Why having only non-Mythic forums is great

If you've spent much time in the official WoW forums, you know that the average post is awful. In fact, I've prepared a style guide.

What Every Official WoW Forum Post Should Look Like, A Style Guide

1. Title
   
   A good title must break as many forum rules as possible without being locked or deleted, for example this is a good start:
   
   BLUE PLEASE READ IMPORTANT PROBLEM
   
   This breaks two rules (all caps and asks Blizzard to answer) and is also totally worthless because it tells us nothing, other than there is a person with some sort of caps-lock related issues. Perhaps they are injured and cannot reach their mouse or caps lock key. The text of the message would say
   
   "I AM BOBBY JACKSON AND I LIVE AT 44897 QUARTER BEACH, UTAH. I FELL AND BROKE MY LEG WITH A COMPOUND FRACTURE AND CANNOT MOVE OR REACH A PHONE, MY MOUSE, OR THE CAPS LOCK KEY. PLEASE CALL HELP IMMEDIATELY."
   
   And you'd think about how courteous he was, apologizing for the caps lock key when he has a bone sticking out of his leg. That's the kind of forum post I'd like to see more often.
   
   But, as we'll see, this hardly every happens.
   
   
2. Narcissism
   
   If you are unhappy with a game, this is the worst thing that could ever possibly happen to the developers of the game. It's probably the worst thing that could happen in the world. Be sure to exaggerate the severity of the problem accordingly.
   
   
3. Insult Blizzard
   
   It's important that you insult Blizzard in some needless and stupid way. Three favorites are 1) they only care about money, 2) they only care about type of player X, or 3) they hate type of player X.
   
   Note that, similarly, a valid response to any post is that "Blizzard does not care about that." For example, if a poster says that their leg has a compound fracture and they cannot more or reach the phone, mouse, or caps lock key, you would respond that Blizzard doesn't care, that they can QQ, and that everyone's perfectly happy with the compound fracture/immobility/bleeding issues except the original poster.
   
   
4. Constructive Criticism
   
   It's good to write this and then highlight it or something so you don't forget to delete it before you post what you've written.
   
   
5. The Complaint
   
   Now, it's important to remember that you need to be as incendiary as possible. It's also important to limit the category of your complaint.
   
   Good complaints also fall into several categories 1) your class is underpowered, 2) another class is overpowered, 3) I am not getting loot fast enough, 4) someone else is getting loot too fast, 5) something is too hard for me, 6) something is too easy for somebody else, or my favorite -- 7) the change that finally fixed a massive truck-sized problem with the game mechanics should be removed.
   
   
6. The Fix
   
   Again, game developers are not ordinary people like us. I mean, we have great, workable ideas for video games all the time, while developers are constantly screwing stuff up. (For example, "Why did you make that class more powerful, it is not my class, you are stupid.")
   
   Instead of being more descriptive about the issue and why you think it's a problem, you should suggest a completely unworkable solution.
   
   Here are some good examples :
   
   Problem : A hunter killed my character
   Fix : Remove Hunters from the game
   
   Problem : Raiders play the game too much
   Fix : Remove Raiders from the game
   
   Problem : Casuals play the game too little
   Fix : Break the legs of casual players
   
   Remember, professional game developers need your suggestions or they might not be able to come up with a solution.
   
   
7. Why It's Broken
   
   If X is broken, it must be because all Blizzard cares about is Y. Be sure to point this out.
   
   For example, if you are dissatisfied with raiding it is because Blizzard only cares about casual players. If you have trouble looting, it is because Blizzard only cares about people who aren't looting. If your server is down, it's because Blizzard only cares about every other server but yours.
   

One thing you'll notice in my style guide (and in the official WoW forums) is all the pointless vitriol. Posts like this are poison, and nothing good can come of them and forums become pointless.

Why is why Mythic absolutely nailed it. See, if Blizzard says "hey, no more poison" and starts banning people it would become a massive scandal and a black eye for blizzard.

However, Mythic can pass off the dirty work to mods at fan forums. Mods at fan forums are accountable to no one, and can delete and ban and destroy until all vitriolic troublemakers have been cleansed.

KABOOM!

That is my unofficial, not-adopted-by-anyone-else motto for my guild, Casualties of WAR. Casualties is kind of a "blogger" guild, and was meant to be for bloggers and anybody who wanted to be in a guild with bloggers. Of the current (roughly) 175 members, 32 are bloggers.

When it comes (and some day it will), I predict the Greatest Guild Breakup The Internet Has Ever Seen. Imagine thirty-two bloggers tearing into each other! KABOOM!

I just love all the wonderful ticking time bombs that the WAR blogging community has offered us. Guilds full of bloggers! Blogs dedicated to a single class the author might not even like! Fifty-plus blog entries written for a game you've only played for ten hours!

Castle Crashers came out today and it looks fun. However, my wife is playing Puzzle Quest right now, and last time we talked about buying Braid I said "let's play through Puzzle Quest first, I want to actually beat a game". Now I've kind of been hoisted by my own petard.

Today was really quiet in the world of WAR blogging, I don't know why. Not a lot to write about if nobody else writes anything. Maybe I'll troll the WHA forums for a while.

Here's one of my old favorites (only in a brand new post) :

Remember in EQ when the game first came out. 6 months after launch there werent many lvl 50s but it was impressive. You knew that if someone was lvl 50 they knew how the hell to play their class. In WoW, you have a 70 hunter on a raid and ask him/her to MD to MT and they look at you like your speaking farsi.

This post just works for me, on at least ten levels:

1. The way it suggests that anything should be copied from EQ into a modern MMORPG. This is awesome.
   
   
2. The way he said "Remember in EQ when the game first came out".
   
   Yes, the 25k people that played EQ when it first came out totally remember when it came out.
   
   
3. The way it talks about "impressing" people. I remember being impressed by level 75's in FFXI. I would always think "Wow, that person is Japanese and got the game like 18 months ahead of me."
   
   
4. How it totally misses the point that modern MMORPG's don't do this because leveling is boring. And it's far less boring in modern MMORPG's than it was back then.
   
   
5. Two words about EQ : Group Leveling
   
   
6. Hey, I have an idea! I'll play the game with my guild. Oh wait -- I'm level 25 and my friends are 32, 40, and 50, guess we can't play together. Bummer we can't play a game like WoW, where I'd be a fresh 70, and my friends are in all-blues, arena epics, and raid epics and legendaries respectively. Because then I could play with them anyway!
   
   
7. The thing that really gets me is that WAR, more than any other recent game, gives you a million ways to impress your friends and acquaintances. You can get your statue in town. You have The Tome. Renown levels are supposed to be hard to get, so you'll get to play with your friends while you all have vastly different renown levels.
   
   You know what would make that better? How about not playing with your friends?
   
   
8. Yeah, it's so surprising that a level 70 might not know how to use an ability they'd only use in a group or raid.
   
   You know, it's almost like they weren't forced to group with other players for 70 levels. Maybe they even got to level at their own pace instead of constantly waiting for groups!
   
   
9. "There weren't many level 50's" -- in other words you play to 50, then you have to think about how much better you are than everybody else, as you wait several months for enough other people to hit max so they can play with you.
   
   
10. And once again, what's my favorite pet peeve? Mistaking bad game design for difficulty! Yaay we have a winner!
    

This is like my most bitter post ever. What I really need is another blog to vent about writing this blog.

Five Reasons Public Quest Booty Chests Are Awesome

You Kill A Mob or Complete a Quest. It gives you reputation. That's pretty much all there is to reputation gain in WoW. Well, the killing is repeated maybe a thousand times, and the quest repeated a dozen or two, but you get the idea.

Reputation is not called reputation in WAR. It's called "Influence". If someone on the street tells you that WoW and WAR are exactly the same, you should point this out.

Influence comes from everything but if you need extra you'll need to find a public quest, which is the best repeatable method to gain influence. Public quests are pretty much what they say. If you wander into a public quest area you'll get a little note on your screen telling you the phase and what needs to be done. You can join an open group or play by yourself and help the rest of the players finish the quest.

On top of the influence you'll be getting (and the fun you'll hopefully be having) you'll also have a chance to roll on the Booty Chest. Players are given a score no higher than 400, based on their contribution (I don't know how low contribution can go, honestly). Then the game rolls 1d1000 for every player, and the players with highest contribution + 1d1000 get loot bags from the Booty Chest.

This has drawn some complaints about the PQ Booty Chest being unfair. After all, shouldn't the people who contribute the most get the best loot, instead of the best chance to get the best loot?

Well, no. Not really, anyway. Well, definitely not in a PQ, let's say that. I like the PQBC the way it is, and here's five reasons why.

1. It Rewards Almost Every Amount of Participation
   
   What really got me thinking about the Booty Chest today was Werit's excellent defense of the existing system, mostly as a discussion about participation.
   
   Public quests can be long and arduous so you'll often gain or lose players in the middle of the PQ. In the current system the players will come and go as they please, and part of the motivation for players who come halfway through is that they'll have a chance at the loot.
   
   But is that a good idea? Of course -- of course it is.
   
   Now it's not a good idea because it's necessarily the most fair thing to do, but because it's just good game design. A player should never look at a game and say "Well, I'd really like to do that, but the game won't really reward me now, so I'll just wait." You're either punishing your players for playing the game, or rewarding them for not playing the game, something you do not want to do.
   
   Of course, rewarding all players is often is the fair thing to do as well. One or two people can start a public quest because early stages are easy, but it might take four or five to complete it, and it's not really fair to tell all the late-but-necessary helpers that they have no chance at loot. The fairness issue also feeds back into gameplay -- if nobody will be rewarded for helping two people complete a five-person PQ, nobody is going to help.
   
   Really, we see the same complaints in WoW as we do here -- why do scrubs (over time) get the same or similar rewards to the best players, do we not want to reward the best players?
   
   The answer is yes -- yes we do want to reward the best players. And WoW and WAR both do reward the best players. Just not as much as the best players would like. For the best players to actually be the best there must be "the rest". And the rest is not going to play if they get nothing for their efforts.
   
   
2. It Rewards Every Effectiveness Of Participation
   
   Suppose you do an entire PQ, healing your ass off the whole time. You get to the end and look at the final scores, and you're stunned. You are ahead of all the other healers -- but you and all the other healers are at the bottom of the list. You see the tanks aren't much better, and that the top five spots all went to DPS classes.
   
   So, do you help out on the next iteration of the PQ?
   
   Well, in a winner-takes-all PQ system you probably would not. It's clear that you'll never ever win because the odds are stacked against your role. Why waste your time here? Why not do some repeatable quests instead?
   
   And, once again, we're punishing players for having fun, and rewarding them for avoiding it.
   
   So instead we use the PQBC system, and it's honestly still not very fair to any poorly balanced classes or roles. But it does still give these players a shot. If a healer thinks it's going to take 7 PQ's to get booty, and also 7 PQ's to get the influence they need, they'll probably stay.
   
   
3. It rewards cooperation, not competition
   
   If you want to witness the depths of intra-faction relations, look no further than the WoW fishing extravaganza.
   
   Every Sunday from 2-4 PM (server time) there is a fishing contest in Stranglethorn Vale, and the player who wins gets the choice of a neat trinket or the nicest fishing rod in the game.
   
   The Fishing Extravaganza, especially on a PvP server, is chock-full of shenanigans. Successful players often have guildies or friends (or mercenaries) patrolling the shoreline, causing trouble for all the other players in the contest. You'll not only have cross-faction griefing, but same-faction griefing, as these "helpers" will try to steal your fish.
   
   If you could win a PQ once and get the best loot, and then never come back, they would turn into the Fishing Extravaganza. And nobody wants that.
   
   With the Booty Chest, everybody is working together to get influence and finish the PQ before timers run out. It's in everyone's best interest to complete the PQ successfully and quickly, so everyone can work towards that same goal without thinking they need other players to fail.
   
   
4. It Does Not Award An Item, It Rewards A Player
   
   This is an idea I've mentioned previously as a mechanism to thwart loot ninjas. This is not really related to the whole "everyone can win" system that I've been praising, but it's such a neat idea I thought I would mention it anyway.
   
   Traditional loot systems award a specific item, or a series of items, to a group, which must then decide amongst itself how the loot will be divvied up, with lots of anger and drama naturally ensuing.
   
   This system allows for no arguments or ninjas by going directly to the player. Furthermore, it gives the winner control over what they win -- if there are no item upgrades you can always take the cash.
   
   
5. The Booty Chest Is Not The Sundae, It's The Cherry On Top
   
   For the final item let's tie it all together. Remember at the beginning where I was talking about the WoW loot grind, how it was rather dreary?
   
   Voila! Public Quests make grinding reputation (influence) in WAR fun! Now, of course it's more fun because you're doing public quests instead of just grinding mobs.
   
   But it's also fun because you're getting intermediate feedback. You see, you're really grinding to get the great, cool loot you'll get with max influence. But wouldn't it be nice to get something great on the way?
   
   The influence gear is the Sundae. The Booty Chest is the Cherry On Top. It's not why you are there but it's a nice treat nonetheless.
   
   But in the same way it's important to remember that it is just a cherry on top. It's there to provide players with a little amusement, but it's probably not something you should take very seriously. No matter what you'll have fun and get your influence loot, and that's what's important.
   

What I liked about the WAR beta

Following hot on the heels of my devastating critique of the WAR beta, here's what I liked about the WAR beta.

This list is mostly fairly specific, and I don't get much into the main features of the game. So I'll just say that I like all the main features of the game -- the Tome, the RvR, the PQ's, the open groups, and the scenarios are all incredibly cool.

1. You are always using skills. I like this. WoW was occasionally slow because you'd would need to conserve mana. Conserving action points comes up much less frequently.
   
   
2. Ironbreaker is a blast to play and it takes me quite a while before I die for the first time.
   
   
3. This is no peculiar insight, but Public Quests rock. Early PQ's are really short which is a great way to ease players into the experience.
   
   
4. You can alt-tab out of the loading window (unlike WoW)
   
   
5. Log on, it says that order population is 258, destruction population is 452. Interesting that they tell you that information without an inaccurate census mod. This comes across as a little cocky of Mythic, to just tell people what the server pops are. I like that.
   
   (Since then this realm population information has been removed, which sucks, although Mythic still tells you the server pop, I believe.)
   
   
6. When someone from Mythic says "War is everywhere" they aren't kidding. You log on for the very first time as a dwarf and you're right beside a cannon duel with the greenskins. There is either PvP or fighting NPC's about everywhere, and this is a really nice feel (I'm always a fan of NPC's that fight each other).
   
   
7. I got like a "ruined" item that has to be repaired before it can be used. Neat idea, I think.
   
   
8. Your "hearthstone" (conveniently called something different in WAR that I'll never remember) resets instantly, so you can hearth home from every quest if you so desire. Unfortunately, it seems like only one quest hub per area has a hearth point.
   
   
9. There's so much going on, it's kind of rare to run somewhere and not see something else interesting on the way. You'll be running down the road and suddenly find yourself in a public quest you didn't expect. This is very cool.
   
   
10. People were worried about PQ poaching but it's not really possible. There's a minimum amount of contribution necessary to get a roll on loot.
    
    
11. There's are a healthy amount of in-town non-combat quests, which is a nice change of pace.
    
    
12. Your map flashes red around the borders when you are attacked. WoW did this too, it's a nice feature.
    
    
13. Level design, and architecture of everything is pretty cool. WoW really nailed certain areas but there are a lot of places that are not that interesting. In WAR it seems like there's been more of an effort to make everyplace interesting.
    
    

Five Things From Friday 5 : Dreams Dashed Edition

1. So I went to the gym (for the first time in like two weeks) on Wednesday night, hoping to listen to the new Chaoscast, and ... my favorite elliptical machine (the one with the kick-you-in-the-teeth "cross-training" program) was gone. So I found another (lame) machine and started the (lame "cross-training") program, and then chaoscast restarted after four minutes, because ... somehow my computer had only downloaded the first four minutes. Aaagh!
   
   
2. Anyway, I finally listened to Chaoscast today, and I was one of the featured community sites. Yaaay! It certainly explains the midweek "bounce" I got. Much like a post-convention presidential candidate, being mentioned in a Syp article will typically give me like 175% traffic for a day.
   
   I was really confused because last week I was third on Syp's Da Bloody Twenty (previous high : 11) and got no Syp bump at all. This week, before I had listened to the Chaoscast I saw that I was not mentioned in Da Bloody Twenty but got the Syp bump anyway. I was very confused.
   
   
3. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, Syp described my URL as "boathammer.wordpress.com" which is a little ... out of date. (current address : http://boathammer.com) However, it does put him in good company, with The Greenskin and Bloghammer which still have my old addie. I should go bug them.
   
   It does mean, however, that boathammer.wordpress.com is still about half as popular as a dead site as it was when it was active.
   
   
4. The fourth race for Dawn of War 2, is officially Tyranids. I'm stoked about this. Hat Tip to Ruur Squig.
   
   
5. I'm quite sick tonight, I had to miss out "date night" with my wife to grab some extra sleep so I had to miss out on Puzzle Quest. I woke up and we hung out for a while, but she just retired so I came to write this blog quick, even though I'm sick.
   
   Reminds me of my old WoW mod, one time I uploaded a new version and there were some remarks about the unusually terse patch notes I had provided. They were largely due to the excessive vomiting of which I partook before, during, and after the version update. When it comes to blogging and modding I am totally hardcore.
   
   
6. I found a particularly disturbing stat in my google analytics this week : according to the cookie, the vast majority of visitors to the site spend less than ten seconds here.
   
   I'm hoping that's an RSS reader thing or something. Right?
   
   Anyway, it does remind me once again that if I could spend my time modding or blogging the former would probably be far more appreciated.
   
   But I don't know if I'll ever end up writing a WAR mod. In WoW I created probably like ten mods but only really had two in good enough shape to share.
   

What I didn't like about the WAR beta

Originally I was going to do a log of my time in WAR but I'm thinking that would be boring. Also I feel a little too nerdy about writing two to four hundred words for every hour in a game.

Overall I liked the WAR beta and I'm going to play the game for a long time. However, here were the things I didn't like.

1. The UI is very busy and the whole experience is very overwhelming at the beginning of the game. There are important UI components that I wasn't even noticing until I had spent nine or ten hours in the game. You end up mousing over every small component on the UI to learn what the UI does. Not very user friendly.
   
   
2. Same thing goes for the game in general. The idea of going into a scenario at level 1 is awesome, but the actuality is really overwhelming because there is too much to do. What would have been nice is to introduce one new thing every level or two until you hit level 10. As much as I want to try out crafting I never got around to it, I was just trying to keep up with everything else going on. Ditto the tome, everything else was happening so quickly I never really got a chance to check it out.
   
   
3. You get a new skill every level, which again I thought was too much too fast. At level eight I thought I had "caught up" with learning how to use all my skills, only to discover that I hadn't learned my four most recent skills.
   
   
4. There seems to be some variety in gameplay for every class, but every variety seems to be "clicky".
   
   
5. I'm sure this won't happen at release, but in the beta I would get like five or ten surveys an hour. I like the idea of surveys, but please, no more than one per hour.
   
   
6. I tried to Dye an item but nothing really happened. Maybe I'm just dying the trim of the item? Either way it was unimpressive.
   
   
7. It's hard to see party members on the mini-map, and if they are out of the area there's no indication.
   
   
8. This is an issue because when you join a PQ I found no indication of the zone or level of the party. All that's indicated is a "time" for the group, the time it would take to run to that group. So you see "4 minutes", and that could mean four minutes across your current zone, or four minutes back to a PQ in a lower tier. You have to join the group, check their levels, and then stay or quit.
   
   
9. Semi-frequently, mobs run away with low health and get far enough away to reset. The running away thing I can handle, the reset is very annoying.
   
   
10. I remember Mythic saying something about when you die they want you to get "right back in the action". You don't get right back in the action, you have to run back from the graveyard just like in WoW.
    
    
11. Speaking of broken promises, I was always under the impression that if you killed a mob before you had the quest, you would "bank" credit for the mob when you got the quest. It doesn't work that way, this only works for these "kill collector" quests, and actually you can't even "get" those quests until you've completed them. This is a big disappointment for me, as I was hoping WAR would finally be the MMORPG to give backtracking a nice firm kick in the behind.
    
    
12. As I feared, it's often hard to get a scenario group, and it's very hard to get a low-level RVR group.
    
    
13. The "find on ground" quests need the WoW upgrade where they show the question mark or whatever even on inanimate objects.
    
    
14. Speaking of question marks, it took me a while to decipher WAR's "new and improved" system for this. If an NPC has a quest for you (repeatable or non-repeatable) he has a yellow open book over his head. If he has a quest you can complete, he has a yellow open book over his head with a difficult-to-see checkmark on it. When they have multiple quests on a list I have trouble telling which is complete, incomplete, or unaccepted.
    
    
15. I was still getting booted, and on at least once in my ten hours I had to quit because the lag had become horrific
    
    
16. PQ's are a nice addition, but they're also yet another thing I'll never be able to enjoy at the odd hours I often play, since nobody will be on.
    
    
17. The number "3" unbinds every time I log on to the game, which is more funny than annoying.
    
    
18. I was playing a "losing" PQ, competing against The Greenskins. All of the sudden they won the first chapter and the whole PQ went away (presumably becoming destruction-only). I'm not sure how I feel about that, but fortunately there was another order PQ nearby.
    
    
19. In all the time I play, I never do find latency or framerate on the UI, or figure out how to display a title on my character.
    
    
20. There's a lot of quest clutter because half of your quests at any given time are "travel" quests, which take a lot longer than normal quests (and obviously take you away from your current questing area).
    
    

Coming soon, what I did like about the WAR beta (probably split into two volumes).

WAR and the people who say it's a WoW clone

So Syp pointed out a few WAR negative nellies over at Waaagh today.

Now, obviously everyone isn't going to like WAR and you can't fault them for that. But the one critique that tends to get under the skin of WAR fans is that WAR is a clone of WoW with a few "minor" upgrades.

Part of this, I think, is that there is some perceived rivalry between WAR and WoW fans, but I don't really buy into it. WoW is a fantastic game. If you like PvE raiding and have a schedule that allows it, you aren't going to find a better game, not in WAR or anywhere else. But those two conditions just don't apply to most players : WoW is a great game but it's the wrong game.

So, is WAR a WoW clone?

Now, as a fan of both games, I don't really believe that WAR is a WoW clone, anymore than WoW was an EQ clone. There are a lot of similarities, because they are in the same genre of game (MMORPG). They are actually in the same sub-genres (fantasy, "theme park" MMORPG).

(If you're not familiar with the idea of "theme park" MMORPG's, it means that the user is guided through the world with quests and classes and common objectives, as opposed to a "sandbox" game in which the user can kind of do whatever they want.)

As you'd expect with games in the same genre, there are a lot of shared genre conventions. There are also a lot of "fixes" WoW made to the genre that WAR picked up, as any responsible developer would. In fact, that's a lot of the problem. The games that followed WoW tried to be different instead of trying to be better, and were unfortunately successful in this endeavor. So WAR looks a lot more like WoW than Vanguard, Tabula Rasa, DDO, LoTRO, or AoC did, and that's because WAR concentrated on being better instead of being different.

Now, being better instead of different doesn't mean you aren't different. It means you take what worked in the past (in WoW and DAoC) and you make it different only if you're making it better.

And this is what WAR does. A lot of things look the same, and the things that don't are vastly improved. In fact, WAR has many big new (or vastly improved) features : it has "war everywhere", PQ's, the Tome of Knowledge, a revamped RvR system, open groups, and living cities (a whole living landscape, really). No other "theme park" game has had as many fun things to do before you even hit level 10. By level 10 in WAR I had already done a bunch of quests, helped kill a couple hundred enemy players in scenarios, taken RvR objectives in world PvP, and gotten influence loot by playing in four or five different public quests.

So I guess my real question is : who are the people that say WAR is a WoW clone? They really fall into two categories.

People who don't know much about MMORPG's

On the internet it's always easy to find experts in any given subject. Expertise, however, is much harder to come by.

These people deride WAR by saying it's a clone, but they also said pretty much the same thing about WoW -- that it had nothing new. But anybody who spent much time playing WoW and a previous MMO could spot the differences pretty easily. You can level on your own, and it doesn't take much time to reach max level. When you hit max level you can play with other people who have been playing much longer. There's an easy to understand questing system that takes you on a guided tour around the world. There's an easy to understand crafting system that rewards you instead of punishing you. Combat is fluid and fun. In fact, nearly every bad mechanic in the genre has been worked and reworked until it's fun.

Likewise, as I've mentioned previously, if you spend even a few hours playing WAR you can spot the differences between WAR and WoW.

People who don't care much about fantasy, theme-park MMORPG's

On the other hand, many of the complaints have come from people who have played the game, such as Brent at Virgin Worlds who said

Having taken part in the variety of game play modes that Warhammer Online offers, I can say with complete confidence that this game might as well have been released 4 years ago as it offers us nothing aside from one standout evolutionary concept, the public quest, that moves the genre forward

His primary complaint is that the game is a grind. This is a frequent gripe people have about MMORPG's. But what game does not feel like a grind when it's made to last for hundreds or thousands of hours? And what game that's meant to be fun for five or six hours will still be fun if you spend hundreds of hours playing it? Honestly, no game feels "fresh" longer than an MMORPG -- that's what they're designed for. But even MMORPG's do not feel fresh forever.

Another viewpoint I see a lot is summed up by Richard Bartle who infamously said

I've already played Warhammer. It was called World of Warcraft.

(He also goes on to say

Age of Conan -- that's PVP. Wow, gosh, PVP – it's pretty hardcore, PVP, isn't it? No. When you played [older MUDs] you got killed after three months of playing, your character was gone. Yeah, hardcore PVP – yeah, we're hard, aren't we?

Which is another one of my pet peeves -- mistaking bad game design for "difficulty".)

Anyway, the big problem is that people like Brent and Mr. Bartle don't see WAR as revolutionary. And to tell you the truth it's not. But making a revolutionary MMORPG is hard, and making a really good one is just impossible. Just making "evolutionary" changes to standard game mechanics (in any genre) is hard. It's not hard because it's hard to come up with new ideas -- it's hard to come up with good new ideas, and then solve all the new problems those new ideas cause.

The extreme difficulty of solving all those new problems ("small innovation") is what really keeps revolutionary MMORPG's from being good, or even being made in the first place. Unsurprisingly, the people that don't appreciate this fact also don't appreciate the "small innovation" that makes WAR more fun than WoW, and WoW much better than EQ.

To Play A Beta Or To Not To Play A Beta

So, with the NDA down, let me just say that I'm pretty excited about WAR. I played over the weekend and got an Ironbreaker to level 10.

It took me about ten hours and I kept a log of my impressions, which you'll all grow to know and hate over the next few days.

But the question facing me now is : should I keep playing?

I do enjoy the game. I can see myself playing almost perpetually after release -- not in the sense that I'll be obsessive, but in the sense that I'll keep playing enough to justify continued subscription.

But part of the joy of playing at release is building your character. Getting crazy tome unlocks. Working on your gear and your level and your renown level and your influence. Anything I do now is just going to be thrown away.

So I think I'm going to take a break until the head start begins. See, one thing I hate about MMO's is that I get so into them that I don't want to play any other games. So I want to spend a month burning through some backlog before that happens. I want to play through Puzzle Quest and Braid and Castle Crashers with my wife before we (or I) get sucked into WAR.

I'll probably log in from time to time and I'm definitely going to keep blogging. I've made it through two months of WAR blogging without being able to play, I think I can do another four weeks ;)

The breaking-in period

In about a month we'll all be frolicking through the Never-Never-Land of Warhammer, feasting on sugarcanes and gumdrops. You'll be talking in guild chat about who's character is more sick from eating candy. I hate to break the NDA the day before it's supposed to drop, but here's one little tidbit : both factions have a public quest area made entirely of chocolate!

The real question is : when you first log on, and prance about this fairytale world of Princesses and Unicorns for the first time, will the servers be able to handle it? Will login servers go down? Will the game even work at launch? Will you be able to level your crafting and start working on your 1,000,000 rabbit kills unlock? How smooth will this launch be?

To help us put these heady launch times in perspective, let us go back in time almost four years. Let's go to the most successful MMORPG launch to date. World of Warcraft : Age of Forty-Man Wipening. How did that one go?

I won't keep you in suspense : server performance sucked. It was so bad that Blizzard had to focus on server fixes instead of game content for the first few months.

I was on Mannoroth, one of the original PvP servers. And lag and stability were bad, really bad. It took three or four months for the server to really start staying up every night.

Then, with the server problems solved forever, Blizzard premiered their first big content patch, introducing the Blackwing Lair raid instance. The very first encounter was this crazy thing where your whole raid group of 40 people fought like 50 mobs at the same time and it was insane and fun.

Neat feature too -- you could tell when another guild on your server was doing that encounter because it would lag every other BWL raid instance. It didn't matter much -- BWL wasn't totally complete when it was released (neither was Molten Core, the first raid instance, for that matter). Blizzard just had a door after the second boss that would not open. And that second boss was broken for a while so everyone got to relearn him when he was "healed" of his crippling lag issues.

Well, how about the honor system? Let's talk about that. The first honor system, the honor system the Blizzard talked about pre-release, was going to reward PvP and control griefing. So you could roll on a PvP server and have fun with PvP against same-level players, but it would protect you from high-level characters ganking you! That's an awesome idea right? It's so awesome I rolled with my wife and friends on a PvP server.

But the idea of anti-griefing systems was evidently not that awesome, as Blizzard eliminated it when they finally premiered the honor system six months after launch.. Yaay! I really liked their reasoning too : they were worried about low-level characters griefing high level characters. I know I was always worried about lowbie gankers when I played. They were a freaking epidemic.

But once the (now old) honor system was implemented, it was sheer bliss, right? After all, it rewarded quantity of participation, not quality. So if you were on a PvP server, the best players could hit Grand Marshal and get the best Weapons and PvP Gear in the game! As long as by "best players" you mean unemployed people who would literally play for a hundred hours a week in a question to see who could "participate" the most!

I guess what I'm saying is this : Mythic is going to have to try really hard to not have the smoothest MMOG release in history. Collector's editions could start exploding and burning down city blocks, and it would still be better than WoW's release.

My End-of-Year WAR Population Estimate

The cool new thing to do is predict the reach of Warhammer : Age of Reckoning by the end of the year. Book of Grudges helpfully sums up the existing predictions ... basically everybody is going for 1 million or more copies sold by the end of the year.

Except me.

I think WAR is going to do great in the long run. In the Massive world, word of mouth is everything. And there's going to be a lot of positive word of mouth about WAR.

But WAR is not really flashy. It is a lot like WoW, and people that are looking for a change from WoW aren't going to see much of a difference.

It reminds me of something that happened at work that I heard about via water-cooler talk. My company put in a bid for a project. We put in a unexciting, pedestrian bid, and told the customer we would do what we had done for others in the past.

One competitor did pretty much the opposite. They put in an exciting, thrilling bid, and promised the world to the customer. And the customer went with the new, exciting, thrilling bid, instead of the old-reliable-but-still-much-better-than-the-status-quo bid we submitted. And now that customer is up to their arms in crap because the exciting thrilling bid didn't deliver and could not have delivered, but they still paid for all that non-delivery.

I see MMOG fans as much like our excitable customer. Age of Conan promised the world and everybody went nuts -- until they realized that Age of Conan wouldn't, and in fact couldn't deliver on their exciting promise.

As much as Paul Barnett shouts, WAR does not promise the world. You'll have the tome. You'll have public quests. You'll have a PvP-based endgame. These are going to make the game incredibly fun but they do not blink, flash, or explode at your average gamer.

Because of this, and judging by the meager number of pre-orders, I expect WAR to have 250k-500k sales by year end.

MMORPG's and the multi-faction learning curve

Syp was nice enough to include me in his latest gab bag. One of the questions was whether we were planning to roll characters on multiple servers.

I said that, following my WoW experiences, I'd probably just go with a single faction. In WoW I had four level 60's back in the day, and got one of those to 70 (and since then I got another char to 63 and then quit). But those were all alliance. My highest horde character was only 20 or so.

I really wanted a high-level horde character for a prospective mod I was making so I always had a goal of leveling one. But I never was able to do it.

The biggest problem was that I'd grown familiar with the alliance leveling areas. If you do a new area in WoW for the first time you end up looking a lot of stuff up. So, while my first alliance character or two was probably hard, by the fourth or fifth I had most of it down pat.

But then I'd try to level my horde character in a zone I didn't know and had to constantly look stuff up. It wasn't that it was harder than my first alliance character, in fact it was probably much easier. But relatively it was an enormous pain and I just didn't have the patience for it.

WAR really ups the ante in this regard, as there is whole set of zones for every race. So if I do a human or a high elf (after my dwarf) I'll also have a whole new set of zones to learn.

The more I think about it, though, the more I think that I want to have a max-level character in each realm. So, learning from my mistakes, I think I'm going to level an order and destruction character to max right off the bat in WAR.

Taking Off For The Week

I'm headed out of town on Wednesday for a few days and I decided to give myself another couple of days off. Mostly after I wrote 75% of a blog tonight but it sucked and I'd either have to start over or rework it.

Have a nice week, folks. May all your torrents be seeded.

Finally got my closed beta invite

10:03 PM last night. Yaaay.

I got it via my CE pre-order.

I have to get to work so I can't set my account up or download the client yet or anything. It is my understanding that there is a special "Collector's Edition Closed Beta" and I'm not even sure that it's active yet. And I'm going away on vacation this week. So it's quite possible I'll still miss the closed beta entirely.

MMORPG's and the spoils of anti-social behavior

If you've played WoW, you've probably experienced it. You run a dungeon, some good loot drops, and it's ninja'd by the group leader, or by someone who didn't really need it, or by someone who rolled on it "for an alt".

If you've ever raided in WoW, you've experienced it again. Something cool drops for the guild, and the officers decide to override the normal loot system to give the loot to themselves or one of their buddies.

And if you've ever played a game without protection against scams (FFXI or EVE Online, for example) you've probably either been scammed, or were hesitant about making deals lest you be scammed.

Ninjas and scammers do what they do because there are no (or few) repercussions to their actions. Why do massive games reward anti-social behavior?

The Ninja Looter

Ninjas, if you've never heard the term before, are people that steal (or ninja) loot from other more deserving players in group settings.

Now, in an ideal world Ninjas would not be a problem. Your friends and guildies are always available when you want to run an instance or dungeon. They do not ninja from the group because they are good people, and also because the punishment is more severe when you steal from your friends or guild. You would never be trusted again, and would likely be booted from your guild or group of friends.

Some players believe that this ideal world exists in real life, as does at least one MMORPG developer, Blizzard. Perhaps if you join a 500-person guild there are always trustworthy people available to run an instance with you.

For most people, however, the ninja is an ever-present problem. There is no method for an entire server to punish a ninja looter. And even if there was, name changes and server transfers would render it ineffective.

The Corrupt and/or Inept Guild Leadership

In many MMORPG's, loot in raids (large groups) is allocated by the raid leaders who are typically also the guild leaders of the raiders. Inevitably, it seems, the judgment of the guild leadership falters, and they make a bad decision, either intentionally or unintentionally.

Once again, I'll note that in an ideal world this would never happen. And once again, I'll note that many gamers, as well as Blizzard, believe that this ideal world actually exists. They'll often say something to the effect of "Why would you be in a guild you can't trust?"

Having been in such a guild (twice), I can tell you that there are a multitude of reasons. Your friends are in that guild. It's hard to find a new guild. In one case I was in that suspect guild because it was still the most trustworthy raiding guild in my faction, because unfortunately "most trustworthy" and "trustworthy" are not always synonymous.

And more so than with ninja looting, poor judgment is as much of an issue as corruption and cronyism. Guild leadership will try to do the right thing and award loot to those most deserving, but then misidentify who the best and most reliable players actually are.

As with ninja looting, there is little recourse. The guild cannot really remove the leadership without disbanding and reforming. So there seems to be a dearth of raiding guilds that are fairly run, probably because there are few adults (in maturity, not age) who actually have that kind of free time and are willing to invest it into a guild.


The Scammer

In most MMORPG's, at least some important types of financial agreements among players are not enforced by the game or the developers. Unscrupulous players will take advantage of this situation and cheat other players out of items and money.

Once again, in an ideal world this would never happen. Everyone would be trustworthy, and any dirty dealers would be cast out. Once again, idealists claim that this is an achievable goal. In fact, they'll often tell victims that "it's your own fault."

However, in this case, Blizzard does not agree.

Blizzard keeps records of chat logs for 24 hours or so, and if you scam another player and that player complains Blizzard will make it right. They will usually return the ill-gotten coin or item, and often punish the scammer with a suspension or ban.

This approach tries to create the ideal world instead of just claiming that it should exist. Now, it's not completely ideal, as there are still unscrupulous people who either don't know or don't care about a ban. There are also unsuspecting players who do not know that scammers can be punished. Once I saw a self-identified newbie and victim of a scam ridiculed in general chat until I mentioned that he did have effective recourse against the scammer. Hopefully he went on to pursue GM-meted justice.

This system also allows even suspicious players (like myself) to trade freely and confidently, in a way I could never do in FFXI or EVE Online.

The Greater Effects of Anti-Social Behavior in MMORPG's

It's worth considering that this rewarding of scamming and cheating eventually spills over into real life. Someone who revels in taking advantage of others will find lots of negative reinforcement in a typical MMO.

Sometimes the scamming and cheating dovetails with actual gray-market or criminal behavior. Gold farmers are also notorious ninja looters who will then sell the now well-equipped characters to unscrupulous buyers. These same gold sellers, as Blizzard has pointed out, will often sell gold and items from hacked accounts -- literal theft.

And what does this say to kids who are playing the game? That scammers win, and that there can be little consequence to their actions. That honest people are at a disadvantage from the start. Nice guys finish last.


Attacking the Problem Instead of The Victim

In these three instances we've only seen one truly effective countermeasure. Blizzard, the developers of WoW, put their foot down against scamming. They developed and maintained a mechanism (chat logging) that allows them to punish scammers. And this system works.

Likewise, talking about ninja looting and bad guild loot allocation will not solve those problems either. What we need are actual game mechanics that disrupt or eliminate these activities.

Attacking The Ninja Looter With Game Mechanics

The mechanic that is the chief culprit in ninja looting is the Vegas-style loot system. The boss drops a few pieces of discrete loot and the players decide amongst themselves how it is to be distributed. Inevitably a player "decides" that they deserve loot they don't really deserve and the whole system crashes down.

WoW does provide some mitigation of this by providing reputation loot and shareable coin. Reputation is awarded based on participation, not rolls, so no player can "steal" reputation from the rest of the group. Coin is split evenly among the group (although some rare coin-related foul play still occurs).

Strict participation-based rewards are nice as part of an overall reward strategy but cannot stand on their own, nor serve as a primary loot mechanism. They offer no special reward for completing a dungeon, earning rep feels like a grind, and there's little reason to return to an instance after hitting the maximum reputation it offers.

A more viable, primary loot distribution mechanism would be to reward a random player instead of dropping a random reward. Vegas loot systems drop a random reward, and then make players decide/fight over it until one player is rewarded. Why not cut out the middleman? Pick a random player, and then pick a random reward (or give them a token) that suits them. Like normal loot, you won't always be giving people something they need -- but it will eliminate the fighting and decision that lead to despair and greed.

Attacking Poor Raid Loot Distribution with Game Mechanics

Loot distribution in a raid is a little trickier since you don't really want the loot to be random. You want to make sure the loot is evenly distributed over time, and you want to award the loot to better and more dedicated players first.

Good guild leadership will do this for you but it is hard to come by.

I won't lie to you and say this is an easy problem to solve. Guild leaders control the raid, so if you try to favor participation or contribution in raid loot rolls, guild leaders can game those numbers just like they game their own guild's loot rules to reward the wrong people.

Having each individual roll against their own potential piece of gear doesn't work well either, because you'd either have to cap the numbers (which would allow more gaming of the system) or have entire guilds that get all their dungeon gear in a single run.

If I could tell you a great answer for this I would be working at Blizzard or Mythic instead of writing a blog in my study. A good system, however, could be to award the lowest quality 80% of the loot in a dungeon as reputation (participation) loot, and allow the highest quality 20% of the loot to be awarded by the guild officers. So in the worst case scenario, everyone would at least get 80% of the loot they wanted even if the guild refused to give them anything.

I guess the best way to solve the guild loot problem is to do what WAR has done, and cut guild looting out of the picture almost entirely by getting rid of large scale PvE raiding.

Big Round of CB invites to CE pre-orders

I guess no other bloggers are around to mention this, but a large round of cb invites sent to CE preorder customers has started and then stopped. Account servers are not yet up but people are downloading. Another round of invites tomorrow according to Mythic.

Excited Warhammer Alliance Thread

Note from James on The Herald saying it's all over for today:

Are You Ready for WAR?

Well you better be!

CE Pre-Orders are being invited in multiple waves, and the first wave has just hit the shore. The servers aren't up yet but you can prepare to join the WAAAGH by getting the client now!

Remember that CE invites are still subject to eligibility, but everyone who pre-ordered the CE will get in for the Preview Weekend coming up soon!

We'll have more for you tomorrow, check back then same bat time, same bat channel.

WAAAGH!!!

Five Things From Friday 4 : Denied Blogs Edition

1. I was so going to make a fake guild charter (I might still do it). And I was going to require all guild members to have a special USB hand that could be used to slap them at any time.
   
   And then I see this.
   
   You Blew It Up! Damn You! Damn You All To Hell!
   
   
2. Went to see my brother and an old college friend last saturday. Turns out my friend writes mods too, only for Ultima Online, which he's been playing on and off for ten years.
   
   
3. Another old friend came to stay with me this week : my 360. Yaay.
   
   
4. Once I get in the game I think it's going to be very tempting to forsake writing (a little or a lot) to write mods. Coding is fairly tempting because I'm a mediocre writer but a fairly competent software engineer and coder. There's no doubt that a decent mod would be far more popular than this blog.
   
   
5. I noticed some of the newer blogs have linked to me, this is very encouraging to see. I usually try to return the favor but I am a little behind on my blog reading this week.
   
   
6. I only wrote two real blogs between a week ago Thursday and this last Wednesday. Only one of those two blogs was really any good. This after I had spent almost two weeks writing a real blog almost every day. This blogging stuff kills me sometimes.
   
   
7. Oh yeah, the exciting week in review :
   
   
   • I'm not so sure about Open Dungeons
   • The Ten Unhappy Facts of WAR
     
   
   Seriously, that was it.
   
   
8. I hit a thousand visits and over a thousand pageviews (overall) this week. Yaay.
   

Mixed Thoughts on WAR's Open Dungeons

Read an article today about the Warhammer : Age of Reckoning dungeon experience. Evidently WAR is mostly going to use the conventional "open world" dungeons, instead of the "instanced" dungeons that are heavily used in other MMORPG's, WoW being a notable example.

Open World Dungeons and Instanced Dungeons

Open World dungeons are dungeons that are part of the game world. Since they are part of the game world, there is just one version of each dungeon per server, so everyone on a server who goes to a particular dungeon (for better or worse) ends up playing with everyone else in that dungeon.

Instanced dungeons are dungeons that are separated from the game world by a zone border. Typically developers will use instancing to allow multiple "instances" of a dungeon, so that multiple parties can each progress through their own unique version.

Mythic is going to use open dungeons at least in part, but with two important improvements. First, open dungeons (or at least the ones in the article) will have public quests, which will allow large numbers of people to cooperate together (instead of compete). Second, there will be instanced bosses so players (again) are not competing against each other.

Why Open Dungeons Have Sucked

This competition is one of the biggest reasons that open dungeons never worked in the first place. Everyone would go into the same dungeon, kill the same monsters, and then wait for the "Rare Spawn" (that was the goal of the dungeon) to appear. In games like EQ or FFXI, the best loot drops often came from these rare spawns. Rare Spawns are probably the worst game mechanic ever used in an MMORPG, and that's pretty special in a genre overflowing with awful, awful mechanics.

Here's how they work : about every n hours this uber monster would appear, and whoever killed the monster had a chance at some uber loot. n could range from an hour to several days, but was usually at least a few hours. So not only were players "playing" the game by sitting around and waiting (sometimes for literal days on end), they are also in cutthroat competition with each other. Only one player or group of players will kill the beast, and only those people have a chance at loot.

Rare Spawns are a triple threat : they are time-consuming, boring, and they encourage (and reward) antisocial behavior.

(Humorously, you'll occasionally hear old-school massive gamers complain about how "easy" games have become since this mechanic has been eliminated. You know, since sitting on your behind for 30 hours waiting for one minute of combat requires way more skill than constantly fighting during an 8-hour raid. It's not just old massive gamers either, many other gamers also see bad game design and think "This game is hard, awesome!".)

An Open Dungeon Alone in a world of Instanced Dungeons

Then WoW came riding in a white horse and single-handedly slew the Rare Spawn beast, probably after pulling an all-nighter waiting for it to show up. WoW did this by having practically none of the best loot come from rare spawns. Rare spawns still exist in World of Warcraft, and they are fun, but their importance is greatly diminished.

So, anyway, here comes Mythic, back with the open dungeons, hopefully having solved many of the problems that plagued them in the past. Open dungeons certainly suit WAR, which seems to encourage a much more casual approach to PvE. You'll be able to wander into a dungeon and hopefully find a group to play with. But will they solve the problems?

I think WAR's open dungeons will work out better than the failed open dungeons of the past. Whether they truly work, however, depends on design decisions we have not yet seen. Will there still be rare spawns? Will players be fighting over quest mobs? Will you be competing against players from the other realm, and if so, is the dungeon more fun or less fun? Is Mythic going to universally provide public quests and instanced bosses in every dungeon? I guess we'll find out soon.

WAR-Blogger-And-Blog-Reader-Guild is GO

Jobildo announced today that the WAR Blogger and Blog Reader Guild is now active and it's called Casualties of War, probably after that great Michael J. Fox movie. I would have suggested "WAR is NOT the answer", but who would listen?

There's also a forum for WAR bloggers that's launched recently, at blogwarhammer.net.

Oh yeah, there was also a ton of news today that's very exciting to hear but rather tedious to talk about, so I'll skip it. Suffice to say I'm excited that I will be able to play in a closed beta for the first time ever.

Ten Unhappy Facts of WAR

I just made myself a Black Cow. That's a root beer float with chocolate ice cream (at least according to Baby's).

So, I'm relaxed, I'm well rested from my little four day hiatus. Let's do this.

1. WAR is going to be Grindy at times
   
   Massive gamers hate few things more than grinding. Fortunately that hate isn't wasted, as only one game genre really has grinding, and that's massive games.
   
   Massive games are always going to have a lot of repetition for two reasons. First, it's expensive to create content, and without repetition all MMORPG's would either be 150 hours long or cost (literally) like a billion dollars to create.
   
   Secondly, and much more importantly, too much content keeps people from playing together. Everybody wants 100 5-mans instead of 10, but good luck filling up your group, or finding anyone who's done the instance before.
   
   Now obviously some massive games are less "grindy" than others. And that's great. But it's impossible to make a massive game that never ever feels like a grind.
   
   
2. (I'm pretty sure) There Will Be Gear Advancement
   
   Many are hoping that WAR will save them from the WoW gear grind, but I doubt that WAR will do so. Gear advancement is great for a lot of reasons, but mostly for one enormous reason:
   
   If it's an RPG, people expect to become more powerful the more they play. If they quit becoming more powerful, they quit period. Without gear advancement WAR will not be able to hang on to players.
   
   Yeah, I know you all loved DAoC which didn't have much gear advancement. Didn't quite have ten million subscribers though, did it?
   
   
3. Waiting is Not Going To Be Easy
   
   I've formally decided I do not care when WAR is released. My 360 is back and I'm going to pick up some new XBLA games and ride out the storm.
   
   
4. Playing Road To War is Not Going To Make Waiting Any Easier
   
   Although I could multiply my traffic by a factor of ten by putting a fake head on my blog ...
   
   
5. There's Going To Be Downtime
   
   If MMORPG players hate anything more than grinding, it's downtime. Downtime is the bane of the online gamers existence.
   
   Except that, as much as gamers talk about hating downtime, they actually need it. People do not enjoy playing games with no downtime, they need rest.
   
   
6. It's (probably) not going to be easy to find scenario groups
   
   Mythic has announced neither cross-server scenarios nor dogs of war. Which means that it's going to be hard to find enough people to play a lot of the time, especially if you are ahead or behind the leveling bulge at launch. I expect long queues.
   
   
7. There will not be horizontal expansions
   
   I know this is a favorite of Syp and the other Chaos Cast guys, but I don't see it happening.
   
   Most players are not going to level a second character to max, ever. Why would Mythic release an expansion where 80% of the content will never be seen by 60% of the players?
   
   And why play a new expansion unless there is better gear, or there are better dungeons or better cities? And if you are making new stuff better than old stuff, what is that called? Oh yeah, vertical expansion.
   
   So either you make this lame expansion that people can literally skip, or you have a vertical expansion and call it a horizontal expansion. Or you just have vertical expansion and everybody gets new skills and goes to the new areas and everything comes up roses.
   
   
8. Open Servers will ruin Public Quests
   
   Public quests are one of the great innovations of WAR. So why roll on a PvP server where you'll never finish a PvE PQ without getting ganked, and furthermore stand the chance of just never finishing many PvE PQ's because the ganking causes you to run out of time? What about when one of your realm guys has buddies from the other realm ganking everyone but him so he can maximize his contribution and influence?
   
   PvP servers in WoW are not really harder, they're just slower. You end up avoiding a lot of content which is why I think PvP servers are stupid, although they aren't the reason I truly hate PvP servers.
   
   (The reason I truly hate PvP servers is that I had a 70 demo lock in TBC and I never died 1v1 to gankers. When I was 60 or leveling and dying to gankers I thought, "well, if I won it would be cool". But then I learned the truth : winning also sucks because it still wastes your time.)
   
   I think public quests are great, and I think people who roll on open servers are going to find that they're missing out.
   
   
9. Large Guilds are still going to have an enormous advantage
   
   Mythic has made much of some measures they've taken to improve the experience for small guilds as opposed to large guilds.
   
   But, if the end game is capturing and holding keeps, how can small guilds compete? Having a large guild does not mean you'll be able to capture and hold a keep, but being bigger is always going to help, and being smaller is always going to hurt.
   
   
10. Hardcore RvR is going to be even more obnoxious than Hardcore Raiding
    
    At least with WoW's (terrible) scheduled raiding you had some idea of what the end-time would be.
    
    Not with RvR. In RvR your guild is going to be this close to capturing a keep right when you're supposed to go to bed. And then, finally, about an hour or two after bedtime, you'll finally capture the keep.
    
    Cool. Now it's time to hold the keep. How long can you hold it? How little can you sleep and not wreck on the way to work?
    
    

I still can't wait to play WAR.

Workhammer : Age of Meetening

Many of the bloggers who are in the closed beta are collecting questions that they can answer when the beta drops.

It makes me really, really hope that when the drop the NDA the open beta is just days away. I really don't feel like having nothing to do but pour over answers to a billion questions about a game I still am not playing.

Also, looks like radio silence from me for the next couple of days. Work beckons. I also haven't written a real blog entry since Thursday. I started exercising again at about the same time I started this blog, and both things are kind of the same. It feels really weird going more than a couple of days without working out/blogging.

NDA Drop This Week Or No?

Saw this post by Mark Jacobs over at WA

Seriously though, we will have some good news to impart within a week. No, it is not big, earth-shattering news like our release date but I promise (and you know I don't do that often) that it will be well-received by the community and it doesn't involve my head on a pike.

On one hand, he promises that it will be well-received by the community, which seems like it is either the Open Beta announcement or the NDA drop.

On the other hand, he says it is not earth-shattering (which either of the aforementioned things would be) and he also says it is not news about the release date. That seems a little weird to me -- it just seems like they'd drop the NDA, announce the OB, go gold, and announce the release date all at the same time, since doing any one of those means you know enough to do the others.

Warhammer Blogger and Reader Beta Guild

This idea has become popular, evidently, with everybody linking back to my original post. I do appreciate the traffic but it's something that seems a little over my head, both in the sense that I'll often have like a single hour to play on particular days during the beta, and in the sense that this is not a particularly well-traveled site.

In my original post I hoped that Keen, Syp, or Snazfg would take up the mantle, being much more popular than myself and being in NA (sorry spinks and arbitrary). None of them did (sadness).

However, a blogger by the name of JoBildo thinks it's a good idea, in fact an idea that had similarly occurred to him. I've only recently found this blog and it's quite good. AND his little post about a guild has something like 35 posts. So he must be charismatic and popular.

So, JoBildo, I hereby nominate you to be head blogger-guild-blogger. Before you accept, keep in mind that this potentially puts you in the position of having to invite me to a guild, a delicate but deadly conundrum in which nobody truly wins.

Five Things From Friday 3 : I'm a Massive Man and I need a Massive Game

1. Getting to Know Boat
   
   Rick over at /random asked in a post why this blog was called Boathammer. I was busy doing something and never responded, and if I did now it would be ten posts down and nobody would ever read it, so here goes:
   
   I really go by "Boat" in games, so "Boathammer" was the first thing that came to mind when trying to come up with a WAR-related blog name. Exciting stuff, huh? :)
   
   I go by boatorious on this site (among others) because it tends to be much more available. Like, as far as I know there are no other Boatorious's on the web, but there are "boat"s erupting from every e-orifice the internet has to offer. Surprisingly, there are other "Boathammers". I didn't even search the name because I figured it would be unique. Google reveals, however, that there are real people with the last name "Boathammer".
   
   What did "boat" come from? One of my friends loves quirky names for characters, and other things -- he had a cat he named "Bucket", for example. Anyway, one day I saw the word, "boat", and it occurred to me that my friend would love that as a name, so I decided to adopt it.
   
   Later I told him about the name and he hated it.
   
   First time I used the name was in a game of Natural Selection (Half-Life mod). The server owner told me I had to change my name from "Player" or I would get kicked. I changed my name to boat and asked him if that was any better, and he said "barely".
   
   
2. Site News
   
   I had ads for the past two weeks. Nobody ever clicked them so I killed them off. I came to the realization that I have neither the traffic to make money nor the kind of traffic that clicks ads nor does either seem likely or desirable. Farewell, sweet Adsense!
   
   While I ran the ads I got to ban about 10 gold-sellers, which was painful in a way but awesome in another. I also tended to get really weird ads. Like if this post had ads, they would all be about (literal) boats, instead of about, you know, Warhammer: Age of Reckoning.
   
   
3. Boathammer Week(s) in Review
   
   Some day I'll get motivated and list other people's stuff that I liked that week. Until I quit being lazy, here's what I've posted recently ...
   
   The War Blogger And Friend Guild
   
   
   • Proposed Here
   
   Shameless Enumeration
   
   
   • I reacted to the E3 News Ten Times, which is nine times better than reacting only once
     
   
   Attempted Thoughtfulness And Game Design
   
   
   • Why Mark Jacobs is a Real Man
   • It's a good thing I like losing or I'd be a very unhappy man
   • I blog once about another game in "Hellgate: Failure". This single non-WAR post killed the entire site for like a week.
   • I think about the head start and then write about it. This is probably the worst thing I've ever written, it's so bloody boring. This is my second worst post ever just for linking to it.
   • Why I think Public Quests will not benefit AFK'ers.
   • Why I have all those Gear Advancement Posters on the wall
     
   
   Totally True
   
   
   • The Perils of Banking Content (note to adsense : not about banks)
   • I meant this one to be the Definitive NDA Waiting Post
   • my guide to the White Lion
     
   
   
4. WAR Blogger and WAR Blog Reader Beta Guild
   
   Looks like there's some interest in a blogger beta guild after all, my little story had ten posts (a new record yaay). I think I'll just start running a regular semi-weekly reminder to keep people on their toes.
   
   
5. I am Stat-Obsessed
   
   In case you can't tell already this post, I am so obsessed with stats. That's actually why I blogged for eleven days straight -- I gotta have the visits. Unfortunately most of the stuff in that eleven days did not seem to go over too well. I'm sure after that day off on Tuesday that everything will be gangbusters from here on out.
   
   On top of that I set a visit record on the day I had no new blog. Kick a guy while he's down, why don't ya?
   
   
6. If you're a WAR blogger in the beta : you suck
   
   No beta invite yet but I did get another welcome email -- my 360 has already been fixed, about a week and a half after I shipped it. I never would have guessed when I bought it, but I'm really in it for the XBLA games. They're such a nice distraction when you're done with what you're doing but still have 15 minutes until bedtime (like right now, can you tell?)
   
   
7. How did I know arbitrary and spinks were in the beta
   
   I did notice, as they themselves blogged, that their posts had become a little less ... contenty.
   
   But mostly I noticed my sad little blog posts, sitting around alone and commentless.