Ixobelle

The Project, Take 3

2009-11-07T09:27:00.000-08:00

First was Warcraft 3, then NWN2's toolset. I've made another jump to the Dragon Age toolset. As I dig deeper into these tools, I'm finding valid reasons to make the switch, but being as Dragon Age was released about 12 minutes ago, and is the logical successor to NWN's set (made by the same guys), I think this will be the final stop. At any rate, it's good to get my hands dirty with more than one toolset, and I swear THIS IS THE LAST DO OVER, K?

My area had mostly been some conversation trees (which can be brought over pretty painlessly with just copying and pasting with both toolsets open), and the physical exterior and interior areas themselves, which will need to be remade. I'm not even positive at this point that the locations can be crafted in the way they were with the NWN2 set. I spent about 4 hours in the toolset last night, following a tutorial that used an existing area. It had me placing doors, linking transitions to various waypoints, and writing scripts that recognized when a pack of connected mobs was killed (thereby flagging a quest event as complete).

The toolset itself is crazy deep, there are WAY more options for creating conversations, and you can do things like raise individual eyebrows mid-word, and the setup of cameras and animations during cut scenes and conversations is much more... uhh... robust, let's say. You can have Stephen Hawking voiceovers created, and the NPC faces will lip-sync the words. There are also much better implementations of quest creation and tracking, and it doesn't crash every time I want to change an NPCs appearance from the default.

As I mentioned, though, I'm not sure if there's even a terrain editor yet, this game probably assumes you're just doing modeling in 3dsmax and bringing your assets into the database. Speaking of databases, it uses SQL, and has some nifty stuff where multiple people can be working on a project, and you can check in and out resources to avoid conflicts with other authors. Anyway, the lack of a terrain deformer might not be a horrible thing. If I just linked two existing outdoor areas together, I could focus on the design-y side of things, writing quests and scripting events, and less on the 'elegant shrubbery placement' side. I'll probably dig around for that today, and get started on the migration of what I had.

Anyway, back into the mines... wish me luck.

Chugging Along...

2009-11-01T16:53:00.000-08:00

I've spent a lot of time (too much probably) just buried in tutorials, and trying to figure a few things out. Today I felt like I was getting snowed over, and just said screw it and started chucking more dialog in there. The dialog trees don't branch properly, and sometimes offer options that 'shouldn't be available yet', but I can always go in there and adjust that later. For now it was important to start just fleshing out the flow of the narratives.

Larisa in the PPI and Tobold in his house on the rise, plus Hatch right outside of town, all have some basic things happening. Hatch walks off towards the bar at the end of his spiel (but never makes it inside), Larisa offers the beginning of a quest that activates your quest log (that you can talk to Tobold to begin completing) as well as gives you a room key if desired (just playing with issuing items based on certain criteria), and Tobold begins to hint at some less than perfect solutions to the problem being faced. Ah, and you can kill Gevlon! Hooray!

Again, these are rough, but this is what I said I was going to be putting up here... the entire process from rough to final. The area itself is more shaped, if not fully textured, and across the river is the scorched remains of the town that Spinks set fire to. There are more trees in general, but I need to stop trying to put down finishing touches in some areas (trees, grass), when others have less than beginnings. It's REALLY hard to be doing everything yourself. I feel an itch to fill a certain niche, and just do one part, but I realize that I've been dicking around with the journal entry system wasy too long, and need to write more dialog, etc etc etc.

I'm finding more ways to cram more people in here, as well. Jong and Megan are going to be our farmers over by the orchard (I have Jong referenced in a quest, but haven't renamed the actual NPC yet), and Melf and Crimson Starfire are the 'new victims' that Tobold mentions could be ... handled ... to solve the problem in a simple manner. They were in contact with Tesh while his son was sick (unbeknownst at the time), and represent the new threat to Lorren itself. They even have kind of strange names, which Tobold chalks up to them running the local alchemy / magic shop, and saying that they thought the names made them sound more mysterious.

Favorite lines of dialog so far:

Tobold: My brother, Syncaine, has a boat over in Pinole Harbor. He makes his living by shuttling tourists here and there.
Ixobelle: Wow, tourists?
Tobold: That's right, anyway... blah blah blah...

wow tourists, lololol!1!!1. This is going to be horrible when it's done. I love it.

Link: http://notaddicted.com/images/isobelle/NwN2_ixo_11012009.mod

Plot Refinement / NPC Intros

2009-10-29T11:24:00.000-07:00

Been working a lot in Word, finalizing a lot of the plot details, and how conversations will unfold in my module. Jumping directly into the world editor is cool if you're just poking around, but it's better if you have an idea beforehand of how things work together.

I have a previous post about plot, already, but this one is kind of the 'final' version. More detailed interactions are included, and who knows, you may even recognize some of the NPC names ;)

Passing through Lorren
A Neverwinter Nights 2 Module by Richard Ericksen

Introduction

The most basic premise of the module, in a single sentence, is to gather enough funds to take a boat back to your homeland.

You are an outsider in these lands, and are on the way to the eastern port to book a trip back home across the sea. You intend to do odd jobs at the dock until you can scrape enough money together for passage, or see if you can come on as hired help on the boat itself.

Passing by Lorren, on the way to the docks, you’re confronted by a man named Hatch who comes running up to you from the town gates. He notices your skin color is different, and can’t believe his luck at finding someone like you just waltzing past the gates. He wishes to ask a favor of you, and wonders if you have time to help.

Thus begins your forray into Lorren.

Town History

There’s a sad story attached to Lorren, that the villagers will tell from their own perspectives. Removing people’s emotion from it, it basically unfolds as such:

A virus is discovered, primarily infecting those working in the mine in the northern town of New Brill. It spreads quickly, and immediately Doctor Tesh sets up a quarantine to keep it from spreading across the river to Lorren.

Many die, or are dying. Tesh finds that he is immune to the virus as he is a Drow, his half-Drow son also appears to be immune. His human wife is one of the first to die, however. He works day and night to find a cure. One day, he and his son travel across the quarantine to Lorren to grab fresh supplies, and inform the mayor of Lorren, Tobold, of his progress. Tobold decides that New Brill is a lost cause, and detains Tesh and his son. Tesh will work in Lorren from now on, much to his dismay at the thought of abandoning his neighbors to the north.

Tesh discovers his son is not immune, and is in fact infected as well. He struggles to find a cure while his son begins to wither. Eventually Tesh finally solves the puzzle, but his son died that same morning. Devastated, he shuts himself in his new house, refusing to see anyone. He eventually resurrects his son, and administers the cure, then collapses in exhaustion.

His undead son wanders outside, and is struck down by a warrior named Spinks. Tesh gathers his body and flees to New Brill, where the townspeople can’t chase him for fear of becoming infected themselves. Tobold orders Spinks to burn the village remotely with flaming arrows shot across the river at night. This is done in secret, and many in the village suspect that it was Tesh who started the fires in his madness.

When you, as the player, arrive in town, there is a new outbreak underway in Lorren. It’s a different strain of the same virus, that works much slower, and is less contagious, but is still just as deadly. It’s actually a mutation that Tesh’s son carried into the village while people thought he was immune.

Cast

There are a few main cast members that will be making appearances in the story:

Yourself – You are a non-human Drow, and an outsider in these lands; your blue skin stands out readily. You are returning home after a year of traveling these lands.

Doc Hatch – the “new” town doctor. He’s trying to fight the new outbreak of the deadly Miner’s Virus that previously struck the sister town to the north, completely wiping them out. People are still afraid to venture across the bridge for fear of becoming infected themselves. He’s interested in getting the old doctor’s notes to further his research.

Doctor Tesh – The “old” doctor. He was also a Drow, with blue skin like yours. He lived in the northern mining village with his local wife and their young son, and tended to the people of both towns. When the infection began, his wife was one of the first to fall victim. Eventually, Tesh realized that being Drow granted him immunity to the virus. The source of the Miner’s Virus is unknown, but –as its name implies– its first victims were workers in the mine to the northeast. Although Tesh lived in the north, he was forcibly detained with his son in the southern town once things became clear that New Brill, to the north, was a lost cause.

Ysharros – Tesh’s dead wife. She was a local girl, whose father was the foreman of the mining operation in town. She contracted the virus from her father, and fell quickly. She and Tesh had a single son:

Mordiceius – The half human son of Tesh and Ysharros. His was an especially unfortunate fate. His father worked day and night to find a cure for young Mordiceius, once he realized that his own immunity was not, in fact, passed on to his son. While Tesh struggled with his research, Mordiceius grew weaker. His being half outsider gave him longer to struggle than most, but in the end he fell victim as well. Tesh finally found the cure mere hours after losing his son. In a fit of madness, he resurrected Mordiceius from the dead, and administered the cure to him, then collapsed in exhaustion. Mordiceius, now undead, wandered outside only to be struck down by Spinks. Tesh went into a furious rage when he realized what had happened, and fled with his son’s corpse back across the river to the north, never to be seen again.

Spinks – The local law. Lorren is a small town, and Spinks mostly is just there to break up bar fights, or keep outsiders passing through in line. She’s a retired warrior, and usually finds the direct solution to any conflict to be the most elegant. As a soldier, she follows orders from Tobold without question.

Tobold – The mayor. He’s able to separate emotion from what must be done for the good of all. It was his idea to have Spinks assist in ‘abducting’ Tesh and his son when they came into town for supplies. He realized that New Brill was beyond help, and only wished to save the remaining people of Lorren. He also ordered Spinks to burn the northern village in an effort to cleanse the area.

Larisa – The innkeeper/ owner of the Pink Pigtail Inn. A spunky little woman with pink hair. She’s the town gossip, as she overhears everything in her establishment. She can be counted on to give the ‘uncut’ (but perhaps biased) version of any story.

Elnia – The bartender of the Pink Pigtail. In contrast to Larisa, Elnia is a realist and more of a quiet observer. While people might be hesitant to talk with Larisa within earshot, Elnia doesn’t seem to pose a threat. She may have valuable insight in some situations.

Syp – The blacksmith, and local honest merchant. Will provide people with what they need, but frowns on bending rules. He suspects Gevlon is a theif, but can find no hard proof.

Gevlon – The money grubbing goblin merchant. Loudmouthed and generally obnoxious. Willing to do anything for the bottom line, though, no matter the cost. Can be counted on to come up with any item that may be needed.

Karma

Again, the basic plot is to get enough money together to board a boat across the sea, 100g.

In an effort to appeal to a wide variety of player types, I’ll be leaving the ‘how’ wide open. There will be three general ways to go about securing that much money, all ranging from ‘helping others’ to ‘good hard work’ to ‘kill em all’. Mixing and matching is good, too (kill half of em, just not the ones that don’t mind if you kill others, etc).

The good: Help the town cure the virus. Through doing only good deeds, you can find the cure, and the town will reward with with your hard work: a pre paid ticket. The mayor has a brother who is captain of a ship, and will guarantee you passage if you rescue the town. It isn’t a pile of gold, but it’s exactly what you were looking for. This is where the meat of the conversation options will take place, and where the unfortunate story of Tesh and his family will be revealed.

The bad: Menial labor. Kill 10 rats. Loot 15 flowers. The boring path, but at least you aren’t rescuing some noobs from some virus you couldn’t care less about. The neutral path requires very little in quest explanation; it’s mostly just a bunch of errand quests branching off of the ‘Whatever lady. I’m just looking for work in the form of odd jobs, got any?’ dialog option.

The ugly: Get a blunt object and just whack everyone in the head. Loot all their little golds and ride off into the sunset. Obviously the ‘bad’ route requires very little in the way of quest writing. Just a way of flagging yourself as hostile once you begin killing people. You’ll also need a weapon, which can be found or purchased. Gevlon and Tobold (to a lesser extent) offer various ways of completing ‘bad, but not genocide’ paths. Gevlon can be killed outright, and has more than enough money, or he can be persuaded to pay you for ... ahem... services rendered in eliminating competetion. He doesn’t want the entire town wiped out, as that would leave him with no customers, but would have no problem if a certain blacksmith were to take a dive.

Tobold, as always, is looking out for the greater good, even if it means handling the threat of the infected villagers while maintaining the health of those who remain uninfected. He doesn’t like the idea of getting his hands dirty, but an outsider such as yourself could certainly do something terrible, then disappear along on your way...

Alternatively, you can just whack Tobold, and take his ‘free ride coupon’.

Conversations

The conversations themselves aren’t going to be typed out here, word for word. But a general outline will explore the various exchanges, and where they lead.

Hatch – The first meeting. He wants help getting the notes from Tesh’s home across the river. He’s generally a nice guy, but is new in town. He doesn’t know the whole history, and is just trying to get settled in this new area. When we go across the river, we find undead walking around, and we mention this as we bring the notes back to Hatch. He’s perplexed, and mentions Larisa or Tobold as possible avenues for information.

If we only wish to perform odd jobs, he can have us collect certain species of flower that grow in the northern areas for his medicines, etc.

Tobold – Initially welcomes us to town, and if talked to before we see undead, points us in the direction of odd jobs (should that be our inclination). Later, once we’ve encountered undead across the river, he tells the story of the virus in more detail, and how he made the decision to hold Tesh against his will for ‘the good of the people that remained’. He offers us passage across the sea with a ship operated by his brother, if we can help with saving the town from another outbreak, by any means necessary.

Should we be interested in odd jobs, he can send us to collect signatures for certain town paperwork, or round up artifacts from New Brill across the river.

Larisa – A chatty woman who is more than happy to fill us in on the general ovewrview of what happened in the past. She had no part in the good or bad deeds that took place, and has nothing to restrain her from telling what she imagines the whole story to be. Her knowledge all comes second hand, and she basically just glosses over major points, giving only a rough outline of events.

Should we be interested in side jobs, she can have us fetch some items for her for the inn/bar, or collect on tabs.

Elnia – the quiet observer. She isn’t as chatty, and must be prodded to tell her understanding of the plot. She reveals the darker side of things that Larisa chooses to gloss over, such as how Tobold sent Spinks on a mission to burn the northern village once the inhabitants were dead, in an effort to cleanse the land of the virus.

If we’re looking for odd jobs, she directs us to Larisa.

Gevlon – A goblin concerned only with money. His rambling is hard to follow, until he siezes on a scheme to have Syp eliminated. Doing this job for Gevlon will earn you a large chunk of gold, but not enough to be cover the entire cost of a ticket. He also reveals in his ramblings of a special shop open only to outsiders: stolen goods he has for sale.

Gevlon is uninterested in odd jobs. He’ll purchase anything you bring to him, no matter where it was “found”, though.

Syp – Is annoyed by Gevlon’s constant hounding, but weathers it. A noble man, he’s distressed by the loss of the town to the north, but has no idea (or doesn’t want to believe) that there was anything that could have been done. He believes the fire across the river was caused naturally, and has faith in his fellow neighbors --minus Gevlon, whom he supects of stealing things from his shop. He’s brought it up with Spinks, but she found nothing, so it’s an impasse. He had tremendous respect for Tesh’s hard work, but doesn’t know the whole story concerning his son.

He would love some help in proving Gevlon is a thief, and would pay a modest sum for such information. He also is feeling the pinch of being cut off from ore supplies to the north, and would pay for any raw crafting materials you can provide.

Spinks – A restless woman. She battles her inner demons, but in the end continues to stand by the idea that everything she has done has been following orders. Tobold ordered her to burn the village to the north when it was deemed a lost cause, and it was she who struck down young Mordiceius when she found his reanimated corpse wandering the streets that fateful morning.

-----------------------

At this point, I have the topography of the land laid out, and am starting to bounce back and forth between writing conversation trees and creating interior areas. Lots of naming doors and connecting transitional areas... creating invisible triggers, and having NPCs run up to you and start with their conversation trees. I'm horribly close to having one version of the module be a HaXXoR version where every break in conversation presents you with choices like

1. ORLY?AMG, NA WAI U GYUS!!!1!
2. WTF, STFU AND GTFO ROLF!2!
3. LFM ONY25 PST LOLOLOL

It's hard to stay so focused on making something so serious 100% of the time, but it's all good practice in the end :)

Oh Boy, Grass

2009-10-25T16:24:00.000-07:00

NWN2 files are large. My thing is already like 60MB, and it's only one half of one of the two towns. I did some more fine tuning, and added a bunch of trees when I realized I can (yes!) turn them off so they don't keep getting selected on accident. There's a bunch of neat little things I'm figuring out, and generally progress is going smoothly.

This is still on the whole exterior "just make things look pretty" side of things, of course. Once I get down to the nuts and bolts, it'll be a whole lot of learning again, but it's good to focus on something you can do for a while. Speaking of making things look pretty, I put some grass down. It's a little overwhelming I think.

I also got into some zen state of mind as I painted cliff walls. Where the grade is steep, I applied a rock texture (grass grows on the levelish surfaces), and I felt like I was painting Arathi Highlands the whole time I was doing it.

I'm really happy with how my waterfall looks, when viewed from the bridge, but not so happy with the path leading up to the waterfall (it's pretty blocky). These are all things to add to the list, but I feel like I'm making strides with the editor, and that's what matters.

It still has nothing in it to 'do' but if you're bored and want to just look around, go for it. Don't judge it yet, it's still pre-rough :)

http://notaddicted.com/images/isobelle/NWN2-102509.mod

Enjoy.

NWN Plotline, Take 2

2009-10-24T15:23:00.000-07:00

Okay. I had a few adjustments to my overall plotline, and spent today restarting my map. Everything is going much quicker now, and I'm trying to focus on one task at a time so I don't jump around between too many different aspects at once and feel overwhelmed.

At first, I'm going to just build the town(s), then start drafting conversations that build the plot. My old plot hooks were based on an entire town that had been wiped out, but that doesn't really leave much opportunity for writing conversation trees. It was going to be a mysterious empty town, but that's pretty boring, I think, in the end.

Here's the final rundown:

Two Cities

The exterior land plot is twin cities, divided by a river. Two bridges join the two sides, one bridge leading onto a small island, and another leading off.

The northern village is dying, its inhabitants overrun by a deadly virus that has all but wiped them out. Both towns are comprised of simple farmer types, except for one outsider (of a non human different race) who was their doctor. As the virus began taking hold in the northern region, the doctor worked frantically to find a cure. His wife (a local human girl) had passed away long ago in a farming accident. The doctor himself was found to be immune as he was another race, differing from the humans of the village. He doubled his efforts when his only son (a half human of just 9 years) became infected as well. The virus worked slowly on his son, due to his race, but was slowly overtaking his immunities.

Soon the entire northern town had fallen victim, and it was only a matter of time before everyone in the northern village was dead. The northern bridges were barricaded off to prevent the spread of the deadly strand of virus. Frantic, he began to delve into deeper and darker cures, until at last the day came when he finally made a breakthrough and discovered the cure. But it was too late; his son had passed away that morning while the doctor was working in his laboratory.

Days passed, and the doctor became more and more detached from reality, never leaving his house, and shutting out the rest of the villagers who came to call on him. Anguished, he called upon dark magics to bring his son back from the dead, in order that he might finally administer the cure he worked so tirelessly on. So distressed was he at his loss that nothing mattered. He loved his wife very much, and to be all alone again would be unbearable. He managed to actually raise his son from the dead, and cured him; but the boy was an empty husk. The doctor, delirious, collapsed in exhaustion, and the son wandered outside, much to the surprise and dismay of the townsfolk.

The doctor awoke suddenly to screams and shouts from outside, and was terrified to find the townspeople standing over his once again lifeless son. They had been horrified to find a walking dead amongst them, and had struck him down. The doctor ran outside, grabbed his young son up in his arms, and cursed the villagers. Sobbing, he fled across the bridge into the northern town, across the barricades, into the ghost town, with his dead son clutched to his chest.

Time passes, and people moved on with their lives. After an uneventful year, the southern village is stricken to find the first new victims of the virus they thought had passed them by. They remember the tragedy that befell their northern sister town, and pray to their gods that the same fate won't befall them as well.

Amidst their new problems, they've all but forgotten about the doctor. They saw his dead son that day, but never knew he was *cured*, as well as reanimated. In his sudden aguish and anger over finding his son killed again, the doctor never bothered to reveal that he had finally discovered a cure.

The doctor hasn't been idle for the last year, and his memory of those fateful days hasn't dimmed. He's been keeping himself busy, over the bridge to the north, under the cover of night. Amassing a small army from the graveyard of the church, or the corpses that litter the streets. Soon there be a reckoning...

So, yeah...

Basically, having the southern town still be 'alive, but infected' builds a sense of tension for the townsfolk, and allows them to reveal the history of the two towns in conversations. Our hero will share the same race as our doctor, and the villagers will respond to that when they see us wandering down the road past their town. Our natural immunity will allow us to travel into the previously shut off northern area to collect items that they've needed, but were too scared to venture forth to get themselves. Across the river on some of these errands, we notice some undead, and the full story of the doctor and his son is revealed.

This plotline keeps the doctor/son combo for the final boss/miniboss showdown, but presents it in a more fleshed out area instead of 'and then you're walking along and notice a ghost town, woo woo, what happened here?' kind of thing.

Anyway.

If these kind of posts bore you, prepare to be bored over the next few weeks as I flesh this out. Some people have expressed interest in seeing these things, and I blog about what I'm doing, and this is pretty much what I'm doing ;)

Once I get the town in a position where it's even able to be walked around in, I'll start posting the modules up here, for now there's waterfall, and a river, some houses, and not much else. I'm still working on the scale of the entire area. I had it set to maximum size, and wanted to actually even make it larger, and was coming across posts on the toolset forums that (rightfully) point out that you don't need 10 miles by 8 miles to make an interesting area. Empty space is just annoying to run around in, so I pulled all of my structures much closer to one another, and will focus on having town density as an aim. Not choked up to where you can't move around, but running isn't fun, solving puzzles and moving the plot along is.

More later...

LOL j/k with Warcraft 3 Maps, That's So 2003

2009-10-22T15:43:00.000-07:00

Whoops! So yeah, sike on the Warcraft 3 map. I'll probably still continue working on it, but the big kids that sit at the big kid table during Thanksgiving use the Neverwinter Nights Toolset, and woo boy that toolset is off the troutscale.

Where in Warcraft I'm happliy plunking down NPCs and creating nifty little If/Then statements in the trigger editor, NWN2 requires that you actually code the location of every shrub in binary. Like ones and zeros: 0001010 0110010010 10010 1001.

That was a joke, but yeah...

It's much more advanced, and by more advanced I mean you just write code. That's cool, I'll figure it out. I kinda had a few cool ideas for my WC3 map, though, so will probably go back to that once in a while when I want to stab myself in the face. Playing with Legos is fun, and relaxing!

In the end, it's a better experience, and a true test of whether or not I can learn a new piece of software (and scripting language) on demand. I was kinda fudging it with WC3, as I already knew my way around the editor, I was just digging deeper. With NWN, I'm Alladin on the magic carpet, converting Integers into Strings, and singing A WHOLE NEW WORRRLLLDDD!!!

I keep going back to my basic principle of having multiple keys to unlock a final showdown, and I keep realizing that I'm horrible at single player RPGs. I kinda click around randomly, and in NWN that means I'm pulling up the inspect menu every time I want to attack something. Plus NWN is totally hax! You can just make your dude level whatever with whatever gear that has plus whatever stats. Oh, sure you honestly earned the Uber Duber Sword of the Tuber Luber. Riiight. You didn't just make a module that was like 'zone in, loot sword, award myself 10 zillion XP woohoo!'. How do I tune for that? Just throw random mobs around and assume the guy is gimping himself to make it a challenge? How does that even work? In WC3 I could assume players started as level 1, and the longer they played, the harder mobs got. Hmm... more to figure out, I guess.

Oh, well. At the end of today, having spent about 6-7 hours poring over tutorials, I've got my basic plotline set up. It's a dungeon crawl, set up in an underground lair. The town above has been wiped out by an undead army set loose by a doctor whose son had died in an accident. He dabbled in a bit of the ol' dark magics to bring him back to life, and was exiled. He fled to a nearby cave and at night would come and dig up the dead from the graveyard, enlisting these dead as his workforce to burrow under the town directly.

Over time he's perfected his craft, and connected his underground network of tunnels to come up through the outhouses above ground (mmm... stinky zombies....).

They made quick work of the town, and you've been called in to put him and his son down for good. Upon entering the outhouse, you travel down into the first level of his lair, and find a scroll on a table facing three doors...

Long have I toiled alone, undergrounds,
while the fools on the surface make their day and night rounds.

With many ways in and many ways out,
I labor in silence; in my mind is no doubt.

That I'll soon have my vengenace, my will will be done,
the dead will rerise, as before did my son.

They mocked me well then, but the day will soon be
when they cower before the new powers that be.

Should you seek me out, hero, here in my lair,
the path is quite simple, just down every stair.

I await your appearance on low level five,
preferably dead, although if you're alive...

My minions await fresh additions like you,
but I'll leave special hints, so your path may be true.

Before you is three doors, a plain simple sight;
going right you'll be left, going left you'll be right.

But then of those two, which will you desire?
The cold stone of death, or the warmth of life's fire?

...more coming later, but this one is gonna take a while...

Warcraft 3 Map v.001

2009-10-21T23:23:00.001-07:00

This is SUPER LOOSE, but people have expressed an interest in my map that I'm building. I've made WC3 maps before that were sprawling 4v4 and 5v5 multiplayer affairs, but never anything that focused on bending the rules outside of basic skirmish rulesets or whatever.

I also got a direct email from the founder of a game studio that shall remain unnamed for now. He said he was impressed with my raid on Blizzard, but wants to know what else I can show besides cojones. As with what I was told by Blizz in Irvine, his own design director has said that something created is the best thing you can put in front of people, so I'm getting cracking on a map to show that I can push all the right buttons in editors and make fancy fun come out the other end.

This being the first posting, don't expect Naxx. It's a map I started just to play with quest triggers, thinking I'd be throwing it out, but then began to like it, and will be evolving it. I'm documenting the whole process in Word as well, and figure I may as well just post that stuff up here, too, for the curious.

Before anyone gets on my case about showing unfinished work, seriously... just hush. No New Document starts fully finished, and I'm a public kind of guy. I don't mind people looking over my shoulder, and in case you haven't noticed, you're kind of reading my diary. So, yeah. Also keep in mind some text and dialogs are just placeholder. I'm mostly concerned with making sure things *work*, and will go through polishing later.

http://marcericksen.com/ixo/ixo_10-21-09.w3x (requires frozen throne)

Anyway, here goes post 1. The map has three 'quests' so far, and I'm just roughing out the area boundaries.

Paste from Word:

10/15 (~6hrs) – Started Map. Basic implementation of various quest types, just to get a feel for the scripting engine, and how certain ‘standard’ quest types are achieved.

Implemented 3 quests in the southwestern corner of the map.

1) Kill 5 Racoons (peon by the farm right where you start) – Your standard Kill 10 Rats MMO quest, and fairly straightforward to produce. I followed a tutorial to get my feet wet. The Unit Group Loop to award experience and gold took a little fiddling, but once I made the ‘Pick every unit’ and the subsequent ‘...to (Picked Unit)’ connections, it fell into place.

2) Find Timmy – Stuck Timmy out by a church, and had his mom in town (by the pond) giving the quest. Didn’t need to lean as heavily on the tutorial, once I got a feel for how the parts linked together. Having Timmy ‘go home’ was a bit weird, so I had him activate a town portal that his mom said he had, and wrote dialog around that. Then it was a simple matter of having the NPC teleport home (and checking to made sure he ended back up there).

3) Church Knight – The Church Knight is the first quest there was no kind of tutorial for, and I think it worked out pretty well. It isn’t so much a quest, as me figuring out how to have him ‘activate’ when timmy teleported home. This is a common theme in MMOs, where the guy standing next to the person you just completed a quest for lights up. I needed to make his quest appear in the tail end of timmy’s completion script, not create one that was there from the get go. This opens up the idea of quest chains, and wasn’t hard to figure out. After seeing how I helped Timmy, he decides to join the party, and switches from an inactive NPC (near timmy) to a teammate (with accompanying sparkle effects and text).

10/21 (~3hrs) – Initial ‘final concept’ for the map forms. I liked the Church Knight, and have decided to use the ‘form a party’ theme as the basis for the overall map. At first this map was to be just a test ground, but I like the way it’s coming along. I’ve decided that there will be four distinct areas of the map, each with their own hero, and as each quadrant of the map is ‘completed’ our hero for that section amasses a small troop. These will range from peons to knights to mages, but will have no air units. The quadrants are sealed off from one another, and each quadrant will need to be unlocked for everyone to come together for the final showdown. In this way, it could be a multiplayer map, but for simplicity during testing, I’ll be making it one player, where someone controls all 4 heros, with the ability to hop between them at will. This will create a fun way to break up leveling one guy. You’ll be leveling all four independently of one another, and then bring them all together for the boss fight.

The armies each hero amasses is crucial, as unlocking the gate at the end of each quadrant requires sacrificing units to unlock the door (this may be tricky). It would be interesting to have certain quadrant quests need to be completed to influence NPCs in other, different, quadrants as well... forcing the player to hop back and forth, rather than just bang them out in order.

After deciding to keep the original map, and build off it, I laid out much of the loose framework of the map. Dividing the quadrants with rock walls, and placing the 3 other heros in their starting places.

I also realized in playtesting that my initial XP/gold rewards were going to each hero, as I previously had ‘pick all units that are a Hero’, but manually changed quest rewards to only reward the hero in that quadrant instead (Pick all units that are type Paladin, etc).

-----------

Don't expect any fireworks to go off when you're 'done'. There are the three quests, and then I threw in random talking NPCs to describe each region (NPC closest to each other hero we control). Once the knight has joined your party, that's it for now.

I was also offered a job in SF recently doing call center stuff for IT, but have come back around to the fact that this gaming work is what I *want* to do. Not just take phone calls about Linda's print queue. I'm in a fortunate position where I have the luxury to commit to this (briefly, until my wife decides to kill me in my sleep), and I'm taking a chunk of time to work on this 9-5, until it's in a submittable format. I'll keep posting updates as the areas progress, and am open to feedback.

What's the Rush?

2009-10-21T09:30:00.000-07:00

I haven't bought Aion yet, but intend to shortly. I still have the prepay $5 thing from BestBuy, and that's the only reason I haven't just jumped online and bought the client digitally. Five bucks is SRS BIZNS, k?

I've been reading a lot of stuff, though, about people claiming it's a huge Korean Grind-o-thon to end game, and maybe wondering if I really want to get sucked up in that right now. WoW's siren call seems to ebb and flow, and just when I think I can't stand another Ony PUG, I join up with a cool guild, and everything goes good for a few weeks. Then the guild falls apart when the GM doesn't log on for 3 days... his mom had a stroke, and I was apparently the only one that didn't mind not raiding for a whole week.

Back to Aion, though. How would anyone that has bought it, and has been playing it, rate it on a fun scale? Before you answer that, though, think about how you're playing it. When I got into WoW's beta, MMOs were new to me, and I poked around in a horrendously inefficient manner for a good few weeks and months before realizing there were even things like spell coefficients and stuff. Actually, it was probably a good year before I knew about a spell coefficient. I just played the game abnd had fun.

What I'm hearing about Aion is that in order to reach the level cap, you have to grind your eyeballs dry, and that powerleveling a tradeskill to max requires afking your computer overnight to cook up 200 recipes while you sleep or whatever.

All which leads me to ask: What's the big rush?

Have MMOs ruined the enjoyment of playing a game? Has the simple act of learning to play a class been horrifically overshadowed by not being a jedi master by the time you leave the store with the box? By reading the box back, you should already know optimal sustained DPS rotations or srsly jus gtfo k thx.

...

I played the Aion Chinese client before it was even open beta for English speakers, and what I found was pretty fun. It was basically WoW, which didn't bother me, but with an overhauled graphics engine, and new classes and spells to learn. People are already complaining that the class system is too rigid, and forces you into a specific playstyle, which could be a design flaw, but then I remember WoW, and how if you aren't specced X/Y/Z as a certain class then you're doing it wrong. The choice is there, but it's fake. There's really only one optimal spec for each tree, and usually only one or two of those trees are viable for PVE, and one for PVP.

Rigid classes don't really bother me. I intend to take it as it comes, and when I reach the level cap (if it holds my interest that long), then I'll worry about what to do then.

I'd be curious to hear from any of you playing it, though, and how you're approaching it. Breakneck leveling or just putzing around, and how it's all feeling for you at this point. I reckon I'm gonna just jump online and put it on my card day, $5 prepay be damned!

The Simple Joy of Browsing Sans Cookies

2009-10-18T18:46:00.001-07:00

I'm not one to champion open source crap browsers, or anything ridiculous like 'online privacy', but I've recently found a simple joy in browsing the text of the internets on one of the most low tech high tech devices I've seen in a while: my new Kindle.

I've read all of one short story on it, but can immediately say without hesitation that if you're on the fence with this one, to just suck it up and take the plunge. It's pretty good, and here's why:

Full, free internets. Everywhere. Free.

Now, I'm not a huge fan of flash powered shockwave sites that want me to click or rollover every button or widget on the site. I am, however, a huge fan of big blocks of text, and can safely say I never have (and never will) complain that something is TL or that I DR it. I never understood jackasses on internet forums that find themselves confronted with text who then proceed to complain about it. TV might be a better alternative.

For those with a willingness to filter out anything fancy, though, what you find is a pretty nice device that is only going to get better with time.

When I bought the Kindle, I knew I wanted one for reading, and didn't do a whole lot of research. I wanted to be surprised, and I have a tendency to read a review, focus on the bad points, and then obsess over them once I have something in my hands. I had heard that wikipedia access was included, on demand, anywhere, but didn't have any inkling that you could just punch a URL in there and go freely about your business. Typing ixobelle.com and having it come up was pretty exciting, even if it was only in greyscale.

I immediately went shuffling around the interwebs to a few blogs, all while a few bullet points rattled around in my head:

- this is free. The kindle itself isn't ($260), obviously, but for all the bullshit hype the iPhone makes about being able to go online at the drop of a dime, there's something to be said about free internet access without being tied to some $80/month plan. I already pay for internet at home. I don't want to pay again for it for my phone. I think surfing the internet on a cellphone is stupid. 240x320 is ridiculous. Typing URLs on a number pad is silly. Reading seven words at a time, and then scrolling, sucks. Yes, the iPhone is also a cell phone, and blah blah blah apps, but I've got a prepaid cell that has cost me 50 dollars so far, and it still has time on it after 3 months back in the states. Amazon, in order to allow you to buy books anytime, just decided fuggit and threw in access to the whole intertron. They could have easily cut all access to any page not on their domain, but they didn't. Very nice.

- yes, it isn't a PC. I can't play WoW on it, or use a full fledged browser that does cookies and all that crap. I also can't, like... do spreadsheets, or whatever people use PCs for. Then again, with my big gaming laptop (or my mom's little fancy netbook), I can't just pop it open at a park and be online unless there's a specific wifi hotspot, and even then, the battery would run dry just powering the cooling fans and screen. I never even bother using a laptop that isn't plugged in anymore. I just think of them as 'more portable' than a normal PC, but they still need to be tethered to some outlet somewhere. The Kindle only uses energy to REDRAW the screen, and push traffic across the connection. If you leave it static, and walk away, it isn't using juice. You can think of it like a USB drive... it takes energy to write the data, but then when it sits in the drawer, the data just stays in place. It came in the box with the screen 'on', telling me to charge it before use, and I thought that it was some sticker I needed to peel off the screen. It's hard to explain how the screen looks, but it's really READABLE.

Some of these images are color adjusted, so it's hard to really tell how it just looks. I have the lights kinda low, and all my pictures started to look like I live in some fucking lodge and blog by a fireplace in a room made entirely of Knotty Pine, so I tweaked the color balance a bit. It's hard to explain what it looks like, because it's like describing a piece of paper. If the lighting in your room is yellow, it'll look yellow. If you bask in fluorescents, it'll be whiter.

You can clearly see Hatch's logo, but Jong's isn't there... I wonder if it just surrenders when it sees something above a certain image size? Some sites are little wonky, I need to 'next page' once to get past Tobold's navigation bar, and Penny Arcade comics show up, but they're small, and barely readable. Again, this is supposed to be a portable book, it excels at handling raw text.

What's that? You wish I had a 50mm Macro lens and would take a 4 second exposure with the aperture closed all the way down? Sure! I'll even throw a penny in there for scale!

The font sizes are adjustable on the fly between about 6 different sizes... above is my normal size, and below is if you hate your eyes...

I even made a swanky little cover for it when I saw they wanted 30 bucks for one on Amazon:

Yeahh... that's FLEECE, baby!

Anyway.

I seriously can't say enough about this thing. It takes PDFs and Mobi books if you feel like catering to your inner eyepatch, or you can download books from anywhere directly from Amazon. There are a bunch of sites like Feedbooks.com that offer free original stories written by internet superstars in the making, or you can legally get any number of a zillion 'classics' that are now public domain (anything from Mark Twain to Tolstoy to Sun Tzu's Art of War to the collected works of Aristotle). Plus you know, the internet. ;)

On a somewhat related sidenote, I've been MIA from blogging for a little while following the drama of Los Angeles. I have an interview on Tuesday for some (normal, IT, tech support) job to just start paying bills, but I've been devouring Warcraft III map making tutorials, and have a pretty good handle on triggers and scripting. I've made a map with what are all the standard 'kill ten rats', 'go find timmy', and 'bring me back 10% droprate wolf tail' quests, just to see how they're scripted and how it all fits together.

It seems pretty straightforward. I'm still not giving up on this, I just got a little soured on it for a sec. For every person that was cheering me on, there were three telling me how stupid I was, etc etc etc. I felt like I had taken poetry (as an example), that I just liked writing on my own... then I worked on some manifesto poem bible for submission to the poetry society of whatever, and then they returned it to me with red ink all over it telling me how I was doing it wrong. I got a little burned on poetry in general for a few weeks, and just needed a break. But I do love writing (not poetry, though?), and I do love what I've been writing about. I'm not gone, just ramping back up to speed. To bring it full circle, if you don't see me commenting so much, it's because I'm reading all my blogs on my Kindle, and CBF to type up responses on the login hating browser. ;)

Overcompensating is Win

2009-10-14T09:10:00.000-07:00

http://www.overcompensating.com/posts/20091013.html

Hover your mouse over the comic for the secret, hidden message.

?

2009-10-13T16:41:00.001-07:00

Once Bitten, Twice Shy (10 player)
Defeat the Blood Queen while having been a vampire in 10-player mode.

...having been a vampire ???

The Mana Master (new class brainstorming)

2009-09-29T09:02:00.000-07:00

Thanks For Your Patience, We Now Resume With Normal Broadcasting...

So there I was, spamming Cirle of Light during Decon's Tantrums a few nights back, really getting in the zone of CoH, instant Flash Heal, Prayer of Healing, pick my nose for one GCD, CoH again when I kinda drifted, and realized I was getting around the halfway mark mana-wise. I don't really have issues with mana, and I'm a Alchemist, which means unlimited (albeit weak) pots, plus I have a shadow fiend. I can't remember the last time I bothered to tell anyone to innervate me, and I began thinking about my Warlock, and specifically Life Tap.

My Warlock never needs an innervate, because she (literally) has mana on tap. She converts health into mana at will. It's the perfect spell to cast anytime you need to be moving at all, since it's instant cast, and if I'm moving, I can't cast Incinerates or whatever. I actually get to the point sometimes where I forget it costs health, and tap at pretty bad times, like during AoE, or when I'm moving out of a flame patch that ticked on me once. My healers probably just think I'm taking two ticks and are annoyed, but I play a healer myself and am pretty liberal with renews on my Warlock raidmates, so screw it.

Anyway, staring at Grid, and watching the little bars go down and have me replenish them is kind of a zen playmode that I enjoy. Some people consider it Whack a Mole, and think it must be horribly boring, just those people just don't get it. You feel important. Any healer out there that enjoys healing knows what I'm talking about. Rarely while DPSing do you ever make split second decisions that will instantly impact whether or not the raid wipes or lives. Tanking gets it from time to time, but healing gets it, like, all the time. Especially with abilities like Guardian Spirit, Pain Suppression, or a well timed Swiftmend or Lay on Hands, knowing when (or not) to pop those can save an attempt.

ANYWAY. Looking at all the little bars going down made me wonder how a mana healer class could work. Like I said, I don't really have mana issues, and there are a few mana rejuv spells in the game already, but what if mana WAS an issue, enough to the the point that you needed a whole new class to handle that particular issue, creating a new Holy Quadrinity (and eliminating Replenishment as a means of regen)?

And so... The Mana Master. Let's see how it could work...

Obviously, for one, we couldn't use mana to grant mana (or we could, but it would be pretty lame), and creating a new regenning mechanic (energy, rage, focus, runic whatever) isn't really necessary. Actually, thinking about it, it might be necessary, but we'll get to that in a sec. The life tap mechanic is actually pretty well suited to this task, so let's tweak it a bit. There are a few ways we could tap:

1) Self tap - exactly the same as the warlock skill, but with varying 'sizes' to tap. Actually, Life Tap is the one skill left in the game that actually works with varying ranks still. Downranking heals is a waste of mana, but downranking a lifetap actually works. On glyphs or set bonuses that trigger on life taps, a rank one life tap that only consumes about 70 health works just as good as the full rank one that consumes several hundred. This is useful for beginning a fight. You rank one life tap, and then start chucking up your first round of DoTs. Anyway, converting your own life into mana is pretty straightforward.

2) Self Donor tap - converting our own health into mana for someone else. Pretty self explanatory.

3) Remote Life tap - converting someone else's life into mana for them. Again pretty straightforward, and makes sense. You cast life tap across the room, and convert some of Mage Billy's healthpool into more mana for him. This is where it begins to get dangerous, as you need to make sure you aren't killing anyone, or putting them in a situation where they can easily kill themselves. If you remote life tapped someone right before a fire patch or cleave was coming their way, it would piss them off, regardless of the fact that you were trying to help them because they were running out of mana.

4) Remote Donor tapping - Life tapping Billy the Mage to give mana to Freddy the Shaman (select donor, cast the spell, select the recipient). This is where is gets REALLY dangerous. Not only are you putting Billy at a health risk, but you're doing it in a way that doesn't even benefit him. You need to actively choose targets that are out of harm's way, and will remain out of harm's way long enough to remain safe until healed. If Billy died in this situation, I could imagine a lot of bitching and moaning.

(this obviously applies to energy and rage as well as mana, and would need to be tweaked to find a happy medium, but for simplicity I'm going to just keep saying mana)

When you think about it, this is a role that carries a lot of responsibility, as it's the only class that has the ability to negatively impact other's resources. A hunter can always MD a boss to a healer if he's pissed off, but he can't ACTIVELY HURT another player. He can only train aggro onto it, and have the mob dish damage out. A few classes have this indirect ability... rogues can Tricks a raidmember, hell... I can pull with my priest and fade and watch as an unprepared group eats a pull to the face.

Similar to how a warlock can't kill himself using lifetap (it will fizzle if it would kill them), all of these moves would need to be made to fizzle if it would kill a raid member. This would ensure Angry PUGmember Sally couldn't just kill the whole raid in a fit of rage.

So now that we have our four distinct mana regen abilities, let's think about the class itself. Healers have their hands full, since there's always damage incoming. But not everyone needs mana all the time. We would be much more active during endurance fights, but there would be a lot of standing around during the beginning of the pull. This is where a slippery slope rears its head. Do we make this a DPS class? DPS classes have real issues with doing anything that will make their place drop on the charts. No one is going to stop their rotation to help someone gain some mana back. So we could make it a healer class, but that seems silly, since our mana regen depends on hurting people. So we hurt them, then turn around and heal them? Hm, that could work I guess. I think making it a tank class is just silly, and we don't suffer a shortage of tanks anyway, so let's explore the other two options.

If they were DPS:

If they were a DPS class, there would need to be a way to continue doing damage while providing the benefit to the raid. Think of how a Shadow Priest works. The damage they deal directly converts to mana for the raid, but it's a passive thing that just happens. That's boring. It would be more exciting, and engaging, to have to select who gains the benefit, while also deciding who can afford to pay the cost (not just the Bosses HP converting to raid benefit).

For example: The Mana Master's damage could either be based on the raidwide mana pools, or damage taken. If the entire raid was at full capacity, the Mana Master deals maximum damage. Then, it's in the MM's best interest to keep everyone topped off. They start the fight at max power, and begin to wane as the fight goes on. They need to maintain pools in order to stay at peak performance. Alternatively, if they dealt more damage the less health everyone had, then it would be in their interest to tap certain individuals to keep them low, thus bumping his own damage. I'm just throwing that last sentence out there, although I fully realize it's a horrible idea. The MM would hate healers, as they directly counter his ability to maintain maximum DPS. I think a good middle ground would be to have the taps be CoTs (convert over times), up to a maximum number castable at a time.

Say each of the four above listed spells are unique spells, and have their own duration and cooldown. He can tap himself and donate to someone on instant cast cycles, and then have the two donor taps rolling on separate raid members, which in turn bumps his damage up. This creates an issue with soloing, as there's less to pull from, but is pretty similar to how healers feel every time they need to grind mobs. In a raid, though, they shine.

If they were a healer:

If the Mana Master was a lower level healer, there would need to be a different set of spells available. I suppose it could be talent tree based. The healing MM, the DPS MM, and the ... well, pvp one I guess : /

Hots and CoTs seem to be the best way to go about this. With a healing talent set, we could have talents like 'when you cast a remote Life Tap on someone, it also invigorates them, placing a HoT on them as well'. Basically the healer would focus on healing (DUH), with the mana regen taking a backseat, but still being there. So perhaps the base set of spells we get (the four listed above) also have HP 'sides' to them as well. We convert mana into health (Mana Tap), we convert someone else's mana into health (Remote Mana Tap), we convert our own health to health for someone else (Life Grant), we convert someone else's mana (Donor Mana Tap) or health (Donor Life Grant) into health for someone else.

The main thing that's happening here is that the healer version is just shifting resources around. It creates buffers for the pure healers in the raid to refill. The tank always needs health, and we have instant ZAPs that will give them health, but leaves someone else (someone out of harm's way) hurting for a sec.

The pvp version of the class would work like a beefed up disc priest, creating shields out of excess resources, or draining life or mana to teammates thru fire and forget CoTs.

There are a few issues with this all, though. The dps class needs group mates to pull from to boost damage to reasonable levels. The healer also is mostly just shuffling resources around. He can create health from mana, but you end up with a group full of health with no mana left to cast heals. The healer would need to keep mana CoTs rolling in order to have something to convert to health. It just seems like it would be hard to heal a five man without having so many resources to draw on.

THIS is where my previously mentioned regen mechanic like energy or rage comes into play. Parhaps the MM doesn't use conventional mana, but instead has energy like a rogue, that constantly ticks over time. Rage wouldn't work, it would need to be a constantly filling bar. This would also make a healer with a never ending supply of heals (similar to how a rogue has a never ending supply of 'mana'), which would fill a niche nicely.

Depending on how the MM is talented, these CoTs can be amplified to lean one way or another. The DPS version has spells and talents that amplify how much damage he generates based on how many CoTs are rolling in a raid, or how much health he has (less health = more damage). He can directly convert health of his own into instant cast nukes, which leave him very vulnerable, but also crank his damage up for the next cast. He can also HoT himself (from his focus pool), but they're pretty weak and take time to ramp up.

The healer, in turn, generates much more HP per focus point burnt in direct heals. He can operate just like a rogue, only converting his own focus into heals, or in a pinch can 'borrow' life (at no --or very little-- focus cost) from a teammate to help heal the tank.

The PvPer can convert focus into shields, health into shields, or mana into shields... all while still having a chunk of CoTs rolling, and having longish cooldown direct 'takes' that are instantaneous.

Once the general mechanic is in place, filling out the class with slows, snares, CC, or whatever is just a matter of playtesting, and seeing if they need to have the ability to kite, or whether they're chasing after people that are instead running from them. I thought about having a sort of pet, but it felt too warlock-y, and not really necessary (although it would give a built in buddy to suck from when soloing).

Also, I've been trying to think of an interesting way to create a regening bar that isn't "and it just ticks". Something like pulling the energy out of the earth by dropping void zones that bump up your focus regen, but create hassles for the group to work around. It could scorch the ground, and stepping in a scorch would hurt, and you'd have to lay another scorch down in a bit, while being careful to not drop them in the way of the group. Another interesting mechanic to the dropping of void zones thing would be dropping good ones that allow the tank to stand in one for increased healing. A tiny tranquility zone that gets refreshed.

Again, that's just kicking around interesting 'twists' to the class, and not really focusing on the main mechanic.

Is there anything I haven't thought of? Anything else that would make it better?

(ah, also, those ear rings are from a picture I found at etsy.com, if i was a chick, I'd totally rock crap like that <3)

Oh No He DINNINT (2.0)

2009-09-27T10:03:00.000-07:00

I had a post up here last night that I typed after 6 hours of very... mentally draining... work I'm doing on the computer to keep busy and make some side money. It kinda rubbed me the wrong way that the unwashed masses coming crawling out the woodwork to point and make pretty obvious remarks with their brilliant 20/20 hindsight into my situation.

So... maybe a few people don't understand the 'whole story' so I'll just spell it out here as plainly as possible.

I applied to Blizzard in the 'normal, accepted fashion'. Email with CV, resume PDF attached. This was for a design position, and I know very well that 'random design hires' don't happen, but the position was listed on the Hiring Page, so I figured I'd go for it. Art hires require art submissions with their resumes, and coders get asked for a sample of code. The job listing reads:

This position will involve the design and implementation of creature placement, behavior, encounters, and events. The ideal candidate will have experience in game design, a strong aptitude for critical thinking and analysis, boundless creativity, a strong visual aesthetic, and a passion for playing games.

I don't have experience, but I do have boundless creativity. I also have a strong visual aesthetic, and a passion for playing games. What better way to showcase "behavior, encounters, and events" than by writing a full dungeon, full of "behavior, encounters, and events", I figure. I typed it up, attached it to the application, and then sat back and thought about it.

Anyone who has downloaded my PDF knows that scrolling a mousewheel isn't the same as flipping pages. That "RGB 255,0,0" isn't as nice as seeing "red" in your hands in front of you. What I should have realized, is that in a country where someone sues (and collects) for spilling coffee on themselves, that there was some legal ramifications to reading a book I hadn't thought of beforehand.

I figured going down and handing a few of these out could only be 'bonus'. I didn't stand out on the curb unshowered, in sweatpants, wearing flipflops and sweatsocks, and screaming at people as they drove by. I put on a nice shirt, shaved, and then subsequently figured the drive down would be a waste if I just turned around and drove home with the booklets still in my trunk, after being turned away at the gate.

My "/2 LF1M to make wow?" sign was actually only out there for 10 minutes before I changed it to 'please take a copy of my raid dungeon'. It was also a little bit of (ZOMG) HUMOR that people working on WoW could probably appreciate. WoW's kind of got some jokes in there, right? Then I just sat there, smiled, offered my things to anyone that pulled over, and chatted with a few employees walking their dogs around the block or whatever.

It wasn't really a huge deal.

I appreciate people that can think it was some big thing, and that they'd NEVER do anything so 'crazy'. Crazy like driving for a few hours and then 'sitting while smiling'. I don't really appreciate people that insist on telling me how I'm going about it wrong and that my wacky plan is doomed to fail. I went down there knowing that at the very least I'd just be giving a few of these away. I didn't expect a curbside interview and hire on the spot.

Like, DUH.

I figured maybe someone who saw one of these would give it to someone whose job it was to click the PDFs, and that person could then 'flip' instead of 'scroll'. That has impact. That was my 'grand mission'.

So thanks for stopping by, and thanks for reading. But I know how to make a resume, and I understand how to get a job. For 6 years before going to Japan I worked in an office, doing I.T., and received promotions and raises for being a good, hard working employee. Then I moved to Japan, organized an entire district's teaching materials across seven schools, and helped to test drive what is now being implemented as the Japanese National English program for the entire nation's 5th and 6th graders. Our district had the best English program in the country. I was interviewed on the Japanese news.　I'm not just some kid trying to get a job at Starbucks.

I figured driving down to LA was something I could do with pretty minimal impact, and perhaps I highlighted some of the ZOMGDRAMA of it to make an interesting post.

I have an email address for those who wish to actually get in touch or talk with me, but it's hard to take anyone serious that has a bag on their head, and then again when they're saying things like 'chew before you swallow'. I don't want to come off like a dick, but this is kinda my online diary. You're free to read it (it's on the internet, after all), but circling paragraphs with red pen and telling me how I should have done things in the margin isn't really necessary.

Millions of people go through their lives every day without really 'doing' anything. Doing stuff doesn't really bother me, and if it makes for an interesting read, then welcome to the site. If you're only stopping by to tell me 'doing things' is a bad idea, or that I'm not doing things the way you would do them, then really... please just don't bother. It's not that I don't appreciate feedback, but much of what people are saying is pretty common knowledge, or is particularly suited to people who don't really... do things. Plus, really, the bag on your head. Who are you? I could say I'm the CEO of EA, but... yeah.

Anyway. Thanks for coming by. Feel free to post little comments below. If you have some huge piece of advice that could help, then by all means, email me. I'd love to have a discussion with you, but if it concerns how to take the Word 2008 Resume Template and select and replace text on it, I'm probably doing okay.

Alas, Andorhal Defeat...

2009-09-22T17:56:00.000-07:00

I'm back in the Motel a bit early tonight. I set up shop with my fancy new red sign at 4:30, and planned to be out until the sun went down at 7, but was physically assaulted and thrown off the premises by two large, burly men with stun guns and tasers.

Not really, but I was politely told I was wasting my time.

There were no stun guns or pepper spray, and sadly I never had a chance to ask anyone to "Not Taze Me, Bro" but two guys from PR came out to the sidewalk and told me I was kinda going about this in the wrong way. They said it in the best possible way, though, so maybe the trip down wasn't a total loss. They could obviously see I was passionate about wanting a job, but they pointed out that any submissions by fans (and not employees) for raid dungeon ideas or the like automatically go in the bin without being read, as a rule, and for legal reasons. If they were to read my idea, then make something similar to it, I could go to court or whatever. I get it. God bless the judicial branch, making everyone's lives that much more annoying everyday. BY LAW.

The best route, they said, was to make War3 maps, or NWN modules. I knew these are good for submissions, and actually have the entire NWN set at home eating up like 50 gigs of some hard drive. I sat down one night to make a module, though, and thought "but MOMMM... I want to come up with the WoWZORS, not the NWNzors".

Ok, that's not really how it happened, but a lot (okay, 99.8%) of what's in my booklet is completely WoW specific. Boss fight mechanics dealing with tool sets that assume rogues can vanish and druids can abolish poison. I'm already too close to the forest.

I need to take a step back, and just create a module from scratch for NWN. Hell, maybe I can tie it into my Baron Von Lupus theme, and have it be the questlines that lead up to the dungeon itself. Give the NPCs all kinds of dialog referencing his grip on the townspeople, and just fill everything they say with WoW lore to bring it full circle.

...

At this point I'm a little discouraged, like when you ask the pretty girl you have a crush on if she wants to go to the winter dance, and she says she's already going with Billy. You want to go home and listen to emo music and OMGIMNEVERGOINGTOANOTHERDANCEAGAINQQ. The fact is that I should have asked earlier, and I should have come better prepared with crap to show Blizz.

The fact remains that some of my booklets made it inside, even if they don't serve their final purpose. Maybe I'll get TOP SECRET FRIENDS AND FAMILY INVITES TO THE DIABLO 3 ALPHA FROM THIS WHOLE ORDEAL (HINT HINT ANYONE AT BLIZZ READING THIS CUZ YOU GOT THE ADDRESS FROM MY BOOK). But yeah. Then, later, when I resubmit, I can be like "and yeah, I was that one guy, you remember me, don't call it a comeback, baby".

Down, but not out.

Greetings from Irvine!

2009-09-21T20:39:00.001-07:00

Weather is great, wish you were here, blah blah blah blah blah.

I'm down in Los Angeles, trying to storm the front gates at Blizzard, and have a few updates for you guys.

1) that rumor about the friend of a friend of that one guy that dressed up like a Paladin and stomped around the reception area handing out his resume are a complete FABRICATION. You read it here first, best get on the horn with the Mythbusters or Penn and Teller or whatever. Apparently ---and like, DUH--- no one gets in the front gate without an appointment or someone on the inside expecting them.

2) that isn't really stopping me.

I grow weary of numbered lists, so let's switch into Narrative mode for a bit, and follow the path of our lonesome hero.

I jumped in the car around 11am on Sunday, bound for Irvine. I had a dozen 40 page (20 page, double sided) booklets I had made with full color illustrations in them outlining The Castle of Baron Von Lupus. This was my raid dungeon from before, that I've been working on over the past.... well, however long I've been working on it. All of the fights have gone through revisions, and I've added a bunch of stuff like trash mob packs and overall layout of the place, plus dungeon pacing and flow. I wrote a monologue for almost every boss, and included meetings with Cenarion Druids and Chromie of the Bronze Flight for flavor, and to move the story of the zone along.

Altogether, holding one of these things in your hand, and flipping through it... they look pretty fucking bad ass. I believe it was Redman who once grasped a microphone in his hand, and stated for the record: "I don't mean to toot my own horn, but I'm the shit" (and if you hearin' this it's clear you paid that 12 cent).

My basic plan was to somehow get these things inside the front door, and hand them out to people. The visual (and tactile) impact of having a 20 page full color book in your HAND, versus having to open some random 14MB PDF from some schlep... it's like Night and Day, baby. All I needed to do was get them into the building, and have SOMEONE take one with them to the crapper.

ANYWAY.

All of that is wonderful, but I still didn't have anyone waiting here for me with open arms. Screw it, right? I jumped in the car, and zoned out down I-5 for a good 400 miles, and arrived in Irvine around 6-ish (Sunday). Just to make sure I knew where I'd be going bright and early Monday morning, I swung by the Blizzard campus, and generally made a lap or two around the block while squealing and making little 'ooh' and 'ahh' noises. Then I got all serious, cleared my throat, and pulled up to the guard kiosk next to the BIG GATE™. There are two entrances; the employees' one, off to the side, and the one for visitors to check in at. The guard was a friendly guy, but basically told me getting inside wasn't going to happen without an appointment or interview set up beforehand.

Hrm. The Paladin farce is exposed for the lies it is, once and for all.

So I found my Motel 6 on Dyer, and started thinking of options. At first, there weren't many. I had all of two Blizzard email addresses at my disposal:

A) "friend of a friend of a friend of some chick in HR" that got my friend an alpha invite for WotLK

B) the GM ticket that was escalated from when I accidentally awarded my RAF Zehvra to the account I intended to let die off, when I wanted it on my main acct.

Yeah.

I emailed them both.

Something along of the lines of "gee, hi, you don't know me but I'm in Irvine right now and..."

Yeah. I haven't heard back from either of them. (Yet? lol)

Anyway. I leveled up my internet attack skills, and booted up LinkedIn (a.k.a. The Facebook of People With Real Jobs). It's a social networking site, but there's no 'throwing of gummi bears' or 'assault with zombies to save the Belgian Rain Forests'. No one wants to write on my Super Wall or whatever. It's actually kinda nice. Bonus points for me ALSO being LinkedIn with Jon Radoff, the guy behind GamerDNA. One day he took it upon himself to invite me to his network (god bless him), through my blog, and now I suddenly realized I'm one degree from Rob Pardo, and a handful of other Blizzard people. I know Jon, they know Jon, they now know me.

So, I begin to send random emails to a few other people in recruitment at Blizz. The recruiters are especially prominent on LinkedIn (duh), and I came to realize that the "friend of a friend of a friend of some chick in HR" above is actually a Lead Recruiter. I curse gently under my breath, and go reread the mail I sent her. Well, it's not so bad, but awesome of awesome, I actually put a typo in my cell phone number at the bottom of the email. Wow, way to go, jackass. So I email her again, a quick HAHHA OOPS LOLOL (not really, but yeah), and give her my correct cell number.

At this point, I know I'm batting .000, but that's what I came down here batting. I'm still trying to cover every base I can think of, and am still trying to keep a positive outlook.

I go to sleep, and have horrible dreams of sending bad emails. Seriously. At one point I went to Sent box, and realized I had accidentally sent some article about Michael Jackson to someone at Blizzard instead of my résumé or something. I hate dreams like that. Ugh.

I wake up the next day, and check my mail. Nothing. I didn't expect much, but it's still pretty disheartening to find an empty inbox. Then again, some of these were sent a bit late, and maybe they'll get back to me today. I spend the day in the Motel (no point in going to the gate), and the box of my booklets mocks me from inside the Kinkos box. Each of these books cost around 27 dollars to print, per booklet. The money is worth it if I can get it in front of anyone, and it gets my foot in the door. That alone is worth its weight in gold, so I don't mind having spent that. The drive down is just time, but it would suck for it to be a big waste of time.

Fuck it. I decide I'll go stand in the street if that's what it takes. I begin to drive back over there, to see what kind of layout I have to work with, and whether this is even a feasible option. Again, at this point, I'm trying to salvage the trip down. Anything is better than nothing, and what do I have to lose? The worst that can happen is security tell me to leave, right? Well I'm typing this from jail to let you all know that --just kidding. No, I drive over there, and stop at a Rite Aid on the way, and see a little laptop table thing for $49. That's a bit more than I was hoping, but I'm already in the hole as it is, so I buy it, along with some day-glo poster sheets and a big black marker. It turns out the 50 dollar desk thing is on sale for 12 bucks! Bonus! Something is going my way finally.

I get over there, and camp out across the street from the employee entrance/exit. I don't know which way they'll be turning primarily, so I set up shop across the street. I make a sign.

(Hatch had an alternate suggestion for the text: "/2 WTT Oral Sechs 4 job interview, PST")

A woman pulls over and tells me that although she doesn't work at Blizzard, she thinks it is perhaps the most awesome sign she's seen, and takes my picture. She drives away. I sit at my desk and wave to Blizzard employees as they begin to leave for the day, and offer them my book, but none stop.

I realize that for every one that comes my way, seven or so go the other way, and while I notice a few slowing down to read my sign, none are stopping. I decide that there's too much on my sign, and simplify:

(I actually just wrote on the back of my green one, but didn't take a 2nd pic, this one is for tomorrow... more on that in a sec)

Suddenly, someone pulled over. Nathan from the Diablo 3 team was my first Blizzard hit! He seemed like a super nice guy, and said in his year and a half of working at this office, he'd never seen anyone out on the curb, and hell yeah he'd take a look at my booklet. I asked if he'd mind taking a few to pass around, and he said sure.

I gave him 5.

Maybe that was a few too many, or maybe I should have just given them all to him.

A while later, security came out to see me. I figured I was being thrown out, but quite the contrary. He told me it was a public street, and as long as I wasn't trying to hop the fence or jump in front of cars, that being on the sidewalk was totally fine with him. He seemed interested in what I had, too, and wished me luck in my endeavor. We chatted a bit about Blizzard in general for about 5 minutes, and he suggested I try to contact the PR people. That's first on my 'to do' list for tomorrow. The PR department didn't even occur to me, but here was a fan that made a pilgrimage to the fabled holy land of Irvine to pass out scripture... hell yeah, that's good PR! ;)

One last guy (Matt) came by, on a skateboard, and we talked for a bit. He took two more copies, before going. One for a "common area" (I'm assuming like a break lounge), and one to pass on to someone who could maybe help.

As ridiculous as my plan was, it worked! Here were 7 of my 12 copies, one their way to inside the iron curtain, and even my being on the curb was eliciting a response. Plenty waved or smiled to me, even if they didn't stop. I plan to set up camp again tomorrow with my new red sign. Maybe those that thought they might have stopped will stop if they see me out there a second day in a row.

But don't I only have 5 left to hand out? Well, I actually just got back to the motel from Kinkos. I'm printing off another 20. That's another 500 bucks, but like I said... if it WORKS, then it's money well spent. If it doesn't work, then I can certainly say I gave it everything I had, and that I pursued every option available to me.

That's passion, baby.

I mean... right?

Crafting Interfaces

2009-09-19T22:40:00.002-07:00

Last article, I talked about basic trade skills, and the lack of skill involved in basically all of the trades offered. In order to craft the most legendary magical breastplates in WoW, the only 'skill' required is that you've spent 3 hours clicking the 'make crappy bracers' button over and over while standing at the anvil with a load of metal in your bags, and blacksmith hammer in your hand. There's no actual crafting involved, and none of it requires any effort. That's great, because it makes everyone feel special and wonderfully equal with one another. You are all wonderful individuals! How boring. The only barrier to crafting rarer or specialized recipes is spending hours grinding out the recipe itself via reputation points, or having the recipe randomly drop off some tiger in the jungle.

My MMO experience doesn't span every game ever made; in fact, some could argue it's pretty limited. I really enjoy trying new MMOs, and doing free trials at the very least, but I'm a latecomer to the genre. My first exposure to an MMO was about 2 weeks with Final Fantasy 11, where I had no idea what was even going on, and then being drafted into closed beta for World of Warcraft. I understand Star Wars Galaxies had one of the most loved crafting systems, but my limited time with SWG (free trial) only exposed me to being a level one nobody running around with Han Solo and Chewbacca on the way to board the Millennium Falcon. At that point, I pretty much considered that I had 'won the game', and didn't see much point in going any further. Another notable standout is the non-combat MMO A Tale in the Desert. They pretty much took crafting to ridiculous levels (in a good way), because that was what one of the game's main focuses was (well, that and social interaction). In order to make a sheet of paper -- which by itself is only another element in something bigger -- you had to pick papyrus, dry it by the river overnight, come back when it was dry (not 12 seconds later), press it into sheets... I don't remember the exact process, but it was like they basically sat down and were like 'how did Egyptians make papyrus scrolls?', and then modeled it in game. Guilds would band together, making adobe bricks one at a time, and could eventually build a pyramid when they had 800 billion of them. Nuts, but awesome.

The focus of WoW and Warhammer, though, is not on crafting. It's on combat, whether it be PvE, PvP, RvR, or whatever the flavor of the month is. Realizing this, the devs seem to have tacked on crafting, because 'it's suppsed to be there'. This isn't to say the systems themselves are horrible, but just that there's no sense of actually crafting anything. In WoW, to make armor, you need to be by an anvil. You don't even need to be facing the anvil though, just 'within the anvil's radial sphere of anvilosity'. The same goes for harvesting ore, you can walk up to the ore deposit, turn around 180, and bang your pickaxe on the ground behind you, and still manage to get some copper. I believe that harvesting professions should show you the item in question (shrub, vein, whatever), and allow you to actually fumble around in a bush, zooming in and out, spinning and rotating it to look for berries or leaves. Getting jumped while harvesting would hide the window, and would lend itself to the initial 'eh?!' confusion you would actually feel if you were involved in extracting ore from a vein when suddenly you were under attack. No more spinning the camera around while you mindlessly whack away at a tin vein.

I propose that the crafting side of trade skills actually resembles a craft, and that you have to actually hit the hot metal with a hammer in order to forge something. A common theme I'm suggesting throughout these skills is the use of a 'workbench' that would be accessible in the guild crafting hall, bank, or whatever. WoW has mana looms to create special spell cloths, and alchemy labs to create flasks, but you don't actually use them, just stand next to them. Lame. Each skill would have a slightly different layout, but with similar features. The workbench could also provide players with a designated storage area for their craft's raw mats.

Let's take a look at a few mock ups (please keep in mind they're rough, but you'll get the idea):

Blacksmithing:

Here's my glorious Blacksmith's Workbench. It's got a few things going, without being too overwhelming. There's a forge in the upper left (with variable temperature settings for smelting various metals), a mold to pour your smelted metal into, an anvil to whack on your creation, and a trough to cool your final creations in. Also in the upper right are two basic tools for use, clicking on which would change your cursor.

Just looking at this simple diagram, you can see a huge amount of options opening up. Various parts of your workbench could be upgraded (better hammer, hotter forge, larger trough for breastplates), and various molds would be unlocked or purchased at various ranks. You still start making 'scale bracers' or 'copper daggers', but now you're MAKING them. I think one of the coolest features would be having the anvil portion open up to something like the 3d model-viewer interface Wowhead has, where you can spin the axe around, looking for rough areas, then set it back down and take a few whacks on it. More experienced blacksmiths would be able to create items with higher durability, and occasionally during the crafting process, mishaps would happen (broken blade, armor with cracks). The ruined gear could be re-melted down and used again, all while trade skill experience points are earned.

Selecting the hammer tool would change your cursor to a circle (or square), and rolling the mousewheel could change the size of the impact zone (perhaps assuming you had hammers of various sizes). Holding down the mouse button would start a golf swing timer, where you let go at the top for a hard WHACK, or just did a few minor bonks to refine the edge.

Jewel Crafting:

Again, the basic workbench has a few tools at your disposal. In this case, you have various files (with awesome default Adobe Illustrator styles applied to them). The roughest would be to determine the basic shape, with different cuts having different effects (+int, +str, etc), as well as the type of gem itself (ruby, emerald) affecting the final result. Upgrades would include files capable of cutting diamonds, different settings for jewelry, or perhaps the ability to actually bore sockets into certain items (using a drill or what-have-you for initial hole, then the files to fine tune the cut). The magnifying glass tool will throw you into closeup mode, where you can spin the gem around, and look for flaws or miscuts. A tumbler would also make sense. Skilling up in jewel crafting would make flaws become highlighted (glowing red) while under the magnifying glass, or enable for complicated multifaceted cuts.

Apothecary:
The Apothecary's tools are a burner (with variable temperature) which rests below a large beaker (which also indicates its own temperature), loose test tubes, a scale (the gold boxes are weights), and mortar and pestle. Recipes would go something like this:
Mix 20g of Bark from a Fel Tree with 10g of Demon Chest Hair. Add to a liquid base of water from a sewage system, and shake the concoction slowly until the liquid becomes a reddish orange. In a separate vial, prepare 10g of Dried Virgin Camel Feces mixed with Boar's Blood (any type will do), and heat until boiling. Combine the two vials into a large beaker over medium heat, and watch carefully. The color will change from the initial red, to dark brown, and finally become a perfect sky blue. If heated too long, the mixture will break down to a vile green concoction that is worthless. Sequester your potion immediately into a non-metalic vial, it should last for up to 60 days.

This recipe alone would take a few steps to make (along with the gathering of various resources), and requires the user to actually not shake too hard, watch the temperature at two points, weigh out precise values, and actually (OMG) craft a potion! Simple beginner recipes call for a dry ingredient and wet to be combined in a simple tube and shaken thoroughly, while something like above would produce a 'flask effect'. Upgrades to the Apothecary Workbench include: spare vials (at first you can only mix two test tubes, eventually you need more), a hotter burner, larger beaker, finer weights (27g isn't possible if you only have a 10g and 5g weight), finer grinder, etc, etc, etc.

All of these were just me sitting down and beginning to type, then jumping into Illustrator or Photoshop to hammer out mock ups. There are so many directions you could go with this. Butchering has the actual animal sitting on a cutting board, and while you can just lop a leg off and roast it up, or cut four feet off of a rabbit for crafting talismans, more advanced butchers could extract poison glands (carefully!) from venomous animals to use for poisons or remedies.

I have a picture in my head of enchanting requiring you channel a spell being cast (limited to mages and the like), and holding it steady in an ever changing dead zone (like doing a wheelie in Tony Hawk?) for an amount of time. The longer you can hold it (to a degree), the more powerful your Fiery Enchant hits for. Get two master enchanters working TOGETHER (gasp!) and they can up the power as well. 6 expert enchanters in your guild? Draw a hexagon on the ground (or go to the designated capital city enchanter's guild where they have various arcane shapes scrawled into the floor), place a weapon on the altar in the center, and channel some nasty mojo into that axe! They all work together, and if the spell backfires, the axe is shattered, or they all have Bad Mojo Sickness for 30 minutes or whatever.

The point is that the options are endless, and go way beyond the typical 'i r have 6 ore in my bag, brb to maek ur ax, gimme a sec'. I also envision a system where you actually drop gear off with someone to be upgraded, and come back to pick it up the next day. I hope you trust that guy, because the spell may backfire ruining your armor, or he may destroy the rare uncut gem you found questing. He may even just sell your armor and never log in again. But those that excel at what they do would earn a reputation as a skilled craftsman, and be valuable assets to their guilds and servers.

originally posted 10/21/08

The Psychology of Losing

2009-09-19T22:40:00.001-07:00

I recently read a few blue post summaries over at mmo-champion.com that gave me pause, and really made me think twice about why I'm not very fond of organized PvP. In the end, I don't find it to be very enjoyable, but when asked why I don't find it enjoyable, I may have drawn a blank until just recently.

These posts are both remarks made by Ghostcrawler, who is the best "blue" Blizzard has ever had, in my oh so humb--- ugh, stop. God, I hate that phrase. It basically gives you free reign to ignore whatever sentence it's attached to, so I'll just cut it short right there.

Anyway, Ghostcrawler descends from the heavens pulled by Chariots of Fire (dun dun dun dun dunnnnn dunnnnn --- queue the clip of running in slow motion on a beach, etc), and pops into what would otherwise be total flame bait threads and answers the questions in a manner that just makes the trolls shrivel up and die inside.

A typical "OMG WTF PRIESTS DIE IN ARENA TO EAZY, WAY TO SUCK, GG BLIZZ" thread which has the poster saying how it's fun to be beat on mobs -- because you eventually win, but no fun to be two shot (which makes sense, but yeah) gets followed up with:

You are going to defeat, by a huge order of magnitude, most of the mobs you meet. In many examples it won't even be a challenge -- you will two shot them. If the PvP matchmaking is working well, however, you will lose 50% of every match (and that assumes classes are perfectly balanced, which I won't pretend to claim). It is much harder to feel like a hero in an Arena because we aren't trying to make you feel like a hero. Psychologically, I think that is a bigger deal than a lot of players realize.

That little gem really made me stop and think back on my arena experiences. While the devs have acknowledged that burst damage is a little out of control right now (they're waiting for people so stack more level 80 resil gear to see how it pans out), it's horrifically frustrating for me to step into an arena on my lock wearing the blue Frostsavage set because A) the Frostsavage set is pretty much garbage, and I'm better off just wearing my T7 and hoping to get a few casts off and B) with Proximo, I can see that every member of the opposing team is targeting me when we look across the bridge in Nagrand at each other before the initial clash. Like all of them. Even the healer.

Training isn't fun for the person getting trained. It feels awesome when you're the rogue, and you Cheapshot the clothie, then your warrior friend charges over and mashes them in the face with an axe the size of Shaq, while you're still backstabbing, and your healer even chucks a Moonfire in there for shits, but when you're the one being defiled by a walking corpse and two large cows it must be frustrating.

No wait... it IS frustrating. Let's say you're superman, and you trinket the CS, plow out a Shadowfury, and Deathcoil with perfect precision... there go like all three of your get out of jail free cards, and they probably just blew one of theirs to nullify yours.

I'm not complaining about arenas, especially not in relation to warlocks. I'm just not very good at them, and so I don't like them, but it finally dawned on me WHY. It seems so ridiculously basic, but in the heat of the moment, I'm not really evaluating my emotions, I'm just busy feeling them, and being pissed that I never live longer than 5 seconds when the shit goes down.

It is much harder to feel like a hero in an Arena because we aren't trying to make you feel like a hero. Psychologically, I think that is a bigger deal than a lot of players realize.

Another thread has the same sentiment echoed in a similar fashion:

What I was actually getting at though was a loftier sentiment that players run through quests or an instance and one-shot everything and then go into PvP and can lose a lot. It's a very different experience, and psychologically I think it affects players more than they give it credit for. (If you are highly-ranked or don't even play PvE much then it likely affects you a lot less.)

I read a book recently (that I really wouldn't recommend) called Fooled by Randomness. I bought it on a whim thinkng it would be a look into probability or something. I like reading kooky books about particle physics, so sue me. This ended being about the stock market instead, and the whole thing was basically the author patting himself on the back the whole time for being so clever for realizing that market fluctuations can't be predicted, and that sometimes successful people are just lucky, but rarely will they realize this, and instead attribute their success to some 'innate skill' they had.

One of the interesting things in the book regarded the psychological effect people have towards winning and losing. Say you have a stock portfolio, and you're online checking it every second of the day. You will see the tiniest fluctuations in value, and these will bring you either joy or misery, depending on if your stocks are up or down. When you look at the bigger picture (say, checking your stocks once a month), you'll feel the same joy or misery, but it's once a month, instead of 100 times a day. It's the healthier thing to do, generally speaking. If the stock is down down down, but then ends up being up in the end, you're still emotionally fatigued from experiencing the downs, and the up isn't very rewarding. If you only checked once --whether up or down, it's only one trigger, and your life is simpler.

Scientists have analyzed these receptors in our brains, and found that for an equal event (say, winning $100 at a casino, or losing $100), the negative impact is greater than the positive, to a degree of about being double. You would need to win $200 (or win $100 twice) in order to 'feel' the same magnitude of emotion as you felt over losing the $100. They go on to hypothesize that this is hard wired into our brains to prevent us from making mistakes over and over. We learn more quickly (and are affected more readily) from the 'bad'. When I think back personally on my youth, it's easier to drum up a memory of me saying something stupid, or getting into trouble, than it is to find one where I said something nice, or did a 'good deed'.

Taking that mindset into the Arena of WoW, it's easy to become exasperated after 5 losses in a row, and not even want to finish out the required ten games for points. We've 'learned our lesson' for the week, and don't want to continue punishing ourselves, psychologically.

Then again, maybe I'm reading WAY too far into this whole thing, and I just suck at playing my lock. At any rate, this weekend, I intend to play some matches, and go into them with the expectation that I will lose. I'll queue up, but not in an effort to win or lose per se, but to gain experience in the Arena. That way, maybe I can turn the loss into a conscious win, as I've gained what I set out to do. The end result will have little meaning.

Whether or not I can fool my more base emotions into believing that remains to be seen, but this same situation applies to PvE as well. Perhaps this is why people are so quick to dissolve a guild right after a night full of wipes. People need to go into the raid with the expectation that they're 'learning the encounters'. Once you have the place on farm, then it's fine to be frustrated by individual mistakes, but this early into endgame, I think it's a good time to lighten up and just take the wins and losses as they come.

Don't let it ruin your day ;)

Originally posted 1/5/09

Expansion Tuning

2009-09-19T22:40:00.000-07:00

Here's an idea I thought of a while back, but never bothered to hammer out into words fully. I'm totally over the whole "WoW Tourist" debate, and it's time to get back to business as normal. Today is a simple topic, but the ramifications are pretty readily apparent the instant an expansion is released. Taking Vanilla WoW vs Burning Crusade, BC pretty much trivialized the entire 'level 60' endgame of regular WoW, by letting anyone into Outlands at 58.

This isn't a shocking revelation, and people had been boosting past content 'they're supposed to be on' way before BC came out. Where Scarlet Monastery is supposed to be for level 35 to 40-ish toons, people are getting friends to run them through it way before they were ready. When I recruit-a-friended myself recently, I plowed through SM Cath over and over (and over) on a 78 ret paly while my two level 26 (I think? the whole grind to 60 is a blur) toons waited patiently at the instance entrance for everything to be pulled to them. I wound up with every blue in the place, a good 7 or 8 levels before I could even equip any of it. By the time I could wear it, I was already scooping blues off of mobs in Zul'Farak as a level 40-something.

Ugh, side tangent. This isn't about having an 80 drag you through zones, but running alone, or with a group, at your intended level.

Vanilla WoW was around for a long time before BC dropped, and there was a lot of level 60 only content that was produced for horizontal progression once you reached the level cap. Two sides of Strat, Scholo, UBRS, LBRS, BRD, Princess runs in Mara, MC, BWL, ZG, AQ 20 and 40, Naxx. Naxx is obviously the exception because it's been recycled, but all of that content is completely useless now unless you want 10 xbox live points.

The same thing happened with Lich King. At level 68, I ran my warrior out to Howling Fjord and started killing Carrion Crows to feed the Plaguehound Dog. There was no need to bother with Gruul or Mag or SSC, TK, or hell... even regular Mechanar. Why bother when the gear in Wrath is easily accessible, and a huge upgrade from whatever I'd get in there anyway?

With the jump from Vanilla WoW to BC, there was a huge leap in STA gear, because they wanted people to survive PvP longer than one or two whacks. That's understandable, and the jump from Vanilla to BC gear was a big one. There's no reason to farm a tier one set if pigs outside of Thrallmar drop what would amount to a Vanilla legendary chestpiece.

That's our problem, so how do we address it? A lot of this post so far has been a bit of a buildup, because I don't like 20 word posts. But here's the 20 word solution, and it actually seems pretty simple:

Tune the initial expansion mobs to be a challenge for players at the pre-expansion level cap, plus 5 or 6 levels.

If the first pig I come across outside of thrallmar rapes my face and one shots me unless I'm wearing tier 2 at least, then it creates a stopgap at the end of vanilla WoW. You suddenly can't just run through the portal and happly replace your trashy level 58 (or 48 in my case) greens with the first round of quest items. You need to stay in Azeroth, hit level 60, and continue to run Scholo and Strat for level 60 sidegrade gear until you can survive that first pig outside of Thrallmar.

If the STA levels need to be inflated, inflate them on existing gear, not 'the new stuff'. This would need to be applied throughout the entire expansion, and be a pre-meditated effort by the entire design team. Thrallmar questlines can't just offer Teh Level 60 Uber Duber Chestpiece of 50 sockets and 2000 Stamina. The quest rewards in the zone should start at "comparable to level 65 loot". Quest rewards, as we all know, don't have level reqs. If you're high enough to accept the quest, you're high enough to wear the reward. But those rewards should be tailored to be on par with "pre-expansion +5 levels". Someone wearing AQ40 purples might find that item an upgrade, but they survived the first pig coming through the portal. Grats, you're welcome in the Outlands. Have fun, and enjoy your stay. The first mobs would similarly drop greens or BoE blues that flatly required level 65 to even equip.

When an expansion drops, it's this mad rush to the end cap, and then a bunch of sitting on your thumbs running Gruul and Magtheridon week in and out. That doesn't really bother me. That's part of WoW. But another part of WoW is hitting a cap, and sliding sideways for a time. If this were the case, we would concievably be running Scholo and Strat still at 61 and 62 (while earning XP, and with inflated stats on the drops), even though the expansion was waiting for us to get out there and tackle it.

Yes, this might have perhaps been frustrating for those who were level 60, but still wearing trash greens. Anyone able to clear AQ40 would have been just fine, though, to go through the gate at 60. For the casual playerbase, you don't NEED to eventually clear BWL before you can zone into Hellfire Peninsula, you just plug away in the old world until 65, then go to Thrallmar and start killing pigs for upgrades, or doing quests that you can handle now. When you hit 70, a similar stop occurs, until you can handle Howling Fjord's level 75 tuned first mobs. Part of the expansion's feature set is new quests in the old word, to help bridge the gap. Not just "fuck this old dump, let's all go to the new zones, hooray!"

The issue that I see here is when eventually everyone reaches 80, and there's no one left to run MC with, but I really don't think that's a problem. Worst case scenario is that the boss HP pools get tuned for 25 man MC, since that's the new 40 man raid size. But people today still run non heroic Ramparts at 58 - 60, and it would be THAT group of people who were instead running (and maybe even experiencing for the first time!) MC and Scholo and UBRS. Non-heroic Ramps is now for level 65 players. BC is basically 65 to 75 content, and Wrath is then 75 to 80, until the new expansion drops, when it becomes 75 to 85. By making the first zone of the next expansion a 5 level gap from the last zone of the previous expansion, it forces people to refine their gear before they throw it all away. Don't get upset, throwing gear away is part of the game.

*EDIT* Looking at the comments so far, I'm not sure people understand this chart. I mean the level CAP in vanilla is 60, but you stay in vanilla CONTENT until 65. Obviously you would need to wait for the first expansion to raise the level cap, but then you don't just abandon the vanilla zones (unless you're ridiculously geared). Once you hit 70, you stay in BC content until 75, THEN go to Borean Tundra or whatever. The main point is that there's a lingering at the end of each section's end game area to get ready for the first zone in the next part. As it stands, people abandon the current section before they even GET to that section's cap (going to HFC at 58, or Borean Tundra at 68). THAT's the problem this is addressing. *EDIT*

And again, to really drive the point home, anyone fully decked in Sunwell loot would have been able to brazenly board the Blimp to Borean Tundra on day one and boldly explore the new frontier ahead of everyone else. They earned it, don't forget to send us a postcard and tell us how awesome it is.

/2 Level 74 t5 Priest LFG BT, Hyjal, or Sunwell

Is that so hard to imagine being a reality?

Group / World Quests

2009-09-19T10:40:00.004-07:00

So, two encounters down in "Spooky Castle Raid 37.b", I reckon about twelve more to go (two of which are already typed up in Word). Today isn't a new encounter, but a general rambling on various 'non-raid' ideas I've had over the last couple days, and just need to type down somewhere. They actually primarily focus on quests, and specifically the ones that call themselves 'group quests'.

Let's be serious here for a sec. A group quest in WoW, as it stands, is just another way of saying 'you'll be fighting more than one mob, or one mob with more hit points than normal'. On my warlock, as a SL/felguard spec that became available at level 71, I was able to solo any mob I came across. On occasion, I would see random level 76 elites or something that were probably for a quest I'd get in like 4 levels, and I'd kill it just because I could. AoE grinding, and the killing of multiple mobs, actually became EASIER the larger the group was. The more mobs I had Siphon Life ticking on, the more health I had coming in every second. Two other talents in the Demo tree, Fel Synergy (heals pet for 15% of my damage done), and Demonic Resilience (reduces all damage taken by my pet by 15%), coupled with Imp Health Funnel (increases health funneled by 20%, demon takes 30% less damage while it's going), made everything trivial.

This is obviously an extreme example, but not very different from a Beast Mastery Hunter. Even other classes don't really have a hard time with elites. My priest just keeps a power word shield up, and all damage is nullified. Shamans can summon elementals to tank, druids can go bearform for regen, or just root and moonfire spam.

Look: the point I'm trying to make it that unless you just feel lonely, there's no reason to group or these 'group quests'. Here comes Ixo with an idea to change that: make it so you actually need two people to complete the quest. In Little Big Planet, there are certain rooms or puzzles that require two people, or you just can't do them. You need to stand on this button and push this lever at the same time, and the button and lever are on opposite sides of the room. Why not make that a quest dynamic? There are various ways to go about this, here's just a few examples...

1) The Channeled Item Thing. WoW does this with a few quests already. The big blue demon in the SW corner of Hellfire. He flys around, and you need to get a staff from some guy to zap him and make him a non elite so you can solo him. Why not make it so the item itself is channeled, and the boss is only non-elite while he's continually being zapped? One person can't solo this quest anymore. It requires one person to be doing no damage (channeling) while the other actually kills the guy. If he hits hard enough, you need a third healer. I could see people being creative and having the healer channel, then stop channeling to pop off a heal or two, but the instant you stop channeling, he goes back to Elite Mode, and it's probably not feasible to amplify his damage output again while you're trying to heal.

"Oh, but Ixo! What about your warlock? You could just channel while the felguard whacks away."

Yeah, but that wouldn't work. For me to kill these 76 elites I had to basically let Corruption tick while the Felguard meleed, and I just kept health funnel up on him (-30% damage taken with my spec). If I used two DoTs, the aggro from those plus my constant healing would pop aggro to me. It usually eventually did with Corruption alone, and I'd have to Soulshatter to drop back down (5 min cooldown). The Voidwalker has better aggro management with a taunt, etc, but horriffic damage output. WIth me funneling, there's be no chance for me to channel the item, so it takes care of itself.

2) The Twin Mobs. There are mobs in Zangarmarsh that get stronger when they're close to each other. They're like slave drivers (or slaves?) or something. They have a yellow beam of light that goes between them to show when they're "in range" of one another. The problem is that the amount of damage or armor they gain is trivial, and we just kill them both outright. Maybe it takes one more shadowbolt or one more cleave. Big deal. Take this concept to the next level, and make them immune to damage altogether when they're within range. You basically need two people to pull them far enough apart from one another, and a healer to stand in the middle. Even if you didn't need heals, but just needed to separate them to burn them down, it requires two people.

This could be done by my lock or a hunter, though, but that would be the exception (and the intended benefit of playing a pet class, instead of just 'my damage comes from two places, yay'). Just make them hit hard enough that a clothie can't tank one to the face, and that solves that? If you could separate them enough from one another to get a fear off (hamstring one, kite the other, then intimidating shout) you get brownie points for being clever. It's better than just "spam cleave since there's two of them". Heck, if the immunity was like a paly bubble, then Hamstring wouldn't even work in the first place, and you need two people.

There's one other thing coming into play here that needs to be addressed: maybe Blizzard doesn't want to force grouping on anyone. The game is very solo friendly, this is given. But I don't see a problem with saying 'you just can't do this chain solo'. They're trying to say that with group quests in the first place ('be sure to bring a friend' is usually found in the quest text), so this would just take it to the next level.

One other idea I want to get down on paper... err... keyboard... dur... is the idea of World Quests. It's my undrstanding that Lord of the Rings have some pretty epic quest chains that take a long time to complete. You whack away at them a little bit at a time, and it's always there in your log. WoW needs something like that. All the quests are these bite sized morsels, and fall more under the heading of "errand" or "chore" that "QUEST". One thing that would tailor it specifically to your toon would be basing it on your tradeskills. This has been done in various quests ("find an engineer to make a bronze casing and bring it to me" etc), but not dynamically base on YOU.

I know there are variables in the game... %t is for target, %c is like your class... certain quests start out with "GREETINGS UNDEAD", or "HAIL SHAMAN!", so I imagine there must be some sort of backend that could detect what tradeskills you have. If not, then this probably wouldn't work, but let's just say it does.

Taking the undead theme of developing a new strand of plague... Brill is the first town that undead come across where you can pick a tradeskill. Have a quest giver there that notices you're an herbalist, and has you pick some quest item-y thing from Silverleaf shrubs. Regular herbing gives you the leaves, so maybe this guy needs the roots or stems. These items only drop from Silverleaf shrubs when you have the quest active (that's already in the game engine for sure), and since it's a quest item, you can't just run to the AH and buy 2 stacks of Silverleaf to turn back in.

The idea is that the chain starts at Silverleaf and Peacebloom, and goes all the way up to Frost Lotus. You always have this quest in your log, and are given small rewards for it along the way, with better and better rewards coming for rare parts (Black Lotus, or Anchient Lichen). Hell, you could make the guy more of a daily quest giver, and you could always go farm Silverleaf stems for the cause if desired, or just keep moving to the 'next section' to keep the chain going.

Typing this up, this sounds more of a tradeskill quest, actually... but my original vision was to have it span the globe. I had originally thought you would grab the quest around level 40, and be sent back to Brill to farm some level 1 herbs, and in addition " I notice you're a blacksmith too, bring me 30 copper ore and I'll teach you how to fabricate DOODAD Z for use in the next part of the quest chain". This isn't a pair of Runed Copper Bracers, it's a special hammer to chisel a rock out of the skull behind Boss Q in Dungeon G. It's not just a 5 minute thing that's over and forgotten about, it's always there, and it's huge... subsequent expansions could add on to the quest, and it would vary for each person depending on what tradeskills or race they were.

edit: it would be cool to make the exclamation point like RED or something to stand out in the town. You'd be in a new area, and be like "oh shit, legendary quest continuation!" and go pick that up. It doesn't need to be the same NPC in Brill doing everything (and would suck if it was). I can imagine grabbing the quest in Brill, taking the stems to Tarren Mill, and then being tasked with part #27 being in Zangarmarsh. You can't even grab that part until you're high enough to venture out there, and as soon as you are, you rush out to grab the next part of the chain.

It would split up groups... with 96 parts to the chain, you're obviously not goign to be on the same part as your friend (and unless you're both identically specced, you won't even have the same step #54, but that's good. It's something that doesn't get knocked out in a day, or even a week. It's always there, and you whittle away at it while you can.

yeah? no?

originally posted 1/25/09

Questing in General, and Player Offered Quests

2009-09-19T10:40:00.003-07:00

Okay, I lied. I said this next one was going to be about armor, and how silly it is a mage can’t wear leather, but I’ve also been thinking about the problem with Warhammer right now, and how people are always looking for the most convenient way to level. There are a few basic elements of Quests in general that I think could use a good looking-at.

One of the most annoying quests for me, personally, has always been ‘go talk to Fred, and then when you get there, he’ll invariably send you back to talk to me again’. Dude, hate to be an ass here, but are you and Fred going through a messy break up or something, and aren’t talking to each other anymore? Go talk to him yourself, I got tigers to slay. While I can understand general ‘breadcrumb’ quests that send you into town number three when you’re all done with town number two, ones that involve NPCs standing twenty feet from one another make no sense. Unless the first NPC was blind, and wanted to follow you around until you dropped him off next to Fred so he could talk to him alone, it’s just lazy quest writing. These quests are to be expected, because they follow one of the default standards set forth by Moses after he came down from Mount Gunbad.

A lot of questing is just the time sink of travel, followed by the time sink of grinding, followed by the time sink of travel again. Why do you think hearthstones have a one hour timer? If it was too convenient to travel around, people would do it, and god forbid that happens. I remember the first time I saw Ruby Red Slippers drop in Karazhan, and thought ‘Wow! An extra hearthstone! That would be awesome for any class that isn’t a mage!’ Then it turned out that using the slippers just activated the hearthstone cooldown, too, and the only benefit to having the slippers was that you could throw away your hearthstone, freeing up one bag slot. Oh but wait, equipping the slippers activates a 30 second timer before you can use them, so technically, they’re worse than a hearthstone.

Here’s an easy proposal that borrows on existing in-game mechanics: have NPCs check their mail! I can already attach 12 items to a single letter in WoW, why not put some tiger tails as an attachment, and just type the NPCs name in the ‘to’ field? The XP could be gained immediately upon hitting send, or there could be a tradeoff… if you bring the tails to Fred directly, he’ll reward you right away, while mailing him the items could take an hour or two for the XP to roll over. There are mailboxes everywhere, and mailing items is a pretty standard fare. Even follow-up quests could be received from the mailbox.

Ixobelle, tales of your valor in slaying the Tiger Tamer of Tatooine have reached my ears, and I have another request to make of you. My village was ravaged by blah blah blah and could you blah blah blah for my blah blah blah?

For quests that have multiple rewards offered, just select the reward ahead of time (at the time of taking the quest), or implement a system where you send the mail back to the NPC including ‘Shoulders of Pwnsauce’ in the body. Hell, if that’s too complicated, add another tab to the mail window titled ‘quests’ and for each outstanding quest, you could have the system itself compose the letter, with drop down menus for your selected reward. Again, taking the time to travel directly to Fred would still allow you to pick up the follow-up, and select your reward the old way, there would also just be another, more convenient option as well.

Another option that’s been brought up is the idea of players offering each other a quest, which is of course a terrifying situation for everyone involved, but ties into my advance trade skilling thing from before, where you have people that are actually using their trade skills in new and creative ways. Once you reach a certain level of Apothecary, you could have a quest available. It would need a ‘quest building’ window to be implemented, and would obviously require some planning and tweaking to iron out the logistics, but here’s the general idea:

I need 10 Felweed per potion of Fancy Felweed Delight that I craft. Once a day, I can offer a quest (Inspect Player > View Available Quests) that will offer gold from my own pocket to whoever brings me trade skill mats. The price per item you offer would need to be researched as to the going price for such items on the AH, plus however much I felt like tacking on for incentive to accept my quest. The benefit for someone doing your quest is the bonus XP that they don’t get by just selling their item on the AH, and perhaps a ‘friendly player’ faction that could provide a title or other reward. Hell, I could offer you those green bracers I got yesterday as a drop as well. RPers could write 80 page novels for each quest offered... go crazy, buddy, whatever floats your boat. The quest taker then decides ‘is it a better deal to give my Felweed to Sally here, or just sell it myself on the AH?’

There are loopholes, but it wouldn’t take rocket scientists to figure them out and squash them. For example: what’s to stop me from giving you 10 Felweed, then making a quest asking for 10 Felweed, and cranking the XP up to 10 billion? First, you don’t set the XP, it’s done internally based on the level of the quest taker. Level 1s get 71 XP, 70s get 5000 (level * 71.42! woo math!). Each person can only complete one or two player given quests per day, and upon someone inspecting you and offering to take your quest, you can accept or deny them. Perhaps you can only give out one quest per day as well, or offer it to as many as you like, but the first to turn it in receives the reward. Upon accepting such a quest, you can see ‘2 of the 4 people who have accepted this quest are currently online’. That keeps it so that if I accept your quest, and log off, it’s not a huge deal. Also, the mailbox can be used to deliver the goods, or two players can be racing to grab the mats and turn it in, creating friendly competetion. There could even be a quest creation hub, where you had to put your ‘reward’ in a safe box, so you couldn’t offer a 500g reward you don’t have. The picture says 'within 24 hours' but maybe that could be further clarified ('this quest will expire in 14h 34m').This ties in to a two way auction house, as well. Say I’m building a Furies Deck (collect cards ace thru 8 for a set), and I only need one more. I can make my quest ‘bring me a (shift click item link to insert it to your quest text) FOUR OF FURIES, and I will reward you with 500g!’ Suddenly, the option to post an item request is a very real option (although an honest to god two way auction house would be best, instead of having to track down a quest giver). Player communication becomes a big deal, as you suddenly see a Four of Furies on the AH, but maybe that quest has been fulfilled ten minutes ago. Bored (or RP) players could start silly or crazy quests involving rare drops or some hard to find item. You could offer the quest to only those in your guild or player list (rejecting any others, or just hiding out in a remote area to offer it). Ten people could plan out an entire quest chain that has them sending people to each other to pick up the next part of a quest. Does this mean they'd ignore the NPC quest givers in favor of other players? OMG we’re playing each other! Social interaction! Run away before the cooties spread!

But still, the underlying problem remains: I give you 10 felweed, make that quest, and you give them right back! Bang 5000 XP. Um, grats. You can only do it once per day, and last time I checked daily quests in WoW or Scenarios in Warhammer are pretty liberal with XP etc, so there’s your daily 5000 ‘I have a friend’ bonus. Big deal. To eliminate the problem with having the ten person quest chain mentioned above all lining up one after the other, just restrict the amount of 'player XP' you can receive in 24 hours. The first two quests will award 5k each, and you're free to pick up and complete as many more as you desire throughout the day (still earning any prizes offered by the player out of their pocket or random unwanted loot drops), but your actual XP is capped from these adventures until tomorrow.

While the typical ‘quest item’ idea is unique, and the normal items looted from quests have absolutely zero value (vendors won’t purchase them), having the item be useful items like herbs or other trade skill-y item makes one stop and think about whether to sell the item on the AH, turn it in to a friendly player, or just vend it. Plus it would be cool to open your mailbox, and find strangers have gone on an errand for you instead of some random NPC, and now you have enough Felweed to craft another Felweed Delight! If the idea became abused, and everyone was just running to the AH to buy the quest reward, then you could choose a specific animal from a drop down and have old fashioned quest items drop off mobs, but you're turning it in to some person, instead of some NPC.

Am I being naïve? Is there some huge flaw to this that I’ve overlooked? The normal quest givers would still be there, and the game would operate as it always has (whichever game it is), but this would be another social interaction to bring people together in way that mutually benefits both parties involved.

originally posted 10/23/08

Oh Boy Trade Skills!

2009-09-19T10:40:00.002-07:00

This is a big deal for many people. I don’t get it, because there isn’t really much to ‘get’ in current implementations on the market. WoW has the various bases covered with regards to gathering and crafting skills, and those seem to be the big two. Warhammer also has gathering and crafting skills, and require you only have one of each so you don’t become ‘that one guy in WoW with herbing and mining that only loots stuff all day and never sits down to make anything’.

The gathering skills themselves (in Warhammer, for example) seem silly to be limited to one per person. There’s butchering (the cutting up on dead beasts), scavenging (the looting of dead humanoids' pockets), cultivating (i r grow teh plants), and salvaging (which is basically WoW’s disenchanting skill). With the exception of salvaging, I don’t understand why some person would be able to cut up a dead deer, but when presented with a dead body, they would have no idea how to put their hands in the dead guy’s pockets? Seriously? Salvaging magical essences from an item sounds a bit specialized, but ‘rifling thru pockets’? What’s the matter, you can’t find them or something? Open your character page; you have two pocket slots yourself.

For gathering skills, the ‘easy’ trade skills, there should be nothing stopping someone from buying a pickaxe and whacking away at any ore veins they come across in the game. Obviously, they wouldn’t be very skilled at doing so for the first ones they came across, and those attempts would invariably fail. But that’s the point. You get BETTER at harvesting the resource, but there’s no artificial limitation placed on “oh you can mine ore, but you can’t also pick flowers if you decide you also want to have inscription, too”. There’s this perceived need to limit people to two slots of skills, when in practice, it’s just frustrating. It’s the same dynamic as saying ‘oh mages can’t wear plate mail’ when that actually makes no sense whatsoever. Just because that’s the ‘established rule’ means nothing. I should be able to put on a ballerina skirt and plate mail helm regardless of my class. The only thing limiting my ability to do so should be the circumference of my head itself, but this is already getting into my Armor discussion.

Let’s refocus on Trade skills. Suffice to say I think a player should be able to pick up as many trade skills as they wish, and the ACT of using the skill should be the only limiting factor to it ‘skilling up’. You could have a level 1 gnome who is an expert at harvesting herbs, and can safely pick berries off the Death Kill Vines that grow on the Cliffs of Mount Pain, but that level 1 toon isn’t going to make it to the shrub without an entourage escorting his delicate hide out there. There’s obviously an upside to being a tough guy and being able to slay all the monsters from here to the berries, but players shouldn’t be expected to raid endgame dungeons if they only want to sit in town and make necklaces to sell. In fact, the ‘level 1’ portion is strictly a ‘combat level’ designation. You get more hit points as you ‘level’, but using your trade skill levels a separate number, which is actually already implemented in these games. I’m currently 104 Talisman making on my Black Orc in Warhammer, and (happily) there doesn’t seem to be a combat level associated cap to my trade skilling. I get the items I need to make my talismans from buying renown gear and disenchanting (salvaging) it. In retrospect, I should have made a level one alt my ‘salvager’ because I don’t need to physically be able to wear the gear to purchase and salvage it. Instead, I was forced to roll an alt with the Scavenging skill (which requires you to venture out to the battlefield and actually do the looting there). This, in turn, forces me to actually level the alt as well, since running around the battlefield trying to kill things as level 1 isn’t very productive.

There’s an entire population of gamers that derive pleasure from ‘playing the auction house’ or just crafting items. They really have no interest in running huge scripted raids, or participating in glorified versions of ‘Kill the Carrier’ or ‘Capture the Flag’. I’m not one of those people, but I think I would have an appreciation for a trade skill that actually requires practice to be proficient, or made more sense than “stand at the anvil and click the button, and then wait 15 seconds for your new chest piece to appear in your bag”.

Warhammer has an interesting new skill called Cultivation that allows you to grow seeds into plants for use in the Apothecary (potion making) trade skill. It’s interesting in the way that reading that last sentence was. Like, ‘ooh! that sounds neat!’ …then it’s not. You end up looting watering cans from dead mobs (watering cans? watering cans.), along with seeds and soil, then combine them all and grow a plant, using nutrients if desired as well. The timing of it, for whatever reason, is an accelerated grow cycle, and takes about 1 minute to grow a plant. You put the seed in the window, and a little sprout appears. Then you wait for 15 seconds, and add soil, wait another 15 seconds and add water, and wait a final 15 seconds and add nutrients. I can see where they’re going with this, but the timing itself is not only unnatural (plants don’t grow in a minute), it’s just staggered enough to be annoying. You can’t go get a soda while your plant grows, because you’re hovering over it waiting to throw dirt and watering cans (watering cans?) on it.

There’s an expression about something being as boring as watching grass grow. Warhammer has managed to make it an in-game feature. New trade skill planned for the expansion? Wet Paint Monitoring. Awesome.

If you’re going to do a plant grow cycle, why not make it last a while? I understand you don’t want people to have to harvest their fields in August (is that when fields are harvested? I have no idea), but make a grow cycle take a week. Stop in to water your plants each day, and actually invest some time in the outcome. If you go on vacation, your plants will die! Have a plot of soil that isn’t ‘one icon large’. As you skill up, your ‘workbench’ improves, and you can have two rows of plants in your garden. You could take a close look at them as you water them each day and pick bugs off them, or pluck weeds. Certain plants would actually yield berries or flowers that you can SEE in the trade skill window, and need to be carefully plucked with a smooth mouse motion that won’t break the stalk. Pruning could play a role. I’m still talking about the plant skill, and haven’t even gotten into blacksmithing or anything yet. There are so many millions of ways you could have made this skill interesting, instead of ‘watch the slow, boring 4 frame animated gif, and click the watering can (?) icon at frame 2’. Did I mention everything from goblins to demons to bandit lords drop watering cans? I have like 200 in my bank. It’s ridiculous.

I’m not just picking on Warhammer, either. WoW does the same thing. Smelting metal takes 3 seconds per bar, and there’s no way to smelt ten bars at a time, unless you download an addon to do it for you. You don’t even need to let the molten hot bars cool before you can throw 500 in your bag and run off (don’t get me started on inventories). Why not have different metals have different smelting points, and you have to fine tune the forge to bring it to the proper temperature? After smelting, let the bars cool. If this all sounds like a pain in the ass, then probably a trade skill isn’t something you need to waste your time on. I’m sure there would be a bunch of people on each server more than happy to play a ‘merchant’ style character, even if only on an alt, that could set up shop and craft wares for the rest of the populace. No one’s willing to do it? Then just live with loot drops. You don’t NEED to craft any items; it’s just another avenue to an end result.

The point is that crafting throwaway items over and over just to skill up in the span of 20 minutes is silly. You need to give people an investment in what they’re crafting, and make it take more work than ‘click the button and wait 12 seconds’. People will take up the positions, and will become valued members of the server, or at the very least, very rich, because no one else will be hassled to bother doing it when there’s a BG popping in 32 seconds.

Next up will be a look at skills like jewel crafting, or blacksmithing. Creating an actual interface for crafting items, and how you can incorporate 'skill' into the trade skill itself, forcing someone to actually become proficient in thier profession to succeed. Stay tuned, this is just getting started!

Re: Combat

2009-09-19T10:40:00.001-07:00

Another long winded exposition on how MMOs should be. Grab a cup of coffee, strap yourself in, and let's get rolling.

Combat. It has been said my myself on more than one occasion that combat is what makes an MMO. There have been plenty of games that, while interesting, totally didn't do it for me because combat felt wrong. Final Fantasy 11 was my first (brief) brush with an MMO, so I missed EQ and DAoC, and whatever came before it. I distinctly remember being in the WoW beta, as well, and feeling how everything felt wrong. Before that, turn based RPGs like Final Fantasy had my characters waiting patiently for me to give them an instruction (Attack!), and they would step into combat, execute said move (one sword slash), then jump back to the line, waiting for my next order. Even Final Fantasy 7 had a radical new approach to combat in that combat moved in quasi-realtime. If no orders were issued, the enemies still would do their thing, and eventually I'd die.

Seeing MMOs take this another step further to a system where my character automatically attacked a mob over and over, and the introduction of a global cooldown timer took some getting used to. I remember thinking how disconnected what I saw on screen and what was happening in my combat log felt. Getting over it took some time, and being that WoW is the foundation now by which every other MMO is judged, whenever I come across a radically different combat engine (AoC, LotRO), it feels jarring. Warhammer, too, forced me to really slow down in combat, but that's mostly because the animation system sucks and if you spam abilities, the animations will play regardless of whether the skill is ready or not. Some skills even require a 2h weapon, and if I'm wearing a sword and board, the animation plays, and then the game is like "oh yeah, lol, ignore what I just played, REQUIRES 2H WEAPON". Basically, WoW, through the course of its gazillion dollars in revenue, and time spent on the market, has perfected MMO combat flow, in my eyes. I enjoy playing Warhammer because it's new, but I'd wet myself if the WoW engine was licensed out the way the Unreal engine is, and people could just create their own worlds-and-lore / classes-and-systems to play in, while using WoW's underlying backend.

Now that that's out of the way, how do I think I could make WoW's combat system more interesting to take part in? That's easy! Give each fight meaning, and drag each struggle out longer. For me personally, given the Scarlet Monastery Cathedral's cathedral itself, and having a choice between clearing in its current form, or clearing it out where there was only one or two fights that dragged on for 5 to 7 minutes each, I'd choose the latter. I'd love to have 'regular' combat slowed way down and become more of a rarity as well. If you think about how hard combat in actual armor must be, and how much it would take out of you, then imagine that you can go out from Thrallmar or Honor Hold and slay 150 Fel Orcs in the course of an hour, it's pretty silly. Obviously this isn't real life, and it's supposed to be fun, but there's no fun involved in playing 5 on 5 basketball with 5 Michael Jordans on your team, and 5 Woody Allens on the opposing bench. It's just a slaughter. Instead of being honestly challenged, we rely on overcoming sheer numbers and boring repetition to reach the end of each area.

The obvious problem is that in order to make the Woodys shuck and jive like Mike would require more AI than our games are possible of delivering, which I just don't believe is true. A few really basic rules, and liberal use of the dreaded RNG (random number generator) that Blizz loves so much would make fights much more interesting. Have aggro randomly drop. Have healing aggro be 5x DPS aggro. Give mobs more than one ability, and don't have every humanoid in Scarlet Monstery turn and run at precisely 17% HP remaining. I want to be frost nova-ed, sheeped, and POM pyro'd in the face. I want to die. I want to fight tooth and nail every pull, not just on boss encounters. Speaking of boss encounters, I want each boss to be like the Opera Event in Kara, where you don't know how it's going to play out until the curtain comes up. Even then, there were only four choices, and once you learned them all it was GG. Something more along the lines of the Anubisath s in AQ40, where you'd have people shouting over vent to either stand below them or spread the hell out ASAP!

I'd love to have a static list of 80 boss abilities: Enrage, Sheep, Whirlwind, AoE Silence, Disarm, +20% Healer Aggro, +20% DPS Aggro, etc etc etc, and have each boss randomly select 5 abilities from the tree before first pull, and then keep those per raid ID until they died or the instance reset. You'd have honest to god communication (gasp!) among your guild after each pull, and some weeks Hydross would be a huge pain in the ass because 'healer aggro is through the roof this week'. Raids would need to adjust strats accordingly, and there would need to be new general strategies formed. In the above example, healers would need to be positioned specially for in case they DID pull aggro, it wouldn't lead to Hydross crossing the beams and reverting to his other form. These wouldn't be the ONLY skills each boss had, but would be 'in addition' to his regular repertoire.

Back to the problem with trash pulls in Scarlet Monastery, I'd love to see it boiled down to two or three hard pulls, then to just perform the exact same pull over and over and over 12 times, only watching out for pats that don't get alerted when they look across the room and see their homies being slaughtered by blood-thirsty savages. The very idea of line of sight should apply to mobs, and this isn't me picking on WoW. In Warhammer, I'm able to walk up close enough to smell a mob, throw an axe past his face to hit the named quest mob, then turn around and run back to a safe area to kill the mob to complete my quest. I want mobs to be on my ass! If I can see them, they should see me, and it would actually make stealthing ahead to scope out the next room a necessary tactic. Hell, static spawn points for the mobs at all is silly, unless there's a specific reason they happen to be standing in the courtyard with their thumb up their asses. How awesome would it be to zone in and have a boss jump on your ass because that's where he happened to be when you zoned in? How awesome would it be to stand outside the instance portal, making sure everyone is ready to zone in together, just in case that happens?

I want mobs that feign death, and mobs that Vanish and try to sprint off, forcing us to react like we would in arena... "Quick! Demo Shout, he vanished! Don't let him get another group on us before we can drink!" Given the previous thing with the 80 Boss Abilities, why not have generic 'spell caster' or 'healing' mobs, and give them each random pools of their own to pull from? Sometimes the abilities wouldn't line up, and you'd get a mob that was too easy, or too hard, but every time you ran the dungeon it would be something new.

Mages and Platemail

2009-09-19T10:40:00.000-07:00

I've had a few theories about 'the perfect MMO' and what it would involve. Often, these actually go the opposite direction, and devolve into what an MMO shouldn't have. To me, there are far too many standards that are followed for the sake of following standards, and there needs to be a game that comes along and breaks every single mold, just for the sake of doing so. Warhammer is interesting, because they've introduced about two new elements to gameplay, and everyone is jumping around acting like the game is revolutionary.

Public Quests are neat, and XP for killing people probably didn't even start in Warhammer. Renown is basically honor, so that's not really new either. What I want to see in the next MMO is mages wearing platemail. I don't mean Deathknights, I mean any class can wear any piece of armor at any time. There would need to be guidelines, but nothing set in stone. That there's some magical barrier preventing me from putting chainmail on a priest is redonkulous. Each item should have stats tailored to fit the intended role (+INT on cloth, +AGI on leather), but if you want to be a mage wearing plate from head to toe, go for it!

Let's take a closer look. For starters, the fact that a rogue and tank move at the exact same running speed as every single other person on the server is stupid. Having armors use a weight system is a step in the right direction. Tanks should naturally move slower, because they have so much crap on, plus they're dragging a shield around as well. Stats like +STR could offset this, so your tank isn't permanently hamstringed. Start with a base 'naked running speed', and for every piece of platemail you wear you're slowed down by 4%... chain is 3, leather 2, cloth 1. See how easy that was? Of course everyone is already getting upset, because they think that I'm implying that everyone would be drastically slowed down from their current speed, but I'm talking about a complete overhaul from scratch. Of course it should make sense that my tank can run faster with nothing on. If he was running from point A to point B and got caught with his pants down, though, he'd pay the price. You could then factor in things like +STR or +AGI adding a movement bonus, and the penalty would cancel out if you geared 'PROPERLY'. Hell, you could even give yourself an edge if you chose to wear one or two pieces of cloth (or nothing), on your hands or wrists as a rogue.

Casters can wear chainmail, but they have a baseline "naked" global cooldown rate. Each piece of leather or plate they wear encumbers their casting speed, and they probably wouldn't want to wear plate anyway because the +STA and +STR stats don't do much for them, but there's no magical reason why they couldn't.

If you want to take armor a step even further, give each slot a specific 'use'. Boots could affect knockdown and stealth. Don't like being knocked on your ass as a mage? Wear plate boots. But a rogue will be KLONK KLONK KLONK-ing everywhere they walk, so it wouldn't be useful in stealth. Leather and cloth chest pieces allow for greater flexibility in combat, and therefore affect your dodge chance if worn. A platemail helm means you don't have to worry so much about deflecting blows to the head, and are therefore free to focus more of your attention on studying your opponents attacks more closely (+parry). Perhaps it could vary for each class; each item slot having different benefits per class. Mages wearing a plate helm would have the same 'confidence' in wearing a plate helm, but it would increase their chance to resist spell casting delay or knockback. It would open whole new talent builds! Warlocks soloing could slap a few pieces of plate on, and skip those talent points they spent is preventing knockback for drain tanking in the wild. In an instance or raid, they shouldn't be taking hits to the face anyway, so they could slap their cloth +damage gear on, and stand in the back DoTting and nuking away, with those talent points not going to 'waste' in a raid setting.

Similarly, being able to wield a 2h Axe, but being baffled by the concept of a 2h Sword makes no sense at all. I can hold a polearm, but those staves are just crazy! Daggers are okay for my hunter, but if the blade is longer than 6 inches, I might get confused and try to the hold the wrong end!

Give certain classes inherent bonuses to using certain weapons. Rogues get armor penetration with a dagger; Paladins are such holy goodie-goodies that if they slay an opponent with an axe, they're so overcome with remorse at the sight of the mess they've created from another living being that they're stunned for 2 seconds. Yet if a holy paladin wants to wield a staff with +healing LET THEM. Maybe a hunter has a better +hit or +crit chance with guns and bows, but a priest with +250 INT can't figure out where the trigger on a rifle is? Really?

This would be extra code to implement, but in the end, would make choosing gear a more thoughtful process. You'd have to weigh the pros and cons of each item, instead of just saying 'grats clothies' and moving on to the next pull.

Of course, it would be stupid of me to pretend I don't know why they do this. Loot-whoring noobs would roll need on everything if they were given the chance to. BUT MY MAGE NEEDS TO DUAL WIELD SHIELDS! Aside from the fact that seeing a mage in Arena wearing two shields would be double the awesome, you could just place a 5 second penalty on casting spells while wearing a shield and the problem solves itself. If said mage wants to channel 10 second frost novas, LET HIM. The game should reward players who are intelligent enough to wear gear that benefits their class, but if a certain clever user realizes that wearing cloth shoulder pads increases his melee attack speed on his rogue just enough to make it worth losing his 'normal' stats on that item, then let him play how he wants to. Power to the people, etc etc etc...

Similarly, it would open the door for interesting gear creation by the devs as well. Instead of every single piece of gear getting the 'default stats', certain greens that pop up in WoW would actually make sense. Ever clear the basement of Kara and get plate wrists '...of the Falcon' (+AGI and +INT) or some crap that suck for tanks and paladins alike? A mage in the raid could take a look and say "Hmm... +INT is always nice, and the +AGI would drop my GCD by .2 sec... sure, I'll take those for boss fights where I'm just nuking, and every second counts".

I think at first, people would be paralyzed by so many options, and the system would take getting used to. Once established, though, the system would work itself out, and seeing a mage rolling on plate boots or a chainmail helm wouldn't be such a big deal, especially since "Hey Mr. Asshole Hunter, thanks for taking the leather, the only type of armor I can wear as a Rogue" would become a thing of the past. Woo! Hunter weapons for everyone!

And Then I Remembered That I Don't Like Twitter

2009-09-15T01:15:00.001-07:00

I was watching Jimmy Fallon while slaving over a hot mouse pointer in InDesign, still working on this 40 page design doc I'm making, when he had John McCain on there and they were both talking about Twitter. Earlier in the day I saw news on the TV talking about some Yale student that was killed and stuffed in some wall at the research lab she worked at. It was all very depressing, but the news camera zoomed up on 'the discussion taking place on FaceBook' regarding this poor dead woman, and all the camera showed was some shit like "@_@ OMG I KNO! SERIOUSLY ITS SO WEIRD! I SAT RIGHT BEHIND HER IN SCIENSE!!! ^_~!!"

I wept for the world a bit, and then wearily did my duty and made a Twitter account, just so I could lock down the Ixobelle name on there for when I'm some world famous... guy. Apparently Kanye West got all upset that someone took 'Kanyewest' on twitter, so I reckoned I should save myself the anguish.

Yes, I'm truly back in America. Learning wonderful things. Apparently the president gave a speech or something recently? I must have missed that. I think I was watching football.

The ultimate... uhh... the top...

Yeah.

I don't even really know what to call it, just look:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but in this picture... I believe Twitter's instance servers are full.

Please try again later...?

Not likely.

Pattern Recognition in Humans (...with applications in MMOs)

2009-09-06T09:08:00.001-07:00

This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while. I've been putting it off, since it's a pretty big topic, but it may help explain a lot of frustrations we have with the genre -- and how the problem lies more within ourselves than the software.

While reading a post over at nakedmaninthetree, I was struck by a sentence:

The one thing I do understand about people is we have the ability to recognize patterns in a way that no other being on this Earth can.

What stood out, regardless of the fact that he was just talking about people in general, was how much it applied to our own tastes in gaming. When you think about a typical night of MMO-ing, there are so many actions we perform that are rudimentary patterns. From the larger overall pattern of an encounter that we've all done before, to various stages of individual class play. From a tank's opening threat generation pattern, to a tank's 'blow all cooldowns to survive the burst enrage phase' pattern. From a rogue's opener to their sustained DPS rotation for the duration of a long fight. A warlock opens a boss fight in a very specific pattern, and all (good) casters shift their rotations near the end of a fight to try and nuke it out and finish the fight with no leftover --and thus, wasted-- mana. Healers also have mini patterns they go through for various stages of fights, from 'topping everyone off before the incoming AoE' to 'spamming flash of light during Patchwerk nonstop, whether they need it or not'.

Rarely at any point during an encounter are we just randomly pushing buttons. Even when presented with a new mob type, we immediately classify it, and begin to fall into a pattern. Does this mob cast heals? Save your interrupt for the heal, and just soak the shadowbolts to the face for the time being. Do they tend to turn and run at 17% HP? Throw up a hamstring or root them around 20% to make that go smoother. Is there a red, spinning circle or patch of fire forming on the ground beneath your feet? You know what to do...

Now take a step back, outside of MMOs, and think about humans in general. We're especially proficient at recognizing patterns, to the point where we've conquered the planet and covered it in all sorts of pattern-spewing devices. From microwaves that beep when they want a reaction from us, to cell phones that we can program with distinct ringtones which we can then associate with individual contacts. Think of how ingrained the response to someone sneezing is. We say 'bless you' or 'gesundheit' without even thinking about it, really. These are surface, or top level, 'reactionary' patterns. Bumping into someone elicits 'excuse me', etc.

Then there are more ingrained, lower level, patterns we respond to. Music. Different timings to a beat. From the simple "Kick, Snare, Kick-Snare-Hi-Hat" of A Tribe Called Quest to the sublime appreciation of a symphony working together to create a single harmony. Lyrics or Poetry. The simple satisfaction of two words rhyming creates a sense of well being, or a feeling that 'it's correct' deep within us. A starfish is visually pleasing to our eye, because we pick up on the radial symmetry we see on display before us. Ferns exhibit a symmetry as well, where the structure of a single frond is mirrored in the leaves on said fronds, and then again on a smaller scale of the fern's circulatory system within those leaves.

I remember when I first went to art school, and my father sat down to try and explain one of the most rudimentary concepts of illustration to me. That the first two lines drawn below --although all four lines are the exact same curve-- feel "correct", because they "fit". There's a beauty there, and it resonates within us. He didn't mention our desire to see the pattern, per se, but it's the same underlying concept.

Okay. Enough about wavy lines, poetry, and starfish. Seriously. I'm just making a point, though, and trying to make you understand that it's there, in almost everything we do. Okay, so maybe one more example, that can help bring it back to MMOs.

Baseball. Specifically, the double play.

Anyone who knows anything about baseball knows how a double play typically unfolds. A ground drive to the shortstop, who tosses it to second base, who tags second, then spins and gets it to first base before the runner can get there in time. It's such a simple act, when viewed in slow motion, and often our brains know exactly what's going to happen the instant you see that ball hit towards the shortstop. You know it's going to mean two outs, and part of your brain relishes watching it unfold exactly according to plan. *This* instant of satisfaction is the same thing we feel when Emalon pumps up an add in VOA, and we (hopefully) notice said mob's debuffs begin to pile up. You know everything is going according to plan, the DPS have all made the switch, and all will be well. We know how the fight plays out, it's being part of a team; executing the toss-to-second-throw-to-first before the mob reaches a ten stack and explodes, wiping the raid.

It's the same trepidation we feel when the DPS is slow, and we notice that the mob has eight stacks now, and we aren't going to kill it in time. The shortstop fumbled the ball, and got it to the second basemen a bit slow. The runner is going to make it to first, and we're all going to die in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1... oh wait, lol, I'm a warlock and lived, oh shit here he comes with no tank to taunt, hrm. Yeah.

And yet we complain. There isn't enough new content to consume, or hard modes are only the same fight with a tiny twist. Hardly enough of a new pattern to suss out and hone to perfection.

I think the point needs to be made that THIS is what the genre offers. Until we reach the stage when every pull is a brand new experience (which I heartily endorse), then we're just running through the same motions, once a week, until the raid ID resets. That doesn't bother me, though.

Baseball is the same game every time, in theory, as well. Three outs per side for nine innings. They don't even get (drastically) different arenas to run their motions out in, and yet it's hugely popular. It's finding the variety within the strict rule sets that makes each game worth watching. It's watching the outfielders slam into each other as they both race to catch a pop fly, and then seeing it land harmlessly on the ground that's the best part of the game. It's seeing the warlock zone out for a second, pull threat, and scramble to shatter as Emalon turns toward him that makes WoW worth playing. With ~~respect~~ apologies to Gevlon, Morons and Slackers make the game FUN. Well... they make it interesting, anyway. The ultimate pinnacle of awesome in a pitcher's lifetime is to achieve a perfectly pitched game where no one got a single hit. I can't imagine a more boring game to watch. A Naxx run where no one dies is certainly an achievement (literally), but is it as exciting as seeing everyone in the raid die and having that lone resto shaman zap Gruul dead with an earthshock while everyone holds their breath?

Within the strictly defined 'ways to play', you have the option to either test the very outside limit of what you can do and still live through it, or just play out your role and enjoy the satisfaction of knowing you played your role within a well oiled machine. Both have their places.

We strive to find the patterns within everything, and this genre we've chosen gives us ample opportunity to slide into well greased grooves every time we blink. If you aren't enjoying the game anymore, then perhaps you're a victim of your own making. Go PvP as a warrior with prot gear on for a change, or (here's a shocker) raid with YOUR VERY OWN TALENT SPEC. Don't fall into the rut of the 'defined' role you're meant to fill, and if you're guild doesn't understand, then don't think those are the only people you're capable of playing with. Suffer through a PUG, dammit. It'll put some hair on your chest.

Mix it up. It's good to break the mold once in a while.