Heroic Gnomeregan and more on Retaking Gnomeregan

Although I mentioned the other day that I thought we'd see more Heroic remakes of old dungeons in Cataclysm, I didn't really put two and two together until today.  This is from Blizzard's nice little article on the retaking of Gnomeregan ...

The immense loss of life at Gnomeregan weighed heavy on Mekkatorque's shoulders, and in his fury he ordered the death of Thermaplugg. A band of heroes took up the mission and returned with a tale of victory, but after analyzing the claim, Mekkatorque realized that the mechanized overlord defeated in the depths of the city was likely nothing more than a cleverly engineered facsimile of Thermaplugg.

So it seems likely that we'll get to defeat "Real Thermaplugg" in either a Heroic Gnomeregan or some variant of Gnomeregan as an instance.  Personally I was hoping that we'd get to take the old city, but given the achievement, and the fact that MMO-Champ is predicting the beta in April, it could be that the surface of Gnomeregan is all we'll get.  I'm sure they'll pretty it up and all, but it ain't the Gnomeregan these droids were looking for.

It would be cool to see what a Gnome city looks like.  To my knowledge we've only see a few Gnome houses scattered about, and never so much as a Gnome inn.  If it ever happens, the first day I set my hearth in Gnomeregan will be a good day.

Our Bizarre Movie Anarcho-Syndicalist Future

Not WoW.  Sorry.  I was watching the trailer for 'Repo Men', which is about some futuristic corporation that replaces people's organs but then charges huge amounts of money and when people can't pay the 'Repo Men' come, disable the person, then surgically remove the organ.  Of course something happens that makes the protagonists rethink their line of work (etc.)

They always do this in movies.  Watch out for the future where people kill you for money!

There's a scene in Babylon AD, a Vin Diesel movie that I thought wasn't bad.  Anyway, dystopic Anarcho-Syndicalist future, and people are getting on board a sub to travel from Russia to America.  People pay and start boarding, but there are too many, and eventually the sub people end up shooting people to get them off the sub.

I feel like I could be a business consultant in the bizarre movie anarcho-syndicalist future.

Sub Captain: Explain again.
Me: Ok, a lot of people pay to get on your sub, right?  Too many, in fact.  So many that your guys start shooting people, paying customers.
Sub Captain: But this is the grim movie anarcho-syndicalist future
Me: Granted, but you're throwing money on the ground when you shoot people.
Sub Captain: Explain
Me: Charge more money for tickets.  Fewer people will be able to afford it.  You can still fill up your sub, make the trip, and make more money.  The people left behind will want to use your service more because they aren't riddled with bullets, and they will get more money so they can.
Sub Captain: So once the paying customers are on the boat, then we shoot them?
Me: No.  Bullets cost money.

The Last Remnants of Vanilla WoW Are Being Swept Away

If you create a new gnome warlock today, March 29th 2010, you will watch the same video I watched five years ago, spawn in Dun Morogh on the same spot I spawned on, and do the same beginner quest I did.  You'll do most of the quests I did, actually.  At level 15 you'll use the brand new random dungeon finder to quickly get a group for the same dungeon I ran five years ago.

Your spells and talents will have changed, though.  They've been changing, getting better, for almost all of the five years.  Once you hit level eleven you'll be eligible for battlegrounds, a refinement of PvP which didn't exist when Azeroth first measured Boat.  You'll zip through level 1-59, thanks to an adjusted level curve, and when you hit 60 you won't stop to play the broken end game I had.  Instead you'll level to 80, to a bright shiny new end-game, brimming with instances and raids and epics.

When Cataclysm launches a new gnome warlock will probably not start watch the same video I did, or do the same quest I did, or even spawn in Dun Morogh.  The quests and world will have changed.  Made better, like all those other things before it.  The instances will be better. The gnome might even spawn as a priest instead of a warlock, which is what I would have done if I'd been given the chance five years ago.

When Cataclysm launches there will be only one remnant of vanilla left.  One little cup of misery for new players to drink.

Professions.

The first 300 levels of professions have changed little since launch.  You still make most of the same useless crap as you did five years ago.  You still level up by making items, which you usually make by buying mats from the auction house and then pressing a button.  You learn to make new items from a trainer, or from a recipe from a vendor.  It's all mechanical, all boring, and almost always useless.  When you've spent enough money to get to Wrath levels of professions they become more useful, but they are not really better by any other measure.

Professions are due for an overhaul.  I'm guessing we'll get them in the fourth expansion, whatever comes after Cataclysm.

Blizzard, Brilliant and Maddening

I can't log into WoW right now.  I can, but not all the time.  There's a 50-page post on the tech support forums, courtesy me and all the others that cannot log in the game.  As frustrating as such problems are, I understand that games will have them.  I also remain somewhat calm because I feel like Blizzard is investigating the problem and will fix it soon.

Sometimes, though, it feels like Blizzard drags its feet on simple issues and that is rather frustrating.  For two or three years Gnomeregan, the instance, had too wide of a spread for mob levels.  Any player that entered Gnomeregan would either encounter gray level mobs (that granted no experience) or mobs that were too high of a level to be reliably killed.  I know nothing of Blizzard's code but it is unlikely that a fix for this would have required code to change -- it would have required a far simpler update of game data which was probably stored in a spreadsheet somewhere.  Any experienced designer could have fixed the problem in a day or a morning, and an inexperienced designer could have fixed it in a couple days or a week.  Yet the issue languished until 2007 before it was fixed.

If WoW was terrible I would understand.  But how do you reconcile Blizzard's frequent flashes of genius with their reluctance to address minor problems that would noticeably improve quality of play?

I ran into another yesterday while running my very first non-heroic random dungeon.  At the end of a random dungeon you are given a 'reward bag'.  My reward from both instances was a 'superior' (blue) caster necklace, which was nice.  But it was too underpowered.  Upon closer examination, the item level matched my level exactly.  That would have been a proper item for any player playing WoW 1.0 "classic" content.  In TBC the formula changed, and again in Wrath.  A level 63 boss or quest no longer rewards an item level 63 item, but something more like item level 91 or 93.

Rewards from every quest and every dungeon boss in Outland reflects this new formula.  But not the new random dungeon rewards.  This is yet another new simple problem with a simple solution -- just fix the formula.  Yet I see the problem almost four months after random dungeons have been introduced, and I'm guessing it's been around for that entire time.

Blizzard's developers and designers, however brilliant they are, are not finding time to fix these simple issues.  They clearly need an intern, or someone, who's time is so unimportant that it can be used to make the game actually work.

Why do we need max level dungeons?

In that Game By Night post I linked the other day there was a little rumination about dungeons, and how he worried that only five levels would mean 'too few' heroics for Cataclysm.

Indeed it might, if Blizzard continued their TBC and Wrath tradition of making new-expansion-level dungeons that they then turn into heroics.

But what if they didn't?

We already know that they are not strictly following the tradition : they've announced Heroic Deadmines and Heroic Shadowfang Keep, remakes of two low-level dungeons. It's fair to assume that the low-level versions will be updated as well, giving low-level players a couple of high quality "WoW 4.0" dungeons to run, as well as giving max level players two new heroics.

Actually, remaking low level dungeons is a much better idea than adding new max level dungeons.

Consider the four late dungeons that Blizzard added in the latest expansion. All were added after most players had hit level 80. The 'regular' versions were all at level 80, but probably not a lot of use to new max-level players, who probably skipped to heroics anyway. How much good can a max level, non-heroic dungeon do for players? Probably not that much.

So this is where the remakes come in. When Blizzard remakes an old dungeon they are killing two birds with one stone. They are 'fixing' old content, which means that low level players have one less piece of ratty old "WoW 1.0" content to deal with, and instead a nice, quick, shiny "WoW 4.0" instance to run. And max level players get a new heroic and the vast majority never miss the max level non-heroic dungeon they don't get.

It's odd that Blizzard waited until now to start redoing old dungeons. Probably a good idea, frankly, as I don't think a two hour long, CC heavy, TBC-era Stockades would have gone over well.

When is raid content too hard?

When I was looking at my armory today I noticed my character feed.

9 Deathbringer kills (Icecrown 25 player). Mar 23, 2010

Obtained [Amulet of the Silent Eulogy]. (Equipped) Mar 23, 2010

10 Gunship Battle victories (Icecrown 25 player). Mar 23, 2010

10 Lady Deathwhisper kills (Icecrown 25 player). Mar 23, 2010

12 Lord Marrowgar kills (Icecrown 25 player). Mar 23, 2010

Earned the feat of strength [Green Brewfest Stein]. Mar 23, 2010

First, I was surprised I had gotten a feat of strength, it must have been with the 3.3.3 patch. I guess getting stuck on the loading screen and having to kill WoW has other disadvantages besides just general awfulness.

Mostly, I noticed the boss kills. Look how many times I've killed those Icecrown Citadel bosses. Twelve kills of Lord Marrowgar, the first boss. I think we spent two or three weeks there before we downed him.

Then ten kills on the second boss, so three weeks of work there. Ten kills on the third boss, so we did that the first week we tried it. Not a huge achievement, it's really just a fun gimmick fight.

Then nine kills on the fourth boss, so that was two weeks we worked on Deathbringer Saurfang before he fell. If you don't double-count the weeks we spent about five weeks killing the first four bosses of Icecrown Citadel.

Now, if you were to look through the last nine weeks of my character feed you would not find any other 25-man ICC boss kills. Which means next week we'll have spent twice as long working on the fifth boss as we spent on the first four combined.

Difficulty is kind of a taboo subject when it comes to games. The general feeling is that if you complain a game is too hard you are admitting that you are an unskilled gamer, and therefore a bad person. I'm an engineer by trade though, and that view perplexes me -- difficulty is not handed down from God to game designers. Tuning difficulty is part of game design, and the developers can actually get it wrong.

And it seems like Blizzard has at this point. Maybe other guilds are blowing past the fifth boss. And maybe not. Wowprogress shows that 85 guilds on my server have beaten at least the first 4 bosses in ICC. There are thirty guilds with only four boss kills -- thirty other guilds stuck like us. There are about eight guilds with 5 kills, and then the rest of the guilds are spread pretty evenly on boss count throughout the rest of the non-heroic raid (two guilds on our server have beaten arthas and are well into heroic ICC).

I don't mind difficulty, but there needs to be a reasonable curve. Give me a 3-4-5-6-7 instead of a 2-2-1-2-7. No boss should be so difficult that they take twice as long to down as all the bosses that came before them.

Should Losers Be Rewarded?

"Why should the losers get anything?"

If you've been around WoW and around the official forums, specifically, it's an argument you see a lot. Why should losers of battlegrounds get any extra honor? Shouldn't it all go the winner?

I'm not sure why people make this argument. It is certainly nothing like the world of professional sports where 'losers' are almost always compensated. In sports, as in WoW, people will not work for nothing, and any 'pro' sport that did not compensate losers would quickly find itself short on players.

In boxing the purse for each fighter is either a flat fee based on the fame of the fighters or a split between the winner and loser. In the recent Pacquiao-Cotto bout the winner took home $22 million while the loser had to settle for a paltry $12 million.

The players for the Indianapolis Colts, the team that lost Super Bowl XLIV, took home a flat $42k paycheck for the game. The minimum salary for a rookie on the 0-16 2008 Lions, the worst NFL team in history, was $295k, the same minimum salary for every other rookie in the league.

In golf the winner usually only takes home 18% of the purse. If there's a $5 million purse, the guy in 70th place takes home ten grand.

Now I don't want to imply that people are rewarded for being bad. These are all competitive sports and that guy making 10k for coming in 70th is, I'm sure, an astounding golfer. But 'losers' need to be paid so they can show up and lose to the winners, or else there's no game.

WoW PvP is, of course, not 'professional' in a strict sense, but is essentially a professional competition in that we are all playing for rewards -- titles and gear. Without rewards the losers would not play and the competitive field would evaporate. Competition is more fun with more competitors, which means you have to reward 'losers'.

Hoisted By My Own Petard

I have no idea what that means.

Last night I got a message when I tried to access the (special engineer) auctioneer in Dalaran saying that the "Auction House was not available." I commented to my wife that people would probably think 3.3.3 broke the auction house, since it had added an error message that would actually let people know when the auction house was unavailable, instead of simply not working.

Of course this morning it's still broken. So 3.3.3 did break the auction house. The Dalaran auctioneer, anyway, in IF it works fine.

The Weird Psychic Powers of Bloggers

I use Google Analytics for this site, which means I can see very detailed charts showing exactly how few people visit my site on any given day.

And yet, anytime I mention another MMO blogger -- seemingly any of them -- they mysteriously show up and make a comment. Yet I have far fewer daily visitors than there are MMO bloggers.

Don't get me wrong, I certainly appreciate the feedback. I'm just mystified as to how it happens.

How much content is too much content?

Both Spinks and Syp linked to the same article by a guy who worries that there will be too little content for Cataclysm. He argues that we will have fewer heroics, and ...

The main issue is that less heroics equals quicker burn out.

I Cross the Boredom Rubicon on about the third run of any heroic. Unless you are going to have 100 heroic dungeons I will get bored. I'd imagine most people have no idea whether they are on their fifteenth run of a heroic or their twentieth : at that point it is just tired and old.

But what if their were 100 heroics? Would that work? The perils of too little content are often discussed in MMO land, and with good reason as that's the more severe problem.

Or does it just seem that way? What would too much content mean?

If there were too much content it would be hard to find other people who wanted to do the content. It wouldn't be very familiar, so that would make it harder. And since it was harder even fewer people would want to do it. So imagine group content that is out there, in a game, but very few people want to do ...

Oh yeah. Low-level 5-mans in WoW are a ghost town, or at least they were before the Random Dungeon finder/cross-server instances came around. There are too many of them and players just aren't that familiar with them. I'm familiar with most of the dungeons (though at least one I've never run in five years) but I still avoid them, because the odds of having a competent group are almost nil.

There are other examples too. In WAR there are too many public quests, which makes it hard to find people to play with. Even though I'm sick of Wrath heroics there are arguably too many of them, as any new player needs to learn 16 dungeons * 3 bosses = 48 encounters before they ever click that "random dungeon" button. And before the random dungeon finder and cross-server instances were introduced it was rather hard to do any particular dungeon, even a heroic, unless it was the daily.

Cross-server instances paired with the Random Dungeon Finder do solve the problem of finding a group. And since you get more rewards for doing 'random' dungeons, it also becomes easy to find a group for any particular dungeon, as any player interested in dungeon X can be matched up with four players doing randoms.

But that still leaves the learning problem of 'too much content'. And without an exponential increase in the number of dungeons, we haven't really solved the 'too little content' boring problem either.

The learning problem can be solved, however, by making encounters more intuitive. Boredom in dungeons is a different matter entirely, one that cannot be solved by variety alone. We need different, better dungeons that are not boring on the third run.

More Leaks Please, Blizzard

Blizzard does not give us players official release dates because they are obsessed with the whole 'managing expectations' thing and they don't want to give complainers anything to complain about. But it doesn't help -- complainers are stupid and they'll complain that Blizzard did not hit the placeholder date that an intern entered at Amazon.com.

Now, consider politics. There is a fine art of leaking in the world of politics. In fact, there is a fine art of deliberate leaks -- 'anonymous sources' who are really press secretaries in charge of dealing with the media.

Why doesn't Blizzard 'leak' their internal target dates? Not a "Cataclysm will be out November 15th 2010" sort of thing, since even Bliz does not know that until they get there, more a "There's no way Cataclysm will be out before November 14th 2010", which is something they do know right now. MMO-Champion often prints 'leaks' about patches, usually a day ahead of time -- more of that sort of thing.

Ordinary people would figure out pretty quickly that the leak was either officially or unofficially from Blizzard and we would then have an idea about release dates, which is a nice thing to know. Complainers, who are idiots, wouldn't get it and would still be complaining about the Amazon dates.

Don't get mad at Me, Syncaine, get mad at Blizzard

I was looking at a recent, angry, ad hominem-fallacy-making comment that Syncaine made the other day (is there any other kind?).

You played one of the easiest (and least wanted) classes in vanilla raiding, and based on that one experience (did you top the damage chart with your 1 spam btw?) you think raiding was easy?

Of course this was directed at me and a comment on my blog so I guess it was unique. I don't know why he's so upset, all I did was make fun of him for saying classic WoW raiding was hard.

But it's not my fault I spam-casted one spell, Syncaine. It's Blizzard's fault.

I do have a rotation now. Actually, I have a priority system. People always say that WoW characters have rotations but I doubt any do -- the three warlock specs, at least, all have priority systems. This means that you only 'repeat' your casts when you hit the least common multiple of your cooldowns and they all expire at the same time, which is not that often.

But I am what Blizzard made me. I now have a 'priority system' because Blizzard gave warlocks a bunch of powerful spells and self-buffs with conflicting cooldowns. Blizzard (and they've admitted as much) deliberately added this to every class that did not already have it, just to make play more interesting and a little harder. The only class I raided with in vanilla WoW that had a priority system was hunters (AQ20, AQ40, and some Naxx) , and I'm sure even that is much more involved now than it was then, unless it is ten times easier than what warlocks do.

But back when I raided lock in classic WoW, Warlocks had no powerful spells with conflicting cooldowns, mobs had only 8 debuff slots, and the only rotationalish option (Immo-Conflag) was negated by the high fire resists of many raid mobs. I don't play to impress, I play to win, and if single-spell spam is what gives the highest DPS (it still does when I AoE) then all I have to say to Syncaine is :

11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

Booo! No Retaking Gnomeregan until 3.3.9

The good news, Blizzard finally confirms the Retaking of Gnomeregan.

Bad news, it's not until 3.3.9 (or 3.9, depending on who you believe).

And where are the Public Quests we were promised?

I realize I wrote the same article yesterday (short article asking Blizzard to copy a feature from another game) but I don't care. I want public quests.

Public quests were really the greatest innovation of Warhammer Online. They were literally public quests -- every player, and the world itself, were on the same phase of the quest at the same time. Once the players had completed the current phase of the quest (kill 100 foozles) the quest would go to the next phase (kill 10 megafoozles) and after three or four phases (kill the ultrafoozle) there was a neat little public dice roll, affected by level of participation, that determined what kind of loot reward people got.

PQ's gave you a fun, efficient way to cooperate with other players in the open world. In WoW I still have to off-spec demo and go help my wife's characters with group quests in Icecrown, because it's rare that someone else is doing them, and even then you have to invite people, and get enough people, and convince people not to leave while you're getting enough people, etc. PQ's did away with that because you could kind of work on the quest until enough people showed up to finish it.

In the sense of the tasks themselves they were also pretty cool. There are a lot of WoW quests where you are told to gather something first, then kill guys, then kill more important guys, then kill the leader of the guys. In WAR's public quests, though, the game would change in those different phases. When you had to kill the less important guys they would be all that was in the quest zone. Then the harder guys would emerge and you would kill them instead. Then the boss would appear and you would have to fight him. It was very natural and very nice. Much better than the WoW quest chains where you are told to kill the boss and you think "Oh I already killed him while I was trying to finish the previous phase."

Public quests weren't perfect, of course, the biggest problem being population -- if there were people around to do PQ's they were great but often there weren't people around and few PQ's could be soloed. Blizzard could solve this problem somehow, if by no other method then by throwing them in a cross-realm instance.

But we haven't seen anything like PQ's announced in Cataclysm so I guess we won't have them soon. Blizzard is Blizzard, though, and they can't pass up a good idea forever. I think we'll see public quests in WoW sooner or later.

When will Horde Mode come to WoW?

One of the great joys of my multi-player existence is Horde Modes. Gears of War 2 introduced them, and they are co-op matches with successively harder rounds of enemies that you keep fighting until you die or "win" -- though usually you die. It's since been used in a number of other games. It's called Firefight in Halo: ODST, and just plain old Survival in Left 4 Dead (2).

The main conceit of Horde Mode is that you will fail, and the only question any particular match will answer is how long you can survive.

WoW does have wave-based instances (Black Morass in TBC and Violet Hold in Wrath) which are fun but aren't quite the same, as they're regular, balanced instances with bosses that end when players beat them, which is the typical outcome (as it should be).

I think it would be great fit for WoW. While I'm opposed to "hard" 5-man content, I'd make an exception for horde mode because it's fun, easy to understand, and there would be less elitism because everybody loses.

And while people say they like unpredictability, you always find interesting things about you and your class when you and your party are near death, just trying to squeak out the last 100k on a boss. You'd get one or more of those situations every horde run.

Boat The Jerk

I got the Wintergrasp Ranger achievement last week. I have mixed feelings about that.

It requires that you kill 10 enemy players in different subzones within Wintergrasp. Most of these are no import to me -- no moral import to me, anyway, as they involve killing enemies in areas of strategic importance during Wintergrasp, something that's clearly part of Wintergrasp battles, which are consensual PvP.

But there are more subzones. Subzones in which no player would ever be found during a live Wintergrasp battle. Places to farm and quest. Places where horde farm and quest. Places where I've ganked horde trying to farm and quest.

I won't say that I've never been a jerk in WoW, but distancing myself from jerk-like behavior is one of my foremost concerns. Ganking is one of the worst manifestations of jerkliness, and even though it's allowed on PvP servers and in WG on PvE servers, I do my best to avoid it. It's the asymmetricity of the darn thing that haunts me. Some guy is trying to fish or farm and I decide to gank his character for my own benefit. I realize getting ganked is an accepted risk but I also don't think you need to be a jerk just because you can.

But that darn achievement. I wanted it and I know that any Wintergrasp achievements I do not get before Cataclysm comes out will never be gotten. So for one weekend I became a jerk. I'd fly around to the two or three areas where I needed a kill, quickly landing to gank any horde I could find. It was actually far easier than I'd ever imagined, though with one mage I needed help and had to call in a guildie. Not fair but achievements don't count fair. We ended up killing the same mage four times in different parts of WG, I'm guessing he was moving, unsuccessfully, to avoid the repeat ganking.

Last week I got my last seven kills around one of the towers -- a Point of Strategic Importance but one at which few fights take place. So I'm officially done with ganking ... at least until I do the ganking achievement in Cataclysm.

Tower Defense Games on the 360 and XBLA

Since a quarter of my hits seem to come from google searches about tower defense on XBLA, and I feel bad that the last news I gave is hopelessly out of date, let's diverge from our regularly scheduled MMO-discussions for a moment to discuss tower defense on the 360.

Right now there are three Tower Defense games on XBLA. I'm not really familiar with any "Live Indie" tower defense titles although they undoubtedly exist.

South Park Tower Defense

I haven't played the game the whole way through, this is just based on what I've seen in the demo. As far as I know this game is exclusive to XBLA, unlike the other two games.

Tower defense with a playable builder and set mob paths (no maze-building). You play as one of the South Park characters and can build and upgrade towers, while also collecting coins and throwing snowballs at enemies. There's a lot going on and you could almost call it an Action Tower Defense Game. There's multiplayer for up to 4 players both locally and over xbox live, though I didn't try out the multiplayer on live. When you have less than four players you can switch between characters and any non-player-controlled characters become mini turrets.

It's not easy to restart a level but the levels seem pretty short so far, so I'm hoping for no play-for-ten-minutes-then-lose-and-have-to-restart hijinks. I'm also not sure what tower variety is like, having only played the game a little bit.

I haven't played much of the game, but it appears solid. The playable characters are very welcome because I like to be doing something while I'm playing a tower defense game. I firmly believe that tower defense should never have nor need "fast forward" buttons. There's also no "interest" at the end of each round, something I hate as I think it's dumb for tower defense games to reward you for not building towers.

Achievements seem to be good, with no terrible Castle-Crasheresqe-Button-Smashing nightmares to be seen.

There's no new animation from what little I saw, just new voice acting along with stills. The game is wacky like the show but I'm not sure how much you would understand without seeing the show. There was nothing that really made me laugh from what I saw, but I'm hoping it's like the show -- a lot of exposition with a light smattering of fantastic gags.

Oh, and like the show it's not very kid-friendly.

Crystal Chronicles

A Final Fantasy-themed Tower Defense game made by Square Enix, which uses characters from one of the earlier Final Fantasy games, or so I've heard. Not being a huge FF fan I don't know if that's true or which game that would be.

There are three modes each with different "towers" -- towers being different characters that can be upgraded. Some modes also include upgradeable "crystals" which provide bonuses to characters close to them, which is kind of neat and pretty much the only unique thing about this game besides the FF theme.

Of course there is interest at the end of the level, which rewards you for not building towers and barely killing guys, and I hate that. There's also a fast forward button that you'll need to hold down from time to time (sigh) and to top off the evil features there's no partial rewind, so you'll need to restart every time you lose which, if you're me, is a lot. There seems to be a lot of strategic depth but you're often not sure why something worked or didn't work.

The game was released on a ton of platforms including mobile phones and it seems a lot like a game that was released for mobile phones.

Achievements are not fantastic, but they aren't terrible either. There is a high scores list but you'll need to manually "upload" your scores.

Defense Grid : The Awakening

You can probably get this game on Steam (for PC) for cheaper, but it is a great tower defense game and one of the giants of the small genre. If you like tower defense games and like the demo for this game I'd really recommend it.

It still has two of the bogeymen of the genre that I've dissed above -- interest and fast-forward. But it also has a checkpoint system without equal, as you can not only rewind to your last checkpoint, but back two or three or four checkpoints (though if you rewind past a checkpoint it's gone forever).

Tower variety is fantastic, and the upgrade system, though linear, is still very cool. The game looks great. There are many different kinds of enemies and a lot of strategic depth to the game, and unlike Crystal Chronicles it's usually easier to understand why you failed or succeeded.

This is also one of the few tower defense games I've played that has a variety of map playstyles. There are fixed path and maze making maps, as well as maps with different levels (heights) and some that are a mix of fixed path and maze making. The heights usually confused me, though, as there seemed to be line of sight issues, but at least it made the maps look cool.

There are a ton of game modes to try, and every mode/map pairing has its own high score list, which is awesome because you will occasionally get a high ranking if you did well on a map.

Can you take back a server?

Gevlon's last experiment was to create a "blue" raiding guild, one that would prove that it was possible to beat difficult content while wearing inadequate gear. It would be testimony to his belief that WoW is easy and skill conquers all. And it doesn't seem like they are making much progress due to lack of interest.

Gevlon, of course, preaches winning by abandoning loyalty, morality, and fun at the expense of unrelenting efficiency. So asking his fans to do something incredibly inefficient and fun out of loyalty to "The Goblin" unsurprisingly falls flat. True Gevlonians probably calculated that the only possible reward was more self-satisfied posts from Gevlon, something they already get for free without any inefficiency, loyalty, or fun required.

His recent project is interesting too : to resurrect the Alliance faction on one of the many PvP servers where it is dead. World of Warcraft, like almost every massive game, requires a certain-sized community for play to be sustainable at the server level. When you don't have the community everything is broken. PvE, PvP, and even commerce is pretty much shot when there aren't enough players. The problem is exacerbated on PvP servers, where the faction balance turns everyday merciless ganking into a real problem.

The problem is bad game design. PvP servers are not about PvP so much as ganking and griefing, so being in the "world" while part of the severely outnumbered faction quickly becomes tiresome. Meanwhile you'll have trouble filling out raids, buying and selling on the auction house, and even finding partners for PvP.

How to fix it? PvP servers should be abolished altogether. There should be more world PvP, of course, though with more of a Wintergrasp flavor, i.e. areas designed to both host and reward PvP.

Of course I'm an engineer so I'd want to solve the problem with better design. Gevlon, whatever he fashions himself nowadays, wants to solve the problem with better people. He's forming a guild of like-minded, self-reliant players with the intent of building an economic, PvE, and PvP community that will reverse the trend of alliance flight.

This Gevlonian experiment will fail for the same reason as the prior experiment, for the same reason that the central conceit of Gevlon-Idol Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged would never work. People driven to succeed are not willing to fail to prove a point.

The problem of taking back a server remains an interesting one, though, but one that players could never accomplish on their own.

Players are products of the games they play. You can see it in the way players have changed since classic WoW. We run more 5-man instances -- because they are easier to run and reward every level of player. We run more PUG raids -- because we have four lockouts for any given raid instance so we can profitably rerun content we already know. Raiding guild leaders are less likely to be despots -- because we can run PUG raids or make our own 10-man raids. Ninjas are less prevalent -- because there is less loot to steal and so much less to be gained from loot stealing.

And so on. Players did not change the way game was played. The way the game was played changed, and that changed us. Some day Blizzard will make rebuilding a faction productive and fun, and factions will be rebuilt.

My Addons Take 18 seconds to load, and it's my fault -- twice

So I ran Warmup the other day because I noticed it's taking me quite a while to log into WoW lately. Turns out I'm spending 18 seconds loading mods every time I log on. And it turns out this is my fault, not once, but twice.

This is the list of mods sorted by time-to-load according to Warmup:

0.001 !!Warmup (0 KiB - 2 KiB), -- [1]

0.015 Blizzard_CombatText (39 KiB - 39 KiB), -- [69]

0.034 Blizzard_TimeManager (45 KiB - 69 KiB), -- [68]

0.044 DataStore_Stats (27 KiB - 24 KiB), -- [17]

0.055 DataStore_Characters (39 KiB - 42 KiB), -- [6]

0.058 Forte_Shaman (0 KiB - 16 KiB), -- [36]

0.062 DataStore_Pets (57 KiB - 85 KiB), -- [12]

0.063 DataStore_Currencies (31 KiB - 26 KiB), -- [9]

0.063 Forte_Summon (63 KiB - 86 KiB), -- [39]

0.064 Forte_Rogue (0 KiB - 5 KiB), -- [35]

0.065 DataStore_Spells (45 KiB - 67 KiB), -- [16]

0.067 Forte_Priest (0 KiB - 11 KiB), -- [34]

0.068 Forte_Mage (0 KiB - 14 KiB), -- [32]

0.069 Forte_Druid (0 KiB - 20 KiB), -- [29]

0.069 Forte_Paladin (0 KiB - 18 KiB), -- [33]

0.07 DataStore_Talents (82 KiB - 94 KiB), -- [18]

0.071 DataStore_Auctions (30 KiB - 50 KiB), -- [5]

0.071 Forte_Hunter (0 KiB - 12 KiB), -- [31]

0.075 Forte_DeathKnight (0 KiB - 28 KiB), -- [28]

0.075 Forte_Vehicle (3 KiB - 2 KiB), -- [41]

0.076 Forte_Talent (1 KiB - 7 KiB), -- [40]

0.077 Forte_Warlock (77 KiB - 109 KiB), -- [42]

0.078 Forte_Casting (52 KiB - 80 KiB), -- [25]

0.078 Forte_Soulstone (66 KiB - 85 KiB), -- [38]

0.083 Forte_Shard (28 KiB - 44 KiB), -- [37]

0.083 Blizzard_AuctionUI (268 KiB - 173 KiB), -- [70

0.083Blizzard_AuctionUI (268 KiB - 173 KiB), -- [70

0.084 DataStore_Reputations (42 KiB - 157 KiB), -- [14]

0.084 Forte_Healthstone (34 KiB - 59 KiB), -- [30]

0.085 Forte_Warrior (0 KiB - 5 KiB), -- [43]

0.086 TitanAmmo (12 KiB - 21 KiB), -- [55]

0.087 DataStore_Mails (58 KiB - 84 KiB), -- [11]

0.087 Blizzard_CombatLog (237 KiB - 207 KiB), -- [67]

0.088 Forte_Timer (154 KiB - 308 KiB), -- [27]

0.088 QuestReward (2 KiB - 22 KiB), -- [51]

0.088 TitanRegen (13 KiB - 20 KiB), -- [63]

0.091 TitanXP (22 KiB - 31 KiB), -- [66]

0.093 TitanRecount (9 KiB - 12 KiB), -- [62]

0.094 Forte_Cooldown (104 KiB - 182 KiB), -- [26]

0.094 TitanLootType (21 KiB - 33 KiB), -- [60]

0.095 TitanRepair (70 KiB - 72 KiB), -- [64]

0.096 SuperBuffs (3 KiB - 6 KiB), -- [54]

0.097 DataStore_Achievements (159 KiB - 188 KiB), -- [4]

0.101 TitanCoords (21 KiB - 29 KiB), -- [58]

0.103 TitanClock (27 KiB - 41 KiB), -- [57]

0.104 TitanBag (16 KiB - 24 KiB), -- [56]

0.109 DataStore_Quests (256 KiB - 314 KiB), -- [13]

0.111 TitanPerformance (35 KiB - 49 KiB), -- [61]

0.123 DataStore_Skills (33 KiB - 220 KiB), -- [15]

0.147 TitanVolume (43 KiB - 94 KiB), -- [65]

0.148 DataStore_Containers (172 KiB - 324 KiB), -- [7]

0.17 TitanGoldTracker (42 KiB - 107 KiB), -- [59]

0.178 DataStore_Crafts (520 KiB - 202 KiB), -- [8]

0.182 BonusScanner (187 KiB - 444 KiB), -- [22]

0.182 Forte_Core (508 KiB - 773 KiB), -- [24]

0.202 DataStore_Inventory (243 KiB - 1197 KiB), -- [10]

0.302 DataStore (600 KiB - 431 KiB), -- [3]

0.305 DBM-Core (296 KiB - 679 KiB), -- [23]

0.306 Postal (140 KiB - 479 KiB), -- [49]

0.331 Pawn (465 KiB - 563 KiB), -- [48]

0.345 Overachiever (216 KiB - 935 KiB), -- [47]

0.379 Stubby (247 KiB - 122 KiB), -- [53]

0.469 Gatherer (903 KiB - 1410 KiB), -- [44]

0.756 Outfitter (1625 KiB - 4129 KiB), -- [46]

0.872 Bartender4 (512 KiB - 2301 KiB), -- [21]

0.88 Titan (499 KiB - 1090 KiB), -- [45]

1.314 AckisRecipeList (2764 KiB - 1575 KiB), -- [2]

1.339 Recount (4532 KiB - 5098 KiB), -- [52]

1.606 AuctionLite (7322 KiB - 2108 KiB), -- [20]

2.007 Altoholic (3758 KiB - 2112 KiB), -- [19]

2.362 QuestHelper (6013 KiB - 6202 KiB), -- [50]

Of course the slowest loading addons are also my favorites. Perhaps there is a correlation.

So it's my fault because I have too many mods. But it's also even more my fault.

1.314 AckisRecipeList (2764 KiB - 1575 KiB), -- [2]

Ackis is descended from an addon I wrote. Ackis is much improved, of course, but most of the existing faults of Ackis are, quite literally, my fault. Things I knew I should fix but never did. One item on a long-lost todo list reminds me to only load necessary tradeskill information on-demand, instead of loading all tradeskills during logon. Now 1.314 seconds of failure greets me every time I log into WoW.

Why is Dalaran Laggy?

I don't know if these sorts of things are obvious or not because I don't ("IRL") know a ton of non-computer people. But, obvious or not, computer people spend a lot of time determining the complexity of computation, so you get to read why Dalaran is Laggy :)

If you have one person on a server, the server needs to process the location of one person, receive the location of one person, and send the location of one person to one person. 1, 1, and 1 * 1, which equals 1.

If you have two people on a server, the server needs to process the location of two people, receive the location of two people, and send the location of two people to ... two people. 1, 2, and 2 * 2, which equals 4.

If you have six people on a server, blah blah blah, you now have to send out 36 messages with player location data. If there are ten people you have to send out 100 messages.

And if it's Dalaran, and there are two hundred and fifty people, you need to send out sixty-two thousand, five hundred messages. The number of location messages you need to send is the number of players squared. Dalaran doesn't lag because it has a ton of players, it lags because the Dalaran server needs to tell every player in Dalaran about almost every other player in Dalaran.

It's also why instanced worlds are so attractive to MMO developers -- two hundred players split to four different servers is 10,000 outgoing location messages, while two hundred players on one server is 40,000 outgoing messages.

Of course, the problems that require n^2 computations for every n data points are bad but they aren't the worst. The worst are the problems that are x^n, where every additional data point multiplies the previous result by x (where x is the amount of processing it would take to do whatever computation once). I bring this up because the popular addon QuestHelper, which computes a "fastest" route between quest objectives, is performing a well-known x^n problem ("The Traveling Salesman Problem") every time it recalculates your optimal route**. Even when it's slow I'm amazed at how fast it goes.

**assuming the addon isn't faking it. I'm also assuming it is doing some optimizations that result in the computation being a constant factor less than x^n.

Crafting my WoW "Do Not Do" List

I like almost everything about WoW. I don't do everything, but I like everything. And now that there are achievements, I can get credit for doing everything, which I already like doing, but that makes it better.

So it can be hard to step away from WoW, because it always seems like there is so much to do. But I think stepping back from your "Main Game" is a good idea from time to time, even when you are firmly entrenched.

For example, I occasionally try "To Do" lists of all the things I want to do in WoW, but they fast become too cumbersome. I set down first five, then ten, then fifteen goals, and then two thoughts pop into my head. First, that I can never achieve all fifteen goals. Second, that the fifteen goals are but a tiny fraction of what I'd like to do in the game. And since I like to do everything in the game, many of those fifteen items are enormous time-dumps that do relatively little for my character.

I've already sworn off one of these, because how can you have time to run Molten Core twenty times but no time to play Mass Effect 2 once? A more thorough swearing-off, though, is warranted. So I've decided to make a "Do Not Do" list. A list of tasks in WoW that I'd like to do, but that are so time-inefficient that I'm prohibiting myself from so indulging.

There are only two rules of the "Do Not Do" list. When I play with my wife anything is fair game, since we are hanging out and I'm up for whatever she wants to do. The other is that items on the "Do Not Do" list must be tasks I had planned or hoped to perform at some point. Saying I'll never level a druid does not save me any time since I'd long ago sworn off the cursed shapeshifters**.

1. No Solo or Duo Molten Core, because each run ends up taking me four or more hours, and I'd need 20 more runs to get everything I need, and I could play two or three (or five or ten) good single player games in that time, and I'm always behind on good single player games.
   
   
2. No mounts that cost more than 5k gold unless there is something truly exceptional about them.
   
   
3. No recipes that take more than ten hours to farm, unless they can make me money. No reputations that take more than twenty hours to grind, unless they are useful or can make me money.
   
   
4. Engineering and Enchanting are my main character's professions. No more changing for any reason.
   
   
5. No new main characters. I am Boat the Warlock, for better or worse.
   
   
6. Only work on achievements on the main.
   
   
7. No more than two new characters leveled from scratch per expansion. I haven't approached this limit in recent history, but the limit itself relieves some stress.
   
   
8. No fishing tournaments. Odds of winning are too low, while the likelihood of wasting time is guaranteed.
   
   
9. I'll never try to hit exalted with any of the worst four or five reputations -- all reps from vanilla WoW, which was an expansion or two before Blizzard figured out how to do reputation.

I notice this is also a thinly-veiled list of my own bad habits in WoW.

** Please don't take this to mean I hold something against cursed shapeshifters in general. I'm quite fond of the Worgen, for example.

The Lords of Difficulty

Imagine a million different lords with a million different trials -- "games", if you will. The one thing that every trial has in common is that it must take one thousand players, and from that choose one winner, one "best player".

Now, imagine each trial built around the game "Ms. Pac Man".

There's a trial where you just play Ms. Pac Man, a trial where you see how long you can play Ms. Pac Man, and trials where the first player to reach level 100 or 100 hours first wins. One trial requires players to play and beat one level every two hours, and the winner is the player that can endure this the longest. There's a trial that's just the first level over and over again, faster and faster. One trial measures who can pump in the most quarters, and another trial just assigns players a random score (highest score wins). There's even a trial with 20 ghosts. And so on.

Two of the trials are interesting, together. In one, the players just play normal Ms. Pac Man to see who can score the highest. In the other, the players are instructed for an hour on Ms. Pac Man, and how to be a better player -- then they see who can score the highest.

In one case the players are given no guidance, and in the other case they are given a lot of guidance. So which trial is harder?

They are the same. Both take 1000 players, and pick the best one. In fact, all the trials are, no matter how easy or hard they seem, equally difficult as long as they follow the 1 winner in 1000 players. Ultimately 1000 go in and one comes out the winner.

Syncaine responded to my post the other day, seemingly a little upset. I can't imagine why, all I did was make fun of him for saying vanilla WoW raiding was hard. Blustering aside, he did say that Naxxramas was not completed by a lot of players in vanilla WoW, therefore vanilla WoW raiding was harder than modern WoW raiding. The first part is definitely true, and Blizzard has admitted as much. Now, I don't agree on the difficulty part, I think old raids were easier but also far less accessible -- raids were bigger, required more organization, and the only way to gear new players was to power-gear them through old raiding content.

But let's take the argument as true -- that Naxx 40 was visited more than ICC is today, solely based on difficulty. There is still ample room for differentiation in the heroic raids. I did a heroic ToGC 10 the other week -- that's the "Heroic" version of the previous tier's 10-man raid. My group was just obliterated, despite outgearing the encounters. It was the hardest thing I've ever done in WoW -- much harder than any fight I'd experienced in any of the vanilla raiding dungeons.

As small as the percentage of players that cleared Naxx 40 in vanilla WoW, I'd say the percentage that will clear Heroic ICC 25 will be much lower. By that metric alone, modern raiding is more difficult than classic raiding.

WoW almost didn't have the Auction House

Interesting interview on the official WoW site with Tom Chilton, looking back on the fifth anniversary. I already gave away what I thought was the most interesting tidbit, so here's the rest of that passage.

There were a lot of sacred cows that had to die. One in early World of Warcraft development was the idea that there should not be an auction house. We were hoping to see the social interaction in any kind of trading -- players meeting up face to face, deciding what the price on something would be, and determining what they were going to do to exchange their goods. After the game had been in beta for a while, and we saw that trading was incredibly cumbersome, and people weren't able to efficiently buy and sell stuff, we made the decision to include a game system to support it.

A short while ago I proposed ditching the AH, replacing it with something I felt was better. The idea of not having an auction house or something similar seems, well, completely insane to me. Of course the other MMO I played the most beside WoW, FFXI, had a useless auction house, but at least it didn't hurt you, like every other bad feature in the game.