Everquest

Things That Should Die…

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…in a Fire

This morning I thought I would take a stab and talking about some of the constructs in online games specifically that need to just go away.  Over the years I’ve noticed a bunch of things that really do not benefit players in games and only serve to divide them.  This is going to likely be a more free form style post than my normal 3 blocks structure… but I am just going with that one.

1) Region Lockout

mapofinternet There are literally an unlimited potential visualizations of the internet, because so much depends upon the activity at the moment you observe it.  The image to the left is someone’s vague attempt at “drawing” the internet.  It looks like many things, but you know what it absolutely doesn’t look like?  That’s right there is no way to somehow match that image up to a map of the countries of the world.  The internet is this grand technology that has essentially abolished borders and turned them into meaningless distinctions.  I have friends in England, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Ecuador, Brazil, and more than I can possibly count in our sibling to the North…  Canada.

Ultimately I want to be able to play freely with all of them, and if it was not hard enough to try and juggle time zone conflicts…  game companies seem to feel the need to throw up artificial boundaries to keep players from different regions in separate bundles.  This needs to stop, and while server localization is a good thing…  blocking players from freely mingling between the areas is a bad thing.  Region based launches and region based exclusivity also need to “die in a fire”.  We are living in a global community, and its about damned time we realize it.

2) Server Restrictions

serverlist Another massive frustration is that as gamers we are still somehow constrained to playing on servers.  Don’t get me wrong… I love servers.  Before it went to shit I loved Argent Dawn my role-playing server in World of Warcraft, and currently I am in love with Cactuar in Final Fantasy XIV.  I absolutely think having a small intimate group that you see every single day is a good thing.  What I don’t think is a good thing is the hard boundaries.  Just because I live in the Tulsa area in Oklahoma… doesn’t mean I can’t go visit someone living in the Dallas Texas area.  Essentially this is how our games should work too.  There are certain games that are already doing this and it is amazing.  In Rift for example you can choose to move your character between servers at will once every week, but more important than that you can choose to transfer yourself temporarily to ANY server in your cluster and you are able to group across servers freely.  The Secret World has the same sort of setup, and it allows you to join up with literally anyone else playing the game.

Both of these situations represent the ideal, that you still have a server structure that gives you familiarity with other players but at the same time the freedom to hang out with anyone else who happens to be playing the same game as you.  Completely abolishing servers on the other hand isn’t as good of an idea.  In The Elder Scrolls Online we free floated on the same server, but the fact that player names were hidden and that you were constantly being mixed with a different batch of players… kept you from developing ties.  There are friends I have in FFXIV only because we saw each other doing the same things over and over and struck up a conversation while doing it.  This is important, but it is also important to be able to hang out with that person you meet five months after you started playing… and find out they are playing in a completely different server community.  Your character is just data, and it should be able to flow between servers… which are also just data.

3) Faction Walls

redvsblue Another thing that I find super frustrating is when you meet someone that happens to be playing the same game as you… but then you find out that you are on opposite sides of some meaningless conflict in game and as such your characters are sworn enemies.  Red versus Blue mentality needs to go away.  It is a very dumb way of dealing with the concept of factions, because in the end it is the players that end up losing out.  I’ve never felt faction pride in a video game, because these factions have nothing to do with me.  I didn’t get to choose the way that the Horde was founded in Azeroth.  I didn’t choose to align to the Orcs and the Tauren and Undead and god forbid the damned Blood Elves.  I was brought into a situation where those were already connected for various also meaningless reasons.  Nothing about that has anything to do with me and my motivations as a player.

What is more meaningful is that for players to start out in the world with certain baseline alignments determined by their race or their class… but have those be malleable.  One of the things I loved about the original Everquest was that your faction choices were personal in nature.  Paineel was a city of Evil Erudite Necromancers… but by choice I aligned my Wood Elf Ranger with the city through lots of personal work.  Meaning that I could go there at any time I wanted and use the city like any other city.  Similarly I knew players who factioned with the giants turning Kael Drakkel… an area that is normally a raid zone into a useable player city.  These are interesting choices ones that take lots of effort, but ones that also bring the player deeper into your world as a result.  Setting up artificial boundaries just for the propagation of shallow player versus player combat is a horrible idea and needs to go away.  Let the players choose their allegiance, and let the players decide just what they are willing to fight for.

4) Weekly Lockouts

not_allowed_to_roll_lfr_wow This one is a thing that is starting to change slowly, but where it still exists it needs to go away.  What I mean by weekly lockouts is that once you run something like a raid you are locked out from participating for another week.  This used to create this complicated process of making sure that you stayed unlocked from this or that content to make sure you were eligible to participate in it with your raid or your guild.  As a raid leader it was always disappointing to get ready to go and find out that one of your key members had locked themselves out earlier in the week.  Like I said this is starting to change slowly with the introduction of the “loot locking” construct, where you can participate as many times as you like but you can only receive loot once.  Even this has many forms because the World of Warcraft version is a per boss loot lock, and the Final Fantasy XIV version is a single piece of loot period from the entire instance.

In both cases however it is significantly better than being locked completely and unable to help out your friends.  If you notice that is a running theme in all of these things that need to go away.  Basically there are a lot of MMO constructs that get in  the way of you playing with your friends.  For awhile now I have had this maxim of “anything that gets in the way of you playing with your friends is bad” and I still stand by it.  What I would like to see is that there be some reward for the players “just helping out”.  Sure they can’t win the actual loot off the boss, but maybe for participating they get a loot bag at the end of the run that can contain some interesting stuff.  This sort of thing would give folks warm fuzzies for helping out their friends, but also not be rewarding enough for people to abuse it by grinding the raids over and over.  In any case… these are four constructs that I feel that MMOs would be better off without.

Death of a Genre

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Downfall of a Game

One of the problems within the MMO community is that we seem to view each release as a zero sum game.  As such when something new comes out, it threatened to chip away at the player base of whatever game we happen to love and are currently playing.  When that game falters and begins to fail, with this point of view it becomes extremely hard not to take pleasure in that downfall.  The problem is this is an extremely toxic and dysfunctional outlook, and ultimately is what has lead to the current climate in MMOs.  For years companies have been chasing an illusive dream of trying to create another World of Warcraft.

This was an inherently flawed vision because really…  “mmo gamers” are a rather small niche in the market, and most folks who play World of Warcraft are not actually “mmo gamers”.  If you take a look at the size of the market before World of Warcraft, you saw a handful of games with sub-million subscriber numbers.  Before the launch of the first expansion World of Warcraft had boomed to be an over 6 million subscriber game.  This was not the conversion of all of these other MMO gamers, but instead the conversion of fans of the existing Warcraft franchise into the MMO genre.  The thing is…  these new gamers are there for a myriad of reasons, but none of them easily translate into a new franchise.

So as these new games launch they are essentially fighting over the same piece of pie over and over.  All you have to do is look at my immediate circle of friends.  A large chunk of them stuck with World of Warcraft, and it would likely take an apocalypse or the servers shutting down to pry them from it.  Another group has wandered away from the game each and every time something new and shiny showed up on the horizon.  Very few of these players stick around in any game for longer than three months, and more often they play their free month and then return to whatever the status quo was before the new launch.  I watched this pattern play out for both Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar, and the games industry is finally realizing that this is going to happen for every single new game that releases.

Indictment of the Trend

The cancelling of Titan has been a far more contentious issue in the blogosphere than I expected.  At this point my point of view is that this is Blizzard admitting that the MMO genre has no more room for new players.  While there will always be a core group of players in World of Warcraft just like there is still a core group of players in Everquest, Everquest II, and Dark Age of Camelot…  that core group continues to shrink as folks either “grow out” of World of Warcraft as they find it no longer suits their interests, or simply run out of the copious amounts of free time it requires as they get that job, family, whatever.  I think they have done some really simple calculus here and determined that there simply is not enough of a pool of players to make a brand new MMO from Blizzard successful.

With World of Warcraft they have a decade long buy in from a large number of gamers.  They have literal years of memories and hard to acquire items to keep them chained to the game.  With a brand new IP, they are starting from scratch in the same position as all of these games that have floundered have been in.  Blizzard brand name recognition just isn’t enough to guarantee success, so I feel like it was a pure business decision that it just did not make sense to further dilute their subscription player base by trying to launch a new MMO.  As much as I love the clean subscription model, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to launch a new game with it.  After watching what happened to Wildstar and to a somewhat lesser extent Elder Scrolls Online, the market does not want any more subscription games.  So by launching a new MMO they would be converting at least a portion of their subscriber base of easy month to month money to far more dicey and less predictable free to play money.

No Joy Watching Wildstar

I find it impossible to find joy in the unraveling of Wildstar that I see before me.  I am not playing the game, so I am in essence part of the problem.  For whatever reason it was an accumulation of all of the things my BC era self said they wanted in a video game.  The problem is we gamers are notoriously horrible at trying to decide what we want.  “We” said we wanted a hardcore game like Everquest and a return to forced grouping…  then when we got Vanguard no one actually wanted to play that.  We said we wanted a hard core PVP game like Dark Age of Camelot…  and then when we got Warhammer Online no one actually wanted to play that either.  So I find it no suprise that when we said we wanted a return to the golden says of World of Warcraft raiding…  no one actually wanted that either when we got Wildstar.  The truth is we have no clue at all what we want until we actually see it and experience it.

The problem is that the MMO design ethic has been so wrapped up in trying to target what the public is asking for, that it has stagnated into a mire of “wow like features”.  A week or so ago there were a series of posts taking point and counterpoint on whether or not WoW has ruined MMOs.  In a way I have to say yes, but not through anything that they did on purpose.  World of Warcraft has been this juggernaut that everyone else is forced to content with whether or not they actually wanted to.  It is a gold standard that every new game is judged by.  So you either have games that try and out feature it like Rift, or out lore it like Star Wars the Old Republic… but each and every new release is at least in someway a response to the success that World of Warcraft was.  Without that outlier of success we probably would see a much more healthy MMO ecosystem…  albeit a ridiculously smaller one.

Death of a Genre

So I cannot take joy in watching Wildstar, or Elder Scrolls Online or any other MMO falter right now, because I see it as all being part of the same shared ecosystem.  When one of these games fails, it is in essence taking a chunk of players out of the pool that will likely never return.  So many of my friends have simply just checked out of online gaming for one reason or another, but the core thread among them all is they are just tired of the volatility.  The choice is either return to World of Warcraft and make due with the status quo, or jump from game to game to game getting a months worth of enjoyment at a time before the ultimate crash.  None of this sounds like a healthy ecosystem, and all of this is what is driving triple A studios away from the notion of even trying to do an MMO.

If you think about it right now…  there is nothing really on the horizon for gamers to latch onto.  There are a few boutique titles like Pathfinder or Camelot Unchained… that are super focused on a specific niche and that may or may not be at least partially vaporware, unlikely to actually launch with all of the features they are touting.  Then you have a constant spin of Korean titles as they have their own MMO renaissance that we went through several years ago.  However After the launch of ESO and Wildstar…  there is really no big western titles on the immediate horizon.  Everquest Next is the closest thing but realistically it is still several years from release.  The other games that are coming out are more akin to Destiny than they are to a traditional MMO.  So I can’t blame World of Warcraft for this current situation, because in truth it is our flighty nature that has salted the fields in our wake.   We are the reason why there is no fertile ground for a new MMO to take purchase.  It is because of all of this… that I can find no pleasure in watching yet another game fail.

Wildstar Attunements

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Bon Voyage

Finally home and sitting on the sofa and starting to tackle the blog post of the day.  I ended up taking the day off from work to make sure I was able to do whatever my wife needed me to do this morning.  She however has been successfully ferried to the airport, and while I got turned around leaving the airport I got to flex my knowledge of the backroads of North Tulsa to get back home.  I am going to have to master highway 11 this summer during the Twitter Math Camp, where I am serving as a shuttle driver.  However for the time being I am nice and safe and home.

When I got here it was really nice out, so I opted to go for a little walk rather than having to do all of it this evening.  The thing this highlighted however is that I apparently need to try and find some earbuds with a longer cord.  If I moved my head too quickly they ripped out of my ears and went flailing to the ground.  If I am going to make it through the nightly ritual of walking I am going to have to do it to music.  So after while I guess I will make a trip out to target or best buy and see what I can find.  Once upon a time I had a set of head phones that had little behind the ear clips, so I am thinking I need to find a pair of those.

Wildstar Attunements

For some time now an infographic has been circulating around the internet outlining the “12 step process” for raid attunement in Wildstar.  I admit when I first saw it, I was extremely hesitant because it is quite the ordeal… however the longer I have “lived with it” the more I think it might be just want the doctor ordered.  I talked about my feeling regarding attunements and skill checks this weekend on the AggroChat podcast, but this mornings post is completely devoted to two excellent posts I read yesterday from Liore and Syl about the subject.  I am not going to preface or summarize the posts, because you really need to just read their own words on the subject.  Instead I am going to go off in my own rambly direction to talk about skill gates and attunements in general.  If you are curious about the 12 step image… it is spanning the right side of the page… for dramatic effect.

Evil Attunements

Once upon a time in another life I was a somewhat successful raid leader in World of Warcraft.  I lead a few raids during the 40 man era, but got really serious about doing it during the Burning Crusade 25 man era with the non-guild based raid groups of NSR and Duranub Raiding Company.  I know the pain that attunements can be all too tragically as a raid leader.  In order to get fresh blood into your raid, it meant either you spent time running old content and gearing those players up… or you resorted to stealing members away from fledgling raids that were maybe not as highly progressed as your own.

The problem with the World of Warcraft attunement system, was that it required an entire raid to complete.  This was a constant drag on the raid system, and meant lots of players would have to join one raid just to get keyed to be able to join a bigger one.  This system invoked so much animosity, just like it did back in Everquest where the system really saw the first light of day.  During the Planes of Power expansion, getting keyed for various planes became a power vacuum that only a few elite guilds allowed anyone to have.  Considering the raid designers for World of Warcraft were themselves the leaders of these elite raids… it was not surprising that the keying system ended up something very similar.

The Gatekeeper

The problem is that the attunements also served as a way to gate the content, and provide a level of gearing that you must be able to get past in order to proceed.  To some extent they have tried to do this with item levels, but that in itself is also inefficient.  Just because a player has a really high gear score, it tells you nothing about their ability.  I’ve known more than a few players who have reached high gear score out of persistence, and still perform horribly in a raid environment.  For ages these games have needed an objective measure for just how prepared a player is for the encounters contained within a raid.  Nothing feels worse than having to be that raid leader, and tell a player that they simply do not perform well enough for the raid to carry them along.

One of the best mechanisms I have seen in a game to gate based on player skill… is the not terribly creatively named “Gatekeeper” encounter in The Secret World.  In fact I have gushed about the need for this encounter on more than one occasion, but the latest is in the “WoW Needs a Gatekeeper” post.  This encountered required you to complete a specific test designed to exemplify your ability to heal, tank or dps nightmare level content.  Your reward for completing it, was literally the ability to get to the nightmare level gates in the game.  As a DPS player at the time, I have to say that the test fully prepared me for the rigors that would be Nightmare difficulty content, and I am sure eventually raid level content.

What was so great about the encounter was that it was entirely personal.  No one could carry you through it, or even assist you.  You had to come to a solution to the puzzle of how to complete all of the necessary tasks to progress forward.  This type of skill gate draws a clear line in the sand between the players that are ready and the players that are not, and takes a lot of the stress off the raid leader.  I don’t like elitism, but raiding was never one of those things designed for the masses.  It is designed to be an extremely rigorous skill based activity, much like high level PVP.  The harsh reality is that not everyone should be able to raid.  That is not to say that I don’t think there should be valuable high end content for everyone to complete.  But I don’t necessarily think that raiding should be something that every  player has the expectation of being able to do.

Why Wildstar Isn’t Evil

One of the coolest things about the Gatekeeper encounter is it gives players a shared struggle that they had to get through to be able to progress to the next level.  My friends and I still to this day talk about what a colossal pain in the ass the dps version was.  It took me 25 tries and I think it took my friend Warenwolf around 30… because we were both too damned stubborn to respec to the “optimal” path to complete it.  We beat the damned thing on our own terms, and now carry it as a badge of honor.  This is what raiding used to be, not about elitism, but about defeating something really hard together as a group and carrying with it a sense of pride in that accomplishment.  I honesty feel like Wildstar is trying to return to that era when you felt like you earned every inch of space in each dungeon or raid you completed.  I for one am fine with this change, even if it means I will likely never be able to raid again.  I just hope that they put in content to keep me entertained in my casualness.

The main reason why I feel like the Wildstar attunement process is just is the fact that for the most part it is a personal journey.  Steps 1-5 are entirely soloable, or at the very least zone events that will likely have other players completing them without the need for a premade group.  Step 6 requires a group but should be able to be completed through pugging if you need to.  To be honest every single achievement listed in the attunement, is either solo or something you can accomplish with either a freeform group inside of the zone, or puggable through the dungeon finder system.  Sure you can get your guild to help you out significantly on several of the steps, but the length of the quest chain means that not many guilds will be dragging players through it.  This means the onus of the entire event is on the player, and not on a guild or a raid to “catch them up”.  So while it is not a one stop shop like the Gatekeeper, I feel it creates a sufficient skill gate to make sure that the players are prepared for raiding in Wildstar will likely mean.

I feel like Wildstar is a game with so much casual but challenging content, that there is always going to be something for the players that cannot raid to do.  While World of Warcraft has made so many steps to make raiding an inclusive thing…  it feels like it lost the epic quality that it used to have along the way.  Some of my best moments in gaming came from Vanilla and BC era raiding, because when we FINALLY downed a boss… it felt like we had done something spectacular.  When I got that tier set…  it felt like it was a long fought struggle… and not something I gained by simply “putting in enough time” or “grinding enough currency”.  I feel like raiding could definitely use an infusion of hardcore again, even like I said earlier… if that means I won’t be able to participate.

#Wildstar #Attunements

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Ramble About Content

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Story Content

I was having a discussion yesterday with some friends about whether or not the MMO player actually wants carefully crafted story driven content.  When you look at the lackluster support that Elder Scrolls Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic and The Secret World have gotten overall, you could easily come to this conclusion… since each of them are deeply story driven and carefully constructed experiences.  I think we are maybe seeing something else at work.  If you look at a game like World of Warcraft, some of its deep story arcs have long been heralded as some of players favorite content.  However the vast majority of the content is nothing like this, and I think it is simply a case of not everything has to be “art”.

It is in essence the filler content, that is just good enough to keep you from throwing up your hands in frustration, that make you appreciate that gem in the rough of a quest.  Games like ESO, SWTOR and TSW attempted to infuse deep story and meaning into almost everything you do, therefore shifting story driven content to the status of a commodity.  I suggest that games need busy work, to make you appreciate the transcendent content when it is placed in front of you.   The “kill ten rats” quests are there to cleanse the palates so to speak, so that when a deeply engaging story arc is put in front of you… you actually take notice and don’t resign it to more content to grind through.

Epic Crafted Content

When I think about epic custom crafted experiences I think of the Mass Effect series.  I have gushed on this game so much, and watched friends play it over and over.  As much as I enjoyed the entire trip through the series… it is not the type of game that I would want to play every night.  That ultimately is the problem with MMOs, you are asking players to come in and inhabit your space… hopefully making it a nightly traditional to log in and play with their friends.  As much as I might like a Mass Effect or a Transistor… I wouldn’t want to play these games on a nightly basis.  I want a space that is much more malleable, and doesn’t require so much of myself to play it.  Essentially one friends assessment that MMO content “needs to be exactly good enough to be passable” is really not too far off the mark.

One thing that the busy work tasks excel at is helping drive your own personal narrative forward.  The players who inhabit an MMO and really live there on a night by night basis, whether they realize it or not, are crafting a custom narrative about their character based on their own actions.  Each time you kill some baddies, save a villager, or deliver a package to some far away mountain… these actions are complementary to whatever narrative you have in your head about your own character.  When you ask a player to participate in something longer, more story driven… the end results are predetermined and may or may not be complimentary with this personal narrative.  When you have a few of these long epics scattered throughout the game, they are welcome interludes.  However when everything you do is based on some narrative that you don’t necessarily fully control… it can be jarring.

Grouped Content

While I would not want to play Mass Effect every single night, I still want to play it often… so there sets up the paradox.  Right now I find myself compartmentalizing games as either “fun to play with other people” and “fun to play by myself”.  Elder Scrolls Online is very much fun to play by myself, with brief flurries of playing with friends when it comes to dungeon and pvp content.  This is part the game and part me.  Firstly I hate questing as a group, and it has been something I have tried to avoid like the plague since the early days of World of Warcraft.  I’ve always found the experience to be generally frustrating since someone is always a step behind or a step ahead of where you happen to be.  Trying to keep people in sync is madness…  but Wildstar and its focus on leveling the guild through grouped content is trying to change this.

They’ve given me a hook, a reason to group up that so many other games haven’t.  I greatly prefer to experience “content” by myself and then group up to do “group content” whenever I can.  But the fact that the only real way to level your guild is through players grouping up together and doing content, makes the entire concept of group questing much more friendly.  They’ve given me a shiny bauble for my troubles, and also given me tools to make the entire grouping experience more meaningful in the way the various “paths” interact with one another.  So this construct is making me re-evaluate the way I think about content in general, and start looking for ways to group up to accomplish things rather than solo everything.

In part my reluctance to group comes from my Everquest roots where your ONLY option was to group for everything.  When MMOs gave me the option to be self sufficient, I took it and ran with it and have simply never looked back.  So in a game like Elder Scrolls Online, I greatly prefer to be wandering around by myself.  I go AFK frequently, often have to take my headset off to respond to my wife, and am generally not always super engaged with what I am doing.  In short I feel like I am a liability for grouping, and in those cases I try and solo the entire night.  The problem is this becomes a pattern with me, and I simply NEVER group unless it is content that I can’t do by myself.  I find it interesting that Wildstar is somewhat successfully making me re-evaluate that point, and seeing that grouping is something that is beneficial to me, the guild, and the players I am grouped with.

Room For Both

Another thing I have learned about myself is that I seem to always need a “WoW”.  I am talking about this in super generic terms because the game has shifted at various times… but I always seem to be playing one.  Traditionally this has been me shifting back and forth between playing World of Warcraft and Rift… while at the same time playing a game like The Secret World or Elder Scrolls Online.  Wildstar seems to be my new “WoW” game in this equation, and it speaks to my desire to play that type of themepark/themebox type experience.  The thing is there is always going to be room for an Elder Scrolls Online as well.  I find myself right now wanting to pair down to just those two games, even though I have a ton of other games that I somewhat want to play.  It is like I have various itches that need scratching on a regular basis, and no one game ever quite covers them all.  However between a combination of those two games it might get close to covering all the bases.

The more I play Wildstar and enjoy it because it is new and shiny and exciting… the more I want to spend my weekend delving into Elder Scrolls Online and exploring Auridon and more of the Veteran level Aldmeri content.  I functionally need both experiences, because so far I have not been able to get both from the same game.  However after seeing the lackluster reception that Elder Scrolls has received versus the glowing recommendation of players for Wildstar, it is pretty clear that most players just want a better “WoW”.  There is no shame in this, because to some extent that has been what I have been looking for as well.  I want to visit these worlds with rich story, but I want to “live” on a nightly basis in one that is more of a “choose your own adventure” novel.  Wildstar inundates me with choices of things to do… and there is a never ending list of achievements and things to explore, giving me a constant stream of adventures to be had.

League Beginner Night

I realize this mornings post has been an odd rambling one…  without much of a firm point.  I blame a clear lack of sleep on my part, and a measure of exhaustion on another.  Hopefully there is something worth reading up there in that big mess.  Tonight is the Alliance of Awesome League Beginner night again, and if you are a member of the AofA community I highly suggest you check it out.  The start time is 9pm CST, but if we have a critical mass of players on mumble beforehand we might start a little early.  Last week we had enough time to play a 3v3 Twisted Treeline and a 5v4+bot Summoners Rift.  We had a ton of fun in the process.

If you have never played League of Legends before, and have been interested in getting into it… now is the ideal time to try it out.  Last week we had several first timers, and to make things easier we broke apart into separate mumble channels to help tutor the new folks in what they should build and where they should be focusing their efforts.  This in part involved me barking orders to Maric quite a bit, but he seems to have survived just fine and is signed up for this week again.  I am still very much a newbie myself, but as a whole it is a really fun time to be had and presents a wild divergence from the types of games I normally play.  I wish we had enough people in Heroes of the Storm to be able to have a similar night for that game.