MMORPG Archives - Page 344 of 408 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Familiarity in Proximity

September 23, 2014 by Belghast

Mega Servers Continued

A few days ago I made a post on about launch issues and game servers, and the problems and solutions that come from various server scenarios. In my post I presented some discussion about the various styles of servers and the weaknesses that each have. Mega Servers are an awesome technology but there are problems with it, namely that it reduces the casual proximity of players. In my post Doone made a comment, and while I normally would have simply posted it as a reply… I am thinking that maybe I need more space to go into my thoughts. For sake of not having to make you jump through a bunch of hoops I am going to repose his comment here.

Im not sure why anyone thinks Megaservers make it difficult to build community? Do you mean that it’s too many people to build intimate connections? Because if thats the case, then we’re just talking about social tools, not megaserver tech. Players just need a reason to interact and that doesnt change because of megaservers.

AA’s current situation is embarrassing. Theres not any good excuses for their current situation. This isn’t the first MMO launch, not even the first MMO with land and other features that complicate server flexibility. Theyre simply unprepared for deliberate reasons. There’s just no way they didn’t know what they needed for a smooth launch.

It’s worse that people who shelled out hundreds of dollars to support development are reporting not getting that 4 day advantage they were promised. That’s a serious charge.

Should AA have gone Megaserver? I don’t see how this wasn’t mandatory given the kind of features it has. You need a vast server community that’s STABLE. And you can’t have that when your system is as inflexible as the one they’ve adopted. I think they’re sinking their own ship right now. — Doone

While I agree with the bulk of what he said, I thought I should maybe clarify my points about mega servers. At first glance they look like a magic bullet for the problem. At the very least I thought they were a magic bullet for launch day woes, however they have their own problems that do not always show up early on.

Informal Community

There is a certain kind of community that happens spontaneously by just being around the same players each and every day. For example the above picture is that of one of the late game hubs in Final Fantasy XIV Revenants Toll in Mor Dhona. Upon arriving at the Aetheryte crystal I am immediately seeing some familiar places that tend to frequent it. You can see a name marked in orange as someone I have already friended. However more than that I recognize if not the names, but the guild tags of many of the players surrounding me. There is a sense of familiarity in seeing the same players day in and out, and when one of them is in need you are more likely to step in and help out. This is the way friendships in MMOs used to be formed through shared activity, not just shared guild tag.

In Final Fantasy XIV it has instanced housing wards, where you purchase a house and in theory become neighbors with lots of other players. Our house is across the street from a Market Board which is the way that you access the auction house economy. Over the course of weeks of being in close proximity with several other players, we have struck up a bit of a friendship. One of which is the name in orange in the above Mor Dhona photo. There is lots of spontaneous interaction that happens just by being around other players and gaining that sense of common goals. This picture is when we just spontaneously put on our brand new Dragon Warrior inspired Blue Slime King hats and started dancing together. But the interaction has spread much further than that, and I’ve helped these players out in the world beyond our neighborhood, as well as had my heart warm each time I happened to see one of them out in the wild.

A Server of Strangers

I’ve played many games so far that have some form of a blended server environment. World of Warcraft for the last several years has blended the leveling zones for the entire battlegroup to make each server feel more populated. The most recent poster child for Mega Servers however was the Elder Scrolls Online. Before launch they made several promises about creating a situation that grouped like minded players together into virtual servers, while still all being part of a much larger farm. While we had one of the smoothest launches since they could easily scale up the hardware temporarily, and reduce it later as needed… there are a lot of problems that came from not being with a fixed set of players. Admittedly some of the issues are due to the poor decisions made with the user interface.

In the above image, can you easily tell where my group mates are? Can you tell the names of players surrounding me? In both cases the answer is a huge nope, and this poor design choice of obfuscating information about other players only served to make the mega server concept feel that more alienating. Everyone that was not you became another nameless faceless person taking up room and competing for your resources. While this is the extreme, I’ve had the same thing happen in World of Warcraft when I encountered players from other servers. It was like that they were somehow less important to me, since they didn’t share the same server lineage. I knew that I would likely never see them again, so why even bother trying to be friendly?

Familiarity in Proximity

In a traditional server structure there is familiarity in your actions. You end up noticing players that do the same things as you do. It might be farming a specific location on the map because you like the look of it, or crafting at a specific machine. In hub based MMOs like World of Warcraft, you spend inordinate amounts of time milling around whatever your faction end game city tends to be. I would spend hours running circles around Dalaran while dealing with raid and guild business over text. While doing this I used to favor certain areas of the town and vendors, and I started taking note of who else seemed to like milling around these same places. Over time I would start up conversations and get used to seeing the same people. If they were gone, I would wonder what they were up to and hope that they were okay. Over the years there are so many contacts that I have made… that ultimately turned into later guild members that I made only because I noticed they were in the same place as me and decided to strike up a conversation.

The problem with the mega server is that it destroys this kind of familiarity through proximity. I feel like Elder Scrolls Online was the absolute worst case of this, because not only did it rob you of being around the same people all the time… it also took their names and guild tags from you. One of the important aspects of a guild is it becomes far easier to recognize than individual player names. Over time you start to associate a certain kind of behavior with a certain guild tag, and then when you see one of those people leading an event you have an informed decision as to whether or not this is going to be a good thing. As a guild leader, my people were amazing and the absolute best advertising I could ever have created. I would get random messages from players who ended up running a dungeon with one of my people, and they wanted to take time to compliment me as guild leader on how nice they were. It is this kind of interaction with others that I hope to preserve with whatever ends up being the next server model.

The Happy Medium

As I said in my first post, I think there is a happy medium somewhere. I think the ultimate version of mega servers, allows you to checkmark certain characteristics that you favor and then creates essentially a virtual server populated with the same players every time. Similarly I think there are ways for games to maybe more easily identify players that you have interacted with in the past. The biggest problem with Elder Scrolls Online is that every player felt anonymous. Even my own guild members, I struggled to locate them in a mob. This should never be the case, you should always be able to pick your friends and guild members out of the biggest sea of names and faces. Similarly I think it is important to be able to identify players, because it allows you to form those connections in your mind that if I saw this player in my crafting hub and they are out here doing the same action… I am invested in maybe going that next step and inviting them to a group. I want us to keep the best aspects of the traditional server structure, and find new ways to scale them as we go forward.

I want to leave with an excellent post from Sig of Crucible Gaming called “How WoW Ruined MMO Gaming”. While the title is hyperbole, there are some really good thoughts contained within, and it seems like Sig mourns the interconnectivity of the previous era of gaming. Once upon a time we needed players, and as such generally treated them better. As games have removed the need for having other players we have eroded that base of civility. While in many cases I think that World of Warcraft has poisoned the well in doing away with some things that were absolutely normal previously, I don’t think we are in an unredeemable state. Final Fantasy XIV has proven to me that there can exist a game that is both social and modern at the same time… and that has a thriving and cohesive community. I think the ultimate trick will be finding ways to take what they have done there and scale it to other games.

Leopard Print Paladin

September 22, 2014 by Belghast

Susceptible to Grind

This weekend I played a good bit of Destiny because it is the perfect game for those moments when I don’t feel like I am get into something terribly detailed. I play this game much in the same fashion as I play Diablo 3, in short bursts with the ability to jettison out if needed to go do something else. As such this has become in many ways the game I play when I know we are going to be leaving the house soon. I am never more than just a teleport to orbit away from safety, which makes me consume the game voraciously in small doses. As such I have mostly been running the game in private mode with my fire team locked down to keep people from popping in at random. I feel like I don’t want to deal with the expectations of others when I am playing a game in this fashion. Generally speaking I am either moments from leaving the game, or playing the game while camping something in Final Fantasy XIV… and in either case I am not exactly responsive enough to be a proper group mate.

The bulk of my gameplay has been doing either patrols on the Cosmodrome or on the Moon. I finally got a blue engram to drop, but unfortunately it was for my class item… which is essentially just decoration. Instead of the traditional “flag football” towel, this one is a series of 3 banners that hang down from my waist. One of the things I am learning about myself is that I am deeply susceptible to grinding. I find it super easy to zone out and just wander around aimlessly in an area. I seem to be able to get infinite amounts of entertainment value from simply wandering around killing Fallen and Hive on the moon and accepting the little mini-quests. As such I was level 16 before I actually finished the Moon this weekend and got the quest chain sending me to Venus. I am sure I will be 20+ before I finish Venus, because as soon as I unlock the next patrol zone… that is more than likely what I will be doing quite a bit of.

I think part of the problem with Destiny is the fact that it has relatively little to go with as far as Story goes. As such I find absolutely no sense of urgency pushing me forward to keep completing missions. In a game like Mass Effect 3 I felt like I was moments away from doom at all times, so I just had to keep pushing forward and trying to turn back the tide in a war larger than myself. In Destiny they have failed to infuse the narrative with any of this. Sure things are going horribly wrong out in the galaxy, but we have this last city that seems completely immune to the effect of what is happening. Sure The Traveler is “dying” but I don’t feel this happening, I feel like that is generations away and I have just been drafted into essentially a science fiction stalemate. So I have zero issue wandering about and taking time to smell the “helium coils” as it were. The moment to moment gameplay are what keeps me engaged with this game, and the story line and as such story quests could not exist at all and I would still be happy.

Leopard Print Paladin

At the beginning of the weekend I was a level 40 newly christened Paladin of Uldah. Over the course of the weekend I managed to push my way through to 46 and get the first of my spiffy gear. For those who are not familiar with Final Fantasy XIV, at 45 you complete a class quest that will reward you four pieces of “Relic” gear that represents the defacto look for your class. This means you get a full set of gear minus two slots. The belt is not terribly important because no belt really changes the look of something drastically. However the other missing piece is the chest piece and it is essentially the item that always ties a class set together. On the Lalafell the paladin “short shorts” look is minimized by the total lack of height, however of anyone else it looks like you are wearing white boxer shorts without the chest piece that gives you the plate skirt that is so characteristic of a paladin in this game.

There is a full set of gear that drops in the dungeon Dzmael Darkhold, that rarely sees much use since it is level 44, and at 45 everyone gets their class set. However the one piece that is extremely useful is the chest, which thankfully in all of my journeys I have gathered up a few of these. The problem is that for pretty much every class there is something goofy going on with this set. For the tanks the set features an inexplicable leopard print inlay, with no way to “dye” the pattern away. So as a result for the last few levels you end up looking a bit goofy until you finally ding 50 and get that class chest piece. Thankfully for me I also managed to pick up a nice pink quality chest for 47 that should make the outfit look a little bit more put together for the last few levels.

Red Bunny Samurai

The other thing I am realizing is just how much of my other gear will work for Paladin. Almost all of the dropped pieces and jewelry from the endgame levels worth for Marauder, Warrior, Gladiator and Paladin. The problem with this is that I have several of the pieces glamoured to look like the Warrior class set. Apparently this will not show as such when I equip them however, and quite frankly the Syrcus tower set looks like crap for plate wearers. So I am wondering what set I am going to glamour to that can be neutral and work for both classes. The most important thing after all is that I still have a proper bunny hat. While I freely admit that I stole wearing this helm from Tam, I think I have more than made it my own… since it was clearly designed to be worn by a Lalafell. He tends to favor the white one with the full face mask, where I am enamored with the red one that allows my full face to show through.

My goal for the coming days is to push the paladin to 50 and get it fully geared in 90 or better items. I’ve been stockpiling hunt marks to be able to do this the moment I ding, but I am really not sure how many pieces I will actually need to buy. All of my jewelry is dual class, as well as my chest, belt, and boots. That just leaves three pieces of gear that I actually need to purchase, and then again I will need to spend the requisite 1125 tomestones of mythology to get the zenith weapon and shield. Right now I have a dilemma I suppose in that I am really close to being able to purchase my next Animus book, but I am also really close to 50 at this point. I don’t have the tomestones to do both. In theory I can get the book and the process of simply getting my relic weapon should give me more than enough tomestones to be able to at least craft the relic. Then I can deal with grinding out the rest as a paladin if I so choose. In either case I should have another animus book and a 50 paladin soon enough. Then I suppose my focus turns to finishing off my White Mage.

#FFXIV #Destiny

Of Game Servers

September 20, 2014 by Belghast

The Server Dilemma

This week there has been a bit of a war waging in the ArcheAge community between two factions. The first faction wants them to open new servers so that they can play the game and not have to wait in 10+ hour long queues. The second faction doesn’t want new servers to be opened at any cost, because it serves to dilute the community, and in a game where land ownership is a crucial part of the experience there is no real way to merge the servers. I feel like this is one of those arguments when both sides have equal merit. Generally speaking when a company spins up new servers to help cover the launch weekend users, they also end up having a bunch of completely dead servers months later that have to be merged.

The ultimate problem with new servers, is that we want to play with our friends. By nature an MMO is a social experience, and at this point most of us bring with us a large group of friends and acquaintances that we want to be in close proximity to. As such lots of players will roll on another server only to get the feeling of actually playing the game they crave, but ultimately later on re-roll once the opening weekend crush is over to be in the same place as their friend. So I feel like new servers by nature are a damned solution to the opening weekend problem. Any servers that spin up are by nature less valuable to established players than the original servers. They will have less of an economy, and less resources to run any group content. Having done this multiple times, there is a certain pride in playing on a “day one” server.

Abolishing the Server

For a long time I thought the solution to this problem was to simply do away with the server infrastructure entirely. Elder Scrolls Online launched with a Mega Server infrastructure, where instead of pool resources into smaller named and classified clusters of servers… they just dumped all of them together in one of two larger data centers US and EU. This allowed them to simply add more nodes to the cluster to gently smooth out the server load without actually interrupting the users experience. I have to say after the what has to be hundreds of game launches I have experienced… this concept made for one of the absolute smoothest I have seen. We were able to get in and play without needing to fuss about what server our guild was going to be on. It solved so many issues and let us get in and play with our pool of players.

The problem there however is that as the population dwindled and our regularly nomadic guild did what they were good at… and moved on to the next big thing, we were left without much of a community. The only intimacy we had in that game was that which we brought with us. Coming back to Final Fantasy XIV it has refreshed my understanding of just how important that server community is to the overall feel of a game. The night we bought player housing, we had various folks from different guilds popping by our house and welcoming us to the neighborhood. Our housing district has not one but two dedicated linkshells for communicating with “neighbors” and after months of doing hunts and fates we’ve joined other really social linkshells that flesh out the rich community feel that I had been craving. So while the Mega Server answers one question, I feel like it comes up lacking in the social aspect greatly.

A Transitional Population

The Rift launch looked like pretty much every other game launch in memory. I compared a game launch to a natural disaster the other day, because really it is very similar. There is this crashing wave of users that hit the servers, and that which they don’t break they flood to the point of bursting. After the storm clouds cleared they were left with the same problem as always. Some servers had massive queue times, whereas the others where relatively dead. World of Warcraft tried to solve this problem by allowing players free character moves between overpopulated servers to very specific under populated ones… and as a result a bunch of thriving communities were born out of the leftovers of higher populated ones. We would not have the Scryers or Wyrmrest Accord servers were it not for this process, so it feels like it mostly worked well.

Rift however went a step beyond this in allowing any character to transfer to another server for free. There were some restrictions initially about transferring from PVE to PVP, but over time these went away as they patched in the “Faction as Fiction” concept. This allowed players to self sort, and overall it seems to have worked. I’ve moved around quite a bit during the time since this went live in that I started on Shadefallen a server that was whisked away in a great depopulation of servers. From there I moved to Faeblight, and then to Deepwood to hang out with Liore and the Machiavelli’s Cats… and then back to Faeblight again because I missed being on a Role-Playing server.

This solved the problem of being fettered to a server and having your friends disappear on you. You could freely transfer elsewhere to play with a different pool of players. One of the big problems I have with World of Warcraft right now is that my friends are so splintered across so many different servers. While you can do cross server grouping to an extent, it just isn’t quite the same as being on the same server and in the same guild. At $25 a pop it would simply be cost prohibitive to move my army around to another location, even though Argent Dawn where we are currently has seen it’s better days. With the Rift situation it becomes relatively easy to move your guild to a new location and set up shop again on more favorable shores. The big thing that Rift is missing however is an equivalent to the BattleTag system that gives you a simply way to connect all of your friends with one single ID.

The Hybrid Approach

I feel like maybe there is a hybrid to these options out there that we just haven’t seen yet. I really like the concept of the mega server in that it removes the work of even having to discuss what server everyone will be located on. It also opens things up.. so if you meet someone that plays the same game as you… there is never that moments later heartbreak when you realize you are on different factions or different servers. What I think we are missing is the concept that Elder Scrolls Online talked about when they were launching, that never quite panned out. Originally the idea was that while everyone would be on a mega server, we would be able to self sort into pools of players with like interests. This would apply an almost dating website series of questions to identify what types of goals you are focused on when you play an MMO. Then through these questions you would be sorted into the cohesive community that best represents your interests.

So when you are wandering around the Capital city, you are seeing the players that represent your tastes in MMOs. If you like being around role-players and crafters, you would end up being shuffled into a very collaborative environment. If you like competing with other players and doing battle to determine who has the most skills… then you would be shuffled into a very competitive focused environment. I feel like a scenario like this would give me some of the permanence from the community that I found I craved when I came back to Final Fantasy XIV. I like being involved with the community just outside of my guild. Guild is a comfortable home for me, but it isn’t the end of my universe, and I crave interaction of new ideas and new players. I feel like this self sorting mechanic would allow for both seamlessly. You could have different types of players in the same guild, but self sorting into their own little “perfect community”.

The Solution

Essentially I have seen a lot of solutions for the same problem, and each of them has fallen short. That doesn’t mean that we should just declare that there is no right answer to the problem and fall back to the old tried and true server structure. I feel like traditional servers are going to be a thing of the past, but we need to find ways of carrying the best aspects of that intimate server community forward with us. I am interested in seeing how people solve the problem moving forward. Games like Landmark and eventually Everquest Next will be tasked to solve it, and with Landmark they are already moving in what feels like the right direction. The ability to move between servers freely gives you the ability to play with anyone also playing the game. The permanence of an individual island however gives you a localized community feel. Do I think it is perfect? No, but I think it is a step in the right direction, and I hope more games try doing something new instead of falling back on the pitfalls of the server.

Booking Dungeons

September 19, 2014 by Belghast

Final Fantasy Roadtrip

This week the Tokyo Game show is happening and we are starting to get a trickle of goodies out like the long awaited updated Final Fantasy XV trailer. After watching it, I have to say this looks like it might be a Final Fantasy quite unlike the others. My friend Kodra mentioned how unusual it was to see an automobile in the Final Fantasy setting, and I had not really thought about it until then but he is right. It has almost been as though they have denied the existence of Automobiles in pretty much every setting other than Final Fantasy VII. Even in the super futuristic VIII they had the requisite flying airships in the form of giant aircraft… but they still lacked anything even resembling an automobile. Let alone a crazy sedan with suicide doors like they are touring the countryside in for this game.

From the video this seems like the game is going to be more like Final Fantasy XII was in the form of a more “Action Combat” approach to the JRPG. This has its fans and its critics, but I have to say one of my favorite Final Fantasy “cousins” was Vagrant Story that featured a very action combat game play style. I even liked Final Fantasy XII for what I played of it, at some point I want to go back and finish the game. What intrigues me the most about the game is the way it feels like the monsters are almost part disaster movie, like they are taking a road trip to survey the countryside like some sort of awkward rubberneckers. I just hope I can control which ever character I choose, because man I am all about the big dude with the beard and the knock-off buster sword.

Castlevania Dark Souls Edition

Another game I have been looking forward to on the PS4 since this years E3 is the game Bloodborne. At TGS they released a new trailer with some more tasty bits about the gameplay featuring what looks to be multiple classes for the player to choose from. I’ve somehow almost entirely missed the Dark Souls madness, but I am looking forward to this game as it feels more firmly in my wheelhouse. I love Castlevania, and I love the dire battle against the things that go bump in the night feeling that this game has. I just hope that the gameplay is every bit as fun as it looks like in the trailer. For a game like this to work for me, the moment to moment gameplay has to feel amazing… and from what I have played of Dark Souls my problem tends too be the wonky feeling control scheme.

This is probably going to to be a title that I end up trying before actually picking it up. I am sure this is blasphemy here but I actually thought Dragon’s Dogma felt much better than Dark Souls as far as moment to moment gameplay. As such I am really hoping that the control scheme is more similar to Dogma. In any case it is a grim dark game about slaughtering the undead and such, and that along makes me a happy camper. We need more games where we roam the country side slaughtering baddies for fun and profit. The only negative that I can see from the trailer is that like Order 1886 it looks a little bit “on rails” for my tastes. In any case I am watching both of those titles closely.

Booking Dungeons

Wednesday night we had tried to run Pharo Sirius for my friend Waren to complete this first Animus book and wound up failing miserably. In my infinite wisdom I attempted to bring along two of our lowest geared players, one of which was the healer… and quite simply he didn’t have the mana to heal the place at just barely ilevel 48 the bare minimum. Last night however we changed up the mix and brought in a very seasoned healer and cleared the dungeon with minimal effort. That really became the theme of the night, cleaning up dungeons both myself and Warenwolf needed for our Animus books. So in total we ran Pharo Sirius, Lost City of Amdapor, Tam-Tara Deepcroft and Stone Vigil. For the last of these we managed to grab one of our up and coming healers that still needed experience and got her roughly a level in doing the place.

Essentially what we learned through the failure that was Wednesday, and the success that was Thursday is that pretty much you can only afford to have a single player in the mix that is significantly undergeared for the content. There were other issues Wednesday night, like the fact that the player had not completed the level 50 quest and was missing both the piece of armor from it and more importantly the critical ability you get that for white mages is your full heal. I cannot impress upon new players enough that the moment you ding 50… go complete your last Job quest. It always gives your class something that you will desperately need from that point onwards. The game assumes you have these abilities, and will throw things at you that often times require them.

As far as leveling goes I managed to get my Paladin to 39, which let me equip a sweet new Grand Company weapon. Since I got Zantetsuken waiting on me in the bank, I thought I would take this opportunity to glamour my weapon to look like the Blazefire Saber. This might literally be the only time I get to use my spiffy gunblade from the Lightning Returns event… since seriously there is no weapon in the game nearly as cool as Zantetsuken. Additionally I have been banking the Hunt Seals needed to buy my Paladin a full set of gear the moment I ding 50. I am not sure what exactly happened, but at this point I have definitely changed focus from leveling the White Mage to pushing up the Paladin. I think more than anything it was my realization that I lacked a class to easily grind additional Atma bits on, now that I screwed up and got my Warrior Atma weapon first. Atma grinding does two useful things for me… firstly I get the chance at atma bits, but more importantly the steady flow of company seals keeps my ventures running. Hopefully at some point this weekend I will have a brand new paladin ready to go.

#FFXIV #FFXV #Bloodborne