How BioWare will make The Old Republic awful

It's the little things that matter, isn't it?

Every great game maker has a pretty thorough mastery of the little things. Blizzard is great at the little things. Nintendo is great at the little things. Valve is great at the little things.

But BioWare just isn't in that same class, and it's really their indifference to the little things that make it so. I've written at length about their lack of checkpoints making me nuts. Let me complain about another little thing in Dragon Age that made me nuts.

So you start a new character in Dragon Age and they ask you to pick a character. This is fine, although they don't tell you that if you don't pick a healer you're at a disadvantage since you won't have one in the first chapter, but whatever. Then they ask you to spend your first skill points. You have never played the game before. You have no idea what you need in the game, you have no idea what is useful or what you find most fun. But you are supposed to choose where your skill points go.

Why have me spend skill points before I know what to do with them? Why give me skill points before I know what to do with them?

People tolerate this kind of stuff in Bioware's RPG's, because you can deal with this sort of stuff in a 20 or 40 hour game, and you can always throw your character away and start over again. But massive games are a whole different ballgame. People aren't going to want to deal with this. I'm angry just thinking about a MMOG designed like a Bioware RPG.

Pilgrim's Bounty : Hats off to the Silvermoon and Orgrimmar Gank Squads

Pilgrim's Bounty is a new event this year in World of Warcraft. As always there's a bunch of crazy crap to do and achievements for doing said crap.

One of the achievements even involves a little bit of PvP peril.

For the Alliance version of Pilgrim's Peril you need to sit at a Horde table in each of their major cities while wearing some event gear (pilgrim's hats and such). Entering an enemy city on a PvE server will result in you instantly being tagged for PvP (attackable by the opposing faction) and then ganked shortly thereafter. Furthermore, you can only sit down at the table when out of combat which would be impossible even if you were slaying Horde left and right.

Indeed, I had a rough go of it in Undercity and Thunder Bluff. I survived Thunder Bluff only with the help of a parachute enchant and rocket boot enchant (Thank You Engineering!) and I didn't survive Undercity at all. I was killed and had to use a Soulstone (gives you a free resurrection if you use it before you die) and res'd when my would-be killers focused on another, living alliance trying for the achievement. Rocket Booted out of that place and made it home.

I don't understand or sympathize with the gank squads in Undercity or Thunder Bluff. Gang-killing an opposite faction player doesn't require skill and isn't fun. It's also a massive waste of everyone's time, both ganker and gankee. On three separate occasions four cumulative Horde even spent five to eight minutes chasing/waiting for me to flag or res so they could kill me (always unsuccessfully).

The people guarding the Undercity and Thunder Bluff picnic tables are idiots, of course. But at least they're doing it right.

Enter the Silvermoon and Orgrimmar gank squads. Like their UC and TB brethren they also zealously guard their picnic tables. Like their UC and TB brethren they anxiously wait for the zero-skill gang-killings that surely must await them.

Except that, Oh Yeah : Sitting at the Silvermoon and Orgrimmar tables does not flag you for PvP.

They are too far out of their respective cities to flag opposing players. I found three Horde guarding each location. In both cases the horde immediately started taunting me, indignant that I would not willingly submit to slaughter. I wonder how many hours you need to sit around before you realize that no Alliance will ever flag at your tables.

PuG Smart (Shocking!)

I've only done a couple of Vault of Archavon groups but I noticed that they did something really smart. There are three progressively harder bosses in VoA, one from each patch -- 3.0, 3.1, and 3.2.

Anyone who does VoA and downs a boss is saved to that raid instance, along with everybody else in that raid. So if anybody in your group isn't good enough to make it through the entire instance you're stuck with an unfinished raid that you won't finish that week (since you'll never get your pug back together).

I'm not sure why it didn't occur to me, but PuG groups always do the hardest boss first. If you can't kill the hardest boss you aren't saved to the instance and can try again in another group. I don't know why this never occurred to me, but I was pleased that pick-up groups do it right.

My Ten Favorite WoW Bugs

As an admitted lover of list-making I'd been thinking about making some WoW-related lists for WoW's fifth anniversary. Then my love of procrastination and forgetting things overcame my enumeraphilia, so here we are.

I've spent more time in WoW than any other game -- there's also more of WoW than any other game. In all the time I've spent in all of WoW I've also encountered many more bugs than in any other game. These are my favorites :

1. Casting when in motion but not moving
Most spells in WoW require the caster to stand still. Originally, however, WoW just required the caster to not be moving (i.e. not pressing movement buttons). So you could start casting spells while you were jumping through the air or falling from something. My dream was to kill a hordie in Blackrock Mountain by matching their lava jump (why bother with the steps when you could make a long jump down into the lava?) and Hellfiring them to death (Hellfire is a channeled spell). It was never to be, Blizzard fixed this at some point in WoW 1.x.

2. Glitching Through Doors
You might still be able to do this, it's just that everything you'd want to glitch through is gone. See, you'd get yourself killed by a closed door, then go back to res. Even as a ghost, I think, you couldn't get through the door. But for a moment after you rezzed your character would ignore the door and you'd run right through. In vanilla WoW I once snuck into Caverns of Time, long before the first expansion was ever announced. It was beautiful and I sadly lost all my old screenshots (probably my number one biggest WoW regret), but it was a less-finished version of what it is today -- even before The Burning Crusade it still had that nightime-stars thing going on and that was awesome.

3. Bad Graveyards
One time I was doing some PvP around Chillwind Camp and the horde killed me. My ghost then appeared at a graveyard in Northshire Abbey, about ten zones distant from where I'd died.

4. Cross-Faction Instances
A guildie zoned into Molten Core, the original raid instance in the game, and ended up in the instance of Twelve Prophets, a pretty serious Horde guild on our server. They killed him pretty quick but he got screenshots.

5. Terrible Raid ID Bugs
Raid ID's in modern WoW reset every week at the same time for everybody. They used to reset a week after the Raid ID was obtained by zoning into the instance. They were also very buggy and you'd sometime keep a raid ID from a previous week even if you hadn't been in the raid.

I read a forum account of a player who had once raided with a guild but had then left. The guild leader, believing some superstition about raids, refused to let the raid group disband, keeping it going from week to week. Well, since the raid ID's belonged to the raid they also stuck with everyone who had ever been in that raid group. The poor player was stuck with that guild's raid ID for three or four months, unable to join a new raid group.

6. The non-flying Pet
Pets now despawn/respawn when you mount. For warlocks, at least, this wasn't always the case. Pets would just follow the player, but that wasn't much of a problem. Until TBC introduced flying mounts. Every time you flew someplace, you would be "dragging" your pet along with you, except they'd be running on the ground super-fast and aggroing dozens of mobs. I used an infernal the other week, and actually they still do this.

7. Reckoning
I'm probably not remembering the name of the ability, but Paladins used to (still do?) have an ability that would be triggered and would empower their next hit whenever they took a crit. Problem was, the amount of empowerment was not capped and continued to rise everytime they were crit. So an enterprising paladin took turns dueling some rogue friends for a few hours (but not hitting back), then found Kazzak. Kazzak was an outdoor raid boss that was a tough fight for a 40-man group, and the paladin one-shotted him.

8. In-Air Queueing
I've heard about this one recently. I'm not sure if it's always been a problem or if it's a more recent thing, but evidently accepting a BG invite while on a flying taxi can be hazardous, as once you leave the BG you'll be returned to the world high in the sky sans flying taxi.

9. Disappearing Boats
Players riding on a boat back in vanilla WoW would occasionally have the boat disappear from underneath them instead of taking them to the next continent. This would happen so far out in black water (which causes fatigue even on dead characters) that players would be forced to spirit res, taking a big repair bill and a ten-minute debuff for their troubles.

10. 30-man Scholomance
Though it's not really that much of a bug, dungeons originally had no cap on the number of players entering, so people would often "raid" the 5-man dungeons, exchanging any sense of tactics or discipline for the crushing DPS of a 30 man raid. I only did this once before they patched in the limits but I do remember, oddly, still being a little intimidated by Scholo.

I guess my DPS is ok after all

Slinging around required DPS is very much a child of the rampant grouping of modern WoW. Back in the day, you either raided and had raid epics, or you were horrible -- not much talk of what your actual DPS was.

Today people group a lot more, and there are more sources for gear, so raid leaders often have a minimum DPS to be admitted into the raid -- 3k DPS, 4k DPS, etc. Sort of a "you must be this tall to enter this ride" thing, except you can lie.

I've been wanting to do Vault of Archavon but was worried about my DPS -- I've often heard 3k DPS tossed around but in heroic dungeons I have a hard time hitting that number. And in dungeons I'm wearing better gear than I would be in raids, since raid requires a lot of a stat called hit (or else you miss).

A guildie was putting together a VoA 10 group Saturday morning so I hopped in and was surprised to see a 20% boost in my own damage. I felt pretty confident so I tried a VoA 25 man group that afternoon -- and saw another 20% damage boost.

Part of this was the fights in VoA (mostly standing still) but mostly it was all the great buffs (and mob debuffs) you get in a raid but don't get in a 5-man group.

Yet -- I follow the game pretty closely and I'd never heard about seeing a big DPS boost in VoA (or other raids) before. I wonder how many people like me are needlessly sitting out?

Why do MMORPG players clamor for terrible MMORPG's?

Tobold points to a Game By Night post asking whether we, as current and ex-WoW players, feel too "entitled"

When these players come to a game like Fallen Earth, they’re shocked by the rusticness of it. , last time I played, one player, couldn’t help lamenting the fact he couldn’t respec his character in region chat. Whether he was right or wrong to expect such a thing (and any FE fan will tell you he was wrong), it’s a prime example of how World of Warcraft has set a bar in player’s minds.

Hard to believe that playing a good game would make you less appreciative of a crappy game, but there you go. Gordon, while comparing the four-hours-because-of-forced-grouping play sessions of EQ with the one-hour-optional-groupings of WoW similarly asks if we've gotten soft about grouping :

are we just becoming more lazy now? Are we too satisfied with our soloing and quest grinding to even bother putting together a group? Or are thing just becoming more accessible and making our lives easier?

Back in my Final Fantasy XI days, the hardest thing in the game for me (and most other players) was finding a good group. You had to have a good group to level. So you'd log on to play, and first you'd have to run to the zone where you wanted to level, and then you'd start to look for a group in chat. It could take a while to find a group if you weren't a healer or tank, and often neither would join a group unless it was already full and ready to go. So after around 30 minutes, you'd actually start to play, and hope your group would last for a while so you didn't have to do the whole sitting-in-chat thing anymore. Eventually someone would leave after 40 minutes though, and you'd be stuck advertising for a replacement.

And the grouping wasn't that much fun either. You would have a "puller" that would run away from the group and try to find one single mob to bring back. If they accidentally pulled more than one, or got extra aggro, it was a guaranteed wipe unless your group managed to zone (literally run into the next zone). If you made it the mobs chasing you would head back to their original spawn point but attack any other parties on the way.

It was absolutely difficult to level in FFXI. But everything that was difficult was due to bad design :

• Traveling to your leveling zone was a huge chore that, at low levels, involved running there on foot. Time-consuming, but not fun, and those five or ten minutes came out of your playing time.
• Finding a group was an enormous chore, and again it was something that made the game "hard". You are sitting in chat, typing, not playing the game, and that's really the pinnacle of difficulty in the game.
• Potentially losing a group member also made the game difficult. Once again, a roll of the dice that made the game hard that had nothing to do with playing the game.
• If your puller got a respawn on the two-minute run back to your camp, you would probably wipe. Unless you are the puller you are not playing the game, and you can still be killed in the game.
• If another party zoned and a returning mob aggroed your group, you and your party would probably die. Very little you could do, in terms of playing the game, could save you from an unexpected pull.

So there's five things that all made FFXI very difficult to play. None of them, however, were because the game was testing your skill in playing the game. It's luck, more than anything else, and if you had an unlucky night you could, thanks to death penalties, end up at a lower level than when you started.

FFXI is a game people quit because they could not find groups that would take their class. For some reason we're supposed to long for this? Please let us harken back to the days of games that were hard because they wouldn't allow themselves to be played?

The worst example of "non-gameplay as difficult gameplay" were the rare spawns. People would sit at their computers for hours or days, waiting for a mob to spawn that they could fight. The game is to sit online but not play the game for like six hours, and then play for like three minutes. And then do it again.

Why are gamers so eager for this? If you are trying to make a modern game like this, who is your target audience? I guess it would be people who are patient and like a challenge, but don't really like playing games.

Why A Little RMT Can Be A Good Thing

Blizzard introduced two non-combat pets for money this week, and a furor ensued. I don't visit the official WoW forums anymore, but I'm guessing that at least a dozen threads were filled up by people who promised (promised!) to cancel their accounts. Larisa portended a slippery slope to pay-for-epics.

I'm going to be a little contrarian, for the first time ever.

When I got out of school I had a number of avenues in terms of searching for a job. It pretty much boiled down to this : I could work for a company that sold my services, or I could work for a company that sold something else -- insurance, for example.

I decided on the former. A company that sold my services was making money on me, and would never have a reason to lay me off to "save money". Whereas an insurance company would probably always see me as overhead (unless I somehow ended up making a product for them) and I would be expendable.

The moral of the story is that you want your employer to make money from your employment, in the most direct way possible.

Which brings us to paid pets. If you are a pet collector this should be a bonanza -- an opportunity to pay Blizzard directly to make more (and cooler) pets. As a result, Blizzard will never think of pets as overhead, and they will always be given their due.

Vault of Archavon, aka Carrot on a Stick

Vault of Archavon is a new type of raid dungeon introduced in Wrath of the Lich King. It's only available to the faction that controls the (also new in Wrath) outdoor PvP zone.

The bosses drop tier loot -- loot equivalent to the "tiered" armor sets available in raid dungeons. There is one wrinkle -- raid bosses drop tokens that can be used by several classes, while VoA bosses drop the class-specific pieces themselves, presumably to avoid loot fights among the PuG groups that are doing VoA.

Whenever a new tier of armor comes out, Blizzard introduces a new, harder boss to the raid dungeon, and this new boss drops the new tier of armor. Which is a problem.

Now, it's great that the new armor is now available, in tiny chunks, to people who are not raiding with a serious guild. The serious raiders get more gear and they get it quicker, but people who just want to PuG VoA also have a shot at some real loot.

But the bosses getting harder is kind of a problem. This raid that is technically nice for casual players is not actually nice to them. My up-and-coming warlock, for instance, has more than enough DPS to take on the first two bosses, but not the third. Since you are saved to a raid ID with other PuG raiders, there's a big incentive to finish the raid in one sitting. So there's zero incentive to take any player who doesn't have the DPS to finish off all three bosses.

But I am getting close, I feel. I'm getting close to being able to take down that third boss. Except. Except that patch 3.3 will be out in the next month or so, and it will be introducing a ... new harder boss with new tier loot. So since the 3.2 patch came out I've went from 1.5K DPS (2.5k short) to around 3K DPS (1k DPS short). Soon though, patch 3.3 will bring a new boss to VoA, probably requiring 5k-5.5K DPS. So I'll be back to where I started, only much more angry about VoA.

The Missing Achievement

A couple days ago I finally hit exalted with Sons of Hodir, which means I can buy ... uh, some enchanted thing that is marginally better than the enchanted thing I could buy the day before. It's called "Progression" and it's why I play WoW, at least until Blizzard releases a marginally better MMORPG.

There was no achievement which was a little disappointing, as similar factions tend to have achievements and I'm a big fan of the achievements. People say rude things about achievement seekers but I make no apologies. I love making checklists and doing the tasks on the checklists even in real life. Achievements in a game are magical checklists that are half game and three-quarters awesome.

Following the pattern that no mistake in WoW makes me think poorly of WoW, this made me think well of WoW. I'm closing in on 300 achievements and this was the first time I thought an obvious one was missed.

Achievements are, for some reason, really confusing to developers but Blizzard seems to get them. The best thing about the achievements are the ones that don't exist -- for all of WoW there are only about 1000 achievements. WAR could have used similar restraint.

Hardcore PvP and why I don't like it but finally get it

I'm not a fan of hardcore PvP and I never have been. This blog exists in large measure because I needed to write this post declaring my hatred for the mechanic.

But it was something I always struggled with. I enjoy PvP immensely and I always wondered why I could be fond of something while being so utterly opposed to hardcore something.

It all made sense to me recently, by which I almost mean two months ago. Syncaine was writing about hardcore PvP which he calls (somewhat more sensibly) "impact pvp". One of the comments caught my eye.

I believe that the extreme aversion to PvP on the part of some is sometimes due to an over-inflated ego and an unhealthy sense of entitlement. That is the only explanation I can devise for someone to go these lengths to avoid a gaming-death and perhaps the loss of some e-loot.

It’s not the interference or any other of the lame excuses, no. It’s just people who can’t stand to be on the receiving end of anything. People who are too full of themselves that cannot handle defeat even if it’s just a game.

So they prefer to play pure PvE games where the risk is minimal and their egoes are safe. That version of the PK’er Strawman that consists on the 12 year old ganking you for hours also is often evoked. That is the worse of it: a big shot real life successful dude getting ganked by a little kid who lol’s his ass off and calls the noob, noob. The bearz all gnash their teeths…

These guys will never play any game where they can measure themselves against an oponent and actually lose something. It would be too much.

It's all total rubbish, of course, but I enjoyed the unbridled, hateful enthusiasm. I nearly responded, "so, do you need to throw a twenty down on TF2 to make it worthwhile?"

Then it occurred to me : what if he said "Yes"?

It finally made sense to me. Why I like PvP but don't like Hardcore PvP. Why people like Hardcore PvP even though (because of death penalties) it means less time spent actually doing PvP.

(Funny, too, that this comment made me think of gambling, and not Syncaine's final paragraph when he likens hardcore pvp to poker)

Hardcore PvP is not hard, ultra super intense PvP. It is PvP with gambling. Hardcore PvP afficionados often talk about loving the uncertainty and the thrill of it. They are probably people who like gambling (or at least the idea of it) in real life.

And I finally understand why I don't like hardcore PvP. I don't gamble and I've never even liked the idea of it. It's just never seemed like any fun to me, and whatever it is, that's the same reason I don't like hardcore PvP.

Encyclopedia Gevlon And The Case of the Broken Gamer

I was hoping to avoid commenting on the whole RMT for pets imbroglio but I just can't resist responding to Gevlon. Gevlon declared today that he has only a single mount and explained, in true Gevlonion fashion, why this makes him a better person than everyone else :

Did I ever missed some other mounts than my wolf and flight form? Never. Did I ever missed a minipet? Actually I barely call upon any of my existing ones. Let's face it, they are completely pointless.
...
people want to own these things because they believe that the Joneses doesn't have them yet, or even worse, they already have one and will look down on us if we can't keep up.

If you're like me, you wonder why Gevlon is wasting his time writing a WoW blog when he could be making the big bucks with his powerful psychic abilities. Maybe he's also telekinetic and blogging is the only thing that keeps him from going all Carrie on us.

I kid, but Gevlon's frequent resorts to ad hominem is more than a little tiring -- you wonder why other bloggers can tolerate him when he never argues in good faith.

But mostly I wanted to point out they irony of Gevlon saying all these things. In the world according to Gevlon, people who collect in-game pets are only trying to impress others. People who are social in the game are "those who want acceptance, connection, love-and-be-loved stuff" and "lack any useful skills". Hardcore players, on the other hand, are just looking for a "sense of superiority".

Evidently everyone that plays WoW, from pet collectors to casual players to the hardcore are all broken. They are playing the game for the wrong reasons. In fact, everybody is broken but Gevlon.

These people have something in common though. The people who collect pets in the game, or play socially with a guild, or play casually with friends, or are hardcore raiders, they area all alike in a way -- they are playing something Blizzard gave them to play. Blizzard put pets in the game so people could collect them. Blizzard put easy dungeons in the game for casual players to play through, and difficult raids to challenge the hardcore players. So despite what Gevlon thinks of these people, Blizzard is clearly catering to these people, and has been supporting a game for them for five years. When these people achieve their goals they are given something in the game -- i.e. the game was made for them to play.

I feel like I'm leaving a playstyle out though. I'm missing something. Oh yeah : I know. What about the guy who is so obsessed with making money in WoW that he doesn't stop until he hits the gold cap, which is about twenty times more money than he would ever need? Who is it, that even though he poo-poo's about every reason for spending money in WoW, still has as much as any player in the game? Who not only insists on making money and not spending it, but is rewarded in no way by WoW for his 'feat'? A guy who is truly playing the wrong game?

Oh yeah, I know a guy like that.



Say hi, Gevlon!

Saying a game has a great story is like saying a girl has a great personality

And boy, does Dragon Age : Origins have a great story!

Well, good enough that I can't stop playing, even to do my Sons of Hodir in WoW, which I'm like three days away from getting to exalted (and then never doing again). Funny that the biggest rewards in WoW are always of the "Well, I'll never have to do this again!" variety. You know what else is funny? **** YOU SONS OF HODIR AND YOUR LOUSY DAILY QUESTS.

So Dragon Age : Origins is pretty cool. Like other Bioware games I've played, it looks great, sounds great, the story is great, the gameplay makes you want to stick a fork in your eye, the characters are great, the setting is great. Everything's great!

But the game as a whole is ok. I just hate the gameplay. Oh yeah, and the marketing "campaign"**. And the fact that they call it "Dragon Age : Origins", bragging in the title that this is just the first of many Dragon Age stories so awesome they can get you to play through Dragon Age games.

** Said marketing campaign consisted of terrible looking in-game footage with the Marilyn Manson song "This is the New S***" playing in the background, and then title and artist printed on the screen. As if to say : "Hey We Have A Song In The Trailer With A Swear In It AND We Show The Swear Written On The SCREEN In The Trailer!!!" I'm sure that this stunt made Bioware the toast of their Junior High School for like a week but it was a complete disaster in every other way.

PvP in Darkfall is not really hardcore

Hardcore PvP is supposedly everywhere. But really it isn't.

Darkfall does not have hardcore PvP.

Ultima Online does not have hardcore PvP now, and it never did.

EVE Online can have hardcore PvP, but most of what is called "hardcore PvP" isn't.

The idea of so-called "hardcore PvP" is that death has consequences, in PvE or PvP. The games above certainly do have penalties for dying. But a penalty to what?

I'm not sure if sledding is a universal thing, but where I grew up it was. When winter came around and you had about four inches of snow on the ground it was time to go sledding. So you'd trudge to your favorite hill, walk to the top, and then sled down. Then you'd walk to the top again, sled down again, etc., until you were silly.

While we would call this "sledding", you really spent most of your time walking to the top of that hill. You couldn't really cheat, either -- if you jumped in your sled halfway up the hill you only got to sled down half the hill. Ultimately, you had to put hours walking up hills to spend ten minutes sledding.

This is the problem with Darkfall.

Death is meaningful because you lose things, but how do you get them back? You get them back through PvE, and that's mostly how you advance your character. So the hardcore PvP is only meaningful because it reflects a much more substantial amount of PvE. Which is why it's not really hardcore PvP -- because it's not really PvP. There definitely is PvP in the game, but that's not what you spend most of your time doing.

I'm sure some people might say, "Well, I don't spend much time doing PvE, I just PvP". But then you have the opposite problem : if there's not much of a penalty it's not really hardcore, is it?

Which is not to say that hardcore PvP doesn't exist. There are two ways to make death meaningful in a PvP-centric game :

1. Have a death penalty for dying, but allow players to advance their characters solely through PvP
2. Have no death penalty, but allow players to fight over something meaningful besides survival. Territory is a good one -- although with it's own problems, as in games like EVE or Darkfall it changes hands far too infrequently.
   

I don't think either of these, done right, would entice me to hardcore PvP. But it would make the term make some sense.

PuG Life

PuG was once a dirty word. To some it still is.

Not to me, not anymore. I've come to love the pug. I've talked about why before, but to sum it up :

1) The game is a little easier
2) the players are a little better
3) the current design of the game encourages experienced players to revisit old content and spread their goodness around

I was talking to guildies last night and they still felt pick up groups were something to be avoided. I tried to convince them otherwise but with little success. In the minds of many, pug's cannot be redeemed.

But you have to give it to Blizzard -- they're really trying to redeem the pug : witness the 3.3 achievements :

• Looking for More - Use the Dungeon tool to finish random heroic dungeons until you have grouped with 10 random players total.
• Looking for Many - Use the Dungeon tool to finish random heroic dungeons until you have grouped with 50 random players total.
• Looking for Multitudes - Use the Dungeon tool to finish random heroic dungeons until you have grouped with 100 random players total.