(Don't) Roll The Priest

I mentioned recently that Cataclysm made me very happy because Blizzard finally introduced Gnome Priests, a class I literally wanted to play at launch five years ago. I mentioned to my wife and my guild that I would be switching to a Gnome Priest after Cataclysm launched.

For about a month, that was that.

Then at some point I started to have second thoughts. I do like playing a warlock. I don't know if I could say I was good at warlock, but as far as I can have a relationship with the word "good" in a gaming context, that would be me on my warlock. I have hundreds (perhaps thousands) of hours on my two warlocks and at some point your fingers start to remember where particular spells reside and you can handle change and disaster almost without thinking. That's a nice feeling.

At launch I had wanted to be a gnome priest -- I wanted to be a healer because healers are useful, and I wanted to be a gnome because gnomes are small and therefore harder to target in pvp. Denied that, I wanted to be a gnome ranged damage dealer, and my friend was already going to be a gnome mage.

So Boat the Warlock was born.

It's amazing that I've stayed a warlock all these years. At a few points while leveling I contemplated making a warrior, but never did because then our little guild would need another warlock. After I started raiding I also tried making a warrior, but my guild never accepted that and I eventually left. Then I came back to WoW again and ended up raiding as a hunter until TBC came out and then I switched back to lock permanently.

And when I've thought about switching classes recently, my mind always drifts to tanking. As WoW has dragged on DPS roles have gotten a little harder and healing roles have gotten a little easier, so tanking now sticks out as the "hard" job in groups, where if you fail the group fails. They have become the quarterbacks of WoW.

But really, the whole idea of switching classes to achieve happiness seems a little bizarre to me. People always say they are happy with their new class, but are they really happier, or is the game just better now? The classes all have different styles, but there is so much subtlety that I don't know if most players could match styles and classes (I don't know if I could). So many people switch because their class is underpowered, but that's constantly changing. I'm sure there is somebody out there who switches to a new class every six months, just arriving at max level in time to get a massive nerf.

Designing an MMOPRG is Easy

The loot design for the Headless Horseman is pretty fascinating to me. The Headless Horseman is part of WoW's "Hallow's End" event (aka Halloween), and most of those events have a boss in an old instance that you go kill.

Anyway, the loot is great -- it's layers upon layers, solving multiple problems.

Problem 1 : How do you get new players to do an instance for possibly the first time?

The Headless Horseman drops several nice rings. They will not replace any raid gear (because that would cause other problems) but they are a nice upgrade for a new player. Now, I'm not saying that a new player would necessarily know about this, but if they did it would encourage them to get out and group.

Problem 2 : How do you get the average player to do the event every day?

You don't want people to do the event just once and then quit -- you want them out there doing the event for most of the two week event.

So you tie an achievement to two semi-rare drops, but do not make them super-rare. You want your achievements to be achievable -- so you give the items a high enough drop rate that pretty much every player should be able to get both over the course of two weeks.

Problem 3 : Once they get the drops for the achievements, how do you get people to come back?

You want people to continute to participate once they have the achievement for two reasons -- first that they are enjoying the event you created, second that you want everybody to get the achievement items, and that's easier if there are more and more people who don't need them.

So you add a sort-of unachievable goal (that is not an achievement) -- a rare mount that most people probably won't even see in two weeks.

Problem 4 : How do you make people do the encounter in a full group?

No sooner would you put this encounter out on the servers than a raid-geared hunter would figure out how to solo the thing. It's nice as an achievement, but you want people to be grouping, both because you want to encourage grouping and because you want the best players in the game in groups with people who aren't, helping and sharing their greatness.

So instead of making the encounter a once-a-day event for all involved (with a 30% chance to drop the achievement items and 1% chance to drop the mount), you make the encounter started-once-a-day-per-character with appropriately lower drop rates, so anybody not going in with a full group is handicapping their drop rate.

Problem solved, right?
There might even be layers that I'm missing here, or maybe I'm overthinking things. Designing a MMOPRG is hard work, though, and you can see how difficult by seeing how much work goes into the loot for a boss that is only in the game two weeks a year.

Blizzard's Alt-Blocking Madness

My first max level alt was a hunter named Croquet. He hit level 60 when I'd been playing the game for six or eight months.

Those were the simple days of WoW. You raided in the evenings, and leveled alts during the day because there was nothing else to do.

My second max level alt was a warrior named Facekick. He hit level 60 around when the game turned a year old. The third was a paladin named Boatastrophe.

Every single max-level alt was a level 60. I've never leveled an alt to 70 or 80. I blame Blizzard.

See, back when Blizzard spent all the time "fixing server stability" they weren't putting out huge content patches every four months, so you could kind of do everything that was in the game. But even once the content patches started flowing smoothly, you could still kind of ignore them, and think to yourself, "Well, I've done a lot on those other characters, it's worth starting a new character".

Then came the achievements. And it's suddenly obvious that your main character hasn't done much at all. If you have 2600 out of 10k achievement points, there's still a lot left to do, and it probably isn't alt time yet.

Bloody Blizzard.

Do We Even Want A Skill-Based Game?

Often the complaints come in - WoW is not a skill-based game. We want a skill-based game. Larisa, I think, has as good a reply as any the other day, pointing out that only a fraction of one percent of the playerbase has completed all the available raids.

WoW is more skill-based than people give it credit for -- it's just also very repetitive, so if it takes ten tries to become skilled at something, you probably end up doing it fifty or sixty times. You then conclude that no skill is involved, because you can't remember the first ten tries when you were awful.

But let's imagine WoW is skill based, and imagine it is like another skill-based game that I like: Pinball. I recently bought the annoyingly titled Pinball Hall of Fame : The Williams Collection, and it's great. It has some great tables and it's well made, and I love pinball.

One little wrinkle though -- I've found I'm not as good at the game late at night. I get drowsy, and it takes me fraction of a second longer to hit the flippers when I want to, and as a result I'll miss a lot of shots. Well, I already miss a lot, but I miss more shots when I'm tired. But it's probably good in a way, or I'd stay up until 2 AM every morning playing pinball, because I find it way more addictive than WoW.

So do we really want a skill-based MMO that we can't play when we're tired?

Progression isn't about what you've done, it's about what you've done lately

I think I know the key to MMO happiness. I believe that you must accept a few basic truths about MMORPG's if you are going to be happy playing them. Now, accepting them won't guarantee happiness, but you will not be happy if you do not accept them.

Spinks runs headlong into one of them today.

But it bothers me that my alt is almost as well geared as my main, and that all the extra work I did on Spinks now seems to mean nothing. I don’t say it’s logical.

Surely the whole point of persistent games was that we could keep working on our characters to progress them over time? What does it really mean if all that time spent means nothing any more.

Spinks ends up reasoning that progression has been flattened because it makes the game more fun and social. But, as I've argued before, WoW has always been the game of now, where progression isn't about what you've done -- it's about what you've done lately. Progression progresses itself, and what was impressive yesterday isn't as impressive today.

The Tyranny of World Events

In WoW, it's another World Event, and another frantic effort to complete the meta-achievement on my part.

Usually mounts get faster as you train higher and higher ranks of your riding skill. The first flying mount is 150% of your (unmounted) running speed, the second flyer is 280%.

But they also offer a special speed : 310% on certain hard-to-obtain mounts. Most of these mounts come from being at the top of an arena bracket at season-end, or completing a difficult raid task or some difficult achievement. All of these are pretty much unobtainable for your average Joe Gnome.

And then there's the Violet Proto-Drake.

If you can complete all the meta-achievements for every holiday event, you are awarded the What a Long Strange Trip It's Been achievement, which comes with a 310% mount.

So you can imagine I'm a huge sucker for world events and I'm always frantic to complete them. This is actually only my second, Brewfest being my first. Finishing this one will actually require some luck, as you need to get two rare-ish drops from a boss you can only kill five times a day.

So maybe I won't get my 310% mount until next year around this time. Assuming that I can complete the Midsummer Fire Festival next year, which occurs right around when I'll be having what my benefits package at work refers to as a "Life Event".

Does WoW have too many quests?

The most achievable yet unattainable goals in the game for me would have to either be Loremaster or 3000 quests completed. Is it possible for me to do them? Yes. They aren't some ultra-hard raid achievement where I have to clear the entire instance in twenty minutes with five people missing without anyone dying and do it twenty times every night for two months. I can do Loremaster.

Except that I can't.

Quests are fun when you're leveling up because even though you know better, you kind of don't. "Doing quests is fun!" you think, like an idiot, because they are really pretty boring. They are one step above grinding. The only worst way to level would be to have it revolve around thirty hour waits for rare leveling mobs to spawn, which I think is how EQ worked.

Anyway, so this can't help but make me think : does WoW have too many quests? Now, clearly if you love quests, WoW can never have too many quests, and I sympathize with you. But, just speaking for normal, well-adjusted people, WoW clearly has too many quests.

Vanilla WoW, before they eased up the leveling curve, did not have too many quests. It actually had too few, as pretty much everyone ended up grinding at some point. Then they eased up the curve twice and there are far more than you would ever do while leveling. But that's kind of understandable.

But why do Northrend and Outland have too many quests, even when they were launched? Outland has seven zones and I think I only quested four of them before i hit 70. Northrend has ten zones and I only finished four before I hit 80. I realize you want extra quests, but do you really need that many extra?

I don't think Blizzard agrees with my assessment, but I just saw yesterday (after I had already decided I would write this) that they are going to make Loremaster much easier to get. Patch 3.3 is on the PTR and Blizzard has added two wonderful functions to the API :

• NEW - QueryQuestsCompleted() requests that the server send the client a list of completed quest ids. Once the list is received the QUEST_QUERY_COMPLETE event is fired. (There is a limit on how frequently this can be called)
• NEW - tbl = GetQuestsCompleted([tbl]) populates a table (creating one if necessary) with the ids of completed quests.

The holy grail of character information -- the one thing Blizzard has always known (even before they started tracking stats and achievements for characters in 3.0) but never told us -- is what quests we have completed. And now we're getting that. I'm not sure if Blizzard will provide a way to access this through their UI, or if that will be left to addon makers. But either way, it's Christmas in October for quest-achievement-obsessives like myself.

Puzzle Pirates Man, Puzzle Pirates. Puzzle Pirates, Yo!

Was reading an article about crafting over at Spinksville and she said this :

I wonder how much of a niche there can be for different crafters at endgame if bored players will level one of each craft anyway. Is it possible to make crafting itself into a more fun minigame, as opposed to the gathering/collecting side of levelling the skill.

Yes! Yes! A Thousand Times Yes!

Two of the loudest questions I hear in world of Talking About Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (or TAMMORPGs) are 1) can crafting be fun, and 2) what would a skill-based MMOG be like?

The answer has been inside you all along. Here's what crafting looks like in Puzzle Pirates :

Distilling Mini-Game (Puzzle Pirates)

Alchemistry Mini-Game (Puzzle Pirates)

Blacksmithing Mini-Game (Puzzle Pirates)

So can you have mini-games for your crafting, and can it work well? Yes.

The rest of the game is the same way, so there's your skill-based MMORPG. So what does that mean for an MMORPG?

Well, I don't know. I never played long enough to find out.

Why Kill Spell Power?

Blizzard is simplifying stats in Cataclysm. Which I welcome. Stats are so complex at this point in WoW that I actually need a mod to tell me if gear that drops in an instance is an upgrade over my current gear.

But as always, there's a bit of a wrinkle.

For casters, there are a number of rather complicated statistics. There's spell penetration, which I have never really understood at all (although I believe it gives extra chance to hit if your target has resistances, which no player or mob does anymore). Haste, Crit, and Hit are pretty easy to understand -- they make your spells cast faster, crit more often, and hit more often, respectively. Except they are a little weird because you get "points" of these three. So you don't get 2% faster casting, you get like 47 points of haste which is completely meaningless unless you know the conversion for points to percentage haste (it changes with level).

Then there's spellpower, which is probably the easiest to understand of all. One point of spellpower gives you one extra point of damage for a 3 (or 2.5?) second cast spell. So a 3 second spell always gets one extra point of damage for each point of spellpower.

So guess what stat Blizzard ditching in Cataclysm? Spellpower, of course. Guess what is being kept? Haste, crit, hit, and spell penetration.

How I Found My Guild

Until recently I never got into a real MMORPG guild on my own. When I started WoW I created a small guild with friends, and one of my friends made friends in a larger guild that we then merged into. I quit the game, and that first guild went away, so I joined another guild with most of the same people from the first guild. Then I quit again and that guild went away, and since then I mostly just joined leveling guilds that would invite any and every player that would accept an invite.

In WAR I of course joined casualties, but I don't really count that as getting in on my own, since I was kind of grandfathered in.

Then about a month ago I was 71 or so, trolling around Northrend and somebody asked for a Nexus group. I joined and we ended up filling up with a couple of eighties from one of the other players guilds. Some of the players had known each other (I think they used to raid together) so a lively conversation ensued. People were talking about guilds and guildies, so I took the opportunity to mention that in my awesome leveling guild people were constantly complaining that they couldn't take enough money out of the bank every day*.

Turns out one of the people in that party was a GM, and she took pity on me and invited me to her guild. The guild started raiding a few weeks later, which means I can contribute and not just be the guy that is dragged through raids to get gear.

The guild is mostly older people so they are pretty cool. I guess the secret to getting a fun guild all these years was that I needed to whine more.

* This blows my mind -- why take donations in an MMORPG? Isn't the point of a role playing game that you build up your character? What else in WoW is that much fun?

Old Most Wanted List Part 1

I'm a notorious enumeraphile. I thought it might be interesting to revisit some old WoW-related lists I made -- one in October 2006, one in late 2007, that listed what I wanted to see changed in WoW. The first was on an old blog so I'll just summarize, noting (in parenthesis) the progress Blizzard has made since I first wrote the list :

1. Fix PUGS by adding Mercs or Cross-Realm Instance Groups
   
   (Bliz is adding cross-realm dungeons in 3.3, but really the getting-a-5-man problem almost disappeared when they added daily dungeons)
   
   
2. Player Housing
   
   (Probably farther away now than it was in 2006)
   
   
   
3. Player Shops or an Enhanced AH
   
   (We didn't get either, but the new 48 hour auctions solved a lot of these sorts of issues)
   
   
4. "No Gnome Healers, no Gnomeland. Come on."
   
   (Gnome Priests and Gnomeregan retaken in Catacysm!)
   
   
5. Useless Vendors
   
   (The vendors that were useless then are still useless now, but there is a lot more achievable loot that comes from vendors, although this is always associated with either rep or a specialized currency (Badges of Triumph, etc.) )
   
   
6. Enchant Your Alts
   
   (With Wrath came Vellums and BoE enchants. Voila!)
   
   
7. Official PvE rankings
   
   (These still don't exist, however achievements and the armory are a poor man's PvE scoreboard.)
   
   
8. Expand the quest log at max level
   
   (It was expanded to 25 quests a short time later -- more importantly questing was made less insane so your log wouldn't be full of quests in your current zone that were too difficult at your level.)
   
   
9. Epic Cooking
   
   (Hasn't happened, but recipes like the Fish Feast have made cooking much more interesting.)
   
   
10. Fix Looting To Nerf Ninjas and Greedy GM's
    
    (A lot of the best gear now comes from tokens (badges) that go to every player in the group.)

Most of these wishes (aside from the Gnome one) were not fulfilled directly, but in pretty much every case Blizzard made big strides in satisfying a random fan wishlist that nobody ever read.

The Birth of Professional WoW

"Just ask for a Citadel group in general chat. But once you get in the group, go directly to the quest area. People don't fool around."

Thus spake my wife, introducing me to the Argent Crusade daily group quest, and to The World Of Warcraft circa 2009.

Once upon a time you would get a group together for an instance. And that would literally take an hour. And then everyone would slowly gravitate towards the instance, which was ten or fifteen minutes away but would require a good half hour for everyone to arrive.

And then you'd do the instance, and despite the fact that there were only sixty or seventy pulls you'd be in the instance for two or three hours. I once had an unsuccessful Scholomance group that lasted four hours. People would just take their time, then screw up, then take more time to recover from screwing up. There was waiting before everything. At least a minute between every pull.

That just doesn't happen anymore. Instances are done quickly and players get out. Often tanks will simply not stop, immediately going to the next pull after the current pull is dead.

It's wonderful.

There's no reason that the game couldn't have been this way back in 2005. Even though instances were longer players still could have torn through them if they so desired. But they didn't. What's changed?

Well, players are more experienced now, but that's not the biggest reason. WoW is more professional because Blizzard has introduced any number of mechanics to make WoW quicker and more streamlined.

It takes less traveling time to get to an instance now. The instances are much shorter. Daily quests encourage people both to do the instances, and to hurry through them (so more dailies can be done). Meeting stones allow the first two players to the instance to summon the rest of the group. Achievements let ordinary players see how much they have undone in the game, and so encourage people to "keep achieving" instead of spending all day in a single instance.

It's something to keep in mind when you see people playing a game stupid : how people play is heavily influenced by the design of the game itself. Game design brought about the enjoyment of professional WoW. Game design in older MMORPG's also made people stay awake for days on end to nab a rare spawn or craft a special item.

Why Paid Addons Would Make WoW Better

My three biggest takeaways from Blizzcon were, in reverse order of interest :

3) Gnome Priests Will Be In Cataclysm (the class I wanted at launch)
2) The leaked, hinted rebirth of Gnomeregan went unmentioned (but became mentioned recently)
1) Starcraft 2 map creators will be able to sell their maps on the revamped Battle.net

Now, I'm way too lazy to find a liveblog or video or notes from that presentation on the sellable SC2 maps, but they also mentioned WoW, and that paid addons for WoW seemed unlikely. Which is too bad.

People on the internet are always rather loud about their dislike of paying for in-game or out-of-game extras. Of course, internet loudness has an inversely proportional relationship with employment, so maybe that's why. I personally almost never feel that way. I'd pay for a new Blizzard game every month if they made them, and was delighted when they pre-announced Starcraft 2 and two expansions. I would have loved to plunk down money for another Diablo II expansion (or expansions for a dozen other games). I'd love to pay a subscription fee for FPS games if they could instantly get me on a skill-matched almost-full low-latency server. And on and on.

And I'd also gladly pay for better WoW addons. A good addon makes playing the game more fun, and I spend most of my free (non-family) time playing WoW, so good addons would be a wise investment in the bang-for-the-buck sense.

I think many people would think of paid addons and think "Hey, wait, I don't want to pay for all the addons I use!" but that's not how it really works out. Injecting money into the addon equation would mean more (and much better addons).

I'd personally attest to this. I did an addon for a while but it just became a burden. People liked it, which was great, but it just consumed a lot of time. Instead of a WoW player that dabbled in addons, I became an addon author that dabbled in WoW.

But making money on the addon probably would have changed my mind. I always have romantic notions of making some spending money from my hobbies that never works out in real life. And I don't feel like I'd need to make a lot of money to justify working on the addon -- if I could squeeze a new computer part out of it every year I'd be pretty happy. So I'd get a new video card, a bunch of players would get a mod (for a buck) that wouldn't exist otherwise, Blizzard and the IRS would get a small cut too, and we'd all be happier.

Maybe Blizzard will come around some day on the WoW mods. I certainly hope they come around with the next MMO.

I Want To Be The One That Blows Up Stranglethorn

I've been doing quests in Stranglethorn Vale lately and I can say with no reservations that I hate Stranglethorn Vale with every ounce of my being. This is my fifth or sixth visit and I hate it more than ever.

I hate it because Stranglethorn Vale, or "STV", as the kids call it, is a kind of greatest hits collection of every mistake Blizzard made in designing their classic zones:

Way too big? Check.

Two levels worth of quests spread over twenty levels? Check.

Quest hubs inconveniently at the edges of the zone? Check.

Difficult to traverse because of lakes, rivers and superfluous ridges? Check.

Every part of the zone looks exactly the same so you never know where you are? Check.

Huge sections of the zone that only have one quest but are right in the middle of the zone so you end up running past them like ten times? Check.

Etc. It is everything you love about zones in classic WoW times a million. But at least the awful zone is a nice distraction from the terrible quests. These are some of my favorite STV quests, if they were named honestly :

• Get Lost In A Cave
• Swimming For Twenty Minutes Sounds Like A Great Quest, Right?
• You'll Have To Kill Like Eighty Trolls Just To Click This One Stone, And There Are Like Three Stones
• Spend Ten Minutes Going Across The Zone Just To Click Like One Thing
• (etc.)

That's why I want to blow up STV.

Blizzard had a minor event for the launch of TBC (just some demons coming out of the dark portal) and a huge event for the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, with a plague sweeping over the entire world, converting players into undead. Since Cataclysm involves Blowing Up Azeroth, Blizzard will really need the Launch Event To End All Launch Events.

The pre-launch event for Wrath involved changing players into the agents of the expansion's principal antagonist -- why not do this again for Cataclysm? I do quests in the game solely for rewards -- I don't really care that I'm helping to defeat the Lich King or whatever. In fact, I always love the "I tricked you into doing something evil!" quests, since I don't care that I'm evil in the game as long as I get XP.

But blowing up STV, and Azshara, and Stonetalon -- that would be a quest I could really get behind.

The Best WoW Ever

I've started playing WoW four times and I've quit three times. Each time I quit playing there were lots of little, underlying reasons to quit, along with one big reason. The first time I didn't want to raid with my guild anymore. The second time I didn't have time to be a dad and still play the game the way I wanted. The third time -- well, I thought that Warhammer would save the world.

I was thinking of my second departure lately. This was back in the days of The Burning Crusade. I had accepted that I wasn't going to be much of a raider (casual raiding didn't really exist then like it does now) but I had hoped to gear up at least a little by running 5-man dungeons. But I had so much trouble as DPS finding a group. I would spend two or three hours just sitting in whichever chat, looking for a group for an instance the whole time. Some dungeons were run by everybody once and then seemingly forgotten -- or at least never run when I was available.

Dungeons had some other problems (like being too long, or groups being bad) but the availability was the biggest obstacle.

Anyway, that's completely fixed now. I use the LFG tool (don't even need to bother with chat) and even as an undergeared lock I usually get an invite in five or ten minutes. And then (despite the fact that I'm always at the bottom of the dps chart) we almost always zip through the instance in less than an hour (sometimes less than half an hour) without so much as a single wipe.

The reason is the daily heroic quests Blizzard introduced. You can get the highest level tokens in the game by running daily heroic instances, so all the good, well-geared players want to run them everyday. This provides a steady stream of competent group members.

Add in the fact that Blizzard finally fixed their worst loot issues -- the best item drops for everybody, so no ninjas -- and pugging is actually fun. Who'd have guessed that Blizzard would finally make playing with strangers fun?

I have read a few naysayers, upset that the dungeons are so much easier this time around. If that were true I think it would be a small price to pay, but I'm not sure it's totally true. Instances in classic WoW and TBC would have also been easy if groups were composed of people in raiding gear who had done the instance 30 times already. A guy in my group yesterday got the achievement for 2500 dungeon and raid tokens on the first boss. I got the achievement for 50 tokens :)