I didn't comment on Blizzard's ill-fated effort at attaching players' real names to forum posts last week because there wasn't an incentive design issue to discuss. But perhaps there should have been.
DDO, WoW, and EQ2 all have bind-to-account/heirloom items that cannot be given to other players but can be transferred to your own alts on the same server. In WoW, one of the uses for this mechanic is to pass along reputation-only head and shoulder item enchants that can only be obtained through grinding factions to your alts once you have completed the grind once. EQ2 allows basically all dungeon loot, along with dungeon and world event tokens, and some faction rewards to be transferred.
Most interestingly, a newly added EQ2 feature lets you short-circuit the lengthy scavenger hunt needed to learn the Draconic languge (needed for epic weapon quests) once you have completed it once. Blizzard had expressed a desire for a similar method for raid attunement quests, but never implemented this feature and, instead, took the easier step of slashing reputation requirements before removing attunements entirely for almost all dungeons.
If you were looking to convince players that they want to switch over to some sort of account-wide identity, the way to do it is not with the implicit threat that someone will find your real world home. The way to do it is to say that publicly linking your characters to your account identity allows you to share certain achievements, like raid attunements or heirlooms. (After all, it's only fair that other players can see why it is that this particular character gets to skip a major timesink.) Then, provide a peer-to-peer comment moderation system to mod down trolls, with posts that aren't linked to an account identity (including your non-identified alts) starting out with less benefit of the doubt.
The real trolls won't care about trashing their account's reputation, but they were equally unconcerned about this when it the identity in question was their real name. For everyone else, you get 90% of the benefit of reduced anonymity with 0% of the potentially serious issues raised by RealID. Meanwhile, players might actually like the feature because it comes with a benefit, rather than a vague and hypothetical improvement to the quality of the forums that might not have been effective in any case.
Early Review of EQ2's Dungeon Game
Among people who are not currently playing WoW, it is taken as an absolute given that Blizzard's game is devoid of all difficulty. Having arrived at EQ2's endgame in time to actually run some recent dungeons (I did hit some at level 80, but that was a mere month or two before the end of an expansion cycle when the content was no longer challenging), how does that perception actually measure up?
Before you walk in the door....
Even before the advent of WoW's much touted dungeon-finder, the game actually had a decent LFG system. As nearly as I can tell, no one uses EQ2's LFG UI, so it's off to the public channels to listen to trolls joking about domestic violence (yes, I've seen this go on for 20 minutes at a time) if you want to find a PUG. Moreover, EQ2 dungeons take significantly more time to clear than WoW dungeons, partially because they're actually longer but more often because trash mobs that don't appear to actually be threatening to kill anyone have enough HP to stand there non-threateningly for a few minutes each.
The ironic result is that I spend far more time grouping in WoW than EQ2, because I almost always have the hour it takes to run a heroic dungeon, and I relatively rarely have the 3 hours to find a group and complete an EQ2 dungeon run.
Sources of difficulty
WoW and EQ2 are in an unfortunate footrace for whose itemization is more screwed up by hyperinflation. In WoW, the result is that 12 of the 16 dungeons in the random heroic dungeon finder are generally pretty trivial during these final months of the expansion cycle, as average DPS has literally doubled during the year and a half since this content was challenging. If you compare the newer dungeons in Wrath to the new endgame in EQ2, though, the difficulty feels relatively comparable. (Random WoW dungeon runners don't necessarily appreciate this challenge, and it's entirely common to have one or more players drop group and take a 30 minute deserter buff when they discover what dungeon they've been placed in.)
If anything, I've been pretty surprised at the portion of EQ2 dungeon fights that are reduced to a simple tank-and-spank DPS check. In WoW, even the 5-man dungeon fights are relatively heavily scripted, if you're not so overgeared that you can ignore the failure conditions and burn through the mobs anyway. My experience has generally been that, if you're wiping, it's far more likely to be because someone isn't switching targets or moving out of the fire or stopping DPS, or whatever the other conditions of that fight happen to be than because your group simply lacks the firepower to be capable of defeating the boss.
Now, in some ways, "you need to be doing more damage" is more of a fair reason to punish the party with a wipe than "you didn't figure out the latest gimmick fast enough". There is a skill factor involved in getting the most out of your character, and I can honestly say that I'm learning more about the correct order to use abilities so that the cooldowns will be ready faster. On the other hand, there have been a number of fights that have left me feeling like I've been beating away at a target dummy for five minutes, which doesn't feel especially challenging even if it does take 2-3 tries to come up with the right DPS rotation.
A rejection of the PUG?
WoW's old world dungeons feel similar to what I see in modern EQ2 dungeons, especially in terms of amount of trash. It takes a pretty darned long time to solo a level 20 dungeon at level 80, one-shotting all the mobs, for the achievements, much less clearing it on level.
Since then, however, Blizzard deliberately cut the no-wipe clear time for its single group dungeons to about an hour in the game's first expansion, and cut it again to the 30 minute mark in the current expansion. The news from the Cataclysm beta is that those old world dungeons are being chopped up into similar bite-sized, dungeon-findable chunks. Turbine tells Massively that LOTRO's lengthy old dungeons will also be divided into short-sesssion clearable wings. This shift is absolutely crucial to being able to run dungeons quickly and repeatedly, which in turn is necessary to being able to find groups efficiently and in a timely fashion.
At the end of the day, I'm left wondering whether EQ2 dungeon PUG's are non-fun because they're not supposed to be. Lyriana's last name is "Lockbreaker" because her disarm trap skill is atrociously low, and she's constantly doing large amounts of damage to our guild by accidentally detonating chest traps. That kind of in-joke isn't possible in the faster paced WoW heroic dungeon setting, and in any case isn't meaningful to people who haven't taken large amounts of trap damage repeatedly over the past year. When you're running with people who you actually know, you can be entertained by the company rather than the content. The EQ2 content feels relatively well suited to that purpose.
If this is the case, though, SOE may be doing themselves a disservice by moving the game more and more towards the WoW model of daily dungeon quests rewarding tokens towards high quality gear as a carrot to get players running the content on a daily basis. Right now, everything else about the way the endgame is set up (at least on my server) appears to be working against a thriving PUG dungeon scene.
Before you walk in the door....
Even before the advent of WoW's much touted dungeon-finder, the game actually had a decent LFG system. As nearly as I can tell, no one uses EQ2's LFG UI, so it's off to the public channels to listen to trolls joking about domestic violence (yes, I've seen this go on for 20 minutes at a time) if you want to find a PUG. Moreover, EQ2 dungeons take significantly more time to clear than WoW dungeons, partially because they're actually longer but more often because trash mobs that don't appear to actually be threatening to kill anyone have enough HP to stand there non-threateningly for a few minutes each.
The ironic result is that I spend far more time grouping in WoW than EQ2, because I almost always have the hour it takes to run a heroic dungeon, and I relatively rarely have the 3 hours to find a group and complete an EQ2 dungeon run.
Sources of difficulty
WoW and EQ2 are in an unfortunate footrace for whose itemization is more screwed up by hyperinflation. In WoW, the result is that 12 of the 16 dungeons in the random heroic dungeon finder are generally pretty trivial during these final months of the expansion cycle, as average DPS has literally doubled during the year and a half since this content was challenging. If you compare the newer dungeons in Wrath to the new endgame in EQ2, though, the difficulty feels relatively comparable. (Random WoW dungeon runners don't necessarily appreciate this challenge, and it's entirely common to have one or more players drop group and take a 30 minute deserter buff when they discover what dungeon they've been placed in.)
If anything, I've been pretty surprised at the portion of EQ2 dungeon fights that are reduced to a simple tank-and-spank DPS check. In WoW, even the 5-man dungeon fights are relatively heavily scripted, if you're not so overgeared that you can ignore the failure conditions and burn through the mobs anyway. My experience has generally been that, if you're wiping, it's far more likely to be because someone isn't switching targets or moving out of the fire or stopping DPS, or whatever the other conditions of that fight happen to be than because your group simply lacks the firepower to be capable of defeating the boss.
Now, in some ways, "you need to be doing more damage" is more of a fair reason to punish the party with a wipe than "you didn't figure out the latest gimmick fast enough". There is a skill factor involved in getting the most out of your character, and I can honestly say that I'm learning more about the correct order to use abilities so that the cooldowns will be ready faster. On the other hand, there have been a number of fights that have left me feeling like I've been beating away at a target dummy for five minutes, which doesn't feel especially challenging even if it does take 2-3 tries to come up with the right DPS rotation.
A rejection of the PUG?
WoW's old world dungeons feel similar to what I see in modern EQ2 dungeons, especially in terms of amount of trash. It takes a pretty darned long time to solo a level 20 dungeon at level 80, one-shotting all the mobs, for the achievements, much less clearing it on level.
Since then, however, Blizzard deliberately cut the no-wipe clear time for its single group dungeons to about an hour in the game's first expansion, and cut it again to the 30 minute mark in the current expansion. The news from the Cataclysm beta is that those old world dungeons are being chopped up into similar bite-sized, dungeon-findable chunks. Turbine tells Massively that LOTRO's lengthy old dungeons will also be divided into short-sesssion clearable wings. This shift is absolutely crucial to being able to run dungeons quickly and repeatedly, which in turn is necessary to being able to find groups efficiently and in a timely fashion.
At the end of the day, I'm left wondering whether EQ2 dungeon PUG's are non-fun because they're not supposed to be. Lyriana's last name is "Lockbreaker" because her disarm trap skill is atrociously low, and she's constantly doing large amounts of damage to our guild by accidentally detonating chest traps. That kind of in-joke isn't possible in the faster paced WoW heroic dungeon setting, and in any case isn't meaningful to people who haven't taken large amounts of trap damage repeatedly over the past year. When you're running with people who you actually know, you can be entertained by the company rather than the content. The EQ2 content feels relatively well suited to that purpose.
If this is the case, though, SOE may be doing themselves a disservice by moving the game more and more towards the WoW model of daily dungeon quests rewarding tokens towards high quality gear as a carrot to get players running the content on a daily basis. Right now, everything else about the way the endgame is set up (at least on my server) appears to be working against a thriving PUG dungeon scene.
Best Buy Journalism Fail
Best Buy - yes, the US consumer electronics chain - has decided to try and launch a gaming magazine. Now you might be wondering whether a company whose businesses include selling games would ever voluntarily give a bad review to a product that they carry. Well, this crucial issue of integrity made the first issue's FAQ, which assures us that, should the reviews appear overly positive, it is only because they've got limited space and therefore have opted to highlight "games that are worth your time and money".
Thanks to this hard hitting journalism, I'm now aware that the worst features of Lego Harry Potter include "Having to wait for the next installment", while the top issues with Crackdown 2 are "At some point, the game will end, and you'll be done" and "In September, Halo:Reach will come out, which is great on its own, but not for those who want to keep playing Crackdown 2".
The sad part of this endeavor is that I at least glanced over the entire free launch issue (which I received for being registered with their website) from cover to cover, including the ads (such as an ad for the official WoW magazine). I can't think of any other medium where I actually pay any attention to the ads these days, but there's still some value in the glossy still screenshot in depicting the potential of a game. You'd think that someone would want to see this thing delivered to my mailbox every month simply because I'd be willing to read it if it arrived.
At $20/year for a subscription, though, I'd be surprised if this thing gets very far.
Thanks to this hard hitting journalism, I'm now aware that the worst features of Lego Harry Potter include "Having to wait for the next installment", while the top issues with Crackdown 2 are "At some point, the game will end, and you'll be done" and "In September, Halo:Reach will come out, which is great on its own, but not for those who want to keep playing Crackdown 2".
The sad part of this endeavor is that I at least glanced over the entire free launch issue (which I received for being registered with their website) from cover to cover, including the ads (such as an ad for the official WoW magazine). I can't think of any other medium where I actually pay any attention to the ads these days, but there's still some value in the glossy still screenshot in depicting the potential of a game. You'd think that someone would want to see this thing delivered to my mailbox every month simply because I'd be willing to read it if it arrived.
At $20/year for a subscription, though, I'd be surprised if this thing gets very far.
When Gear Scaling Arrives Too Late
The punchline is that my little Dirge is not relying on top end raid gear, or even group dungon loot, to transform into a walking Chuck Norris fact. The majority of her gear consists of quest and faction rewards from the solo quests of the current expansion. She's been on three successful dungeon runs and got a few pieces of level 90 loot. Apparently those first few pieces were enough to make me bump up against 100% for both crit and double attack chance.
(The DA number includes a 15% buff that I can only cast on a single person at a time, and would most likely go to a pure DPS or tanking class rather than myself in a group setting. The crit number is a also technically a soft cap because it takes more crit to affect higher level boss targets in EQ2. Even so, I'm not yet doing dungeon runs in earnest and I'm already starting to swap out gear to shift away from the stats that I'm capped in - the "crit bonus" stat that improves the amount of damage you do on a crit is comparatively more valuable when EVERY hit is a crit.)
This situation arrived in EQ2 because the game was desperately due for a gear scaling adjustment with the last expansion. Unfortunately, the developers managed to get browbeaten out of doing so by community outcry, and the result is a situation where, as Ferrel notes, we're left to wonder what will happen next expansion, triple attack and extra critical hits?
The problem is that, once the situation gets this badly out of hand, the solution is bound to be painful. WoW's gear situation may be almost as bad after the game had to add multiple tiers of additional hard mode loot to the current expansion. The rumor out of the Cataclysm alpha was that combat ratings will decrease in effectiveness by a whopping six-fold between level 80 and level 85. Part of the idea there is to leave room for future expansion so that the next time the curve does not need to be so steep. In this case, it might actually be difficult to keep players from actively becoming LESS powerful when they gain levels in the Cataclysm era.
The challenge, then, is to scale gear downwards BEFORE things get so out of hand. That, apparently, can be easier said than done.
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