Instead of expending the PvE game, maybe the major selling point of WotLK will instead be spectator mode for PvP, like Blizzard has been hinting at? Maybe seasonal bracket tourneys like Warcraft 3 had are coming to WoW?

Sure this is likely all wrong, but at the very least, a few dots do seem to be lining up. With Starcraft 2 set to release sometime late 08/early09, why not release Starcraft Worlds in time for Christmas 09, building on the rush from SC2 and completing the transition from WoW to Starcraft?

Posted in MMO design, PvP, Random, Warhammer Online, World of Warcraft | 25 Comments