Tobold's Blog
Thursday, June 30, 2005
 
The Sound of Silence

No, I'm not talking about the annoying white space you are probably seeing between the header and this text. That big blank is caused by Blogger having changed their code, and they are apparently working on a fix. They proposed I add a line "#main #menu {position: absolute;right: 21px;}" to my template, but when I do that, the sidebar covers a part of the text, which is even worse.

But the silence I want to announce is the one you are going to hear from me for the next two weeks. I'm on holiday in Yorkshire until mid-July, and I'm not taking any computer with me. Not even a GameBoy. I hope I survive the withdrawal symptoms. :)
 
Blizzard still pushing PvP

Blizzard announced a change to the PvP system, which will go into the next patch (v1.6): "Honor system reward item's rank requirement will now be based on a characters highest lifetime rank rather than the character's current rank."

What this means is that PvP rewards are now permanent. If, for example, you reached the PvP rank needed to get the epic mount for only 80 gold, and then you go on holiday for a month and lose PvP rank, you can still use the mount afterwards. In the previous system you would have kept the reward, but would have been unable to use it.

This change is obviously designed to make PvP more popular, offering more carrots, less sticks. And it's well timed just before the summer holiday period. But of course PvP getting more popular has the perverse effect of making PvP rewards harder to get, as your rewards are given out according to your relative contribution, compared with all the other players on your side.
Sunday, June 26, 2005
 
Travelling with WiFi

I arrived in the hotel in Strasbourg where I will be staying until Wednesday. It's 30 degrees Celsius outside, and the rooms don't have air conditioning. And the announced high-speed internet access is only working in the lobby. Which happens to have air conditioning. So in spite of the 10 Euros for 2 hours cost of the Orange WiFi access, I'm connecting to the internet in the cool lobby. I even played a bit of WoW, although that is rather uncomfortable on the low tables and couches here. Damn addiction. :) I know why I'm not even taking the laptop on my holiday which is starting next weekend.

My priest, Kyroc, now reached skill level 225 in tailoring and enchanting. Which is all he can do at level 20. I think I need to be level 40 to get to 300. Anyway, the guy teaching enchanting that high is hiding in Uldaman, and you need to be pretty high to just survive getting there.

Raslebol meanwhile has been farming the mines close to Brackenwall Village in Dustwallow Marsh, which are full of spiders. The money earned there isn't much, but the spiders drop thick spider's silk, shadow silk, and white spider meat. The silk is for tailoring special stuff, and the white spider's meat is for cooking food with +12 stamina bonus.
Saturday, June 25, 2005
 
WoW Journal - 25-Jun-2005

This is a strange weekend for playing WoW. I'm at my parents, and I'm playing on the laptop over the WLAN I recently installed for them. Works well enough, but it isn't as comfortable, a laptop keyboard forcing your hands into a strange position. WoW is certainly playable over the laptop, although there is a bit more lag, probably due to having only 512 MB of RAM instead of 1 GB.

And of course I'm playing a lot less here, prefering to spend time with my parents. When my mother calls dinner is ready, I have to jump immediately. :) So I didn't do anything which would commit me for hours, like a raid. Only grouped shortly with one guildmate to help him get a quest item out of Razorfen Kraul, and then once with a huge guild raid group to slay Araj for the Scholomance key quest. With the real holidays coming up, I don't see me doing Scholomance before the second half of July. Well, two weeks away from the computer should do me good.

So this weekend I was mainly busy doing some farming. I looked up Thottbot on where to farm silk, for Kyroc's tailoring / enchanting. But Thottbot said the best silk drop chance were the woodpaw gnolls in Feralas, which turned out to be a misinformation. They dropped very little cloth, and most of it was mageweave, not silk. I wonder if the loot tables changed, or why Thottbot would be so wrong there.

Then I decided to farm wool, and had heard that Razorfen Kraul had lots. Another wrong information, because *there* I found the silk, and little wool. I read Scarlet Monastery was the best place for silk farming, I wonder what I'll find there. For the moment I stick to RFK, the wool / silk mix there is just what I need.

Another thing I'd need to farm would be money. Raslebol is quite poor for a level 60, just having 40 gold, no epic mount, and all those hungry mouths of my alt twinks to feed. The rogues in the guild are a lot richer, being able to sneak into instances and pilfer chests, but the only thing I can do is slaughter lots of mobs for cash. It seems humanoids and undead are the best cash source, but I'm still working out what is the best level range. Lower level mobs have less money, but take a lot less time to kill as well. So while the undead in the Eastern Plaguelands have nice cash per kill, around 10 sp, I don't know if they give the most cash per hour. Razorfen Kraul mobs gave only around 3 sp per kill, but I killed them faster, and I gained green items to disenchant, and cloth for Kyroc at the same time. Warriors are a bit at a disadvantage here, I can survive endless streams of attackers, but I'm not killing them very fast.
Friday, June 24, 2005
 
PlayOn at Palo Alto Research Center

The PlayOn Blog from the Palo Alto Research Center has interesting WoW census data. They describe themselves as: The PlayOn project at PARC is an investigation into the social dimensions of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and virtual worlds. Can you believe that there are independant researchers getting paid for watching other people play World of Warcraft?
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
 
World of Warcraft - Under Development

More news on the future of WoW can be found on the World of Warcraft Community Site -> Info -> Under Development page. Some things there are nice, for example the Battlemasters, which will allow you to enter a battleground without having to travel there. But I noticed that most of the new content to be added is specifically labeled as "High Level Raid Dungeons / Content", or is about PvP. It seems Blizzard hasn't understood where their strong points are, so let me spell it out for them:

World of Warcraft is a wonderful game from level 1 to 59, offering quests and content for solo players and small groups. It also offers mediocre PvP for levels 21-60. And then there is the level 60 high level raid dungeons content, which throws the game back right into the middle-ages, the bad old times of the first Everquest. However easy you make it for players to reach level 60, casual players will *never* participate in a 40-player raid to Blackwing Lair. It is simply too difficult to organize, and a 40-player "pickup" raid group would be doomed to failure. Thus this sort of content is reserved exclusively for a tiny part of the player base, the power gamer uber guilds.

THAT JUST ISN'T WORTH ALL THE DEVELOPMENT EFFORT! You can not put your whole development team to work on content which isn't accessible to the majority of your players, that is a waste of resources. It would be much better to make more dungeons, zones, and quests for level 1-59 players, than to add only high level raid dungeons. Not only are the power gamer uber guilds that are able to access the new raid dungeons a relatively small part of your population, they are also mentally totally unable to ever feel satisfied. You could give them 10 new dungeons tomorrow, and they would *still* bitch about lack of high level content on all message boards. Catering only to the power gamers was the reason that Everquest never had more than one fifth of the subscribers that WoW has. If WoW wants to keep on top of the pile, it has to satisfy the average gamers, not the extreme ones.
 
World of Warcraft Battleplan

Shane Dabiri, Lead Producer of the World of Warcraft Development Team posted a Battleplan for WoW, reporting on previous achievements, and what the future is holding. Mainly marketing talk, but it gives a good idea what the development team is thinking of themselves. Normally I'd just post the link, but as posts on the official forums aren't archived very long, I'll quote it in it's entire length:

It has been over six months since World of Warcraft launched in North America, and we have seen much growth during that time. Just prior to launching in China last week, World of Warcraft had achieved a subscriber base of more than 2 million players worldwide. Thousands of new players around the world are joining the adventures in Azeroth each day, and the early signs from China are showing that World of Warcraft is proving to be very popular with players there as well.

With this rapid growth, we expanded our operations from 48 realms at launch in the U.S. to over 450 worldwide. The introduction of hundreds of new realms caused some growing pains, and we experienced some stability issues with our realms in the months after launch. During these few months, we were able to significantly improve our code and update our hardware, which increased our performance dramatically. Our realms are now stable, and we are concentrating on providing consistent content patches to our players.

On the customer-service end, we have expanded our 24/7 in-game customer service staff (GMs) in all regions since launch. World of Warcraft now employs more than 550 GMs worldwide. Along with assisting players with in-game problems, these GMs also actively seek out and ban the accounts of people caught cheating, botting, or doing anything else that would negatively impact our customers. We have billing and technical support call centers on all the major continents, who employ phone, Web, and e-mail support for customers. Our community websites are moderated by regional teams of community managers who provide answers to customer questions and give feedback to the development teams so we can better focus our efforts. All of these people are there to improve the quality of the game experience for everyone.

Aside from improving our server stability and customer service, we have also been hard at work delivering great new content updates for the game. Since release, we have had four major updates and nine minor updates. Thanks to our major updates, customers have had the opportunity to experience:

  • The introduction of the PvP Honor ranking system and many exciting Honor rewards.
  • Our newly released PvP Battlegrounds. Warsong Gulch, a frenetic 10-vs.-10 “capture the flag”-style Battleground, and Alterac Valley, a 40-vs.-40 epic-scale battle for dominance.
  • Two new full dungeons (Maraudon and Dire Maul)
  • New world raid encounters (Azurgos and Lord Kazzak)
  • World events such as Feast of Winter Veil, the Elemental Invasions on Kalimdor, Children’s Week, the Gurabashi Arena Event, and Noblegarden.
  • Many improvements to the game’s user interface, such as additional action bars, quest tracking, and buff timers.
  • Over 200 new quests for all levels.
  • Over 600 new items, including new professions recipes, epic mounts, and raid sets.
  • Over 200 new monsters.
  • 12 new flight paths.
  • Numerous new class abilities and class-balance adjustments.
  • Improvements to many of the dungeons already in the game, such as Scholomance, Stratholme, and Blackrock Spire.

We are committed to delivering the highest quality online experience for our players. Some of our upcoming plans have already been mentioned on our community site. For example, in our next major update, we will be releasing Blackwing Lair, a 40-person raid dungeon, where you will be able to battle against the epic dragon Nefarian and his minions. We are also working on a 20-person dungeon called Zul’Gurub, and the mysterious lands of Ahn’Qiraj in Silithus. Outside of dungeons, we want to continue adding new world events, such as a carnival that will take place in Mulgore and Elwynn forest.

Of course, on top of all this, each content update will also bring new quests, items, professions recipes, and continued class improvements. Some have asked about an expansion and what it might hold. I wanted to let players know that it is in the works, and we’ll release details as soon as we can.

These are but some of the things you can expect over the coming months. There is still so much to speak of, but I hope I have at least given you all a peek at how World of Warcraft has progressed since launch. I also hope I have given you some insight into the future and our dedication to growing World of Warcraft for years to come. Thanks again for your continued support, and we’ll see you in Azeroth!

Shane Dabiri
Lead Producer
World of Warcraft Development Team

Tuesday, June 21, 2005
 
WoW Journal - 21-Jun-2005

It is astounding how you can spend a whole evening of 4+ hours in WoW without doing anything special. Yesterday evening I was just pottering around with all of my characters. Raslebol only made a couple of potions for guild mates, and spent money on twinking the other characters. Honey did the main part of her level 30 quest for the Felhunter demon. And most of the time was spent with Kyroc, handing in quests, visiting the artisan tailor and enchanter, transforming a huge bundle of silk first into clothes, which were then disenchanted, and the resulting dusts used to boost his enchanting skill. And I'm still far from 225 skill in both tailoring and enchanting, I need a lot more silk and mageweave. Guess I'll send Raslebol farming.

Then I realized that I needed a new character. Raslebol is level 60 and can't level any more. Honey should stay at the same level as my D&D friends on the French server. And Kyroc is teamed up with my wife's mage, and can't solo either. So I reactivated a level 2 orc shaman named Waldin, who I had created long ago, and never played. I wasn't too impressed with shamans during the beta, but since then they have risen considerably in my appreciation, especially since they seem to be a good combination of healer and tank, which is something I always like. And I guess the problem of low survivability I had with my shaman in beta can be solved with some twinking.

First thing I did with Waldin was travel to the Tauren newbie zone. I prefer to play an orc over a tauren, but as my last two Horde characters were troll and undead, I wanted to do the Tauren quests in Mulgore instead. Mulgore has the disadvantage that it is relatively big, so you need to run around a lot, and filled with aggressive creatures, so you need to run away a lot. Darniaq on the Grimwell boards always claims that Tauren were originally foreseen to have higher "plains run speed", so they made their zone larger, and couldn't change it back when they ditched the idea of the run speed boost for Tauren. But the quest in Mulgore have a very nice American Indian cultural touch, while the orc quests are comparatively bland.

Then I started working on the twinking part. Raslebol did a tour of Ragefire Chasm, but didn't get much stuff useful for a low level shaman, so he bought a level 9 and a level 14 mace in the auction house. Next logistical problem is having an enchanter and the character to be twinked on the same account, so I can't have the two meet and enchant. So I'm first sending the equipment by mail to Kyroc, the enchanter, who will then enchant it and send it on to Waldin.

Progress on the new character, and on this blog, will be slow for a while. From Thursday to Wednesday I will be on a trip where I first visit my parent for the weekend, and then spend some days in France on business. And the Saturday after that I'm leaving for a two-week holiday to Yorkshire. For the first trip I'll have my laptop with me, and might still be able to play a little bit. But on my holidays I'll be without computer, I'd rather explore good old England when I'm there.
Monday, June 20, 2005
 
WoW Journal - 20-Jun-2005

I'm still in a bit sad "game over" mode, due to Raslebol having hit 60. I tried a range of possible level 60 activities, but none of them were as fun as leveling up. The best activity was to lead a group of guild mates through the Scarlet Monastery, because I really like being able to help people. Then I tried PvP, but the battleground system isn't working all that well. The wait is often so long, that by the time people are allowed to get into the battlefield, they have gone afk, or started something more interesting, and then decline the invitation. In the worst case I found myself as one of only 3 characters on my side of the battlefield, instead of the 10 it takes for the capture the flag. In such cases the battlefield closes down after 5 minutes. I tried at least to get a honorable kill or two in that time, but the other side not only outnumbered us, they also had 2 mages who kept turning me into a sheep. There doesn't seem to be any defence against that, and so I spent most of the 5 minutes totally helpless and frustrated, and with no desire to try it again.

The main activity for level 60 is raids. I'm member of a The Order of the Rose-Croix, a very nice guild, but only medium sized. Sunday evening I did a raid with them, but all we could get together was 8 level 60 players. Small raid. At least at level 60 I wasn't all too worried about not being able to do quests, and getting little xp, but raids are still not very profitable. We spent several hours in Lower Blackrock Spire, and we got less than 1 blue item per person. And not many green items either. I ended up with one blue plate Belt of Valor, which is good because I already had the Bracers of Valor, and this is the first time I get two pieces of a set. And one green belt which was only good for being disenchanted.

The raid was relatively successful in that we never got wiped out, although we had a few deaths. I died only once, when our only healer lost his connection. I only made one big mistake, using shift-click to loot random monsters, and accidentally picking up a piece needed for the key for Upper Blackrock Spire, which should have gone to the guild leader. But it seems the key needs this piece and three gems, and we only found one gem, so we have to redo that part several times anyway. I'm certainly willing to go on raids whenever my guild needs me, but it seems we aren't doing this more than once per week, on Sunday evening, due to lack of players. But I wouldn't want to be part of a powergamer guild, just to be able to do raids more often.

So I think I'll stick with the previous plan of now mainly playing my other characters. Kyroc, my priest, is now always teaming up with a mage character played by my wife. That is very nice, playing with your significant other. We both reached level 20, so I now can push the cap of tailoring and enchanting to 225, and use the silk and mageweave cloth I gained with Raslebol, which I had hoarded for that purpose. The only problem with our team is that we had planned to stick to the undead zones, but we have run out of quests there. We did all the quests we could in Silverpine, and all the remaining quests there, and the quests in the next zone, Hillsbrad, are too high for us. So we will have to move to the Barrens and quest there, which is not as fun, as we both have done the quests there already. Which is actually the main stumbling block on the way to replayability of WoW, after about 4 characters (2 Horde, 2 Alliance) you run out of quests that you haven't done before.

On the French server my warlock Honey is still level 30, having mainly done a couple more battlegrounds this weekend. 43 honorable kills, but only 111 honor points, because our side lost all the time. The Horde repeatedly fielded a well organized team (You could recognize that by the fact that several characters had nearly identical names, only differing by one letter), consisting mainly of shamans. And on a capture the flag battleground, shamans are simply superior to all other classes. They are allowed to use their ghost wolf running ability, thus they are faster than anybody else. And once they got the flag, they drop earthbind totems, which slow down the pursuers. In a game mode which consists mainly of running around, having one class which runs faster and can stop others from running fast is unbalanced.

More and more I see that World of Warcraft character classes are really nicely balanced for PvE. Some solo a bit worse than others, but then they are better in groups, so no class is much worse or much better than the others in PvE overall. But as PvP is a completely different game, the same character classes are horribly unbalanced in PvP. As I always said, PvE and PvP don't mix well. I just hope Blizzard isn't spending too much energy on further fiddling with the PvP system, I'd rather have them work on more PvE content.
Saturday, June 18, 2005
 
Level 60

Let it be known that my main character, Raslebol the troll warrior, on the Runetotem server, today reached level 60. That is the first time ever that one of my characters in any MMORPG reaches the maximum level. Time played with Raslebol is just below 500 hours, which I find very reasonable, neither too long nor too short.

So now for the very first time I have the problem that I don't quite know what to do with Raslebol. A typical problem in a game based on level advancement and a maximum level. I could try to improve my gear, but what do I do with the better gear, if not gaining xp and levels? Of course I still have some places to visit, and some dungeons to do, but I'm going to miss "dinging" more levels.

I guess in the future I'll play Raslebol a lot less and my other characters more.
Friday, June 17, 2005
 
WoW Journal - 17-Jun-2005

I finally got around to check what my battleground experiments had yielded me in PvP rank. Honey had a total of about 500 honor, which resulted in a standing of 300 (that is 299 players on that server on that side had more honor that week), and a new rank, Private (Rank 1). Tobold had a total of 1000 honor, but a standing of 0, and still no rank at all. That obviously confused me a bit. But some nice people on the WoW message boards sent me in the right direction. As the new honor system guide (World of Warcraft Europe -> Info -> Basics -> Honor System Guide) explains, one needs at least 25 honorable kills to keep or attain rank 1. And then there is a second cut-off based on honorable kills of all players on your side and server, and if you are below that, you can only hold or achieve rank 1, not more.

Kind of stupid to first give out honor points, and then not making them count due to number of honorable kills. It was easy to get honorable kills with Honey, you just need to do 1 single point of damage to the enemy before he dies to get a kill counted. With a Warlocks rain of fire and long range spells that is easy. Getting your number of honorable kills up with a warrior is a lot more difficult, unless you start doing stupid things like using your ranged weapon to fire on everybody on the battlefield. I think I'll just won't do any more PvP with Raslebol, except maybe try Warsong with him too, and keep that activity reserved for the warlock.

In other news Raslebol dinged 59 last night. The end is near! Even if I don't consider it as an end. But I'm highly motivated to rush to 60 this weekend. Less than 200,000 xp remaining, and all on double xp rest bonus. And I want to visit all the overland zones I haven't been yet, like the two plaguelands.

One quest I did yesterday was The Stones that Bind Us, given by the fallen hero of the horde who stands just at the entranced of the Blasted Lands. Quite interesting, you have to kill a special sort of undead, whose soul is captured in crystals. You need to incapacitate the undead, then destroy the crystal, before you can finish off the mob. The reward was a trinket that promised to increase mana and hitpoint regeneration by 5. But according to the regeneration counter on Telo's info bar that doesn't work. I need to research that a bit more, jump off a tower in Ogrimmar and see how many hitpoints I regain at each tick with or without the trinket.

But the most xp I got yesterday was in the temple of Jintha'Alor, where I went with the two D&D buddies who have characters on Runetotem (the others only play on the French server Khaz Modan). There are a number of elite quests in the new Horde village in the Hinterlands, which all lead to this temple. And while the temple and the whole zone were relatively empty from players previously, right now it is a pretty busy place. We killed lots of elite trolls up to level 52, and did our elite quests, so we all racked up a nice amount of xp. My friends are level 51 and 52 now, and I dinged 59, so we'll soon be able to go into the high-level dungeons together, inviting two more people. For now I'm concentrated on reaching 60, doing quests outside of dungeons. I'm going to abandon the remaining non-elite quests from the Hinterlands. None of them gives a reward beyond money and xp, and I'd rather go to new places than do the green quests there.
Thursday, June 16, 2005
 
WoW Joke

This picture found on Wonderland made me smile today:



But I admit that having played too much WoW is a prerequisite for finding this funny.
 
EverQuest expands into monsters

The original EverQuest is adding yet another expansion set, Depths of Darkhollow. While the subscriber numbers haven't grown for years, they also never fell, in spite of EQ2 and WoW coming out. This is what economics call a cash cow, a product for which the development cost has fully been paid, and which continues to sell and make profit. And expansion sets are what keep this game alive for so long.

Depths of Darkhollow is interesting in that it will introduce "monster missions", where players can play as monsters instead of heroes. How that will work, and whether these monsters will then be able to PvP, remains to be seen. DoD will also allow people to play as lower levels, so they can adventure with friends, a sort of reverse CoH sidekick model. The expansion also promises items which evolve, as well as the usual new zones, new quests, and other new content.

That still doesn't make me want to return to EQ, because the underlying grind model isn't enjoyable to me. But I sure hope Blizzard is listening and learning how to perpetuate a MMORPG with expansion sets. Blizzard just announced breaking through the 2 million subscribers mark, and the game just has launched in China, where more growth is expected. I sure like how Blizzard is adding content in their big patches about every month, but a WoW expansion set would really be nice.

The only info we have is a "blue name" post on the WoW boards saying "Also, while we haven't made any announcements yet, we do plan to create an expansion set for World of Warcraft. We're currently focused on adding new content to the game through regular content updates, but when the time comes, we'll make an announcement on our community web site regarding our plans for the expansion.".
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
 
WoW Journal - 15-Jun-05

Grog was asking what WoW UI mods I am currently using. I don't use any compilations, neither Cosmos nor otherwise, because I found them too big and unwieldy. I'm using Gatherer, which doesn't cause any problems on my PC, to keep track of the herbs and other stuff I found. I have Telo's Infobar, which displays useful stuff like my money and the amount of free bag space on top of my screen. I still use Simplemail, although part of it's functions are now built into standard WoW. I'm also using QuestLevels, which both displays the level of the quests in my journal, and speeds up the quest display speed. And finally the newly installed BerzerkDing, which is troll specific. I have CensusPlus installed, but rarely use it anymore.

This turns out to be a bad week for playing WoW, I simply don't find the time, so you can stop reading here, the rest of the post is only faintly WoW related :). Monday I was playing pen and paper D&D until past midnight. Tuesday I had to travel to Paris and only came home late. Today, Wednesday, I'll be helping one of my D&D friends to install the new Dell computer he received yesterday. Up to now he was playing on a PC which didn't meet the minimum specifications for World of Warcraft. It is a miracle he got to level 34 with his rogue under these conditions. His graphics card isn't compatible with WoW (I tried every possible driver), and the only way the game was running at all was by adding a -opengl parameter in the properties of the WoW shortcut on his desktop. Then the game wouln't crash more than once per hour, and run at 8 frames per second, less in populated places. His PC was so slow, it ended up affecting his run speed, he kept rubber-banding back. Quite annoying when we wanted to run somewhere as a group.

Our whole group will be quite happy when he gets his new PC running, and we don't have to wait for him any more. A 3 GHz Pentium, with 1 GByte of RAM, and an Radeon x300 SE graphics card should be more than sufficient to run WoW with no problems at all. Okay the graphics card isn't high end, but it's decent enough, and much better than what he had. Should be easy to replace in a year or two, the rest of the system is solid enough for a while. And the whole thing only cost about 1000 Euros, including screen, keyboard, mouse, and everything.

Computers are still getting cheaper and better, although the clock rates don't seem to follow Moore's Law any more. Yesterday I say an ad by PackardBell, advertising "wireless music everywhere", with a guy dancing on the street to the music played by a laptop. I don't think we are there yet, for wireless music everywhere I'd recommend a cheap radio or ghettoblaster CD player. But on my last trip to the USA I saw people in the airport sitting around a laptop and watching a movie while waiting for their plane. I'm just waiting for technologies like WiMax to provide wireless broadband internet access everywhere, and I'll be able to play online games while I travel.
 
Carrots and Sticks

The behavior of other players is a huge influence on your experience of the virtual world of a MMORPG. The places that are over-crowded or deserted, and where you have to go to find a group, often plays a big role in what you decide to do in the game. Over the years the game developers have become better in directing people to where they should go by using carrots and sticks, rewards and punishment.

How rewards and punishment had a strong effect on where people would go in a virtual world was very visible in the first Everquest. EQ has a relatively harsh death penalty system, in which the character that died has to run naked to his corpse to recover his equipment. It quickly became obvious that dying deep in a dungeon meant having much greater problems getting back to his corpse than dying outside. As a result the dungeons of EQ are often either totally deserted, or only populated by people much higher in level than the monsters, people who are busy "farming" the dungeon's treasures. SOE tried to counter that by increasing the experience point reward for dungeons, but that was only marginally successful. Making a game hard and putting in penalties only encourages people to play it safe, which is not much fun in a game of heroic fantasy.

Another example from the old days of MMORPG was the split of the world of Ultima Online into two identical mirror copies: The PvP-enabled Felucca, and the non-PvP Trammel. The rewards for playing on one side or the other were identical, but Felucca carried a much higher risk, namely to be attacked and killed by another player. Unsurprisingly about 90% of the population chose to play on the Trammel side, to the great chagrin of the players who loved the PvP part of the game. It would have been better to have PvP servers and non-PvP servers, as then the number of servers of each type could have balanced the demand.

Fast-forward a couple of years and the carrots are going out of favor. Death doesn't have much sting any more, there is less and less punishment for dying. This affects the willingness of people to take risks. The dungeons in World of Warcraft are very popular because even if your whole group dies, you just run from the graveyard to the dungeon entrance and only pay a minimal repair cost as penalty for dying. But people are still being influenced by the presence or absence of rewards. Often in ways that aren't easily predictable.

In Final Fantasy XI, the rewards for killing a monster in a group are strongly dependent on the level of the highest player in that group. This leads to players wanting to group only with people very close to their own level. More than 2 levels higher would kill the group xp, while more than 2 levels lower would often be ineffective against the monsters you plan to fight unless the lower level group member is a healer. But this group level restriction has a secondary effect on where people go to adventure. Since setting up a group becomes more difficult when you have to limit yourself to a narrow level range, your only realistic chance to find a group of your level is by going to the place where most of the players of your level hang out. Players become more and more concentrated in the popular places like the Valkurm Dunes, leaving other zones with monsters of the same level, like the Buburimu Peninsula, nearly deserted. The final result is a very boring and repetitive game in which every time you level up you play through the same succession of zones.

World of Warcraft manages to distribute players all over the world very well by giving out good rewards for quests which lead the players to every possible corner of the world. WoW also offers a good example of the effect of giving out rewards for something: The rewards for PvP that were added in the last big patch. Simply by offering rewards for killing other players, the PvP activity on both PvP and normal servers has increased dramatically. Before the rewards, PvP raids were rare. Since the rewards were introduced, PvP battles in places like Hillsbrad Foothills, between Tarren Mill and Southshore, are raging practically 24/7. Of course that can be considered to be giving rewards that encourage bad behavior. On PvP servers the honor system has increased problems of player killers "ganking" people, keeping them from hunting and doing quests.

Being able to influence your players with carrots and sticks is both a danger and an opportunity for the developers. If you hand out rewards and punishment without careful consideration of the effects, bad things like unused dungeons can happen. But it also enables you to leave your players a lot of freedom and persuade them to do what you think they should do in more subtle ways. A typical example would be the developers wanting players to group, but some players preferring to solo. It would be much better if instead of the current model of creating content which a solo player is unable to beat, the developers could simply balance the experience point reward for grouping. Encouraging people to group, without giving them the feeling that without a group they can achieve nothing should make all play styles possible.

This post has also been published on Grimwell.com
Monday, June 13, 2005
 
WoW Journal - 13-Jun-2005

Apart from the PvP reported in the other article below, and some non-computer weekend activities like going swimming, and seeing Star Wars Episode 3, I spend a good number of hours playing my several characters.

Honey, the gnome warlock, leveled up to 30 by doing the last quests in Redridge Mountains, and by doing some quests in Stormwind. There is an ultra-long series of quests about treason in Stormwind, for which I had already picked up pieces in the Deadmines and the Stormwind Prison. In the end you need to kill a high-place traitor, and you are awarded an audience with the king. And you get a rather crappy ring as reward, so don't do the quest series for the reward, do it for the story.

My undead priest, Kyroc, now regularly teams up with a mage of the same level, played by my wife. We leveled up to level 18 this weekend together. Priest / mage is an okay combination, much firepower, some emergency healing, but no tanking ability. In the open space we rule, but quests that require us to enter confined spaces in buildings are difficult. My wife sitting right next to me when we play together, and us thus being able to use "voice chat", just without the software :), helps with coordination.

We quested in Silverpine Forest for the last couple of levels, and we will probably move from there to Tarren Mill in Hillsbrad. One level 20 quest led us to the gated wall that closed the access to the kingdom of Gilneas, but you can't pass that gate. But a quick look on the world map revealed that in fact there is a "zone" behind that wall. And there are other similar blank spaces on the world map, which are currently inaccessible. Interesting, it seems as if Blizzard could open up those zones later, adding more content to the game without adding a new continent.

But most time this weekend was spent playing my main (that's why he is called my "main" :) ), Raslebol the troll warrior. I reached level 58 this weekend, and I still see no end to his rest bonus xp. I finally finished the Sunken Temple, on the third try, with another pickup group. Me, a level 60 rogue, and a warrior, priest, and hunter of around level 51. A well played level 60 rogue is impressive, my DamageMeters addon indicated that the rogue did nearly half of all the damage of the whole group. The group was well organized, and we did the complete tour, first killing the 6 guys holding up the shield, then killing Jammal, Hakkar, and Eranikus. Third time lucky, this time we were able to kill Hakkar without ending his summoning prematurely, and I finished my last quest there. Not much luck with loot though, I would have liked the shield of Eranikus, but he didn't drop it. I ended up with only one green item, a half-decent 1h axe.

But on my previous Sunken Temple expedition I had gained a blue two-hand sword, and the quest reward for killing Hakkar was a blue dagger, both being quite good. So I spent some time skilling up 1h axe, dagger, and 2h sword, to be more versatile. The ideal place to skill up those weapon skills was the Hinterlands. With the last patch Blizzard had added more content to that zone, a Horde village on the coast, complete with flight path and a bunch of quests level 48 to 51. Green to me, but that way I could use my new weapons, and skill them up without too much risk.

Another zone I did this weekend was Azshara. The zone is big enough, and good for gathering herbs, but there aren't many quests there. There are still a couple of zones I have never visited, like the Plaguelands. So I still have the feeling that there is a lot left to do for Raslebol. I just wonder what happens when I hit level 60, whether I will still be motivated to do quests, or whether I'll more or less retire him and play the lower level characters. Will depend on my mood then, I'm not really making plans here.
 
WoW Battlegrounds - Part 3

I did some more battleground PvP fighting in World of Warcraft this weekend. With my level 29 gnome warlock I did the Warsong Gulch battleground three more times, well, make that two-and-a-half. The first two times I had less than 10 minutes wait in the queue, but for the third battle I had to wait over one hour. The first two battles both were won by our side, 3:0 and 3:1. With me doing a range of different activities, attack, defense, rack up kills in the middle of the battlefield, and I even captured the flag twice.

Not that I'm an expert in PvP fighting, or that our side was well organized, but the enemy was even less well organized. My flag capturing worked because the defenders had not stationed a guard in the tunnel leading to the flag room, so I was able to grab the speed boost icon in the niche in that tunnel, run in, grab the flag, and run out. With my pet and other players from my side keeping the enemy busy. On one occasion nobody was following me, and on another occasion only one defender followed me, and was stopped in the middle of the battle by somebody from my side.

The third battle was a dud. Right after we entered we received a message that there weren't enough players on the battlefield, and that the battle would end automatically in 5 minutes. Funnily in these 5 minutes I still managed to run to the enemy base, capture the flag, and bring in back to our base less than 30 seconds before we got ejected. So it still counted as a "win" for us. And I found out that against expectation you get 1000 xp for *each* win, not only for the first one.

I also learned a bit more about the honor system. Up to now I had only looked at the "honorable kills", but I found out that they have not much to do with your progression in PvP ranks. What counts is the honor points, but those you only see the next day. Whether you just deal 1 point of damage, or all the damage needed to kill an enemy, you get 1 honorable kill. But the amount of honor points you get depends on how much of the damage you (or your group) did, and on the relative levels. And honor points you can also earn in other ways, for example each full win on the capture the flag battleground got me 120 bonus honor points, while the short battle with just one flag captured still got me 48. That is 288 honor points total for the two-and-a-half battles I did. And my total for that day was 340 honor points, so the battleground bonus rewards are significantly higher than what I got from killing enemies. That is important, because it means that battlegrounds are a lot more "profitable" for honor points than random PvP in the rest of the world. On my "normal" servers, the PvP activity outside of battlegrounds has much diminished. I can only hope there is also less ganking now on the PvP servers.

The honor points are not the end of the story. At the end of the week the honor points are calculated into your contribution points. Contribution points means that all the honor points of all the players on your side is pooled, and it is calculated what your percental contribution to that was. Then contribution points are given out according to everybody's part in the greater war. Which means that if you know you have 1000 honor points, you still don't know how many contribution points you get. The more the other players on your side racked up in honor points, the less contribution points you get.

It gets even more wicked. Because your rank is calculated by taking your contribution points of last week, adding those of this week, and dividing the total by two. So if you make 100 contribution points every week, the first week your rank is calculated from (0+100)/2 = 50, second week (50+100)/2 = 75, third week (75+100)/2 = 83, and so on, slowly the rank you'd get with 100 points. At constant effort you get diminished returns. And if in week 4 you don't do any PvP at all, your new rank is based on (83+0)/2 = 42, halving with each week you don't PvP. Increasing in rank thus gets harder and harder, and you need a lot of effort just to keep your rank up after a while.

Some more thoughts on honor points: If you are alone, your honor points are solely calculated on the base of the damage you do. Meaning that damage-dealing classes like rogues, hunters, or mages have an inbuilt advantage here. If you are an ungrouped healer, all your healing and rezzing on the battlefield will get you exactly nothing. In a group the honor points for each PvP kill are divided based on levels, just like the xp for a killed monster are.

Fortunately I'm not very much interested in achieving some high PvP rank. My main, the warrior isn't much suited for gaining lots of honor points, unless he is grouped. But I got a good amount of rewards from the battlegrounds anyway. First the Frostwolf Ambassador standing in front of the Ogrimmar bank sent me on a quest for which I only had to speak to a guy in front of the Alterac Valley battleground. Bing, 6600 xp just for talking to him. Then that guy sent me in the battleground, but no to kill other players, but to get a flag from a cave full of gnolls. Another bundle of xp and money. I was just half an hour in a three-man group, and only got 2 honorable kills, but with the quests done there and a night-elf head handed in, I ended up with over 500 honor points, more than the warlock got from 3 battlegrounds. Not sure if it was the quest rewards that earned me that much, or the fact that combat between higher level players gives much more honor points than combat between lower level players.

There are a lot more quests on that Alterac Valley battleground, and many of them don't involve PvP at all. Which I find rather silly. There can only be a maximum of 40 players from each side on the battlefield, so why should the game try to distract them by encouraging them to do non-PvP quests in that zone? I kind of liked the idea of players being able to do quests that end up helping their side, like collecting blood to unleash a huge elemental on the enemies. But me killing a cave full of gnolls helped nobody but myself, as far as I know.

My future PvP involve doing some more capture the flag battlegrounds because they are fun, and exploring the Alterac Valley battleground quests a bit more. But I won't do lots of PvP in the Alterac Valley, I still dislike the chaos and the lag there. And I July I'll be on holiday without computer for two weeks, which will in any case destroy my PvP rank, so there is no point in pursueing rank for me.
Friday, June 10, 2005
 
WoW Battlegrounds - Part 2

Another day, another battleground, and a totally different experience. For this battleground test I used another character, Honey, my gnome warlock, level 28. I logged on at 6 pm in Ironforge. Flew to Menethil, came just in time for the boat to Auberdine, flew to Ashenvale, and ran to the battleground entrance, where I arrived at 6:20 pm. Entered the waiting queue, which mumbled something about a 9 minutes wait. But in fact that wait took a bit over one hour. The battle itself was relatively short, less than half an hour (we won 3:1), and at the end of the battle you get kicked out automatically. I immediately entered the waiting queue again, but again had to wait over 1 hour, and only got another invite at 9:10 pm. I declined that invite, because by that time I was in a group with friends. But nevertheless it means that in my typical 4 hour play sessions from 6 pm to 10 pm I couldn't do more than two half-hour battles. Obviously that is for Alliance, the waiting time for Horde could be much shorter, my Horde character waited only about a minute to get into his battleground the day before. The only good thing is that you don't have to wait in place, you can even go to the other continent and still get teleported to the battleground when the battle starts.

The Warsong battleground was a lot more fun than the Alterac Valley one. With only 10 players per side, there was no noticeable lag. Me using a warlock meant that I had no problems with range, especially since the battleground is a lot smaller. The capture the flag mode provided a lot more feeling of purpose than the endless ebb and tide of the large battles. I first did four honorable kills in the middle of the battleground, and then guarded our flag for the second half of the battle.

The only problem remaining identical to the other battleground was lack of organization. Not knowing how the system worked, I had joined a 10-man raid group in the waiting area outside of the portal. Turns out that the game totally ignores groups, it simply takes the 10 next people in the waiting queue. We ended up with 8 people from the raid group inside, and 2 outside, with 2 non-grouped people inside with us. The raid group leader was a stubborn idiot, and refused to kick out the people left outside, and invite the 2 others in instead. And there was very little communication anyway, even between the people in the raid group, so we wouldn't have needed to bother. After our flag got captured without anyone of us even being around, I decided that at least one person should be guarding the flag, and although I wasn't probably the best class to do so, I didn't think I could have persuaded somebody else to do it. No idea what tactics is the best here, but I think a single mage defending the flag and freezing anybody who sneaks in to steal it in place, while alerting the others, would have been good.

There was a lot more melee combat going on, even 1:1 fights, than on the large battlefields. But running, and preventing people from running, still plays a major role in this battle mode. A hunter with his run speed enhancement, or a shaman as ghost wolf, has a significant advantage when trying to capture the flag. While a mage with his freeze root, or a druid with entangling roots, is highly useful in preventing people from running. With my warrior Raslebol I'd probably get a chance to use my hamstring.

I was lucky that my warlock happened to be level 28. If I had been level 31, I'd been in more trouble. The battlegrounds are divided into slices of 10 levels, from 21 to 30, 31 to 40, and so on. And 10 levels is a lot in WoW, a level 21 doesn't do much against a level 30. But of course if they had split the slices even smaller, the waiting queues would have been even longer. I would have liked to enter the battleground with my friends, but some of them are over level 30, so we'd end up in different battlegrounds. And once we are all level 31 minimum, we will be at the lower end of power, and better wait until we are all level 35-40. Hmmm, I'm getting flashbacks of endless discussions about Magic the Gathering Online here, where the problem of pairing of equal strength opponents and lengths of waiting queues in leagues was discussed for years and years on the forums.

Well, as I said I declined the second battleground invitation. Not that I wouldn't have wanted to do another one, but by that time I was in a group with all of my D&D buddies. Level range 27 to 32 now. So to narrow the gap, and get some elite quests for everybody done, we went all together into the Redridge Mountains, killing the elite orcs of Blackrock Keep. Highest level quest was 26 elite, not much of a problem with two paladins over level 30 in the group. In relatively short time I got 6 quests done, 4 of them elite, and the quest reward xp made me ding 29.
Thursday, June 09, 2005
 
WoW Battlegrounds Report

Yesterday I spent over two hours to test the first type of the new battlegrounds in World of Warcraft, the Alterac Valley, where big battles of 40 vs. 40 players take place. Unfortunately I found it rather horrible, and pretty much unplayable. The main problem here is lag. My computer is pretty good, 3 GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM, and a Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card, but in spite of a 3 MBit ADSL broadband connection, my WoW client simply doesn't get all the information fast enough. Most of the time I don't see the other people moving, I see them "blinking". And sometimes I don't see them at all. That is *my WoW client* doesn't see them at all. Pretty annoying if you find yourself dead, you look in your combat log what killed you, and you find a line saying "Unknown Entity hits you for 349 points of damage. You die.".

The second problem is me playing a warrior. I racked up 5 honorable kills by shooting with my gun, and 0 by attacking with my sword. I mean, in real life, what would you do if a troll with a sword approached you? Run like hell, you would. And so does everybody on the battlegrounds. I'm lucky if I get one hit in before my target is gone, and the lag prevents me from following him. I never get the rage built up to hamstring him or use any special attacks. Due to lag I even had my charge attack not working, with the target gone by the time I arrived.

The third problem is that nobody takes PvP as seriously as PvE. People don't form groups, and if they form groups they don't stay together, which totally negates the advantage of a group. Utter chaos reigns on the battlegrounds. Random assemblies of players form, get into battles, and disperse again. The front is moving back and forth, with nobody willing to stand their ground, everybody is running around like headless chickens.

On the battlegrounds you can loot fallen enemies, getting loot like night elf heads or dwarven spines. There are quests for these, and the first time you do them you get a decent amount of xp and cash, but afterwards only reputation. Problem here is that everybody can loot any corpse. I didn't get any of the loot from my 5 honorable kills, but I got loot of corpses that I never did damage to. Probably the people with the most loot are those that spent the least time fighting, and concentrate on picking up stuff. You also get enemy blood as loot, and you have to bring that to the shaman of your side. When he has received a couple of hundred portions of blood, he will summon a big elemental for your side.

The battleground has a lot of nice ideas and side quests, but people tend to ignore them. For example you *could* get a group together and sneak through a side valley guarded by level 57 elite mobs and get into the back of the enemy lines. But nobody bothers. There are also mines guarded by kobolds, which you could liberate with a group, and thus give some unspecified bonus to your side. But in all the time I've been on the battlefield, I've never seen one of the mines taken, and if ever there were only single players there, never a group which would have been able to do it.

I think if you could get a *good* group together on the Alterac Valley battleground, you could do some fun things. Liberate the mine, help your cause by doing some quests, and work together in PvP for much greater efficiency. Provided Blizzard finds a way to handle the lag. But chaotic as that battleground is right now, it isn't much fun. There is no sense of purpose to it, you don't get the impression that your actions change anything, even your kills are mostly just random luck. There is neither tactics nor strategy, beyond moving with the bulk of your army for greater safety.

I'll check out the other battleground tonight. Maybe things are better on a smaller, 10 vs. 10 battleground.
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
 
Google Personalized

Google is now offering a personalized version of its main page. That is basically the old Google main page on top, and your personalized selection of info on the bottom. News, stockmarket ticker, weather, the usual stuff. Unfortunately stockmarket symbols and weather are limited to the US, so if you live in Europe and would prefer to know the local weather and share prices, you are out of luck.

I'm using it anyway, because you can also show the latest mails in your GMail inbox. I really like GMail, and being able to quickly check if you have mail on the search page of Google is useful.

By the way, I now have accumulated the right to invite up to 50 people to GMail, just by using it and Blogger regularly. So if you are one of the few persons who still hasn't got a GMail account but would like one, just send me a mail with your real name and current e-mail account, and I'll send you an invite.
 
WoW Journal - 8-Jun-2005

Still playing Raslebol, as I'm still sitting on a pile of rest bonus xp. I started the evening by doing two travel quests, the first leading me to Ratchet, and the second being handing in stuff from the Sunken Temple in the Swamp of Sorrows. There I suddenly realized that Raslebol has never visited the Blasted Lands, south of the Swamp. I first do a simple quest, getting orders to the orc hero ghost standing at the zone border. Then I move in.

The main attraction in the Blasted Lands are two guys giving out 5 repeatable quests. Each of these quests gives you a 60 minutes buff, increasing one of your stats by 50, plus a kind of potion which gives the same buff. The potion with the strength buff is called R.O.I.D.S. :). The only thing you have to do for these quests is to kill the hyenas, vultures, scorpions, and basilisk in the zone, which range from 45 to 53 in level. Easy enough for a level 57, and except for the level 45 everything still gives xp to me. The only problem is that the quests are popular, and it is sometimes hard to find something to kill.

So while I'm hunting various monsters in the Blasted Lands, I get a tell from somebody I don't know at all. He has a group of 4 already, and is missing a tank, to go to Dire Maul. You've come to the right address, man, I'm always up for a single group dungeon crawl. Traveling there takes some time, a hearthstone plus two flight routes, but then we head into Dire Maul.

We avoid most of the ogres standing in the non-instanced part, but it quickly becomes clear that none of us has ever been here, and we don't really know what to do. We go to the western part first, then to the northern part, but both are locked, and we don't have a key. I search for a map on my laptop which is standing right next to my regular computer, and find that the key is found in the eastern part, so we head there. The fights aren't easy, but as long as we manage to pull only single mobs, everything is fine.

The only problem is the hunter, the guy who invited me. One of the level 60 is doing a good job of giving directions as to what to do, trying to organize the group. And he wants me, the tank, to pull. Which has certain advantages, especially when pulling small groups of monsters that are linked together, as I get the initial aggro. But the hunter thinks that due to his long-range attack skills, it should be him who is pulling. We often end up pulling simultaneously, but things are still going well. Then the group leader asks me in group chat to pull the lasher on the right side of us, which I do. But simultaneously the hunter pulls the mob on the left side of us, plus the roaming patrol standing next to that mob. We all die, and we don't have a shaman or warlock for a self-rez, so we have to run back as ghosts. Except for the hunter, who is frustrated, hearthstones away and leaves the group. Doh! So we decide to give up and hearthstone out as well. The loot I found doesn't even pay for the repair cost, so my first Dire Maul expedition isn't a success.

<*Rant*> I really do appreciate games giving me the ability to solo. But I *do* see that the biggest idiots in the games are usually playing the best solo classes. In Everquest these guys were called dr00ds, because they usually played druids, and they gave all druids a bad name. It was hard to convince other people that my druid knew very well what to do in a group. In WoW the idiots are usually playing hunters, and it has come so far that I instinctively cringe when I see a hunter in my group. My excuses to those hunters who do know how to play in groups, but there are far too many hunters out there that don't. Hunters in a group are belonging in the damage-dealer category, the guys with the low armor who have to take care not to draw too much aggro on themselves. Them pulling doesn't help, and I've died more than once because they didn't keep their pet close to them, and the pet trained half the dungeon on the group. <*End Rant*>

Starting from today it will be difficult for a while to find any group for a high-level instance: Battlegrounds are going live today on the European servers (yesterday in the US), and every high level in the game will be playing there for the next couple of days, until they get bored of it. There will be two types of battlegrounds, each in several copies. One is a battle of 40 Horde players against 40 Alliance players, and is level 41-60. Which basically means level 55-60 only, everybody below that will be considered as dragging down his side. The other battleground type is accessible from level 21 on, and will be split in slices of 10 levels, so all level 21-30 will be together, and the level 31-40 will be in another copy, and so on. This type of battleground offers smaller, 10 vs. 10 battles, of a capture the flag type.

You enter the battleground by stepping through a red swirling portal, similar to the blue portals of the instances. Then you are in a waiting queue. If you are Horde, the queue should be short enough, as there are twice as many Alliance players as Horde players on each server. If you are Alliance, you will need to wait for some time, and only do 1 battleground for every 2 battlegrounds a Horde player does. But it seems you can continue hunting and questing outside, and you'll get a message when there is a place for you.

So this evening I will spend some time patching. I have 4 copies of WoW running, on 3 computers, with 2 accounts. The main computer has a UK and French version, and the laptop and my wife's computer only have the UK version. I think I'll download the patch from Fileplanet, which should be faster, at least for the UK patch which goes on 3 machines.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
 
WoW launches in China

In a press release from Blizzard the launch of World of Warcraft in China was announced. That in itself isn't all that interesting, just another localized launch after the US, Korea, and Europe. But the interesting part of the announcement is this:

Only players who have purchased an authorized CD key will be able to activate their accounts and enter the game. Each CD key costs 30 Yuan/RMB and can be purchased with a World of Warcraft Points Card. Point Cards also cost 30 Yuan/RMB and can be used at a rate of 9 points per hour (0.45 Yuan/hour) to play World of Warcraft.

That's right, there is no monthly fee. Instead you pay 0.45 Yuan per hour, which is about 5 US cents. Which is a lot cheaper than playing WoW in the US or in Europe, you would need to play over 300 hours per month to reach the $15 monthly fee of WoW in the US. There also is no CD sold, you just open an account for 30 Yuan ($3.60) and download the game for free. Well, I guess WoW has to be cheaper over there, due to people earning much less. But what really fascinates me is the pay-by-hour business model, because I find it a lot fairer than the pay-by-month model.
 
WoW Journal - 7-Jun-2005

My choice of server nowadays is pretty much following what my D&D friends are doing that evening, which means regular switching between Runetotem and Khaz Modan. Well, the advantage is that I'm nearly always playing with a good buffer of rest xp bonus. Last night we were on Runetotem, doing the second part of Maraudon.

Our group consisted of my level 57 warrior, and 4 lower levels, from 47 to 51. Two more warriors, one rogue, and one shaman. Not quite an ideal group, but workable. We had some problems at the start, with one of the warriors being a big fan of charge, and charging mobs without looking around for roamers first. But after we got wiped out, I was able to persuade him to let me pull the mobs, and he'd charge in a few seconds later, which worked a lot better.

Using the sceptre to teleport to the middle of Maraudon, the way to reach the final boss, the princess, is quite short. Our group not being all that powerful, and this part of Maraudon being rather tough, I simply took the shortest way to the princess, ignoring all the other bosses. The princess has some mean knockback attack, and brought all down to low hitpoints and no mana for our only healer. But by some miracle none of us died, and the three group members who hadn't been there before got their quest done. My warrior is still using the Thrash Blade from that quest, so this is really something to do if you are a 1H sword user.

After the princess we still had some time, although the rogue had to leave. With just 3 warriors and a shaman we wanted to try another boss, the rock elemental. But while we were still fighting his bodyguards, roaming stone elementals attacked us from behind (they must have respawned, we had cleared that part earlier), and we got wiped out. So we decided to call it a day.

There are still a number of level 50+ dungeons I want to do. I haven't finished the Sunken Temple, and my quest log is full of quests for Blackrock Depths, where I only went with a raid and thus couldn't do quests. And I've never been to Stratholme, Scholomance, Dire Maul, Blackrock Spire, Molten Core, or Onyxia's Lair. But I'm not sure which of these dungeons are still "classical", in that they have quests and you can do them with a single group. It seems all the level 60 in my guild only want to do raid groups. That is fine for them, if they already did all the quests and they don't gain xp any more. But as I still want to finish quests and gain xp, single group dungeons are preferable for me.

I really wished there were more dungeons below level 50 in the game, as dungeons are the best part of WoW in my opinion. But of course that is an eternal problem of MMORPG, that you can consume content faster than new content is added, and that everybody would like different sorts of content added to the game. Blizzard is obviously concentrating on adding PvP content, in the form of the battlegrounds, and not working that much on adding new dungeons, new zones, or new quests. Unless they are secretly working on an unannounced expansion set as well, which would be clever of them, as they could easily sell a million copies of an expansion set at christmas. But the silence about that is worrying me, Blizzard is known for producing high quality, but at a rather slow pace. Would be a pity if the expansion set only came out christmas 2006.

By working on battlegrounds, Blizzard is following one of the oldest ideas of the genre: Instead of producing new content, let the players produce their own content in the form of PvP. That is obviously cost effective, and in a game with "Warcraft" in the title you need to offer PvP. But a lot of people found out by now that MMORPG PvP has not much to do with the much more balanced and strategic battles of a Warcraft game. Even in a perfect implementation the best you can hope for with battlegrounds is a kind of sword and sorcery version of first person shooter (FPS) game like Counterstrike. That is very much different from the PvE part of the game. And as PvP in MMORPG depends strongly on level, you need people that both like the PvE part so much that they are willing to level to 60, and also like FPS games so much that they are willing to switch from PvE to PvP at level 60. People that only like PvE won't use the battlegrounds much, and people that only like FPS won't ever get high enough in level to enjoy battlegrounds.

That is why I personally prefer MMORPG developers to add "more of the same", more content in the form of new zones, dungeons, and quests, instead of grafting a second game on top of the first.
Monday, June 06, 2005
 
The Uncanny Valley

Wikipedia has an entry about the Uncanny Valley, which I think applies to MMORPG graphics. The idea is coming from robotics, but it also applies to graphics depicting humans. If the graphics are either clearly artificial (like WoW characters are), or undistinguishable from real humans (we aren't there yet), people have a positive emotional response to them. But if the graphics are nearly photo-realistic, and the animations are nearly right, the emotional response to them is negative, because they spook us.

The exact curve, and where exactly the valley lies, is probably different for every individual. But I can't help but think that Everquest 2 fell in my personal "uncanny valley", being nearly realistic, but just far enough from real to seem weird to me. That probably explains a lot of the discussion between people preferring the WoW graphics and others preferring the EQ2 graphics.
 
WoW Journal - 6-Jun-2005

One disadvantage of putting up an e-mail address on this blog is the inevitable flood of spam. Fortunately GMail does a good job of spam filtering, and only a small amount of spam lands in my inbox, instead of going directly to the spam folder. So I'm a bit puzzled by a mail I got, advertising WoW gold. 100 gold on a US server apparently cost $13.99 now, while on a EU server they are at $20.99. If I think how many hours of farming at level 40 it takes to get the money for a mount, I can understand that some people are interested in buying. But why did I get this mail? Was it just general spam, which just happened to hit somebody actually playing WoW? Or is the spam address finding software nowadays so sophisticated that it can target everybody with a blog mentioning WoW?

I hope all spam is getting more sophisticated, as most of the spam I'm getting right now is for things I absolutely have no need of, like "low mortgage rates", fake Viagra, or the millions of dollars from a deposed African despot. Everybody is talking about how your personal information is being grabbed by advertising companies on the internet, but frankly I don't see much targeted advertising yet. I actually *wish* the people sending all this mail knew me a bit better, and wouldn't bother sending me ads for stuff I don't need. They don't even know if I'm male or female, I get both penis enlargement and breast enlargement offers.

Back to WoW. A Sunday spent mostly at a cold and rainy barbecue limited my time spent playing, but I made some progress anyway. Honey, the gnome warlock, is now level 28. Over the weekend I grouped mostly with my D&D friends. As we are exactly 5 on that server, it makes for a nice group when everybody is online. Getting everybody in the same level range is more difficult, we now span from 26 to 31. The 5 of us did Shadowfang Keep on Saturday, and the higher level ones didn't get any xp. But the loot was good, and I won the rolls for blue cloth shoulders, and for Arugal's robe. We breezed through the dungeon with little problem, fearlessly approached the level 26 elite boss at the end, and promptly got wiped out. Arugal is one nasty piece of work. We should have brought shadow protection potions, his shadow bolts deal insane damage. But I had put my soulstone on one of the paladins, who then rezzed all of us, and we managed to kill Arugal on the second go.

Sunday evening we were still 4 D&D players, so we invited a 5th guy and did Blackfathom Deeps. Better xp than Shadowfang, but less good loot, I had the impression. But we were lucky and got another Rod of the Sleepwalker for our mage, my warlock having already found one the last time we went. I'm wondering which dungeon to do next. The prison in Stormwind is too small, and Gnomeregan still a bit too high. Maybe Razorfen Kraul, although getting there isn't easy for Alliance.

On the Runetotem server I played a while with Kyroc, my undead priest, and leveled him to 16. The only really interesting thing about that is that my wife is playing a level 16 undead mage, and we can team up together. Priest / Mage works better than I would have thought, in spite of the total absence of tanking power. But we make up for that with crowd control and direct damage, so we managed reasonably well.

I also had a lot of fun with Raslebol this weekend. Originally I wanted to farm Shadowfang for wool, so Kyroc could turn the wool into magic clothes, and disenchant those for skilling up enchanting. But some guild mates needed help, so I first escorted two guys through all of Wailing Caverns, then another two guys through the first part of Scarlet Monastery. Wailing Caverns is bad for finding any cloth, but in the monastery I got a lot of silk. No xp in either dungeon for a level 56 of course, but the good karma from having helped lower level guild mates.

Sunday morning, I played Raslebol a bit before the barbecue. I usually wake up early, and like to use the time when nobody is online yet to gather herbs. So I flew to Felwood, to stock up on Plaguebloom and other stuff. But then I noticed lots of exclamation marks over the heads of NPCs and decided to gather all the quests there and do the easier ones. Good choice, because doing the quests worked together well with gathering herbs. Killing some mobs here and there, and suddenly I dinged 57 without having noticed my progress. And I still have a full level of rest bonus xp.

Especially nice is a quest where after killing 15 wood elementals you are charged with healing corrupted plants. That is a repeatable quest, you get quest items as random drops from all monsters in Felwood, and also from gathering herbs there. You can hand these in to get Cenarion Salve, and that can be used to heal the corrupted plants. You only get xp the first time you hand in stuff, but healing the plants enables you to harvest them. One type of plant gives a nice +15 buff on all stats for one hour, and the other three types of plants give different fruits. One works like food, in both regenerating you when sitting, and giving you a stamina buff. One heals your hitpoints like a healing potion, and the third heals both hitpoints and mana, like a rejuvenation potion. But in spite of working like potions, the fruit don't use the same timer, which makes them interesting. Gathering the quest items for the salve is easy enough, only finding the corrupted plants is hard, as they don't show up on your mini-map, in spite of you getting a Cenarion Beacon whose description sounds as if it should help you find the corrupted plants. But the only thing it does is enabling you to find the quest items for the salves. You need a map from Thottbot, or a lot of searching, to find the corrupted plants.
Friday, June 03, 2005
 
WoW Journal - 3-June-2005

I'm still busy doing dungeons with my level 56 troll warrior Raslebol, and my two friends from my D&D group, playing a level 49 troll warrior and a level 50 orc shaman. Last night we did Maraudon, with the help of a level 50 rogue we picked up there. Main purpose was to get the Maraudon quests done, if you don't group much the dungeon and elite quests have a tendency to clog up your quest journal.

What we did was first go from the entrance straight to the first Khan, and kill him. Then go back to the first crossroads, and take the purple route, killing the second Khan in the purple pre-instance part. Back to the crossroads, and took the orange route, killing the third Khan in the orange pre-instance part. In that part we also took the quest for the sceptre, which will later allow us to teleport into the middle of Maraudon. All that is very easy, with monsters level 40 to 43 elite, who were all grey to me.

Then we took the orange entry into the instance, and fought our way from the entrance to Noxxion, the local boss. On the way we killed the fifth Khan, who is patrolling the orange instance. We killed Noxxion to get his half of the sceptre. We tried to advance further from Noxxion towards the central part of Maraudon, but we got wiped out when we got swarmed by too many plant mobs. Mobs here were level 44 to 48 elite.

So as our next target was in the purple instance area anyway, we took the purple instance entry next, fighting tree mobs and satyrs, also level 44 to 48 elite. We killed the fourth Khan, completing that quest. And we killed Lord Vyletongue for the second part of the sceptre. After that we just needed to continue to the central area of Maraudon, kill the level 49 elite Celebras, and get the combined sceptre for future teleports. In effect the sceptre is a kind of "save point", which allowed us to stop playing there and do the final part of Maraudon another day. And probably with a full group of 5, as the mobs from there on are 46 to 51 elite.

I'm still not a big fan of Maraudon. Not only is the dungeon too big for my taste, but also the level range is too wide, from 40 to 51. You need at least a full group of level 50 to do everything, and then the level 40 part is far too low to yield anything interesting.

DamageMeters reported the level 50 rogue easily outdamaging me, he did nearly 50% more damage than my warrior, in spite of me being 6 levels higher. It was good to have him, because with two warriors and a shaman concentrated on healing, you otherwise don't deal all that much damage, and the fights last a lot longer.
Thursday, June 02, 2005
 
WoW Journal - 2-June-2005

In spite of the distractions from playing my gnome warlock, I still like playing my troll warrior very much. Yesterday I had arranged to go to Zul'farrak with two my D&D friends. But me being online before them, I had the idea to try to get the mallet of Zul'farrak first, to be able to summon Gahz'rilla. As getting the mallet technically isn't a quest, there are few people who do it, most people decide what to do based on their quest journals. So I had never found a group to get the mallet, and now wanted to try it solo.

I'm proud that I did succeed in this, because even at level 56 it is quite hard to do solo. You first need to go to one altar in the Hinterlands and get a part from a level 50 elite keeper. But that keeper isn't alone, he is standing right next to another elite of the same level, and one normal troll. But I managed to rush in, kill the keeper, grab the quest part, and flee with just a slice of hitpoints left. The second part requires you to use an altar in the huge maya-temple-like troll stronghold. The temple is full of elite trolls from level 46 to 50 (more for the named), and I didn't really want to have to kill them all. So I did the long way to the top of the pyramid with a minimum number of fights, trying to keep my distance from the mobs, even using an invisibility potion once, and once by just running for my life and being lucky that my pursuers lost interest. I killed the level 50 elite standing next to the altar on the top, got the mallet and teleported home with my hearthstone.

A bit later my friends logged on. As we were running more and more into problems when doing dungeons with just the three of us, I managed to get them invited into my guild, and we got another shaman from the guild to join us. Zul'farrak is still one of my favorite instances. We got killed once at the fountain on the first crossroads, because too many roamers added to the fight, but one of the shamans managed to die on a safe spot, reincarnated and resurrected the rest of us. We did all the quests for the 3 other guys, me having already finished all quests there. The huge battle of the pyramid is always impressive, even if you did it before. Killing Gahz'rilla was more difficult, we got wiped out because in spite of us having cleared out the area, a patrol of roamers just spawned on us in the middle of the fight. And in that case Gahz'rilla was sitting on the corpses, and we needed to run back to the instance as ghosts to try again. But in the end we succeeded.

Unfortunately I'm getting a bit too high for the place, half of the monsters there don't give any xp at all any more, while the others give very little experience points. I made only about 10% of a level on the whole evening. Which still is more than a level 56 character in previous games would make in a day, so it isn't all that bad. But there are still a lot of dungeons I haven't done at all, or only partially, and I'm really looking forward to my friends catching up a bit more with their levels. They are 49 and 50 now, everybody but me in the Zul'farak group dinged in there. I had the DamageMeters addon running, and unsurprisingly I did the most damage, being at least 6 level higher than anybody else. But I was impressed how much damage killing a whole dungeon adds up to. At the end, together, we had done over a million points of damage, with my part being over 40%.
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
 
Scaling Content

One of the major attractions of MMORPGs is that they offer cooperative game-play, usually in the form of a group of adventurers battling against monsters. But solo play is also very popular. Since a group is inherently stronger than a single character, games trying to please everybody have segregated content into group and solo content. But the result is far from optimal. Is there a better way?

In current games like EQ2, WoW, or Guild Wars, there is some content designed for solo play, and other content designed for group play. EQ2 uses a system of putting ^ symbols behind a monsters level, to show whether it is meant for solo players, small groups, or full groups. WoW has the notion of "elite" monsters, which are designed for groups, and all instanced dungeons fall in that category. Guild Wars has mission zones designed for groups, and even displays a big warning sign if you try to enter them alone.

While this offers some content for every possible style of play, it still isn't totally satisfying. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, and especially solo players feel "excluded" from content that is available only to groups. By the time a solo player has advanced enough in levels to be able to fight a group-only monster, the rewards aren't useful to him any more. Groups fighting solo-monsters pose a bit less of a problem, but sometimes being in a group of 5, each looking for 10 orc scalps, means that you have to kill 5 times as many orcs as you would need to if you were alone. And there is a certain risk that the group is simply too powerful for the solo-content orcs, making the fights less interesting, although one can overcome that by going for higher level targets.

Another problem is that game developers cannot design content for every possible mode of play. Beyond solo and full groups, there are couples playing together, people regularly playing with one or two friends, and guilds wanting to conduct raids with 10, 20, or more people. Instead of forcing the players to go with a specific group size if they want to experience a specific content, it would be better to let players first choose whatever configuration they want to play, and then scale the content accordingly.

A game that makes a first effort to do so is City of Heroes. The type and level of the monsters in each mission instance are predetermined, but their number scales with the number of players in the group entering the instance. That works pretty well, unless you have players quitting the group in the middle of a mission. The advantage is that you can do the same mission alone or with as many friends you currently want to play with, up to the maximum group size, and always get a challenging encounter. And as an added advantage CoH has the sidekick system, which enables you to include friends of lower levels in your group in a meaningful way.

Guild Wars is trying to enable smaller groups by allowing you to pad your group with NPC henchmen. That is better than nothing, but doesn't work quite as well. The artificial intelligence and level of the henchmen is often lacking. You often end up with the combined disadvantages of solo and group play, instead of the best of both worlds.

In my opinion the ideal game would have content scaled to whatever group size, from single player to guild raid. That should be easy enough to do, at least in the instanced dungeons. The more people there are in the group of players entering the dungeon, the more monsters there are to oppose them. And increasing the numbers of opponents isn't the only way to scale up the difficulty level to fit the group. Monsters could gain levels or just receive tougher statistics when more players oppose them. If that is well balanced, the overall challenge should remain about the same. And all of the content of the game would be available to all of its players, no matter how many friends they have.

This article has also been posted on Grimwell.com
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