Tobold's MMORPG Blog

Some random WoW pet store thoughts

2009-11-06T08:33:00.000+01:00

I'm not buying either of the two pets on offer. I expect them to be fun for about 5 minutes, and most of that fun you can experience by watching somebody else's pet, and save your money.
The $5 to charity deal (limited time offer, and only valid for one of the two pets) is a scam. If you disagree, I have an offer for you: Send me $10, and I promise to send $5 of it to charity.
Blizzard used to be one of the few game companies with a basic understanding of exchange rates. Playing WoW in Europe is more expensive than in the US, but not by a stupid factor of 1.5 from an $1 = €1 calculation used by other companies, like Steam. But this isn't true for the pet shop, a pet costs €10 in Europe, £9 in the UK. That makes the UK pet more expensive than the cheapest monthly subscription rate! Europeans pay $15 for the exactly same pet that Americans pay $10 for.
Dragon Age: Origins has microtransactions too. I understand the part where you buy additional playable content. But instead of buying items that make the game easier, you could just change the game's difficulty level. And why would you pay for vanity items in a single-player game?
I don't care if you think that $10 or $15 isn't "micro" any more. I'm still using the term "microtransaction" for buying virtual items from the game company for real money. I'm using RMT for buying virtual currency *from other players and companies*, just to have two different terms for two very different things.
Do microtransactions make baby murlocs cry?

Dragon Age: Murphy's Law

2009-11-06T06:30:00.004+01:00

In an extremely predictable sequence of events dictated by Murphy's Law, I first bought Dragon Age: Origins via Steam, and promptly got an e-mail from EA's marketing people saying that they decided to send me a review copy after all, and that it's in the mail. In hindsight of course I should have waited, but at least by buying the game a few hours before it came out I got some pre-purchase bonus in-game items.

Well, I started playing, and did both a dwarf commoner warrior, and an elf mage, playing them until their stories converge. First impression is that the mage is overpowered, having ranged magic dps, crowd control, and healing. As it is a lot easier to pick up various melee types for your party, playing a mage as your main guarantees you always have a healer around, plus excellent dps, which is a great tactical advantage. I'm enjoying Dragon Age: Origins very much up to now, due to combat being a lot more tactical than most MMORPGs. Even at normal difficulty setting you can't just storm into every fight on automatic settings and expect to come out alive.

I'll play this a good deal more, before I write a review of the game.

Blizzard introduces microtransactions

2009-11-05T06:43:00.002+01:00

A lot of people have previously argued that while Blizzard will take extra money from you for services like server moves or race changes, they aren't selling you any virtual items for real money. That isn't true any more. Via MMO-Champion and WoW.com comes the news that Blizzard now officially launched a microtransaction shop for their game, the Pet Store. For $10 you will be able to buy an in-game pet for World of Warcraft.

Right now there are only 2 of them available, a pandaren monk and a miniature Kel’Thuzad. Others will undoubtedly follow. Then maybe other fluff items (armor dyes would sell well, Blizzard!). And later this could be expanded to classics of microtransaction shops like double XP scrolls, mounts, and various other things.

I think I just won an argument with one of my readers who swore that no AAA MMORPG like World of Warcraft would ever add microtransactions. Wake up and smell the coffee, people! Microtransactions are now officially arrived on the list of possible features for every MMORPG. Once World of Warcraft does it, many other games that don't have microtransactions will copy them.

Dragon Age: Absence

2009-11-04T16:54:00.003+01:00

So Dragon Age: Origins is all over the internet today, having been released in the USA yesterday. Europe only gets the game this Friday, which is one reason why I'm not yet playing it. The other reason is more complicated:

Since some time somebody working for a public relations agency emloyed by EA to promote Dragon Age: Origins sends me regular e-mails with news about the game, and links to where I can download publicity materials. And they offered me a review copy of Dragon Age: Origins weeks ago, asking me to preferably write a review before the release date. That review copy never arrived. Yesterday, the day of the release, I got a mail instead, saying "I should hear back from EA later this week about whether I'm able to secure a review copy for your site. I'll keep you posted."

This has the somewhat perverse effect of me being reluctant to buy Dragon Age: Origins and to review it. If EA ends up sending me a free copy, it would be stupid to pay for the game as well. But as they apparently aren't really sure about whether they want to send me that free copy, I'm a bit stuck. If I didn't have this half-promise of a free game, I'd certainly buy Dragon Age: Origins. But the way EA handles their public relations ends up with me hesitating to buy the game, and in consequence not writing a review. That can't be what EA had planned when they wrote me.

[P.S. I'm just seeing that Rohan from Blessing of Kings has exactly the same problem]

Thought for the day: Ignorance

2009-11-04T06:52:00.002+01:00

How come that every time an outage of Blizzard's servers in mainland China is reported, some people reply with comments about the effect that has on Chinese gold farmers? Isn't it blindingly obvious that if you wanted to shut out gold farmers of whatever nationality, you'd need to close down the US/Euro servers, not the Chinese ones? How do people imagine that gold is transferred from Chinese servers to US/Euro buyers?

Blizzard's Chinese adventure

2009-11-03T09:09:00.004+01:00

Reuters reports that Blizzard's troubles in China aren't over yet. The General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) regulator ordered the Chinese distributor of WoW to "suspend charging users to play the game, and disallow new account registrations". Activision shares promptly dropped 4.3% yesterday. But analysts said that "the Chinese market for World of Warcraft accounts for 5 to 6 cents a year of Activision's earnings", which is less than 10 percent.

This is a good opportunity to clarify something about numbers: It isn't the number of players that counts, but the amount of revenue from these players. Thus, if WoW China is shut down again, and World of Warcraft player numbers drop from 11 million to around 5 million again, this might look like a big drop. But as the 5 million players are contributing 90% of the revenue, while the 6 million Chinese players only contribute the remaining 10%, the actual impact is a lot smaller.

You have to be very careful with the numbers that companies announce. Champions Online recently announced 1 million ... characters created, not active subscribers. As this counts all the people who bought the game and quit since release, and also counts every player who created several characters multiple times, the "1 million" number gives a completely inaccurate picture of the success of Champions Online. The same thing is true with free Facebook games, like FarmVille having 60 million players: This counts everyone who ever signed up, played 5 minutes and left. And even from those who actively play, only a small minority pays anything. The company running these games is making millions in revenue, but compared to the billion dollar revenue of World of Warcraft that still isn't that impressive.

If you disagree, and think that big numbers automatically mean big bucks, I have a blog with 3 million visitors to sell for you.

Magic: The Gathering - Tactics

2009-11-03T08:00:00.002+01:00

Freixa alerted me to the announcement of Magic: The Gathering - Tactics, which is an online 3D turn-based strategy game developed by Wizards of the Coast and SOE, to be released in early 2010. Now my heart should be jumping for joy, because I was a big fan of Magic, and I love turn-based strategy games. But unfortunately there are several alarm bells ringing in my head when I read the announcement:

Announcement in late 2009 for a game that is to come out in early 2010? The website and teaser trailer are so extremely void of any useful information about this game that I can't help but wonder how far they are in the development, and what the budget was. Right now this all looks extremely half-baked to me.

Unfortunately the people making it don't inspire much confidence in me either. The previous online version of Magic, called Magic the Gathering Online (MtGO) suffered from countless technical problems and design flaws. Version 3.0 of MtGO was announced and postponed for years, until it finally came out and disappointed.

So, considering that the last good computer game based on Magic the Gathering came out in 1997, I'm somewhat sceptical. I really, really hope this game is going to be good, but I'm not holding my breath.

Getting over fear of digital rejection

2009-11-03T06:30:00.001+01:00

CNN Tech has an interesting article about the fear of digital rejection, with people reacting strongly to seemingly trivial acts, like being defriended by somebody on Facebook. I personally once got extremely annoyed about having been kicked out of a pickup group; silly, because I knew I was the third healer they kicked out, and they never realized the "we can't seem to find a good healer" might not have been the actual problem, but hurting nevertheless.

And of course the fear of digital rejection is something that bloggers have to live with. You post this absolutely brilliant idea, and get 20 comments on how it'll never work, and that's just the polite ones. Quite often your qualification to discuss the subject is put into question, for all sorts of strange reasons. Gothie sent me a post by some science blogger who was very annoyed for having been rejected on another science site just because he didn't give his real name. While that digital rejection certainly hurt him, the reason for the rejection can point us in the right direction how to get over the fear of digital rejection: We need to realize that we are not our digital personae.

My passport doesn't say "Tobold", technically "Tobold" doesn't exist. There is me, a flesh and blood real human, with a real life, who chose to create the "Tobold" persona for my writing about MMO games and other subjects. The decision to use an online persona and hiding my real name has consequences on the amount of trust other people put into "Tobold". Somebody using his real name on the internet for MMO blogging (Raph Koster, Dr. Richard Bartle) or being known both under a pseudonym PLUS his real name (Scott "Lum the Mad" Jennings, Brian "Psychochild" Green) automatically evokes more trust. In the other direction, somebody commenting on my blog as "Anonymous", is less trusted than somebody always using the same pseudonym. Trust is simply based on an impression of knowing somebody. I know him well, I trust him. No, he is a stranger, I don't trust him.

On the internet most of this "knowing" each other is an illusion. You don't know me, we never met, and you wouldn't recognize my face if you saw me (I admit, that photo ID in the upper right corner of the blog is fake too :) ). You might trust me because you think you know me, because you read my blog for a long time, and thus know some of my beliefs and preferences. But my evil "I am Gevlon" joke this year was a perfect demonstration on how easily that trust is shattered. In a perfect world the validity of any argument I make in a blog post does not depend on who I am. But because people's brains process information based on how trusted the source of the information is, suddenly the illusion of knowing me matters a lot.

Once you apply a reality check to your online relations, you'll realize that you don't know many of your online friends all that well. At best you'll have an accurate picture of some aspect of somebody, like if you read all my blog, you'd get a pretty good idea how I think about MMORPGs. At worst the hot avatar you were cybering turns out to be a fat, middle-aged guy.

As we don't really know each other if we only meet online, the digital rejection is also never more than partial, and often based on partial or even incorrect information. People jump to conclusions, often wrong ones, and then react on that false conclusion with rejection. I can easily see that when I moderate comments: I regularly get negative comments based on the commenters conclusion that I'm either a fanboi or hater of this or that game, when in fact I'm neither, I see good and bad in every game. If somebody doesn't know me, and obviously doesn't understand what I'm saying, why should I feel disappointed about his digital rejection of me? In fact people threatening to "unsubscribe" from my blog always make me chuckle.

But I admit that this isn't always that easy. The sting of rejection is felt accutely by most people, even if on closer inspection the relationship that was rejected was far from being a close one. Only the most anti-social among us are immune, or at least pretend to be so. Probably our brains are hardwired for social interactions which are very different from the online social interactions we experience nowadays. Rejection by your Neanderthal tribe was a big thing, and could affect your survival. Being defriended by a friend of a friend on Facebook isn't. We just need to adjust to the new reality.

Getting tired of Facebook games

2009-11-02T12:39:00.002+01:00

My excursion into the world of Facebook games was a short one, I'm already quickly losing interest. While Teut let me know that social network farming games are all the rage in China, I still have problems understanding what the fun is supposed to be. I click once to plow my field, once to plant, and once again to harvest, and that is where the gameplay ends. Multiply that with 200 fields on a 14x14 farm, and you'll get a big click-fest, but still not much fun. And the only "strategy" consists in choosing what to plant, with me having a preference for slow crops, because then I need to do those 600 clicks only every 3 or 4 days.

If I continue that for a while, I'll be able to afford a tractor, which presumably will save me some clicking. But the fuel for the tractor can apparently only be bought with "Farm Cash", which you can only get with real money, or by signing up for "free" FarmCash from advertisers. Surprise, surprise, mbp warns me that many of these "free" offers are scams, with users involuntarily signing up for some subscription they didn't want, and ending up paying more for the "free" Farm Cash than if they had just bought it.

No wonder people are increasingly suspicious of the microtransaction business model. While there are lot of good examples of microtransactions being used in a transparent way to buy access to more content in a good game, the frequent use of microtransactions in opaque scams for "games" that don't really have much gameplay, and where you are basically just wasting time and money to advance in a meaningless social competition makes people wary. But then of course a lot of people think that monthly subscription MMORPGs are also just a waste of time and money to advance in a meaningless social competition. So maybe I'm biased when I say that interesting gameplay is the minimum I expect from a game. Apparently for some people it is sufficient if they just get virtual rewards, even if the game doesn't amount to anything much.

Two economies

2009-11-01T08:15:00.003+01:00

When playing a lower level character in World of Warcraft, one thing that constantly surprises me is how separated the fixed, NPC-based economy has become from the variable, player-based economy. Looting a level 30ish mob gives my character around 1 silver worth of cash and vendor loot. But finding just one mining node, even copper, already nets me around 1 gold. And recently I was lucky to have a blue random world drop, Feet of the Lynx, a highly desirable twink item, and it sold for over 100 gold.

The reason for this disparity is the level-based inflation that all level-based games share. Basically the only real unit of currency in a MMORPG is time. Thus the amount of copper you can mine in one hour is "worth" 1 hour. And how much that corresponds to in gold depends on what the highest level character can easily make in gold in 1 hour. As long as high-level characters buy low-level materials and items for their twinks, the price of these materials and items depend on the income of the high-level characters, not on those of the low-level characters.

As long as the low-level character never visits the auction house, he'll be stuck in the low-level economy, where you look silver, and your training costs, repair costs, and flying fees are also in silver. As soon as he hits the auction house, everything is priced in gold. We won't be able to buy anything useful with the silver he looted. But on the bright side, if he has something to sell, he'll sell it for gold, and can then use that gold to participate in the other economy.

The downside for the developers is that they lost control over the low-level economy. Nobody really cares any more how much silver a low-level mob drops, or how much it costs to train a low-level spell or ability, it's all just rounding errors in the price level of the high-level economy. I can't think of a good solution for that, can you?

How my wife got a new graphics card

2009-10-31T06:30:00.002+01:00

In February this year I bought a new computer. High-end system, except for the graphics card, a Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX (1 GB), which even at the time was more upper mid-range. So the idea was to replace it when I could find a better card without the ridiculous price tag of a GTX 285 or 295. So meanwhile Nvidia launched the GTX 275, and I was reading nice things about it.

At the same time my wife said she wanted a new screen for her computer, replacing a 17" 4:3 screen with a 22" wide screen. Great, one "find a present for the wife" problem solved. But her computer has a Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS (640 MB) graphics card, and I worried that this card wouldn't handle a 1680 x 1050 resolution all that well. So I came up with this brilliant plan: I buy a new GTX 275 for myself, and put my old 9800 GTX in my wife's computer, everybody happy.

I mail-ordered the card last week, and it arrived yesterday. First surprise was the box it came in, which was bigger than my computer. At that moment I was still laughing, because I correctly assumed that much of the content of the box was packing material. I unpacked the card, unplugged my computer, opened it up, removed the old graphics card and tried to put in the new graphics card. No luck! The Gainward GTX 275 is *really* bigger than my computer. Or rather, it's too long, having a full 9.5" length, and there being only about 8" of space for a graphics card in my Antec 900 mid tower case. Doh! They didn't mention card length in the system requirements!

My wife's computer however has a much longer case ...

So now my wife got a brand new GTX 275 graphics card. The jump in performance from a 8800 GTS to a GTX 275 is astounding, for example the Furmark score jumps by a factor of over 3. This solves the problem of her having a card able to handle a new screen with higher resolution. But I'm still stuck with my 9800 GTX. And I have no idea how to find a new graphics card which would be an upgrade, and actually fit in my Antec 900 case. The sites selling graphics cards don't even mention card length, and even most of the reviews you can find don't include physical measurement. Those I did find for other GTX 275 cards show that other brands are even longer, not shorter. I doubt that the GTX 275 even exists in a short version. :(

Vanity lasts forever

2009-10-30T06:15:00.000+01:00

I log on my level 80 characters in World of Warcraft every day, but most of the time only to do things like the daily jewelcrafting quest, or alchemy transmutes with 23 hours cooldown. The rest of the time is spent between working on my inscription business, and playing alts, with my paladin being level 36 now, and my druid level 29. The gear my level 80s are wearing hasn't changed for quite a while. I just haven't been motivated to gather things for them. With one exception: I did spend several hours getting two vanity mounts for my priest.

My warrior already had several vanity epic flying mounts, from doing daily quests at level 70. My priest, although technically my "main", and having much better gear, was still riding his racial epic mount, and flying the standard epic flying mount, because he didn't have anything else. So I was quite happy when during Brewfest the epic ram dropped for my priest. Then I decided I need a new epic flyer too, and started grinding Cenarion Expedition reputation until I was exalted and could buy the hippogryph.

Now why would I spend time and gold on a vanity mount, and not be interested in improving my epic gear? Two reasons: Acquiring epic gear by raiding is only useful for raiding, it is a self-contained cycle, you raid so you can raid more. Nobody needs epic gear to do daily quests, and for heroics I'm more than well enough geared. And the second reason is that vanity items have better lasting value.

Just look at the level 70 vanity epic flyers my warrior is riding, the Netherwing Drake and the Nether Ray. Yes, they required me to grind a lot of daily quests back at level 70. But I'm still using them at level 80, and I will still use them at level 85. My priest spent level 70 gathering raid epics, which I promptly ditched shortly after Wrath of the Lich King came out. And the level 80 epics I'm wearing now with my priest will again be replaced by new gear at level 85, while I'll still be riding the Brewfest ram, and the CE hippogryph mounts.

Yeah, so the vanity mounts are just fluff, and aren't actually any faster than the standard variety. And it seems the main use of some vanity mounts for some people is that they are so big that you can obstruct the access to flight masters with them. But I do like the option to ride something else than my standard horse or flyer, just to pretend that I'm individual. They are for vanity only, but vanity lasts forever, and so do vanity mounts. Epic gear by comparison has a rather short "best before" date.

What patch 3.3 really changes

2009-10-29T11:07:00.003+01:00

World of Warcraft has been patched quite often in the last 5 years, and even big content patches aren't all that rare. Which is why generally patches aren't exciting me much any more. Sure, adding more dungeons and raid dungeons is nice, but ultimately the new dungeons will play pretty much like the old ones did, just with better rewards. And I'm way past getting all bothered because Blizzard "nerfs" this or that class by changing the effect of some talent from 4.3456% to 3.9876% bonus. Having said that, I'm extremely excited about patch 3.3, not because of all this usual stuff, but because of the major changes to social engineering that are in that patch. The big question is: Will patch 3.3 be the patch in which Blizzard after 5 years of countless attempts finally gets the looking for group functionality right?

To summarize the new system in a short feature list, this is what patch 3.3 does to the LFG system, according to MMO Champion:

Join as a Group or Solo
Cross-Realm Instances/Grouping
Instance Teleporting
Smarter Group Matching
Daily Random Dungeons
Repeat Random Dungeons
Choose Multiple Dungeons
Vote Kick system
Lovin’ the PUG Bonuses
Looking For Raid
Need Before Greed Updated
Group Disenchanting

Plus the LFG chat channel will again be disconnected from the LFG system, so maybe finally people will stop using the Trade chat channel to find groups. All this sounds extremely promising, and way more than I had initially hoped for when Blizzard announced cross-server dungeon functionality. These changes make *sense*, for example rewarding people for joining a PuG is the perfect response to PuGs being unpopular.

Of course we will still have to see how all this works out. But at the very least the changes should make finding a group at the level cap a lot easier, and more rewarding. And if I dare to hope, maybe I might even be able to find level-appropriate groups for level-appropriate dungeons for my lower level alts! As I said, Icecrown and all, nice, but ultimately that's just yet another content patch. But if the new LFG system works well, this will have a profound and long-lasting influence on how World of Warcraft is played. Here's hoping.

Good times for budget gaming

2009-10-29T06:56:00.002+01:00

I had a short look at Torchlight yesterday, and it was a pleasant surprise. I could get it via Steam the day it came out (initial plans had been a Steam release 30 days later), and for once as a European I didn't have to overpay much: 15 Euro, which today is equivalent to $22.50, and thus not all that far from the $20 the US players pay. Torchlight is very much cloning the gameplay of Diablo 1:1, with a village and quest givers upstairs, and a random dungeon downstairs. Graphics are modern, and cartoonish, which I personally like very much. The big advantage of cartoonish graphics is that they run better than any attempts of photorealistic even on low spec machines, and they age a lot better too. Torchlight has system specs so low, it actually has a button for netbook settings in the graphical options.

Lots of other games have tried to clone Diablo, but none has come so close to the fun of the original than Torchlight. And they added some new features, like you having a pet which fights, helps to carry your inventory, and can even be sent to sell your loot and come back with the cash. There are three classes, with three talent trees each. And Runic plans to expand Torchlight into a Free2Play MMO in 18 months, although I'm not sure if that is just a fancy way of announcing the equivalent of Battle.net. Not bad for a budget game for 20 bucks.

If you can't even afford that, I'd recommend you to check out Dragon Age Journeys, a free browser RPG EA set up to promote Dragon Age Origins. For a Flash game it is surprisingly well done, nice combat system, and giving player a glimpse into the world of Dragon Age Origins. Which happens to be all I got right now, because after EA first asking me where to send a review copy and could I please write a review of Dragon Age Origins before release on November 3rd, the word now is "we should be getting word on review copies shortly. I’ll let you know asap when I hear if I’m able to reserve a copy for your site and when I anticipate it will be shipped." Dear EA, I'm happy to hear you haven't totally given up on me yet, but if you haven't even shipped your review copies on October 29th, you won't get your reviews before launch.

Generation conflict theory applied to MMORPGs

2009-10-28T08:41:00.002+01:00

Once you checked out the video I linked to in my previous post, it is an interesting excercise to apply Clint Hocking's generation conflict theory of video games to the narrower field of MMORPGs. The original Dungeons & Dragons pen and paper roleplaying game, published in 1974, is very much a product of the baby boomer generation, being all about free interaction between players.

The generation X version of roleplaying was Everquest: punishing, and abusive, and all about achievement, and beating the fixed challenges of the game. But EQ had inherited a social component from D&D, almost involuntarily: If you create the Matrix in the generation X style as objective reality against which players bang their head, the real-life fact that doing something together is usually easier than doing something alone invariably sneeks in. The more punishing and abusive you make the virtual world, the more players are forced to play together, to cooperate. But generation X is a generation of lone wolfs cherishing their independance, and so they called this feature "forced grouping" and hated it.

World of Warcraft started out with a generation X base, but with the knowledge that players hate forced grouping. So the generation X loner's dream of a massively single-player online RPG was created. But of course if you have a game in which grouping is possible at all, and in which you want to enable soloing, this turns out to be incompatible with the generation X idea of games having to be punishing and abusive. You need to lower the bar for single players to be able to overcome the challenge, because the minute they can't get over a hurdle alone, they'll group up. In the end the only way Blizzard found to make content that was hard, was to create instances with a limit on group size. Note that in vanilla WoW group limits weren't totally fixed yet, you could still do Stratholme and Scholomance with 10 people, or UBRS with 15.

I think it is best to see World of Warcraft as a game between generation X and generation Y. The lowering of the bar necessary for generation X to solo it, simultaneously fulfilled the generation Y condition of a game having to be more accessible and forgiving. If you compare other features from Everquest and WoW, you'll find more generation Y influences: The death penalty has been lowered significantly, and gameplay is guided by handing out a steady stream of rewards from quests. World of Warcraft being a game with both generation X and generation Y influences makes it both successful, because all generations want to play it, and a battlefield of the generation conflict. As Clint Hocking predicts with his demographics, generation Y appears to be winning that conflict, with WoW definitively moving towards ever more forgiving gameplay, and handing our rewards to everyone for participation, not just top performance. The increase in social features, like the patch 3.3 new group finding system and the Cataclysm guild cooperative features are pure generation Y.

Nevertheless, the generation X roots of World of Warcraft are too strong to ever turn it into a pure generation Y game. Which is where Blizzard's next generation MMORPG comes in. People often wonder how Blizzard is planning to make a next generation MMORPG without canibalizing the WoW user base. I think part of the answer is that the next generation MMORPG will be very much a generation Y game, with little generation X influence left over. I expect the next Blizzard MMORPG to be a lot more cooperative, with a lot more social networking than WoW has, and with a lot less of the generation X aspects of players trying to overcome static challenges. Of course generation X players will hate that game, and deride it, but by the time it comes out generation X will be past its prime anyway, especially in the teen to young adult age group most likely spending their time in virtual worlds. The next generation Blizzard MMORPG might resemble A Tale in the Desert and Facebook more than it resembles Everquest.

Generation conflict

2009-10-28T06:29:00.005+01:00

If I could have one hour of your time, I'd propose you spend that hour watching Clint Hocking talking about gamer generations on Teut's blog. Clint Hocking is Creative Director of Ubisoft Montreal, responsible for games like Splinter Cell and Far Cry 2, and talked at the International Game Developers Association meet in Montreal last February. While the video is long, and gets off to a slow start, it then explains brilliantly Clint's theory of gamer generations.

While the very first video games were made by the generation of baby boomers (which happens to be my generation) born between 1946 and 1964, the exponential growth of the video game industry, and its tendency to hire young people, means that in 2000 80% of game developers were members of generation X, born between 1965 and 1981. But there is a generational change ahead, with generation Y, born between 1982 and 2001, about to take over by 2015.

Clint says that generation X "doesn't play nice with other people", but they prefer abusive, punishing, single-player games, or multiplayer games in which they dominate the other players. Generation Y is a lot more social oriented (not unlike baby boomers), cooperative, and prefer games that hand out rewards left and right, and are very forgiving. That kind of relabels the hardcore vs. casual conflict into a generational X vs. Y conflict, but gives it an inevitable demographic shift direction towards generation Y. But Clint expresses some hope that generation Y learns how to handle handing out rewards better than just giving everyone the same, and that they can solve the hard problem of immersion in the context of games, especially multi-player games. "Generation X always imagined that the Matrix was an objective reality, created by machines, and given meaning by our senses. Generation Y is going to discover that the Matrix is an aggregate subjective reality, created by players, and given meaning by our hearts."

Being a baby boomer, I agree with generation Y that kicking other people's ass cannot be the ultimate meaning and purpose of games. But when I look at the strong effect of trivial rewards on people's behavior, I have to agree with generation X that it doesn't make sense to just hand them out to everyone, regardless of performance and behavior. Having discovered how powerful rewards are, we must now use them to encourage positive behavior. Too bad that generation X and generation Y will never be able to agree what exactly "positive behavior" is. So here I'm with generation Y again, hoping that it will mean cooperation and social interaction, and not just striving to perform well in an artificial, abusive, and punishing virtual reality.

WoW hunter changed to shooter gameplay

2009-10-27T15:06:00.002+01:00

When Blizzard announced Cataclysm, they also announced that the hunter class in World of Warcraft would undergo significant changes, not using mana any more. At the time that bit of news went unnoticed, due to all the other significant changes to the game. But now Blizzard revealed more about the changes to hunter gameplay, and the changes are more significant than we originally thought: Instead of using hotkey abilities with mana, hunters in combat will now change into "aiming mode", with a crosshair in the middle of their screen. Using the mouse wheel they can change between first-person and third-person view. The keyboard selects what kind of shot they want to fire, but the actual firing is done by targeting the enemy with the crosshair and clicking the mouse. The WoW hunter class is being changed to classic shooter gameplay. Apparently lots of people complained that the standard auto-attack plus hotkey combat was too slow, and not really appropriate for the hunter class. So in future a big part of the damage calculation for hunters will depend on how well you aim your crosshair. This is an attempt to modernize World of Warcraft, shooter gameplay apparently is more popular with the younger crowd.

If this piece of fake news fooled you, you're too gullible for the internet. I would have saved it for April fools' day, but we'll probably know too much about Cataclysm already at that date for any fake news about the expansion to be believable.

The reason I wrote this, is to get you thinking about gameplay changes in World of Warcraft and the MMORPG genre in general. You might think changing WoW hunter gameplay to mimic first-person shooters is an outlandish idea. But if we'd find somebody who has played Everquest in 2000, hasn't seen any MMORPG since, and we show him a typical WoW raid combat, he'll probably find the current combat gameplay as outlandishly strange as a FPS hunter. MMORPG combat in general, and World of Warcraft combat in particular, has become a lot faster. Having to make decisions faster and to press buttons quicker than before makes combat harder. So to balance that, tactical aspects of combat have been made easier: Aggro management is a lot easier now than in vanilla WoW, and mana management has become downright trivial for many classes.

Not only don't I like the change towards faster, less tactical gameplay, but also I have a sad feeling of déjà vu. Once upon a time I was happily playing turn-based strategy games, enjoying the gameplay based on interesting tactical decision making. Then real-time strategy games came along, removing a lot of tactical decision making and replacing it by speeding up gameplay. That was a lot more popular with the mass market, and turn-based strategy games disappeared from the main stream. Nowadays they are niche products, made for a small community of grognards, with titles like Europa Universalis or Heart of Iron, which are pretty much inaccessible for the average gamer. Or there is a small turn-based part leading to big real-time battles, like in the Total War series. The best turn-based games nowadays are remakes like King's Bounty, or indie games like Fantasy Wars. The big games from big companies with big budgets are all real-time strategy games now.

So MMORPGs getting faster and less tactical is something that worries me, because I don't know where it will end. Is the future FPS-RPGs like Borderlands transformed into massively multiplayer games? Do you agree that MMORPGs have become faster and faster over this decade, and is this something you like or dislike?

Eldergoth Alganon Review

2009-10-27T07:02:00.002+01:00

Carson 63000 from Eldergoth has posted a great review of Alganon, to which I have not much to add, except some personal history:

In March 2009 I was asked by Quest Online whether I would be willing to play the closed Alganon beta and give them some feedback, basically unpaid consulting work. I agreed, played the closed beta for a while and came back with exactly the same conclusions that Carson lists in his review: Alganon is a badly done clone of WoW, with very few unique selling points, and lots of bugs. There are other games, notably Runes of Magic, who do a better job of copying World of Warcraft, and which are Free2Play. I can't imagine anyone wanting to pay a monthly fee for Alganon if even just playing the completely free part of RoM is much better. I advised the guys from Quest Online to make some radical changes, for example making the combat system much different from WoW's, to have some distinguishing feature. Apparently they didn't listen.

I have the greatest respect for small game companies trying to survive in a harsh world of corporate giants. But making inferior clones of the games from corporate giants and then charging the same monthly fee for it is a strategy that is doomed to failure. The role of the small game company is to make games like Brice or World of Goo, which are innovative, even if they weren't made with a multi-million dollar budget. In MMORPGs their role is to provide niche games that do things radically different than the mainstream games. Look at A Tale in the Desert from eGenesis, Puzzle Pirates from Three Rings Design, or even at Darkfall from Aventurine (if you are into S&M and PvP) if you want to see how a small game company can make a successful MMORPG. Alganon is just plain bad.

Facebook games: Scam or useful tool?

2009-10-26T10:47:00.002+01:00

While I am present on Facebook as Tobold Stoutfoot, I wasn't actually using Facebook all that much up to about a week ago. Then I read somebody claiming that the future of gaming was Facebook apps, some of which already have millions of players, and I decided to see for myself what the fuzz was about. I tried out several different Facebook games, and quickly realized certain commonalities. These games all work along the same simple lines:

1) Gameplay is extremely simple, and does not require a whole lot of tactical or strategic thought. Basically you click on something, and you get a reward. The next reward is never more than a few clicks away. And it is very obvious what to do to get the next reward, so your chance of failure is small. Facebook games are simple Skinner boxes.

2) All these apps have some important elements based on real time. As you are rewarded for a few simple clicks, the game basically needs to stop you from doing those simple clicks for hours repeatedly and rise to the top too fast. Real time elements are the answer to that, in different forms. Either your click starts a process for which you can gather the reward only hours later, or you have a maximum number of activity you can do before your pool of energy / stamina / whatever runs out, and you need to wait hours for it to refill. In consequence you are encouraged to play Facebook games in short spurts, not taking more than a few minutes, but to come back every day, or even several times per day.

3) With the real time elements braking you out, it is likely that you feel an urge to advance faster than the game will let you. But, lo and behold, the Facebook app also offers a way out from that dilemma: Microtransactions. You can buy yourself more clicks, leading to more rewards per time unit. Or you can even buy the rewards themselves, for cash. I begin to see why some people are so rabidly opposed to microtransactions, because with Facebook apps you really see just the worst kind of them. For those who don't want to spend money on game advantages directly, there are also lots of indirect ways: The game company has commercial partners, who will give you whatever reward points the game uses in exchange for you signing up for something like ring-tones, or at least for agreeing to be bombarded with advertising.

4) Facebook apps are using the power of social networks. If you and your friends are playing the same game, you can help each other, even if you aren't online at the same time. There is always some mechanism which allows you to recruit your friends, and get some in-game advantage from that. The further you advance in the game, the more often you will actually *need* friends to do certain things. The Facebook app will also encourage you to plaster your "wall" with announcements of your progress, and even offer your friends rewards if they click on those announcements to join the game.

And that is it, the general principle of Facebook games. The purpose is rather obvious: Get people hooked with easy rewards, then block them from gaining those rewards as fast as they want, make them pay you money directly or via another company, and encourage them to invite all their friends to participate. It is an extremely effective way to make money with games, because much of the game is in the interaction of the players with his friends, and doesn't cost the game company anything to produce.

My apologies to those of you who have me as friend of Facebook, and who had to endure a lot of Facebook spam being caused by me trying out the various functionalities of different Facebook games!

Now we could just judge this to be an elaborate scam, and be done with it. But I'm not in the business of judging games, I'm in the business of analyzing them. While I find these Facebook apps to be somewhat distasteful, I do recognize that they "work". Which makes me think that instead of using the working part to squeeze out the maximum amount of money from players, and entice them to get their friends hooked as well, for a minimum amount of game actually delivered, we could use the same principles to make good games even better.

One thing these Facebook games do really well is to allow players to cooperate even if they are not online at the same time. That is an element which is often missing in MMORPGs. The requirement to be online at the same time, and in some cases the additional requirement to stay online together for consecutive blocks of hours, is a strong limitation to classic MMORPGs. Even communication in-game between friends and guild-mates is often quite limited, which is why pretty much every guild in every game has a website *outside* the game. MMORPGs could learn a lot here from Facebook apps: Guilds could have cooperative in-game projects to which every guild member can contribute at his own pace and timing. MMORPGs could be integrated with social network websites, where your character info would always automatically be up to date, and you'd automatically be part of the social group representing your guild. Guild forums and raid calendars could be part of that social network group functionality, and be accessible both from inside the game and from outside, via a browser or even via a smart phone.

In short, Facebook apps are using some quite powerful social engineering tools. And just like most tools, they can be used for different purposes, good or bad. Just like a hammer can be used for bashing somebody's head in, or for something constructive, these social engineering tools can be used for fleecing suckers on Facebook, or to create the next generation of MMORPGs.

Write your own Alganon review!

2009-10-26T07:55:00.003+01:00

This is an experiment. Today the NDA for Alganon drops, in preparation for the game launch on the 31st. I haven't played Alganon long enough to write a really qualified review, so I have decided not to write one at all. But as I did hand out 10 Alganon beta keys to readers, and I know some other readers got into the beta by other ways, I'm leaving the floor to you guys on this one: Write a "user-created" Alganon review in the comment section of this post!

You don't have to be a great writer, or write a long review covering everything. Just write what comes naturally, to be part of what will hopefully become a greater whole, a quilt patch review so to say.

New York Times on hardcore vs. casual

2009-10-24T08:39:00.003+02:00

Thanks to Changed for pointing this out to me: The New York Times posted a very intersting article on the hardcore vs. casual issue. They interviewed hardcores saying that casuals being able to participate at their own plodding pace "is a joke", and complain that "It used to be that it was worth something — there used to be a pride saying that you did it, but not anymore. Now it’s, ‘How low is the bar?’".

The casuals were interviewed too, and are quoted as saying: "The complainers are just a bunch of ornery, grumpy people who want it all to themselves and don’t want the slower. But too bad. The whole is fueled and funded by people like me."

Before we start the same old discussion here all over again, please go and read that post in the New York Times, before coming back here to comment.

What Windows 7 version for gamers?

2009-10-23T10:48:00.002+02:00

So Windows 7 was released yesterday worldwide, to replace the much maligned Windows Vista. Now you might innocently walk into a shop to buy a copy of Windows 7, at which point the shop assistant will ask you "Which version?". Your options include Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate. Each of these might or might not be available in both 32-bit and 64-bit, and might be available as either upgrade or full install version. On some markets there are alternative versions, like the European "N" version replacing the previously planned "E" version, not containing additional Microsoft programs like the Internet Explorer or Media Player for anti-trust reasons. At this point the average computer user is seen running screaming from the store, suffering from being unable to decide due to information overload. So, if you are an average PC gamer, which version of Windows 7 should you buy?

My choice would be Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit full install.

You certainly shouldn't get less than the Home Premium version (and actually in many countries you can't get less if you want the full install and not an OEM version). You might be tempted by the Windows XP virtual machine compatibility mode of the Professional edition, but I doubt you really need that one. Enterprise and Ultimate are just overkill for a home computer. You should definitely take the 64-bit version, because the 32-bit version would limit you to 3 GB of RAM, which might still be sufficient today, but will certainly be not enough in a year or two. Given how often I did complete re-installs of previous Windows versions, I'd recomment the full install, because that will be a lot easier to apply after you formatted your hard drive.

The full install version of Windows 7 Home Premium is sold in a pack that contains both the 32-bit and the 64-bit version, and costs $200, or £115, or €120 on Amazon.

So of course the big question is whether you actually need Windows 7 right now. I'm not convinced. While Vista was a catastrophe at launch, it actually runs well enough now, with service pack 2. To get the full advantages of Windows 7, I would need to go and buy 2 copies, one to replace my Vista, the other for my wife's computer to replace Windows XP. That would make creating a home network very easy, but do I really want to spend 400 bucks on that? The alternative is to keep using what you are currently using, and get a copy of Windows 7 included the next time you buy a new computer. That also saves you the hassle of reinstalling your games after having changed operating systems.

Are you going to buy Windows 7 now, or only later with a new computer? Do you agree with my choice of version for gamers, and if not, what version would you have picked?

(And as we recently discussed comment moderation policy, I think it is obvious that your "Windows sucks, buy a Mac / Linux" comment will go straight to /dev/null.)

How is your guild doing these days?

2009-10-23T06:30:00.002+02:00

Most people, me certainly included, are not constant in how actively they are playing MMORPGs. One is more likely to play at high intensity levels just after new content came out, and there are dips in activity at other times. Of course not everybody is on exactly the same schedule, but there is some correlation. In a mature guild in which the overall number of members isn't moving very much any more, any such decrease in general activity results in less people being online at any given moment.

In World of Warcraft and games with a similar raid endgame, this causes a particular problem: When activity drops too far, the number of guild members online can drop under the fixed minimum number of players needed for a raid. If normally 10 to 12 people turn up for raiding, but now its just 7 to 9, raids get cancelled, and suddenly nobody can raid any more. That puts some strain on guilds, often resulting in players leaving to join another guild, where the number of raiders is still high enough. Which isn't really a good solution, because once activity goes up again, the initial guild still hasn't got enough people to form a raid, while the other guild now suddenly has 15 people fighting for 10 raid slots.

I'm writing this because I detect a lull in activity in my own guild, where some of the regular raiders have gone to play DDO instead or, like me, reduced their raiding activity. Reading through various World of Warcraft blogs, I see quite a number of the typical "my guild is imploding" blog posts, so I was wondering if the decreased activity and resulting guild problem was widespread. How is your guild doing these days? Would you say there are less people around? Did that lead to any problems?

Of course the more interesting question would be whether we could come up with a system to solve the problem, but Wolfshead already beat me to that.

What audience do I write for?

2009-10-22T08:24:00.003+02:00

Gevlon blogs about me not being harsh enough to comment trolls. His policy is that when on his blog a commenter points out a mistake, the comment gets deleted, and the mistake fixed without any record of the edit. Like the party fixing historical records in 1984, that makes Gevlon look omniscient and always correct, because he leaves no trace of ever having been wrong. And he has an interesting justification for it. Gevlon says:

My most disliked action is "sneak editing", aka fixing an error in the post and delete the referring comment. I'm writing it for the readers. See it from this perspective. He is not interested in old incorrect versions and their incremental fixation, nor the comments that pointed out the errors. He wants to read an error-free post.

Exactly like Blizzard I won't make content for only 1-10% of my subscriber base. While I personally like intelligent commenters more than a random guy who spends 2:15 on the site, my personal feelings does not matter. Business is business, cost effectiveness above all!

Now statistically speaking, Gevlon has a point. There are 3,000 people visiting my blog every day, plus another 3,000 reading the RSS feed, which is a lot compared to the 25 comments the average post gets. But the comparison with Blizzard is dead wrong: Outside Asia, Blizzard is dealing with customers who are all paying about the same monthly fee, thus they have a good reason to try to make content for all of them, and not just some 1-10% subgroup. But what if WoW was Free2Play, and only that 1-10% subgroup was paying, while the other 90-99% were playing for free? It would still make sense to not totally neglect the majority, as they could always decide to move into the paying subgroup. But you'd want to favor the payers over the non-payers, to make paying more attractive. In such a model, not everyone in your audience is equal.

My blog isn't much different. Not everyone in my audience is of equal importance to me. Google Analytics tells me that over the last 30 days I got 68 visitors who found me by typing the search words "Age of Conan sex" into Google. Most of my visitors only stay between 1 and 2 minutes on my site. So why should I value those visitors as much as I value the readers who come here regularly, especially those who leave feedback?

I consider those of my readers who leave comments to be "paying" customers, while the others are Free2Read customers. :) And as my commenters are important to me, I take their feelings into account in my comment moderation policy. I do agree with Gevlon that I should have deleted the troll comments which derailed my "transferring a character is cheaper than buying gold" thread earlier. But even when I finally deleted those comments, I still left a note of why I did that. And whenever somebody points out a mistake I made, I do *not* delete the comment pointing out the mistake, and I *do* leave either a comment or a note in the post that I edited it to fix the mistake.

That is not to say that I allow every comment on my blog. I regularly reject comments (and with the new system you actually never see them), either because they are comment spam, or because they add nothing to the discussion, or because they contain personal attacks. Unfortunately we live in a world where you can't mention the possibility that some game might possibly have some flaw without somebody shooting off a "you are just a WoW fanboi" (or "you are just a WoW hater" in case I'm talking about WoW) one-liner comment. Also I get those stupid "you shouldn't write about this subject" comments Gevlons mentions and delete them. Comments which don't use the word "you" are usually of higher quality. But I think I sufficiently explained my comment moderation rules and reader rights in my Terms of Service.

The point is that I am not afraid to admit that I'm just human. I make mistakes, I get hurt, I get angry, I react, just like everybody else does. And I do have a social relationship with my "community", however you want to define it. There are rules, but there is also respect, and mutual appreciation. My blog is not "business", it is far more personal than that. And the funny thing is that if Gevlon would be honest to himself, he'd realize that writing a not-for-profit blog is an extremely social act, as the only rewards for it are of the social kind.

Buying gold makes baby murlocs cry

2009-10-22T06:30:00.002+02:00

Blizzard explained this week that buying gold not only made baby murlocs cry, but also had a range of other negative consequences, as much of the gold being sold would come from hacked accounts or bots "which can cause realm performance and stability issues". Blizzard says: "The negative effects these companies create depend directly on people using their services. Without them, the companies have no way to continue their unethical actions." So if you'd please just stop buying gold, hacking and server instability would magically disappear!

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)'s Uniform Crime Reports, a motor vehicle is stolen in the United States every 26.4 seconds. So I want to urge my readers never to buy a used car again, as that would obviously encourage car theft.

You most likely balked at the flawed logic of the second paragraph. So why didn't you balk at the identical flawed logic of the first paragraph?

I am not saying that account hacking isn't happening. What I do say is that it is a lousy argument against gold buying. If this was the main problem of gold buying, then why not make the Authenticator mandatory and end hacking forever (and power leveling at the same time)? What if Gevlon offered to sell his 214k gold, which he acquired without hacking or botting, would that be okay?

The fundamental question when prohibiting something is whether the activity *by itself* is bad, or whether it just is connected to something else criminal. Take drugs, or prostitution: The Netherlands for example decided that cannabis and prostitution by itself weren't all that bad, but the related drug crimes and white slavery were, so they ended up legalizing both cannabis and prostitution. If Blizzard says that gold-selling related crimes are far worse than gold-selling itself, then they open the door to future legalized gold exchanges, like SOE already did, or even to selling gold themselves. "Buy our legal gold, because not only won't we ban you for it, but also you don't cause hacking and server instabilities!"

Attacking gold-selling just for the related crimes of hacking and botting is as weak as the reason that it makes baby murlocs cry. If EVE Online can hire an economist, then World of Warcraft could easily finance an economist as well. I'd love to see a well founded and researched argument against gold selling based on hard economic data, not murloc tears or playing on the customer's darkest fears. But what Blizzard does here reminds me very much of right-wing parties arguing against immigration by saying that immigration makes crime rates go up. By using such weak arguments, they are actually weakening the case against gold-selling, not strengthening it.