Old Blizzard teaching New Blizzard the same old tricks

Posted on November 7, 2019 by SynCaine

There are two ways to take the news that New Blizzard is finally learning from Old Blizzard about how to make an MMO.

On the one hand, maybe it gives you hope that New Blizzard can turn Retail around and make it into something worth playing for MMO players.

On the other hand, its infuriating to see New Blizzard be this dense about MMO design, to the point where only AFTER millions of players show them why Vanilla worked that they wake up and go “gee, maybe faceroll easy everything with autogrouping isn’t the solution for everything?”

Also, considering who the audience is that plays Retail today, I could see this design pivot backfiring; current Retail players WANT an sRPG that is faceroll easy and occasionally auto-groups them with silent bots that happen to actually be controlled by real people. That’s what they are paying/playing today, and while most of the overall playerbase has quit WoW due to this direction, the CURRENT playerbase presumably likes what the game is today. They don’t want Vanilla and all that it brings, as we saw when those sRPG players tried Classic and still went back to Retail for whatever reasons.

Of course the biggest mistake in all of this now is spending time/effort on Retail over Classic, but Shadowlands was already far-enough along that Blizzard might as well finish it and push it out the door. Hopefully it wraps up the amazing and cohesive plot of Retail, that version goes into maintenance mode, and Blizzard can focus on the real breadwinner of the franchise. (s/ but not really…)

Posted in MMO design, Rant, World of Warcraft | 9 Comments

The Outer Worlds: A few more thoughts

Posted on November 4, 2019 by SynCaine

A few more thoughts on Outer Worlds as I continue to play it:

To start, I’m still very much enjoying it overall. It’s not flawless, but has far more good than bad, and even the bad isn’t ‘oh god this is terrible’ bad.

Dialog and voice acting are fantastic, for example. I truly enjoy talking to new characters, and the game has some of the best companions I’ve seen in a long time from a personality perspective. The way companions interact is also great, and may be one of the main drivers to play the game again, just to see how different companions react to different situations/choices.

Quests and their objectives are generally above-average, and some truly stand out. No spoilers, but so far most quests have been pretty logical, with some nice surprises worked in. Also so far everything has ‘fit’, without anything seeming to exist simply to be a quest objective. If you dig into the details of an area, most things are explained in a way that makes sense (for the setting).

The big downside so far has been the difficulty; the game is REALLY easy on normal. So easy that it feels like weapon/armor selection doesn’t matter, which stinks because weapon and armor customization options are very high. But if a less effective weapon still gets the job done, it doesn’t feel rewarding or smart to tinker with things and make sure you are playing optimally. I wonder if things would feel more ‘right’ on the hard setting. The highest setting changes a lot of the rules (the usual ‘survival’ stuff like needing to sleep and eat), and I’m not interested in that, but maybe just on hard things would feel a little more challenging.

Back to the good, I’ve yet to run into any technical issues such as crashing or broken quests. Considering the state a game like Fallout or Elder Scrolls ships in, that’s a big plus. To be fair Outer Worlds is far less… worldly than those games, but still.

Still baffled that you can play this game for a dollar via Game Pass, but it’s a hell of a value at that price!

Posted in Random | 7 Comments

Blizzard and J Allen Brack reverse course on the Hong Kong situation

Posted on November 1, 2019 by SynCaine

Blizzard, and more importantly, J Allen Brack, have publicly apologized for incorrectly handling the Hong Kong / Blitzchung situation. If we are being 100% honest, this is about as much as Blizzard could have done at the very opening of Blizzcon. To lead off your biggest event with an apology is a big deal.

Also important was the acknowledgement that actions mean more than words, and Brack strongly insisted that players were free to protest and demonstrate at Blizzcon. This is exactly what they punished Blitzchung for, so their ACTION here is a complete reversal of that original decision. Short of outright telling China to go F itself, I don’t know what more they could have done to show they are correcting the mistake. That someone is being allowed to walk in as Winnie the Pooh is, in fact, that direct F You to China.

For my part I’ll resub to WoW Classic when that comes around (assuming Blizzard doesn’t screw it up by then, but that’s an issue for another day/post). This also means I’ll go back to blogging about the game. Hopefully the gaggle of children I lead in-game will now have their faith restored that daddy won’t abandon them and resume more actively playing as well.

Finally, for everyone who was doubtful that players protesting Blizzard over this incident wouldn’t matter, suck it. Some part of Brack saying sorry was due to a financial hit related to this incident, whether direct via cancelled subs or indirect in bad PR. Here the protesters and players won, and China lost. That’s a good thing, that goes far beyond just silly videogames.

Posted in Inquisition Clan, Mass Media, Site update, World of Warcraft | 19 Comments

Early Impressions: The Outer Worlds

Posted on October 28, 2019 by SynCaine

I’ve started play The Outer Worlds via Microsoft Game Pass, because paying $1 to play a new release that I’m interested in seems like a decent deal. So decent, in fact, that I fully don’t understand how the economics of this works. I would have paid full price on Steam for Outer Worlds, but since the game is EGS exclusive for a year, that didn’t happen, and instead I paid Microsoft a buck, of which I’m guessing Obsidian (Outer World devs) get very little of. I’m sure they got some money from EGS to be exclusive, and I’m also guessing they got money from Microsoft to be on Game Pass, but are those two sources of revenue greater than actual sales of the game?

Note, even with the Game Pass option, I still would have bought Outer Worlds on Steam, as I’m guessing DLC is coming at some point, and perhaps it’s a game I want to replay at a later date. Plus I do value the tracking aspect of my Steam account, and I like seeing all my games in one place, enough so that I’ll ‘overpay’ when given the option. But here I didn’t have that option thanks to EGS, so a buck it is. Sorry but not Obsidian.

As for the game itself, I’m not very far in, but have seen enough to talk a bit about it.

First off performance of the game was initially odd. It defaulted to near-ultra on my PC, with a frame rate of around 80-90 according to Fraps (not being on Steam meant no FPS indicator via Steam, yay…), but the game felt like it was running below 30 FPS when moving about and in some combat situations. It was just sluggish and off. But then I capped the FPS to 60 in the game, turned everything up to Ultra, and it feels much better. I haven’t looked into whether G-sync was an issue here or just not having the framerate fluctuate solved my problem, but either way it was an odd first impression in terms of graphics/performance. That said on Ultra at 3440×1440 the game is gorgeous, and finally we have a Fallout game with good-looking character models!

And make no mistake, this is a Fallout game just without the IP and the setting (more on that shortly). The gun play, the overall gameplay style, the character progression; its all Fallout. And that’s a good thing! With Bethesda busying wasting the Fallout IP on F76, it’s nice of Obsidian to come along and give us Fallout: Alien Planet.

That said, I am a bit confused as to how to approach this setting from a roleplay perspective. You play someone who was in cryosleep for 70 years, in a setting where corporations own everything, including people. Is my character familiar with corporations having this much power? Am I supposed to play someone with the morality of a 2020 non-Trump human, or someone who understands but maybe doesn’t accept the setting of Outer Worlds? Early dialog options give you the chance to be unaware of how the setting works, but you can also pick options that show you do, so which is it? Maybe this clears up a bit further into the game, but right now it has me confused, especially because the first follower you get is also a bit ‘grey’ in this regard, while seemingly everyone else in town is 100% aware of how things are.

More later I’m sure as I dig deeper.

Posted in Fallout 3 | 6 Comments

WoW Classic: New Blizzard removes layers with New Blizzard execution

Posted on October 23, 2019 by SynCaine

My motivation to blog about Classic is obviously down thanks to the whole Bliz/China issue, which sucks on multiple levels that I’ve already written about. Blogging today because New Blizzard continues to screw up Classic, which at this point is really just incredible when you think about it. We aren’t talking balance decisions, or game design, or anything else that might be ‘hard’ to do with an MMO. Nope. We are talking about maybe don’t bend the knee to China, and hey, could you manage to open the right number of servers in a way that doesn’t clusterfuck the whole thing? New Blizzard says ‘nope’ to both of those questions.

The latest development is that they are turning off layers on most servers. For those unaware, Classic servers today can hold many times more players than Vanilla back in 2004, and since we all have more powerful PCs today than in 2004, we can handle more characters on the screen. The game however isn’t designed to have 100 people in a zone, and you run into issues with mob spawns and all that. Layering was the quick fix for this; it created a copy of an area, so you were still on your server, but it felt like far fewer people were competing for the same mob/resource. Great right?

I’m not one of those people who feel layers bastardize the Classic experience. Yes the tech wasn’t around back in 2004, but for the most part having layers doesn’t change the gameplay feel of Classic. I say for the most part because it DOES impact things like world boss spawns, which were designed to only spawn once and only weekly. If you still have layers, you can kill the same world boss multiple times across multiple layers. That’s bad.

So in order for Blizzard to launch phase 2, which adds world bosses, all server must be down to a single layer. Well last night, Blizzard turned off the layers on Benediction, and not only was the server queue back, but the zones were absolutely swamped with people. We were trying to quest in Tanaris and it was a complete shitshow, with mobs being tagged the instant they spawned, and large roaming groups ganking because of the overloaded population. It was barely playable, and extremely unfun. From some reddit browsing, it seems that even more populated servers had it worse, with multi-hour queues and silly numbers of people in the capitals.

All of these issues are self-inflicted wounds by Blizzard. They did a terrible job initially with server counts, and then responded horribly after that, opening servers and enabling transfers too slow/late. Now they stack removing layers too early on top of it, with no notice or plan beyond “hopefully you are annoyed enough to transfer or quit”. It really is a clownshow.

Posted in MMO design, Rant, World of Warcraft | 7 Comments

LoL TFT: Diamond Rank achieved

Posted on October 16, 2019 by SynCaine

Back in July I posted that I hit Gold rank in Teamfight Tactics. This post is about me moving into Diamond, the rank above Plat, which is above Gold. According to this site, that puts me just about in the top 1%. Suck it plebs.

The big key to my recent success was basically forcing 6 Brawlers / 2 Gunslingers (Jinx + Lucian or Miss Fortune) every game. That build is currently VERY meta, but prior to the last update it wasn’t as widely run, making it much easier to force every game. Even now the top meta comp is dragons/shapeshifters/guardians, meaning zero overlap with brawlers/slingers, so forcing it still works. In terms of items it’s a bit flexible, but you basically try to stack Jinx and then adjust based on what you get.

Its rare the build gets me outside of top 4, where you gain rank, and if I highroll (3 star a brawler, 2 star Fortune, or get insane items) winning a game can happen. Forcing the build also means rather than focusing on the units I want to collect, or which items I might prefer, I can instead focus on what the other players are building and how to counter, whether that’s via items or board positioning. Positioning is especially crucial as the build runs Blitz, and a good grab of the enemy carry usually means an easy win. Additionally because the build has two hextech champs, late game you force the opponent into sub-optimal layouts, which you can then counter-play against. Overall I really enjoy the build, and the more I play it the more little details/tweaks I discover to optimize things.

Riot just announced that Season 2 of TFT will being in a bunch of new champions, while also making most of the current champions unplayable (I don’t want to say retired as I’m guessing they will come back at some point in future seasons). This will, of course, drastically change the meta and everyone’s understanding of what is good and how things work. It’s a soft reset, and I can’t wait.

Posted in League of Legends, PvP, Site update | Comments Off on LoL TFT: Diamond Rank achieved

China takes a loss, lapdog Blizzard is still a problem

Posted on October 14, 2019 by SynCaine

Blizzard apologized with their actions, but not their words. That’s… something.

Let me be very clear about what the words and actions mean before I dive into what I think of it all. China, via Blizzard, reduced the penalty, which is an admittance of a mistake made. China, via J Alan Brack and the clearly-translated letter, did not apologize in the statement that was put out on Friday night (the time you put out news you want to be ignored). I don’t work in PR, but I’m pretty sure this is not what a smart PR strategy looks like.

Here is the good news as I see it; Blitzchung’s actions, and the supportive reactions of Blizzard fans, caused China to back down. Regardless of how big or small the back-down was, showing any weakness is a major blow to an authoritative regime, and that’s exactly what happened here (along with the NBA backtrack). As I said before, one canceled sub of $15 alone isn’t going to change the world, and this one defeat for China isn’t suddenly going to shut down their interment camps. But it is a step, and even small steps are important.

Here is the bad news; everything Blizzard. It’s terrible that the president put his name on a Chinese’s government propaganda statement, especially one so poorly translated it looks almost intentionally embarrassing, as if China here is punishing Blizzard by not even attempting to hide the source of the wording, and trying to save some face by making it clear they still control Blizzard and tell them when to jump and how high.

It also means that actions against Blizzard must continue, because while China backed down, Blizzard has not, and remain in the same position as they held prior to this incident; beholden to China. The only way this changes is if being pro-China costs Blizzard more money than supporting them, and that only happens if non-China fans continue to hurt them in the only way corporations care; the wallet. (I won’t get into how much the Chinese market is actually worth to outside companies, but do some research; today its not nearly the goldmine you might think).

Like it or not the world now revolves around capitalist, and that means money and profit justify the decisions made by corporations. In some ways that sucks (not all ways btw), but those are the rules of the game we all play. This doesn’t however mean that corporate actions don’t have consequences. If tomorrow we find out that Blizzard is harvesting baby organs to produce games, that kind of bad PR hurts them financially, and is the reason they don’t do it, regardless of the morals. This is the reason twitter backlash actually matters; the bad PR in turn results in loss of revenue. There are countless examples of a company quickly changing course because they are negatively trending on twitter, so pretending bad PR doesn’t matter is foolish. I hate twitter and basically all social media, but again in the world we live in today, it matters and can make a difference.

I hope Blizcon is a disaster for Blizzard, and that the big news coming out of Blizcon is Hong Kong-related rather than the next Retail expansion or whatever was planned to be the big thing. Blizzard leadership at the top has to change (I suspect most employees are currently angry or at least embarrassed by the actions of the company they work for). They had a chance to do so here, and so far they have failed in spectacular fashion. I only hope that game fans, including those who like Blizzard products, continue to do the right thing and continue to push Blizzard to change. With enough pressure they will, as it will be the ‘right’ thing to do for their shareholders. Until then, the boycott continues.

Posted in Mass Media, Random, Rant, World of Warcraft | 7 Comments

Blizzard picked a side, I’ve picked mine

Posted on October 8, 2019 by SynCaine

Blizzard recently banning a Hearthstone player due to a statement they made about Hong Kong has now put me in a personal quandary. On the one hand I’m really enjoying WoW Classic and want to keep playing. On the other hand giving money to Blizzard is pretty directly telling them its ok to side with a dictatorship, and that money is a higher priority than free speech. I can even understand why Blizzard did it; they are ok with losing some customers outside of China over losing potentially all their customers in China. It is, at the end of the day, a purely financial decision, as I doubt anyone high up at Blizzard is especially pro-dictatorship (you’d hope?)

Back to me, do I stop playing a game I’m enjoying just to make a statement, however small that statement is to Blizzard? Yes, as obviously cancelling my sub is the right thing to do. And there is even some wiggle room here as I have a 6 month sub, so I could cancel now and keep playing, and by the end of the sub period maybe Blizzard has changed course (not likely) or maybe I’m done/bored with Classic (also not looking likely), or at that time I make the minor sacrifice of not playing Classic. Stinks if it comes to that, but in some ways it really is a reflection of the times we live in, and the stakes behind the decisions we make. Plus compared to those in Hong Kong who are protesting, its not exactly a large sacrifice on my end.

Posted in Inquisition Clan, Mass Media, Random, Site update, World of Warcraft | 30 Comments

WoW Classic: The game-changer expansion

Posted on October 3, 2019 by SynCaine

I posted my initial thoughts on what a Classic expansion might look like. It was basically ‘more of the same’, and avoiding what WoW gets wrong with WotLK and beyond. But the more I think about it, a lot of those suggestions (new zones/quests, new dungeons, new raids) fit better into a patch vs a full-on expansion. And while I think Blizzard should 100% try and get such patches into Classic (again whether New Blizzard is capable of doing it right or not is another question), an expansion has to be bigger, and ideally focused around a theme.

I think I’ve found said theme.

The first Classic expansion should add a third faction.

Think about it, right now by far the most popular server type for Classic is PvP, and the only PvP going on in Classic right now is open-world randomness. You know what would make open-world PvP more interesting? A three-way battle of course! Out of all the things Dark Age of Camelot got right, the three-way fighting was very high up on that list. Imagine a third faction fighting in Hillsbrad?

The lore in Classic already supports this too. You have goblins and their allies as neutral to both Horde and Alliance, right? Well now they are playable and a bit less neutral! Plus you also have neutral-ish races like Ogres, Wargen, Kobalds, and the Naga. Classes that fit right in would be Pirate (Trickster ranged/melee hybrid), Tide Caster (water-based caster/healer), or Mechanic (turret pet class) to suggest a few. Perhaps Pirate is faction-only, and Alliance/Horde can also roll some of the new ones, to match the current Pali/Shaman setup.

The third faction would then need their own starting and ‘controlled’ zones, but could also be easily worked into existing contested zones, with perhaps a few new settlements created for questing and flight points. Booty Bay is upgraded into a capital city, with the unique bonus of being ‘true neutral’ and still open to the other factions (so you don’t have to rework all of STV).

In addition to the third faction, the other big add of this expansion would be to bring more meaning to open-world PvP. Give contested zones control points to fight over that give minor zone-wide bonuses, or grant a flight point. Add a Darkness Falls-like open-world dungeon for everyone to fight over/in. Maybe add a few spread across the level range, like lvl 25, lvl 45, and lvl 60 versions. Add a true reason to raid other faction’s cities and capitals. Basically, give players a real reason to care about world PvP beyond the fun that is bashing heads as people do in Hillsbrad today.

An added bonus to going down this path is now you truly separate the lore and story direction of Classic from Retail. Keep the main story about Horde vs Alliance, but now with a meddlesome third faction AND additional threats like the Burning Legion or whoever you need to be the big-bad of a raid.

A more minor additions that also fits the theme would be allowing everyone to have two specs, ideally one PvP and one PvE, but that could be useful even for pure PvP or PvE players as well. Respec’ing often in Classic just isn’t financially feasible, and while I believe assigning talent points SHOULD be a serious decision that is costly to change, specs lean too far towards either PvP or PvE to not allow for a second option.

Do I think this will actually happen? Eh, most likely not. Should it? Yes, of course. Make WoW what is should have been all along, an MMO rooted in PvE, that also has PvP as a core feature of the world, not a side-show of battlegrounds and silly arena fighting.

Posted in MMO design, World of Warcraft | 4 Comments

WoW Classic: Nostalgia or Design?

Posted on October 2, 2019 by SynCaine

What Blizzard feels is the correct answer to the question “Why are people playing and enjoying Classic” will go a long way in determining the game’s future direction. If the answer is heavily towards ‘nostalgia’, then the key to Classic’s continued success is feeding players more nostalgia. If the answer goes more towards “because the design of Vanilla results in a great MMO”, then you need to feed players more of that design, right?

The nostalgia route means either keeping Classic as-is, or going down the known path towards The Burning Crusade and perhaps beyond. If people are playing because this reminds them of 15 years ago, keep feeding that and people should be happy. Launch fresh servers from time to time so people can repeat the ‘fresh start’ feeling, and you are good to go ala EQ nostalgia servers.

The great design route means creating more of what makes Classic work in order to keep people playing/paying. You can’t just go down the known route of TBC and beyond, because at some point :cough: WotLK :cough: things go too far down the path towards Retail, and we know how that path ends. Instead you need to support Classic as you traditionally support an MMO; more content, and hopefully that new content is what your current players actually want, and again not towards the direction of Retail.

I wonder what, today, Blizzard feels is the bigger driver in the success of Classic? I wonder what most players feel is the reason?

My personal opinion is that nostalgia was the primary reason most people showed up to try Classic, along with the hype of this release being the big to-do in the MMO space for 2019. People like to be part of a big event, even if the core ‘why’ behind the event isn’t something they are overall super interested in.

I think Classic still going strong, and the fact that demand continued to grow after day-one, is because of the design. Gamers like to play good games (crazy huh?) and Classic is a good game. It hits the right notes, its design is deceptively brilliant, and the whole thing has aged far better than I think most expected. The moment to moment feel of the combat is just as smooth and enjoyable as it was in 2004, perhaps in large part because no one has done it better since that time. The downturn of the MMO genre in recent years isn’t because gamer tastes have moved on, its because actual good MMO design has been lacking. Classic is a ‘new’ launch of that good design, and people have shown up.

Assuming I’m right (99.9% of the time, I am), this leaves Blizzard in a difficult position. They need to update Classic like a real MMO, and not a nostalgia experience, because an MMO that isn’t getting updated is an MMO that’s dying, and the suits don’t want to see that 223% revenue increase just drift away. This means new content, but that new content needs to be in the same spirit as current Classic content, and not what they do today for Retail. Can New Blizzard do that? And even if they can, if the new stuff is on-target, how will those who ARE here purely for nostalgia handle that? Will we need a “True-Classic” server?

Blizzcon in Nov will perhaps give us some clues to the answer to the nostalgia-or-design question, and also perhaps more clues into what Blizzard intends to do with the title that is suddenly the biggest game under their umbrella. They simple can’t say/do nothing, can they? (Spoiler: New Blizzard certainly might, because lets be honest, if you can release HotS, you definitely can find a way to spoil Classic)

Posted in MMO design, World of Warcraft | 9 Comments