Champions and Explorers

Silliness from the official SWTOR forums

noreply@blogger.com (Piper) — Mon, 18 Jan 2016 16:47:00 +0000

From a twitter post by Ness The Happy:

........I have no words...... #SWTOR #swtorfamily https://t.co/oCY4WtAKxr
>— Lorhin (@NessTheHappy) January 17, 2016

I was amused by the pro-story, anti-raiding post in the Star Wars: The Old Republic general forums mentioned in the tweet (original here http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=866001):

It is so earnestly over the top that I couldn't resist a bit of fun satire. I was tempted to post this in the above thread, but given forum posters I figured it was better posted here than adding any possible fuel to trollish fires there.

Story content has been in decline for years. The obvious reality that single player participation in story in this game does not justify the cost, so by focusing on multilevel difficulty operations and more inclusive, smaller scale PvP, there is much greater potential than trying and failing to get people to replay the exact same story arc.
If single player story participation does not increase as a results of 4.0, where all story content was nerfed from eight stories to two (in 2.0) to one (3.0 & on), companions buffed to do the fighting for you, the ability to level 1 to 65 in your starter gear with no advanced class, then just write it off and focus on the content that people do want to participate in, the 'MMO bits'.
Let the metrics guide you, don't listen to an over-represented vocal minority anymore. That's what got you guys into the revenue decline mess in the first place - listening to single player story content locusts over the much larger group of people who want the group content MMO are uniquely known for.
Please don't relapse into what you did in RotHC, SoR, and especially KotFE. Return to the glory days of Vanilla when everyone had it all.

The Wait for PvP content: A Chronology of Battlegrounds and Warzones (Updated)

noreply@blogger.com (Piper) — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 01:52:00 +0000

One of the constant PVP requests for SWTOR has been for new Warzone maps. I decided to see just how long it has been been between the release of new maps, not just for SWTOR, but for World of Warcraft and Rift as well. I wanted to see where SWTOR’s wait time between maps fit in among other successful MMOs.

Leading the pack in 40 Alterac Valley.

First off, let’s look at the battlegrounds in World of Warcraft. Fair or not, WoW is the MMO most commonly used in comparison for MMO content. Warcraft’s Arenas and Area PvP aren’t on this list because they aren’t a part of the random battleground queue. If you were to include those two pvp areas, then Warcraft’s PVP content gets that much larger.

Event	Patch	Date	Min Level	Wait Time	Notes
World of Warcraft	1.10	2004-11-07			Initial Release
Warsong Gulch / Alterac Valley	1.50	2005-06-07	10 / 20	212 days	Introduction of the classic battlegrounds
Arathi Basin	1.70	2005-09-22	15	107 days
Burning Crusade	2.05	2007-01-15			Expansion content went live
Eye of the Storm	2.03	2007-01-09	15	474 days	Pre-release content patch
Wrath of the Lich King	3.03	2008-11-13			Expansion went live
Strand of the Ancients	3.02	2008-10-14	50	644 days	Pre-release content patch
Isle of Conquest	3.20	2009-08-04	55	294 days	Added BG experience for leveling
Cataclysm	4.03a	2010-12-07			Expansion went live
Twin Peaks / Battle for Gilneas	4.03a	2010-12-07	30 / 25	490 days	Pre-release content patch
Mists of Pandaria	5.04	2012-09-25			Expansion went live
Temple of Kotmogu / Silvershard Mines	5.04	2012-08-28	40 / 35	630 days	Both required for legendary PVE cloak quest
Deepwind Gorge	5.30	2013-05-21	45	266 days	Item levels capped / Roles enforced in BGs
Warlords of Draenor	6.03	2014-11-13			Expansion went live

No new battlegrounds as of posting date (2015-05-30): 739 days.

Rift Promotional PvP Image from the Trion Worlds official Rift website.

Rift is considered one of the best examples of a free-to play-game. Rift’s instanced PVP combat is called Warfronts. I haven’t played Rift enough to be familiar with Warfronts so this information is from various online sources. If I’ve made any mistakes feel free to point me to the definitive source via comments or email.

Event	Patch	Date	Min Level	Wait Time	Notes
Rift: Planes of Telara	1.0	2011-03-01			Initial Release
Black Garden / Library of the Runemasters / The Codex / Whitefall Steppes / Port Scion	1.0	2011-03-01	10 / 10 / 20 / 30 / 50
Storm Legion	2.0	2012-11-13			Expansion Release
Karthan Ridge	2.0	2012-11-13	50	623 Days
Nightmare Tide	3.0	2014-10-22			Expansion Release
Ghar Station Eyn	3.0	2014-10-22	60?	708 Days

No new warfronts as of posting date (2015-05-30): 220 days.

Defending Mid in Alderaan Civil War.

Now we have Star Wars: The Old Republic. The two most controversial parts of SWTOR’s Warzone strategy was the removal of ranked eight man Warzones and the addition of arenas as part of the regular Warzone map rotation. Ranked eight man Warzones were popular among a subset of players, but that subset wasn’t large enough for Bioware to want to commit the resources to its continued development. (See note below about participation.) Instead Bioware went with 4v4 arenas. The controversial part about arenas is that Bioware included arenas as a part of the Warzone map rotation. While the size of arenas fit well with SWTOR’s multiples-of-four instancing it was viewed as a stopgap measure that didn’t address the requests for cross-server queueing, a tournament server, or a megaserver (similar to what Elder Scrolls Online uses).

Event	Patch	Date	Min Level	Wait Time	Notes
Star Wars: The Old Republic	1.0.0	2011-12-13			Early Access
Alderaan / Voidstar / Huttball	1.0.0	2011-12-13	10 / 10 / 10		Early Access
Novare Coast	1.2.0	2012-04-12	10	121 days
The Ancient Hypergate	1.6.0	2012-12-11	10	243 days
Rise of the Hutt Cartel	2.0.0	2013-04-09			Early Access
Arenas	2.4.0	2013-10-01	10	294 days	Part of the random Warzone queue
Quesh Huttball	2.7.0	2014-04-08	10	189 days (483 days if you ignore Arenas)
Shadow of Revan	3.0.0	2014-12-02			Early Access

No new warzones or arenas as of posting date (2015-05-30): 417 days.

"Wait Time" is the number of days it has taken the listed PVP content to appear since the previous entry. I have included expansion release dates for context.

While making these charts I ran into the classic “apple vs orange” situation, trying to make the comparisons on the charts equal. I eventually decided the easiest thing to do was just point out the differences. Below I outlined some of the non-battleground/Warzone PvP content available in WoW and SWTOR, as well as pointing out some of the problems with Arenas.

Wintergrasp, Tol Barad, and Ashran are all Area PvP attempts to recreate the open-world PVP of Southshore vs Tarren Mill from Vanilla World of Warcraft. (The 10th anniversary of WoW had a limited time recreation of Southshore vs Tarren Mill as a 40 player Team Deathmatch map.) Unfortunately none of these are true open-world pvp because Blizzard applies equality of forces for "balance" reasons.

SWTOR's version of open world PVP was ... Ilum. I think we can all agree it is better off left for dead, only remembered as how not to do open-world PVP.

Outlaw's Den on Tatooine is a free-for-all area allowing you to deathmatch against your own faction. WoW has four equivalent areas (Gurubashi Arena, Outland Nagrand Arena Floor, Circle of Blood in Blade's Edge, and the Darkmoon Deathmatch [week long event once a month]). While these areas are great for player run PVP tournaments, these areas simply don't pull in other types of organized or unorganized PVP.

A possible issue with SWTOR’s eight man ranked is that it only existed during the first (hideously long) preseason. This preseason lasted from patch 1.2 to patch 2.4.3 (2012-04-12 to 2013-11-12, 579 days). We’ll never know if having actual seasons with rewards would have increased participation enough to have made it worth the development time to support eight man ranked.

Arenas are problematic because each game handles them differently. WoW has a separate queue for arenas. SWTOR, on the other hand, places arenas in the regular Warzone queue in an effort to quicken queue pops. Another issue in comparing Arenas is that WoW has 2v2, 3v3, and 5v5 arenas and SWTOR has the single size of 4v4, but you can queue solo or as a team. It gets even worse with ranked queues as WoW has the player population and technology to have cross-server ranked battlegrounds and arenas. SWTOR as of this writing doesn't have the technology in place to overcome the issues of the player base isolated across various servers.

After looking at these MMOs, I think it shows that new maps on a regular basis are important to sustaining PVP at all levels of play. While balancing classes for PVP may be more important (possibly even more important than PVE balance as nerfed Ops bosses don’t complain on the forums), it is the content we see, the playgrounds we interact in, that keep us going. The “hey, a new Warzone map” does more to sustain the idea that PVP is a major focus of the developers than any other single PVP change.

While SWTOR had a reasonable amount of Warzones for the age of the game when Shadow of Revan launched, a new Warzone is something we’ve come to expect with any expansion of every MMO. The new map doesn’t have to be there when the expansion launches, but it is something that needs to be a top priority during the time the expansion is current content. I’m hoping that at least one map is part of the Fallen Empire reveal on June 15, or is a part of a potential second half of 2015 roadmap.

Interactions with and by the community, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Piper) — Tue, 28 Apr 2015 18:19:00 +0000

Let's look at a couple of representative interaction with the fanbase.

PvP

Love it or hate it, PvP, like PvE is large part of why people play MMOs. Currently PvPers in SWTOR are pretty unhappy with the state of PvP. (See http://www.xamxamsays.com/?p=1473for an excellent post about why folks are unhappy with PvP).

The combat team has been trying to interact with the PvP community and explain what they are doing. Recently they explained their thoughts http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=8122355#edit8122355on the success of Sentinels/Marauders. They followed up with http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=8127209#edit8127209.

Reading these after the fact it looks like a reasonable position. The problem is that the second post is two days later. If combat team had posted those two items as a single post with a sentence saying something to the effect 'That's where we aim our balance efforts (win/loss ratio), but we understand many of you look to the leaderboards for evidence of overall class balance…' they would have headed off much of the two days of vitriol.

Bioware has to be the ones who connect the dots from how they view things to how the fans view things. By saying, yes, we see that issue too and are working to change it for the better Bioware acknowledges the concerns of the fanbase (and demonstrates they are listening to the fans, to boot!) No fanbase is going to like every answer, but when you are listened to you have a reason as a fan to stay engaged with the communication instead of just grumping about everything.

And, yes, talking about the leaderboard situation might be a bit Captain Obvious and repetitious for the combat team, but repetition is crucial in communicating with your fanbase. You never know when any particular fan is paying attention so you want to make sure you keep your messages out there.

The Cantina

Depending on your point of view, the cantina event at Star Wars Celebration was either a success or just another Bioware screwup. Given the event was designed to promote the game, Bioware did a poor job of communicating what they would be talking about[1] to they most-engaged fans.

It would have been much better if they had stated something like, 'The SWC cantina event is for us to promote the coming patch (3.2) to the wider Star Wars, non-SWTOR-playing audience. There will be a few new things, but don't expect to see any huge reveals at this time.' That alone would have helped set expectations properly for the engaged fans. (The fans that read the forums, follow blogs and websites, listen to podcasts, watch the videocasts and Twitch/Hitbox streams. Basically, your front line influencers/tastemakers.) Knowing that Bioware was using the event to try to expand the player base would have given the engage fans a chance to help out. As it was, the lack of knowledge simple stirred the dregs of disappointment as Bioware 'failed' to wow the existing involved player base with a cool roadmap.

That disappointment then bred cynicism with the Q&A portion of the event. While the questions weren't supposed to be vetted, they certainly gave the appearance of vetting. Vetting to the point of hearing the same questions asked once again (playable Wookies, anyone -.-). Whether or not the questions were vetted, Bioware should have announced that they did vette the questions. Vette them to add hard questions. If you are going to be accused of something, make it work for you.

Here's a couple of questions the fanbase perceived as hard and that were vetted out of being answered. I've included hypothetical answers;

[Hard question]: PvPers haven't had anything new in over a year. Could we at least get a new map? We've shied away from new maps because we didn't want to reduce the chance of you getting your favorite map. Until we can implement a solution for faster queue pops we don't want to mess with PvP in a possibly negative manner. If you want more maps with the risk of seeing the ones you like less, please sound off in our forums on the issue.

[Hard question]: Why are we getting an Outfit Designer when we have adaptive gear? Why not make everything adaptive and just give us a real Gear Manage instead? First, making everything adaptive would require us to go back and redo the rewards for all of the old quests. That's a non-trivial amount of development time that we prefer spend elsewhere. Secondly, we want to do a Gear Manager. If you considered the Outfit Designer as a first step to seeing what kind of load such a system might put on our databases then you might be thinking like we're thinking. That said, we've had many requests for the ability to use non-adaptive gear for cosmetic purposes. While recognize this adds yet another cosmetic system, this was the easiest way for us to go, development-wise.

Again, dealing with questions the fanbase thinks you are going to just ignore is a great way to start building credibility again.

Solutions?

From the fan base, a goal should be to continue to talk about improvements fans want in the game including possible solutions. While folks are frustrated at many parts of the state of the game, being constantly negative just gives the developers and the community team the excuse to tune you out. Be fair, if they get it right, say so. If they make a mistake, say why it is a mistake without being person. There are enough trolls in the forums, don't be one. A critical, but fair fan is more likely to rise above the noise of the trolls and have their signal heard.

Suggest solutions to problems you see. Bonus points if you explain why the solution is a win-win for both sides. Bioware is going to expect any solution a fan makes to be a win for the fan – it takes an unusual fan to suggest a needed nerf – but a fan that can show how the solution helps Bioware gives ammunition to the community team and developers to push through changes. Yes, Bioware may have already considered the change themselves, but when can point to community support and acceptance of a possible solution the effort needed to 'sell' the resources required to implement a change becomes that much less.

From Bioware, more openness. Let us know if a cantina is going to reveal new, major information, or if it is going to be aimed more at casual player. (Engaged fans tend to seriously underestimate the lack of knowledge the casual player has about upcoming changes.) Explain why you do things from a developer perspective, but always, always, ground those explanations in what the player base is looking at.

If you want an example of what can be done, just look at what Greg Street (Ghostcrawler) did for Blizzard. His willingness and tenacity at engaging in a much larger, more vocal fan base changed the tone and amount of interactions Blizzard has with its fanbase. It wasn't easy, it took a lot of time, but engaging with your community pays huge dividends. Dividends a smaller MMO can't afford to miss out on.

[1] Remember the basics you learned in Speech class where a simple speech should be in three parts? The first being about what you are going to talk about, the second being the talk, and the third summarizing what you talked about. The idea is to be redundant with your communications because you can't tell when someone will be paying specific attention to what you are saying.

Interactions with and by the community, Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Piper) — Tue, 28 Apr 2015 18:18:00 +0000

First, a bit of history

Bioware built a strong PR hype machine based on the strength of their games. The Baldur's Gate series, Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Age: Origins, Knights of the Old Republic, and the first two Mass Effects are all strong RPG games. They delivered content that their fans loved. Bioware could be cocky and swagger because they had shown they could deliver results.

The first crack in the Bioware PR machine came with Dragon Age 2. While the developers naturally wanted to do something different to stretch themselves and expand their new franchise, the fans generally wanted Dragon Age: Origins, only better.

The second crack was the launch of SWTOR. While it wasn't said explicitly, you could see that the Bioware devs were gunning for World of Warcraft. Wow was on a slow decline at the time and Bioware was touting their Fourth Pillar (storytelling), while building a game that hewed closely to the Wow MMO model[1]. The problem was that folks expected a game that was Wow, only better with more or, at least, equal content. The endgame content wasn't there and Bioware didn't grasp just how fast folks would level to get to endgame. After all, Wow has conditioned people to sprint to endgame, that leveling is a nuisance designed to reset gear/teach new skills, that the endgame is the 'real' game. Try as they might, Bioware's PR couldn't keep people paying a monthly subscription, The game crashed from a high of 1.7 million paying subscriber down to roughly 500,000 paying subscribers. The Wow challenger had basically dropped to EQ1 (at it's height) numbers.

When Bioware had to consolidate servers – the initial rush caused them to create too many new ones – it couldn't be PRed in the mind of the larger potential playerbase as anything other than a failure of the game. And who wants to commit serious time to playing a failed game? Which was terribly ironic given that EA continues to support Ultima Online after two failed attempts at a sequel.

Then we have the Mass Effect 3 ending major fracture. From a developer being quoted in a magazine as saying Bioware wasn't going to have 'A, B, and C' endings to the trilogy, to their continued statement of how many awards they had received, Bioware had a real disconnect with their paying customers and fan base. The majority of normally silent customers displayed they annoyance with the endgame as it existed. These customers sat on the normal forum trolls and gagged the white knights. Most of them are working adults so they dismantled and explained all the stock PR steps Bioware tried to use to shut up their customers.

In the end, the bulk of the fans 'won' as they forced Bioware to create a new ending. (Whether you liked the new endings is a different issue). Bioware's PR machine was not only de-fanged, but ME3 became a target for studies on how to screw up a major franchise right at the finish line. That hubris is still alive today.

The consequences of these PR mistakes would be pretty strong. After a face-saving amount of time, Bioware's two founders left. While these events may not be the sole cause, they certainly had to be a factor. After all, it is common for American CEOs of subsidiaries to resign after a series of bad events. It is also common for the parent company to pull a broken department (perceived or otherwise) back into the corporate structure.

Hopefully, this (wordy ^_^) reprise of Bioware's PR gaffes shows some of the reasons why their current SWTOR PR is lacking. Some of it is from them being gun-shy with their PR because of self-inflicted wounds. Some of it may just be the fact they have to work through more levels of corporate management to say things. Certainly any Star Wars related property is going to have to get the blessing of Lucasfilm andDisney.

[1] That was actually a good idea. Many of Wow's systems work well for an MMO shooting to be a major, mass-market game. Don't reinvent the wheel if you don't need to, when that wheel is successful.

A modest suggestion for 8-man ranked and Huttball League

noreply@blogger.com (Piper) — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 00:40:00 +0000

(I originally submitted this as an email to the podcast Star Wars: Beyond the Stars. They read it on episode 28, but I thought it would be nice to memorialize it here it case it sparked any additional discussions.)

I would like to see Bioware take two fan requested pvp features and combine them into one marquee item: a ranked eight-man Huttball league.

Because Huttball is closer to what a non-gamer sees as a sport – taking possession of a ball, running the ball, passing the ball, scoring at an endzone, etc – I think a ranked Huttball league would make an excellent esport to promote the game. With the new Appearance Designer you could even have the players dressed as Rotworms or Frogdogs.

If Bioware added three more Huttball maps they could start running tournaments where the best 3 out of 5 matches won. Each server could have a ladder to win the pvp rewards Bioware already creates for ranked pvp play. Instead of a rating teams would win based on their winning ratio.

Add in a tournament server and you are ready for something worth promoting on a large scale, prize- and publicity-wise. Let teams register for the tournament, have a season of play to set a ranking / seeding chart and then let the best 8 / 16 / 32 / etc. teams duke it out for the top prizes. If they set the prize rewards to something equivalent to what you would get at a major esport tournament I can guarantee they will get plenty of teams.

The reason I suggest a tournament server is that would fix the issue of cross-server queues with the least amount of effort from Bioware. It would also give them complete control over what the players had access to before and during the matches.

A side benefit to three more Huttball maps would be that for unranked games Bioware could have the option to queue for A) Any pvp map, B) Any Huttball map, and C) Any non-Huttball map. This would handle the issue of people preferring one type of game map over another. It would also allow informal player run Huttball or Warzone tournaments.

A possible downside could be longer queues, but if Bioware made the pvp Daily and Weekly quests be only doable with the “Any pvp map” option it should mitigate most any possible queue time issues. I'd suggest leave the normal, participation-based, warzone commendation rewards alone. That way folks could still get the comms their preferred way once the daily and/or weekly quest was finished.

Well, these are some of the thoughts I've had about making pvp something that helps promote the game to a wider audience for Bioware. I don't think either an eight-man ranked or a Huttball league by itself is going to happen, but if we combined them and showed Bioware how that can make the game appealing to people not currently playing we have a chance at seeing something new and cool. Heck, if ranked eight-man Huttball were to be a good publicity boost for Bioware to the larger gamer community they might even consider bringing back the old eight man ranked.

Shuttled

noreply@blogger.com (Piper) — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 14:07:00 +0000

I've been enjoying the expansion. Because of the reports that Makeb itself wouldn't provide enough experience to hit level 55 I picked up the Macrobinocular and Seeker Droid. I enjoyed the traveling around to older planets. It keeps the game from feeling limited as only focusing on a new area makes any expansion feel small. (Even the large area of Pandaria in WoW felt small in time when it was the only place most of our quests were at.) Because of all the travel, it is nice when time is short to have lots of options to move around quickly. One of the options that gets overlooked are the old Fleet Shuttles because they aren't being used for their original purpose.

The fleet shuttles are from the earliest days of the game, pre-Group Finder. The ostensible idea was that while you quested on a planet you'd be in general chat looking for a group while you quested. Once you had a group put together your group would travel to your planet's fleet shuttle, pick up the feeder quest, shuttle, and then head to the instance portal on the fleet. Profit!, and thus a server community would be built. At least in the minds of the Bioware devs.

Unfortunately it didn't work that way. As a practical matter, unless you were in a static group or had a guild of were folks were at the same level (mostly) this tended not to work. It was hard enough putting together a group for the planet's heroics - everyone seemed to be trying to hit the endgame - as it was to find an instance group. Even worse, if you were on the wrong side of a faction imbalanced server, say, Republic on the late Keller's Void, you were even more screwed. I never saw instances on my Republic toons until the server merge to Jedi Covenant and the emergence of the Group Finder.

The nice thing about the Fleet Shuttle is that it doesn't have a cooldown nor does it cause a cooldown on your Emergency Fleet Pass or legacy Fleet Priority Transport. That's handy when your Emergency Fleet Pass is still the 18 hour one or you haven't unlocked the legacy one.

Here's a list of what taxi location you need for the various shuttles for each planet.

Planet	Taxi location
Alderaan (Imperial)	Outpost Bolym
Alderaan (Republic)	Wardpost Duval
Balmorra (Imperial)	Glorinth Imperial Outpost (landing location)
Balmorra (Republic)	Bugtown (landing location)
Belsavis (Imperial)	Imperial Command Post
Belsavis (Republic)	Republic Watchtower
Corellia (Imperial)	Imperial War Camp
Corellia (Republic)	Republic Outpost
Coruscant	Senate Plaza Taxi
Dromund Kass	The Wall Speeder
Hoth (Imperial)	Leth Outpost (Fleet Shuttle is on the other side of the base)
Hoth (Republic)	Outpost Senth
Nar Shaddaa (Imperial)	Lower Promenade
Nar Shaddaa (Republic)	Lower Promenade
Quesh (Imperial)	-None-
Quesh (Republic)	-None-
Taris (Imperial)	Toxic Lake Garrison
Taris (Republic)	Waypoint Station Aurek
Tatooine (Imperial)	Toxic Lake Garrison
Tatooine (Republic)	Waypoint Station Aurek
Voss (Imperial)	Fort Kodentha
Voss (Republic)	Ken-La Outpost

WoWed out

noreply@blogger.com (Piper) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 21:40:00 +0000

[Given the date I'm posting this, I do have to say this isn't an April Fool's joke.]

Today I cancelled my WoW account. The game has reached a point where it isn't fun and I don't have the desire to login and complete those few things I still had some interest in. (A couple of titles, a couple of older legendaries.)

Now, WoW is still the wildly successful 800 lb gorilla in the MMO market, so I don't want to come across as if I was saying it was a bad game. It's not. What has happened is that what I want out of WoW isn't there and probably won't ever be there. I've finally gotten tired of the Red Queen's racetrack of gearing, WoW-style. Gear has become this short-term consumable that's ongoing irritant. You hope to get a drop from RNG, then you have to enchant it, gem it, reforge it. Then if you get another piece of gear you might have to redo it all once again. Long gone are the days of just equipping something and going. Of getting a drop meaning something special because you knew you'd be using it for a long time. Add to that the mentality of 'You Must Be This High of an ilevel to raid' and gear is an unpleasant stick.

(I am aware of the irony of dropping WoW and playing SW:ToR, given SW:ToR heavily imitated many WoW systems. While it isn't particularly logical, all I can say is that I'm having fun in SW:ToR whereas I'm not in WoW.)

Another issue is that I've played WoW for a long time now. I've been playing since 2006. That's a long time for anyone not in a guild with strong social bonds. Over the years I've all the boss fights, quests, battlegrounds, done a large number of achievements, and so on, and so forth. It's become difficult for Blizzard to do anything fresh. Even when they do something fresh (the new talent system, for example) that thing isn't enough by itself to attract me. Sequel-itis wears out even the best games. Even your favorite eating place would get boring over time if that's the only place you ate at.

At this point it is time to focus my attention on other games. Time to try different eating establishments and broaden my tastes, as it were. Perhaps one day I might go back and try my old favorite -- they nicely keep my seat available to their credit -- but maybe not. We shall see.

Late to the event

noreply@blogger.com (Piper) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 16:05:00 +0000

I finally got around to do doing the Gree event the second time around. The first one I skipped as I was a bit busy at work. I was also pretty burned out on any sort of dailies after doing a bunch of them in WoW to get my main there exalted with all of the factions. (Since my main there works on the reputation achievements the grinds were effectively mandatory. Having been the primary tank for my guild unlocking the valor gear was a motivator, as well, for the reps.)

The rep grind has been pretty relaxed for me. By the time the event goes away again I should have enough rep and rep tokens banked to get me all the way to Legend. Not bad for a two week event. In future I'll be able to just focus on the dailies that give me the item tokens.

I started out at first doing the dailies on three characters, my Jedi Sentinel, my Jedi Consular, and my Sith Warrior. Once I hit Friend and could do the Grey Secant quests I stopped doing the dailies on my Sith Warrior. I did do the one-time quest on all three. That one was fun, other than a few hiccups on Voss, as I got to get out and about on the planets instead of sitting on my ships or on the fleet. I even skipped doing dailies a couple of days when I just didn't feel like logging in. It has been nice to be at the point I do dailies when I feel like it and not feeling like I "have" to login and do them to keep up.

The pve quests were generally painless, though the pirate one could be a pain when you went for the 'end boss'. Having him spawn next to another gold mob can be problematic for a healer with a tanking companion. Still, it was a bit reassuring, in a twisted way, to see that Bioware still screws up mob placement even now. ^_^

The pvp dailies were the most surprising. On my server, Jedi Covenant, very few people were doing them. Turning in the orbs was quick and painless for the most part. I think the most I ever saw in line for the orbs was three people (including me) on one occasion Other than that, it was pretty much wait a minute or so at the pylon and turn in your quest.

Actual pvp was limited to a few times when my group was doing the heroic in the pvp area for speed and once on the pylon/orb quest. The pylon pvp was actually funny as a there were several Consular involved and they kept blasting people back from the pylon. No one was hurt and I was just laughing at my keyboard as I had the image of a school ground shoving match going on.

I do hope Bioware brings back the other events. Even if they were once a year things, that would be nice. Definitely the Rakghoul plague because re-occurrences of a plague makes sense. The Grand Acquisition might not make sense, but being a bit selfish I would like to see it because I wasn't able to work on it while it was here.

All in all, I liked the Gree event and I'm ready to start working on the other reps (as I feel like it) when the Gree event is over. Kudos to them for a successful event.

By the numbers

noreply@blogger.com (Piper) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 17:43:00 +0000

My son and I were talking about Richard Garriott's Shroud of the Avatar Kickstarter game. We were specifically discussing the 'personalized multiplayer' aspect of the game. He mentioned he wished he had more money to help support nudging the industry more towards this direction. I mentioned that even if the title was more of an indy hit, you didn't need big numbers to be profitable. Ultima Online is still running and it has around 100k subscribers. (Which, swtor fans, is good news. EA will keep a profitable MMO running for a long, long time even if it doesn't have a WoW-sized player base.)

Later on I thought about how World of Warcraft effects everyone's perceptions of success, especially the ardent defenders of the game. Now, to be clear, I am *not* saying that WoW is dying. Far from it, but there are things in the subscriber numbers to notice and watch. At its peak WoW had 12 million subscribers (Blizzard press release for October 2010). As of date of this post the official subscriber numbers are at 9.6 million subscribers. The numbers have been lower, surged a bit at the release of Mists of Pandaria, and have dropped back down. Most of the defenders tend to focus on the raw numbers. To be fair, they rightfully say that WoW's numbers are still impressive (they are) and that most MMOs would love to have a player base equal to what WoW has lost. 2.4 million subscribers would stellar for 99% of the MMOS out there.

The thing is, the defenders haven't discussed the dip in subscribers from a business perspective. Any business (and Blizzard is a business first[1]) would be very concerned to have lost from 20% to 25% (at one time) of their market. Losing that many people means something has gone wrong. It could be internal mistakes or a failure to adapt to external changes. When you look at Mists of Pandaria from this angle you can see why some of the design decisions were made. Perhaps not as a primary factor, but definitely as a significant one. The loss of subscribers helps explain why Blizzard went back and recycled some of the concepts from Vanilla and Burning Crusade (tiered raids you have to progress through, alt-unfriendliness, etc). Going back to systems, albeit with a fresh coat of paint, which originally brought in a lot of subscribers is worth trying.

If we look at that loss a bit differently it can actually be positive for WoW in the long run. In some ways the loss is permanent. People's lives change and they just won't play an MMO, any MMO again. In other ways that loss is good if it means people went to a different MMO and are having fun. Ignoring the inevitable WoW-bashers in other games, most of the people playing other MMOs are having more fun with their current MMO than WoW. This is good for the industry as a whole when each MMO can find its (profitable) niche. More experiments, more successes, more people playing MMOs (or MMO-likes, such as Shroud of the Avatar), even WoW. Having WoW (or any big MMO) can be nice because it gives us a common language to talk about MMOS in game terms. It isn't so nice when to succeed people try to imitate WoW or call themselves WoW-killers *cough*sw:tor/warhammer*cough*. As players we need those experiments to push the genre. Without it we're stuck with Blizzard trying to reinvent WoW each expansion and the inevitable stagnation and player-base decay that will occur. So the next time someone gets defensive about WoW's decline in subscriber, introduce them to the idea that it could be a good thing for WoW in the long run. :)

[1] Blizzard is a very competitive, very hard-nosed business-oriented company. If you look at when they release cinematics, patches, expansions and when their competitors do the same you'll find a fair amount of matching up on the dates. While they disingenuously say they develop on their own cycle without paying attention to competitors (a tactic Apple uses all the time) there are too many coincidences for them not to be trying to compete. Now if I was an Activision-Blizzard shareholder I'd be happy about this. If I was a competitor I'd try to make sure I was ready for Blizzard to mess with me.

Spacebar

noreply@blogger.com (Piper) — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 20:33:00 +0000

I've been trying to hit up a flashpoint everyday with my smuggler to get the daily planetary commendations. (Having a lot of adaptive gear creates that hunger for the leveling mods, dontcha know? :)) As I've been reaching the conversations pitstops I noticed that I was waiting on the rest of my instance group to reach the response tree. Having played since the beginning I had gotten used to everyone hitting the space bar to get through the conversation as fast as possible. Grab those social points and go, go, go.

At first, I figured the other people were likely the casual f2p players being in the instance for the first time. Later I realized when folks were buffing me with all four buffs everyone now seems to be actually watching the events, even the long term subscribers. I don't know when people's behavior changed, but this is a welcome improvement as far as I'm concerned. Having and enjoying the story in the flashpoints is part of the fun and I had missed it during the spacebar-at-all-costs era.

Big in-game events

noreply@blogger.com (Piper) — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 17:53:00 +0000

I was playing the ending arc of Chapter 2 of my smuggler's story line when a casual line by an enemy got me to thinking. The line was to the effect that the Republic and Empire were officially at war. There was more, but the thing that focused my attention was the fact that Bioware never really showed the war starting. You can easily miss the fact about the war as you level because it was so quiet. It is easy to continue on up to Corellia not realizing this. (In fact, Voss's planetary storyline is such that it could easily be a cold war situation.)

For a game company that made story its Fourth Pillar, not seeing the events that started the war unfold is strange. That's a major story event, and big events should be shown to a player. If they happen in passing or in the background then they become minor and unimportant. I don't know how they would have included the start of the war, but having each class see or be a part of the start would have ratched up the tension in the game and added to the flavor.

This isn't to pick just on Bioware. Blizzard really messed this up with the beginning of Cataclysm. There was an event in two of the cities of each of the factions. An elemental invasion were if you slew enough elementals you could open a portal to four bosses for some quick loot. The problem was that fairly quickly only one of the faction cities gathered enough folks to kill the elementals. Since two of the four bosses were tied to each city if you wanted a drop from the other two bosses you were out of luck. Yep, it was pretty boring and uninspired as far as world events go. (The Mists of Pandaria non-event was even worse. There was none, just a showcase of a scenario that didn't make sense to anyone that hadn't read the book. Talk about disconnects.)

Now, when Cataclysm started you basically woke up in a set spot and moved on. Unless you played through specific low level areas (Darkshore, for example) you never even felt the impact of events. Heck, the Worgen starting zone literally has the Cataclysm happen off screen. As it was, it was a 'Huh? What happened? :shrug:' and move on moment. Instead of having us fear Deathwing or making a connection to us where he mattered, Deathwing became this empty threat that would torch a zone once in awhile. Instead of being this dangerous, intelligent if crazy opponent, he became this ineffectual blowhard that we put down while we advanced Thrall's life crisis. :sigh:

I think if Blizzard had let us be involved with the Cataclysm happening then it would have allowed us to make an emotional connection to the events. Ask anyone that played WoW if they remember the zombie invasion pre-Wrath, or the pre-BC event where a massive demon attacked the major cities. Those big events got us fired up and ready to go when the expansions launched. When we got to the final fight we could look back and have closure. So, my thinking is, if we could have tried to stop Deathwing at the start and *failed* then it would have A) let us see the start of the Cataclysm and B) allow us to get emotionally invested in stopping Deathwing. When we finally beat him in Dragon Soul it would have made for a much better sense of closure.

TL;DR: If a game company is going to have a big, world changing event, they need to let the players be a part of it. We need to see it unfold and be in it, even if on a periphery. Big events that happen in the background or off-stage are non-events.

Leveling tip

noreply@blogger.com (Piper) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 00:33:00 +0000

One of the things I've found helpful while leveling characters is the ability to switch world instances. World instances are the that Bioware handles lots of players on a given planet. Too many people and you get lag and too much competition for mobs, resources, etc.. By having from 1 to around 120 people per world instance Bioware balances the feeling of having enough folks around to make the world seem active with the easing of excess competition.

All that said, sometimes you hit the leveling wave at the wrong place on a planet and have to wait longer than you want for mobs, quest items, etc. What I've found that can sometimes help is to manually switch world instances (if you've ever joined a group on a world to do a heroic quest and been moved you've encountered the automatic version of this).

If you want to switch just press M to bring up the main map and look in the lower right corner at the World box. If you see your planet's name and a number then you're read to switch. If you don't see the dropdown box then you're currently out of luck as there aren't enough people on the planet at the time to spawn multiple world instances. I've only seen Quesh not have multiple world instances. (Mainly due to Quesh being so fast and short.)

Choose your destination, click yes, and hopefully you'll be able to get back to leveling!

Note: You can generally only take this option once every 30 minutes or so. Occasionally you can bounce between instances without having the cooldown start.

noreply@blogger.com (Piper) — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 19:02:00 +0000

I posted part of this as part of a comment on Blessing of Kings: Disengaged, but I thought I'd post it here, as well. Maybe I can get off my behind and start actually writing stuff up on my gaming blog. :) Consider this as a snapshot of what I'm playing, MMO-wise.

The Secret World - I'm still mucking around in Kingsmouth. I felt the starter bit for the Dragons was pretty poorly done. (Give me a tutorial mission where you give me abilities and then take them away at the end? Not too smart.) I think Funcom's problem is that they when they did the quests for TSW they got too enamared of ARGs for everything and not just for Investigation quests. This game really feels like you need a second monitor with a browser open looking everything up all the time. Personally, combine that with the ability to eventually learn all the skills in the game (though you can only use a few at a time) and you get the situation where you feel like you're spinning your wheels without any direction. If they had taken the idea Guild Wars 2 used and an obvious story thread to follow, plus a few stock 'archetypes' for abilities I think they would have kept more folks subscribed. It also wouldn't have hurt if they had put something more interesting in as the starter zone. Zombies and the Lovecraftian/King atmosphere are both rather overused at this point in time. I eventually want to push through the content and see everything, but I feel like I'm fighting the game to see it and not working with it. :sigh:

The Old Republic - Right now I'm just leveling characters to 50 to see their class stories. With the new expansion coming I'm not worried about doing anything with my other 50s. Leveling characters is a lot of fun because I'm seeing how Bioware intertwinned the stories among all the classes, plus I love seeing the little callbacks to the KotorR games. This is the game I'm spending the bulk of my time at the moment. Being able to do what I want, when I want has really invigorated my desire to log into an MMO and play.

World of Warcraft - I was pretty burned out by the end of Dragon Soul, but I hung in for my guild to help give it some leadership stability. I've leveled three characters to 90, but with all the dailies and the alt-unfriendlyness of the expansion, I've pretty much gone into hibernation with it. All I'm doing is logging in to see if I can get my other binding from Baron Geddon once a week. My guild is still raiding, but with the changes in raiders due to folks leaving at the end of Cataclysm they picked a raiding time that doesn't work for me. That's ok with me, but it does mean the normal "I need to be on and prepared to raid" efforts aren't keeping me logged in. I have done LFR and subbed in on some normal mode runs, but I have to say that T14 is pretty 'meh' for me. That may be just DS burnout lingering, but it may be that I'm very tired of trying to stay on Wow's Red Queen's racetrack of progression.

Guild Wars 2 - I had been leveling a Charr with my son and we were having a blast with the content. Luckily both of us are in sync with how we like to play (both completionists about things) so that made the leveling very fast and smooth. I've also been messing around with a Norn guardian. While I tend to do the best with melee classes, I normally wouldn't be quite so exuberantly extroverted as she is. It has been a fun change to play a character so different in tone from my usual choices. I need to get back to the game, but that's one thing I really appreciate about GW2 is that I don't feel like I have to log in or else I'm wasting my subscription fee.

World of Tanks - I downloaded this to just see what it is like, but unfortunately work decided to eat my extra free time. Right now SW:ToR and a tiny bit of WoW playing consume my free time. But as someone that loved the old board wargames like Panzerblitz, Tobruk and Squad Leader the idea of manning my own tank is irresistible.

Edit (Mar. 10, 2013): Thanks to my sharp-eyed son for noticing that I had my ToR mixed in with my WoW. That should have been "level three characters to 90", not to 50. >< Fixed now.

Raiding and the Red Queen's Race of Heroics

noreply@blogger.com (Piper) — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 16:39:00 +0000

(Note: I posted this on the official forums, but I wanted to memorialize this here as well)

First off, I respect Blizzard’s right to steer WoW however they see fit. With what I write below I’m trying to say why it doesn’t work for me, not that they suck for what they are doing and must stop immediately. I hope adding my voice to these discussions gives them another insight or data point that allows us to find a common ground that makes things work for both of us.

I’ve taken a break from WoW and below are some of the issues that keep me from wanting to come back. I’ve enjoyed raiding as it has been some of the best fun in the game for me, but the current situation just leaves me indifferent about the game.

A part of the problem with raiding is the lack of chances to practice without involving others. I can go practice my PVP skills (such as they are) without dragging guildies or friends into it. I can’t try a new strategy for tanking the Omnotron Defense System without involving 9 or 24 other people’s time and effort. Having a ‘practice mode’ for raids that let you try with a few friends or solo with a set of bots would be a big help. (Ironically, making 10 and 25s share the same lockout on a boss means many of us have less chance to work on a fight than we did in Wrath.) You can explain a fight, but for many doing the fight is the best way to learn the ‘muscle memory’ that’s going to help us down bosses. I realize that practice mode is ambitious enough to be more a next-expansion-feature, but I do see it being a useful tool for helping new raiders.

Given that the ‘practice mode’ is very ambitious, perhaps it would be better to have the trash teach people about the various boss abilities they are going to be dealing with. Give them something to relate to when their raid leader says “This boss does ‘x’, ‘y’, and ‘z’” because they’ve seen those three things with the trash they’ve cleared. As it is, WoW bosses are like being given a teacup, a harpoon, and a bagel while standing in the middle of a bull ring with no explanation of what you’re supposed to do. It’s very difficult to determine if I’m being skillful or just lucky when I don’t know the rules of the game. Leaving it to the community to provide that information is problematic. Those who work through the encounters often relay the sizzle, but not the steak of the boss fight. People tend to cover their part of a fight without touching on the roles. If more information was provided by Blizzard in-game then all the roles would be appropriately covered. The community could build on that base instead of kind-of, sort-of working on the base itself.

Another issue is that a number of fights in the current tier seem to be more about reversing the Wrath idea of accommodating the player before the class. Granted there are always going to be some classes and specs consistently on the top of the various charts, but Cataclysm raids really seem to be tuned for more ranged and/or DoT heavy classes over melee (and elemental shaman). Building a static 10 man while letting folks play the characters they want becomes more frustrating for all involved because of encounter design. Add to that the increased difficulty of the encounters for those that might only be able to raid one or twice a week for three or four hours at a time and the problems compound. In Wrath you could still be successful and have fun. In Cataclysm it feels more like you’re not wanted as a raider. I know that’s not the intent, but Cataclysm has to live with the consequence of the broader group of Wrath raiders.

All that said, the biggest reason for me not to come back to raiding is something that isn’t raiding. It is running heroics for points.

A little background, first. I don’t mind grinds. I don’t necessarily like them, but reaching a goal is doable for me. You can check my achievements for evidence that grinding out something isn’t daunting for me.

My issue is mostly with the running of heroics for valor and justice points. Once you’ve gotten the gear you want out of heroics they become a chore. They aren’t a grind as a grind has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Heroics are a Red Queen’s race for valor points.

We’ve been running heroics for badges and points for four years now. People are burned out doing that. I think the biggest problem people have with the increased difficulty with the Cataclysm instances is not that they are harder, but that they take longer and that we’ll be running them for two long years over and over and over…

Even moving the target from a daily run to ‘seven on Sunday’ doesn’t help. As a tank, I can get instant queues, so let’s say I get great pugs each time and each run is thirty minutes or so. That means for me, I just spent three and a half to four hours working for valor points. I wasn’t raiding, I wasn’t working on skills that help me beat a progression raid boss, I was doing a chore. I basically spent the equivalent of half a day of overtime doing something that wasn’t fun. If I queued as a dps then my times get that much worse. Queue lengths for dps are around forty-five minutes on my LFG group. Keeping the same instance run time, we end up spending eight and three-quarters hours on Sunday just trying to get our valor points!

(If my numbers are off, please feel free to let us know what the actual average queue times and instance run times are. I’d rather have accurate numbers and discuss those than my anecdotal experience.)

Adding the 4.1 troll instances as a separate tier makes it even worse. People will be trying to run those *two* instances seven times. As soon as the tanks and healers can move up a tier the bottleneck you’re trying to avoid with the Call to Arms is going to reappear making longer for newer dps to get the gear / points to the higher tier instances.

It has been said that Blizzard wants us to play more alts (with how the raid lockouts are working), but given the amount of time it takes to run heroics there’s less incentive to want to run heroics for your main and then turn around and try to do the same for one or more alts. (Assuming you’re wanting to get and keep an alt raid-ready at the level of your main.)

Oh, as far as the Call to Arms goes, the incentive doesn’t motivate me to tank more. Having to solo queue for the bag is anti-guild. Normally as a tank I want to include as many of my guild’s dps so that they have short queue times. Given I’m already burned out on running heroics, I’m not going to run twice as many heroics, so I can either alienate some guildies or have strangers bitch if something goes wrong that all I want is the bag. :sigh: Still, I’m glad to see Blizzard experimenting, but I don’t think the Call to Arms will work that well.

As a side note, reseting people’s valor points when a new tier of raiding comes out is just insulting. We earned those points. Why be so dismissive of the time we put into earning them by devaluing them? It just becomes another reason why trying to build up valor points via heroics is so unpleasant. Yes, they become justice points, but justice points aren’t a difficult thing to get.

Honestly, I wish you got all your weekly valor points when you defeated your first raid boss of the week. That would at least tie the valor points to raiding and not running heroics.

At the risk of generating enough heat to melt a few glaciers, I’d rather see this endless rush after gear go away. I’ve been changing gear since Diablo 2. It would be nice for once in an expansion for the first heroics be the intro raiding gear for the entire expansion. Then have the various raiding tiers stay at the same item level. Go for more varied gear at each tier. This way the player can decide when they have the set of gear they like without feeling like they are gimping their raid. It becomes more of a choice of what to use than a ‘I must upgrade no matter what’ situation.

A side benefit is that all throughout an expansion a fresh 85 could run the heroics and get geared enough to step into a raid without having to run a sequence of the initial heroics, then the next tier of heroics (the troll ones for Cataclysm), then whatever other heroics that get added. The way it looks now is that if we want to gear an alt later in the expansion we’ll have to run all the tiered heroics in order to catch up to the then current raiding tier. Adding more plateaus just eliminates more folks from endgame raiding later in the expansion.

I know some will just tell me that I need quit my bitching and go kill more raid bosses. :shrug: I’m not in a twenty-five man raiding guild nor were we killing enough bosses in my ten man guilds to even make that much of an impact on valor points. Heroics are what many of us have to use to make up the difference. We’re trying to see the content when it is appropriate, not get stuck on waiting for the next tier to come out so that we can clear all of the current tier.

Random prediction

noreply@blogger.com (Piper) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 17:53:00 +0000

I would like to make one prediction for the next expansion. I expect the 25-man raids to go the way of the 40-man raids. As Blizzard continues to make Warcraft as widely accessible to player skill levels as they do to computer hardware requirements they will push the raid size downwards. To compensate for the loss of the 25-man raids Blizzard will add more achievements to make the difficulty self-selecting (similar to *10*-man Obsidian Sanctum with three drakes up being the hardest raid pre-patch 3.1.). Achievements are wildly popular and are a natural path to ramping up the difficulty of a raid.

In addition, I expect the raids to scale to the number of people you bring, with the raids being 6- to 10-man instances. This is much more small guild friendly as a group of friends can still raid without having to pug any extra members. (Aside: pugging extra people isn't bad, but there's lots of resistance as well as some outright cultural hostility to pugged members. Sometimes it is just easier on all involved if you can keep the raid 'in guild' so to speak.) I firmly believe having scalable raids this way would push Blizzard to be more creative in their raid designs. Having limits forces you to search for more creative solutions. The 25 man raids where the developers assume the raid generally has one of each class encourages more kitchen-sink style design.

Epic Raid?

noreply@blogger.com (Piper) — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 17:01:00 +0000

One of the things I find interesting when people talk about Warcraft's raid size is that you inevitably find people who say the 25- and/or old 40-man raids were epic. That the 10-mans just aren't epic at all.

25-man raids are simply not epic. They are not epic in story or scale. 25-man raids are much closer to being a classroom field trip than epic (and 40 man raids are more like a tour bus gone astray ;)).

Xenophon and the March of the Ten Thousand, the invasion of Normandy, the defense of Stalingrad are all epic in scale. Heroic Naxxramas or Alterac Valley aren't. They are just too small to be epic. They are just small mobs, not epic groups.

The 25-mans aren't epic in story, either. Traditionally epic stories focus on a hero or small band doing a great dead. Other than Jason and the Argonauts -- and honestly, how many of the Argonauts can you name besides Hercules? -- epic tales focus on ten or fewer people. The smaller raid size allows you, the player, to know your contribution matter more, that you were important instead of being just another spear-carrier in a 25-man raid. It gives you a chance to be a heroic member of an epic tale. The impact of defeating Arthas with 9 good friends is always going to be stronger, epic-wise, than beating Arthas with 24 casual acquaintances.

Preparations...

noreply@blogger.com (Piper) — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 00:36:00 +0000

Please forgive the mess while I get this place underway.

I'm a typical WoW player with some experience at hardcore raiding (six, seven nights a week). Nothing cutting-edge I grant you, mostly Tier 4 and 5 content, but with the changes Wrath brought I'm seeing guilds trying to raid or raid consistently and making some of the same mistakes. Hopefully my experiences and observations will keep you from making those mistakes while allowing you to pioneer all new mistakes. :)

The title of my page comes from the fact that I have three toons with the Champion of the Naaru title. I've done raid dps as a Beast Mastery Hunter, raid healing as a Holy Priest, and raid tanking as a Feral Druid. I've done each as a raid progression member (including main tank raid progression) and as quite a bit of raid farming to help people bring up their toons to the raid levels.