Blizzard's future release schedule

Keep meaning to write this post, and thought I did, but I searched through my old posts and couldn't find it. Please forgive me if I'm repeating myself.

Anyway, Blizzard said earlier this year in a conference call that they expect one "front line" release a year for the forseeable future. We can assume that a "front line" release is either a game or an MMO expansion. Since WoW expansions come about every two years, that telegraphed at least the next four years :

2009 : SC2

2010 : WoW Expansion 3 (We now know this is Cataclysm)

2011 : Diablo III

2012 : WoW Expansion 4

2013 : One of the New IP's

And I think that's the end of the "forseeable future". Note that SC2 ended up being delayed, but we are now going to see SC2 and Cataclysm in 2010 (but not Diablo). Also note that SC2 (2007) and Diablo III (2008) were announced three years before their eventual/projected release dates, and so we'd expect the new IP to be announced this year, not last year.

It's kind of weird how people tend to ignore these unspoken release schedules when they talk about upcoming games. Many were shocked when they heard we wouldn't see another Diablo in 2010. And while it's a pretty good bet that Gears of War 3 and Resistance 3 will be out this fall, (according to the rhythms that their respective developers have established) nobody's willing to talk about them when it comes to "anticipated games of 2010".

In Halls of Reflection, Content Experiences You

WoW's 3.3 patch is out and the new Dungeon Finder is here, along with three new five-man dungeons and a load of other content. The dungeon finder is cool although I worry a little about an overconcentration of fun. Drinking five milkshakes sounds like fun, but really it would make you sick. Five instances in a row without waiting (if you are a tank) also sounds like fun but, like the milkshakes, would probably result in some vomiting.

The three five-man instances have names, I understand, but the name that sticks with me is the final instance -- Halls of Reflection. It is a neat dungeon that, uh, PUGs can't handle. Because it is very difficult.

As is the style of WoW you generally have no idea why the group failed, you just know that they did. WoW is awful at giving feedback to players. And even when you know why the group failed, what are you going to do? I was in a group once and the healer couldn't keep up. Do you kick them then? I wouldn't -- why upset someone for the sake of an instance run? So I'm usually the first to leave. I'm hoping "I don't think this is going to work out right now. Thanks for the group" is considered polite, because I end up putting that in party chat most times I visit HoR.

I've been there around six times and I've completed it twice. That's about a 33% completion rating for those keeping score at home. Let's compare that to every other heroic instance :

Successes/Attempts in Halls of Reflection: 2/6 (33%)

Successes/Attempts in Every Other Heroic : 30/30 (100%) (approximate)

Before the dungeon finder you just didn't run instances you didn't like. Now you queue and get stuck with HoR.

I've read online that many, confronted with HoR, just drop group and take the "dungeon chicken" debuff. Sounds like a sweet idea to me -- I'd rather waste 15 minutes doing something productive than an hour banging on the first boss in the instance.

The Game in the Red Dress

The latest edition of Game Informer (issue 200) listed what they felt were the top 200 games of all time. Because they are all print-y they don't have the list online, but if you google you can find it.

I'm old enough that none of the games were really before my time. But counting through them I've only played 69 of the best 200 games of all time. And I'd say 30 or 40 of those I played for less than an hour -- "not for me".

I feel like an oddball when it comes to games. On one hand I haven't played a wide variety of games, but on the other hand I don't play games long enough to really feel like I've mastered them. I've only had two or three full games in my life that I really completed, in the sense that I did everything you could in the games. All of them had "Ratchet" and "Clank" in the name.

Really it takes me a while to warm up to new games, and even once I warm up to games I bore easily. So I'll often get myself in a position where I'm in the mood to play nothing at all.

I could quit playing games too. On two or three occasions I've decided to quit playing games, or to quit playing them for a week. The same thing happens every time -- I successfully quit games for two or three nights, but give up giving up when I realize I've replaced my gaming time with doing nothing at all.

What's the point of this post? Now that I'm raiding WoW is driving me nuts. I need to find another game to play as a distraction but I don't feel like starting another game. So I need to force myself to pick another game and play it for a night or two until I warm up to it and can play it for fun. And I'm dreading that so much that I'm writing a blog post so I can put the task off all the longer.

Man, I've been whiny lately, haven't I? Speaking of going without things, I think I need to do a week of posts without talking about me or my overactive "feelings". A Boat detox, if you will.

Ranged DPS is Easy ... and Boring

I've now been to two raids and, uh, meh. I'm not sure why I find them so excruciating, but I think a lot of it is due to being a ranged DPS class.

Tanks and healers have tougher jobs and if they mess up they wipe the raid. Even melee DPS have a lot more going on because they have positioning issues to worry about. Not ranged DPS -- we are out of range of most of the nasty stuff, and if the encounter ever gets really intense we can ease up on the damage for a minute while we work things out, which is not an option for tanks or healers.

So Joe Tank or Jill Healer might take four or five (or twenty) tries to get everything right. Meanwhile, Ted Ranged DPS takes one or two tries to figure out his (relatively easy) task, then does the same thing every attempt until the tenth time when, mysteriously, the boss finally dies.

I've Joined a Semi-Casual Waiting Guild

It's been great so far. Last night we started off by waiting in the new Icecrown Citadel instance for a while, then we were running low on people so we decided to go wait in the old ToC raid. There was some interstitial stuff there (I remember casting a few spells) but mostly it was a pretty successful night for waiting.

I always criticize EVE Online for requiring so much downtime between excitement, but raiding (which is the "pinnacle" of WoW) often comes dangerously close to that. Mostly because it's impossible to find 25 people that can agree to sit down and play for three hours in a row. Over the course of the night I think we had five or six people drop that had to be replaced. Five!

Someone pointed out (as usual) that "RL trumps WoW", so it was ok for people to desert the raid.

I don't get this. Imagine you call your significant other some morning from work and say "let's grab a sandwich at lunchtime today." If you then stand them up, what are you going to say? "It's just a sandwich, it's not that big a deal." How's that going to work out for you?

Now, you didn't stand up the sandwich. The sandwich doesn't matter. What matters is that you stood up a person you made plans with.

What's missing from this "WoW is just a game" equation is that you aren't doing some random solo quest in WoW -- you're raiding and twenty-four people were expecting you to honor your commitments.

I don't have any problems with people leaving if they have an emergency or if they have urgent matters that must be dealt with. It's just when I think about myself, I don't have emergencies or unexpected urgent matters to take care of most nights. I don't have an emergency once a week, or even once a month. I'd guess two or three a year, at most.

So how did 20% of the raid have urgent matters last night? I'm guessing they didn't. I'm guessing they just didn't plan to raid the entire session or they made excuses because they were bored. Either way, they decided that their problems were bigger than the time of 24 other people in the raid.

What's Fair in Fees

I'm not a big fan of the word "fair" unless it is immediately preceded by the word "State" or the word "County". In life there are always going to be winners and losers, and whenever somebody wins and somebody else loses there's always someone to pop up and complain that it wasn't fair. Then they propose (or introduce) some new rule that ... picks winners and losers in a different way. "Fair" is never actually fair.

So Tobold proposes a way to make subscription fees more fair :

Funnily enough, it is possible to play World of Warcraft with a business model which is extremely fair, in which every player pays proportionally to the cost and drain on resources he causes. You just need to move to China for that. The Chinese WoW business model is extremely simple: You buy a time-card with X hours on it, every hour costing around 5 cents, and every minute you are online is deducted from this amount of time you paid for. Nobody subsidizes another player, every player pays exactly what he is consuming, and the whole thing is fairest business model for MMORPGs possible.

Except that consumer goods are intrinsically fair -- companies are allowed to set the price they think fair, and consumers are free to judge whether they think the price fair. No consumer subscribes to WoW unless they feel it is worth fifteen bucks a month.

Furthermore, hourly payments are not necessarily that fair. The expenses of an MMO developer do not increase linearly with time played. The number of players in prime time would drive almost every capital investment -- like servers and facilities -- as well as other major expenses like internet connections. It doesn't matter if a prime time player plays two hours a day or twenty -- they still need the same amount of server capacity. Tubes need to be big enough to support prime-time, and facilities need to be big enough to handle the prime time GM staff and all the prime time servers.

Worst of all, hourly payments would introduce a new series of value judgments for players that would make the game less fun. Time-consuming activities that are disliked now would be despised in a pay-per-hour system. Blizzard might spend millions on new content, just to discover that players aren't willing to pay for all the hours it takes to experience it.

Tobold's argument is that, essentially, MMO tourists would find it much easier to play multiple MMO's in the same time period if you could pay per-hour. I'm sure that's true but I'm doubtful how many people that would affect. It seems like most MMO bloggers have multiple subscriptions and play multiple MMO's, but they are in my experience a minority. In five years of on-again, off-again WoW I've never once heard a player say they actively subscribed to another MMO.

Am I playing WoW or youtube?

I just joined a raiding guild.

I even teared up a little bit as I left my old casual guild behind. My new GM invited me as an "initiate" where I have to prove I can be successful in raids in two weeks. Except that I haven't raided anything relevant in Wrath, so I need to nail it cold, or at least fake it convincingly.

So I've been watching a lot of youtube lately.

There's a great series of videos that teach WoW raid bosses by a website called "Tankspot". They are great and informative and I usually nod off about halfway through. Because instead of playing WoW, I'm watching somebody else play WoW while trying to memorize the five ways I can wipe the raid in every fight. So I can avoid doing those things.

Why do I need to do this?

You'll find a lot of people on the internet, and on the forums, and online, that talk about how great it is to come up with a successful raid strategy. I'm sure that it is great to come up with a raid strategy. But now that raiding has become mainstream, how many people get to have this kind of fun? If your guild asks you to watch the tankspot videos, it's likely that none of them ever had that fun.

If you're not one of the strategizing-fun people, you're one of the learning-bored people. And step one (falling asleep on youtube) isn't even the worst part -- the worst part is step two : going to the instance terrified that you'll forget something from youtube and wipe the raid because you didn't see a little debuff icon that said you were a 30-second bomb. Of course there's a mod to watch for the bomb icon. (sigh)

Can't we just dispense with this? Most single-player games don't require you to spend hours strategically planning fights ahead of time, and they certainly don't require you to watch for tiny icons.

A good boss encounter should show players what they need to do before the fight, while making it clear during the fight what is happening. For example, before the fight show the boss turning one of his minions into a bomb, and then show his minion exploding and killing other minions. Every player will then know (sans youtube) that being a bomb is bad, and that being near other players while being the bomb is worse. Then during the fight, instead of giving players a little "bomb" debuff icon, turn their character models into a physical bomb.

So without any mods that yell I am the bomb, and without watching youtube, I can actually play World of Warcraft. Instead of the mod-downloading, youtube-watching MMO that I'm playing right now.

Why Every Upcoming MMORPG Will Be Terrible

Maybe somebody out there doesn't realize that my blog, "Boathammer" was named out of my enthusiasm for Warhammer : Age of Reckoning, which was going to save the MMORPG world and instead only saved me from Wrath of the Lich King for like six months. You know, Wrath, the WoW expansion that saved WoW.

The worst thing about WAR is that I always felt (and still do) that it was well-designed in a billion little ways, and lacking in just a handful of big ways, and it failed miserably. I guess those 90's t-shirts were right : Second place is the first loser.

So I'm jaded now. There are no upcoming MMORPG's that I anticipate. Zero. I realize everybody else anticipates something or other. So anyway, here's why you are all wrong :

The Old Republic : So you're going to spend thousands of hours playing an RPG made by people who can't properly design a twenty or forty hour RPG?

Star Trek Online : Cryptic-developed City of Heroes was bad, Cryptic-developed Champions Online is bad, and Cryptic-developed Star Trek Online will be _____ . (exercise left for the reader)

Jumpgate Evolution : To be fair, I don't think it will be bad, but next to everything else it will feel underwhelming.

DC Universe Online : When SOE made their last good MMORPG in 1999, most people that play Horde in WoW hadn't even been born.

The Agency : See DC Universe Online, also the fact that it was pretty much missing from E3 this year.

Stargate Worlds : Inexperienced Studio + Licensed Property = No way this will ever see the light of day.

Warhammer 40k MMO : Ditto

Anything Korean : I'm sure it will look great and I'm sure the end-game (that only four americans will have the patience to grind up for) will be awesome.

Blizzard's Next : Even Blizzard admits it will have "more broad appeal." It's either a kid-friendly microtransaction Free2Play disaster or a pizza restaurant with ambulatory mechanopandas.

Are MMORPG's games or are they Digital Stratification Machines?

Tobold reacts a little to lonomonkey reacting a lot to a troll comment on some blog. The comment is something you see a lot in the forums (but hardly ever on blogs), something to the effect that Blizzard had it right in WoW 1.0 and WoW 2.0, and normal people should never have access to advanced raid content, only people who can attend scheduled raids for 20 or so hours a week.

Honestly, one of the great disappointments of blogging is that I was hoping their would be more yelling. See, before I blogged I would always yell at people in the forums because they were stupid. Always threatening to cancel their subscription over every little change, always complaining that other people might enjoy the game ("But how can I enjoy the game, knowing that other people are enjoying it too?"). Those people don't seem to make blogs. Well, one of them does, but for the most part MMO bloggers are sane, and that's more than a little sad.

Anyway, I think some people see WoW as a Digital Stratification Machine. It looks down on players from on high, and judges them worthy or unworthy of enjoying certain parts of the game. Better players get access to better content, other players not so much. The main critique of the Digital Stratification Machine, as a game, is that it is s***hole game design to spend millions of dollars creating interesting content just to deny most players the ability to access it.

Fortunately Blizzard is in the game-making business and have kind of thrown the Digital Stratification Machine-model out the window. Better players get more achievement points, have cooler looking gear and get other neat perks like mounts and pets. They do not, however, get exclusive access to raid content, and that's terrific.