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. 

MMO Death Penalties Are The Harshest Ever

Tobold muses about whether the success of two recent strategy games in which the player can actually lose the campaign against the computer pave the way for tougher failure penalties in MMO's.  Ironically, today's seemingly lenient penalties are arguably MORE punitive than the seemingly harsher penalties in the days of old.

Based on my experience with X-Com in the late 90's, seeing how different strategic choices influence the outcome is the fun part of the strategy game.  In some ways, "losing" the game meant a fresh start where you could try a different approach to combating the alien invasion.  The penalty for failure was only a penalty if you did not like the game that you were playing.

Meanwhile, as I've written for a long time now, all death penalties in MMO's can effectively be expressed in terms of the time it will take to get your character back to the state they were in prior to their unfortunate mishap.  Whether it's the time to run back from the graveyard, payoff exp debt, replace lost gears and levels, or even to re-roll after hardcore perma-death, there is always some quantity of time that will repair your losses.

The difference between Tobold's bygone era, where this threat brought communities together, and today is a more diverse playerbase.  In an era where the predominant form of play was grinding mobs in a group of your friends, the loss of exp just meant more time grinding mobs in a group of your friends - i.e. only a penalty if you did not like the game you were playing.

Today's genre attempts to draw a wide range of playstyles, such as solo players, small groups (who may not have tanking/healing), structured groups, raiders, crafters, etc.  More to the point, developers are increasingly using incentives to get players to use the other forms of content, as they cannot afford to let the development time used to support all of this stuff sit idle.  The result is that, if you were to lose gear or exp as a result of death, you would probably be forced to go do something you do NOT enjoy to get it back.  Having to spend an hour to re-queue and repeat a dungeon finder PUG that failed is arguably WORSE than losing a level in EQ1, because you did not want to be doing PUG dungeon finder runs to begin with. 

As long as this is the case, making more substantial death penalties only serves to increase the amount of time your customers have to spend doing stuff that they did not want to do to begin with - not the best business plan for a genre that depends on retaining satisfied customers.

Scenarios: Continuing Fun, or Coddling Aggro?

Having gotten over the initial disappointment surrounding the story in WoW's Theramore scenario, I've played through the thing several more times (7 total, judging from my stack of fireworks).  Through this experience, I have found that the scenario is more fun the less optimal your group is.  Looking ahead to Pandaria's endgame, though, this makes me wonder if Blizzard has only further delayed the point at which players will be forced to learn how to play in a "real" group. 

The Trinity and Soloing
The central tenet of the "holy trinity" approach to MMO's is that DPS should not be taking damage.  Even if you personally are capable of pulling one of the mobs and soloing it, this is strongly discouraged as your healer will feel obliged to heal you (whether or not you need the help - if you are wrong and you die, your mob gets loose) and all of the mobs will survive longer because your group's DPS is split. 

When Blizzard added solo play as an intentionally supported form of gameplay to the MMO genre, at WoW's launch in 2004, they had to change this model.  When you are alone, there is no one else to take the damage for you.  Thus, every character needed their own mechanism for avoiding, healing, or mitigating the attacks of their enemies.  However, the game (and most others that have offered solo leveling since) transitions to the traditional model at max level, and players nigh universally note that the leveling experience does little to prepare new players for this shift. 

Cooperative Soloing
A scenario group with a tank functions largely like a traditional trinity group.  A scenario group without a tank functions like a trio of solo players cooperating.  On paper at least there's no problem with individual players intentionally pulling aggro and using all of their tool to survive and conquer.  (The one issue arises if a player sees my mage fighting stuff, assumes that I can't survive, and adds my mobs onto the ones they had already pulled for themselves, taking on more than they can tank.)  Indeed, designing scenarios with large pulls of soloable mobs rather than single mobs that lone players can't survive seems to have been the whole point of the design.

This puts scenarios in an unusual niche in the overall context of Pandaria's endgame.  It sounds like the intent is to offer a gradual transition into group content, with a finite endpoint as you get the requisite gear.   The catch is that, while players are probably introduced to more group concepts than they would be solo, they are by design free to continue disregarding the holy trinity concept.  This is a good thing if the solo playstyle is what you find fun, and you are now free to continue that fun for one more tier up the progression.  This is a bad thing if the longterm goal - for yourself, the playerbase as a whole, or Blizzard - is to break players of bad aggro habits before they get to "real" group content. 

Rift To Remove Player Factions

Today, Trion announced plans to functionally all but remove factions from Rift.  As far as I can tell, all guilds, group content, instanced PVP (the random groupfinder already puts "mercenaries" into cross faction groups, so this is only a change to queueing), chat, and most other functional portions of the game will now be shared between factions.  Quest content, lore, and the two capitol cities will remain in place, presumably because re-writing all of the above would be a prohibitive amount of work. 

Trion is spinning this as the two factions recognizing the need to come together against common foes after having beaten four of the six elemental dragons.  This isn't actually new - we saw it in the game's first world event, back in March 2011, and frankly the faction system added so little to the game that I was questioning what purpose it served before launch even happened.

One area that may be kind of screwed up is non-instanced PVP.  Residents of PVP servers will be locked out of most of these features - good I suppose if you rolled on that ruleset because you really like it, but bad if you are being left behind for PVE purposes.  At least Trion offers free server transfers?  There could be some odd quirks in terms of faction spying, trash talking, etc, but some of these are already possible.  Trion also recently added a three-way PVP system where players choose to join one of the sides independent of their racial faction alignment, so I suppose they may intend for this system to replace the game's original lore. 

As always, tip of the hat to Trion for doing what they think is necessary, rather than allowing a situation they clearly felt needed to be corrected to continue - most developers would not consider doing something this dramatic to a launched game.  As long as the two factions are always fighting the same enemies anyway, there is very little value to the two faction system.  Since developers don't really have the time to develop completely separate content for their factions, this is a logical alternative. 

(Meanwhile, Blizzard is supposedly ramping the Alliance/Horde rivalry back up, other than the detail that the Horde's hated warchief is the final boss of the expansion.  The whole Galactic War thing kind of rules out merging the SWTOR factions.  I don't know that anyone is going to come scrambling to follow suit in retrofitting their games, but it will be interesting to see whether future developers stop doing two factions simply because that's how WoW did it.) 

Level versus /played

Via Massively comes an interesting tidbit of Warhammer Online news.  Beyond the first fifteen levels, the game will now use the RVR Reknown level, rather than the PVE character level system for RVR scenario matchmaking.  Characters with a low PVE level will be bolstered up to some baseline while in the scenario, while higher PVE-level players with low reknown ranks will remain what's functionally a training bracket until they rank up. 

It's an interesting concept.  In PVP in general, player skill is going to play a larger role compared to /played time, and that effect is only amplified if the player spends their leveling time in (possibly solo) PVE content.  Depending on how well Warhammer has tamed the AFK problem, the time to Reknown rank 70 may actually be enough to train newbies to play with the veterans. 

On the downside, last I checked Reknown rank was character-specific rather than account-wide.  Players who really know what they are doing are potentially trapped in the training bracket for 69 levels - it's not clear to me from the patch notes whether level 40 players can group up with their friends and queue together as a group, or whether these folks will be split by reknown rank.  By the same token, someone who really likes steam-rolling newbies could presumably serially re-roll to stay in the entry level bracket and feast on the tears. 

This may be a moot point in the context of a game that's down to its last server (or two, I've lost track) simultaneously rolling out a stand-alone spinoff version of the scenario gameplay in a free to play somewhat-level-less MOBA.  Faults with the execution aside, though, separating players by some measure of skill rather than time /played may be a sound concept, especially for PVP, and it'll be interesting to see who steals it in the future. 

PAX East 2012: Things to do, people to meet

As a first time convention-goer, I had very little idea of what to expect of the PAX East extravaganza in Boston.

In some ways, it was not what I expected.  There were no major game announcements that I'm aware of, and even the stuff on display on the show floor tended to be minor updates to information we already had.  The demos and panels that were present were trapped behind massive lines that required substantial commitment.  Meanwhile, though some MMO's had senior developers manning their booths, it wasn't really an opportunity to ask all the hard-hitting questions that professional journalists dare not mention - though satisfying the fans is a plus, these folks were there to promote their products.  Even the swag was relatively limited (though my decision to steer clear of lines may have influenced that, and the swag I did get was very good stuff indeed).

As the song says, you can't always get what you want.  Even so, the things I found were in many ways better than the the things I might have expected.

The Road to PAX
The lowpoint of my PAX experience came very early.  Given unlimited time and money, I would definitely have preferred to fly in a day early and take the show at a measured, easy pace.  Instead, I work up at 4 AM to fly to Boston and arrive at the show floor around 11 AM - already a non-trivial day.

I arrived to find that they had run out of the day's allotment of swag bags.  Concerned that the MMO loot might find a similar fate, I set off on a rapid fire run around the perimeter, snagging codes from The Secret World, SWTOR, LOTRO, DDO, and Tera (none of which, as it happens, were in any danger of running out).  The one advantage to showing up on the second day was that I already knew what to expect on the show floor - nothing major and new.

At this point it was lunch time, so I grabbed an overpriced and mediocre convention center sandwich and wondered whether I had made a big mistake in spending the time and money to come to a place that, on a first pass, didn't have much to see.

Hope in unexpected places
With lowered expectations, I began my post-lunch circuit of the show at the Turbine booth.  I had a brief conversation with some DDO folks - not really my primary objective since the expansion is really aimed well above my characters' heads - before getting in line for the LOTRO hoodie promo.  Anyone willing to wish LOTRO a happy 5th birthday on camera was given a free hooded sweatshirt.

I asked the guy in the WB Games shirt watching the line and greeting people whether he posted in the forums.  He said he did, under the name Berephon.  Yes, the lore lead for the game, maker of the famous timeline of events that the public can't have, was smiling and waving at dozens of people who had no idea who he was.

I promptly extracted a few chuckles out of the man by asking a question that I've been dying to hit him with for years - how much time it take a normal person in Middle Earth to do all the travel that occurs in the epic book questlines.  After a good laugh, he conceded that the travel time was something that they just had to let go of in terms of the game design and the lore.  I noted that Elrond was right when he tells the player, at the start of Volume 3, that they are the only one capable of gathering all the rangers in time. 

It was a small moment, but the start of finding the hidden little moments that made this show worthwhile.

Dancing on chairs, and choices about lines
After stopping to listen to a panel at the SWTOR booth, I headed across the floor to see the sights and make it to Ferrel's book signing.  I've been listening to the man on podcasts for years, and have even been on his show twice, but I'm not sure that I will ever be able to look at it the same way now that I know that the guy isn't kidding when he suggests things like dancing on chairs to entertain the masses.  Kidding aside, it was great to finally put a face to the voice of Epic Slant. 

From here, it was time to start making choices about what exactly I was prepared to wait in line to see.  I was definitely starting to get tired, I already knew I had more possible activities in the evening than energy and time to do them, and I didn't want to overdo the afternoon on the show floor.  I was definitely surprised by how much demand there was to attend even the smallest-seeming booths and panels at the show.  I've always heard that everything at PAX has a line, and apparently this was true.

The one line I finally decided to wait in was the one to get in the Assassin's Creed III threater.  All told, this took about 40 minutes, for a chance to watch a developer-narrated preview of the gameplay in a room decorated to resemble colonial barracks.  The playthrough of a single sequence in the game probably took a mere five minutes or so of gameplay, but the commentary actually did manage to point out some interesting tidbits I might not have realized I was watching - efforts to make the climbable trees look more realistic, numbers of soldiers forming firing lines and shooting in formation, etc.   I enjoyed the video, and collected an inflatable hatchet for my time, though I'll concede that I did not line up for any more videos or demos.

Partying with Turbine
Everything I'd heard said that Turbine throws a great party at PAX, so I'd made RSVP'ing a top priority and picked this shindig over the numerous others (including a blogger tweet-up, parties hosted by The Secret World, Curse, and Bioware, and a Jonathan Coulton concert).   In a world where I had more time, I might have left the show early to nap and save some energy to hit more than one social event, but I guess I had just come to terms with the fact that attending an event as big as PAX means that you will necessarily miss some things that would have been worth going to.  In any case, it appears that I chose well.

Lining up to enter the party, I noticed a familiar logo on the shirt of the guy who had walked in at the same time I did, and realized that his voice sounded familiar.  Completely by accident, I had run into Chris from MMO Reporter.  In addition to his role as the head of a Canadian MMO Podcast syndicate, Chris was covering the show for PC Gamer.  It was interesting to hear about what he had seen (which we can all do via the podcast and upcoming videos), and he had definitely lined up way more formal interview time than I got by wandering the floor, but I was a bit surprised to hear largely the same impression I'd gotten of the show - some interesting tidbits but relatively little major news.  Perhaps PAX has gotten so big these days that it's only worth paying the cost of exhibiting for the biggest titles that are gearing up their marketing pushes for launches later this year.

Chris was not the only famous podcaster in attendance.  Jerry Snook - founder of DDOcast and now a member of DDO's community team - was in the house, along with longtime DDOCast PAX East correspondent Steiner-Davion and frequent guest-host Rowanheal.   Meanwhile, Turbine spared no expense, booking the back room of Jillian's across the street from Fenway park, providing free drink tickets and high quality swag.  (The highlight - an actual real-world cloak.)  For extra amusement value, they had the TV screens that would ordinarily be showing sports in most bars in Boston playing the promos for the LOTRO and DDO expansions instead - quite an unexpected sight.

On top of all that, I ended up getting to chat with Executive Producers Fernando (DDO) and Kate (LOTRO) Paiz for the better part of ten minutes about their experiences running their games through their now famous free to play conversations.  As Fernando tells it, one of the first questions the marketing people asked was how quickly they could retrofit DDO to free to play.  His response was very quickly if you didn't care about the quality of the product, and fortunately a more measured response won out.

Many couples might have been nervous about working together on such a high profile, high pressure project, but Fernando claims that things very quickly got too busy for them to get in each others' way.  Kate covered many of the business model systems, while Fernando worked more closely on the design and engineering side, and both had plenty of work to do.  I asked whether Turbine's shared engine made it easier to repeat the process with LOTRO, and Fernando definitely agreed that having two major projects running the current engine made it easier to justify large investments in this technology.  (In general, he said that LOTRO gets upgrades first, though DDO got to be the first in line during the conversion.)

Following up on this discussion, I asked Kate about the shift to the larger scale expansions in both games.  She confirmed that having the highly successful expansion launch in LOTRO definitely helped make the case for undertaking the larger project in DDO.  I'm still not 100% satisfied with this move, as I feel it undermines the a la carte choice of the model, but at least I can respect that they are trying more ambitious things with the larger revenue that has come under the new business model.

Winding Down
I finally headed out of the Turbine party a bit after 10 PM - perhaps a bit early by nightlife standards, but it had been a very long day and I had many sore muscles to show for it.  (Ironically, Bioware may have been exceedingly clever in providing comfortable seating in a portion of the SWTOR "booth" that served as a lounge and venue for several daily panels/Q&A's.  On paper it looked like a lot of underutilised space, but I wouldn't be surprised if tired convention-goers spent more time in view of the promotional videos and panels because it was a good place to rest.)

Sunday had much smaller crowds - after both Friday and Saturday sold out, there were plenty of badges to be had at the door, and I convinced my wife to tag along and demo some tabletop (yes, non-video) games.  The con organizers apparently had set aside an allocation of swag bags for Sunday, so I was able to get the loot that I missed out on Saturday morning.  The table top section of the convention was a real pleasant surprise - you can read reviews and buy games anywhere, but it's not every day that you can get people to teach you dozens of them just to see which ones you find interesting.

Cell phone reception at the con was sluggish, leading to delayed text message times that had Riannon and myself criss-crossing the show floor in an effort to introduce ourselves before heading out.  Riannon and Pete are another duo of folks I've been hanging out with online for years, and it was great to meet them as well.  That said, we were all pretty tired by this point in the con, and we all headed out our separate ways back home around lunchtime.

Overall
Far and away the best advice I got on attending the con was not to have my heart set on catching everything that was going on, as this seemed downright impossible.  I know I missed any number of things due to conflicts and aversion to lines, and that was just something to come to grips with. 

I saved some money through my less than optimal travel arrangements and staying with a friend in town, and I spent surprisingly little at the event itself - the Turbine swag in particular included several free items that I would have considered paying for.  That said, the cost of the weekend trip still comes pretty close to the total of what I spent on MMO's last year.  If not for the fact that both PAX locations happen to be in cities that my wife and I have reason to visit anyway, this trip would be very hard to justify.

That said, overall I had a good time at the con - in some ways despite the con itself.  The moments that are going to stick with me are not the games or the booths, but the people.  Perhaps in the same way that some of the things we do in MMO's can become fun in the right company, some of the less desirable quirks of the convention - long lines and limited information beyond what you could have read online for a fraction of the time and money - are worth overlooking.

Interstellar Cow Clicking

Tipa has always excelled at naming things, such as her post likening the new Duty Officer system in Star Trek Online to "cow clicking" in Farmville.  My experience with the game is reasonably similar with a caveat - as a newbie, I've never known the game  as it was before the advent of cow clicking. 

Some of the many assignments the crew of the USS PVD-2 are working.  The quality and traits of the officers you assign to the task affect the percentages. 

In some ways, the critique is apt.  Like a Facebook game, the optimal strategy involves showing up to click on a painfully frequent basis - the best return of duty exp per time is always found from missions that take shorter real world timeframes (30 minutes through 4 hours) versus longer missions (up to 2 days).  This makes it irritatingly easy to end up with half your crew idle.  Players can purchase an increased duty officer cap, or even random booster packs of duty officers.  You can also earn currency, which can eventually be converted into cash store Cryptic points, albeit at rates so slow that many players will be tempted to open their wallets to cut to the chase. 

Prices.  For reference, 500 CP costs $6.25.  That said, I'm not convinced that any of these are necessary.  You can only have 20 assignments (not counting crew stuck in sick bay recovering from their latest failure), so you only need so many officers.

However, the analogy does not hold up so well when you consider that there is an actual MMO attached to this minigame.  Due to cooldowns, you're not going to find the best assignments by parking your ship outside Earth Spacedock.  The system is mostly level-independent; some of the prices in energy credits are a bit steep for a lowbie like myself, but there's no combat or other restrictions.  Interestingly, it's also almost entirely solo-based.  You can, in principle, buy and sell officers and materials on the in-game auction house, but so far my crew seems to be able to find missions they can do without external support.  It's a far cry from either traditional raiding or spamming your friend feed in search of people who are too tactful to tell you to your face how little they care about your Facebook livestock. 

One thing that does worry me is the rate at which I'm gaining regular experience (skill points) through the system.  I get crafting materials but extremely limited gear for either my officers or the ship proper, and I could see getting in over my head if PVE content scales assuming that I have been earning gear through the traditional leveling path.  I'm currently at level 17, and the mission I'm currently working on the Klingon War episode arc has a minimum level of 9 (though all the mobs scale up to my current level).

Overall, though, I'm reasonably fond of the system.  I find STO's ground combat game pretty underwhelming.  The ship combat game is different, but I don't think I'd play this on its own merits either.  The story content is more interesting, but unlikely to last all that long, maybe a month or two of primary MMO playtime.  But the game where my ship and crew exist to travel the galaxy searching for things to do is both fun and original.  It also feels appropriate to the lore - hijinks like we saw on the shows can't possibly happen every single day in the 24th/25th century, or the universe would have ended by now.  Whatever its other quirks, this system feels like what you'd expect from the life of a Star Fleet Captain. 

Smed is a Congenial but Unscrupulous Ferengi.  No word on whether Cryptic has included similar shout-outs to famous competitors elsewhere amongst the thousands of duty officers.

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. 

Weekly vs Daily Engagement

As a result of my dungeon and raid finding activities earlier in the week, there have been no more Valor points available for me to earn in WoW since Thursday.  This new, more flexible system point system makes WoW a game that requires weekly engagement, rather than daily engagement.  While this change may be good and even necessary, I wonder what effect it will have on community and retention.

The new system
I earned the VP for the week as follows:

• I attempted three dungeon runs on Tuesday night (reset night in WoW), two of which were successful, for 300 Valor Points. 
• I went two for two on Wednesday night for another 300 points.
• I spent Thursday night on a Raid finder marathon, and would have been awarded 500 VP's if not for the weekly cap of 1000 points (i.e. I only received 400 points due to the cap).  I even re-queued to loot the bosses I missed the first time around. 

Effectively, I had maxed out the potential gains I could get for the week before Friday rolled around.  Having killed each boss once for the achievements, I probably won't re-queue in the raid finder just for the chance to loot items that are a tier behind what is on the Valor point vendor.  A single night, or two at the most, will probably be enough to pick off the most valuable rewards. 

Min-maxing by minimizing
In terms of both schedule and level of burnout, not having to grind away at WoW is definitely a good thing.  The reality may very well be that the game can no longer hold player interest seven days a week.  The issue is that the old daily rewards did not just prolong the time it would take players to earn all the rewards. 

Having a reason to sign in every day encourages full guild chat channel.  I wonder whether players will begin to notice emptier guilds as the population on a whole adjusts to this new, reduced commitment.  This could, in turn, reduce player involvement and ultimately make the online world less "sticky" than it was before.  Are we looking at a tragedy of the commons, in which players want flexibility but will be disappointed when their friends aren't around due to the same flexibility?

Easy Raids And Player Conversion

Rohan at Blessing of Kings is looking vaguely prophetic.  On Thursday, he wrote about a split between what he calls "transient" players - those only willing to tackle content designed to be completed in a single session - and "extended" players - those willing to invest greater amounts of time over multiple sessions in traditional raid content.  He wrote:

The single biggest problem with the endgame of WoW is that it persists in believing that if the incentives are just right, Transient players will transform into Extended players, and everything will work out properly.

In a followup post on Monday, he suggests that having a lower difficulty raid setting with automated group finding is a compromise solution that could provide transient players with an endgame, while preserving the more traditional endgame.  Today, we learned that Blizzard has been hard at work implementing his suggestion, and that the looking for raid tool in patch 4.3 will indeed send players into a lower difficulty level. 

Dealing with Transience
To greatly abuse numbers, I'd suggest that transient players make up 80+% of the MMO market - that's the approximately 5 million NA/EU WoW subscribers versus the approximately 500,000 subscribers to the most successful MMO's that pre-dated WoW. Some portion of that increase may be the fabled Blizzard "quality"/"polish", the popularity of the IP from previous games, etc. However, I just don't think that these things account for an order of magnitude. Instead, I believe the additional numbers are transient players, who Blizzard chose to invite into a previously closed genre by allowing them to solo to the level cap.

The challenge ever since has been how to entertain transient players now that they are here, providing the majority of the revenue for the genre and voting down the extended players (including the EQ1 vets who now work as developers at places like Blizzard) on questions about whether it's appropriate for expansion storylines to culminate in raid zones that only elite players can complete. 

Some games, like LOTRO, have effectively punted - that game's core story is now soloable, with group content as an optional additional-fee add-on.  Others have struggled to find the resources to tack a solo game onto a model that was intended for something else.  Meanwhile, a few hold-outs, notably WoW, have tried to hold the line for the extended old-guard, selling everyone the same expansion with the same storyline, but reserving the ending for not merely regular raids but harder "heroic" raids, with heroic-only encounters like Sinestra and the final phase of the Firelands Ragnaros encounter. 

Continuing the trend?
Assuming that this does play out the way it sounds like it will, transient players will indeed get to see all of the zones in the game.  The real question I'm wondering about is "why".  If the answer was "to provide more content, without having to re-design raids for 5 players", this plan would make sense.  However, according to the interview summary, the one of the goals of the system is to teach players how to raid for future efforts in the "real" difficulty settings.  If so, I believe the effort is doomed to failure because it continues the mistake that Rohan pointed out - the belief that somehow players who are paying to play a game on their own schedules can be convinced to switch over to more structured raid schedules, if only they can be made to see the light. 

Nothing that Blizzard or anyone else has attempted since 2004 has succeeded at this, and I don't expect that exposing players to 24 strangers in WoW's notorious random dungeon pool will do the trick.  Meanwhile, if Blizzard intends to reserve the real ending of the raid storylines for players who do the traditional non-easy versions of the raid, I doubt that most transient players will be impressed. 

In principle, this whole thing should have limited impact on "real" raiders, who are supposedly raiding because they actually enjoy raiding.  If the plan succeeds, real raiders might even see more experienced recruits coming out of the raid finder.  That said, to the extent that some raiders are motivated by exclusivity, Blizzard may see some customers heading for the exits. Whether this number will be offset by increased retention among players who can now PUG all the raids remains to be seen.

The Curious Case Of The Dissappearing Rift Podcasts

As someone who plays and writes about many games, podcasts are a hugely important source of gaming news.  Anyone can type up an article to convey the same information, but a good podcast will give you a real sense of the game's community, and why the stories matter (or do not).  Throw in the fact that I can listen while not in front of a computer, and I literally don't know if I'd still be able to do this blog without podcasts. 

Which is why I find it interesting, sad, and perhaps a bit disturbing that, as Rift hits the six month mark of release, I'm on my third Rift Podcast in search of a fourth. 

The Rift Podcast
Around a year ago, when I started hearing rumblings about this game called Rift that people were getting excited about, my first real info came via The Rift Podcast - the oldest post I have tagged with Rift is actually a link to one of their old episodes.  To this day, I associate Rift's login screen music more strongly with the podcast than the actual game, and the interviews definitely played a major role in letting me know what this game was about. 

The partnership formed by the three girls - Arithion and Desikis the podcasters, and Cindy "Abigale" Bowens at Trion - accomplished something that may never have been done before, at least on such a scale.  Ari and Desi were given pre-beta NDA's so they could come in each and every week and hold live interviews with the people actually building the un-released game.  Exclusive access to the devs sounds like any podcaster's dream, but some of the stories Ari told late in the show's run made it sound like managing this working relationship was much more work and pressure than a typical podcaster has to go through.  Likewise, I'm sure that Cindy was taking at least somewhat of a risk in bringing outside people onboard to talk to everyone from the community team up to Scott Hartsman.  Fortunately for everyone, it paid off.

The Rift Podcast shut down shortly after the game finally launched, as Ari was suffering from health issues, and I was genuinely glad to hear that she's fully recovered.  In the mean time, the dedicated Rift slot in my podcast playlist was up for grabs.

Rift Watchers
I'd actually been listening to several of the other podcasts that opened up as the game hit open beta, but my new favorite was Rift Watchers.  There was no hot Austrailian chick, and Gavin did once threaten to hunt down and camp the corpse of Brian "Psychochild" Green because of something I had tweeted - apparently he thought "Green" Armadillo was somehow a cover name for the more famous developer.  Other than that, the show was great, with player round tables and a notorious call-in phone jingle. 

Then literally everyone involved suffered from nigh simultaneous cases of new or more involved jobs, additional projects, etc, and the folks decided to go their separate ways.  (Amusingly, poor Ferrel was finally promoted from recurring guest to official co-host the week they canceled the show, which sounds like something Joss Whedon would do.)

Player Versus Rift
So, it was back to the podcast pool yet again for a third podcast.  This time, I settled on Player Versus Rift.   Their sense of humor is a good change of pace from some of the other shows on my playlist, and I suppose I can support their choice of the name (which has absolutely nothing to do with me as far as I know).  So everything has been going well for like all of a month... and then out of the blue Casey announces that they're ending the show because he has a new job or something. Planes bleep it all. 

Morals of the story
The first moral of the story is that if any of you know a Rift podcast that you'd really like to see shut down in a week or two, let me know so I can add them to my hitlist and make that happen for you - this post is really all about me after all.  :)

That said, I wonder if there is something up here.  Podcasts open and close all the time, but this rate of Rift-related podcast attrition seems unusually high, especially since everyone seems to still like the game as of when they signed off.  Is it just inevitable that pre-launch enthusiasm will die down, as podcasters realize how much of their potential gaming time they have to spend working on their shows?  Or is there something else going on here? 

I don't know, but I suppose I have some dead air in which to think about it as I debate which Rift podcast to kill next.  :)

Transparency In Loot

While I was out, Ferrel posted a survey on loot perspectives. I find the discussion as interesting for the perspective he attacks the problem from as a guild leader as for the actual age-old debate.  One of the questions posed is:

"Do you trust other players to award loot fairly or do you need to see some sort of tracking metric?"

As a player, my instinctive response to this question is that you're running with the wrong people, or at least the wrong loot system, if you think that transparency is the only way (or even an effective way) to protect yourself from being screwed over by your leadership.  In the ideal case, the value that I see for a tracking metric is primarily as a tool to help make decisions more quickly and in a way that results in an effective distribution of the loot. 

Based on Ferrel's longstanding interest in the leadership of guilds, I think he's coming at this from more of the administrative perspective.  In the real world, perhaps having more transparency might help mitigate the inevitable questions that get asked when the distribution of scarce loot happens not to work out in the favor of individual players. 

Interestingly, the survey responses are almost universally in favor of trust over accountability.  This is not a scientific random sample - in particular, a fair number of the respondents are in Ferrel's guild, which appears to be relatively free of loot drama - but I wonder if this is one of those odd cases where people on a whole distrust Congress but are fine with their particular Congressman (party affiliation permitting). 

Players, even when they're happy with their leadership, invest tremendous amounts of time, effort, and emotion in implementing loot systems that may or may not be any more fair/effective than using the in-game need/greed button.  I wonder whether it's really the resulting distribution that matters, or merely the feeling that players have done something to address the inequities inherent in assigning the scarce and random loot that plays such a large role in MMO incentives. 

EQ2 Dungeon Tokens Testing Need Versus Greed

Lyriana's slow and steady journey through the instances of Velious is continuing, and I'm learning a bit more about the endgame armor system than I knew when I had my first piece crafted.  SOE has made some unusual choices when it comes to having items crafted from account bound group dungeon drops.  The system seems to be working, but it also blurs the lines between the traditional forms of need and greed.

Verifying Need

A tier three armor recipe

As detailed in Feldon's guide to Velious armor, there are three tiers of class-specific armor that can be crafted using tokens from the current expansion's single group (six players) dungeons.  All of these have in common the Primal Velium Shard, which will be familiar to players who are familiar with dungeon currencies in other games.  Your typical dungeon run awards somewhere between 3-5 shards, which are account-bound (as is most dungeon loot in EQ2, so that players with multiple level 90's can be flexible in which character they bring), and your typical piece of loot from the first two tiers will set you back between 20-33 shards, while the third tier wants as many as 45.

(In tiers 1 and 2, finding a crafter to turn your shards into armor saves you 5-8 shards off of the vendor price, and also excuses you from any faction requirements on the vendor.  Because you are going to need to farm up shards no matter what, and because the shards can also be used for higher tiers or "adornments" - EQ2's version of enchantments - most players head straight for the second tier; I've very seldom seen anyone advertise that they're crafting the tier one stuff.)

In tier two, also known as the Ry'Gorr armor because the NPC vendor is part of the Ry'Gorr orc faction, the player must supplement the shards with a polished gem.  The rough gems, which are account-bound, drop in regular instances and are rolled as regular loot.  However, as I learned when I went to get my first piece of armor, you can trade these items once a crafter has polished them - perhaps in part to protect players from being screwed by the random number generator (and the prospect that the gem will be a six-way roll if it does drop).

This means that we have a standard need before greed dungeon drop that sells for over a hundred plat on the broker.  In principle, you could inspect the players who roll need to determine whether they already have the piece of armor that can be crafted with that gem (or better).  Then again, is it legitimate to roll need because you can sell that gem for the plat you need to buy the gem for the piece you don't have yet, when you have no way of knowing whether the other rollers are doing the same?

The situation in the third tier gets even more complicated.  Instead of gems, the tier three armor costs the standard velium shards plus ore that is obtained by disenchanting regular loot items that drop in those dungeons.  In the tier one and two dungeons, I typically don't even roll greed on stuff my character doesn't intend to use, because someone else might at least have an alt that will use the account-bound gear.  In the third tier, I would need to obtain some of those drops to get the ore for my own armor, and, again, there's no good way to tell whether someone is rolling need for the gear, for the ore, for the cash to exchange for other ore, or just straight up for the cash.

Good idea?
On the one hand, I see where SOE is coming from with this system.  For the slots where I can have class-specific armor crafted, it's very rare that I'm going to want a generic dungeon drop, and that does reduce the system to a pure token grind.  That said, I don't know that I'm entirely comfortable with what this model does to the incentives in loot rolling, especially with cross-server grouping coming to the game possibly later this month.

Overall, the problem is a shortcoming of the genre-wide need before greed mechanic, rather than anything specific about EQ2's armor system.  I'm just not sure it's a good idea to have a system that tests community agreement of what constitutes need versus greed. 

EQ2 Epic Complete

Always fun to get a personal grats from a dev, thanks Domino! 

Lyriana has been working on her epic weapon for over a year now.  I completed the fabled version in late January 2010 and started working on the quest to upgrade it after hitting the new level 90 cap in June.  Unfortunately, I ran into a wall that took a lengthy hiatus from the game and a server merger to overcome.   

Mythical History
The upgraded "Mythical" epic weapons, with sometimes class-altering abilities, have been in the game for over two expansions now, and they were causing a bit of a design problem.  Classes had been balanced assuming that they had the epic abilities, but the only way to earn the weapons was to complete Kunark-era raids from 2007-2008.  Once you had your weapon, you were never willing to use anything else, because it would mean losing your epic abilities.  Neither of these conditions was tenable.

In 2010's Sentinel's Fate expansion, SOE added a new quest that allowed players to drain the energy from their epic weapon, gaining the powers that the weapon previously held as a permanent buff to your character.  The good news is that this only required single group dungeon content from the new expansion.  The bad news is that this quest was now nigh mandatory, as you would always be behind the curve no matter what weapons you obtained in the future if you did not have your epic buff.  

Looking For Server
I'm in a small guild called The Halasian Empire from the Lucan D'Lere server, so it wasn't possible to just strong-arm guildies into taking me through the content.  Meanwhile, LDL was desperately in need of a server merge due to low populations, but it did not receive one until this past February because it was an RP server, and there was no RP server with room for additional players.  This made it nigh impossible to find a group for the epic questline.  The big dungeon I needed was a zone called Cella, and I once spent an entire evening asking for it in the LFG channel on a day when it was the daily dungeon quest, without success.  This had gotten too frustrating, so I finally gave up.

LDL finally got its server merge into a regular PVE server called Crushbone earlier this year.  The improvement is dramatic.  It still took about three days to find a group to run Cella (which is now previous-expansion content, and was even less attractive this weekend with the EQ1 anniversary event running), but I was finally able to get a PUG to complete the dungeon last night.  Two of the players in the group even accompanied me into a non-instanced dungeon area known as The Hole to kill the last few relatively weak (but not quite soloable) mobs I needed, and I was able to claim my epic prize. 

 

Epic Group Finder
As Rohan said in his Rift-wrapup, it's hard to overstate the impact of not having a dungeon group finder.  I actually enjoy single group content when I can actually get a group.  The thing that I don't enjoy is having an entire night feel like a waste because I spent the whole time plaintively looking for a group and failing to find one.

There were a lot of problems with WoW's Wrath era heroics (most significantly that Blizzard intentionally packed them with overgeared raiders), but a 15 minute queue time plus a 30 minute dungeon run meant that I could actually do group content whenever I wanted to.  Last night's session ended up taking over four hours and running to about 1 AM - fortunately, I was able to find a group on a Saturday, because I'm not young enough to pull those kinds of hours off on a work night anymore.

Overall, I enjoyed the actual content, and I look forward to taking Lyriana's new toy for a spin over the next few weeks.  That said, it's somewhat problematic that the logistics kept me from finishing for so long.  In an era where group players are increasingly feeling that they're being pushed to the side in favor of solo play, studios need to do a better job of helping people who actually WANT to make the jump from solo to group content do so.

Blades, blades everywhere!

Rift Server Choices

I got asked today which server I'm going to be playing on when Rift arrives.  I did decide to go with my gut and roll Guardian on the more familiar PVE ruleset.  I liked the Guardian lore and feel better than the Defiant side, and I've never been that fond of open PVP.

Guardian Side
My current plan is to join Ferrel and Massively's Karen Bryan on Byriel, a US PVE server.  (Their group had previously been looking at Belmont, but I'm glad they switched - being on the first server in the alphabetical sort can end poorly.) Pahonix and The Grubs guild are also rolling on Byriel. 

The US-RP server Faeblight seems to be a choice destination for Guardians and Defiants alike.  To my knowledge, the Guardian contingent includes Syp and Pete from Dragonchasers.  I'm neither for nor against the RP ruleset per se, but I don't want to be told that my server needs to be merged due to underpopulation but can't be merged due to the ruleset.

(This concern results from a bad experience with underpopulation on EQ2's LDL server, which lived on for months after it had become uninhabitable because there was no RP server with room to take us.  SOE finally gave up and merged it with a regular PVE server this month.  The "good" news for Faeblight is that so many people are heading there that it looks more likely to become overcrowded than underpopulated.  I've also heard a rumor that it's one of the unofficial Penny Arcade servers.)

Finally, if you're in the market for Guardian RP-PVP, Keen and Graav are taking their folks to the Guardian side of Sunrest (the US RP-PVP server).  I know they've had good success with their WoW guild, so this alone could be

Defiant Side
I know lots of people who have said that they plan to roll Defiant, but relatively few who have picked specific servers.  Here's what I know so far:

• Counter-balancing the Guardians of Faeblight, a group of people including Ardent Defender, MMO Gamer Chick, and Magson are rolling Defiant on that server, as part of a guild run by Multiplaying.net.
• Pete says he's putting some Defiant alts on Shadefallen (the other US-RP server).  
• The guys at Rift Watchers are setting up a Defiant guild on Sunrest, the US RP-PVP server.

I'll probably roll up a Defiant alt eventually, if just to see some of the content, so I'll definitely be interested to see where my readers are playing.

Anyway, that's where I stand for now.  I will keep this updated and/or tweet tomorrow if/when I get settled in.  Also, feel free to leave a comment with your server, faction, and blog/guild if you'd like to be added to the above list.

P.S. If you're looking for unofficial oceanic servers, Buboe says you're looking for Wolfsbane (PVE), Briarcliff (PVP), or the ever popular Faeblight (RP).  

Encourage Heals With Fun

Last night, I equipped my Discipline priest with all the heirlooms I don't usually use for solo content because they make things too easy.  I bought up some stacks of water (which I didn't end up needing), set some keybindings, and told my twitter followers that I'd miss them if I didn't make it out alive. Then I clicked the "healer" button on the dungeon finder, and signed up to be the healer in a WoW dungeon.

Healing through DPS



I was out to test the new smite-healing spec.  With a combination of talents and glyphs, the Discipline priest converts their smite spell from a modest nuke into a smart heal that never misses, can be spammed indefinitely, generates mana and a healing buff, and incidentally still does modest amounts of damage. 

The intent appears to be a character that plays like a DPS who is doing a bit of off-healing on the side.  The smite spam deals with topping off incidental damage to the party, so you're only watching for situations that require more attention (e.g. an instant Power Word: Shield followed by a Penace instant/channeled heal).  It's not any more difficult to play than being a DPS was back in my raiding days, when I had to keep myself out of the fire and occasionally watch the raid for curses to remove.  If anything, it was a bit too effective, in that I really could have coasted through the instance (Scarlet Monestary GY on level) by just spamming the smite key.

Incentives will not motivate DPS to heal...
Before Tobold dragged 18th century German Philosopher Immanuel Kant into a discussion on whether it's morally wrong to queue for WoW dungeons as a DPS, he suggested that "Blizzard isn't rewarding tanks and healers enough for taking their social responsibility".  I Kant say I'm qualified to evaluate the philosophical question, but the incentive question is more my area, and I don't think Tobold's idea is going to work.  

Tobold doesn't specify exactly what reward he would like Blizzard to hand out to good team players, but I'm presuming he means loot since tanks and healers already have shorter queue times, and since he suggests that Blizzard could alternately dock rewards for overpopulated roles (DPS).  The recent history of MMO's in general, and WoW in particular, suggests that loot is particularly ill-suited to this goal. 

For example, PVP rewards have been effective in getting players to AFK instanced battlegrounds, but have done very little to encourage players to cooperate with a team in the hopes of actually winning the battleground match.  In fact, just last month Blizzard managed to demonstrate that a large enough honor reward will convince players to deliberately throw world PVP matches without any in-game means of communicating their intent to do so to the other faction. 

Lest you think that this trend is specific to PVP, you need look no further than the PVE dungeon finder.  Raid quality loot was able to motivate players to zerg down trivial Wrath-era heroics with complete strangers each and every day for a year, but it did absolutely nothing to convince players that they want any part of this activity if it actually becomes difficult or time consuming.  (Thus, the current situation.)  In fairness, the minimal need to actually tank and heal the mob probably ensures that players won't be able to AFK their way to the Tobold bonus, but I have every confidence that WoW's exploitative community will find a way to subvert any system that Blizzard implemented in this department. 

(Perhaps a trio of hybrid characters can run the dungeon as DPS and votekick the tank and healer with the final boss at 1%, nominating themselves as the new tank and healers to ninja the bonus loot?  Stranger schemes have been tried.  A more pedestrian approach might simply be to ignore Heroics for a patch or two until they can be trivialized with raid gear, which seems to be more or less what's actually happening.)

... But making healing fun might.
All of which brings us back to WoW's discipline priest, which is actually in good company these days.  Rift has at least two souls that I'm aware of - the Rogue Bard and the Mage Chloromancer - that also heal by doing ranged DPS, and I think there's a melee healer in there somewhere.  Warhammer also put a fair amount of work into DPS-like healer archetypes.  I seem to recall hearing that Guild Wars 2 was going to eliminate dedicated healing altogether, though I haven't been following that plan closely enough to know if it's still being implemented. 

(Interestingly, the Warhammer Chaos Zealot is the only other class I've ever actually used to heal in an MMO, and it also focused on instant casts.  This makes me wonder if my main reservation about healing is a UI issue; let me ignore a few of the health bars with a smart heal, or remove some of the lag between when I notice someone is taking damage and when they start regaining HP by letting me use instant cast spells, and I actually start to enjoy healing..) 

As long as this particular spec remains viable, I am never going to queue this character as a DPS instead of a healer.  This is not because of the queue times (which don't bother me while leveling alts, since I can usually go level while I wait) or because of the incentives (which are identical), but because I enjoyed this particular style of healing more than DPS.  Somehow, approaching the tank and healer shortage by addressing the design issues that make these roles less fun to play seems more productive than branding the majority (60+%) of players as selfish and immoral for failing to enjoy the current design of tanking and healing in MMO's.

Immanuel Kant may or may not believe that it is immoral for a gnome mage to use the dungeon finder, because he cannot switch to another role to meet the group's needs. 

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. 

Could GW2 Self-Heals Backfire?

The gang on the Multiverse did a rundown of upcoming MMORPG's this week.  They noted that there seems to be a general trend of backlash against class-based games in general and the "holy trinity" in particular these days, and they blame the rise of solo play.  I'd suggest that their cause and effect may be reversed.  In my view, the holy trinity mechanic complicates the process of looking for groups to point where developers are forced to offer more solo options as a concession to the difficulty of finding a group. 

As the gang reminded me, the forthcoming Guild Wars 2 will supposedly eschew the traditional dedicated healer class, instead giving all character the tools to watch their own health bars.  This might sound like a way to address the problem of the holy trinity, but I'm wondering that the devs may be giving players what they say they want instead of what they actually want.

Causes of "LF2M tank and heals"
In every game that I've played, the most common difficulty in assembling a group is finding players to fill the tank and healer slots of the "trinity".  People who are down on solo play will jump to blame it for this problem - DPS characters often solo faster, they would argue, and therefore the system encourages players not to play tanks and healers.  The truth is more nuanced than that. 

I only lasted a bit over a month in FFXI back in 2006, which was about as solo-unfriendly as games have ever been.  The tank and healer shortage was in full effect in that game, and I'd routinely see groups spend so long looking that the four bored DPS would try asking more DPS with tank or healer subjobs to try and fill the missing roles (which tends not to end well when the group also insists on trying to pull the toughest possible mobs for max exp). 

Meanwhile, over in WoW, the fact that it's easier to level solo is nigh meaningless, because dual spec allows players to switch from the best solo spec to the best tanking/healing spec at the literal touch of a button.  As Spinks points out, there are other issues involved in picking up WoW tanking at this stage in an expansion cycle (chiefly the learning curve), but I don't think you can argue that solo leveling alone accounts for the fact that tanks get groups nigh instantly, while DPS wait for 15-30 minutes. 

The dirty little secret is that DPS IS EASIER.  As a DPS, you need to know two things: what order to push your buttons in, and where to stand.  The order in which you push the buttons may vary slightly based on the situation (perhaps you're saving cooldowns for a burn phase, or AOE'ing adds), but that's usually not that unpredictable.  The where to stand part means being in range of the boss and not standing in the fire, and even the second part of that role is more than many DPS (myself sometimes included) can handle. 

As a tank or a healer, you still need to be aware of the two things DPS need to know (what buttons to push, and where to stand) but you also need a far greater awareness of what the other members of the party are doing.  I was once the last player capable of removing a curse from the main tank left standing in a 40 man raid, and that one minor responsibility - far less than a real healer would have to handle - was enough to make that fight the most stressful experience I have ever had in an MMO.  Being a tank or healer is harder, carries more responsibility, and many players simply do not want this level of complexity to their hobby. 

Distributing heals, responsibility
So back to GW2's little revision, in which everyone has to heal themselves.  The practical effect of this change is that, instead of one player shouldering the responsibility for everyone's health bars, everyone has to add their own self-healing on to their other responsibilities.  If I'm right, this means that GW2 DPS WILL BE HARDER than DPS in other games due to the additional task.  The really good DPS, who always top the meters and move out of the fire and do whatever misc utility their classes have, will really shine under this system.  Those of us who struggle to react quickly enough with someone else watching our health bars may not fare so well. 

The point of asking for the removal of the trinity is to make it easier to assemble groups.  It's simply not fun to have five people lined up outside a five player dungeon only to be told that they all have to sit on their rears because none of them is a healer.  However, the new problem may be that this system further emphasizes the difference between a good player and an average one.  The average player no longer does average DPS, they do 0 DPS because they failed to watch their health and they died.  The irony is that this may leave players - especially the good ones - unwilling to do PUG's at all.  If that's the case, a change that was intended to facilitate grouping may actually make it more difficult. 

Balancing Guild Rewards

DDO's guild airship/housing has gone live on the game's test server, and players have dug up the list of rewards. All of this is obviously very subject to change (at the moment, the most efficient way to level your guild is to farm kobolds for reknown items in level 1 quests, which was not the design intent), but we're seeing enough to get some idea of what the trends are going to look like.

Guild rewards are a challenging design area. On the one hand, players are supposed to want the perks that come with being in higher level guilds (otherwise, they wouldn't really be rewards). On the other hand, guild features are supposed to enhance the guild experience and encourage players to form social ties. If the perks to guild membership are too substantial, the developers risk creating an incentive to leave your guild for the largest, least personal guild you can find, so long as they have the requisite perks.

What's on your airship?
That said, the perks in the DDO version don't look that game-altering. There are the requisite bankers, storage boxes, auctioneers, and teleports, but I've never actually felt that I was really missing these perks in the game as it stands today.

There are "crafting" stations, used to combine raid drops into raid gear, but it seems like players with access to the ingredients should be able to reach the crafting stations as well - from what I've heard, the limiting factor is raiding enough to get the materials, not actually going to do the crafting.

Finally, there are a variety of miscellaneous buffs, the most significant of which is an exp bonus that goes as high as 5%. These aren't trivial, and may be more important for players who are working on the tougher true resurrection exp curve, but nothing I'd panic over missing out on.

I'm still a bit concerned that the system as is heavily favors large guilds, which appear to have more rapid access to the most powerful rewards. Even so, if you look by comparison to EQ2, where guild rewards include teleportation to multiple locations in every zone in the game and the complete elimination of the need to harvest as a prerequisite for crafting, DDO's rewards don't feel overly game-defining.

Choices for guilds
On the plus side, low-key rewards also mean that DDO guild leaders dodge a bullet in terms of deciding what to put in their guild's limited amenity and crew slots on their airship.

If there's one thing that concerns me about WoW's upcoming Cataclysm, it's the guild talent point system. EQ2's rewards are massively significant, but there aren't that many of them, so even a small guild can quickly obtain the most game-affecting ones. If WoW's housing-less take on this type of system features more choices, and some of the choices force guilds to choose between, say, raiding and leveling alts, that could have some very unfortunate effects on guilds. Who makes that kind of choices? The officers? The whole membership? The members who contribute most to guild leveling/exp? These are tough questions that could make guild features more divisive than beneficial.