Mixed Early Thoughts On Pandaria

When my initial impressions of WoW's Pandaria expansion were primarily negative, I made a conscious decision to hold judgement - and not post on the blog - while I tried to figure out why. 

I knew some portion of the issue was a disruption to my routine - after spending the overwhelming majority of my time in WoW during the last two years either running random dungeon groups or working on pet battles, suddenly the five new levels stood in between me and what I was used to doing for probably the first time in my MMO career.  Some portion was the learning curve associated with yet another major overhaul to the game's class system.  Some portion was that the story simply needed time to ramp up. 

I'm glad I took the time.  Having cleared the Jade Forest, and hit level 87 in the process, I have found truth in both the mitigating factors but also potentially some degree of disappointment with the expansion itself.

Changing the time-to-kill
Over the years, I've found that I'm notoriously bad at predicting what class I am going to like in a new MMO.  Many things that sound good on paper turn out to be not so fun in practice.  The one indicator that works most of the time is the time it takes to solo an individual mob - a seemingly highly technical thing to look at but a major impact on my personal playstyle. 

When individual mobs die very quickly, I would rather play a ranged character so that I'm not spending all of my time chasing after my next target.  (This was a particular problem for SWTOR melee because your NPC companion switches targets automatically, while I'm still trying to figure out what direction to run in.)  When mobs take comparatively long to beat down, I often prefer to play a melee character, as they are better suited to being in melee range and spend less time and effort kiting mobs around in an attempt to avoid damage. 

WoW has historically been a game that tended very strongly towards short mob life expectancy - in Wrath in particular, solo mobs could take no more than 2-4 hits and live a total of 10 seconds each - really short compared to soloing in any other MMO.  As such, it makes sense that I tried melee and ended up sticking with a mage.  With Cataclysm - and now especially Pandaria - it seems that they have made a conscious effort to slow combat down.  Health pools for both players and mobs are larger.  The mage has been given the tools to deal with this - all three mage specs can now have a snare on their primary nuke spell and access to previously spec-specific defensive abilities. 

POM, Ice Barrier, and Living Bomb, now all on one spec

Still, it's a big difference in feel, and this threw me for a real loop when trying to get back into leveling content.  In any other game, I would probably just switch over to one of my several melee alts (85 Warrior, 70 Pally, 45 Rogue, and instant Death Knight on the server of my choice), but with so many years behind this particular character as my main in WoW, that's a bit of a tough sell just because the class design winds are blowing in a different direction this year. 

Atmosphere of Pandaria

Assuming you don't hate the stylized graphics on principle, WoW has been getting prettier with every expansion.  Cataclysm's approach of tacking on a few new areas to fill in gaps within the old world map made the expansion in some ways disjointed, but they did a very good job of making each zone feel like WoW's take on a specific environment (desert, undersea, etc).  With a new, thematically consistent continent, Blizzard has tackled one consistent theme - China - and done so with some of their best results to date. 

On the downside, the story definitely took a while to grow on me. One Pandaren in Warcraft III was cool, and the idea of an expansion of them sounded cool, but the reality of an entire continent of bears talking in Chinese-accented English going on about the serenity - and comic appetite - of their people may be overusing the gimmick after all. 

Meanwhile, the story has inadvertently driven home how absurd WoW's current faction setup really is.  The majority of the expansion's content, as with past years, pits players against common foes, often on behalf of neutral NPC factions.  There is a strong effort to push individual storylines for the Horde and Alliance, but this only drives home how these are NPC factions that players are forced to live with. 

Players have no more influence over the actions of "their" side of the conflict than they do over the numerous groups of NPC's.  It is immediately obvious from the narrative that enlisting the local population to fight a war on a land where negative emotions can take physical form with catastrophic results is not a good idea.  However, your NPC's are no less hapless than any of the others in avoiding this outcome, and for this we divide the playerbase permanently in half, only to once again be sent off to kill common enemies once the storyline is complete.  At this point, the game would be better served leaving the two sides in place and having player characters be a third faction who can hang out with whichever group of NPC's they prefer for story purposes.

Moving Onwards
With the preliminaries resolved - the initial zone, two of the five levels, and yes, incidentally, taming pretty much every battle pet that moves on the continent so that's no longer competing with PVE questing for my attention - it'll be interesting to see how the experience shapes up.  The thing that's odd about my Pandaria experience is that I'm clearly not tired of the sandbox PVE experience - that's what's competing for my time in numerous other games.  It's possible that in another month, I'll be back to my routine of hitting the dungeon queue and doing whatever else strikes my fancy while I wait for the group to form.  Or perhaps I need to face reality and switch to a melee character. 

Regardless, my path forward in WoW is murky in a way that it hasn't been for years. 

At least there are Chinese dragons to collect?

Blizzard Pays For Overemphasizing Item Level

Via Blizzard tweet, we learn that WoW's patch 5.2 will remove the ability to upgrade the quality of endgame epic gear which they added to the game in patch 5.1.  The studio was forced to backtrack not due to the design merits of the system, but rather because they have spent years emphasizing the importance of item level (ilvl) in the game's incentive structure.  They have no one to blame but themselves that players are now over-reacting to anything that affects this meta-statistic.  To understand why, we need to look at both the history of ilvl and how it has been used as an incentive.

Making a book-keeping stat into an incentive
Item levels were originally an internal number used to determine how many stats each item got.  In principle, you could use this meta-stat (after accessing it via third party database or UI add-on) to compare gear (or to argue on the forums that a specific item should have higher stats based on its ilvl), but in practical terms it was irrelevant to players for years post-launch.

Ilvl shot to prominence midway through the Wrath of the Lich King era when players began using a third-party add-on called "Gearscore" to add up the ilvls of a player's gearset as a quick and dirty way to check whether the player's gear was plausible for the content your group intended to complete.  Gearscore was not without controversy, but Blizzard brought it into the game's base UI anyway, adding the average ilvl of the player's gear to the UI and using it as a screening mechanism for the random group finder in patch 3.3.

This change happened comparatively late in that expansion cycle, and applied primarily to content that players were already routinely and trivially completing (easy 5-man heroic dungeons).  Going out to get gear specifically to meet a minimum ilvl to be allowed into content came later, most prominently with the addition of the raid finder in Cataclysm's final patch.  During the same window, we've seen each raid expand to three separate tiers of loot - differing primarily in ilvl and associated minor bump in stats - that only further emphasize that increasing ilvl is an incentive in its own right, and not just something that happened incidentally as you upgraded your gear.

Comment Update: Commenters point out that ilvl scaling is actually less linear than I remembered, making the upgrade system too powerful, not too weak.  The rest of the reasoning in this post about why focusing on ilvl as an incentive is a bad idea stands (and actually makes more sense with the correction).
A Technical Increase In Power
The new item upgrade system in patch 5.1 crossed an important line - increasing the ilvl of gear (along with marginal bumps to its stats) was explicitly used as an incentive.  The intent was to extend the benefits of continuing to earn valor points (from daily quests, random dungeons, etc) by allowing them to be used for small upgrades to certain gear.  A bump of 8 ilvl's may sound significant until you consider the context.

In the launch game, ilvl's corresponded roughly to the level at which the player obtained the item.  However, max level group content at each of the game's level caps led to dramatic inflation of item levels, such that gear at level 90 is approaching ilvl 400.  As a result, the new system was only a 2% boost to the ilvl of one of your pieces of gear (out of 15-16 depending on whether you use a two-handed weapon).

Even if you did eventually get this bump across the board (I'm not familiar with whether every single slot could actually be upgraded this way), a 2% increase in ilvl for all of your gear does not directly lead to a 2% increase in DPS or other output.  Other factors, including your inherent base statistics, scaling rules for increased combat ratings, and most importantly actual player performance are also going to impact character performance.

In short, this mechanic was technically an increase in character power, but functionally small enough that it's all-but cosmetic.

Running into the "optional" debate
Blizzard's defense of the item upgrade system hinged on two arguments.  First, they state that players will quit if there is not stuff for them to do, and that many players will not do any in-game activity that does not increase their character power.  I think we can agree that this is mostly sound reasoning, with the caveat that most players would really prefer that "stuff for them to do" take the form of new content on a more frequent basis, rather than incentives to run the old stuff into the ground.

Having said all of that, Blizzard tried to have it both ways by saying that the upgrades, while intended as an incentive to convince players to get valor points, are optional.  This argument is sound from a game design perspective for all the reasons I discussed above about the actual significance of such a small boost to ilvl.  Unfortunately for Blizzard, the correct design approach lost a battle of perceptions brought on by their own decisions to emphasize item level in incentive structures.

Players were already complaining that they felt daily quests were not optional because the resulting reputations are required to purchase entry level gear to start raiding.  Allowing item upgrades exacerbated the situation because players eventually either run out of reputations to grind or else acquire superior gear by other means.  I don't believe the system worked on all gear, but it worked on enough gear to make these players feel that they were now obligated to continue doing stuff they did not want to do in order to get valor points to pay for the upgrades.

I don't think Blizzard's position was wrong from a design perspective.  However, as I wrote a few months ago, I think they lost this battle for the same reason that they lost the battle over dungeon difficulty early in Cataclysm.

Failure of the skinner box
Blizzard is still in the business of trying to sell a service to customers, and you can only get so far by telling a customer who is dissatisfied that the merits of your design trumps their preferences.  If you tell the customer that they need ilvl - directly through minimum requirements for the raid finder and indirectly by using ilvl as an incentive - you should not be surprised that they believe they need ilvl.  Once that has happened, it is natural for these customers react poorly when told that they have to do something they do not want to do in order to get the ilvl they think they need.

As Tobold points out in a post examining the motivations for botting, MMO's have increasingly misused incentives as a means of pushing players into trying other forms of gameplay - daily quests, dungeons, PVP, etc - that they do not enjoy.  History has shown time and time again that this CAN change player behavior, but DOES NOT change player preferences.  The numerous unsavory reactions - joining PVP matches only to try and sit AFK for the currency rewards, requiring gearscores far in excess of what content was designed for, and threatening to cancel because you feel "forced" to do daily dungeons - are a natural response.

I recognize that studios are struggling to produce enough material to keep people paying, and that they need to get each player to use as much content as possible.  I recognize that incentives can be the difference between enough players in the dungeon queue to fill groups in a timely fashion and leaving newcomers high and dry.  In the long term, though, reducing the game to a "Skinner box" activity that you do only because it is a prerequisite for something you actually want to do (e.g. raiding with your friends) is a recipe for burnout and churn.  This particular example of pushing an arbitrary number far beyond its functional significance was an extreme case, but it is by no means the end of the issue.

Examining SWTOR's endgame

When I first hit level 50 in SWTOR, I was in no hurry to try the "elder game".  My leveling path went solely through solo story content - I don't believe I joined a single group - and I was not in the mood to make the transition to grinding dungeons and farming daily quests.  Having returned, I have been pleasantly surprised to find the game well-designed and executed.  

However, given how much progress I made in a single month, I can see why Bioware is touchy about calling its max-level content the "endgame".  SWTOR's high production value story-driven content is especially vulnerable to growing stale with repetition, and its incentive curve is already buckling under the pressure of how to accomodate new players. 

Grouping for An Assassin

The HK-51 companion has some interesting design.  The droid is a specialized DPS beast designed to chew through the stronger mobs in daily quests - for each five mobs HK-51 damages, he can open the next fight by one-shotting a "strong" level mob, which can save a lot of time and danger. 

My immediate incentive to jump into SWTOR's group content was the addition of the HK-51 assassin droid in last month's patch 1.5.  Though NPC companions are only used while solo - they take up a slot that is almost certainly better filled with a human player in max level content - the quest to obtain this new companion has multiple steps that require group content.  Worse, two of the steps that basically require a second player occur in special instances that are specific to this questline.  With no incentive to ever repeat this content in the future, I rushed out to complete them ASAP for fear that it would no longer be possible to find players who still needed them. 

Setting aside the issue of whether players will ever be able to complete this quest chain in the future, Bioware got what they wanted.  I claimed the free level 50 starter gear from the mission terminal (at the time, there was only PVP gear, but now you can supplement this with some PVE stuff), respecced my character into the DPS tree that sounded easier to play, and jumped into the hard mode flashpoint queue. 

The first few groups got a lousy deal with such a green newbie.  When solo players complained that this arc required groups, many players responded by arguing that grouping should be required for something in a MMORPG.  I'd be curious how many of those players would have changed their minds and concluded that they would rather not have had me taking up a slot in their party.  The good news is that the learning curve settled down eventually, I enjoyed the flashpoint game enough to continue beyond the required two hard mode runs, and eventually I picked up enough gear - and perhaps experience - to vaguely carry my weight. 

Incentives ahead, but short-lived?

Triumph of the very blue speeder bike, obtained for running each hard mode flashpoint once

Your first few group zones at max level in an MMORPG are generally pretty rewarding, as everything is an upgrade.  After running around a dozen hard mode flashpoints - each of the eight options once, and a few repeats - my character has left behind almost all of the endgame starter gear.  Most of my Tionese gear (the PVE starter set - I actually bought this stuff with dungeon tokens, but players now receive it for free) has since been handed down to my companions, while I'm wearing mostly Columi stuff (originally found in the easy mode of the game's first raids), and a few pieces from the next tiers up. 

Unfortunately for the game's longevity, very few outright upgrades remain for me in flashpoint content.  A few pesky drops aside, most of the upgrades that I can still obtain come from the "black hole commendation" vendor.  Like WoW, SWTOR hands out raid quality gear as an incentive to keep players running the flashpoints (and also at least some daily quests).  I could see this getting old really quickly given how much non-skippable story dialog happens in the flashpoints. 

The other goal I've been pursuing are cold hard credits.  On a good day, I pull down several hundred thousand credits, which I've been able to use to purchase a variety of stuff - legacy perks, and F2P unlocks to use when my subscription expires.  This too has a limit, especially for the non-subscriber with the strict limits on currency. 

Overall, it was a fun month, and perhaps there's another month or so worth of stuff to do at some point, but this endgame does not feel sufficiently robust to continue for month after month.  Perhaps it should have been no surprise that the game's subscriber retention suffered as it did. 

Optional Is the New Hard

Two years ago, players were complaining that the dungeons of World of Warcraft's Cataclysm expansion were not fun because they were too difficult.  The Blizzard response - that content should possess non-zero challenge - was as accurate as it was irrelevant.  Customers were dissatisfied with the level of fun they were having with the results of the design, not the quality of the design itself.

Today, Blizzard argues that various non-raid activities - such as daily quests and running the looking-for-raid difficulty in pick-up-groups - are optional for raiding because only the very top difficulty setting is balanced so tightly as to assume that players have the best gear available.  I like to call this the "pants optional" argument - no MMO I am aware of has a mandatory requirement that characters wear pants, but very few players opt to go pantless.  The choice technically exists, but is largely uninteresting, as there is almost always (*) no benefit to going without pants and the player would then be obligated to upgrade the rest of their gear to off-set the stats from the missing leggings.   More to the point, every bit by which you exceed the theoretical minimum requirement gives the player - and the group of 9-24 friends they are raiding with - that much more margin for error to help secure victory.

We could sit here and argue the academic/semantic merits all day, but this misses the point for the same reason Blizzard's 2011 defense of the game's difficulty missed the point.  If paying customers feel like they are obligated to do something that they do not believe is fun, it does not matter if the customer is theoretically incorrect.  Lecturing the customer on why they are incorrect, not as good at playing the game as people who are beating the content with the minimum gear, and need to find new friends with lower expectations - however accurate all of these statements may be - is not a good business strategy. 

The structural issues with Cataclysm as an expansion probably would not have gone away had the game's initial cadre of heroic dungeons launched with lower difficulty and shorter completion times.  Even so, it was an inauspicious start to what turned into the game's least successful era to date.  If Blizzard continues to build a game whose core endgame mechanic is upgrading character performance through acquisition of better gear, and continues to require non-raid content for access to upgrades that raid players want, Pandaria may not be off to any better of a start. 


(*) - There have been several eras of WoW in which certain tanking classes were obligated to intentionally lower their mitigation when attempting content that was significantly below their gear level, because their classes were dependent on taking sufficient quantities of damage in order to generate resources.  Several players I knew would remove their characters' pants in this scenario, because it was the quickest and most humorous way to accomplish this. 

Back at the LOTRO Cap

My Champion hit level 75 in LOTRO, which brings me back to the level cap, albeit for a relatively brief time.  I finished the main story from the Isengard launch, but plenty of content remains, including the entire Great River zone and large portions of the sidequests of Isengard. 

Not much new to report here, but one minor quirk - because Turbine's model offers free players access to the current level cap, exterior zones, and epic story, it is important that I finish this content now, rather than after the expansion.  There's no option not to purchase the new level cap, and therefore no option NOT to advance beyond it until I've run out of content.  Ah well, at least it's been a good ride thus far. 

TOR Trial Thoughts

SWTOR's patch 1.2 finally landed last week, and I finally took the game for a spin.  A few thoughts on the experience arriving four months after the game's launch and playing the game through the 15 levels of the trial...

Getting In
For a game that seems to want new players, they appear to be trying everything except what all the other subscription titles (and most non-subscription titles) are doing - the one week trial requires a referral and does not offer any benefit to the person who sent sent you said.  Anyone who does not have someone to refer them needs to wait for fixed weekend events which are shorter than the referral trial.  While I guess I can see an advantage to making the community seem more populated by concentrating newbies into specific weekends, this process feels convoluted compared to basically all the other MMO's out there. 

Fortunately, hunting for someone willing to send an invite also allowed me to get a head start on the first and hardest irrevocable choice in the game - picking a server.  This turned out to be easier than I anticipated, as basically everyone I asked suggested the RP-PVE server Sanctum of the Exalted, home of the Republic Mercy Corps and numerous bloggers. 


Trooping
Anyway, I signed into the game and rolled up a cyborg trooper named Aldebaran.  (In keeping with my custom, this is a location from Star Trek Online - the sector in which Deep Space K-7 resides in Eta Erdani block.)  I've previously said that I don't see why this class is even in the game - compared to Han Solo (smuggler), Boba Fett (Bounty Hunter), and people with Lightsabers (four of the eight classes), it wasn't clear to me why anyone would choose to be a cannon-fodder stormtrooper.  Setting that concern to the side appears to have been a good call.  I've found a fun story, and if anything perhaps it's easier to reconcile being one player amongst hundreds as a trooper than it would be as a Jedi given that so much of the movie lore revolves around a handful of force-users changing the course of the galaxy. 

Lore aside, this class is also one of the most unique I've played in MMO's.  The trooper's resource are energy cells for their weapons, which regenerate over time but at a slower rate as they are depleted - you can burst if you need to but there will be a longterm penalty to doing so.  The really unusual part, though, is that this is not your squishy ranged class.  In fact, I selected the Vanguard advanced class, which allows me to function as a full-fledged tank with damage reduction and short-to-medium ranged skills.  Meanwhile, many of my abilities can be cast on the run, rather than channeled, making it feel much more dynamic than your standard stand-and-nuke class.  Overall, several big pluses.

Firing on the enemy.  Note also my companion's mighty invisible gun, looks like he's killing foes via ranged pelvic thrust.

The Business
Bioware made some headlines last week with an odd promotion - a free month of game time for everyone who had already reached level fifty, an offer that was later extended to accounts that had hit Legacy level 6 in a move to appease alt-o-holics.  Azuriel has a good take on this odd move - it was pitched as a reward for loyalty by players, but it actually demonstrates the opposite sentiment from Bioware - cold calculation that something needs to be done to hold players who are hitting the end of the road from leaving and disrupting their communities. 

During about half of the trial week, I have gotten a character to the trial cap (currently level 15) and also reached the permitted levels in three crew skills (slicing for cash, bioanalysis and biochem for potions).  I could probably do the same on a second character, but I'd rather continue to advance my main and unlock the Legacy system first, so I can receive exp and perks for my future alts.  I see relatively little way in which Bioware would lose by making this an unlimited level-capped trial - yes, someone could in principle play all the newbie planets, but all of these are just the first chapters of stories that successful players will want to continue. 

Overall, my outlook on the game so far remains the same.  While I think this game is less vulnerable to churn than most MMO's because players will be tempted to come back to play additional stories, I'm already seeing where the focus on story may harm replay value.  In a very brief visit to the beta last winter, I played through level 6 or so on Ord Mantell as a Smuggler.  My trooper had different class quests but the same sidequests, and I already felt like I'd been there and watched these cutscenes before, even though it was months ago.  Legacy perks may help by offering the chance to skip more of the content on subsequent playthroughs, but this will also reduce the amount of additional subscription time that followup characters will require. 

This game is not in trouble yet, but I definitely can't blame them for being proactive in attempting to keep it from getting there. 

Pre-F2P Early Aion Impressions

I had an evening with no immediate plans last week, and Aion has been on my list of things to investigate now that it's going free to play.  Since Xaxziminrax asked nicely, I decided to give the game an early look.  Obviously, I can't comment on the new (and somewhat nebulous) business model, but at least I won't be stuck in an overcrowded newbie area trying to figure out where to put my hotbuttons.

Rolling a Daeva

Blue dude on the right is the standard look for Asmodians, the green girl is what I rolled up.

Aion has precisely two races, Elyosians and Asmodians, for the two player factions. However, these races have a surprising degree of customization - height, body type, and color are all up for grabs if you want a large or small character.  The result is actually much more robust in terms of appearance options than we have in some games that offer more races but much less customization.  I also seem to recall someone mentioning back when the game launched that going small was actually an advantage in PVP because it made your character hard to see, go figure. 

The game has four basic classes that branch into a total of eight subclasses. While I concede that MMO's in general don't do the best job in helping the player make an informed class choice, this one felt especially lacking because it's not apparent what your subclass choices will do before you've even tried your main class.  The usual subclasses include a tank, a healer, two melee DPS (the non-tank warrior and the stealth rogue), two kiting DPS (a mage and the archery rogue), all of which I promptly ruled out for lack of interest.  This left me with two options - the Chanter and the Spiritmaster.

My brain suggested the Chanter - the hybrid cleric option, which offers some healing, buffs, and off-tanking.  I frequently pick this type of class because I'm willing to trade off some DPS for more versatility and variety.  My gut told me to do something different, which left the pet-based mage class.  I don't think I've ever actually used a pet class as my main in an MMO, but somehow this one felt like the right call. 

Killing Asmodian Rats



Once I zoned in, what I found was about as standard of a solo MMO experience as you can get.  The usual array of hotbars and linear quest progression push the player through their first 9 levels.  There are a few tweaks to the usual - if you click to loot an object on the ground, such as a harvesting node or quest item, and fail to pick it up, you can click it again and the loot window will pop up instantly.  Unfortunately, you need this feature frequently, as it seems very easy to accidentally interrupt spellcasts, looting, and other such activities.

As with the character models, the intro zone is generally rather pretty, and there is at least occasionally some creative creature design.  For instance, there are mobs called Snufflers, which are mini-armadillo's with elephant snouts.  The Green Armadillo approves, even if some of these had to die for one of the many standard critter kill quests.

There's also the now standard map that shows quest objectives, identifies what mobs drop items you need, etc.  It may be worth noting that some of these features were new and innovative at the time Aion launched with them.
 
The only other thing that stood out during my first 9 levels was the game's combo system.  As I gained levels, my main DPS spells picked up chain upgrades.  If I cast the fireball-equivalent twice in a row, the second will be an instant cast attack that also adds a magic debuff.  The frostbolt-equivalent snares on the first cast and applies a knockback if comboed.  These secondary effects have cooldowns attached to them, but I could see some interesting tactical decisions in when to apply a combo versus continuing to cast your most damaging spell.  There's also some sort of a UI talking about default combos, which suggests that I might eventually be given more choice/strategy in how to use this system. 

Ascending and beyond

Wings of a Daeva, as seen in a story quest

When you hit one exp shy of level 10, which appears carefully tuned to require all of the quests in the newbie area unless you go grinding, your progress stops until you can complete the ascension questline.  Through this process, you pick your subclass - with only one quest panel's worth of text from an NPC to explain what you're getting - earn your wings, and travel to your faction's main city.  Here are the usual amenities, including auction houses, bankers, and weird cat creatures with sunglasses who you can pay to expand your inventory. 

I'm reasonably aware that there is a lot I have yet to learn about the game, including what exactly my new fire elemental does, whether/how I can use the wings, etc.  So far, however, what I've seen is a bland and underwhelming solo quest grind that has little to recommend it over all the other options in the crowded marketplace.  I can definitely see how this game struggled under the old subscription model, and it will be interesting to see whether F2P can revive it. 

The inventory expansion fox-cat-thing.

Scroll of Resurrection: Game Vs World

While I was struggling with internet access issues last week, Blizzard announced that they'd gone ahead and implemented that crazy idea EQ2's David Georgeson kicked around last year - a free boost to level 80, but only as a promotion for lapsed subscribers.  MMO Melting Pot has two posts rounding up the blog reaction so far, and even this list only scratches the surface. 

The conflict
This debate emphasizes the split between MMO's as games versus MMO's as worlds.  As a game, the correct answer to the question "can I play with my friends?" is always yes.  By contrast, the very structure of the persistent online world is full of "no" answers to that question. 

• Wrong server/faction?  No.  
• Wrong class?  No.  
• Wrong spec/group role?  No.  
• Wrong level?  No.  
• Not enough gear?  No.
• Don't own enough expansions?  No.  
• Not located in the right location (back in the days when traveling across the world could take all night)?  No.  

For the players who primarily see the MMO as a world, all of these answers are the entire reason to play the game.  What is the point of playing a game where everything you have worked so hard for will be given away for free as the next promotion?  For the players who want to play with their friends, all of theeeese answers are what's keeping them from playing the game.  If there is fault in the new system, it's that it's still too limited - current players need not apply, while even the fortunate former subscribers must grind out five levels and whatever gear they need to join their friends at endgame.

A solution worth trying?
In the short term, I think there are legitimate questions about whether this approach will work or is a good idea.  As Azuriel points out, some of these goodies represent money left on the table for Blizzard, and it's not clear how many of the returning players Blizzard will be able to retain.  That said, I think it was overdue for someone to try this, and Blizzard is one of the best positioned, even after the rough year. 

As long as entire segments of the game - such as solo content, non-raid group content, etc - are reduced to a prerequisite that raiders must complete to be allowed to advance, there will be consequences to the way that players who actually want to use this content are able to experience it.  In Cataclysm, Blizzard expended a staggering amount of resources on new leveling content that even their core demographic for this material - longtime players like myself with high nostalgia value and willingness to roll alts - can't use the content because the rush to level cap ruined the exp curve for everyone else. 

As damaging as paying to skip to max level (the next logical step in this progression) may be to the MMO's, I think the consequences of continued inaction may be worse. 

Do MMO's Teach Players To Bend The (Loot) Rules?

Allocation of scarce resources is never an easy question, but it seems like sometimes MMO players are an especially tough crowd on this front.  Which got me thinking - perhaps we are a tougher crowd precisely because of the games we play? 

MMO gameplay can be broken down into two basic skillsets - the player's ability to react to situations correctly and quickly, and the player's ability to min-max.  From our very first quest to rid the world of 10 rats, we are taught to optimize our performance.  This tactic kills rats faster with less risk to the player, while that weapon skill is ineffective compared to its peers.

Can we then truly be surprised when players apply these same approaches to maximizing their gains out of whatever loot system - random rolls, DKP, etc?  My guess is that loot rules in general distribute loot according to the letter of the rule, rather than how their designers (developers or guild officers) intended.  If there is a loophole, though, one might expect a pack of MMO players to be the first to find it. 

Returning to the Open World (of Warcraft)?

WoW's Winter's Veil holiday is up and running with one minor but interesting change from last year.  Two years after introducing a dungeon finder and allowing most players to spend all their time in cities, Blizzard is actually trying to move things back into the open world.

Blizzard has turned the Abominable Greench into a daily boss mob, complete with the obligatory daily loot box containing 24 Justice Points, previously retired presents from previous years' events, and the possibility of a new holiday minipet (a rock elemental representing a lump of coal).  Unlike the revamps they just finished applying to all of the other holidays in WoW's calendar, however, this new event is not run using the dungeon finder.  Instead, you have to physically fly to Hillsbrad - yes, in the actual open world - and wait for a tank and a healer to arrive. 

The fight itself is intentionally easy; any tank and healer combination can probably duo the boss if necessary, but you won't have to.  So far, I've had suitable "groups" form in under 10 minutes every day, morning or night, that I've attempted the event.  I use quotes because you don't actually need to be grouped - all players in the area during the fight, or who show up for a minute or two after, can get credit, even if they are not grouped with the player(s) who killed the mob.  It's even a rare occasion for cross-faction cooperation - the healer needs to be the same faction as the tank because you can't heal hostile players, but DPS from both sides are free to pitch in. 

Towards Pandaria
Given that the event only drops cosmetic items - other holiday bosses also have loot - its popularity is probably a minor success.  I'm even working on Archeology, since I'm flying by zones that have relics in them anyway.  That said, it's possible that Blizzard is using this as a trial run for promised open world content in Pandaria. 

If so, the real question is whether players are willing to accept being forced to go back out into a world that so many have been so quick to abandon since the Dungeon Finder arrived.  Blizzard's lack of success with selling players on the concept of challenging 5-man dungeons in Cataclysm, after the easy zergs of Wrath, may bode poorly for the popularity of extending this trend from optional holidays to WoW's core gameplay.

The Time Gamble for 4.3 Heroic Valor

I've had a bit of time to play around with the dungeon finder, where I've noticed something unusual about the new Heroic dungeons. 

When patch 4.1 added the two troll instances to WoW's heroic pool, the newer, more challenging instances were separated in a different tier, with separate Valor point awards (much to the chagrin of people who wanted to get their weekly valor cap but who got tired of running those two zones repeatedly).  Patch 4.3 adds three new instances, and these are indeed available as a separate category in the dungeon finder.  What is gone is the additional Valor award.

You can now get seven VP grants per week (the last of which will be reduced from 150 to 100 due to the weekly cap), regardless of whether you take the option that only includes the new zones, or the other option (which includes all of the Cataclysm heroics you are eligible for, including the 4.1 and 4.3 instances).  This makes for an interesting gamble on players' time versus reward ratios. 

• The newer zones seem to be reasonably quick, drop better loot (until you have something better yet anyway) and have a higher starting item level requirement, which means that you're not going to be added to a group with people who have not done at least some dungeons in Cataclysm.  However, the 4.3 zones are still a bit tougher than what you see in the old zones, so the chances - or at least the fear - of failure is potentially higher.  
• If you go the unrestricted random route, the basic Cataclysm Heroics are going to be even quicker because players grossly outgear them, resulting in a high speed, low risk clear if those are chosen.  However, you run the risk of drawing one of the new zones, or, worst of all, one of the time consuming and challenging troll heroics, which now no longer has any additional reward.  I've seen a lot of people immediately drop groups upon zone-in, and I assume these folks were hoping for the easy win.  

I suppose it's a good compromise solution - players like myself who are behind the gear curve looking to meet the requirements for the EZ-auto-raid-finder mode of Deathwing can self-select into the new content without losing the weekly VP bonuses.  Other players are available to fill in groups for anything, even the rare person (like myself, having not had a subscription for most of the time since 4.1) who actually still wanted to sightsee in the old zones.

This is one of those times when I wish we could actually see the numbers.  It would be fascinating to see which of the options players end up picking. 

Combat Pacing and Feel

A few semi-related ramblings about combat pacing, which are aimed in the vague general direction of this question: To what extent can/should the mechanics of actually playing the game (pushing buttons etc) influence what roles the player can perform?

• LOTRO got a bunch of complaints in the early days for "sluggish" feeling combat.  I think this can be chalked up to several different factors; the time to kill a solo mob is much higher than in WoW (which was the only other MMO that focused on solo content at the time LOTRO launched), there were some issues with lengthy animations that would have to complete before characters to execute their next attack, and there may have been some other factors as well.  Regardless, this was a major critique of the game at the time of its launch.
  
  Speaking of things dying quickly, I've been getting much more interested in healing now that I'm actually grouping in games that aren't WoW, and a big part of that may be that WoW has always had faster paced combat - with less reaction time for the healer. 
  
• I blogged about DCUO weapons last week, and I've since earned enough skill points to allow my main to equip any weapon he wants (though he only has special attacks for a handful).  Weapons differ drastically in their combat speed, what types of click combinations are necessary to execute special attacks, etc.  Some, like the slow 2-handed weapon and brawling types, I dislike for slow speed.  Some, such as dual pistols and staves, I'm not so fond of due to the attack sequences.  The assault rifle I dislike because it has a really bad habit of hitting far away mobs that I did not intend to pull, which I suppose is a valuable lesson in firearm safety courtesy of SOE and Superman.
  
  At the end of the day, I have some options I can live with - Bows and 1-handed weapons are my current favorite.  I think these are passable options for my two roles (DPS, healing), but it's certainly possible that there is a more optimal choice that I'm not using because I don't like it. 
  
• When talking about their plans for the new monk class in the Pandaria expansion, Blizzard admitted that the design of not having an auto-attack may be so far out there that they will have to fight to keep it through testing.  DCUO meanwhile has confirmed its new Flash-themed DLC pack, and stated that the new "Lightning" powerset will do some sort of ward-based smart-healing.  Given my namesake, you'd think that I've be playing a Green Lantern, but I'm less interested in their group role (crowd control/regen) than in healing.  I'm reasonably happy with the Sorcery powerset I'm using on my main, but the Flash powerset may or may not make the new DLC more appealing, even if the subject matter is of less interest.

I don't know that I really have a bottom line today, quirky/pensive mood I suppose.  

EQ2's Inexplicable Dungeon Progression

Feldon reports the latest in EQ2 itemization news, which leaves WoW's notorious gear resets looking gentle by comparison. 

The Velious Instance Game
EQ2's group game was in an odd position.  Even though the level cap did not rise in February's expansion, a gear reset effectively took all previous level 90 content out of the conversation.  Instead, non-raiders had effectively three tiers of group content, each consisting of a cluster of three 6-man dungeons. 

Progression from tier to tier is strictly gated by two stats - critical hit chance and critical hit mitigation - and eventually a fourth tier was added with such thresholds that it is difficult to even qualify for without raid loot.  On top of that, the tiers get increasingly difficult, even after you hit the minimum thresholds.  Like Feldon, my experience has been that players stick to the first two instance clusters (indeed, avoiding the final zone of the second cluster, which is noticeably harder) to maximize their shard/time earnings and minimize the chances of PUG failure. 

The Shards
All of these instances award a token called "Primal Velium Shards", which are exchanged for both loot and "yellow adornments" - enhancement slots found on group dungeon gear that can only be purchased with tokens, and which are essential to meeting the higher crit/crit mit caps.  Meanwhile, the loot includes three tiers of armor sets that can be purchased or crafted with some combination of shards, faction, platinum, and dungeon drops.  

I am currently working on the "Ry'gorr" armor (tier 2, even though it is associated with the third instance cluster).  Each time I obtain a rare gem, I need Velium shards (40 at the expansion's launch, 20 after an earlier nerf) to have it crafted into a piece of armor.  As a result, I am extremely reluctant to spend five shards on consumable yellow adornments, or even the "tier one" armor set, both of which would be wasted when I replace the gear as I can get the gem drops. 

The Changes
As Feldon's earlier commentary noted, SOE has removed the crit mit requirements from all nine of the launch Velious zones.  While this change does mean that an undergeared player will no longer be one-shotted in the instances, I agree entirely with Feldon's observation that such players are probably not going to be prepared to make a good contribution to groups in even the earliest zones (much less the later, harder ones).

I suppose we should have seen the next change coming - the latest test server build slashes prices on shard gear to fire-sale levels.  The first tier is available with no meaningful cost at all to anyone who can find a crafter with the appropriate book (or from an NPC if you want to grind up some faction and plat, albeit on a faction that advances very slowly).  The second tier will now only require the rare gem (which are apparently skyrocketing in prices on the broker).  The third tier is now available as outright drops rather than through a complicated crafting chain in which players had to obtain large quantities of loot from the fourth and hardest instance cluster just to break it down for ore and then combine it with shards to craft the armor.  

On the plus side, I no longer need to fret about spending shards on yellow adornments, since it doesn't look like they will be needed for much of anything else.  Also, to the extent that the problem with moving on to harder tiers of content is the difficulty of the content, rather than acquisition of gear, I expect that we will see some in-coming nerfs to some or all of the instances in the coming weeks.  The addition of an automated group finder in the coming weeks will only hasten calls for the content to get easier. 

The Fallout
In my experience with the Velious dungeon game, the issue was the attempt to force too many tiers into the available content.  Players were expected to spend a long time farming the same three dungeons repeatedly before leaving them behind to work on the next three, which gets old very fast.  If they had done only two tiers - the first 5-6 instances on one tier and the remaining 3 launch dungeons, plus the 3 newer ones, on the second - there could have been much more variety and much less tedium.

The changes they are making instead do little to fix this problem.  Instead, they remove the incentive to run any of the instances from the first half of the expansion, cramming all group players in to the remaining dungeons, which are still too hard to PUG effectively.  Moreover, how excited can I really get about farming up loot now, when the trend appears to be that it will get even easier if/when more instances are added?

Unless the plan is to force players into content that is over their heads in an attempt to sell the new expansion box with additional AA's, I don't see how this approach gets anyone where they want to go. 

Rift Alternate Advancement For Advancement's Sake?

Part of Scott Hartsman's Rift State of the Game is a plan to introduce alternate advancement at the game's level cap.  While I am a non-raider who does enjoy continued progression - the theoretical target audience for this system - I am not convinced that this is a good idea. 

I'm curious what Scott thinks of the AA system over in his old game, EQ2, where players arrive at level 90 with less than half of the current AA cap and can expect a lengthy grind to obtain class-defining abilities in their AA trees.  Unlike gear, there is no short-cut involving plat or guildmates willing to hand you loot - your AA will remain substandard until you've played "enough" to fix the problem.  This is fine if you're happy with what you're doing while you play and less fine if having a minimum number of AA is a balance requirement for your friends to be allowed to bring you on raids. 

Meanwhile, the balance implications are significant.  In the short term, this is yet another form of vertical progression that will make the repeatable content that is intended to keep players in the game easier and easier with each passing day.  In the long term, it's not just group players who face content balanced around the assumption that players have AA - either all future content will assume some baseline level of AA or all future content will be easier than intended for current players.  The former is a problem for new players (who would have to stop and grind AA before continuing to grind levels so they can get to the cap and grind more AA).  The latter is a problem for current players (who will find each new expansion's difficulty ruined by their efforts in the previous one). 

I understand the appeal of the alternate advancement - it's a way to give players permanent progression in chunks that are much smaller than additional levels (which would have an especially big effect on an open ended class system like Rift's).  It is possible that the system could even be used for something unique and interesting, though it's equally possible that it will be reduced to boring but mandatory stat bonuses.  In either case it is unlikely that the game will break on the day the system comes out.  In the long run, though, Trion might end up regretting the decision to add more vertical progression solely for the sake of progression.

Early Vanguard Trial Impressions

Vanguard - despite its reputation as a harsh, old-school game with a dwindling population - has been vaguely on my list of things to try someday for a while now.  I'd been hoping for a free-to-play relaunch, but SOE has taken that option off the table, and honestly I may be better off with the $20 Station Pass offer anyway; if it's not worth paying $5 more than I'm already paying for EQ2 many months, it's not worth my time, and this way the game doesn't get hit with all of EQ2X's cash shop antics.

The game's free trial is back online now that the dust has settles from the SOE hack, so I decided to take it for a spin. 

Searching for character

The refreshingly varied list of character races include cat, wolf, and fox people, along with goblins, giants, and other fantasy staples. 

I wanted to try out a class with a good reputation for soloing to mitigate the difficulty, since I don't expect to be grouping much more than I do in other games (read: not all the time).  My first attempt was a Necromancer, your typical ranged DPS with pet.  I somehow keep forgetting that I hate to play ranged classes with pets because I end up feeling like my job is to watch the NPC do the work of actually fighting mobs, and this lasted about four levels. 

My next attempt is Disciple - a melee healer, with normal mana-based heals supplemented by heals on a melee combo point-like mechanic.  This is going much better, and it's moderately likely that this second character will stick, if for no other reason than because I'm not prepared to spend the time it takes to test drive all of the game's classes.  (Many classes don't get key abilities until a good way through the game's level curve.) 

It's worth nothing that Vanguard classes appear to be ahead of their time - DPS healer archetypes like the Disciple and the Blood Mage are increasingly popular in more recent games like Warhammer and Rift. 

Complexity for its own sake?

The character sheet has six panels, half of which have multiple tabs, and some of which aren't where I expect to find them

On the one hand, I can definitely see what appeals to players who miss the old school days.  Vanguard has a crafting system like EQ2's, only this version features more steps, components and subcombines.  There's also a "diplomacy" minigame in which a number-based card system is used to model players negotiating with NPC's.  Adventurers can expect a group dungeon before they hit level 10.  On the other hand, some of the complexity feels redundant. 

Almost anything the player does advances multiple skills, factions, diplomacy standings, etc.  Characters have four separate sets of gear, stats and exp (adventuring, harvesting, crafting, and diplomacy, with an extra tab for your mount and appearance gear), each of which can be further equipped with containers of varying types.  I failed a crafting combine early because I got an error message saying that I needed a "rigging tool" to fix something that had happened, and I made the mistake of buying a second toolbelt to put the missing device into.  Apparently you can have more than one belt, but you can only use the tools from one belt in a single crafting effort per combine, - I ended up losing my materials because a tool I needed was in a belt I didn't realize was inactive. 

Some of this stuff isn't more challenging or more strategic, just complex for the sake of complexity.  One wonders if the game's notoriously rough launch might have gone a bit smoother if someone had asked whether some of these stats and tabs and mechanics were really adding to the game. 

Does the trial play to the game's strengths?

A familiar looking quest system

On his new Vanguard podcast, Ardwulf suggests that the game's "Isle of Dawn" free trial area demonstrates how the game plays, but fails to capture how the game feels.  Having started the trial, I definitely see what he means.  The starter quest series (one each for adventurers, crafters, and diplomats) are linear and just like every other quest-based MMO out there these days.  The confined trial approach locks players out of the open sandbox world that Ardwulf and Quert claim is the game's best feature, instead putting a generic questing experience with somewhat generic lore (all of the game's races, which have lore of their own in their subscriber-only starting areas, have to be willing to take these quests) front and center. 

I'm probably going to spend a bit more time with the trial before making any decisions, but it looks like players need to upgrade to a real account to get a real view of Telon.  That's an unfortunate situation for a game that is looking to attract more players.

An early quest calls for players to loot a toolbox.  If you were there in the real world, it would be easy to see (and you'd also be free to mistakenly bring the questgiver any of the other abandoned tools in the area).  In your standard 3rd person MMO interface, the primary challenge in this quest is figuring out which small part of the landscape will accept a mouse click.

EQ2 Destiny of Velious Month 1 Impressions

I have never played the original Everquest, and this is both an advantage and a disadvantage for EQ2's take on the continent of Velious.  On the one hand, I lack the context for events that are based off of the original game, which I would imagine have more meaning for those who actually played it.  On the other hand, I don't need to be offended when the new version is inconsistent with the old (or at least my memory of the same), and I can still recognize that the lore has the polished sense of having more behind it than the paragraph in the quest journal, even if I don't know all of it. 

Perhaps this opportunity to judge the expansion on its own merits is ironically the best approach to the new content.

Expansion Content
The adventuring content in last year's Sentinel's Fate expansion really suffered from SOE's decision to increase the level cap by 10 levels without the content available to support that many levels.  As a result, the new content had absurd quest hubs where you got nine quest completes for killing seven mobs, because there was no other way to hand out that much exp in that little content. 

DOV did not increase the level cap, and, with that constraint removed from content design, the new outdoor solo content returns to the higher level of quality from pre-TSF expansions like ROK and TSO. I'm pretty much done with Great Divide now, and it looks like there's a fair amount of content to do in the next zone. 

I've also spent a fair amount of time in dungeons, having completed four of the expansion's nine heroic single group dungeons.  A big part of this is because I'm fortunate enough to have picked a class that plays like a DPS but gets group invites like a tank.  I'll also concede that the content is occasionally buggy - especially when it comes to giving everyone in a group credit for certain updates, but sometimes with more serious issues as well - but I've had a decent time despite this.  It's very uncommon for original, high quality solo content to become something that I do to kill time while looking for a group, but that's exactly where I've ended up in EQ2.

New Features
I've written about the new flying mounts, and I remain unconvinced that player controlled flight is a good idea in this type of game, but at least they're well implemented and people seem to like them. 

The other big new mechanic is Norrath's take on the public quest. On the plus side, these things do give players a reason to group up in the open world.  Unfortunately, I can't really recommend them.  Instead of offering a fixed challenge (like Warhamer) or a scaling one (like Rift), this version simply starts out at raid difficulty and fails as many times as is needed until the number of players present are able to defeat it.  With a large enough group, victory becomes a certain, if laggy, proposition.

It's not a horrible diversion, the best loot is a bit beyond what you can get in solo quests, and you are also guaranteed a gem worth a daily quest's worth of rep with the faction of your choice, which allows you to do PQ's in place of other ways of pursuing rep.  That said, I can't imagine that this version of PQ's is going to convince anyone to pick EQ2 over Rift, and one has to speculate that this was part of SOE's motivation in implementing it.

The Business Model
I don't really enjoy writing about SOE's usually inscrutable business decisions, and this expansion hasn't done that much to change this. 

• They released a new race at a separate (and large) charge from the $40 expansion box, which are already the most frequent fees of that size amongst major recent MMO's.  
• The game's most populous server is the separate free to play server, with a population that is predictably and horribly skewed towards low level characters of free races and classes - last time I did a /who all 90 dirge on Freeport during prime time, there were only 6 online (compared to 40+ on Crushbone) which can't be fun for trying to get a group together. 
• All the trivial solo quest rewards have been upgraded from "treasured" to "legendary" quality (think if WoW removed greens and had only blue items) because non-subscribers in EQ2X have to pay per the item to unlock these.  Ironically, it's cheaper to play the game as a raider than a non-raider, because a raider gets their best in slot item and keeps it for months, while solo gear may last for only the next quest chain.  

Then, there was the much-publicized public brainstorming session in which the producer suggested giving out level 90 characters as a "winback" bonus to returning subscribers, and the internets exploded.  The thing that didn't get talked about was what they actually did - wait for six weeks after the expansion launch to ensure that returning players like myself had already bought our expansion boxes before announcing a promotion for former players that included a week of free time and $15 worth of station cash (which can be used to buy future expansion boxes). 

SOE either did not know or did not care how this would look to people who came back voluntarily.  Likewise, the idea that some existing players might want to jump on the free level 90 alt bandwagon supposedly did not even occur to Smokejumper (unless he was fishing for this request to claim that there's demand for level 90 premades in the game's cash store). 

There's a line between smart price discrimination and making your existing customers feel that you value potential customers over current ones, and repeated incidents like this over the past year have left many current players feeling that the line has been crossed.  If you're selling a single player game and never expecting another dime from your customers, that's your prerogative, but it's less advisable in a genre where you're asking for more money each and every month. 

Outlook
What I've seen of Velious so far is a definite upgrade from last year's effort, though that says as much about the poor quality of TSF as about DOV.  SOE has now kicked off a publicity campaign promising to deliver the remaining content of the Velious story arc - which many of us feared would be put off to a future paid expansion - as regular content updates.  After last year, they haven't exactly earned the benefit of the doubt, but the three new instances in next month's patch are a decent enough start. 

Overall, I'm not sure how to recommend this expansion.  On the one hand, it's good quality content that I've enjoyed playing so far, and expect to get at least another month out of.  On the other, the expansion is completely useless until you've reached level 86+, and the bugs that I've seen in the early content are apparently nothing compared to the issues in the high end game, where mandatory progression bosses are still routinely removed from the game for weeks at a time due to bugs and where veterans are strongly displeased with both class balance and itemization.  It's never a good sign when your strongest advocates are all off playing Rift, and that's precisely where many of EQ2's strongest former partisans are now found. 

Seeing Ferrel, Jaye, Feldon, Starseeker, et al in Rift over EQ2 is seems as odd as Otter/Frog romance.

At the end of the day, I suppose my best advice if you're on the fence is to wait and see how the promised changes play out.  Who knows, there might even be a free level 90 character or other exclusive discount offers available if you just hold out a bit longer - perhaps not in the game's best interest, but this is a bed of their own making. 

(P.S. I picked up something like 17-18 AA's during the last month, but I'm still at only 209 out of the current cap of 300.  This is a problem, because raiding guilds expect 250+ AA's, and the rate that I've been earning them at is not sustainable once you run out of non-repeatable awards for quests and first-time boss kills.  I'll be out of content AND even geared for raiding well before I hit the 250 mark.)

Soloable Core Story, Group-Based Epilogue/Finale

Over the past few days, I spent some time in LOTRO completing the newly soloable Volume 2 Epic quests. With this set of changes, LOTRO has completed a shift in its storytelling style in which the game's core story is open to all players via soloing, while group content is presented in optional epilogues or side-quests. 

Revamping the content...
In more traditional MMO fashion, the story quests of Volumes 1 and 2 were designed with the intent of luring solo players into group content in order to see the unfolding story.  Unfortunately, for reasons I've decried at length, this approach didn't really work because the solo and group player demographics just don't match up. 

Starting with the Mirkwood expansion and the final Book of Volume 2, Turbine presented the epic storyline as soloable content, with a group epilogue that allows players to go back and tackle foes that the solo players could not conquer alone.  They also announced a change, implemented a few months later, which would revise the Volume 1 content from the launch game to allow players to complete the content without the need for groups of players that simply could no longer be found.  At the time, I wrote that it looked like Turbine was going to be using this approach going forward. 

It took over a year after that to finish the job, but last month's patch finally gave the non-soloable portions of Volume 2 (Books 4-6 and Book 8) the solo treatment.  The new Volume 3 quests that have been released since then have also been solo content, with a new optional side storyline leading players into the newly introduced group dungeons from the latest patch.

...to fit the audience?
Lord of the Rings Online is not a game that has had an overabundance of development resources; their decision to spend that limited time on removing the need to group for the game's core story strongly implies what those of us without access to the internal numbers can only assume from anecdotal evidence - that the audience for the game was simply not using the most crucial content because they were unwilling or unable to group to do so.  Moreover, the decision to continue this process book by book for over a year until the work could be completed implies that they liked the results they saw with the earliest changes. 

The MMO market in general, and LOTRO in particular now that it offers a non-monthly-fee option, is not what it used to be. Like it or not, the majority of paying customers are not interested in committing to raiding schedules that more closely resemble a job than a game.  The longer this goes on, the less willing the market is going to be to tolerate being told that they don't get to see the central story of the game they're paying for. 

This trend hit LOTRO first and hardest because it has always been a slower paced game that is more likely to appeal to a laid back solo player than a highly dedicated group player (who would quickly run out of content).  That said, the competition is starting to respond in a similar, albeit less drastic, way to the same problem.  If you look at the quests in the new zones of World of Warcraft's Cataclysm expansion, or in the newly-launched Rift, you will see an increasing push for exactly the same kind of storytelling - self-sufficient soloable zone storylines with the option to return for group content later. 

In some ways, it feels like MMO storytelling is shifting to be less like chapters of a book and more like episodes of a TV show - the new storylines appear meant to stand on their own merits, rather than merely setting up the real story for the few who beat the toughest dungeons.  Time will tell whether this compromise will prove satisfactory. 

Triumph of the Winged Fairy Who Needs a Winged Mount To Fly

Lyriana can now fly.  Well, she could kind of fly before, because she has fast runspeed from her bard class abilities and safe fall/gliding from her racial abilities, which meant being able to spend a lot of the time in the air if she was able to find a tall enough place to jump off of.  Anyway, the new expansion added a new flying mount mechanic to deal with the pesky problem of gaining altitude. 

My perspective may be skewed because of my race/class, but I'm not sure that this is a feature the game was missing.  Having a flying mount means being able to go safely overhead above any threats, dropping in for just long enough to loot a quest item before taking to the skies again.  Yes, sometimes you can find something interesting on top of a mountain that you didn't think you could scale before, but there's no reason why that problem couldn't be addressed with NPC-controlled flight paths/teleports.  If the game isn't going to go out of their way to include content that actually incorporates flight, I'm not entirely convinced that the value added is worth the value that is lost by no longer needing to pay any attention to travel.

(That said, again, bards have it pretty good because we can outrun most anything and stealth past a lot of other stuff, even before you include Fae wings.) 

We'll see whether EQ2 manages to make this mechanic worthwhile.  One place where it could be a big deal is for non-adventuring crafters, who could have a much easier time harvesting or getting to daily crafting quest hubs without worrying about mobs they can't kill.

Unlike WoW flying mounts, EQ2's will go into a dive-bomb animation if you fly straight down.

Bring the loot, not the fun

"Unfortunately, most people (myself included) are not running heroics for challenge, they are running them to get loot. "
- Anonymous commenter on my Friday discussion post

MMO players pretty universally blame WoW's dungeon group finder, introduced in Patch 3.3, for a variety of social ills; players relying on the "anonymity" of cross server groups to misbehave, class role imbalance, and decreased dungeon difficulty are blamed on the system, and players of games that aren't WoW dread the day that their game gets a dungeon finder. 

I would argue that my anonymous commenter's point, not the dungeon finder, is the real threat.  Daily dungeon quests designed to bribe overgeared players into trivial content they no longer need in order to fill groups for late-comers have reduced a once fun activity into a grind that is only worth the time if the run is quick and successful.  A working dungeon group finder could be the cure to these social problems, rather than the cause. 


Fallout of the Crusader
In patch 3.2, Blizzard abruptly upgraded all the emblem drops in the Wrath dungeon game.  The same dungeons we had already beaten six months ago would now drop emblems good for loot from two raid tiers above the difficulty of the content.  The daily dungeon quest would now drop emblems for three tiers above the content.  (Both drops would be upgraded an additional tier in patch 3.3.)  In the comments of that post, I wrote:

"The issue is that this change reduces the entire pre-Ulduar game into an exercise in maximizing your emblem/time ratio. Players who actually need loot from 5-mans are undergeared, potentially slowing players progress, and therefore won't be welcome in groups. You can't entirely blame elitist players for this - the way RaidID's currently work, you don't get to form a second group and try again if your first group downs at least one boss in the daily dungeon but fails to finish the zone.... Convincing raiders to run trivial 5-man content appears to be the point, not an unintended consequence. "

(I get a lot of predictions wrong on this blog, but I feel pretty good about that one in hindsight.)

The massive item inflation had become necessary because Blizzard was itemizing four sets of loot per dungeon, to accommodate both regular and hard modes in both 10 and 25 man content.  Before this change, it had actually started to become difficult to find groups for five-man content because anyone who raided at all no longer had any need to use the content.  This left fresh level 80's stuck with extremely limited options to get starter raiding gear - some three or more tiers above what they had when they hit 80.  Blizzard decided to approach this problem in 2009 much like they're continuing to approach a variation of it in 2011 - attempting to bribe players (in this case, raiders) to carry newbies to their entry level loot rewards. 

The dungeon finder, introduced a patch later, may have exacerbated these issues by adding the anonymity factor to the groups.  More important, the popularity of the now extremely easy content - a single DPS character in Icecrown raid gear might do as much DPS as all three of those leet 2K DPS players from a year earlier in the very same content - popularized the idea that players should be rewarded for trivial content on the off chance that someone in the group still needs the loot drops. 

Was there another way?
I actually enjoy reasonably challenging single group content.  Blizzard's decision to prevent players from ever graduating from this content removed the challenge not by changing the content itself, but rather by ensuring that groups would be overgeared.  In turn, the system itself only worked because the content was so easy - demolishing these old dungeons isn't that much fun, so it was ONLY worth doing if you were nigh certain of the rewards.  Now that dungeons are hard, the groups are a much tougher sell. 

I've done low level dungeons using the system, and you do sometimes get overgeared players (usually decked out in heirlooms), but usually you get a relatively reasonable group.  The problem was that there simply aren't enough players of a specific level/gear range on a single server to reliably fill out groups. Perhaps a cross-server dungeon finder WITHOUT a daily dungeon quest would attract players who actually need the content but don't overgear it to such an extent that they can afford sloppy gameplay if they wish to succeed. In the long run, this approach might have been the far less harmful solution to the problem. 

Tank Solution: Larger Groups, More DPS Slots?

Tank motivation is a pretty popular topic in the wake of Blizzard's latest bright idea, so here's a quick drive-by musing for folks, so here's a drive-by discussion point. 

Rohan suggests that distributing the responsibility of the tanking (and healing) roles among multiple players might lessen the pressure and therefore make players more willing to tank. He suggests that 2 tanks, 2 healers and 2 DPS might work.  Chris@Game By Night's experience with public rift groups suggests otherwise, as players would rather wipe and fail than switch over to healing, even when most classes have passive healing options that play almost identically to DPS. 

What if we went in the opposite direction?  The current holy trinity calls for 1 tank, 1 healer, and 3-4 DPS, but it seems that far more than 60% of players only want to DPS.  If you're not going to blow up the entire holy trinity/aggro concept (which no current aggro-based game can do in a patch), and you can't convince players to move over to the tank category, why not change the numbers to match how players actually behave?  Perhaps 1 tank, 2 healers, and 7 DPS would reflect the actual preferences of the population. 

There are problems to overcome.  That said, pretty much all of these games already offer a raiding format that is about twice as large as the default group but only utilities a single tank - if anything, this would lessen the degree to which single group content fosters 2-4 times more tanks than there are slots for in raids. 

Thoughts?