Tobold's MMORPG Blog

My material relationship with EA Bioware

2009-11-12T17:14:00.002+01:00

Okay, I'm nearly 3 weeks early, as the Federal Trade Commission guidelines on disclosure of material relationships between bloggers and companies only kick in December 1st. Nevertheless I wanted to let you, and the FTC, know that my review copy of Dragon Age: Origins just arrived by mail. This is a first: While I got free access to some online games in the past, this is the first free physical copy of a game I received. Which is nice, notwithstanding the fact that getting a review copy a week *after* release is a bit late, and I already bought Dragon Age via Steam while I was still unsure whether I'd get a review copy.

I'm already past the Zitron number of 9 hours played. I will probably publish a review of Dragon Age: Origins next week, after having played it a bit more. As this will be way too late for a classical standard review, I was thinking of doing a comparative review between Dragon Age and World of Warcraft. Not because these two games are similar, but because they are so different. By comparing them I hope to explore the question of where the inherent limitations of MMORPGs and single-player RPGs are.

Modern publicity warfare

2009-11-12T15:00:00.003+01:00

According to user reviews in various places, like Metacritic, IGN, or Amazon, Modern Warfare 2 is one of the worst games in history, with a user review score hovering very close to the absolute bottom. At the same time press reviews regularly score the game above 90%, as one of the best games of the year. What's happening?

What is happening is that the press in most cases reviews the game just on the merits of its gameplay, and apparently MW2 is a fun game to play. The players meanwhile are very upset about issues not directly connected to gameplay: The campaign is too short (and downloadable additions will probably cost extra), the game is priced more expensively than comparable games, and the multiplayer mode is too restrictive. Thus large groups of unhappy players are trying to send a message by voting down the user review scores of MW2 on various sites. Something similar happened in the past to games like Spore, which were downvoted for their DRM, but with MW2 the practice of lodging a "political" protest against a game by giving it a bad user review appears to be expanding.

I've never been a fan of any review scores, but the more different issues you try to express with a review score, the less useful it becomes. I am not saying that the protests aren't valid: $60 for less than 10 hours of gameplay is expensive by any measure (and 30 times more per hour than I pay for MMORPGs). But by mixing measures of gameplay quality, price, DRM, and customer service into one single number, you end up with a number that isn't expressing anything at all. Different players have different degrees of sensitivity to things like price, game length, or DRM, so a score expressing everything is even theoretically impossible.

What will protest review score lead to? Amazon already got into trouble during one of the previous protests when they sneakily tried to remove the protest reviews from one game. If protest reviews become more widespread, people trying to find out about a game will learn to ignore user review scores. And sooner or later the sites now offering the possibility for users to review things will stop doing so. Sites like Amazon will decide that the protesters are hurting sales. Sites like Metacritic and IGN will decide that offering infrastructure for user reviews that are then ignored by the regular users, because they are held hostage by some protesters, isn't worth it.

And the effect of these protests on Modern Warfare 2? Apparently none, MW2 is said to have broken all first-day sales records, netting $310 million on the first day alone, with sales for the first week projected as being 10 million copies. Not bad for a game that score 1 out of 10 on average in user reviews.

What can we expect from RPG storytelling?

2009-11-12T08:39:00.002+01:00

Bigeyez sent me a funny chart he found at Hellforge, which shows how much the stories of Bioware RPGs are similar to each other. Somebody posted that chart on the Mass Effect 2 forums, and got an angry response from a Bioware writer, defending the classic story structure.

Actually that discussion is far from new. In Joseph Campbell's book on comparative mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, from 1949, already discussed the idea of the monomyth, the idea that numerous myths from disparate times and regions share fundamental structures and stages. Bioware games conform to that monomyth structure, as do fiction works from Lord of the Rings to Star Wars.

What I think is that requirements of RPG gameplay limit the freedom of writers. The monomyth structure works well in role-playing games. The structure of the hero's journey perfectly fits the RPG structure of character development. It is easy to transform fiction with the structure of the monomyth into a RPG. Which is why there are lots of games based on Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, but no games based on, lets say, Jane Austen novels. A story like Pride and Prejudice simply doesn't have the structure and the setting which would make a good RPG.

MMORPG storytelling suffers from the game having no end. That clashes with the basic narrative structure of stories, which normally have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Seen as a whole, MMORPGs have a short beginning, an infinite middle, and no end. Thus storytelling in MMORPGs usually works by not telling one story, but thousands. Each story is short, has a beginning (quest giver dialogue), middle (you go and kill ten foozles), and end (you return and get a reward). The inherent repetitiveness of that approach isn't very engaging. And often gameplay is more efficient if instead of doing these stories sequentially, you do them in parallel, accepting all quests at a quest hub at once, then doing all the tasks, and then returning to the quest hub getting all the rewards, which further dilutes the impact of the story. You easily do a dozen or more quests in a single play session, so none of the stories is memorable, and would be better described as "errands" than "quests".

The *real* story of a MMORPG, the one the player is interested in, is a personal one. It is the story of how his character developed, how he interacted with other players, how he overcame major challenges. Very few games offer the tools to chronicle this sort of life story: You get tools like the armory showing where your character is now, but not a history of how he got there, except for the dates in small print in the achievement list. Everquest 2 had some web-based tools, but for World of Warcraft you'd need to use a third party application like Path of a Hero to chronicle your virtual life story. And of course even automatic chronicles would only tell the predictable story how you leveled up, and would need room for manual additions to tell the stories of your encounters with other players.

Single-player RPGs have an end, thus they can have an overarching story of the player vanquishing a greater evil at the end of the story. Nevertheless that larger story is often subdivided into chapters, main quests, and sub-quests, so often you end up doing exactly the same as you do in a MMORPG: Talk with an NPC to get a quest, go and kill some mobs for the quest, return and get a reward. The dialogue with the NPC might have several options, but sooner or later you realize that most of the time these options boil down to "accept quest", "don't accept quest", and "get more information". That isn't really much different to WoW's quest dialogue window, where you can accept, cancel, or scroll down to read more. You don't even really have the option to play the unhelpful guy, because if the NPC asks you to save his farm for him, and you say "no", you simply miss out on the quest and the attached reward. Which is why in MMORPGs with a "good" and an "evil" side the evil guys end up being exactly as helpful and nice to NPCs as the good guys.

In summary, I would say that storytelling in RPGs can be improved, but mainly in terms of delivery and pacing. There is little hope that these games ever will be able to tell a wider range of stories, which are significantly different from the monomyth structure of the hero's journey. Pride and Prejudice Online isn't going to happen.

Kudos to Blizzard for honesty

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

Via MMO-Champion I saw this Blizzard "blue post" on pugging in 3.3:

Just a couple of observations from our point of view:

1) Players who don't pug dramatically underestimate the number of people who do.
2) Players often assume every realm has the same dynamics that their realm has.

Pugging is something an awful lot of players do and our (frankly inadequate) tool didn't facilitate that experience very well. The new tool is pretty fast and simple. If you enjoy pugging (or don't enjoy it but do it anyway) the new tool should let you spend less time organizing and more time killing (or wiping).

If pugging isn't your thing, that's cool. We're not trying to push you into it... unless you really like pugs (by which I mean the pooch). The tool will also benefit premades.

Emphasis is mine. It is refreshing to see that Blizzard is well aware that their LFG tools, in spite of several iterations, are still "frankly inadequate". And I do believe that the patch 3.3 approach of making pickup groups more common by A) making them easier to find, and B) rewarding people for pugging is the right one.

It is said that Blizzard's "A team" moved away from World of Warcraft to create the next-gen MMO, and left the "B team" behind to take care of WoW. Usually people use these designations to indicate that the people now working on WoW are less qualified than the people who built WoW originally. But to me it appears that at least in the field of social competencies the "B team" is way ahead of the "A team". It would be ironic if patch 3.3 made WoW blossom into a far more cooperative game, and the next-gen Blizzard MMO would turn out to be another massively soloplayer online RPG.

Thought for the day: EA layoffs

2009-11-10T10:15:00.001+01:00

EA is usually the first company mentioned when people complain about game developers making unimaginative bad sequels instead of innovative good games. EA, due to sheer size, is also the company whose games are getting pirated the most. Now EA is laying off 1500 people, and there is an outrage among gamers. What did people think would happen to a company making bad games and being constantly robbed, in the middle of an economic crisis? If you wanted to save an EA programmer's job, all you had to do was buy some EA games legitimately.

World of Microtransactions, and how we got there

2009-11-10T06:30:00.002+01:00

If you consider what the most likely business model for future MMORPGs is, you might be surprised to realize that the most likely scenario is that you will pay for that future MMORPG three times: Once for buying the game, a second time in the form of a monthly subscription fee, and a third time in the form of microtransactions, buying virtual items for cash. At this point most people either just shrug, or start ranting with foam on their mouths. But what I want to do is to explore how we got into this situation, and why microtransactions in subscription MMORPGs are a logical consequence of our own behavior.

We start this journey with classical board games, games like Chess, Monopoly, or Risk. The outcome of these games is determined either by just skill, or by a mix of skill and luck. These are games of equal opportunity: The participating players all have exactly the same opportunities in the game. A player very much determined to win can try to increase his skill by playing the game a lot, or even studying tactics in books. But unless he cheats, he can not do extra turns while his buddy is getting a coke from the fridge, or buy extra play money for real dollars.

MMORPGs are different, they have never been games of equal opportunity. While some people might want to argue that MMORPGs are open the same number of hours per week to everybody, it is obvious that due to real life not every player can spend the same number of hours in the game. And as MMORPGs are games of continuous progress, the player who spends more hours in the game progresses further than the player who spends less. In addition to the direct effects of more playing hours, there is also an indirect effect: If you can play the consecutive blocks of hours, usually at prime time, required to participate in raiding, you will get extra epic rewards unattainable to people whose schedule doesn't allow raiding. Of course skill also plays a role in your raiding success, but a player with time to raid and lack of skill has a better chance to still leech some raid epics than a player with lots of skill and no time to raid. And raiding is not the only way to get rewards in the end game: There are alternative ways to get epics, and there are alternative rewards, like achievements, and many of these depend nearly exclusively on the number of hours played.

The influence of time spent on rewards and thus social status in MMORPGs has led to a curious reversal of how people regard time spent: In other forms of entertainment the time spent in the entertainment activity is a gain, in a MMORPG time spent is often considered a loss, a cost. If you paid $15 for a movie ticket, you'd be seriously annoyed if the movie lasted only 5 minutes, because you counted on having paid for something like 90 minutes of entertainment. In MMORPGs, if it would take 90 minutes of killing monsters to do a quest and get a reward instead of just 5 minutes, you'd complain about "the grind". Any time spent in a MMORPG in an activity that doesn't give a reward is considered pointless, and any addition of a reward even as silly as an "achievement" to a previously pointless activity will make players pursue it.

Thus people spend time playing Chess either to pass time in a fun way, or to get better at playing Chess. But they spend time in a MMORPG to get rewards in the fastest way possible. If time spent in game is a "cost", it not only makes sense to minimize time and maximize rewards, but it also suddenly makes sense to outsource the activity. Nobody pays somebody else to play Monopoly for him, because it just doesn't make sense. But people do pay others for powerleveling in MMORPGs, and they also pay others to farm gold for them. People tend to blame the gold farmers, but those only respond to a market demand. And it was always just a question of time when the game companies would respond to the same demand. The game companies can create unlimited amounts of virtual goods out of thin air, so they are at a natural advantage over gold farmers, who have to work (or steal) to get virtual goods. Plus game companies make the rules, and thus can sell items that can't be traded between players, another big advantage.

At first microtransactions were just used as an alternative business model for smaller games. Instead of paying an advance sum for the game, plus signing up for a monthly subscription, the game company offers you the game to download for free, and you can play for free as well. But then you'll encounter some obstacles to progress, and are offered a way out by buying virtual stuff from the item shop. If you consider time spent without virtual rewards in a game to be a loss, then it makes sense to buy a scroll that doubles your rate of advancement. It makes even more sense to buy the reward you could get by playing directly, even if that reward is just a mount or a pet. Then somebody noticed that the two business models of monthly subscriptions and microtransactions aren't mutually exclusive. Now games like Champions Online, and since recently even World of Warcraft, have both. This leads to the bizarre situation that at the same time you pay the game company money to be allowed to play their game, *plus* you pay them money so you don't have to play all that much, but get the reward without the "grind" of playing. It's like first paying to enter a movie theatre, and then paying a second time to see the movie in fast forward instead of at normal speed, so you get to the end faster.

There is no equivalent for this in board games, you can't pay to advance faster in Monopoly or Risk or Chess. Not only would the fun of playing very obviously be destroyed if people could pay to win, but also by paying to win players would cut short the entertainment time, and the opportunity to get better at the game, which was the purpose of playing these games in the first place. We need to ask ourselves why this is different in MMORPGs. If a game isn't fun, why don't we just stop playing, instead of paying a second or third time to make it through faster?

Many people have pointed out the negative consequence for game design: If the game company earns more money because you pay them to bypass tedious content, they are more likely to put in tedious content into the game to make you pay. What you end up with in the end are stupid Facebook games, which aren't fun at all to play, but offer you rewards for mindless clicks, and then let you pay money to avoid the mindless clicks. Is this how we want the future of MMORPGs to look? Now everybody blames the greedy game companies for this, but as RMT in games without microtransaction shows, the demand was there before the game companies responded to it. The fundamental flaw isn't company greed, but the attitude of the players who value the virtual rewards more than being entertained for some time, or getting better at playing. And the truly casual players, who just play for fun without running after various rewards and achievements, are actually less likely to buy virtual goods than those who believe that these virtual rewards mean something. If you never stepped onto the treadmill of virtual progress, you aren't paying to advance faster. The day we don't believe any more that the player with the shinier gear and more glamorous fluff is superior, both RMT and microtransactions will just wither and die. It is the relentless pursuit of rewards, the idolatry of purple pixels that got us here, not just company greed. As long as we value virtual rewards more than gameplay, game companies will happily sell us those rewards.

Frost Lotus

2009-11-09T09:16:00.000+01:00

The number of people trying to make money with inscription has increased a lot since MMO-Champion posted a guide on how to get rich quick with glyphs. Basic economics tells us that this should cause the price of glyphs to go down, and the price of herbs to go up. While the former is certainly the case, the herb price has remained remarkably stable. Why is that?

It turns out that the Northrend herbs most often used for making pigments and inks for inscription are actually a byproduct of herb gathering. The main source of income for somebody farming herbs is frost lotus, which is needed for all level 80 flasks. With raiding now being accessible to far more people, the demand for raid flasks has gone up, and so has the price for frost lotus. While pretty much everything else in Wrath of the Lich King has suffered from deflation, the price of frost lotus went up from around 25 gold to around 75 gold. As there are very, very few pure frost lotus nodes, the only way to get more frost lotus is to gather lots of various high-level herbs, because each gathering has a small chance to net you some frost lotus as well. That is somewhat annoying, because getting frost lotus that way is so random, and on some days you get a lot, while going empty on other days. But the consequence is lots of Northrend herbs being gathered and being sold for around 1 gold per herb. Basically those herbs are just a side-product, who cares for the price of the 1-gold herbs when he is trying to get the 75-gold herbs?

Right now this is more or less balanced, as the excess herbs are being used for inscription. When the glyph market cools down, there is a risk that the continued search for frost lotus will make the prices for other Northrend herbs crash. Already now some mid-level herbs sell for more than most Northrend herbs. Will be interesting to watch how this develops further. It's the law of unintended consequences that tells you that linking different production chains together isn't really a good idea, because it is unlikely that demand for both productions will always remain balanced.

Thought for the day: Story

2009-11-08T08:49:00.002+01:00

While Dragon Age offers choices in dialogue which will lead to minor variations in the story, ultimately all these variations lead back to one main story line, which never changes. If I were to play through the game a second time, the same major plot elements would happen, and there would be nothing I could do about lets say getting betrayed a second time. While better storytelling especially in MMORPGs would be nice, it all ends up with us being trapped inescapably in stories we already know. Is story the death of replayability?

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?