Dark Age of Camelot

Origins of Color Coded Loot

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This morning we are going to go on an adventure, or at least travel down a rabbit hole. Be warned that today’s post is going to involve a heavy dose of speculation. There are going to be things that I just don’t know and could not find the answers to, but drew my own conclusions. Like so many of these adventures that I occasionally go on, it starts with a random thought that I carelessly posted on twitter.

Color Coding Loot

Color coding loot as a concept is a brilliant one, because it quickly allows players to filter which bundles of stats are worth paying attention to and which should just be sold or broken down immediately. As someone who plays an excessive number of games that throw loot at you constantly, they are invaluable and help me do a first pass before actually sitting down and inspecting whether or not an item is worth keeping.

The thing is… we have ended up in this situation where most games use effectively the same system with a few minor tweaks here or there. This is a random assortment of games that have color coded loot rarity systems. As you can clearly see there is a pattern here and an agreed upon language that we have landed upon as to what each color means. The funny thing is this same logic applies to many other gaming related spaces, for example when I set up a discord my default is going to be to land upon a white > green > blue > purple > gold scale for hierarchy as far as ranks go. The same was true when I was in the business of building forums.

The Popularization

This lead to a search of what game popularized this concept. This was a fairly short search if we are willing to accept Wikipedia as the authoritative source. To keep you from having to click through and read the entire post on loot in video games, here is the relevant bit.

Loot may often be assigned to tiers of rarity, with the rarer items being more powerful and more difficult to obtain. The various tiers of rarity are often indicated by particular colors that allow a player to quickly recognize the quality of their loot. The concept of color-coded loot rarity was popularized with the 1996 game Diablo, whose designer, David Brevik, took the idea from the roguelike video game Angband.

Wikipedia – Loot (video games) article

So there we have the most basic answer. The game that popularized this concept was Diablo and this style of loot coding has carried forward in the ARPG genre and can more or less still be seen today in games like Path of Exile or Wolcen. This however is deeply unsatisfying because even when the color coding was expanded by Diablo II and Diablo III you still end up with a vastly different scheme than what we have come to accept as the bog standard loot coloration. I feel like we still don’t really have our true answer yet of how we ended up where we are on what colors mean what things.

The Consider System

Now is the point where we start drifting into wild speculation. There are however a few facts that one should take into account. The game that I most closely tie the “standard” loot scheme to is World of Warcraft. I believe in my heart of hearts that its popularity is what has lead to the wide adoption of a specific meaning for each color. However we don’t really know how they landed upon the specific scale that they did. We do know a few things about the early designers of that game and its itemization. In many cases they were hardcore Everquest players, with Alex Afrasiabi and Jeff Kaplan in particular being the leaders of high end raiding guilds. So we know for a fact there is a specific color scale that they would both be intimately aware of.

Everquest was a game that did not give you clear statistics for the monsters you were encountering. It wasn’t like you could highlight the mob and get a specific level number to indicate how difficult an encounter might be. Instead you had something called the /consider command, that would give you a rough approximation both in text and color coding how difficult an encounter might be. So for example if you typed /con on a mob that was significantly lower than you it would spit back a message in green saying “looks like a reasonably safe opponent”. If you considered a significantly higher encounter it would spit back in bright red “what would you like your tombstone to say?”.

As a long time Everquest player, this scale became so ingrained that we just referred to encounters by the color that they considered. You might brag to your friends that you were able to easily solo yellows, or that you managed to kite a red. You also might complain that you ended up getting swarmed by greens and took a stupid death due to the glitchy aggro of a specific zone. It is within this consider system that I think we start to shape up what is the standard going forward.

The Dark Age of Camelot Consider System

Alex Afrasiabi, better known as Furor to the old timers… was the leader of a rather notorious raid guild called Fires of Heaven. I started my Everquest career playing on Veeshan, the server they were resident on and was quite aware of some of their exploitative tactics for coming up with creative solutions to encounters. During one of these such encounters it earned Furor and practically the entire raiding group a permanent ban from Everquest. I believe it was during this time that a number of Fires of Heaven folk set up shop in Dark Age of Camelot, which was the first true competitor for Everquest and offered a significant number of tweaks to the template. Again we are going into the territory of speculation here as I have no specific knowledge that Furor was among this group, but I believe if my memory serves me that Fires of Heaven had a Midgard guild.

The DAoC consider system is pretty close to that of Everquest, with a few tweaks. For starters there is no specific “even” consider within the system. Things that are Yellow are either on level or above your level. One of the problems with the Everquest system is that Red was a really obtuse consider ranking, especially at low levels. There were times that reds were absolutely something that was reasonably to do with a full group, but it was impossible to tell without the use of Allakhazam whether those mobs were 20 or 40 levels higher than you. In Dark Age of Camelot they fixed this problem by introducing purple as being extremely higher than you, meaning that no really… you were absolutely going to die if you tried this thing.

Another really interesting thing that Dark Age of Camelot did was set usability ranges on your gear. if you used an item significantly higher than your current level, it would wear down more quickly given that you “lacked the skill” to use the item. As a result the items in the game used this same consider color system to indicate how far or above an item was to you, giving you some indication of whether or not you should be using a weapon and when you should probably start upgrading it. As far as I am aware this is the first case this specific color palette was applied to specific loot items.

World of Warcraft Viral Spread

As I said at the beginning of this nonsense, I am absolutely certain that games like Borderlands use this color scale because World of Warcraft popularized it. World of Warcraft is the very first example I could find of using purple as the rarity immediately following blue for example. My theory is that Diablo had already popularized and codified the concept that loot should have colors denoting rarity, and since very seasoned Everquest and potentially DAoC veterans were over the itemization… that we ended up using that very familiar color scale as their gauge. I feel like I am bolstered in this notion by looking at the original launch color rarity scale. Red in the Everquest consider system was used to indicate the end of the scale, and this was also the original color of artifact gear. Yellow at some point became gold, maybe because in later revisions of the DAoC con system Orange was introduced to wedge between Yellow and Red.

Today we have a slightly different looking color scale with Artifact and Heirloom meaning very specific things and as such being outside of the actual rarity scale. Once World of Warcraft became a cultural event, this same loot scale spread from game to game until now it is just effectively the standard language for quickly indicating how special an item might be. Do I know for certain that anything I just said is the truth? No… not really. Like I said at the beginning of this, today’s was a journey of speculation. Do I think that my theory is likely? Yeah I really do think that Diablo popularized the concept of loot color coding and that the World of Warcraft Standard was deeply influenced by the Consider system from Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot.

The Gank Squad

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Random aside before I get into the meat of the topic this morning. Apparently it is my 11th anniversary on Twitter this morning, or probably more likely later this afternoon. Twitter and blogging have forever been inextricably linked. I joined Twitter for better engagement with other bloggers and creators, and wound up staying there because I found a terribly interesting and engaging gaming community. Sure there was a challenge in trying to hold a conversation in what was then 144 characters at a time, but somehow we managed to string together some pretty interesting topics. Now that we have proper threading, longer character counts, and @ing in people not eating up all of the conversation space, it is staggering just how much easier it is to hold a proper discussion.

Which leads me to a segue to the topic at hand, which actually came up yesterday in a Twitter thread but has also been something I have been discussing with the AggroChat folks. Each time I see a new game advertised as a massively multiplayer sandbox survival game, I have to resist rolling my eyes back into my head. This is a design pattern that budding designers seem to think they can make work, but so rarely does. They set out with this ideal of simulating a realistic world with consequences and one that forces interesting decisions to be made for the sake of survival. What ends up happening is either a barren wasteland that no one is playing or a brutal and toxic kill box that eats anyone who did not start on day one or does not have the fortitude to wade through a river of feces to get to a stable place.

There is a very vocal minority of players that will scream at devs about wanting the ability to kill other players and loot their corpses, but what they really mean is that they want to prey on the weak. So a new game is released with a bunch of tantalizing world building elements or intricate crafting systems, which draws in players like myself that have always wanted an interesting modern PVE sandbox experience. Then like blood in the water the gank squad shows up to ruin everyone’s day. My working theory is that this is effectively the same group of players that show up in every new game. Much like FPS players are fickle and will flock to whatever title has the most traction, the gank squad shows up in whatever environment they feel has the most hapless noobs.

It begins a cycle of these player killers making life hell on the PVE populace until they ultimately log out never to return. I still remember the opening weekend for ArcheAge there was a quest that involved having to cross a bay in a rowboat to continue the storyline. Lined up were a bunch of players with massive ships that would do nothing but ram into the poor innocent rowboats and sink them. Eventually I logged out and decided that the game just wasn’t for me, and perpetuated the cycle. The gank squad flocks to these fertile hunting grounds and once their toxic behavior has turned them fallow, they move on to the next new hot game trying to make this design pattern work. The PVE player wanders off feeling frustrated and swearing that they will never go through this process again… only to be lured later by some killer feature in an otherwise frustrating game.

The funny thing is in my experience if you return to those same games six months later, what has grown up from the dead earth is often times a thriving oasis of cooperative players that more or less ignore the player versus player aspect of the game. Some two years after the launch of ArcheAge I returned to the game and found that I could roam freely and enjoy the world for what it was. Sure it was hell trying to find a plot of land since those had long ago been snapped up in the process, but I managed enjoy the leveling process without ever encountering another hostile player in the process. From what I understand from friends currently playing Sea of Thieves the same thing is happening there, and they ran treasure missions without encountering another hostile ship throughout the weekend.

Ultimately my question is… why do companies keep trying to make the PVP and PVE elements work together? If it is actual player combat that folks are craving, then they are far better served by a game that ONLY supports player versus player engagement. However that is not what the gank squad wants. They want unfair fights where they roll in and “pwn noobs” and then laugh about how weak their prey ultimately is. So when I hear complaints on forums about there not being enough players engaging in a system like “war mode” from Battle for Azeroth, what I am actually hearing is that there are not enough lambs to slaughter for the gank squad to get their jollies. The players who actually care about challenging combat are off playing games that are solely focused on player versus player engagement. The folks that want to feel powerful as they dominate the weak… well they roam off to the next new game looking for victims.

To answer my own question, the reason why these games keep trying to make this work is that player versus player engagement is effectively free content. Story driven content is time consuming and thus costly to make. However dropping a bunch of players into a kill box looks enticing because the theory is that the players will ultimately create their own content. Visions of giant continent wide battles dance in the designers head as they envision players creating complex social structures as they duke it out in multi-tiered warfare. This didn’t even work in the games that folks hold up with praise like Dark Age of Camelot, because ultimately one faction became so dominant on a specific server that it forced a defacto alliance between the other two factions if they had any hopes of delaying the slaughter.

Ultimately I welcome continent wide battles… but I want those battle to be waged with intricately crafted NPC factions and not a bunch of random players. Where I get hung up with playing games that have open flagging for player combat is that I could have a lovely evening where I get a bunch of things accomplished that I wanted to. However equally likely is that I will be minding my own business and wander across a band of player killers and wind up logging out of the game rather than trying to recover my body while dealing with the spawn camping. At its core, I don’t like the idea of having my fun impacted by other players. I realize in an PVE game I might have this sort of impact when I queue for a dungeon and people are assholes. However there are plenty of other activities I can do entirely solo that dilute those negative interactions. When engagement with the world alone paints a target on my back, I find it really hard to get hyped about going through those motions.

I would love to see some of these games that really no longer have active player killer populations simply remove that functionality from the game entirely. Taking your otherwise interesting game with PVE sandbox mechanics, and making it “safe” for players who want no part in the other aspects would be essentially igniting a beacon to those of us who had been avoiding it. Hell even having a PVE only server would go a long ways. I mentioned Dark Age of Camelot earlier, and the moment they opened Gaheris which was the co-op server I re-rolled there without a second thought. That server was an awesome thriving environment of folks who wanted to engage in the awesome PVE and raiding content in the game, but wanted nothing to do with the battleground experience. If it worked so well in the game that everyone holds up as the pinnacle of making a PVP game engaging, it can pretty much work in any game.

I still feel like there is effectively a single loud mouthed PVP Gank Squad that roams from game to game, and an ocean of PVE only players that are turned off by them existing. It seems like it would make business sense to create those PVE only servers that players ask for. I admit a lot of my lack of excitement over the Fallout 76 changes are knowing that there is a slim chance of my enjoyment being adversely effected by some other player as I wander the wasteland. I was originally not interested at all in the New World until they took a massive uturn and moved away form the multiplayer kill box concept. I’ve avoided Sea of Thieves similarly because while I am fine with a piracy simulator, I want to be engaged with interesting NPCs and not running away from players. Similarly I have always been interested in the Dark Zone in The Division, but have avoided it like the plague because I don’t want to engage in combat with other players. Each time I bring up these points I realize how not alone in this line of thinking I am, as was the case on Twitter yesterday. Surely there is a market here that is more or less being ignored by the constant striving for a design pattern that doesn’t actually seem to work.

The Tower Guardan

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There are many stories that at the time were frustrating but become more humorous through the lens of nostalgia.  I think we as gamers all have thousands of such tales in us, and with this new feature my goal is to try and devote some time to committing these to paper.  Nostalgia is a powerful force, but one that is fun to wallow in every now and then.

Ignorance is Bliss

The original Belghast the Celt Champion I’ve told bits and pieces of my time in Dark Age of Camleot in the past, but today I thought I would delve further into what was ultimately the second MMO I played.  I remember being in the beta process and thinking that the game seemed so much more advanced than Everquest that I had been used to.  However I did not really play the game seriously until the launch of Gaheris the co-operative server.  Most people think fondly upon Dark Age of Camelot of the realm versus realm combat, for me however it was all of the interesting PVE things that I did with my friends.  At that time we had an extremely small and close knit guild called the Whispers of Legend.  In fact the only real remnant of that guild is a posting on Zam’s for an item I submitted under our guild name.  One of the best things about Gaheris was that we could literally play any class in the game together, and explore any realm freely.

Our motley group consisted of a Dwarf Warrior as the main tank, me on my Celt Champion as dps and off tank, a Lurikeen Enchanter providing dps and crowd control and a Celt Bard being dual boxed by our warrior providing all of the healing and song twisting.  Much later on I picked up a second account and ran my very own bard, but much of the content that we experienced we did as a trio, with my friend Shadoes playing both the role of main tank and main healer.  This game was also the very first appearance of me using the name Belghast, so even if I could never actually return to playing it… it will always hold a special place in my heart.  There were so many times we ventured someplace we should not have been only to end up trying to fight our way back to our tombstones, more than anything to prove to ourselves that we could do it.  It was a different time in online gaming, when more often than not we were playing with people we were able to lay our physical hands on in the real world.  On average the three of us would get home from work, and log directly into Dark Age of Camelot for that nights adventure.

The Tower Guardian

alb-tower-guardian The adventure that most stands out in my mind was our finding of the Tower Guardian.  When the Shrouded Isles expansion hit we spent a good deal of our time wandering around its wilderness looking for interesting things.  With that expansion a number of named encounters were introduced and spread through out the world.  So it became our mission to try and find all of them… and farm them for every last bit of loot.  In fact the item that I talked about submitting… I am pretty sure came from one of these such trips.  One night while wandering the Dales of Devwy we stumbled upon this giant clockwork golem looking creature that towered over even the trees.  I think at the time it conned purple to our group, but we decided to give it a shot anyways considering the area around it was difficult but easily huntable.  While it took several attempts we managed to down it and got some really nice loot.  So we proceeded to farm it, each time getting better at the process until we had it down to a science.

A few days later we happened to be in a local game shop, that had several folks that played Dark Age of Camelot far more seriously than we did.  We were talking about our fun farming the golem, and the shop keeper had a somewhat stunned look on his face.  I turns out that apparently this encounter was designed for a raid to take it down, and while it took upwards of thirty minutes for us to actually defeat it… we managed to do it with four characters, two of which were being played by the same person.  While games have evolved to have hard requirements on what you need to bring to be successful, I have never forgot the lessons that we learned playing this game.  That while you might not have the optimal grouping, you can sometimes persevere through sheer force of will.  There have been many times I’ve tried to do things in an unorthodox way, but no game has rewarded it quite as much as Dark Age of Camelot did.

Sometimes We Failed

sshot_11sshot_15 I won’t lie and say that things always worked out in our favor.  In fact I have quite a number of  screenshots like one above, with us dead in fairly horrible places.  However we always seemed to manage to pick ourselves back up and keep trying long after others had given up.  This trip down memory lane would not be complete without a photo of Shard our Dwarven Warrior main tank.  The thing I find so odd about this game is that our experiences and our memories are so vastly different from most players that wax nostalgic about it.  This was not a pvp game for me, but instead a game that let me explore freely every corner of three vastly different and exception realms.  This was the game that really cemented in my mind how poor of a design decision that hard faction walls really were.  Dark Age of Camelot went from being a lackluster experience, to one of the most memorable with the simple addition of the co-operative play server.

Do you have any memorable stories of games that you and your friends maybe played in a less than suggested style?  I would be curious to hear some of your stories of times you entered something vastly unprepared but managed to pull out a victory nonetheless.  One of my fondest memories from World of Warcraft for example was the time we took nothing but hunters into Upper Blackrock Spire and timed our aimed shots on the same target, just watching it explode before our eyes.  It was like we were a walking firing squad, slowly mowing down our targets or burning it down while one of us kited the pack.  Sometimes unconventional play can be extremely rewarding.  For years I’ve found myself getting caught up in trying to do things the right way for the sake of speed and efficiency.  Sometimes however you just have to break the rules and play games in a manner no one in their right mind ever planned.  I freely admit that I still wish there wa such a thing as a melee hunter.