Malygos and Wrapping Wrath

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

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

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

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

Separating Players By Server/Faction

Last week we had a seemingly minor story about Blizzard expanding cross server group finding.  When the process is complete, all North American servers will be combined for the purposes of random PVP battlegrounds, and servers will be split into four groups of battlegroups for the purposes of the dungeon finder. 

The thing I find interesting about this story is that it's seemingly a step towards a single global server for the game.  WoW already supports cross-server chat with members of your random instance group, and I don't see any technical reason why the game couldn't eventually allow players to type "/invite playername servername" to add their friends from any server in the region, if not the world, to their groups. One might imagine that allowing players to actually PLAY with their friends would be great way to encourage the use of Battle.net as a social networking platform (which appears to be a major goal over at Acti-Blizzard). 

Such a transition would not come without cost.  Server communities would have less and less meaning, though even the current limited cross-server-dungeon-finder has already started us down that path.  There is in principle a lore issue with allowing Alliance and Horde players to team up (though both sides tend to kill the exact same foes in the exact same dungeons).  Perhaps most important to Blizzard, the lucrative paid character transfer services would be much less attractive if they were not necessary to switch over to the server where your friends are playing. 

Then again, helping players meet up with their friends may be worth far more in the long run, as a way to keep players involved in the game and actually wanting to come back and pay more subscription fees.  As the technological barriers come down, it will be very interesting to see whether Blizzard thinks the price is worthwhile. 

Triumph of the Horse Painted To Look Like a Deathcharger

With a few days left to go in LOTRO's harvest festival, I finally snagged the Halloween themed mount.  Because of the lore issues associated with having players ride anything other than horses and more horses, we can't very well give players a Skeletal Deathcharger in Middle Earth.  (Some folks complain about whether there's lore to back up the Moria goats.)  We can at least have a black horse with bones painted on it. 

Obtaining this horse is as simple as looting a chest in the haunted cellar once per 24 hours and hoping that you get lucky.  I'm not really doing much on my LOTRO main at the moment, but you're allowed to log out standing next to the box, so there was no reason not to spend the one minute per day to log in and loot the thing. 

That said, I don't know that I will ever use it again beyond the traditional screenshot.  LOTRO's rep-based mounts are already somewhat better than the basic and festival options, thanks to increased HP (used to determine whether enemy attacks will dismount you).  In the next patch, rep reward mounts will have 2.5x as many HP, will provide reduced damage from critical hits, and will allow mounted players to dodge, parry, and block attacks.  The bonuses are so significant that there's no reason to ever use a regular mount again, other than social events and screenshots. 

At least the screenshots are pretty though. 

May-Ban Festival And Group Accountability

DDO's already underwhelming Mabar Festival took a turn for the worse last night when an automated exploit detection system carried out one of the largest erroneous banning sprees in recent memory. 

Turbine is trying to downplay the issue by claiming that it affected less than one percent of accounts, but that figure is extremely misleading in a free to play game; the overwhelming majority of "accounts" were not used during the event and therefore were not at risk.  The 1% of players who got hit with the banhammer were the most active players on their servers, and their absence was highly visible in game last night. 

Public Groups and Exploits

Customer service performance questions aside, there's an interesting design issue here.  The group portion of the event used a public instancing system; players had only limited ability to control who would be present in their dungeon for the boss fight.  As this type of public cooperative content becomes more popular - see also Warhammer public quests and even WoW's automated group finder - there's a real question of fairness in enforcing exploit policies. 

If a member of your guild exploits a raid encounter on a group raid, you theoretically bear some responsibility for that action by virtue of choosing to associate with that individual.  (Then again, a dedicated griefer might be willing to join a new guild and take a ban if it brings down a raid full of innocent bystanders along with them.)  When the server provides the group, your ability to avoid benefiting from others' illicit activities is limited.  On the other hand, the developers have no way of determining whether players are complicit out of game, and the ingame consequences of exploitative behavior are identical whether the beneficiaries were willing or not. 

At the end of the day, companies generally have to give players the benefit of the doubt to avoid irritating legitimate customers. It does not matter how good your product is if players are unable to use it due to poorly communicated and unjustified account suspensions.  In particular, permitting an automated system to issue bans outside of business hours, such that it will be over twelve hours before there is even anyone in the office to figure out what went wrong, is just asking for trouble.

Regardless, this is a real challenge for dynamic public content, which is inherently difficult to test to begin with.