I love my girls, they're awesome.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Table Games
Which perfectly matches the table the girls made me earlier:
I love my girls, they're awesome.
I love my girls, they're awesome.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
It's the Economy, Stupid
Star Wars, The Old Republic (SWTOR) is in closed beta, and sometime in the next six months will be released to the public. As of right now, the game has got great buzz and people are anticipating another great product release from Bioware, but this isn't going to be your standard MMO.
For the standard, you must use World of Warcraft. Not because it's the first or best, but because it is the most played. Millions of players have played it as their first and only MMO, with a population that dwarfed EverQuest and other predecessors. Because of it's ubiquitousness, anything that comes after it will be compared to WoW: The AOL of MMOs.
SWTOR is a story-heavy MMO. It wants your choices to matter, and it wants to make your character's abilities change based on the decisions you make. There will be prescribed amounts of 'light' and 'dark' force points you earn based on these decisions, and the only way to do this will be through making clear choices during scripted events.
So a large part of character development will feel like a choose-your-own-adventure book. If you decide to spare the life of an attacker, go to pare 35. If you choose to execute him with your light saber, go to page 114. The characters are also heavily voiced, meaning lots of cut scenes, and lots of the game enjoyment will be cinematic and not actively engaging. Add into this that we're told that your companions will do most of your actual crafting for you, even while you're offline, and where does that leave us if we derive enjoyment from participating in the economy?
How much of the economy will be player-driven? What will material availability be like? How will trade skills progress over time, and how useful will they be for manufacturing items used in combat? We're not getting a lot of answers right now, but given how much hand holding Bioware is planning for character development, I'd wager the tradeskills/professions aspect of the game is going to be thin, or at least heavily diluted.
Bioware has given us a few hints on what to expect.
That is what drives the economy, more than anything else. If you don't need to build, you don't need to buy materials. If you don't need to buy, you don't need to sell. If you don't need to sell, you don't need to gather - and now two-thirds of the skills are broken. WoW started strong, but missed the boat. At the very high-end of content there is room for both raid rewards and crafting rewards, and they should require an equal amount of effort.
Here's an example. Let's say your guild knocks over a boss and loots his pockets for a MegaBlade, and in your crafting system you know of a pattern that exists for a MechaBlade, which has equal abilities. If your raid has 8 people in it and it takes them 3 hours of playtime each to raid and loot the MegaBlade, it should take 24 hours of playtime (not offline NPC crafting time) to craft one MechaBlade.
The raiders will say "but we worked to gear ourselves up to tackle this content, so it's a harder effort." To that the crafter replies that they spent weeks (months?) leveling up their tradeskill to the point that they can learn the difficult recipe. It should be no different; the ability to acquire gear should be dependent mostly on time invested. If either method is significantly easier than the other, people will abandon the lesser one altogether in favor of the easy one.
And as new raid content is introduced to provide progressive challenges, crafting should mimic it equally. I mean, think about it. How in the hell do the bad guys always get the best weapons and equipment, and why are they in their pockets? If they have a MegaBlade in their pocket why didn't they take it out and stab me with it? It doesn't make sense. And if I were living in a practical universe, and I wanted to acquire the best Blaster I could find, would I fly to Alderaan and look up the best engineer on the planet, or would I go out into the wild and kill space boars randomly until I find one crammed up its ass?
At the beginning, WoW's crafting and economy made sense. When raiding began it was harder than it is now, and the best craftables were comparable to the best 5-man blues. There were some very rare epics, and there were epic questlines to craft epic items. There was room for both in the expanding WoW universe. Soon however, the recipe fell apart. When they improved access to raid content for players, they forgot to compensate crafting with equal attention and it was relegated to a series of hoops you jumped through to gain a combat buff, and little else. Most serious players these days craft only for the raid buffs - if they raid - or only gather and sell materials - if they don't.
The net result is that the gold being pumped into the system doesn't cycle through crafting costs, and gold sinks have to be added constantly to prevent inflation. Now in Cataclysm, those inflation-fighting measures are failing, and the economy is failing with it. Unless WoW addresses (see: completely revamps) tradeskills, the game's economy will implode. And in WoW's case it's a game-wide issue, since wealth is transferable in significant amounts across any realm at any time.
The newest Bind-on-Equip items from Firelands raids are selling for tens of thousands of gold in the auction house, and people are buying them at those prices, because gold is so plentiful, and there are no crafting alternatives that come remotely close. So crafting begins to feel worthless for the crafter, useless for WoW as a way to control the economy, inflation runs rampant, and everyone is a billionare with nothing worth buying.
Some things make sense, and some don't - here's hoping that Bioware learns from Blizzard's mistakes and the economy in TOR makes sense.
For the standard, you must use World of Warcraft. Not because it's the first or best, but because it is the most played. Millions of players have played it as their first and only MMO, with a population that dwarfed EverQuest and other predecessors. Because of it's ubiquitousness, anything that comes after it will be compared to WoW: The AOL of MMOs.
SWTOR is a story-heavy MMO. It wants your choices to matter, and it wants to make your character's abilities change based on the decisions you make. There will be prescribed amounts of 'light' and 'dark' force points you earn based on these decisions, and the only way to do this will be through making clear choices during scripted events.
So a large part of character development will feel like a choose-your-own-adventure book. If you decide to spare the life of an attacker, go to pare 35. If you choose to execute him with your light saber, go to page 114. The characters are also heavily voiced, meaning lots of cut scenes, and lots of the game enjoyment will be cinematic and not actively engaging. Add into this that we're told that your companions will do most of your actual crafting for you, even while you're offline, and where does that leave us if we derive enjoyment from participating in the economy?
How much of the economy will be player-driven? What will material availability be like? How will trade skills progress over time, and how useful will they be for manufacturing items used in combat? We're not getting a lot of answers right now, but given how much hand holding Bioware is planning for character development, I'd wager the tradeskills/professions aspect of the game is going to be thin, or at least heavily diluted.
Bioware has given us a few hints on what to expect.
- You will be able to make weapons & armor that is equivalent to gear required to start raid content.
- You will be able to 'brand' items so people know who made them.
- Becoming highly skilled in a craft requires more than materials, it will require time invested (no powerleveling tradeskills).
- Crafting will include quests, that take anywhere from minutes to hours.
- Gathering is done by your companions to free you for other activity.
- Crafting will reward both the casual crafter and the very dedicated crafter.
That is what drives the economy, more than anything else. If you don't need to build, you don't need to buy materials. If you don't need to buy, you don't need to sell. If you don't need to sell, you don't need to gather - and now two-thirds of the skills are broken. WoW started strong, but missed the boat. At the very high-end of content there is room for both raid rewards and crafting rewards, and they should require an equal amount of effort.
Here's an example. Let's say your guild knocks over a boss and loots his pockets for a MegaBlade, and in your crafting system you know of a pattern that exists for a MechaBlade, which has equal abilities. If your raid has 8 people in it and it takes them 3 hours of playtime each to raid and loot the MegaBlade, it should take 24 hours of playtime (not offline NPC crafting time) to craft one MechaBlade.
The raiders will say "but we worked to gear ourselves up to tackle this content, so it's a harder effort." To that the crafter replies that they spent weeks (months?) leveling up their tradeskill to the point that they can learn the difficult recipe. It should be no different; the ability to acquire gear should be dependent mostly on time invested. If either method is significantly easier than the other, people will abandon the lesser one altogether in favor of the easy one.
And as new raid content is introduced to provide progressive challenges, crafting should mimic it equally. I mean, think about it. How in the hell do the bad guys always get the best weapons and equipment, and why are they in their pockets? If they have a MegaBlade in their pocket why didn't they take it out and stab me with it? It doesn't make sense. And if I were living in a practical universe, and I wanted to acquire the best Blaster I could find, would I fly to Alderaan and look up the best engineer on the planet, or would I go out into the wild and kill space boars randomly until I find one crammed up its ass?
At the beginning, WoW's crafting and economy made sense. When raiding began it was harder than it is now, and the best craftables were comparable to the best 5-man blues. There were some very rare epics, and there were epic questlines to craft epic items. There was room for both in the expanding WoW universe. Soon however, the recipe fell apart. When they improved access to raid content for players, they forgot to compensate crafting with equal attention and it was relegated to a series of hoops you jumped through to gain a combat buff, and little else. Most serious players these days craft only for the raid buffs - if they raid - or only gather and sell materials - if they don't.
The net result is that the gold being pumped into the system doesn't cycle through crafting costs, and gold sinks have to be added constantly to prevent inflation. Now in Cataclysm, those inflation-fighting measures are failing, and the economy is failing with it. Unless WoW addresses (see: completely revamps) tradeskills, the game's economy will implode. And in WoW's case it's a game-wide issue, since wealth is transferable in significant amounts across any realm at any time.
The newest Bind-on-Equip items from Firelands raids are selling for tens of thousands of gold in the auction house, and people are buying them at those prices, because gold is so plentiful, and there are no crafting alternatives that come remotely close. So crafting begins to feel worthless for the crafter, useless for WoW as a way to control the economy, inflation runs rampant, and everyone is a billionare with nothing worth buying.
Some things make sense, and some don't - here's hoping that Bioware learns from Blizzard's mistakes and the economy in TOR makes sense.
Friday, July 15, 2011
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Photoshopping
One of my favorite pastimes is photoshopping. Basically it's a peer-vote competition to make the most creative and funny picture out of an original image provided to everyone. My favorite forum for doing this is on Fark, where there's a wide viewership and lots of good competition daily.
Just for fun, here's today's submissions.
Original:
Photoshop:
Original:
Photoshop:
Just for fun, here's today's submissions.
Original:
Photoshop:
Original:
Photoshop:
Monday, July 11, 2011
Players of the Last Alt
One more time around the block as they say. One last character reroll, on the Horde side, for old time sake before we give up WarCraft (again) and play SWTOR this fall.
We've decided to farm up a bunch of heirlooms and mail them to level 1 horde alts to level up together. I got a jump start - and need to stop for a day or so - and got my hunter up to level 25 in about 6 hours played. I'm playing an orc hunter with the heirloom helm, shoulders, chest, bow, and dual daggers, with everything enchanted. I've been purposely trying to take it slow so I don't jump out ahead of everyone else, but it's almost impossible.
I figured battlegrounds would be a good way to waste time with little xp, but because of the heirlooms and the guild bonus (we joined a L20 guild) when we win a Warsong Gulch match I end up getting almost a whole level of XP! Crazy.
I'm still doing my firelands dailies on my paladin, and this is just for fun and filling spare time. Skinning & leatherworking are my professions, and I've already got ~100 in fishing, cooking, and first aid. Seriously, I must be bored. When will we get our TOR release date?
We've decided to farm up a bunch of heirlooms and mail them to level 1 horde alts to level up together. I got a jump start - and need to stop for a day or so - and got my hunter up to level 25 in about 6 hours played. I'm playing an orc hunter with the heirloom helm, shoulders, chest, bow, and dual daggers, with everything enchanted. I've been purposely trying to take it slow so I don't jump out ahead of everyone else, but it's almost impossible.
I figured battlegrounds would be a good way to waste time with little xp, but because of the heirlooms and the guild bonus (we joined a L20 guild) when we win a Warsong Gulch match I end up getting almost a whole level of XP! Crazy.
I'm still doing my firelands dailies on my paladin, and this is just for fun and filling spare time. Skinning & leatherworking are my professions, and I've already got ~100 in fishing, cooking, and first aid. Seriously, I must be bored. When will we get our TOR release date?
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Star Wars: The Phantom Beta
Apparently there is a lot of information out there about Star Wars. Somehow, I'm not getting any of it. There is one very helpful summary post on the SWTOR forums that TheDarkKnight provided summarizing all the leaked information to date (and it's on the site, so you know it's true and non-NDA threatening). But in spite of reading it a few times and searching for other sources, I'm not getting the answers I need about SWTOR.
Check that - the answers I want, not need. And I don't think anyone will provide the answers I'm looking for. I have questions about classes, crafting, combat, world exploration, NPCs, ships, and lots of things. But what I want to know most of all is if I'll like it.
Yeah, no one can tell me that, but I could find out really easily if I had a chance to play the Beta. When I got into the Cataclysm beta for WoW it reassured to me that there was a lot of new and interesting content (especially for re-rollers and casuals, like me) and that purchasing it was going to be a certainty. I thought I wanted to get into the beta to learn about the crafting and zones and what the quickest path to prosperity was, but I discovered that the only thing that gratified me was seeing that there was new content to explore.
I participated in beta the way a person should. I did quests, discovered and reported bugs (Town-In-A-Box, etc.) and tried lots of different things to explore the fringe edges of the game. It was fun. But then I logged out after only a couple of days and didn't go back, because I wanted to save the content for when it went live. I had my answer, I liked it.
Am I going to like SWTOR? I don't know. I'm not sure anyone will be able to answer that for me. I need to know what combat is like. I need to know if I will be relying on macros and keyboard tricks to survive in PvP. I need to know if the interface is built for clickers. I need to know if the content is forgiving enough to support people no matter what choices they make. I need to be able to drive the game with one hand and the sound off for periods of time, because I refuse to ignore the family while I play: The game is in the background, not the family.
Nobody can tell me these things in a forum post or even a youtube video (which would be a violation of the NDA right now). Nobody, however eloquent, can describe in enough detail what I will find annoying, what I can deal with, and what I will really enjoy. The only way I can get these answers is by trying the game myself. If I weren't already promising to a group of friends that I'm playing SWTOR at launch, I would be hesitant to buy it. Not because of the content or quality of the game, but because of the interest, interface and comfort of play.
I don't play games much for the "enthralling story and lore." I'll take whatever storyline they give me, and enjoy it enough. The make or break however is the feeling that without keyboard smashing and just a combination of normal reflexes and intelligent strategy that I can survive most of my obstacles and PvP encounters. If I can't, if it requires overly complicated techniques and focus, then it's going to have an uphill battle winning my admiration and spare time.
So I've been entered in the beta for a long time now, and I've had an account on the SWTOR site for almost two years, but I'm not getting in the beta, and my questions are going unanswered.
Will I buy it? Yeah. I promised I would.
Will I like it? We'll see.
Check that - the answers I want, not need. And I don't think anyone will provide the answers I'm looking for. I have questions about classes, crafting, combat, world exploration, NPCs, ships, and lots of things. But what I want to know most of all is if I'll like it.
Yeah, no one can tell me that, but I could find out really easily if I had a chance to play the Beta. When I got into the Cataclysm beta for WoW it reassured to me that there was a lot of new and interesting content (especially for re-rollers and casuals, like me) and that purchasing it was going to be a certainty. I thought I wanted to get into the beta to learn about the crafting and zones and what the quickest path to prosperity was, but I discovered that the only thing that gratified me was seeing that there was new content to explore.
I participated in beta the way a person should. I did quests, discovered and reported bugs (Town-In-A-Box, etc.) and tried lots of different things to explore the fringe edges of the game. It was fun. But then I logged out after only a couple of days and didn't go back, because I wanted to save the content for when it went live. I had my answer, I liked it.
Am I going to like SWTOR? I don't know. I'm not sure anyone will be able to answer that for me. I need to know what combat is like. I need to know if I will be relying on macros and keyboard tricks to survive in PvP. I need to know if the interface is built for clickers. I need to know if the content is forgiving enough to support people no matter what choices they make. I need to be able to drive the game with one hand and the sound off for periods of time, because I refuse to ignore the family while I play: The game is in the background, not the family.
Nobody can tell me these things in a forum post or even a youtube video (which would be a violation of the NDA right now). Nobody, however eloquent, can describe in enough detail what I will find annoying, what I can deal with, and what I will really enjoy. The only way I can get these answers is by trying the game myself. If I weren't already promising to a group of friends that I'm playing SWTOR at launch, I would be hesitant to buy it. Not because of the content or quality of the game, but because of the interest, interface and comfort of play.
I don't play games much for the "enthralling story and lore." I'll take whatever storyline they give me, and enjoy it enough. The make or break however is the feeling that without keyboard smashing and just a combination of normal reflexes and intelligent strategy that I can survive most of my obstacles and PvP encounters. If I can't, if it requires overly complicated techniques and focus, then it's going to have an uphill battle winning my admiration and spare time.
So I've been entered in the beta for a long time now, and I've had an account on the SWTOR site for almost two years, but I'm not getting in the beta, and my questions are going unanswered.
Will I buy it? Yeah. I promised I would.
Will I like it? We'll see.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Summer Vacation
It's like that last summer after high school, when you know you're done with public schools forever, yet you haven't quite begun the adult adventure of college. You have a deadline of fall to grow up, but you sort of want to cling to the childish years a little while you can.
So goes the summer before SWTOR. WarCraft has been an excellent game and has absorbed hundreds of hours of my time, but SWTOR will be the game I graduate to this fall. I'm still playing WoW while I wait, but there's no seriousness to it. We five-manned Vashj last night for kicks but there wasn't any real reward for doing it. We were happy that we were able to do it, and moved on.
SWTOR glitters on the horizon. It appears that our group will be playing the light side, and I'll be a Smuggler. Even a universe with light sabers and force powers needs a few gunslingers, amirite? The sabre stuff looks cool, but the space cowboy is my style. Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side, kid.
So goes the summer before SWTOR. WarCraft has been an excellent game and has absorbed hundreds of hours of my time, but SWTOR will be the game I graduate to this fall. I'm still playing WoW while I wait, but there's no seriousness to it. We five-manned Vashj last night for kicks but there wasn't any real reward for doing it. We were happy that we were able to do it, and moved on.
SWTOR glitters on the horizon. It appears that our group will be playing the light side, and I'll be a Smuggler. Even a universe with light sabers and force powers needs a few gunslingers, amirite? The sabre stuff looks cool, but the space cowboy is my style. Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side, kid.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
April Showers
Bring May flowers. Without any game communities placing demands on my time I'll be spending time outside recreationally and gardening, etc. There are still rainy days though, and for those times it's good to break out the old solo games (Jedi Academy, MW2, Red Alert, etc.).
There's nothing new coming out that appeals to me, although I may break down and spring for a copy of Black Ops. I'm almost done beating Spore (on sale at a Walmart near you for $20), but it doesn't seem highly replayable. Rift is exactly what it was advertised to be - a great, flexible fantasy MMO - but I'm just burned out on fantasy games and MMOs at the moment.
There's always baseball games, I guess.
There's nothing new coming out that appeals to me, although I may break down and spring for a copy of Black Ops. I'm almost done beating Spore (on sale at a Walmart near you for $20), but it doesn't seem highly replayable. Rift is exactly what it was advertised to be - a great, flexible fantasy MMO - but I'm just burned out on fantasy games and MMOs at the moment.
There's always baseball games, I guess.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Divergence
Everyone I know is on a different kick at the moment. But before I get into whom and what and details, I need to lay the foundation for this update.
Once upon a time, everything you'd ever want to play was available at Walmart. The time was about 2005, and the everything was console games, computer games, handheld games, roleplaying games, collectible card games, and everything else gamey, nerdly, and techy.
Then Blizzard entered the MMO market. With the rise in broadband access and cheap proliferation of internet access and a networking-style game based on a popular franchise in the same genre as the newly released Lord of the Rings movies, it sucked up huge amounts of market share to the point that little else was available on the shelves aside from deer hunting and console games. It was the One Ring that ruled them all, the AOL of MMOs.
There were some software stores in malls that did a healthy traffic of consoles and console games and second-hand items, but they didn't really start to flourish until about 2007, when people started to get sick of WarCraft. Up until then, for two solid years, World of WarCraft had an unbreakable grip on all of us. We slowly struggled to gain our freedom, and until the release of the Cataclysm expansion we hadn't felt like Frodo had succeeded in tossing the mind-controlling ring of MMOs into Mt. Doom, breaking its hold over us.
Those who broke away earlier have been playing mostly consoles and some 1st person shooters (Call of Duty, for one), waiting for the rest of us to come around. At the end of 2010 Cataclysm popped and the spell was broken for many of us. Some of us fled to the land of consoles, some for single player games (Dragon Age, et. al.) and some headed to a replacement MMO, Rift.
And now, there is a great divergence. Sensing that the next event that will semi-unite us again is long on the horizon in the form of SWToR, we are staying in touch but sampling different games. I'm full into Rift, and enjoying it. I play a little MW2 on the side, but Rift is it. A couple people are playing The Show, a career baseball game for the PS3, and some are looking forward to the new edition of Mortal Kombat. My son is fully into Minecraft and loving it, although he misses WarCraft sometimes.
The subscriptions and attention slide away from WarCraft, and the community prospers as a result. There are now a larger number of people who appreciate daily electronic gaming as a pasttime, but don't want to play WarCraft to fulfill that need, so there's plenty of money to go around again for other titles.
Which is good, because with this economy we need to reinvest in our sole industry of dominance - entertainment. (Preferably, the electronic version.) Coin up - Buy American!
Once upon a time, everything you'd ever want to play was available at Walmart. The time was about 2005, and the everything was console games, computer games, handheld games, roleplaying games, collectible card games, and everything else gamey, nerdly, and techy.
Then Blizzard entered the MMO market. With the rise in broadband access and cheap proliferation of internet access and a networking-style game based on a popular franchise in the same genre as the newly released Lord of the Rings movies, it sucked up huge amounts of market share to the point that little else was available on the shelves aside from deer hunting and console games. It was the One Ring that ruled them all, the AOL of MMOs.
There were some software stores in malls that did a healthy traffic of consoles and console games and second-hand items, but they didn't really start to flourish until about 2007, when people started to get sick of WarCraft. Up until then, for two solid years, World of WarCraft had an unbreakable grip on all of us. We slowly struggled to gain our freedom, and until the release of the Cataclysm expansion we hadn't felt like Frodo had succeeded in tossing the mind-controlling ring of MMOs into Mt. Doom, breaking its hold over us.
Those who broke away earlier have been playing mostly consoles and some 1st person shooters (Call of Duty, for one), waiting for the rest of us to come around. At the end of 2010 Cataclysm popped and the spell was broken for many of us. Some of us fled to the land of consoles, some for single player games (Dragon Age, et. al.) and some headed to a replacement MMO, Rift.
And now, there is a great divergence. Sensing that the next event that will semi-unite us again is long on the horizon in the form of SWToR, we are staying in touch but sampling different games. I'm full into Rift, and enjoying it. I play a little MW2 on the side, but Rift is it. A couple people are playing The Show, a career baseball game for the PS3, and some are looking forward to the new edition of Mortal Kombat. My son is fully into Minecraft and loving it, although he misses WarCraft sometimes.
The subscriptions and attention slide away from WarCraft, and the community prospers as a result. There are now a larger number of people who appreciate daily electronic gaming as a pasttime, but don't want to play WarCraft to fulfill that need, so there's plenty of money to go around again for other titles.Which is good, because with this economy we need to reinvest in our sole industry of dominance - entertainment. (Preferably, the electronic version.) Coin up - Buy American!
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Rift Delivers
It lacks the lore characters of Azeroth that people have become familiar with. Aside from that, Rift beats the pants off of World of WarCraft in almost every way.
At first I took a look at Rift (a soon-to-be-launched MMO from Trion) as something to do and explore the limits of in place of Warcraft, which was feeling more and more like a box game and less like a sprawling world. The interface for Rift was extremely similar to WoW, which allowed me to jump right in. I can't emphasize enough how important this was, because as an older player I am less and less able to acclimate to different sets of keybindings. I bound the middle mouse to toggle autorun and I was set.
Running the game even on an ancient laptop with limited graphic ability I was able to navigate well, engage in combat, and use my abilities. The quests were understandable and not meaningless, the zones that were highly populated were not cumbersome, and the battles were winnable. When grouped with different classes, tanking, damage-dealing, and healing roles all shined. It was clear that this wasn't an Age of Conan debacle, this was a real MMO.
What happened after that was unexpected. Normally, I have no reason to really care about NPCs or even the world I'm playing in, I'm just a sword and a bag of gold. After playing WarCraft for so long I learned all of the NPCs - if only to just be able to solve quests - and I had a huge mental database of people, places, and things. I was worried that I would miss my investment in WoW lore and knowledge. It didn't happen. There's two reasons for this.
First, WoW blew itself up. The whole world changed, and what I realized I valued most was my knowledge of where to go and what to kill in order to farm items and craft with them. All of this accumulated information was now worthless. Monsters had all changed, dungeons had changed, zones were mutated, and I found myself relying on the auction house to obtain goods (which is a sure-fire recipe for poverty on most servers). I wasn't interested in re-cataloging all of my information, I just wanted to know where, and how. Wowhead had a fairly decent database of new drops, but I got tired of tabbing out and asking a website for every little question. In short, it became tedious. I was starting to lose my attachment to the world.
Second, Rift doesn't hold still. The world is constantly under attack from elementals shifting in from different planes, wreaking havoc on the countryside and putting yourself and your allied NPCs in peril. If you don't beat them back, they'll grow stronger and destroy you! I don't have much interest in defending the world, but the guys who are teaching me to fight and to do crafts are pretty important, and I'm not about to let them get crushed by some elemental army. So I fight! I join the dozens of other adventurers in an impromptu raid and beat them back, so we can continue on our quest to grow stronger.
The "uh oh, look out" instant raid group events bind you to the game in a way I wasn't expecting. It felt somewhat like the old days of Tarren Mill and Southshore in WoW, when you ended up in a battle due to proximity, not because someone gave you a quest to go there. It makes the world feel alive, and it gives the game an extra level of energy.
And I'll be playing Rift starting the 24th, in the final 'headstart' beta. No server decision yet, but probably as a Guardian on a PvE realm.
At first I took a look at Rift (a soon-to-be-launched MMO from Trion) as something to do and explore the limits of in place of Warcraft, which was feeling more and more like a box game and less like a sprawling world. The interface for Rift was extremely similar to WoW, which allowed me to jump right in. I can't emphasize enough how important this was, because as an older player I am less and less able to acclimate to different sets of keybindings. I bound the middle mouse to toggle autorun and I was set.
Running the game even on an ancient laptop with limited graphic ability I was able to navigate well, engage in combat, and use my abilities. The quests were understandable and not meaningless, the zones that were highly populated were not cumbersome, and the battles were winnable. When grouped with different classes, tanking, damage-dealing, and healing roles all shined. It was clear that this wasn't an Age of Conan debacle, this was a real MMO.
What happened after that was unexpected. Normally, I have no reason to really care about NPCs or even the world I'm playing in, I'm just a sword and a bag of gold. After playing WarCraft for so long I learned all of the NPCs - if only to just be able to solve quests - and I had a huge mental database of people, places, and things. I was worried that I would miss my investment in WoW lore and knowledge. It didn't happen. There's two reasons for this.
First, WoW blew itself up. The whole world changed, and what I realized I valued most was my knowledge of where to go and what to kill in order to farm items and craft with them. All of this accumulated information was now worthless. Monsters had all changed, dungeons had changed, zones were mutated, and I found myself relying on the auction house to obtain goods (which is a sure-fire recipe for poverty on most servers). I wasn't interested in re-cataloging all of my information, I just wanted to know where, and how. Wowhead had a fairly decent database of new drops, but I got tired of tabbing out and asking a website for every little question. In short, it became tedious. I was starting to lose my attachment to the world.
Second, Rift doesn't hold still. The world is constantly under attack from elementals shifting in from different planes, wreaking havoc on the countryside and putting yourself and your allied NPCs in peril. If you don't beat them back, they'll grow stronger and destroy you! I don't have much interest in defending the world, but the guys who are teaching me to fight and to do crafts are pretty important, and I'm not about to let them get crushed by some elemental army. So I fight! I join the dozens of other adventurers in an impromptu raid and beat them back, so we can continue on our quest to grow stronger.
The "uh oh, look out" instant raid group events bind you to the game in a way I wasn't expecting. It felt somewhat like the old days of Tarren Mill and Southshore in WoW, when you ended up in a battle due to proximity, not because someone gave you a quest to go there. It makes the world feel alive, and it gives the game an extra level of energy.
And I'll be playing Rift starting the 24th, in the final 'headstart' beta. No server decision yet, but probably as a Guardian on a PvE realm.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Seven-Year Itch
Blizzard's World of WarCraft has been in operation for over six years, and will reach the seven year mark in November of 2011. By that point there are going to be a lot of people who will be seriously contemplating how faithful they are willing to be to WarCraft.
Already, signs are emerging that it is the beginning of the end.
As we discussed last February, the most powerful lore character - in terms of his ability to carry a storyline - was Arthas, aka The Lich King, and he's dead. He was killed and replaced with Bolvar (mostly so that people can keep running the dungeon content if they want and it sort of makes sense), who now resides as eternal ruler over the Scourge, to keep them from running wild.
Posts are starting to show up on the forums from people who were initially concerned about whether the game would remain interesting after the death of Arthas, and they're having a hard time getting into the villany of Deathwing. There's no argument that Deathwing is powerful, but he doesn't have the same grip on players the way Arthas did. Arthas was one of us. In fact, in WarCraft III we played part of the game as Arthas and saw first hand his downfall and weakness and transformation into video gaming's greatest villain.
Deathwing... is a big dragon. He's always operated at a historical level, and when he's been thwarted in the past the playable races had nothing to do with it. It's like fighting El Nino or Terrorism - his scope is beyond the actions of a single player. Of course they'll scale him down, probably as a result of long player-completed questlines that marginalize his power, and with the assistance of a bunch of dragons you'll get to slip in at the last second when everything is in balance and deliver the final blow. Yeah, you can see this coming from a mile away. The guy has over 200 million health, there's no way a party of 10 people is going to spoil his day alone.
Also on the forums we're seeing a lot of people asking outright "does it seem like people are leaving?" The answer is yes, of course, there will always be people who leave after the first two months of an expansion. A lot of people said they would come back to see Cataclysm, and they have, but they never said they'd stay. They wanted to see the world and see the changes and they've seen it. Additionally, another wave of "I've been playing since launch" players are trickling out the door.
It's an expansion based on nostalgia. The old world has been given a massive makeover, with all of the classic instances revamped for ease of play or level changes, territories mutated by the tidal waves and earthquakes that accompanied Deathwing's arrival, and a shift of control over regions by the Alliance and Horde as a result of their renewed war. The war itself is kind of refreshing. We've been trying to obliterate each other for six years because - let's face it, diehard Hordies and Alliance really do hate each other - but after years of things like account bans for griefing NPCs and 'dishonorable kills', it's hard to get the factions to take world PvP seriously anymore. Usually it's a few nere-do-wells ganking people by surprise in the wild, or packs of arena monkeys holding small camps, and nothing more.
Guilds have been given a larger role in the expansion. They now provide purchasable rewards like heirlooms and noncombat pets for guild growth and achievement, so it benefits people to be a member of a larger guild to take advantage of them. This doesn't really solve the problem of people being unwilling to participate in guild events, it just makes guilds bloated and less familiar. It's a double-edged sword, guild leaders need to accommodate players and not burn bridges, and players need to endure the disgusting affectations of their guildmates to continue enjoying benefits. It makes the guild system stronger, but individual guilds weaker and less socially meaningful.
Cataclysm is also the first expansion that launched without the addition of new servers. Being a self-admitted server locust (I enjoy rerolling on new servers to watch the communities grow from stratch), I was a little disappointed to see that no servers were added. Initially, we suspected that they might add one or two because there were dozens of servers 'locked' - meaning they would not accept new accounts rolling characters on them. This weekend in the evening I looked at the server list and there were only a dozen or so that were in the 'full' state and none of them were 'locked'. I haven't heard of any login queues at all for any server. It is undeniable, the active population has dropped dramatically since the launch of Cataclysm, probably by now to the point of pre-launch, and malaise has set in.
Every expansion brings a series of phases:
1. Wow, this is new, I love it
2. Ok, I've seen everything new and I'm running out of exciting things to do
3. Content Patch 1: Some people love it, some wonder if they'll ever play it, some reroll
4. The state of game balance becomes clear, people reroll favored classes on favored factions
5. Content Patch 2: Some people love it, some never see it
6. Pre-expansion game changes implemented
With each phase the active population goes up a little, then declines more than it rose. The high point in population is always at launch of a new expansion, and it declines slowly, somewhat buffered by content patches. It appears at this point that the population was never higher than previous levels, and is declining faster than with previous expansions.
Something happened when the game changed itself to accommodate the more casual player: Players treat their game play more casually. It has become less important to them and they are more willing to walk away and do something else instead. They know that being gone for a couple of months or even a year will result in a very small setback, and in some ways will make their playtime even more enjoyable. Blizzard has made the game easier to pick up for new players, but also easier to put down for veteran players.
And currently, it looks like people are ready to put it down and walk away.
Already, signs are emerging that it is the beginning of the end.
As we discussed last February, the most powerful lore character - in terms of his ability to carry a storyline - was Arthas, aka The Lich King, and he's dead. He was killed and replaced with Bolvar (mostly so that people can keep running the dungeon content if they want and it sort of makes sense), who now resides as eternal ruler over the Scourge, to keep them from running wild.
Posts are starting to show up on the forums from people who were initially concerned about whether the game would remain interesting after the death of Arthas, and they're having a hard time getting into the villany of Deathwing. There's no argument that Deathwing is powerful, but he doesn't have the same grip on players the way Arthas did. Arthas was one of us. In fact, in WarCraft III we played part of the game as Arthas and saw first hand his downfall and weakness and transformation into video gaming's greatest villain.
Deathwing... is a big dragon. He's always operated at a historical level, and when he's been thwarted in the past the playable races had nothing to do with it. It's like fighting El Nino or Terrorism - his scope is beyond the actions of a single player. Of course they'll scale him down, probably as a result of long player-completed questlines that marginalize his power, and with the assistance of a bunch of dragons you'll get to slip in at the last second when everything is in balance and deliver the final blow. Yeah, you can see this coming from a mile away. The guy has over 200 million health, there's no way a party of 10 people is going to spoil his day alone.
Also on the forums we're seeing a lot of people asking outright "does it seem like people are leaving?" The answer is yes, of course, there will always be people who leave after the first two months of an expansion. A lot of people said they would come back to see Cataclysm, and they have, but they never said they'd stay. They wanted to see the world and see the changes and they've seen it. Additionally, another wave of "I've been playing since launch" players are trickling out the door.
It's an expansion based on nostalgia. The old world has been given a massive makeover, with all of the classic instances revamped for ease of play or level changes, territories mutated by the tidal waves and earthquakes that accompanied Deathwing's arrival, and a shift of control over regions by the Alliance and Horde as a result of their renewed war. The war itself is kind of refreshing. We've been trying to obliterate each other for six years because - let's face it, diehard Hordies and Alliance really do hate each other - but after years of things like account bans for griefing NPCs and 'dishonorable kills', it's hard to get the factions to take world PvP seriously anymore. Usually it's a few nere-do-wells ganking people by surprise in the wild, or packs of arena monkeys holding small camps, and nothing more.
Guilds have been given a larger role in the expansion. They now provide purchasable rewards like heirlooms and noncombat pets for guild growth and achievement, so it benefits people to be a member of a larger guild to take advantage of them. This doesn't really solve the problem of people being unwilling to participate in guild events, it just makes guilds bloated and less familiar. It's a double-edged sword, guild leaders need to accommodate players and not burn bridges, and players need to endure the disgusting affectations of their guildmates to continue enjoying benefits. It makes the guild system stronger, but individual guilds weaker and less socially meaningful.
Cataclysm is also the first expansion that launched without the addition of new servers. Being a self-admitted server locust (I enjoy rerolling on new servers to watch the communities grow from stratch), I was a little disappointed to see that no servers were added. Initially, we suspected that they might add one or two because there were dozens of servers 'locked' - meaning they would not accept new accounts rolling characters on them. This weekend in the evening I looked at the server list and there were only a dozen or so that were in the 'full' state and none of them were 'locked'. I haven't heard of any login queues at all for any server. It is undeniable, the active population has dropped dramatically since the launch of Cataclysm, probably by now to the point of pre-launch, and malaise has set in.
Every expansion brings a series of phases:
1. Wow, this is new, I love it
2. Ok, I've seen everything new and I'm running out of exciting things to do
3. Content Patch 1: Some people love it, some wonder if they'll ever play it, some reroll
4. The state of game balance becomes clear, people reroll favored classes on favored factions
5. Content Patch 2: Some people love it, some never see it
6. Pre-expansion game changes implemented
With each phase the active population goes up a little, then declines more than it rose. The high point in population is always at launch of a new expansion, and it declines slowly, somewhat buffered by content patches. It appears at this point that the population was never higher than previous levels, and is declining faster than with previous expansions.
Something happened when the game changed itself to accommodate the more casual player: Players treat their game play more casually. It has become less important to them and they are more willing to walk away and do something else instead. They know that being gone for a couple of months or even a year will result in a very small setback, and in some ways will make their playtime even more enjoyable. Blizzard has made the game easier to pick up for new players, but also easier to put down for veteran players.
And currently, it looks like people are ready to put it down and walk away.
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