Pithy Insightful Commentary

Actually not.  Its just hard to come up with continuing variations on a “Weekend Update” theme.

WoW

The instance group is on temporary hiatus due to certain vacation plans, so while we are all about 68+, the slog up the final Hillary Step seems to be exactly that.  A slog.

We have been extraordinarily efficient in leveling almost exclusively via instance work once a week and only one other noninstance session each week which, particularly since the 2.3 patch, has allowed us to pretty much remain level appropriate for all instances with our modest play budget.  With the crack like concentrated xp that instance work has generated, its very hard to feel like you’re making any progress by “merely” doing quests.  Even more so when you’re running a group of more than two or three.

As Wilhelm, the Ancient Gaming Noob reported, we lifted our self imposed stay at level rule for our group since we were so close to 70.  Playing mostly with the group twice a week, I hadn’t really noticed how significant the solo bias has crept in.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m pro solo experience but I’m also very pro small group.

A week or so ago, I happened to take a Sunday– ostensibly a non-WoW day– to grind a bit to get over the hump to level 68.  Several of us were still stuck in the last half of 67.  In a matter of a relatively short time, I knocked out some green quests in Terrokar and Shadowmoon to get over the hump.  Others of our group, playing only during our “appointed” group times twice a week have failed to keep pace when doing non-instanced content.

No news here, but for the same amount of time that we play together, we make less progress than had we undertaken the same content for the same amount of time.  Playing with a group of three or four, we simply don’t make as much progress as a solo or group of two.

That’s frustrating.  Instance minimum is five but if I can’t make the same experience (or more) working together with a group for the same amount of play time, something’s borked.

EQ2

So much for WoW.  Mrs. P and I logged into EQ2 for a brief session and managed to level and nearly get another as we scale the teens and try to remember how to play the game.

Diablo

Like so many other bloggers, we took obvious note of Blizzard’s announcement of Diablo III.  Go them.  Despite the gameplay being so NOT MMO, I loved the original and will give them at least $50 as a nostalgia dividend.  If the multi works decently enough, I could see our WoW group trying to explore this game ad nauseum.

Others

Given my state of boredom with the MMO space, I downloaded the Spore creature creator and spent some time playing with that.  Lots of fun and I’m very interested in seeing what the rest looks like.

One of our instance buddies mentioned that he had been looking around for something else and mentioned Sins of a Solar Empire. I started drooling at the possibility of rekindling an RTS night.  Before MMOs, RTS games (C&C, Warcraft, AoE, AoK) ruled our universe for years and Sins seems like a good opportunity to go there again.

Blogosphere

I can’t believe the continuing “conversation” that has grown from Richard Bartle’s off the cuff comments “I’ve played Warhammer.  Its called World of Warcraft.”  or somesuch (I’m too tired to link the quote).  Raph Koster has weighed in and said that MMOs left more features of MUDs behind than they implemented.  A ridiculous quasi-historical discussion ensued on Raph’s site that seems to be racing to discover the Big Bang of the current MMO genre.  Most folks left it at  D&D was a major root influence from which all or most MUDs, MOOs, MUSHs, and later MMOs flowed.

So we owe everything to Gary Gygax’s Chainmail (R.I.P.) or Avalon Hill or Tolkien or Risk or Parchesi.  Meh.   Two questions go unanswered in all this conflated Gas Baggery:  1) Why hasn’t anyone innovated on the basic game mechanics in 50 years and 2) WTF happened to the single most distinctive feature of the table top gaming system that purportedly evolved into MUDs and MMOs:  the Game Master.

Absent the game master, the game is simply a ruleset, generally applied to static content.  No MMO to date has anything even close to the approximation of a real live breathing game master.  Therein lies the next generation my friends.

We can all learn how to kill Van Cleef as a staged, canned encounter.  Its the same whether its a group of 5 alliance mages or a mixed group of hordies or a level 70 warlock and 4 various classed noobs or whatever.  “Van Cleef pay big for your head.”  And you for the box and the subscription.  Make that encounter dynamic based on the level and mix of classes in the encounter– and what they’ve done in the virtual world then to date– and I’ll buy stock in that company.

Non Game

Finally, it warmed my heart to hear that the 73 year old Leonard Cohen stole the show at the Glastonbury Festival.  My faith in humanity may have been restored.

And the first tomato from my garden was harvested and it was good.

P out.

Lost Colonies

Reactive blogger that I am, and bored with all that is MMO at the moment, I decided to take up Tobold’s $50 Million Question, so here goes.  Anyone who’s been reading for while might recognize some of the themes I’ve touched on before.

Name of the game: Lost Colonies (working title)

Genre: Sci-fi/Fantasy

Short description of gameplay: 3d space fantasy (sword and planet) universe with action taking place both on planets (cities, zones), spacestations and in interplanetary space.  Several unique aspects– multiple modalities of gameplay from traditional hack to ship based combat to non-combat tycoon activities.  Players and guilds could occupy and control planets, moons, asteroids etc.  Another unique aspect would be a reconceptualizing of the guild system– players could belong to multiple guilds simultaneously and guilds would be able to own and operate property in its own right (more on that below).

Business model: I’ll be boring and say box + low monthly + velvet rope

Backstory

The backstory similar to that of Eve or Battlestar Galactica, DS9 or any number of other sci-fi IPs:  colonists of Earth long ago departed for the far reaches of the galaxy after discovering messages being transmitted from some ancient beacon.  The unravelling of the beacon mystery is the epic storyline that unites all the factions.  Technology being what it was at the time, the colonists departed on what was understood to be a one-way journey, each headed off to the location of a different beacon.

Colonists arrived, adversity ensues, generations pass and each ends up taking their own unique adaptive and evolutionary course based on their unique circumstances.  At the time the game begins, the sundered colonies are spread out over a large but navigable sector of the galaxy far from the now mythical earth.  Each of the colonies has devolved into factions that don’t necessarily get along with each other.  Only in recent generations has each developed to the point where travel and communications among the various colonies has become possible.

Archetypes

Five homeworlds representing the five defacto races each with different archetypal traits as a result of their independent divergent evolution since their departure from earth.  Each of the archetypes would have rock-paper-scissors like strengths and weaknesses:

Colony 1.  Humans 1.0.  First would be basic humans which pretty much survived intact and suffered the least differentiation from their Earth ancestors.  Like the Terrans in Starcraft, they are versatile but equally vulnerable.

Colony 2.  Biological Mutants.  Crash landing on an environmentally unfriendly planet resulted in a massive loss of life and the survival only of those resistant to the initial effects of radiation and environmental hazards.  In order to survive, the mutants became extraordinary genetic engineers and developed ways to influence and select favorable mutations in themselves and organisms in their worlds.  Mutants have unlocked previously unknown abilities of the human mind.

Colony 3.  Cyborgs.  Similar to mutants, they were dealt a different set of cards and evolved to developed and exploit technology and augment themselves to adapt to their circumstances.  Resistance is futile.

Colony 4.  Convicts.  One of the great colonial experiments was to offer commutation of sentences for convicts who volunteered to leave Earth to earn their freedom and a new start on a new world.  Old ways died hard and the convicts usurped their masters to set up a civilization that ran by their rules.  Don’t drop the soap.

Colony 5.  Capitalists.  Similar to the convicts, the capitalists usurped civilian rule to establish an amoral state focused entirely on economic exploitation of space and their neighbors.

Gameplay

Most of the traditional MMO features but with a bit less emphasis on the individual.  Player combat would be somewhat MMO-FPS like– swords, blasters and psi-magic.  Ship combat would be less Eve and more X-Wing fighter.

Character advancement would be largely skill based with strengths and weaknesses of the various archetypes impacting but not limiting the ability to specialize in various areas.  There would be no classes or professions per se– they are in essence one and the same and mastery is attained by deploying skills toward your desired end.  The entire amount of skill points deployable would be limited, so that even though a player could choose to master anything, they would not be able to be a master of everything at once.

Careers could be changed, though not instantaneously.

Players and enterprises (discussed next) could colonize existing planets, moons, asteroids, etc. and build outposts, factories, facilities in space.

Enterprises

For want of a better term, I’ll retread Eve’s Corporations aka Guilds for a player affinity group I’ll call Enterprises.  Enterprises, operate like simplified corporations in our world: they are in effect persistent gameworld entities that can own property in their own right, have their own internal set of governance rules and allow different degrees of individual ownership.The big innovation is that a player is not limited to one enterprise.

Items and structures can be owned by an enterprise outright, not by its members individually, so individuals could set up say a mining processing business by building a structure on a planet, moon, asteroid etc. and set up shop.  In this instance, the facility could actually serve the public (for a fee) if desired.  An enterprise could buy, sell and build assets and the proceeds would be distributed automatically to its members in accordance with their ownership interest.

Each enterprise would have a governance system established at its founding and could only be changed in accordance with its determined ruleset.  Board of governors or single iron fisted executive, you choose.

Since players could participate in multiple enterprises, there are many many opportunities for “orthogonal” gameplay and player collaboration.

PvP, RvR

It has to be there but on the frontiers of civilization.  I think Eve got this right with the concept of security space.  Out in 0.0, its anyone’s game.  In 1.0, its basically carebear PvE.  Players would have individual faction with different “realms” but their actions would contribute toward RvR status.  If the Convicts are raiding a lot of Capitalist shipping, a state of war could result turning each into attackable opponents and KoS to NPCs unless individual faction was high enough to “trade with the enemy”.

Player activities would influence the RvR state– real and economic warfare could result in a “victory state” occurring such that hostilities cease and the benefits of victory persist for some period of time– i.e. favorable exchange rates, prices etc. for the victor and likewise unfavorable tolls and fees for the vanquished.  Likewise, diplomatic and trade activities could result in an Alliance state developing with similar benefits to all of the alliance members.

Finally, the more a faction occupies an area of “neutral” space, it will eventually become that faction’s territory.

Careers

For the solo player, canned career groups or enterprises would be available.  Stay in the Terran Navy for your entire career, join the Capitalist Geological Survey or launch your own enterprise when you’re ready.

Epic Story Line

There are two natural overarching story lines just waiting to be explored– Is Earth real or just a Myth and Who or What is Responsible for the Ancient Beacons?

Velvet Rope

With a space based game, there are no natural limitations to the game space allowing for the easy addition of new worlds.  A velvet rope business model would allow both devs and players to incrementally expand.  Traditional big expansions could be implemented for major content additions, but incremental expansion could drop in new content which players could unlock for a small fee, expanding the playable universe for them.

Alright, this has gotten long enough.  Back to thinking about Diablo III.

Being a Place Matters

A number of bloggers, including myself, have ragged on Age of Conan for the extensive use of zoning and instancing. Too much use of these design elements leaves you with the feeling of the “world” being merely a series of rooms connected by jumps rather than the impression of a contiguous world. In a word, it doesn’t feel like a “place.”

I got waylaid this (U.S. 3-day holiday) weekend by a last minute work project and got almost no decent gaming in, but I made time to soak up some of the Mars Phoenix mission events. Being a total space dork, how could I not? One of my earliest memories was watching Neil Armstrong step on to the surface of the Moon.

The images returned of the Moon returned by the Apollo program transformed the Moon in people’s consciousness from being effectively a 2d small floating disk to a bona fide three dimensional world of its own. As Carl Sagan would say, the Moon became a “place.” A place where we could imagine that we could go and explore and see ourselves walking over a distant horizon.

A similar transformation occurred in 1976 when the Viking missions successfully landed on Mars and began returning pictures like these:

I’d been to places like that. I could see myself in that landscape and wanted more than anything to sprint off toward the horizon to see what was over that next ridge or hill. For me Mars became a “place”. Even though the Viking landers were totally stationary, they managed to convey the impression of a complete new world. Not bad with just a few static images.

Seeing the latest today from the Mars HIRISE observer, those feelings are rekindled. This is my new favorite picture (the first of a spacecraft in the process of landing on another world). Click for the full width shot. Its really breathtaking.

With images like this, Mars is more than a place. More importantly, space travel and planetary exploration is made more real in our minds. We’ve seen the NASA animations about how these landings are supposed to look, but we’ve never seen them happening until now. I can almost see the lander drifting across the Martian landscape in its last few minutes of descent not unlike so many other similar images or scenes we’ve actually witnessed back here on Earth. Its like we were there.

No human has yet visited Mars, so these images in effect create merely a virtual Mars in our collective minds (like the virtual Moon). With each new mission and new set of images brought back, the impression is created that Mars as a world has become larger and more unbounded. Its an illusion, but a compelling one.

To create a compelling game world, for me at least, the designers have to similarly stitch together their resources to create that illusion. Simply having zoning doesn’t mean that’s broken. In EQ, zoning, while a necessary evil, didn’t seem to break the illusion of a continuous world. A few seams, maybe, but if you’ve ever stitched a few side by side vacation snapshots together to create a panorama, you know that the resultant composite image says so much more than the individual ones that the borders between pictures don’t really matter. They match up, there’s a small hiccup going from one to another, but leaving from the left of one, you enter from the right of the next.

Even with zoning, EQ was able to create that sense of place which persists into EQ2. Likewise, environments like WoW and LotRO’s seamless outdoor worlds are indeed places in my mind. I never got that impression from games like PotBS and certainly didn’t from AoC. I felt boxed in like there was no horizon over which to travel. Neither in my mind’s eye, nor in the game did I ever get that same feeling I get just by looking at those few pictures from Mars.

Miner Rant

So there I was running around this weekend in LotRO and a little bit in WoW. Each of my characters in each game had their craft node radar on so they could see the nodes pop and run to mine them when convenient. Typical MMO fare at this point.

Wait a minute. Ore which can be refined into metal just randomly pops out of the earth (and then dissapears)? I mean, this isn’t Bog Iron or meteorites. You don’t just find them laying around FFS.

I appreciate the effort and the “concession” to game play, but lets face it. Someone phoned it in on the mining. Consider leather or hides. Better hides come from more extraordinary beasts that you encounter in your travels through the virtual world. Kill it. Skin it. ‘Nuff said.

Herbalism. The paradigm works for that. Specific plants found in different climes randomly occurring sure, I’ll buy that.

So why is it so hard to adapt mining or wood collection (”Forestry” in LotRO-speak) to something other than the random node model? If I’m a forester and I’ve got an axe, damn sure I’m headed to the woods, not running across the barren expanses of the North Downs or Lone Lands looking for branches that SOMEONE must have dropped (because I don’t see no damned trees). Nor do I see some geologic uplift that accompanies that Rich Iron node that popped in the middle of the farmer’s field…

Now I’m all for balance in gameplay, but part of fantasy (and sci fi too for that matter) is some relationship to the reality we are familiar with. A sword is a sword, a bear is a bear. It reinforces the immersion.

So why not start out as a novice minor and go work The Man(tm)’s mines to get crafting experience? Doesn’t Ironforge or Thorin’s Halls have some full fledged industrial mining operation going on nearby?   The area around Goldshire is chock full of mines (you no take candle, though).  Likewise how many times do you run through Silverdeep Mine outside Thorin’s Halls.   Why not adopt a sharecropper model for working these mines (i.e., the player would keep a percentage of what they produced with the rest going to the owner of the mine)?  Why not learn into the true prospecting skill where you learn to detect likely mineral concentrations and ultimately how to build your own hardrock mine–in a place that made sense.

Sure, it wouldn’t be instant, but if you had to build a mine and mine it for a while (as long as you could haul all the ore) it would sure make mining feel a lot more like mining rather than say, herbalism.  Or maybe the better paradigm is fishing in most MMOs or perhaps farming in LotRO, or asteroid mining in Eve– go to a specific location, perform a series of skill based acts and you are rewarded with a harvest of useable ore which you can then refine.

Panning for rare metals in streams, hardrock mining, gem finding and yes, even perhaps locating Bog Iron.

Likewise, why not grow into the fine art off silviculture.  Need lumber? go find a forest of the type you’re looking for, set up a lumber camp and mill.  Certainly not inexhaustible supplies, but all kinds of rate limiting devices can be used– tool repair, hired labor that must be paid, etc.

Quite frankly, I’m amazed that LotRO (home of the farming profession) didn’t implement something like this. Somebody do this… Please.

Fixing WoW’s Progression Problem

Tobold’s post and comments on the idea of creating disincentives to guildhopping got me thinking. People are fundamentally self-interested asshats (this I already knew). There’s just not going to be a lot you can do about that problem. Good or bad design can mitigate or exacerbate the tendency though. The more I look at it though, its really a problem with WoW’s current PvE reward/progression model.

WoW’s progression and reward model greatly exacerbates the tendency toward asshattery (greedy, selfish, anti-social and uncivil behavior) by requiring collective action for personal (and uncertain) rewards (primarily in the form of improved gear). Twenty five or ten or five people devote a significant amount of time to collectively work on an objective without any guarantee that they will be rewarded for their efforts at all (no useful drop), and if rewarded that they will be able to share in that reward (useful drop, lose the roll or drop is useful only for other class).

Under the current paradigm, we are required to run and re-run content to get another pull on the slot machine. No matter how many times you run an encounter/instance/raid the fundamental law of statistics applies– each run results in the same percentage to get a desire drop. Everytime you toss a coin, the probability of heads coming up is 50%. Its called the Gambler’s Fallacy for a reason.

As our tank Earlthecat knows after 60+ Baron runs (back in the day…) without receiving his class pants, that can be brutal and fundamentally smacks of unfairness. Your item has to drop AND you have to win the roll unless you have collective assent to redistribute the limited loot. Of course, that’s where that asshattery problem kicks in again…

The opportunity for asshattery exists as a result of the limited number and random nature of the drops. Five/10/25/40 toons enter, perhaps no one leaves with a goddamned thing. Tigole must surely be sitting somewhere with Rob Pardo laughing their collective asses off. And they should. Like Skinner in the lab late one Friday night with a bottle of Wild Turkey watching the mice. What a bunch of chumps.

As Tobold and the commenters pointed out, the guild (or raid group or just plain friend group) doesn’t progress evenly. So long as one player “needs” a certain piece of kit to progress, they are bound to collective action. Once rewarded, ggktxbye, sayonara suckers. I’m off to find the next group of chumps and my next piece of better gear.

So how to mitigate rather than exacerbate the baser aspects of our greed-addled nature? Seems pretty basic, but the problem comes down to one of two basic approaches– either collectivize the ownership of the rewards (discussed, bad, problematic) or simply equitably distribute rewards among the group (impossible to do with random, limited drops).

Simple concept and already in the game and yes, maybe a little boring– earn marks, badges, rep, BoP currency, whatever you want to call it, and distribute it equally to all members of the group. Acquire X tokens, spend them at the token merchant for the reward of your choosing. If it takes 5 runs to collect enough tokens to get the uber shield of ultimate defense or cap of bottomless mana, so be it. Take the same damned boss mob loot table for a dungeon and make that a vendor’s offerings.

Everyone progresses equally. Everyone’s contribution to that session is rewarded. No one gets screwed or ninja’d. No one cares if you guild hop, so hopefully you have incentive to stay to play with mates. At least you have less incentive to bail early. People with different play budgets will always progress at different rates, but at least if out-of-work-basement-guy does 40 runs of instance X, each of the other members of those groups were each equally rewarded toward each of those runs. If those are the same 5/10/25 people for each of the runs: Hurray! If not: no one is QQing because tankboy (who completed 40 of those runs) cashed in and got his just rewards.

Assuming some of the geniuses that created the already tired grindy-assed mechanics could come up with some shred of a shitty story to keep us mildly entertained while we’re doing it, so much the better. Basic quest to point us at an instance with some reward for clearing it, then some crappy subplot that ties into the main story arc to thinly justify that by grinding instances we are participating in the epic grand story.

If you really wanted to be generous and encourage helping others out (at no personal opportunity cost) you could make the tokens either homogenous but drop with greater frequency in higher level content or make them exchangeable so rewards in one instance could be used for rewards from another. All micro/tokens are BoP.

Imagine this: You show up in Honor Hold and receive the basic “Go Kick Ramparts Ass” quest (Blah blah blah, epic battle, enemy of the alliance, contributions to the war effort would be rewarded, etc. etc.). You get your group, run the dungeon. As you clear mobs, instance specific microtokens drop at reasonable rate from the trash distributed via the basic loot rules. You progress and kill 2 out of the 4 bosses receiving 1 token for each group member for each boss downed before you wipe or get tired or someone needs to change a diaper. Run over. Each group member would have received 1/5 of the microtokens that dropped (click on 10 to turn it into a full token just like motes) and 2 tokens.  Think two bits and pieces of eight, you get the idea.

Go back to Honor Hold, talk to the quartermaster and exchange your tokens for the gear items you want that are available from that instance. Don’t like the rewards available for Ramparts tokens? Convert them into Underbog tokens (at some less than 1-for-1 exchange rate so the progression model doesn’t get gamed too badly).

Starting to all seem a bit familiar? It should. It looks a lot like the PvP reward system except its not screwed up with a marks + honor system. As the guild/group raid begins to acquire the upgraded gear, the runs get better. By the time everyone has acquired a total of X tokens (enough that they could be exchanged for all the usable items from that instance) the guild could move on and no one should be left behind assuming they’ve contributed equally.

So what do you end up with?

• The progression path is group agnostic, but still collective action dependent.
• Down-playing (i.e., helping your lowbies in a below level instance) isn’t penalized– its rewarded equally in upconvertible tokens.
• Ninjas cease to exist for progression gear.
• Because rewards are certain, the risk of grouping is reduced encouraging collective play.
• Unlike the battlegrounds, there is no timer, so progression requires play, not just afk honor farming or AV zerg rush min/max strats.

While we’re fixing WoW’s PvE progression, level restrict the instances and add mentoring so higher levels are downscaled to a lower level instance so the tokens aren’t devalued. Sorry twinkers.

Now that WoW’s fixed, I think I’ll go have lunch.