Ode to Gear Advancement

Most people don't seem to be too fond of gear advancement. That's pretty much begging me to champion it, so there you go.

Now, when I talk about gear advancement, I'm probably talking about the same thing as you are. But let's make sure we're all clear. Gear advancement is the advancement of your character through external (swappable) items, as opposed to the advancement of your character through intrinsic stat boosts (as through levelling, skill gains, etc.).

We'll also assume here that gear advancement is a a max level mechanic in a game with levels. Gear advancement in a level-less game (like EVE) is quite a different animal.

Of course, both types of advancement are fun, and to me that's the point -- it's more fun to have two types of advancement instead of one (or none). Besides that, let's resort to base enumeration.

Why Gear Advancement Is Great

1. Gear Advancement Makes You Look Cooler. A level 70 in a tux looks no different than a level 1 in a tux. But let that 70 step into some sweet raid gear and they look great.
   
   The best reward is a tangible reward. And there's nothing more tangible than a piece of gear you wear all the time.
   
   
2. Gear Advancement puts advancement in the hands of the player. When you are max level you will have a wide variety of gear to go for : you can get pve gear, you can get pvp gear. You can get gear to accent one of your class/career specialties, or you can get generalist gear. You can even just go for gear that looks cool.
   
   How many options for advancement does a level 1 character have? Ideally they'd be able to choose between level 2, level b, level orange, or level John Adams. Right?
   
   
3. Gear Advancement narrows the difference between casual players and hardcore players. This is the example I always give : which two characters are closer in strength and power and can play together?
   
   a) WoW : A fresh level 70 and a full epic/legendary level 70
   b) FFXI : A level 30 and a level 75.
   
   Keep in mind that we are talking about similar time investments in both games.
   
   I know people complain about how gear makes such a big difference, and blah blah blah. Baloney. You can theoretically make gear advancement overly powerful, but WoW, for example, just does not. A character with 15 days played (to max) and a character with 200 days played (to max and full epics) are just not worlds apart in terms of power. And that's awesome.
   
   
4. Gear advancement gives you quick, short "levels".
   
   I think anybody would go crazy in a game with 500 levels. But what about a game with 40 or 80 slow, big levels, and then 400 quick, small levels?
   
   Gear advancement lets you say "hey, in a few hours I want someone to be able to gain a 'level'", without breaking your game or driving people nuts.
   
   These small levels can really be balanced well between motivating players to 'level' and not discouraging them because they are too far behind.
   
   
5. All the awesome things you can do with gear that you can't do with levels. You can have enhancements for pieces of gear. You can have matching sets. You can have massive swords twice the size of any player. You can put extra skills, buffs, debuffs, or old or new attributes on gear.
   
   Obviously, you can do all these things in a game that isn't about gear advancement. But it's far less meaningful.
   
   

Anyway, I'm hoping that WAR has a long, rich, and full gear-based endgame, although some things that Mythic has said make me think no. However, some things they've said (like how they want WAR to have more longevity than DAoC) make me do think they'll have a nice gear endgame. I'm hoping I'll know in a week.

The Great Public Quest Scandal

If you've missed it, over at Warhammer Alliance they're having not a little scuffle over Public Quests.

A forumite by the name of Czechmate writes :

contribution means almost nothing, and everyone stands a chance of getting loot. In tier 4 content, whats to stop people who already have or don't want their influence loot, from entering PQ's, hitting a mob once or twice, and waiting on the rest of the people to finish the PQ for them so that they stand a good chance of taking the rewards from the people who earned them?

If you're not familiar with the public quest "scoring" system, it's pretty simple. Doing the quest gives you contribution, at the end of the PQ the game rolls 1d1000 for everyone and adds it to their contribution. The top three or so get to pick loot or money as they prefer.

It's up to 138 posts now. I posted a response last night and it took me so long to write that little post I didn't write here and I broke my 11 day blogging streak. I checked traffic today and it's almost equal with yesterday's (which was barely a record for the new site). So I know what sells with you people : not writing. You guys were visiting my site out of gratitude : thank you boat, you not writing is the gift that keeps on giving.

Anyway, here's what I wrote :

There are two possible situations.

1. There are a bunch of people in your PQ
   
   Say there are eleven people in a PQ. Ten of them try and each get 205 contribution points. One of them is a scrub and gets 5 contribution points.
   
   What are the odds that the scrub will win? (warning rough math ahead) Well, there's only about a 11% chance that none of the ten 205 guys will roll 800+. There's only about a 3% chance that none of them will roll 750+. And then the scrub will still need 20 of those rolls to win.
   
   Sorry I'm killing the math, but I think we can see that the 5 point scrub has less than a 1% chance of winning. Suppose it was 1% -- it would take the five point scrub about 100 PQ's to win, while the 205 point guys would have each won ten times by then.
   
   So the scrub is not a big deal.
   
   
2. There are not a bunch of people in your PQ
   
   As seen in the example, if there are not a ton of people in your PQ, then randomness plays a bigger factor.
   
   However, if there are only 7 people in your PQ, guess what? You're still better off than the 205 point guys in the above example, who only have a 9.9% chance of winning.
   
   So again, the scrub is not a big deal.

Which pretty much sums up my views on afk'ers. Can afk'ers win PQ loot? Yes. Will they? Yes. Is the system still somewhat fair? Yes.

At any rate I think the fixation on the treasure chest is misguided. To take a Paul Barnett example, the chest is the cherry on top. You have this big, meaty, public quest you can do with other people just by showing up. You're basically raiding without a schedule, which in my mind is so awesome it's cheating. You're also getting experience and you're having fun. Plus, while you're doing the quest you are gaining influence, which gets you closer to getting uber influence loot. To top off this delicious gameplay sundae you then have a shot at the chest loot, the "cherry", if you will.

An afk'er who only wants to take that 1 in 100 chance at the cherry is just not going to get that much out of the public quests.

In my mind itemization is going to be what really makes or breaks the public quests. But that's another blog.

Getting to Know The White Lion

A lot of people think they can mess with those cute little lions, but you do so at your own peril. They're little furry balls of braids and bows and hate! I used to have a dismembered head trophy : one of those blasted buggers bit the face CLEAN OFF. It was a lot like My Little Pony, only super-pissed and in lion form.
- Hatekill Bloodmaimer, Associate Skull Priest, United Church of Chaos


Description of Class
White Lions are high elves with powerful War Lion pets. White Lions are most powerful in melee and as such will closely resemble survival hunters in WoW. By this I mean that they will roll on pretty much every kind of gear that drops. In fact, White Lions on RP servers will need to roll on everything because "that's what their character would do."


Role
The principal role of the White Lion is to constantly remind other players that their pet is called a "War Lion" and the class is actually what's called a "White Lion".


Appearance
White Lions wear light, striking ensembles that strike fear into the hearts of the fashionless. Like other High Elves, they also wear ridiculously tall hats. This is in honor of the High Elf God, Hatnor, who wears a might hat that is taller than any mountain and also any other hat.

The War Lion pet is festooned with braids, bows, and other accessories.

Early Concept Art For the White Lion

Core Mechanic

The principal mechanic of the White Lion is the customization, or "styling" of their War Lion. These allow any player to create a custom "talent build" for their pet. There are three different styles that can be applied to a War Lion.

• Braids
  
  Braids augment the stats of your War Lion. A low-level cat might have only a single, simple braid that gives a slight bonus to stamina. A level 40 cat would have many braids of varying hue and breathtaking complexity. These braids would give some of the most powerful stat bonuses in the game.
  
  
• Bows
  
  Bows produce powerful auras around the lion that affect the player and their party. The player must choose carefully, as only one bow can be equipped at a time.
  
  
• Accessories
  
  Accessories grant the lion additional skills. A higher level lion has more available accessory slots and can therefore equip more skills. A level 1 lion will start with only one accessory, the tennis racket, while a level 40 lion will have a variety of powerful accessories to choose from, such as the Tiara or the War Lion Pretty Princess Corvette.

Make a Note Of It
Mythic has also (really) announced that War Lions will not scale with gear, which is pretty much guaranteed to turn the class into a balancing nightmare.

My Greatest Fear
That Mythic will take the Blizzard route and ban any variation of "Mr. Pants" as a cat name. I tried unsuccessfully to name my hunter pet Mr Pants, Mister Pants, mrpants, and misterpants, and eventually had to settle with mstrpants. If you deny me this simple pleasure, Mythic, I will send the real Mr. Pants for you :

Proposed : The WAR Blogger And Friend Open Beta Action Guild

I've seen at least one other WAR blogger (scary?) suggest that the WAR bloggers get together and play the game at release. Which is insane (I like that) and won't work (don't like that).

There are three big issues. First, some of us already have friends we're planning on playing with (not me), some of us already have server types and factions picked out (not me), but mostly we'd bore the hell out of anybody reading our blogs, since nobody wants to read about the same humorous guild mistell from 24 different perspectives.

There's really no solution for #3. However, there is a bit of a solution for #1 and #2. What if any interested WAR bloggers (and any interested WAR blog readers) band together and make an Open Beta guild instead?

In my mind nothing good can come of this idea -- it can only lead to disaster and ruin. So you can imagine what a blogging gold mine it would be.

Now, the first thing any new guild needs to do is come up with a mission statement.

Proposed Mission Statement

Our guild will utilize paradigmatic synergies to leverage our mission statement.

Guild Name

We're bloggers so I suggest something literary, like I Stick Pen In Your Eye

Now That All the Heavy Lifting Is Done

Now that I've solved all the tough problems our guild will face, all that remains is one minor piece of trivia : Recruiting and organizing this guild. I would never know in a million years who could do this. Who could bring the entire WAR blogging community together? Who could do that?

Hypothetically, let's say there were three bloggers who were pretty well known and even had some connection to each other, like they were on the same bowling team or had a podcast together or something. Let's just arbitrarily call them "Syp", "Snafzg", and "Keen". If one of them thought it was a good idea to make a War Blogger And Friend Open Beta Action Guild, they could go ahead and do it by the sheer power of their charisma. I know that's a completely hypothetical example, but it seems simple, right?

Some thoughts on the WAR head start

Note: I'm getting a bunch of google traffic from people looking for info about the head start -- probably something more concrete than this.

Based on an ad I saw (that promised three days head start for SE pre-orders) and Mythic's promise the CE preorders get an extra day of head start, it looks like CE preorders will get in the game on Sunday, September 14th (+4 days) and SE preorders will get in the game on Monday, September 15th (+3 days).

Boat (8/31/2008)

Original Article:

When Mythic announced their collector's edition for WAR they also announced that players who bought the collector's edition would get a head start in the game : they could start playing the game before everyone else. I think it's a great idea but there are some good and bad parts to having a head start.

Good Things About A Head Start

1. Rewards the most devoted fans - If you must offer some plum that only some of your players can enjoy, I'm all about charging a modest amount of money for it. A lot of people might not like it, or might say it's unfair, but it's a really good way to make sure that, in general, the people who get the plum are the ones who care the most.
   
   
2. Spreads out the population on launch day - Launch day for an expansion (as WoW has shown us) can actually be a lot of fun. Launch day for the MMORPG itself (as WoW has shown us) can be very frustrating. The former is basically an interactive story that you can experience even if you're laggy or occasionally disconnected. In the latter you're just trying to overcome the first obstacle of many that your character will face, and lag and overpopulation are really going to hinder that goal.
   
   So, the fewer people that are in the starter areas, the better. It will be much more fun for the people in the Head Start that can level with little competition, especially people on PvP servers who will face less chance of ganking. It will also be a little better for people without the collector's edition who start playing at launch, because there will be less competition to complete quests and such.
   
   
3. Most Importantly, It Will Let Me Play The Game Earlier - It's nice (in theory) if the game is fun for you guys, but ultimately I like games the most when they're fun for me.
   

Some Downsides to Head Starts

1. Makes some of the players feel alienated - In a subscription game (which costs almost $200 a year) most people will be able to spare 30-40 dollars for a collector's edition. But some people won't, and other people honestly won't feel it's really worth that much money.
   
   So these people might feel a little cheated by the Head Start, and it's not good when you kick off a game by cheesing off a few of your customers.
   
   
2. Sets a troubling example - The last thing you want in a subscription game is to reward people for spending more (real) money. People are already paying $15 dollars a month (or whatever, there have been rumors that WAR will cost $20) and you don't want to make them feel like they're not getting the full experience unless they spend more.
   
   Asking people to spend an extra 40 dollars every year, or every other year, for a slight advantage is not that big of deal, and I think most people will be able to accept that. But I'm assuming (and hoping) that Mythic will explore this mechanic no further.
   
   

Timing

The above pros and cons apply to the Head Start that I'm assuming Mythic will give : the weekend before the game hits stores.

Any more time than a weekend would be problematic for a couple of reasons. For one it's not much fun to level up in an empty world, and it's certainly no fun to hit max level and then do nothing while you wait for everyone else to max. The other issue is that a long head start would make regular players angry, and since (you hope) they are the majority of your player base it's not wise to do that.

Five Things From Friday 2 : The Fivening

1. There have recently been some ... unpleasant characters lurking around. If you see one please email me the URL and they will be dealt with appropriately.
   
   
2. I miss Syp!
   
   
3. This Blog is One Month Old Today. I had to look it up. If you'd asked me how long it had been going on I would have said a thousand years. Blogging is fun but it definitely ... it definitely takes it out of you.
   
   
4. I was listening to Chaos Cast (I've been going from current to oldest) and heard the proprietor of Warhammer Alliance refer to Mythic's canceled MMORPG (Imperator) as "im-puh-Rate-er". I thought this wrong (consider 'imperative') but looked it up, and sure enough, that's one of several awkward but correct pronunciations.
   
   Maybe we should just pronounce it incorrectly because it sounds better that way. One of my friends always pronounced necromancers as "neh-Kraw-min-sirs". I always thought that far superior to "neh-kro-Man-sers", so I always use my friend's incorrect (yet awesome) pronunciation instead.
   
   
5. Kudos to Mythic for having Real Actual Oceanic Servers instead of crap seattle servers (or wherever WoW has their oceanic servers).
   
   
6. Last time WAR was delayed, I heard it was delayed until "Q3". I thought : alright, here comes September. Except lately the Mythic guys have said the plan was to release it in fall (not Q3), which (for them) is September-November. This is the great unspoken two-month delay! Ahhhhh!
   
   

All Quiet On The WARstern Front

It's now been about seven days since we've had any new WAR news, aside from a couple meager servings of clarification.

Now, it could be that Mythic is pretty much done with these sorts of press releases because the NDA is about to lift. That could totally be true.

And yet it's not. Starved of any new information, weary, despondent and hungry, now I finally see the truth :

There is no game aside from what we've seen.

What have we seen? Players running around starter areas? Ha! Players that wander out of the starter areas will fall off the edge of the world because there's no world there.

You think you can gain levels, but have you seen anyone gain a level? Have you? No. If you gain a level your computer will explode, because there is no level 2.

What about your precious pets? Your pretty white lions? (all white lions are pretty from what I've seen) Your darling little squigs? Your little goblin shamans? They Do Not Exist. They are only available at level 3, which is one level beyond impossible.

They've told us they cut four classes and four capitol cities. This is only to prepare us, to soften us for the news that they've cut twenty classes and four more capitol cities.

What? You think you've seen the guild interface? The crafting interface? WRONG! You've seen nothing! You've only seen what Mythic wants you to see.

You thought you saw Jeff Hickman and Paul Barnett talking about the game, but that too is a lie. Jeff Hickman is a robot, and Paul Barnett isn't even British, he's Canadian.

There is only one feature implemented in the game, and that is the Tome of Knowledge. But you will not be able to earn any rewards in the tome because the tasks provided by the stone do not really exist. The Tome will just be a picture, and PunkBuster will ban you for viewing it.

In the grim darkness of the future, there is only warcraft.

Hellgate : Failure

As you probably know by now, Hellgate: London has proven to be a massive bust, nearly bankrupting Flagship Studios, killing Mythos, causing confusion and chaos.

What you probably didn't know is that my very first gaming blog was a Hellgate : London blog, which I abandoned after three posts because I was already bored with the game.

I'm older and wiser now. For the moment it's impossible to quit blogging about WAR because I'm bored with levelling, or because I hate the end game. I'm a blogging machine that cannot be stopped HAHAHAHA.

Hellgate : London is kind of an enigma to me. I know that I really disliked it, but I had a hard time explaining why I disliked it. Then again, I've never been at a loss for words before ...

Ten Reasons Why Hellgate : London Was Bad

1. Third Person Action
   
   Something about third-person gaming doesn't translate well into an action RPG. It's just not quite as satisfying to mow down your enemies when you can't even see them dying. Or taking damage for like five seconds before you can even find the guy who's doing it. Or dying and saying "What the **** just happened, there was nobody there?"
   
   Now that we've all seen Diablo III in all of its isometric glory, it does make you think. The rumor was that Blizzard discarded the original Diablo III, the current one we're seeing being a rewrite. Allegedly when this happened many of the Blizzard North guys left to form Flagship. Was Diablo III killed because of the lame third person view?
   
   
2. Cool Weapons that Don't Last Long
   
   I'd be chugging along on my engineer, putting points into pets and stuff, and then I'd pick up this awesome rocket launcher. And I'd be like "Whoa! Awesome Rocket Launcher." And then I'd kill all these guys with it (if you were there you would have seen that it was awesome) and then more and more guys. But as I levelled up the rocket launcher would get weaker and weaker until I had to get a new, stronger weapon that worked completely differently. Then I'd get into that weapon but then have to swap it out, etc.
   
   It was like you could pick up the coolest skills in the game but only use them for three levels until they just wore out.
   
   
3. Lame, Underpowered Skills
   
   I don't even remember if they were called skills, abilities, or talents. I just remember that they weren't that powerful and weren't that interesting. As mentioned above, it was the weapons that were really cool but unfortunately transient.
   
   
4. Disposable Loot
   
   I hate randomly-created loot.
   
   In the early days of WoW Blizzard had ... how to say this politely ... they had "not put a lot of effort into itemization." You'd get epic cloth gear with ... agility. There was pretty much no spell damage gear in the game so casters had no way to effectively boost their damage. It was a disaster but Blizzard eventually fixed it.
   
   Imagine getting agility on your cloth gear all the time, and you'd have Hellgate: London. This is really the problem with random loot systems. In a game with non-random itemization you might say "Hey, I want this piece of gear, why don't I have fun working towards it and then enjoy reaching that goal and then have fun using my new cool piece of gear."
   
   In a game with random gear you say "Hey look at the Awesome piece of gear that just dro... Oh, wait. I can't use that stat. No wait, I thought it was awesome, it's higher level than what I have now but it's worse, it gives me stats I don't need. That's a shame."
   
   This makes almost none of the loot memorable and pretty much all the loot disposable. When you finally get a named item (that is never for your class) it will sit in your bank wasting space because you hate to get rid of it, which is a terrible and avoidable situation all by itself.
   
   
5. Random Monsters
   
   With few exceptions most instances had random monsters. It sounds nice in theory but in practice you just don't get a sense of place. You'd go into a basement zone (yeah, there were basement zones) and there would be ... I don't know, zombies there. And you'd kill all the zombies, and then come back and it would be filled with ... demons. The whole experience is just forgettable because everything blurs together.
   
   
6. Random Levels
   
   This is an entire blog right here. In fact, this is more than an entire blog. I think I could write a book on why random levels are so horrendously stupid and awful.
   
   But there's really one overriding reason that's pretty simple. Ok, imagine you're playing the game ...
   
   You see the Corridor bends to the left. You turn the corner.
   
   But what if it were totally different experience for you? Something so innovative, so unexpected that the shock would kill you?
   
   You see the Corridor bends to the right. You turn the corner.
   
   AWESOME!!!
   
   
7. The TIlesets
   
   While you're tromping through these random instances (all totally different, all totally boring, as we've mentioned) you might notice another pattern. There are four instances in which you will spend 75% of your game.
   
   1. The Ravaged and Destroyed Town Instance
   2. The Subway Tunnel Instance
   3. The Basement Instance
   4. The Subway-Tunnel-Instance-connected-to-a-Basement-Instance Instance
   
   Occasionally you'll get to go to a different or (in some rare cases) cool instances but mostly it's just those four. Add in the random monsters to make them all seem the same, and realize that each time you beat the game you'll play about 15 different levels even though you've been to 60 different places.
   
   
8. The Fleeting Moments of Awesomeness
   
   I have a lot of ideas for games. One of my favorite ideas (and it's probably been done before, it seems like an obvious idea) is to have an action game where you control a small group of guys. You only have to move one unit (the units move intelligently given your orders) and they'll automatically do their thing (attack, heal, debuff, etc.) You control your special abilities and the movement and there you go -- awesome little action game.
   
   Well, Hellgate did this. In one level you control this unit of four or six guys in this little RTS/action thing. They use their abilities automatically, you move them and use their special abilities, and it was absolutely perfect. I ran to my wife and told her how awesome it was.
   
   I loved this mini-game but you only get to do it once. And then you're back to the main game which is, in comparison, 100 times worse. It just reminds you you're playing an awful game.
   
   (Also, I'll admit that I loved the story and I still kind of hope we'll see a sequel someday (in good game form) just to see what happens.)
   
   
9. Backtracking
   
   Randomized levels are what really make you backtrack, but I hate it so much I'm going to just to single this one thing out as being particularly loathsome.
   
   
10. Remember WoW?
    
    I was hoping for a great, "light" game to tide me over between bouts of WoW. WoW at this point has been out for three years, so you've had three years to absorb all the lessons WoW (made by your ex-coworkers) has taught you about making a great online RPG, so what do you do?
    
    "Hey, let's copy the punctuation over the heads and call it a night."
    
    No end-game to speak of. Boring, boring level grinding. No loot worth working towards, no skills worth working towards. Few memorable locations. No memorable mobs. No crafting worth talking about.
    

Ah, to be young, and to love a game before it's released ...

When Losing is Fun

"Don't talk about WAR Blog Club" is both the first and second rule of WAR Blog Club. So I'm not even going to say anything about it.

Except to mention that rule 8, I think, requires us all to blog about what server types we want to play on.

Server Types in WoW

In WoW I went Alliance. Partly because my friends wanted to go alliance, partly because I wanted to be a gnome (I love small races). It was ok most of the time except for one thing : Battlegrounds. Since the Alliance outnumbered the Horde, the Alliance would wait forever on BGs while the Horde would get right in. Cross-server queues helped a good deal but Alliance still had to wait for many battlegrounds.

For all the theories about why Horde beat Alliance in battlegrounds, I've never heard what I think is the simplest : the Horde have more practice. Not so much anymore, but back in the day a Horde character could, in 3 hours, play nearly 3 hours of PvP. An alliance character with three hours probably wouldn't spend more than 2 hours playing for every three they tried.

So here we see the outnumbered players with a distinct advantage in a controlled environment. Not just an advantage that lets them win -- an advantage that lets them play the game more than their opponents.

Losing in TF2

The only FPS I've played in the past year is TF2. I'm out of practice now -- back when I was playing I was a fair player. I was good enough to lead the losing team in kills but not good enough to lead the winning team in kills.

In this game, like in many FPS games, it's a little more fun for me to lose. See, when I'm winning, my teammates are running around, competent, slaying our foes left and right. You can probably see how that makes the game really boring for me.

But losing -- ah -- sweet losing. If you are losing (and not totally getting rolled, just losing) you have what the military likes to call "a target-rich environment". There are just so many people to kill and it's so much fun. Plus, unlike being on the winning side, it's easier to feel like you are making a difference.

So in TF2, it's fun to lose.

Losing in Warhammer : Age of Reckoning

I can almost feel what it's like to lose in WAR right now. It's this sixth sense I have about games. Where were we?

Oh yes. As I mentioned previously, there seems to be an advantage to being on the smaller side of a faction war server with controlled PvP. I also mentioned previously that I think it's more fun to lose than it is to win.

So who's going to be outnumbered? Who's going to be losing RvR? My faction, Order, that's who.

Also I'm going core since (as this post makes clear) I totally despise PvP servers.

Since I'll be one of the only people playing Core Order I'll probably need to come up with some good guild names. My favorites so far are "Lonely", preferably spelled "L O N E L Y", and also "THE Core Order Guild".

The Perils of Banking Content

Occasionally the bug will bite me and I'll write so much that I'll get to bank some stories for later. This is a little dangerous. Two weeks ago I saved up a story for the weekend, before the Classpocalypse. I decided not to run it.

Big News and Why I Want To Play Warhammer : Age of Reckoning
Written 7/10/08 By Boatorious

I've heard some rumors lately (I have a guy on the inside) and Mythic is about to hit us with some Big News. I don't want to say "NDA drop" or "Open Beta Announced", but I'm sure that's what it is -- I just have a good feeling about this. A really, really good feeling. In a few days I will be playing WAR and I'm so freaking excited.

Since it's time to play WAR it's time to kick WoW to the curb. I ninja'd most of my guild bank last night and cursed out pretty much everyone in the guild before I deleted my character. See ya losers! Who needs WoW, anyway, when there's WAR to play? It's funny, but I think I'm going to go insane just waiting those two or three days before I can play!

And I know the first thing I'm going to do when I log in. I'm going to take my Choppa (my first character) and I'm going to go straight to Karak Eight Peaks, the greenskin Capitol City. Ever since the game was announced I've been waiting to do that. Most of you don't know, but I'm such a huge fan of the Choppa that I had one tattooed on my arm! It even says "CHOPPA" on it, awesome huh? I think I'm going to get a tattoo of Karak Eight Peaks (the K.E.P. y'all!) on my other arm. I'll flex and it will be like "BOOM! BOOM!" K.E.P. and the Choppa, comin' at ya!

The Choppa is going to be awesome but here are my top five classes :

1. Choppa -- I've just always loved Orcs and this was really the only choice since the support and ranged DPS classes are goblins (I'll never, ever roll a tank, thank you very much).
   
2. Knight of the Blazing Sun -- how could anything with a name that long not rock? I have actually renamed my son "Knight of the Blazing Sun", do you think I could get a beta invite for that?
   
3. Black Guard -- Huge Halberds! I'm going to play Choppa but I seriously think that this class will be the most fun of any class in the game.
   
4. The Hammerer -- is it him or her? Is it scale or fur? Does it occur?
5. Repeatedly Slamming My Hand In A Car Door -- seriously. If the game is delayed and I have to wait another month or two to play these awesome classes, that's what I'm going to do.

Why Mythic is Great

Other MMORPG's always launch without content. You start playing and there's always something missing -- always something you find out about at the last minute. But Mythic is seriously a different kind of company. I mean, we might see another delay (but I doubt it) but everything's going to be there at launch : the twenty-four classes, the six capitol cities, the FFA servers. Did you know that Mythic is going to have four careers for every single race? Just awesome.

Anyway, I'm so tired of FPS's. I was playing Battlefield last night and I kept getting kicked by PunkBuster. I just get so frustrated. It's silly, but you know the one thing that's been keeping me going, giving me hope all this time? Life is tough but I've always had this one beacon of hope : when WAR comes out I'm going to swear off FPS games FOREVER so I never have to deal with Punkbuster ever again! I'm in an MMO, you can't touch me PunkBuster Losers!

Well, I'm going to get back to checking my inbox every 30 seconds (here comes the open beta invite!). I'll see you guys in game!

Mark Jacobs, Stand-Up Guy

When I was raiding with my WoW guild I remember one particular exchange. It was initiated by one of our officers, who was, if I recall correctly, 20 years old and an employee at a home supply store.

Some of our teenage members made some mistake in a raid and he proceeded to berate them. One of them asked why he was being so abusive and he said, "Hey, this is what real life is like, you better get used to it."

I remember thinking that was odd, because in my eight years of professional software engineering I have never once been so abused, nor have I known anyone that has.

Professionalism isn't something that's really taught (although it should be), it's something that you just kind of pick up over time. You always treat everyone with kindness, respect, and courtesy. If someone makes a mistake, you explain why it was wrong and show them the right way, there's no abuse or recrimination.

You do not talk ill of anyone at your job at any time. If Bob makes a mistake, when describing it you say "someone" made a mistake unless identifying the person is an absolute necessity. If you make a mistake, you say "I" made a mistake. If you tell someone to do something and they do not do it correctly, you assume that you miscommunicated.

If there's a crap job you do it if possible instead of passing it on to your subordinates. You share the glory and hog the blame. And on and on. In a lot of ways it's just like being a good person and an adult.

I'm bringing this up because I'd like to comment on the Mythic announcement of a week ago about the dropped classes and cities. Who showed up on the forums to answer questions? Who showed up the forums to take the blame and the abuse? Who made like two dozen posts on the WHA boards alone over that weekend?

Mark Jacobs, the CEO of Mythic. He could have easily dispatched one of his leads to endure the ****storm and nobody would have noticed. Why not send out Jeff and Paul, who have been doing most of the "I love you, I love Warhammer" appearances and interviews? Instead of delegating he faced it himself.

And Mark did not say it was not the fault of the class designers, or his leads, or the testers, or the people that were (probably) asked to save those classes. It was the studio that failed, and that's all there was to say about that. And he decided to let us know all that well before launch.

I point this out not to exalt Mark, even though many studio heads would not do the same thing. I work with professional people, and any of them would have behaved the same way he did.

I point this out because I sometimes feel like there's little understanding in our society (and even in the MMORPG community) of what it means to be an adult. Many MMORPG players are over 18 but precious few have really grown up. In fact, many of you will soon find yourselves surrounded by 20, 25, and 30 year-old children.

In those dark moments console yourself, and know that at least one adult is associated with this game.

Ten Reactions to the E3 news

Lots of news from E3, courtesy Keen.

1. Characters identified by silhouettes
   (Despite my massive interest in spelling I have to admit that I had no idea how "silhouette" was spelled. I had to "rip off" the spelling from another website, I'm sorry.)
   
   Games really blur the line between "art" and "engineering", because even the art has an engineering side to it. In this case, the art lets you identify a class from afar, which I think is great. I played a lot of TF2 when it came out, and let me tell you the huge difference it made in character identification. I remember in Team Fortress Classic you would often see a character from far away and have no idea of the team, let alone the class. No such problem in TF2.
   
   Mythic says they did this in DAoC as well, so forgive my ignorance of that game, but it was definitely a good idea to maintain.
   
   
2. 400 Armor Sets In Game
   Fantastic, fantastic idea. If you've played WoW (or almost any other MMORPG) you know that you look like crap for a long long time. Having matching gear is a privilege reserved for only the most powerful of players -- which I always think is silly.
   
   WoW always added insult to injury by having matching, yet severely flawed "sets" of low-level armor. You would have, for example, a color-and-style matched set of gear at, say, level 28. They would be named the same -- "Numismatist Greaves", "Numismatist Hat", etc. That was great. But then the stats on that gear would still be generated randomly (one of the "Of the Owl", "Of Stamina", etc.) and the only way you could procure the gear was by having it drop for you (5,000 to 1 odds) or by buying it from the Auction House.
   
   So nobody ever had gear that looked good until they got to 60 and got sets. There would be individual cool-looking pieces, but in general you had to wait to 60 to have any gear that matched.
   
   So great idea by Mythic to have a ton of sets, which I'm assuming means some low-level sets (yaay).
   
   
3. Practically No Instanced Raid Dungeons
   All I have to say is YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY. You know in nature shows when they show some predator that was specifically designed to totally annihilate their prey?
   
   "This anteater can stick his long snout directly into the ant mound, totally f****** those ants. "
   
   "The Red Snail of Madagascar is the world's most beautiful snail. But he has few defenses against the Salt Bat."
   
   "This beautiful baby seal has many enemies -- disease, starvation, injury. But none as deadly and relentless as the Club Shark."
   
   That's what instanced raid dungeons are to casual players. They are less a gameplay mechanic than a monument to the hatred of casual players. Their omission is very welcome.
   
   
4. Early Mounts
   You get your first mount at level 20, and even before then you can get some other kind of mount (with limited charges or limited time or something like that). That is just insanely cool. In WoW you are just totally miserable for 39 levels until you get your first mount.
   
   
5. Customizable Mounts
   If I sat down a week ago and listed 10,000 things I'd like to see in WAR, I never would have thought of Mount Customization. But it sounds cool, and I'm looking forward to it now.
   
   
6. Uber Keeps
   Additional keeps have been added to make up for the loss of the capitol cities. I really think the most fun you're going to have in the game is capturing and holding a keep with your guild. So adding more keeps is fantastic.
   
   
7. Scenario Level Boosting
   Low-level players in scenarios will get an effective "boost" so they are competitive with higher-level players. I can't wait to do some RvR with a level 1 character.
   
   
8. The Open Grouping System
   Meh. We don't know if there's much advantage to groups in normal gameplay. However, this is an extremely useful addition for Public Quests.
   
   
9. Built-in UI customization
   Great, great idea. I remember using some UI mods in WoW and they'd just take hours to set up, and then they'd break at patch time and you had to update ... just a disaster.
   
   
10. Modding System
    It's clear that they took the many lessons of WoW scripting to heart. No spell casts via mods, no crazy hooks for mods.
    
    

Sorry for the weirdness

If you're reading today, I apologize, I'm fooling around with a billion different themes trying to find one that doesn't suck.

Moving Here FOREVER

I am abandoning my old haunts over on the bad side of town. Concurrent with the moving and the domain name I am making some other improvements.

Cat Pictures on New Blog : Check
Cat Pictures in Image Header : Check
Links To Blogs on My Blogroll Will Go To Custom Cat-Framed Versions Of Those Blogs : Check

Once these changes are implemented I will be fully compliant with all Web 2.0 standards.

The Placeholder

Right now my real blog is at wordpress but I'm thinking of moving over here ...

UPDATE : I have moved over here. Any content below this story was moved from my old blog. Enjoy!

My Penultimate WAR Question : Scenario Balance

There's only one big question I still have about WAR that hasn't been answered by the E3 news. The title is just to cover my a**.

How is Mythic planning to deal with player imbalance in scenarios? The original plan (and ironically one of the things that interested me about the game) was to use NPCs, "Dogs of War" to even out the sides.

Since then, I guess, Mythic hasn't been clear about whether they were planning on having "Dogs of War", cross-server scenarios, or neither. Let's examine both briefly.

Dogs of War

This would involve introducing NPC's to even out the sides. Players generally have worried about the ability of NPC's to compete against players -- "players are always smarter", as they say.

When Blackwing Lair came out I remember some WoW players were feeling their oats, saying that they could beat any dungeon Blizzard gave them. One of the CM's responded and pointed out that it is ridiculously easy to create a boss that will annihilate players every time. Blizzard doesn't make unbeatable bosses because it's bad game design, but it's not something that's difficult to do.

So I do think that Mythic could make NPC's that players could beat, say, 60% of the time.

The hard part of Dogs would probably be AI. There are a lot of different types of scenarios (good job on this Mythic) but it seems like each would need a slightly different AI regime. One way to avoid too much AI coding would be to allow players to order the Dogs around, but that could really change the focus of scenarios from PvP to micromanagement.

Cross-Server Scenarios

Right now it's 6:15 on a saturday morning, and I've been at my computer since about 5:25. This is not unusual for me. So let me tell you I am a huge fan of WoW's cross-server battlegrounds (battlegrounds in WoW are instanced PvP, equivalent to scenarios in WAR). No WoW server would ever have a battleground going at 5 AM on a saturday, but with cross-server battlegrounds there are usually at least a couple to choose from.

The criticism of cross-server scenarios has been that they make it harder to develop rivalries since your foes are never the same. This is true in a way, but ultimately I'd prefer RvR whenever I want rather than somewhat improved rivalry-making. Additionally, if there were a cross-server system implemented it would not be much harder to create a hybrid system that automatically switched to single-server scenarios when (on a server-by-server basis) there was interest to support them.

The problems and how I think Mythic will solve them

WAR has far, far more scenarios than WoW has battlegrounds. Getting them all filled even during prime time is going to be difficult. So clearly something needs to be done.

Now, the option that I'd like Mythic to choose is : both. Again, I play at weird times, and I just don't think that all the scenarios I'd like to play could possibly have enough players (even cross-server) to fully populate them. Likewise, Dogs don't really do it for you on a single server, because I can see starting a scenario and being the only player on either team. I don't know if WAR would even allow you start such a scenario. Either case would not be much fun.

However, implementing both would give you enough players to populate a side, while still allowing, say, a 4v8 in a 12v12 scenario.

What will Mythic do? We know that both solutions will be a pain to implement, and it does not seem that Mythic broached the subject at E3. So I'm guessing that we'll actually see neither option at launch. It's evidently a pretty good thing to leave out, since I've seen very little talk among players about whether or not it will be included.

I do have a little hope for cross-server scenarios, however, as Mythic probably had an inkling during design that they would be necessary (as opposed to Blizzard, who seem to have been surprised by the necessity for them).

Five Things From Friday

Before I start the article I'd like to curse wordpress for not saving my formatting properly, causing me to redo it ten times in a row and finally discarding my list altogether)

I think I might do this every week, by "this" I mean post five random things every week on Friday. I would like to note in this inaugural post that when I say I'll post 1. five things 2. every week 3. on Friday I actually guarantee none of the three.

I'll keep the name though, it's catchy.

1. Obsessing Over Statistics and How WAR Bloggers Are Awesome

The only thing I obsess over more than WAR is the statistics for this blog. I wrote this epic post about weirdness or coolness in my stats but realized you would all be bored.

I will say that about 99% of my traffic comes from Syp, Arbitrary and Spinks, Snafzg, and Matt, who've all been very kind to link to me (I pre-wrote this, since then scary and thade have linked to me as well). I can never thank you guys enough :) If you look at my comments section you'll also note that they and other bloggers account for most of my comments. Again, very very nice to get feedback, and very nice of you guys to go out of your way to make a new guy feel welcome.

2. My bizarre sense of humor

This week I wrote a love letter to PvP servers and a parody of my own blog. I don't know that anyone got it, either that or they were really bad. This makes these blog entries like most of my jokes.

3. Interview with Josh Drescher

This is old.

Anyway, this interview with Josh Drescher over at gamasutra is interesting for two reasons. First because he says that Mythic is right across the street from the NRA. Back when I lived in Fairfax I used to drive past the NRA every day on the way to work. I still drive past it on 66 when we go to visit my wife's grandfather and I always point it out. I guess now I'll say "That's the NRA AND Mythic is right across the street."

Also interesting because Josh talks about how your MMORPG doesn't have to, you know, beat WoW to still make money and be successful. I always find that when gamers talk about the success of games and game studios, they vastly underrate survival. Gamers consider a really innovative game that nobody bought to be a fantastic success, even when it kills the studio that created it. Likewise, a modest success that keeps the studio in business is considered a failure. "I hope they don't disappoint us again!"

4. Fringe Benefits

My favorite side effect of the Classpocalypse? It Absolutely Murdered Every Warhammer Alliance Forum Thread About The Expansion.

5. Listening to Podcasts

I have only had an Ipod for about a month but I love it. I listen to podcasts at the gym. Tuesday I listened to my first Warhammer-related podcast, the ChaosCast. I was listening to the current episode with Carrie Gouskas (I'm resolved not to look up the proper spelling) talking about the Tome of Knowledge. There is some new information in there that I had not heard before, so I highly suggest it.

The formatting of this article sucks for some reason, so sorry if it looks weird to you. Bloody wordpress.

Why I quit WoW and what I want from WAR

I don't know that I've made it through a single post on this blog without talking about WoW. There could be a drinking game :

Take 1 Drink if Boat mentions WoW
Take 2 Drinks if Boat says WoW is the best game ever
Take 3 Drinks if Boat criticizes WoW

So why did I quit in the first place?

Well, WoW is a great game and I love playing it. In fact, I kind of consider going back to distract myself until WAR (or until the 360 gets fixed). I consider WoW, from a technical and gameplay standpoint, to be the best game ever made. There's no comparison with any other game -- to do such a big game and do it so well is just amazing.

The problem is that while WoW achieves its goals, it doesn't have the correct goals to begin with. The end game is still time consuming, calendar-slinging, large scale PvE. I raided for about 20 hours a week for about six months shortly after the game came out. It was a fun experience but eventually I was just exhausted, and I lasted longer than most.

I tried to come back but I eventually asked myself : if I had no job whatsoever and could do whatever I wanted with my time, would I spend 20 hours a week raiding? It's an easy "No" for me. It's not so much the time, but the schedule that kills me. My "good time" goes to working, family, and exercising. I want to play in my "down time" when I'm done with work, after I've spent time with the family, and after I've been to the gym. 7-11 PM every night is not "down time". It's another job.

Raiding is not just hard as a matter of schedules, it's also completely detached from the rest of the game. So you can't just log on and raid -- you need to farm to buy mats for potions. You need to work on attunements. You need to get the best not-in-raid gear so you can be better at the raid.

The thing that really kills me the most is not that I don't have the best gear. In fact, with apologies to Marx (Groucho), I wouldn't want to play a game where I have all the best gear because I want it to require more devotion than I can muster. After all, it's not having the gear that's fun -- it's earning the gear.

But if you're not a raider in WoW you'll never earn the coolest gear, no matter how much you play.

What I want from WAR

I want to take a break from RvR when I want to take a break -- not because I ran out of potions, need attunements or need to go PvE for gear.

I want the best gear in the game to be RvR gear that can be earned without requiring 20 hours of scheduled play every week.

I want to log on and play the "end game" anytime I want.

I want to log on any given night and play the "end game" with my guildies.

I never want to spend three hours in a PvE instance, ever.

I want it to be easy to find a group for PvE instances and easy to find public quests being completed.

I never want to make another bloody content mod again, I want the idea never to cross my mind because The Tome is so awesome.

I never want to fight with my guild over loot.

I never want to fight with my guild just to be allowed to contribute to their success.

I want to remember right now that I'll be supremely happy if I get two or three of these things :)

Some Concerns about WAR's Capitol City Rotation

Mythic recently dropped the bomb about the content that will not be available at launch. They've talked about several options for mitigating the removed capitol cities but the option that concerns me most is the idea of rotating the capitol cities.

I'm not sure how this would resolve people's concerns about RvR. Let's examine some of the issues.

How will the Mythic rotate the cities?

I was talking to my brother about how we thought Mythic would rotate the cities. He feels the cities will rotate clockwise, but I really feel like they will rotate counterclockwise. Neither of us would back down and we almost got in a fight.

And then I was talking to my wife today and she really threw out a curve ball -- what if they rotate, like, upside-down? This would certainly make melee DPS and tanks less useful, perhaps Mythic is planning the rotation to counteract the removal of some of those classes.

But this brings up even more issues. Are the city 72v72 scenarios balanced for "capsized" play? How about the Public Quests, will they still work? This just brings up a ton of issues and it seems like it will take Mythic longer to properly implement the rotating cities than it would be just to fix them in the first place.

Issues with Lore

I'm not an expert on Warhammer lore but I also think it would be difficult to incorporate spinning cities into the rich Warhammer lore. There are very, very few revolving cities in Warhammer, certainly none that are planned for the game right now. Did Mythic speak with Games Workshop about the change? Sometimes I feel like Games Workshop is really selling out -- I'm prepared to play a Warhammer game without Space Marines (although it's a stretch, they're my favorite race) but twirling cities are really going to make me feel un-immersed and dizzy.

Motion Sickness

There's no doubt that revolving capitol cities will cause more player vomiting than many of the alternatives. But Mythic can do a lot to mitigate this, I think. If the cities rotate more slowly (I'd suggest no faster than one revolution per minute) this will alleviate the issue but not eliminate it. The problem is that a slow rotation would mean players would have to wait longer for the exit to come around so they can leave the city. I guess there needs to be a happy medium between puking and delaying travel.

Conclusion

I think that Mythic faced a tough problem and came up with a very risky but extremely unique solution. Hopefully the NDA will lift soon so we can all see how our new rotating capitol cities look.

Why am I not worried?

Working through the blogs this morning I was surprised how hard most of the WAR blogging community took the recent news of (I just made up this name) The Classpocalypse. I certainly thought the news was interesting, but it didn't really affect my desire to play the game. Why not?

Don't cry over cut classes

A good deal of it is that, for better or worse, I'm not really that invested in any particular class at the moment. In WoW I really wanted to be a healer and the smallest race. Since gnomes didn't have healers I didn't really care -- so I picked warlock because my friend was going to be a mage, and I ended up with 60 days played on that little guy.

The abundance of classes in WAR just overwhelms me, especially considering the NDA is still up so we don't even know that much about them. I still know humorously little about the classes that will soon devour my life. I guess that turns out to be lucky.

Are Three Cities Better Than One?

As for the city reduction, I just think of Ironforge and Stormwind in WoW. Ironforge has another city underneath it -- "Old Ironforge". Very cool idea, except that Blizzard hasn't done a thing with it. Oh, and Stormwind has a portal that's supposed to be for player housing. Also a very cool idea, except that Blizzard hasn't done anything with it. Instead WoW players get multiple capitol cities that are fun to visit but otherwise all serve pretty much the same boring purpose.

So I'm excited about the idea of dropping down to one capitol city per faction. It really gives the developers a chance to go all out and make the cities great. If you look at the content Blizzard introduced at launch and the content they introduced after launch there's just a big difference in quality. The team had learned a lot and were also able to focus on individual parts of the game. We're going to get great capitol cities out of this "disappointment".

Also, I just trust the Mythic guys

Pretty quickly after you start working as a software engineer, you go to your lead and ask them why the software does this insane thing. You might not say it, but you think, "this is stupid, why do we solve this simple problem in this insane way?"

And your lead will explain why all the sane solutions weren't workable and why they had to go with the insane solution. You do this a number of times and eventually realize that the software isn't stupid -- you are stupid. You still ask why problems are solved in insane ways, but you start to expect a reasonable explanation.

You just start to trust other engineers. They think the same way as you do, they solve problems the same way you do. Most of us even dress alike.

I've never worked on a game, but my experience as an engineer and gamer has made me very opinionated about good and bad game design. And nothing Mythic has shown us so far has been poorly designed. The big draw, the RvR, is a little too complex for me to judge at the moment, although it does seem like a good idea. But smaller, more understandable things, like the Tome of Knowledge, the Crafting System, and the Living Guild system just seem well designed. They are elegant, workable solutions to problems that no other MMORPG has even begun to grapple with yet.

So, like I expect the guy at work to give me a reasonable explanation for something that's seemingly insane, I expect Mythic knew what they were doing when they brought about The Classpocalypse.

Rumorhammer : Mythic to introduce Hardcore Crafting Servers

If you're like me, you've been hearing a lot of rumors on blogs and forums about hardcore crafting servers in WAR. So what's up with this, and what is the story behind the hardcore crafting servers?

Fortunately I have a source on the inside. I promised not to reveal his name, but he sends me inside information about WAR in return for a never-ending stream of blood pudding and jellied eels which I have smuggled into the country.

The Genesis

The idea for hardcore crafting servers come from PvP servers. See, on a PvP server (in WoW or "Open Servers" in WAR), you can be wandering around, doing something you enjoy, and suddenly be forced into PvP, which you probably like but weren't planning on doing at that time. You can be questing and be forced to PvP. You can be gathering and be forced to PvP. You can even be in a town or at a vendor, or waiting for an instance, and suddenly be forced to PvP. And this is wildly popular with the players.

So why not go a step further and apply this popular idea to other mechanics in the game? Hence, Hardcore Crafting Servers were born.

Living Recipes

The new mechanic of the Hardcore Crafting Servers is the introduction of "Living Recipes". These recipes will be immensely powerful creatures with abilities that can easily kill any player in the game. The only way to defeat a Living Recipe is to create an item of that recipe. So if you were attacked by a "Potion of Healing" recipe, the only way to survive would be to quickly craft a Potion of Healing.

The manifestations of the Living Recipes will mirror the ways PvP occurs on PvP servers -- in other words they will senselessly interrupt other parts of the game. So a player that was about to capture a RvR objective might suddenly find himself beset by nine or ten recipes, which would then proceed to attack, kill, and camp him. Or a player that was about to loot a Public Quest treasure box might find himself killed and then repeatedly spat upon by the specifications for a plus-healing trinket, etc.

Life on a Hardcore Crafting Server

It's important to understand that, like gankers on a PvP server, the recipes will not necessarily be tuned to your level or tradeskills. There will be bands of max-level recipes roaming low-level areas. You might defeat a recipe only to be immediately ganked by two more that show up. This makes sense if you think about it -- after all, the game is not called "Fairhammer".

Eventually players on Hardcore Crafting Servers might want relief from these Recipe Onslaughts. Taking a page from WoW, Mythic will introduce special, boring grinding areas where recipes rarely go. So this way players have a choice between being corpse-camped by, say, "Lilly Seeds of Fortitude", or slaying Rat-Men of varying hues for hours on end.

Directed PvP with objectives and rewards can be immensely enjoyable, and can enthrall players for hours on end. The principal invention of PvP servers is the minimization of this fun PvP, so that greater emphasis can be placed on ganking. "Open Crafting" servers will function in the same way. Players will not have as much time to spend crafting useful items, or in advancing their crafting skills. They will be so absorbed by unsuccessfully avoiding Recipe Squads and the resulting corpse runs that they'll have time for little else.

Target Population

You might ask yourself : why would players play on a Hardcore Crafting Servers? Well, there will really be two kinds of players Mythic expects to see.

The first are crafting fans who will roll on these servers in the mistaken belief that this will make crafting more fun. These players will learn too late that Hardcore Crafting Servers make everything (including crafting) less fun, but by that time they'll have friends and guilds and it will be too late to switch servers.

The second group are the people that are already referring to themselves as "Craftcore". They will spend most of their time on the forums belittling people who are not on crafting servers, the so-called "craft bears". Mythic will enforce this view by prohibiting transfers to crafting servers, but not vice-versa.

The end result

I think players will be really happy to see the effort put into the crafting servers, and will agree their inclusion was more than worth the loss of all those lame classes and cities.

jackpot

Today, Mythic announced some big news that you've probably already heard. Four of the twenty-four classes will be missing from launch, and four of the six capitol cities will be missing from launch. Oh, and Mythic is going to use PunkBuster.

My first reaction was surprise. "Boy, is this surprising" I thought, perhaps unsurprisingly.

My second thought was "This is like An Entire Month's Worth Of Easy, Easy Blogs."

This is probably the greatest gift that anyone has ever given me. I think I'm going to cry. I'm just so happy. You know, I could probably milk this one piece of info for an entire year.

Stay tuned for my next blog : "Let's talk about the recent WAR announcement : Part 1 of 47"

Losers always whine about their gear. Winners capture a castle and kill the king.

With apologies to Sean Connery in The Rock ("Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and **** the prom queen.")

Skill, for whatever reason, is probably one of the biggest forum preoccupations in WoW. Who has skill. What kind of play style requires skill. I have skill. You don't have skill. Why doesn't having skill automatically make me a millionaire assassin rock star monk. Etc.

Probably the most popular type of skill discussion is the "skill vs. gear" discussion. The issue is that players with less "skill" can often defeat players with less "gear", and this seems wrong and upsets everyone a great deal.

I had almost forgotten until the topic was inevitably raised in the context of WAR. Bo at The Greenskin kicked it off with a piece on skill vs. gear (part 1 and part 2 up today) and stormcrow over at The White Tower of Hoeth wrote up a couple of pieces as well (part 1 and part 2).

Both seem to agree on certain things. Among others, they agree that inequality is inevitable, and that nobody wants to win due to gear. I agree only with the first.

The problem of MMORPG's and player inequality

Video game RPG's (we'll exclude the table top here) come in all different shapes and sizes, with vastly different gaming mechanics, art, and stories. There's really only one common characteristic that every video game RPG shares : advancement. You spend time playing the game and your character gets more powerful.

So it seems pretty straightforward to assume that PvP in an MMORPG would involve characters of unequal power. Bo and stormcrow both agree on this point, as do I.

Surprisingly many people don't feel this way. You can always find a dozen posts on the WoW forums lamenting that gear matters in PvP.

But Bo and stormcrow are right on when they say that inequality in PvP is inevitable.

Nobody wants to win due to gear

Bo and stormcrow also posit that nobody wants to win because they had better gear. I'll disagree. I just want to win. Play to Win is the best essay ever written about competitive gaming and it is my mantra. According to the essay, the "scrub" is one who

is bound up by an intricate construct of fictitious rules that prevent him from ever truly competing

While a good player wants to develop their skill, they'll also gladly take any advantage they can get. The wanton desire for "skill" is just devotion to a fictional rule. A good player will instead pursue the combination of skill and advancement (gear) that will lead them to victory.

Thrilling And Useful Site News

If you're visiting my site you probably already know that Syp (of Waaaugh) and Arbitrary and Spinks (of Book of Grudges) very kindly accepted my offer to swap links (since you certainly came from one or both of their sites). Very, very kindly since I only had about four hits ever in my first two weeks.

Waaaugh and Book of Grudges are pretty much the two best WAR blogs around, so it's all very cool. I even know that Waaaugh has three letter A's. I am a true fan.

Syp posted tonight about the rules for staying on his blogroll :

RULE #2: Be a helpful, friendly part of the WAR community. If you’re antagonistic to other sites or blogs (in a mean way), if you’re exclusive or insular, if you think the entire WAR world revolves around you and you can’t be bothered to be part of the larger community, then I have no desire to see your name sully this blog. To date, I’ve only ever removed one site from my blogroll because of a snobby, elitist attitude (I won’t mention which one, but I’m sure if you’re bored you can figure it out).

I like the antagonism bit -- I only write because I enjoy being a contrarian ;)

WAR and the Formalization of Games in Games

I wish I remember who said it, but in the past year I read one of my favorite descriptions of video games.

It is not really a primary definition of video game, but more definition from an engineering standpoint. (I really wish I could find the quote, but all I can remember is that some developer said it.) The quote was that "Video Games are collections of smaller games."

WoW as a collection of smaller games

Being really into WoW at that time, you could really see that WoW is the "video game", but there are numerous fully supported smaller games. Levelling to max is a game. Each available reputation is a game. Making money is a game. Getting better gear is a game. Each individual PvP battleground instance is a game, and getting the honor from PvP is another game. Arenas are a game. Quests are games. You could go on and on.

There are also a number of "unsupported" games. For example, you can collect as many non-combat pets as you want, but the game does not recognize this or reward you for it. The most famous unsupported game in WoW is probably the most famous game, period : PvE progression. While you do get gear and rep, WoW does not have any sort of formal recognition of PvE progression. There are official no scoreboards for it, even though end-game progression is considered by most players to be the most important aspect of the game -- the biggest small game.

This always bewildered me, honestly. The guys at Blizzard are quite smart and I never understood why they didn't implement this basic feature.

(I didn't realize it until later, but I wrote a mod that formalized part of the existing game of WoW. It was a mod to show you missing recipes called FGTradeLacker*. This made a semi-formal game out of an informal game. And at least one of my guildies then religiously played the 'recipe collection game' after I created the mod, which I thought was really cool.)

Mythic and innovation in small games

Mythic is making two big moves to formalize existing "small" games in WAR. With the Tome of Knowledge they are adding trophies and logs of past accomplishments. This is not totally new even in a massive game, but WAR's dedication to this mechanic via the Tome of Knowledge is staggering. This is not some tacked-on achievement system : the devs have clearly put a lot of work into the Tome and it's a major part of the game.

The second way WAR is formalizing the smaller games is the Guild system. Not only do guilds gain XP, they also gain their own trophies and (allegedly) have their own point system. This advances far beyond even what Mythic did previously in Dark Age of Camelot. It takes an existing small game (guild achievement) and makes it much more fun by formalizing it.

I think that this mechanic is a major innovation of WAR. In fact, I believe that in time that these formalizations will be seen, over PvP innovations, as the major innovation of WAR.

* In fact if you use one of the current recipe mods they tend to use my original data -- although so far none of the subsequent mod authors who "requisitioned" my data have fleshed out the acquisition info for the cooking recipes, which irritates me to no end. If I can do the research for like 1600 recipes, surely somebody who filched my db can cover the remaining 300!

The Massive Multireader Online Rolereading Blog

To truly serve the fans of the MMORPG, Warhammer : Age of Reckoning, we here at Boathammer have decided you need a new type of blog. A web 4.0 blog. A blog that is actually a game.

Welcome to Boathammer : Age of Bloggening! Thanks to our innovative design, we guarantee that we'll be the best game blogging game that you've ever seen!

Just look at our feature list (WARNING : NOT YET IMPLEMENTED)

• Multiple Modes of Advancement : You can advance in comments posted, trolling, lurking, or cursing
• Comment Dyes : Earn the right to post in custom colors! Pre-orders will get unique comment dyes that will never be available again!
• Guilds : Just respond to a comment to join that person's guild! To quit a guild, don't respond to that person's comments!
• Comment Combat : Players of the opposing faction can delete or alter your comments!
• RVR : RVR included!

Or take a look at our implemented features :

• 15 dollar monthly subscription fee : Just stick 15 dollars cash in an envelope, go to the park, and duct tape it to the bottom of the bench by the tree. It's that easy!
• For non-US residents : please attach the envelope to helium balloon, wait until the wind is blowing towards the US, and release.
• For US residents, if you find a balloon with an envelope attached to it : That's mine. Please stick an additional 15 dollars into it, go to the park, and duct tape it to the bottom of the bench by the tree.
• Released in 2011 : YEAH!

Five Things That Worry Me or Encourage Me About Warhammer

There have been a number of these lists floating around. You'll notice I spend a lot of time comparing WAR to WoW. In my mind there's really no other game in town.

Five Things That Worry Me About Warhammer

1. The NDA is Still Up
   With less than three months to the projected launch date the NDA is still up. Although that kind of secrecy isn't unprecedented, WoW had dropped its NDA around seven months before the game was released.

   Especially considering that you can easily close off "unfinished" portions of the game -- what isn't the general public ready to see?

   One thought is that, while the NDA will allegedly still be active during the guild beta, it might be smoke and mirrors since Mythic may be waiting until the Guild Beta starts to announce the drop.

2. There are still CE's available
   Mythic has made it clear that there are only 60,000 CE's available. The CE should be attractive to players because it offers a head start and guaranteed access to the beta.

   However, there are evidently still a number of CE's still available. Considering the recent success of Age of Conan, selling 60,000 beta keys shouldn't be that hard.

3. Bastion Stair
   Mythic recently released a video of one of the end game dungeons, the Bastion Stair.

   What can I say about it? Well, the exterior looks great. The inside ... well, the inside has an awful lot of red hallways with blue columns connecting small red rooms.

   A raider is going to spend a lot of time in a twenty-five man dungeon and it helps if the dungeon reminds you of how great the game looks instead of how you're sick of looking at the same wall texture for 20 hours a week. If I were Mythic I would hold off on the Stair at release.

4. Variety of Gameplay
   Most MMORPGs have PvE as the main game and PvP as the sideshow. That's OK, because there's generally a lot of solo PvE to jump into, and since PvP is always easy to jump into there are always two options for players who can't find a group.

   Warhammer inverts the equation. Crafting seems a little sparse, and there doesn't seem like there is much solo PvE at max, via repeatable quests or honor or what have you. So what do you do in Warhammer when you're bored of PvP?

5. The Wife Doesn't Think She's Going To Play
   I realize this doesn't affect most of you, but the single most important factor in my MMO adoption has always been my wife's tastes. When I start a game and she doesn't pick it up, I tend to quit. I also tend to quit if she quits.

   It's really for a number of reasons. It's nice to chat with her in game, and I'm not trying to schedule my game playing around hanging out with her (since it's fun to play together). Really , a game doesn't seem massively multiplayer to me unless I'm playing with my wife.

Five Things That Encourage Me About Warhammer

1. What we've seen so far looks good
   With the exception of Bastion Stair I haven't seen any feature of the game that seems poorly designed or just un-fun. Indeed, there are a lot of nice things in the game, like the dynamic landscape (capturing, leveling cities), and the Tome of Knowledge. Not to mention that the Warhammer IP is just rich, fun, and ... old.
2. The devs seem to say the right things
   The interviews with Jeff Hickman and Paul Barnett seem to go well. They talk a good game and talk like they know what a good game is. They seem spontaneous but never seem to throw any red flags.

   Of course I never really understand what Paul Barnett is saying. Who knew Canadians could be so silly?

3. It's the Age of the MMO
   Many people worry about the effect of WoW on WAR, but not me. Nearly everybody who plays WoW needs a break sooner or later. What do you play during your break? How about something a lot like WoW but with some cool, different features?

   I played one MMORPG that I took seriously before WoW. During breaks from WoW I've now tried out four or five.

   In an age where lackluster MMORPG's survive and flourish, an even half-decent Warhammer has little to fear.

4. How successful does it have to be?
   We often talk about WoW's 10 million players but not much about how relatively small other MMOG's have been. It took EVE online two or three years just to hit 100,000 users. And how long have they been around? 100,000 users paying 15 bucks a month gives you almost 20 million dollars a year. When you're paying a lot of technical people that's not an infinite number of money, but it does let you staff more than enough to keep your game going.

   If Warhammer manages 100,000 players in North America and 100,000 players in Europe, subscription fees alone will get them about 35 million a year, which should be more than enough to keep the devs, EA, and the fans fat and happy.

5. They've done this all before
   The game doesn't seem to have the polish of WoW, but I'm also fairly confident that we'll never see a WoW-original-honor-system level catastrophe from Mythic. They have run a successful MMO in the past and hopefully have all their big design mistakes behind them.