From Shattering To Cataclysm

Courtesy of notes I took on my twitter feed, here's what I did during the two weeks between the Shattering and the launch of the Cataclysm proper:

• Frothshock, new level 13 Dwarf Shaman, cleared Dun Morogh.  (Beer puns are pretty common on the newly permitted Dwarf Shaman.) 
• Cheerydeth (the third), existing level 41 Gnome Rogue, cleared half or so of West Plaguelands, gaining two levels (to 43)
• Orcthanc, a new level 6 Orc Warlock, cleared the orc level 1-6 area.  (Warlocks are evil, and Saruman, who lives in Orthanc, is also evil, making for another pun.) 
• Tangleroot, a new level 9 Troll Druid, cleared the new Troll newbie 1-6 area and started in on Razor Hill.  (I plan to make this a balance druid, and have a personal habit of stealing location names from other games - DDO in this case - when I'm not slapping an atrocious pun on a character I don't intend to keep.)  
• Gnoheals, a new level 5 Gnome Priest, cleared the gnomes' level 1-5 corner of Dun Morogh.  (Gnomes previously had "gno", err, I mean no healing classes, and another pun was born.)  
• Odus, a new level 12 Night Elf Mage, cleared out the quests of Teldrassil.  (Another stolen zone name, this time from EQ1/2, for the newly allowed NE Mage combo.)  
• Greencross, a previously existing level 23 Dwarf Priest, took the discipline spec for a test drive in Duskwood, gaining two levels (now 25) and clearing somewhere between a third and half of the zone.  
• Cowsader, a new level 11 Tauren Paladin, cleared out Mulgore.  (Another newly allowed race/class combo, another terrible pun.)

Once the Druid wraps up Durotar, I will have covered the newbie intro zones for half of the game's twelve (as of tomorrow) races. 

Sustainability of the Shattering
Half of these characters will most likely never be used again (except possibly as bank alts), but I don't regret having taken the time to run this little experiment.  In addition to the new storylines - some of which actually do require a character of the appropriate race - it was an interesting chance to see how the new "streamlined" low level gameplay works out on a variety of classes.  I might even stick with some of these alts to level 60- yes, as Gevlon points out, I could solo the content quicker on my high level characters with flying mounts, but there have been enough changes to many classes over the years that it's actually a bit of fun in its own right to see how they work these days.

All that aside, this does illustrate a bit of a challenge that Blizzard faces in having spent so much time and effort on revamping the old world.  Even the best possible case for Blizzard, where I complete literally all of the new content on level-appropriate characters (somewhere between 3-6 level 60's, with another half a dozen or so alts abandoned at level 20) is not going to keep me occupied for the next year or more.  If this is where I am after two weeks - bearing in mind that my gaming time was a bit below average due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the States, a few months of serious alt leveling may be enough to clear out the world.  Meanwhile, it's far more likely that I will lose interest after seeing some of the most dramatically changed zones, if for no other reason than because I will literally run out of classes to play. 

I suppose that Blizzard simply doesn't care because they've got enough subscribers to tolerate some part-timers, but it's certainly a bit of a cautionary tale for anyone thinking of trying something like this on a smaller budget. 

Anyway, tomorrow the expansion arrives, and I haven't even decided what I'm going to do on my main when it gets here.  I don't know anything about the level 80+ game other than the names of the zones, so I suppose I'll just hop on a flying mount and head off in one direction or another.  In any case, I'm going to save enough time before bed to run one last heroic five-man, perhaps to kill Cyanigosa or Ingvar one last time for nostalgia's sake.  The way the revamp rolled out, there wasn't ever really a specific moment that felt like a final farewell to Wrath, so I suppose one final easy dungeon zerg will be as appropriate a send-off as any. 

WoW 2010 More Like 2008 Than 2004

There's been a lively discussion on my post from Monday about WoW's old world revamp.  To quote Longasc, who tweeted about the post and his comments thereto (which may or may not be a PVD first):

"It is a guided bus tour through Azeroth, more so than ever, an on-rails experience. The elements of challenge and failure, the whole *game* has been removed."

Aside from a discussion on the merits of this argument, I don't consider this exactly breaking news.  The state of the game today is a natural continuation of a trend that has been going since the launch of the Wrath expansion two years ago, if not since the quest system was expanded from the tutorial zones to the entire leveling game during WoW's pre-launch testing. 

The game that people talk about when they complain about the current "rails" was gone long before last Tuesday.  Two expansions' worth of talent tree revamps left players vastly overpowered compared to formerly even conned mobs - my wife and I tried to pick up our old duo from the pre-TBC days sometime a bit after Wrath launched, and we had to go 2-man instances that were supposed to be designed for five to find any semblance of challenge.  Meanwhile, the time to level was drastically decreased, partially through direct reductions in exp to level, and partially through time-savers like improved access to mounts and (recently removed) teleport options.  Less time spent on each level meant less reason to leave the beaten path for anything else, which naturally downplays the value of exploration. 

With these changes, there really wasn't a point to the world remaining in the state that it was in - even for players who actually wanted the 2004 experience, the content was no longer serving that purpose.  For players who actually enjoy the low stress guided tour approach to questing, there were 40+ levels of unpolished old world content to slog through before getting to the expansions.  Players who just wanted to blaze through to the group endgame had even less reason to enjoy this part of the game, until the dungeon finder functionally replaced it by enabling low level instance pugs last year.  Whether or not the 2010 version of Azeroth is better than the 2004 version, it's definitely better than the 2008 version because at least now it's consistent.

Aside: too much content?
Ironically, Blizzard may have caused problems for themselves by actually creating TOO MUCH content in the low levels.  There's a reason why the stereotypical kill quests calls for ten rats, rather than five or twenty; the number of kills is supposed to move players out of each area after they've had a chance to take a look around but before they feel that they've been trapped in a boring grind. 

Blizzard seems to have made an effort to build satellite hubs around every camp that was in the pre-Cataclysm game, at least in the early zones I've seen.  The result is that they have to move you on from some areas at six kills, rather than ten, because the exp from the extra four mobs would push you out of the level range for the zone.  This is faster than players expect, and leaves us feeling like we're being dragged along by the metaphorical train.  Dun Morogh, for example, might actually have been better if Blizzard had declared half of the zone exploded by the Cataclysm and had doubled the kill requirements for the remaining material. 

Scattered Shattering Impressions

When I appeared on the Multiverse earlier this year, Chris asked me whether I thought that Blizzard's strategy with Cataclysm - taking time to revamp the old world at the expense of less higher level content - will allow them to hold the attention of longtime and potentially bored players.  Having spent a bit of time in the shattered world, my guess is that it will not. 

The cinematic approach comes to level 5.

Conflicting Goals
As I wrote on Twitter while rolling up five new alts over the last week, the new starter zones have a very "My Cataclysm, Let Me Show You It" feel to them.  NPC dialog (which the player may or may not be required to stay and watch) does its best to point out exactly what it is about the world your new character has entered that would not have been true two weeks ago.  In some ways, this experience seems more tailored as a sales pitch to returning vets (of which there are many, at least on the blogosphere) than actual newbies (who won't know what the story was before).

At the same time, Blizzard's efforts for simplified skill/spell progression have left those early levels surprisingly boring from a gameplay perspective.  New casters literally spend two levels mashing a single button ad naseum because they only have the one spell.  Combat may be balanced for characters who aren't carrying a heirloom arsenal, in the sense that the mobs pose the correct level of challenge level to players, but it is designed to lack the tactical depth that comes with more situational spells that the character will gain later (sometimes much later) in life.  This may help newbies learn the basics, but it paradoxically makes the early levels feel trivial for the vets that the story appears to be aimed at. 

(Meanwhile, I almost regret my decision to pursue as many heirlooms as I did.  I put a throwaway Night Elf Mage on my Horde server, where I "only" had access to heirloom shoulders and an enchanted staff, because I only have so many slots to spare on my main server with my main arsenal.  The character proceeded to one-shot his way through much of Teldrassil.)

I thought my twink gear was OP, but at least my arms aren't wings.

Upside in the Shattering
The real upside to the revamp comes at the game's mid-levels.  Players who are looking to burn through to max level ASAP to join the group game can rest assured that they will no longer be forced to run all the way across a zone just to turn in a FedEx quest that doesn't award enough exp to justify the largely non-interactive travel time.  Players who actually enjoy the "tourist" solo game offered in the two expansions can now expect the same types of vehicles, scripted events, and convenient travel that are found in the game's more recent content; you're probably going to run out of races and classes that you haven't already played before you run out of content.

(Alternately, you can go back on a flying mount after Cataclysm to blaze through the new stuff on a level 60+ character just to see the storylines.)   

All that said, Cataclysm does not (and indeed should not) fundamentally change the game experience itself. Players who complained that the last expansion was too much of an "on rails" experience really don't have any grounds to claim shock when an expansion that promised to make the old world like Northrend delivered on its word.  Though there definitely is some neat new content here, the re-roll experience is designed to go quickly, and players who weren't alt-o-holics before probably aren't such completionists that they're going to feel compelled to re-roll multiple times. 

If anything, my biggest concern with the revamp is whether Blizzard has planned for the next Cataclysm.  The current story is very strongly rooted in a sense of "this happened RIGHT after Wrath".  This is really neat now, but in a few years it may seem as dated as the journey into a Northrend still ruled by Arthas is today.  Problems for another time I suppose. 

The Worgen Are Amongst Us

For those of you who aren't with family or out shopping, I give you a screenshot of a Worgen questgiver.  I ran into her running the revamped Western Plaguelands (now with substantially less plague), working for the Cenarion Circle.  Apparently they're Austrailian or something judging from the accents. 

Difficulty As A Motivation

Over the weekend, I soloed a flurry of level 70 heroic dungeons on my mage.  This project has been simmering on the back burner for a while now, but I really wanted to get my best effort in before Cataclysm.  I got stuck on the second boss of the Black Morass/Opening The Dark Portal event and decided to give the dungeon a shot on my arcane spec rather than my usual instance-soloing frost spec.  This proved so effective that I promptly blazed through half a dozen dungeons, including some that I just couldn't beat previously.

(With patch 4.0 changes, my Arcane blast spell crits for more than 25K damage, which means that I can easily kill just about any level 70 boss in the 30 seconds that the Mirror Image spell keeps them busy.  On top of that damage, AB now automatically applies the Slow spell debuff.  This is actually more effective for single target crowd control than Frost is, as the Slow spell was balanced with the now-outdated assumption that players were going to be spending 20% of their time recasting Slow if they wanted the effect to stick.)

Though this tactic did allow me to cross a number of items off my to do list (all but the last boss of Arcatraz; if any mage has soloed this, I'd be curious to know how), in many cases it was so easy that the dungeons were no longer fun.  Playing as a frost mage requires carefully juggling aggro and freeze effects.  Playing as Arcane involves spamming Arcane Blast until everything is dead.  There were only a handful of encounters (notably the Raven boss Anzu, who I actually had to switch back to Frost to deal with) that were still in any way interesting with a character as powerful as a modern day level 80 Arcane mage facing level 70 heroics. 

The Issue With Difficulty As A Motivator 
Ghostcrawler, WoW's head system designer, posted a lengthy philosophical piece last week explaining how they felt that healing in the Wrath era had become overpowered, much as my mage is now overpowered for many dungeons that I was working on.  Cataclysm is designed to challenge healers with more limited mana regeneration to address various (and significant) issues that resulted from the old status quo.  The problem is that, unlike my choice to solo old instances because I'm bored, these changes don't occur in a vacuum.

Group content in World of Warcraft (and most other holy trinity MMO's) is designed to require 20% or more of players to play healers.  This constraint on class requirements for groups has created a situation where large numbers of players who do not want to play healers are doing because someone has to (and/or because their personal wait times are lower as a result).  When someone is doing something that they want to do, you can appeal to their sense of reason that increased challenge will make their victory more enjoyable.  When someone is only doing something because their guild needed another healer, increased challenge only makes an unpleasant task even less enjoyable.

I believe the crab when he describes the problems that resulted from healers who never ran out of mana, and it's entirely possible that the game the crab envisions for Cataclysm would be more enjoyable than the one we have today.  That improvement is reduced to an academic point, though, if the majority of players (who choose DPS) have dramatically less access to actually playing the game because the guy with a healing off-spec no longer thinks he can handle healing the instance and decides to queue with all the other DPS instead.  It's going to be very interesting to see whether Blizzard sticks to their guns if the increased difficulty leaves the highly popular random instance grind unplayable. 

Surprise! Cataclysm!

The other evening, I got a tell consisting of a single question mark.  I shift clicked the name to see if it was a guild-mate or something, but it was a random level 40 character I'd never heard of before.  I sent back my customary reply, a lone exclamation mark.

A few seconds later, the lowbie restated their question.  "Why should I abandon my home, possessions, and cares?"

I was working on the pre-Cataclysm world event, and there's a stage where the player runs around saying Twilight Hammer doomsday cult slogans in an attempt to infiltrate the organization.  Though these slogans are automatically generated by the quest, they are otherwise indistinguishable from regular player speech.

I considered how to respond; I'm not much of a role player, but it's so rare that my characters are ever doing something that makes in-game sense (as distinct from "re-killing the guy I killed yesterday for more loot") that it seemed a shame to waste the opportunity. 

"The Twilight Hammer made me say that," I replied, carefully choosing words that make sense both in and out of character.

"I don't know who that is," the lowbie replied.  At this point, I was starting to get the impression that they were legitimately confused, rather than playing along with the in-game storyline, so I decided to break character.

"It's for a new quest," I said.  "Oh," came the reply.  Then it was time to go kill an invasion boss, and I'd forgotten the encounter by the time I was done with that.

Cataclysm for the unaware?
Looking back, there are more questions I might have asked.  Was this person new to the game?  Were they aware that we're just over two weeks out from a game-altering expansion?  If they do ever find the quest they asked me about, will they know that their characters efforts are pre-destined to fall short, with the world shattered just as the players' seemingly ineffectual adversaries would like?

The alternative is that this player legitimately had no idea what was going on.  That someday, possibly as soon as next week, they're going to log in and find that the zone they logged off in got blown up overnight, wiping out half of the questgivers and even entire towns.  What happens if that player logs off for the night in the doomed city of Auberdine?  Or if they were advised by a veteran to buy a mage portal to Shattrath or Dalaran for easy hearthstone/portal access and log in to find that the portals leaving these high level areas have been removed? 

These types of issues have probably happened to players in every MMO that has ever launched an expansion.  Based on sheer size, though, Cataclysm will almost certainly take the title for total number of players who are caught unaware by a major expansion revamp to content they were just working on.  I wonder how many people will be asking how they "go back" to the old world when December 7th rolls around.  

Cataclysm Invasion Event Breaks Instance Limit

Public Service Announcement: Do not run any more than four Cataclysm invasion instances within an hour of a raid you want to attend.  

World of Warcraft has an undocumented limit of five instances per account per hour to prevent players from overloading the game's instance servers.  Under normal circumstances, players will not be in danger of hitting the limit, since it's relatively hard to chain any useful dungeons more rapidly than 12 minutes each.  The Cataclysm elemental invasion makes it much easier to hit the limit, as it is possible to queue, enter and clear the instance, and requeue inside of five minutes. 

The automated dungeon finder disregards the five instance rule (which is ACCOUNT-wide, not character specific), so you can easily run vastly over the limit without any idea that you've done something wrong.  Then your guildies ask if anyone else wants to join the raid, you try to join in, and you're not allowed to zone in until the timer wears off. 

It's not the largest of issues, but it's pretty disappointing for you (and potentially your group) if it happens unexpectedly.  There's no UI that informs you of how long you have to wait, so you're just left to guess how long it will be before your fifth-most-recent instance hits an hour old.  It's a bit disappointing that Blizzard did not take this restriction into account when designing the world event. 

Malygos and Wrapping Wrath

I've been waiting for weeks now for Malygos to come up as the weekly raid boss so that I could finally complete the Champion of the Frozen Wastes achievement.  This title was awarded for completing each heroic dungeon and raid encounter that was in for Wrath's launch, and I've had all but the Malygos kill since about January 2009. 

It's hard to ever say for certain precisely when one is "done" with an MMO expansion, but this is pretty much the end of the line for my mage.  Earlier this week, I hit exalted with the Frostborn Dwarves, the last 5-man dungeon faction I had yet to complete.  Over on the Horde side, there are a few more reputations I could complete for heirloom head and shoulder enchants, and maybe a few more Heroic 5-man dungeons to complete once for the respective achievements, but nothing I'd cry over missing.   

I suppose the interesting commentary here is that all the things I am still working on are non-RNG based goals.  Theoretically, I could keep farming the elemental invasion bosses for a few upgrades, but these will all be moot in about a month anyway.  I've actually had some pretty good luck with the random number generator this expansion, but I'm just not as interested in rolling the dice this close to the end of the line.  At this stage in the game, it makes much more sense to focus on finishing off things I was already working on, especially if they offer something that will stay with me into next expansion, such as a title or heirloom. 

I suppose that the long term question, after an expansion cycle that featured frequent and dramatic gear resets, is whether the picture will actually look that much different in a month. 

Balancing Polish And Ambition In Cataclysm

Chris at Game By Night argues that the state of WoW's Patch 4.0 is so bad that Blizzard has forfeited its claim to superior quality and polish.  Personally, I'm not at all convinced that the bug and balance situation is significantly worse than we've seen in the past - take the time when patch 3.0.8 forced Blizzard to disable Wintergrasp to keep it from killing the servers for just one example. 

(Or the highly unreliable server stability for game's first 3-6 months, when, incidentally, there was no PVP system and extremely limited and buggy raid options.) 

That aside, I'm more interested in addressing the second half of Chris' argument. 

Is the lore revamp all or nothing?
We've known since Cataclysm's announcement that the old world revamp was only slated to cover levels 1-60.  Zones like Azshara and Felwood are much worse off than anything you'll find in Outland because Blizzard had not planned to offer quests all the way to the cap to begin with, and didn't have time to do more than a cursory effort on the upper mid-levels before the game's initial launch.  (After launch, they had level-capped characters to worry about, and could afford only token efforts on the leveling game.) 

The problem is that this revamp is not just updating the local quests to meet modern design standards (e.g. not repeatedly sending players back and forth across multiple zones).  The timeline of the entire world is actually advancing past the fall of the Lich King, which means that these old expansions are literally years in the world's past. 

Blizzard made a comment at Blizzcon that they simply did not have time to redo the first two expansions, and Chris jumps on it, accusing them of not finishing the job of updating the lore so that the game can release in time for the holidays.

More Ambition, Mo' Problems?
WoW is currently two years out from its last expansion and an entire year out from its last significant new content.   The looming expansion has posed a morale problem for many guilds for as much as six months now, and there's a very real argument to be made that even an unfinished expansion would be better than none at the moment.  More importantly, the only reason why it's taking so long is because Cataclysm is actually a very ambitious expansion. 

Wrath of the Lich King launched with about 1,000 new quests.  Cataclysm is launching with a whopping 3,500.  Cataclysm will actually offer more new zones per level than Wrath did (five zones for five levels, versus eight zones for ten levels - I don't count Crystalsong because there are like two quests in the entire "zone") even while gutting and overhauling literally thousands of old world zones and quests (and adding two races, with new zones of their own).  The same type of math works on dungeons - there will be fewer completely new dungeons, butt more total dungeon work as Blizzard revamps a dozen old world leveling dungeons.

It's simply not reasonable to expect Blizzard to take all of that and then also expect them to go through and redo the entire contents of the game's first two expansions.  If the rules had been that Blizzard must revamp the entire game up to the present day lore or not touch any of it, an expansion like Cataclysm simply would not have been possible. 

If "when it's ready" for Cataclysm does indeed end up being a bit less polished than 1.0/2.0/3.0 (again, all of which had their growing pains), that's the cost of having Blizzard actually try something difficult and ambitious instead of churning out another cookie cutter 10-level expansion.  Time will tell, but it looks to me like the results will be well worth the price. 

Hallow's End Haul

WoW's Hallow's End event technically doesn't wrap up for another couple days, but I appear to be done with the event by virtue of having looted it for literally all it's worth.  My mage snagged the Horseman's mount for himself a few days after the Tauren got his hands on one.  Between the two of them, I've also obtained a total of seven of the once-rare Sinister Squashlings and three Hallowed Helms (one of each was not wasted, as the Tauren did not previously have either). 

I had no intention of ever repeating the holiday achievement grind again after the pain of going through it the first year, but the Tauren ended up with all of the hard achievements by the time he was done beating the horseman into submission.  At that point, it was just a question of doing the world tour for candy (I'd never even set foot in the zone of Shadowmoon Valley before) and looking for people to wand-zap me in Dalaran for the second leg of the dreaded meta achievement. 

Pre-Cataclysm Bucket List
As long as I'm rambling about my characters, it seems like a good time to update the pre-cataclysm bucket list.  Time permitting, the things I'm working on are:

• Finishing exalted with the Frostborn Dwarves on the mage (probably 3-4 random 5-man runs to add another +1 to my rep counter, will be harder to complete once I'm no longer 80)
• Dungeon runs on the warrior for access to heirloom rep-based head and shoulder enchants.  Cataclysm will probably add updated ones, but it could be a while before I get them.  The old ones will be better than nothing in the mean time.  Also, this will provide the occasion to try and beat each Wrath-era heroic once.
• Soloing old level 70 heroics on the mage.  I've beaten half of them so far, and I think the Black Morass is beyond my current level of dedication.  We'll see how many I get to.  

Cheerydeth the third, my level 41 gnome rogue, remains parked until the content revisions of Cataclysm hit.  I was considering taking Greenhammer, my old level 70 Pally, out for a spin since Northrend is not due for any sort of update, but leveling felt trivially easy with my shiny new heirlooms (plate shoulders and chest, and the 2H sword).  Maybe it won't be such a bad thing if I do end up running out of character slots on Hyjal and spending more time on other servers. 

Finally, there is the Thanksgiving event that I pointedly skipped last year due to holiday burnout.  I guess there's no harm in taking a look next month to see how that goes.  The next stage of the Cataclysm launch event will also kick off sometime around then.  That said, none of this is completely irreplaceable, and I won't cry if I ultimately fail to complete most or all of it.  There's something to be said for the nostalgia tour, but there are plenty of other things to do while I wait for the End of the World (of Warcraft).

4.01 PTR Heirloom Prices Increased 5x

A week ago, I took a look at the test server pricing on existing items, in order to determine whether players who current have emblems, stone keeper shards, etc should buy now.  These prices apparently were not final.  In particular, heirlooms are now going to be much more expensive, and PVD advises readers to buy their heirlooms ASAP. 

The Changes 

Justice Point costs for existing PVE heirlooms have increased by five-fold.  JP costs on other items have remained mostly constant, suggesting that this particular change was deliberate, and not merely some across the board tweak to the exchange rate.  We should have seen this change coming, because level 85 dungeons will award the same Justice Point currency that we will get for our old emblems in the patch.  The current prices are more in line with what level 85 dungeon rewards cost in JP - the intent is presumably that heirlooms will be as easy to get at level 85 as they initially were at level 80 when Wrath launched. 

The Wintergrasp side is even worse; prices on these heirlooms increased by 6.79-fold.  This appears to have been part of a broader sanity check pass on new honor point pricing, so further changes may happen.  Level 60 and 70 PVP gear prices have decreased dramatically, probably to account for the fact that new honor points are more valuable, and therefore will be awarded in drastically smaller numbers.  The old PVP mounts have also had their prices slashed 4-fold, and now seem more reasonable compared to the other items we can see.

The good news is that Argent Tournament heirloom prices have not changed.  Though this could change in the future, my gut says that it might not.  The tournament uses a separate currency that is only available through the current (level 80) quests (and one heroic dungeon).  An item that costs 60 seals will still require you to complete 60 daily quests, because there won't be level 85 daily quests that award 3 seals.  Also, unlocking the vendor to spend these seals requires completion of a lengthy daily quest-gated rep grind, and there's no reason for Blizzard to discourage players from signing up for this if they really want to.     

Buy now?
Prices could change again, but my advice to readers is now to buy any and all heirlooms you can afford if you have any interest in using them.  The worst thing that can happen if you do this is for you to end up with a full arsenal of heirlooms.  The alternative is a real risk that these items will be harder to obtain in the future. 

I've got several hundred emblems on my mage right now, which will net me either half a dozen heirlooms or a single piece of patch 4.0 level 85 dungeon gear.  The heirlooms will stay with my account indefinitely, while the gear will presumably be trashed in patch 4.1.  Frequent dungeon runners will still end up with heirlooms because of the hard cap on Justice Points, but these players have even less of a need to have a piece of gear waiting for them as a reward for past efforts. 

Finally, anyone looking to cash out Stone Keeper Shards should bear in mind that these can only redeemed when your faction controls Wintergrasp.  Don't wait til the last minute if your faction loses the majority of Wintergrasp battles. 

Cataclysm Digital Download, War On Retailers?

WoW's Cataclysm finally has a release date, December 7th 2010.  If you compare the press release to the announcement for Wrath two years ago, you will notice a small but significant difference. 

"The expansion will be available on DVD-ROM for Windows^® XP/Windows Vista^®/Windows^® 7 and Macintosh^® at a suggested retail price of $39.99 and will also be offered as a digital download from the Blizzard Store."

For most players, this means very little.  Personally, the DVD drive on my gaming machine is broken, so I'm probably going to take Blizzard up on this offer even if it means not having a box to set on the shelf with my other WoW packaging.  For retailers, though, this may mean war.

Both previous WoW expansions were not available as a digital download on launch day.  This means that Blizzard had to share the launch revenue of these expansions with a variety of middle men, from the guys who manufacture the boxes to the shippers and distributors to the actual retail store that ultimately sold the game.  For Cataclysm, all the revenue will go straight to Blizzard - they won't even pay for the majority of the bandwidth, since they managed to set a precedent six years ago of using the customers own bandwidth to serve patches. 

The Retailer's Dilemma
This will put retailers in an interesting position.  On the one hand, the older expansions are apparently still selling in large enough numbers that every store that carries any PC games carries them.  Blizzard has not announced plans to obsolete the old expansion boxes by offering an all-in-one box like other games (such as EQ1/2 and LOTRO) have done. 

That said, stores generally don't get a cut of the recurring revenue from subscriptions, excepting the portion of players who use time cards.  Instead, they lose revenue from players who stay subscribed to WoW instead of buying other new games from the retailer. 

Don't get me wrong, it's certainly going to be possible to walk into a store on December 7th and pick up a copy of Cataclysm.  Whether or not they like what Acti-Blizzard has done here, Cataclysm may be the biggest selling game of the year, and they'd be hurting themselves by sitting out the expansion launch.  The question is whether they will continue to allocate as much shelf space as they do to the game's four boxes even as Blizzard takes greater efforts to promote digital downloads, or whether stores will let their current stock run out and cut shelf space accordingly. 

Do MMO's Need Shelf Space?
In the end, there's an open question of how much retail space actually matters. 

SOE clearly thinks that it does matter, as they made a point of delaying the digital version of the latest EQ2 expansion by a week to encourage stores to stock it.  In my view, the gesture was half-hearted.  The all-in-one box obsoleted all previous SKU's of the game currently on store shelves, one of which had been released less than six months prior.  SOE also included a coupon for $10 off the digital download of the expansion in the retail box, to encourage players with friends or multiple accounts to take their business straight to the source after buying a token box from a retailer - perhaps they make more off of a $30 digital download than a $40 retail sale.  Retailers apparently were fooled, though, as I've seen many more unsold copies of TSF on shelves than previous expansions, all of which will be obsolete in five months. 

Then again, the EQ2 story raises the question of whether MMO's, which are inherently online only, actually do get a lot of walk up impulse purchase traffic.  How many of these boxes are actually sold to new players, and how many were bought up on sale months later by knowledgeable players when the full priced digital download cost more?  Perhaps a lapsed subscriber might see a new box someday and decide to try the game out, but otherwise the commitment required for MMO's tends to draw a more informed consumer.

Especially in Blizzard's case, it's possible that the stores need the sales more than WoW needs the store. 

Updated WoW Cataclysm Justice Point Costs

Update 9/30: Blizzard has made the higher conversions official - emblems of Triumph and Frost will now be worth 11.58 Justice Points each.  Either my math is wrong or I got an extra emblem from somewhere after starting the PTR character copy.  This does not change any of my analysis, but I'm scratching out a paragraph of the below.  

Also, MMO-Champion believes that the patch will go live next Tuesday, October 5th.

Original Post

Two weeks back, Blizzard announced plans for a currency revamp in the 4.0 patch.  Though they did release enough numbers for MMO-Champion to make a currency converter, this was only half of the story - how many honor or justice points would we receive for our existing currencies.

The other question, if you're sitting on large piles of tokens currently, is what will happen to prices on existing items.  Do you cash out now for things like mounts and heirlooms?  Is your current stuff worth so little that you might as well burn it on soon to be obsolete level 80 gear?

I went on the PTR's today (9/28) to take a look.  Here's the bottom line up front:

If you are SURE want CURRENT Frost or PVP rewards now, spend your Frost Emblems and Honor Points before the patch.
If you're on the fence, though, you might be better off waiting and taking your chances that you might end up paying slightly more later.

Emblem Conversion

My first surprise was to log in and see that I had over 2400 Justice Points.   The currency converter told me to expect a quarter of that number.  I had to copy over a second character, compare justice point totals with emblem totals on live, and attempt some high school algebra I haven't thought about in years.  Where the previously announced conversion valued both Emblems of Triumph and Frost at 2.75 JP, the new totals are 11.58 JP per emblem.
, my possibly fuzzy math says that the new totals are:
Triumph: 12.05 JP

Frost: 11.34 JP

This does not make a lot of sense, as Frost Emblems are more difficult to obtain and yet appear to have converted into smaller numbers of JP.  If this remains true, it would actually be more efficient to downgrade your frost emblems into triumph emblems before the patch.   Either way, the payout in JP per existing emblem appears to have gone up by nearly 5-fold.  This makes sense if you look at prices.

On the live servers, the Khadgar's items (T9 set) cost 30 or 50 Emblems of Triumph, which works out to 15.93 or 15.94 JP per Emblem.  (Presumably, the costs were set to deal with rounding.)  The Bloodmage (T10) gear costs 60 or 95 Emblems of Frost, which works out to 11.6 JP per Emblem.  Again, strangely, the Triumph stuff seems to be valued more highly than its higher quality counterparts. 

My advice here is this: If you have frost emblems that you are planning to spend on a frost item ASAP, try to do so before the patch.  Otherwise, wait.  Though Triumph items will cost more emblems per item, I'd be less inclined to liquidate them simply because, at current exchange rates, they are worth better than 1:1 for Frost emblems.

It's also worth noting that, in the current beta build, level 85 JP reward gear is costing about twice what T10 gear costs.  Would you rather have two pieces of T10 that you will replace with quest rewards, or one new piece of entry level dungeon gear waiting for you when you reach level 85?  There's no right or wrong answer, it's your call based on your playstyle, and whether you expect to be over the 4000 JP cap (mid 300's total emblems of Triumph and Frost) after the patch, assuming no changes to that number.

Heirlooms

I was too impatient to wait for the item names to load, so you'll have to take my word for it that these are the existing PVE heirlooms

The PVE heirlooms are coming in at 10.88 JP per emblem in their existing cost.  Any low quality (heroism, valor, or conquest) emblems you still have will be turned into gold, so you should probably turn those into heirlooms ASAP.  Triumph and Frost emblems should NOT be turned into heirlooms unless exchange rates change again.

Stone Keeper shards appear to be converting at the previously announced rate of 1.6 New Honor Points per shard, and prices on these heirlooms appear to have scaled by the same factor.  I.e. your shards will buy exactly as many heirlooms after the patch as they do now.  In fact, these heirlooms will arguably be easier to obtain because you can use honor from ANY source, not just shards. 

New Honor Points

Because there are so many things that turn into the New Honor Points, I was not that inclined to double check the math - the number that the MMO Champion calculator reported was the number that I had on my main after the copy.  This means that Honor will convert at a rate of:
1000 Old Honor Points = 24 New Honor Points

Level 80 PVP vendors were not available, so I checked some of the older vendors. 

Guardian's Dreadweave Belt (S4 PVP gear)

18000 old HP = 3113 NHP (0.173 per)

Mounts

50,000 old HP = 8601 NHP (0.172 per)

We can't be sure if these numbers are final, but this is a potentially staggering increase in prices.  For perspective, 50,000 OHP = 1200 NHP (more than seven-fold below the adjusted mount cost!)

My advice on honor points is simple - spend now or hold them until level 85.  Also note that any old battleground marks you still have should be converted into honor points up to the cap (75000) because this offers a more favorable exchange rate.

Uncertainty

Though I hope that this post has answered some questions, it all counts as currency speculation.  As we have already seen, rates can and might change without notice.  (In fact, a new build went live while I was writing this post - the 2H heirloom weapons seem to have dropped in price from 707 JP to 700 JP.)  Moreover, we have no idea when the patch itself will go live, at which point it will be too late to make any exchanges.

This type of uncertainty is precisely why I argued and continued to believe that converting these legacy currencies retroactively was more trouble than it's worth.  Blizzard had to approximately preserve the relative purchasing power of these emblems to avoid screwing someone who was short by a single emblem on the night before the patch (especially since only the most attentive of players will even know this change is coming in advance).  Was all this really worth a slightly cleaner currency panel?

Thrall's Farewell To Nagrand

I haven't heard officially whether the questline where Thrall visits Nagrand will be removed by Cataclysm, but it seems like an unfortunate but safe bet.  Garrosh Hellscream will sit in Thrall's chair in Ogrimmar, making it difficult to keep an old storyline about how the player enlisted Thrall's help to talk Garrosh into attempting to make himself useful. 

Assuming that it is gone, this story is possibly the biggest loss that Deathwing will inflict on Azeroth. 

Poor mechanics....
In terms of poorly designed quest structure, this quest is right up there with LOTRO's notorious Tomb of Elendil quest. 

First, the player must complete all of the solo quests in Garadar, along with a handful of non-instanced quests for small groups of level 68 players in the western end of the zone.  (Good luck finding a group for these, as level 68 players will receive far superior loot by going to Northrend instead of sticking around Outland.)  This opens up a few more solo quests, followed by a visit to the 5-man Auchenai Crypts. 

The Crypts are tuned for levels 65-67, though I guess that the original intent might have been that some players would run the dungeon as a level 70 heroic.  The good news here is that the random dungeon-finder ensures that there will be players willing to fill out your dungeon group in exchange for random rewards. 

To add a parting insult, however, the final step after the dungeon run is another non-instanced group quest.  This is the exact same flaw with the LOTRO Tomb of Elendil line - the sheer number of prerequisites drastically reduces the number of players who would be at all interested in teaming up for this final step.  (The other non-instanced group quests do not have any pre-requisites, so any players who happen to be in the area can immediately jump in if someone is looking for help.)

In short, finishing this questline at the apporpriate level in an out-dated expansion would not be fun for anyone who does not have a static group of some sort helping them out.

Meet over-inflation...
Fortunately for my hopes of ever seeing the end of this story, WoW has had far more gear inflation than LOTRO over the last three years.  I was able to solo all of the non-instanced steps up to the Crypts run at level 78, but the final boss of the Crypts was a bit too much.  Two levels and a bunch of gear upgrades later, the dungeon was relatively easy to solo. 

The final step was obviously very easy to solo at this excessive level, but it would have been hugely frustrating had I been working on this quest at level 68. 

... For a unique reward
As an Alliance player, I had been aware that this storyline would ultimately bring Thrall to Outland in order to tell the tale of the redemption of Grom Hellscream to his despondent son, Garrosh.  As thanks, the younger Hellscream has gone on to become the annoying sidekick of the expansion, and there are people who would rather follow the famous corpse of Mankrik's wife than Garrosh as the Horde's new Warchief.

What I did not know was that there was something else in the story for Thrall.  Upon completing all of the quests and failing to get Garrosh up off his rear end, the Mag'har Greatmother laments the absense of her son, Durotan.  This name is meant to ring a bell - by the end of Warcraft III, Thrall has named the new Horde's homeland Durotar, after his late father.  By doing what we normally do as adventurers, slaughtering our way across the zone, us players have inadvertently reunited the Warchief with his grandmother. 

Players have some close brushes with the lore in various places in WoW.  The Alliance has the now mostly removed storyline of the "missing diplomat" and Onyxia's stint as Lady Katrina Prestor in the very throne room of Stormwind.  In Northrend, the Alliance reunites Muradin Bronzebeard with his brother.  Horde players can hear a haunting melody by returning a keepsake to Lady Sylvanas.  Both sides experience the battles of the Wrathgate and the Undercity (the latter of which will be gone in Cataclysm). 

In these dramatic moments, though, it feels like the player serves in a supporting role to the real protagonists. We may provide crucial intelligence and support, but the final battle is fought under the banners of Bolvar Fordragon or Thrall or some other more significant character, with the player serving as a mere footsolier.  Though it is ultimately Thrall that returns Garrosh's resolve, this story succeeds in making the player feel that it was our actions that led the Warchief to return home.   

Getting this story done before the increasingly imminent Cataclysm was my highest in-game priority in MMO's, and the payoff turns out to have been well worth it.  If you have never seen the tale and you have a character anywhere near the appropriate level on the Horde side, I'd advise you to do what it takes to see this story unfold before it's too late. 

On the left, the legendary Doomhammer, weapon of prophecy.  On the right, a hammer I picked up off of a random Flesh Giant who forges weapons for the Lich King's grunts in the Pit of Saron.  Fill in your favorite joke about players and/or item designers overcompensating here. 

Introductory Tanking Experience

My warrior finally hit level 80, so I've now got the levels I would need to tank.  With the gear I'm getting from random dungeons I run as DPS, I've got the stats I would need to tank.  With dual spec, I've got the tools I would need to tank without having to sacrifice solo and DPS options. 

The challenge, then, is getting the personal experience I would need to actually know how to tank.  This is one area where the game comes up pretty short at the moment.

Off-tanking some trash
Like many good PUG stories, the Gun'Drak run crisis began with a hunter's pet.  The hunter maintained that the healer was responsible for keeping his pet alive and the tank (who claimed to have a "top Shaman healer" as one of his other characters) took the hunter's side.   The mage and I just tried to get the the tank and the healer to tolerate each other for the ten minutes it would have taken to clear the dungeon, since, as DPS, we would have been staring at lengthy queues to find a new group.  Unfortunately, after squabbling our way through three of the four bosses, bickering over whether it's okay to need a blue item that no one wanted for off-set, and a failed vote kick attempt, the tank decided to pull a group of mobs and then drop group.

As the highest DPS party member, aggro fell directly on my Bladestorming shoulders, and the healer was apparently good enough to keep an Arms warrior in battle stance carrying a two-handed weapon alive, because we survived the pull.  The remaining group members suggested that I should try to tank the rest of the dungeon in case we couldn't get a replacement, so I switched over to my tanking spec and gear and made my first ever pull as the tank of an instance group.  As it happened, the group finder got us a replacement tank shortly thereafter, but my curious lack of failure in this brief role tempted me to see what exactly I could do.

Looking for easy mode
In all likelihood, there will never be another dungeon I know quite so well as Utgarde Keep; the first dungeon of the expansion, it was also the easiest heroic and therefore the most reliable source of emblems back before 5-mans became a playground for bored and overgeared raiders.  At level 79, with a gearscore around 2.5K in my tanking set, I was way above what should be needed to tank the level 70-72 normal mode of this dungeon, so it seemed like the safest possible way to give tanking a chance. 

I queued up and was shocked to get a group before I had even finished switching over to my tanking setup.  Off we went.  Realistically, I had set a very low bar for myself to see if I could physically find the buttons needed to tank stuff.  Apparently I passed that basic standard, as we burned through the dungeon with no deaths and minimal if any cases of loose mobs running after other players. 

Next up, I queued to try the Brewfest boss.  In terms of absolute difficulty, this should have been a relatively attainable goal, as that fight is not especially challenging.  Unfortunately, this otherwise easy content is a bit harder to tank in a PUG precisely BECAUSE it is too easy.  My first attempt at a group had started and nearly finished the event before I even finished zoning in.  The second time, I bungled badly because someone has to talk to the boss to get him to attack, and I somehow lost track of him in the commotion.  The third time I actually managed to pick up the boss, but all-our DPS from raid-geared players pulled him off.  Because the fight is so easy, none of these resulted in a wipe, and therefore no one had any reason to slow their attacks for a noob tank. 

Back up to the high end
My curiosity was mostly satisfied, so I went back to work on the last few bubbles of exp I needed for level 80 as a DPS.  Then disaster struck in the Halls of Lightning.

My queue number came up as a replacement for someone who dropped after a wipe.  The tank was clearly new and struggling.  Given my own inexperience, I would have been happy to be patient with him, but he had apparently had enough, and quit without a word after a wipe on the third boss.  I warned the group that I was inexperienced but offered to try tanking the rest of the dungeon, figuring that the worst that could happen would be a group disband (which they were considering before I offered to tank). 

HOL was the hardest of the 5-mans at Wrath's launch, and features lots of AOE splash damage.  At Wrath's launch, players were required to do a variety of things to avoid this damage (e.g. the person who is giving off damaging sparks should run away from the rest of the group), but it started to become standard practice to ignore these mechanics and try to heal through them as players got more geared.  The challenge is less about holding aggro and more about somehow staying alive and doing enough damage to kill the bosses before the healer runs out of mana.  In other words, definitely not an ideal training ground for new players. 

Anyway, we gave it a shot and ultimately cleared the instance with me tanking.  I am very unfamiliar with defensive stance in general, and found myself scrambling for cooldowns I barely even knew I had just to stay alive long enough for the healer to get back to me (while also keeping the DPS up).  On both of the boss fights I tanked, my self-heals from herbalism and alchemy were the difference between life and death.  We wiped once, on trash, because I was standing in the wrong place (having always done this dungeon as a ranged attacker) and got several groups of adds, but overall it was about as great of a success as anyone could have hoped for. 

Training day?
I don't really plan to continue on as a tank on this character.  I am glad that I tried it, though, because the challenges were not what I expected. 

As a DPS, I figured that holding aggro would be hard, because the thing that I notice is when I produce more threat than the tank and the mob comes to kill me.   As a tank, I found that I never really had trouble holding down a mob against comparably geared players. 

The thing that really challenged me was the reactives - where to stand, when to move, what buttons to press in what situations.  Part of this is due to WoW's health pool design, which is currently far too heavily weighted towards massive damage spikes - Cataclysm promises to revamp the system to make survival and healing more a matter of strategy, though time will tell how they succeed. 

The bigger design problem, though, is that there is no way to learn this system other than to try (and possibly/probably fail) to tank for real live groups of other players.  Cataclysm may worsen this aspect of learning to tank because the game will be shifting to a more rigid sub-class-like system where solo builds will not see even the basic tanking tools.  There really needs to be some way for me to learn what I need to know without screwing over four other players by showing up and claiming that I can serve as their tank when that could not be further from the truth. 

PVD On The Multiverse

The latest episode of The Multiverse is out, and, if you've been waiting for years to hear the sound of my voice, your day has arrived.  Apparently I use about as many words when I'm on a podcast as I do when I'm writing a blogpost, so listeners can expect to hear me rambling on for a significant portion of the episode's hundred minutes.  Major topics include the prospects of Cataclysm, the state of EQ2, the role of the subscription in the future of MMO's, and a very special message for John Smedley. 

I'd like to thank Ferrel and Chris for having me on the show (and express my regrets for having missed out on Riknas).  The Multiverse at its core is a bunch of knowledgeable, intelligent bloggers sitting around and talking about our favorite hobby, and they were very welcoming for this podcasting newbie. 

I'll also say that it's a bit odd being on a podcast that you actually listen to, because you're used to hearing their voices and you might even talk back occasionally, but they don't usually hear you when you do.  Regardless, it sounds like I was reasonably coherent, even though I was a bit flustered at the top of the show after the two of them spent several minutes talking about how great they think I am or something.  /blush  I'd visit this show again anytime.

I would like to echo the shout-outs I made on the air to DDO Cast, LOTRO Reporter, and EQ2 Wire for being tremendous resources on their respective games.  I really do rely on these sites for the in-depth coverage that I need to stay on top of the news while juggling so many games.

Anyway, head on over to Vagary.tv to listen to the episode!

Cataclysm Currency Calamity

Blizzard previously announced plans to reset honor upon launch of the expansion in order to prevent people from stockpiling enough honor to buy level 80 gear the moment they dinged 80. I commented at the time that this was a major PR Failure, in part because they inexplicably failed to have the new honor award info ready until a day later, but also because of an issue of consumer confidence; wiping out previously earned honor implies disrespect for the time spent obtaining said honor.

Well, now Blizzard has reversed the decision, saying that they will, instead, jack up prices for level 80 stuff. This, of course, is what they should have done in the first place. I am staggered to think that they didn't imagine there would be outcry and only thought to react to it after the news broke.
- Me, back in September 2008

When you've been writing an MMO blog for long enough, you start to get the feeling that you're writing a post that you've written before.   Case in point, it's late September before a WoW expansion and Blizzard has once again announced last minute plans to mess with existing currencies even though they once again do not have the answers to obvious questions.

Honor 3.0
Honor points, currently capped at an arbitrary 75,000, will be scaled into a new form of honor points that cap at an even more arbitrary 4,000 (with a grace period between the conversion and Cataclysm to spend down excess points before they're turned into relatively trivial amounts of gold). 

A variety of miscellaneous PVP currencies - but possibly not all of them, such as Outland world PVP tokens - will also be removed and converted into the new honor points. MMO-Champion implemented a calculator that can be used to calculate what your current stuff is worth.  (At the moment, you will obtain more honor from converting battleground marks into honor points than from holding them, exchange rates may change.)  Wintergrasp heirlooms will now be purchased using the new honor points, and may or may end up being more expensive - personally, I'm redeeming all of my Stone Keeper Shards for heirlooms ASAP. 

An obvious and unanswered question is what will happen to the Wintergrasp Commendation, an account bound item that currently allows players to turn their Wintergrasp rewards into honor points on future alts.  Cashing these out immediately would hugely decrease their value.  However, players have been banking these items because they can also be used to store excess honor, defeating the honor cap. 

Dungeon emblems
Legacy badges and emblems will immediately be cashed out into gold, which, again, is relatively useless to most players who have enough emblems to care.  I plan to convert my old valor and conquest emblems into heirlooms ASAP.

Meanwhile, existing Triumph and Frost emblems will be turned into the new "points of justice" at an equal exchange rate, even though Frost emblems are substantially more difficult to obtain.  At current PTR exchange rates, both currencies stand to lose some purchasing power (i.e. you won't get enough points of justice for 60 emblems to buy something that currently costs 60 emblems).  On the other hand, points from Triumph emblems will be spendable on things that currently require Frost emblems - if you even want to purchase any of these things a month before they're replaced in the new expansion instead of saving the points for free dungeon loot at level 85. 

Why not just replace the currency?
The thing that boggles my mind about this change is that it was completely unnecessary.   Blizzard could have left existing currencies in place for existing content and introduced NEW currencies for the new content, as they have done in every gear reset that the game has had to date.  Instead, they are now allowing us to bank points now for use in the not-yet-released expansion.  In the interim, there's a mess of how to balance exchange rates and pricing on existing items that are only a month or two from irrelevancy anyway. 

At the end of the day, I think I might have liked Wrath's approach to dungeon currency better than Cataclysm's.  Under Wrath's rules, you might as well spend your rewards as you earn them, since saving the tokens won't actually get you anything better in the next patch.  Now the goal will always be to stay as close to the cap as possible before each new patch allows you to spend your existing points on better items than you can obtain today. 

In any case, I'm a bit surprised and disappointed that Blizzard seems to have learned so little from the failed honor reset two years ago.  Would it really have killed them to have the answers to obvious FAQ's in hand before rolling out the announcement? 

New Beginnings, Old Character Slot Limits

WoW's Cataclysm launch events kicked off last week with a pair of new stories explaining how the gnomes and the trolls finally get their hometowns back from the low level mobs that have been occupying them for six years.  The beta has new introductory voiceovers for all of the existing races, and presumably other changes like these events will mean a lot of new low level content.  My guess is that you're going to need anywhere from 2-4 new alts to see the 20-60 leveling content, and as many as 10-12 new alts if there are significant changes to the 1-20 content.  To the best of my knowledge, WoW's per server character limit will remain at 10. 

There are sound technical reasons for character limits - data storage is not entirely free for one thing.  Even so, there is a distinct possibility that Cataclysm will test the limits of character slots per server on a scale that has never happened before in an MMO.  The stakes are non-trivial; many longtime players have high level alts occupying all of their slots - some folks have all 10 level 80's.  If you're forced to move to another server, you leave behind heirlooms (I'll have over a dozen when I decide what to spend my existing currency balances on) and social ties to your existing guild (which will also lose out on guild exp for your new alts). 

I suppose there is a bit of a silver lining opportunity here.  All of us probably know someone who plays on another server, and perhaps the Cataclysm is the time to pay them a visit.  It's just going to be interesting to see whether we're going to see disruptive player migration when the new content meets the old character cap.

Bonus event commentary: "da druids, we been layin' low".  Yes, we've seen various troll mobs that can shapeshift, but they have always referred to themselves as Priests of a specific animal loa.  Until now, I can't remember a Troll who has actually called themselves a druid, or displayed the ability to change into more than one different kind of creature.  This is why I don't take lore seriously as an argument to justify game design decisions - it's a fictional construct that can and will break as early and often as the developers want it to. 

Financing the Neglected Middle-Game

It has been mathematically proven that DDO has a significant lack of quests for the mid-teens (the game's level cap is 20).  You might think that Free to Play is the model that would solve this problem, as there would be a market for content to fill that gap.  Instead, the most recent adventure packs have focused on level 5, levels 6-8, and soon levels 9-12.  What's keeping them from addressing the more pressing level range?

The issue is one of numbers.  There's always going to need to be some attention to endgame, because players at max level have nothing to do if you're not adding endgame.  There's always going to need to be some attention to the early game because new players and alts have to get through that range, and might give up if the content is not good enough.  This leaves an unfortunate neglected middle ground that's just temporary enough that the developers don't feel they can spend too much time on it, and just high enough into the game that it isn't really going to be a make-or-break selling point. 

For example, I don't have any characters above level 6 at the moment, so a new level 15 adventure pack isn't going to be driving my purchasing decisions in DDO for the time being. When I do get up that high, I might start thinking about trying to save my Turbine Points for endgame content, rather than spending them on a level range that I might not make it back to a second time. 

Coping with the middle-game
Every game has this sort of murky middle ground.  Often, it'll be found towards the upper end of the levels that were available when the game launched (e.g. 40-58 in pre-Cataclysm WoW, the 40-68 range that SOE's been slowly working on in EQ2, 30-50 in LOTRO).  My gut says that the challenges may actually be worse under the DDO model because the game's income is so directly tied to whether people want to pay money for the new content.  In response, Turbine has been trying to have it both ways by implementing content that is designed for low level characters and then offers a scaled up version for endgame players, with the middle game left as the odd level range out.

Interestingly, a solution to this problem for the DDO model might be lurking in one of the game's least well-regarded adventure packs, the Devil Assault.  This pack gets raised eyebrows because it consists of a single quest, which sounds vaguely like WoW's Violet Hold, with the player standing still in a room defending it against attackers.  The thing that makes this quest unique is the level range options.  Typically, the optional harder difficulty settings on DDO quests bump the level by 1 or 2 above normal.  In Devil Assault, the levels jump from 6 to 12 to 18. 

If Turbine is really struggling to make one content pack fit all level ranges, they should consider using this approach with future adventure packs; have a low level option and a level 20 epic option, as they do currently, but add in an additional option in the mid levels.   DDO quests are worth less exp each time they are repeated (with the exception that you get the full award for the first time you complete the quest on each difficulty level), so there's relatively limited danger that players will be able to ride a handful of adventure packs all the way to the cap with this approach.  Meanwhile, it would make the new packs attractive in a way that yet another addition to the already crowded 1-8 level range simply is not these days.

Cataclysm Post-script
The quirk to Blizzard's decision to spend so much of WoW's new expansion working on the previously neglected level range is that they're really not going to have much of a hole left in the leveling game by the time they're done.  Some people are adamant that the TBC-era content from 58-68 is markedly worse than the Wrath era content from 68-80, but the difference in quality is FAR less than the difference between sparse zones like Azshara and Felwood in the 40's and Outland in the 60's.

Ironically, if Wrath is any indication, WoW's neglected middle ground post-Cataclysm may be for non-raiders at the level cap.  If you're actually looking to raid, it sounds like the options will be comparable to what we've seen in the past.  By contrast, there will only be 8 five-man dungeons at Cataclysm's launch, down from the twelve that Wrath had.  It sounds like Cataclysm will keep the system of bribing overgeared raiders into these instances for daily rewards, so this may once again mean that they're not all that interesting for anyone who regards them as the final destination, rather than a temporary waypoint en route to the raid game. 

WoW To Replace 10 Classes With 30 Subclasses

World of Warcraft's Cataclysm expansion is quietly shaping up to be almost more of a sequel than a traditional expansion.  We already knew that they would be replacing the existing game world with a new one set six years in the future from the game's original launch.  Earlier this week, in a story that no one on my blogroll has commented on because of the uproar over RealID, they announced a change that may have equally major implications - a complete overhaul of the game's talent system.


Under the new system, Blizzard is essentially replacing WoW's 10 classes with 30 sub-classes. 


The state of the trees
The modern WoW talent system gives players one point for every level starting at 10, for a total of 71 points by level 80.  These points are divided amongst three trees that are unique to each class.  The final point in each tree requires 50 points spent, so typical builds take 51 or more points in a single tree and split the remainder amongst the low hanging fruit of other trees.

Philosophically, talents are about specialization, rather than alternate advancement (as seen in EQ2's AA system or LOTRO's traits).  Every character of a given level has the same amount of talent points, which are granted automatically upon leveling.  The cost of spending 51 points in a tree is not getting the abilities that cost 21+ in the other two.  This approach creates two issues.

The first is that tree-defining talents must be placed deep in each tree.  Anything in the first 20 points can be obtained by other specs.  For example, melee Enhancement Shamen currently cannot get the ability to dual wield until their 31 point talent at level 40, because the other two specs of Shaman are spell casters.  No other caster can dual wield, and it is not worth the bother of balancing around exactly one spec combination of one class (e.g. Elemental caster Shamen who happen to have taken Enhancement with their leftover points) carrying around two spell power weapons.

The consequence is that a leveling enhancement Shaman needs to use a 2-handed weapon for their first 39 levels.  Many classes need to wait as long 60 levels to obtain 51-point talent abilities that will be the core of their damage rotations at level 80.  If you care about new and low level players, which everyone does these days, that's way too long to make players wait to actually play their class.

The second issue is one of balance.  The addition of even a single talent point allows specs to reach previously unattainable 21-point talents in their off-trees.  Worse, each tier has to be more powerful and more defining than the previous tier if Blizzard does not want players to start going with hybrid 2-3 tree specs.  It's hard enough for Blizzard to balance a role for each of the existing 30 trees without worrying about the prospect that some obscure 41/30 spec will turn into an overpowered/broken combo.

What is changing
Under the new system, players will effectively choose a sub-class - one of their existing talent trees - before spending their first talent point at level 10.  Choosing the subclass will immediately grant a previously exclusive talent ability that will not be purchaseable by the other subclasses for any amount of points, even if the next expansion adds a thousand of them.  For example, the melee Enhancement Shaman will immediately receive the dual wielding ability, along with a previously 36-point off-hand attack. 

Speaking of points, there will be way fewer of them.  No tree will go further than 31 points (down from the current 51), and players will receive only 41 points by the new level cap (down from the current 71).  To further constrain things, players will not be allowed to spend a single point outside their chosen tree until they have spent 31 points in the main tree.  Effectively, players will have a mere 10 discretionary points to divide between the two off-trees and/or additional points in their main tree.

The end result is a dramatic reduction in the range of customization options at players' disposal.  The variations between specs of a subclass will be much more akin to the variations on a theme in EQ2 subclass AA trees.  The theory is that, in exchange, each subclass can be more unique and better balanced against the other 30 subclasses. 

Why and How
All these problems were well known, but Blizzard's initial plan was to ignore them and blaze ahead with five more talent points for the five new levels.  To be honest, I didn't think they had the nerve to mess with something so fundamental.  Perhaps they didn't until they actually tried the traditional tree revamp and were unsatisfied with the results.  Apparently reaction to an initial preview of the new trees was enough to steel their resolve to burn the system down and rebuild it from scratch.

In the short term, this will be a mess.  We are probably no more than four months from the retail launch of the expansion, in a public, no-NDA closed beta.  It is almost certain that the system will need some work at launch, and I'd imagine that Ghostcrawler and his team won't be getting much sleep during that time.  In the long term, though, this change could have a huge positive impact on the game.

The fact is that a wide open system means that most of the options will be bad, and the few unexpected gems may be in line for balance nerfs.  In exchange for that limited freedom, the developers can improve the experience for the subclasses that are left.  The new system will also do a better job of scaling with future expansions, which might only add 2-3 additional points.  Either way, this is one change that looks to live up to the Cataclysm name.