Yearly Archives: 2011
Talk About Free Publicity (Diablo 3)
Diablo 3 will let you sell pixels for dollars, in-game, and vice versa.
My first thought, along similar lines to Alto, was: can you imagine the number of gold guides for Diablo 3? WoW alone supported one costing $47 for the majority of the game’s lifespan, and that is discounting the other, cheaper ones of the last few years. And you couldn’t even really cash your gold out! In a game where you could presumably spend $47 and make $100 in-game using the tips, it might be foolish to not do so. Unless you could get those same tips from anyone with a blog, of course.
My second thought was self-reflection on why I instinctually despised this news. If you never use a cash shop, and if you don’t care that other people do… then why hate it? There are two reasons why.
- Number 1: It removes, or diminishes the value of time.
When you drill it down, by “value” I really mean “advantage.” If I can play five hours a day and you can only play two, all other things being equal, I will have an advantage over you in an MMO. Especially in MMOs, where the design is to throttle content to ensure monthly subscriptions. I will reach the level-cap sooner, I will level more alts, I will have access to more professions, I will have more attempts on raid bosses, I will be geared to the teeth while you are still struggling for your two-piece bonus. Skill can overcome Time in many areas (Arenas, raiding, etc) and obviously a complete moron would be incapable of any number of activities no matter how much time they spent playing.
Most people, grudgingly, can accept when their Time was beaten by an opponent’s Skill. In RPGs, people are more forgiving of when Time beat Skill – the premise being that Time is something that acquires value in only one specific way (“earning” it) that is available to anyone*. Cash Shops, RMT, and so on radically change the calculus. Time, which hitherto was “priceless” in-game, now has a price. If we are equally skilled, I can win by either Time or Cash whereas you may be limited (literally or philosophically) to Time alone. If the game makes Time capable of beating Skill, and Cash = Time, then Cash > Skill becomes possible. This is where the whole “Pay-To-Win” (Golden Ammo, etc) pejorative comes from. As a gamer, you have to start asking yourself why you would “invest” in Time in a game where anyone with more Cash could stomp you at any moment. If Time is all you have, there are other games without Cash Shops which would give you a better return.
Blizzard has thus far avoided the Pay-To-Win scenario in WoW by keeping the Cash Shop limited to cosmetic items and preventing gold from being (legitimately) purchased. Meanwhile, Diablo 3 is balls-deep in Pay-To-Win by every available measure. From their FAQ:
Will players be at a disadvantage in the game if they do not purchase items in the auction house?
All of the items available in the auction house can be obtained in the game. The auction house system is designed to facilitate the exchange of items (items can also be exchanged through character-to-character trades). Diablo III is primarily a cooperative game; while the game will offer some highly entertaining player-vs.-player options, we don’t intend to balance items for player-vs.-player gameplay. We feel that a robust and powerful item-trading system will make the co-op experience more enjoyable.
The question after that is equally hilarious.
Can I just buy the most powerful items and breeze through the game?
Items will be level-restricted, meaning your character won’t be able to use an item until he or she is at the appropriate level for that item.
Read: you can purchase the most powerful items for your level to breeze through the game with, until you hit the level cap of 60 where uber-gear** will likely make or break your character just like in WoW. For the low, low player price of $100 per slot, if we are lucky. And we may actually see sales that high or higher, given that it would be “affordable” after the sale of a bunch of $5 auctions. Keep in mind that while Blizzard is providing a “cash out” advanced feature, it is actually pretty misleading:
How do I cash out from the currency-based auction house?
As an advanced feature, players will have the option of attaching an account with an approved third-party payment service to their Battle.net account. Once this has been completed, proceeds from the sale of items in the currency-based auction house can be deposited into their third-party payment service account. “Cashing out” would then be handled through the third-party payment service. Note that this process will be subject to applicable fees charged by Blizzard and the third-party payment service. Also, any proceeds from the sale of items in the currency-based auction house that have been deposited into the Battle.net account will not be transferrable to the third-party payment service account. Not all regions will support this advanced feature at launch. Region-specific details, as well as details regarding which third-party payment services will be supported and the fee that Blizzard will charge for the cash-out process, will all be provided at a later date.
In other words, any dollars that actually reach your Battle.net account essentially become carnival tickets – non-refundable currency that performs as pseudo-cash, buying you the big fuzzy bear, Disco Lion, or 30 days of WoW. The “cashing-out” only occurs if you tweak your Battle.net settings so that AH proceeds never actually touch your Battle.net account, but get directly deposited into your Paypal account or whatever. Considering you can’t actually buy anything with dollars until said dollars are loaded into your Battle.net account (thereby making them non-refundable), I have little doubt there will be quite a few surprised AH goblins out there who find that their $1000 nest egg will, at best, keep them subscribed to Titan or whatever for the next half-decade.
- Number 2: It threatens design integrity.
This is decidedly a gray area, especially in a post where I already said “[…] the design [of MMOs] is to throttle content to ensure monthly subscriptions.” What design integrity means to me is asking yourself whether what you are about to do is going to make for a better game (story, simulation, etc). I intentionally did not say “makes your game better” because typically gaining more subscriptions or selling more boxes makes a game with a multiplayer component better. Instead, design integrity is about making the game in of itself better at what it is. If a game can only be better if it had more people playing it, that is a job for the marketing department, not game designers.
One of the clearest, most easily recognizable breaches of design integrity to me would be the Firelands daily quests. There is nothing about this series of quests that gets better for them having been spread out over 30+ days. Nothing. Even if your argument is that the number of days serves to simulate the long struggle of a dangerous military campaign, I would counter that the same feeling could be accomplished by doubling the number of actual quests, and allowing a choice few to be repeatable once complete. An example could be, I dunno… the entire Hyjal zone itself?
Obviously the Firelands dailies were not the first incident of intentional content throttling (there were reputation grinds, etc, from Day 1), but it is particularly galling to me insofar as the way it was hyped and presented. Seriously, they came out and said…
Rather than these stages only becoming available after a certain period of time or at the end of a long quest series, players will instead get to use a new alternate currency called Marks of the World Tree to unlock them at their own pace.
…as if stages were not available until after a certain period of time (weeks) or at the end of a long (daily) quest series. Again, the Argent Tournament et tal did this years ago, but in that particular preview they merely state exactly what was going on: new dailies.
How this relates to Diablo 3 is simple. Does a currency-based AH make Diablo 3 a better game? I do not think it does. What it seems to be aimed at is what Blizzard mentions in the FAQ, along the lines of “since you guys are going to do crack anyway, we may as well supply it.” If getting the perfect item or set is the motivator for playing the game (after finishing the story), does the inclusion of an AH at all make Diablo 3 better than, say, some profession/item/etc that could randomly turn items into a different version of itself? Such a thing would perhaps be distracting from the Skinner Box lever that is grinding bosses for loot (e.g. spend more time randomizing one item than simply killing things for a random shot at another), but it is a question worth asking anyway.
The fear here is Cash Shops and RMT lead to F2P-esque games that sacrifice the fun of the game for monetization of the game. Tobold has talked about the World of Tanks model many times, but it is most succinctly described in the opening paragraphs of his Payslope post:
Even Free2Play games need to make money to be sustainable. Many have some sort of paywall, reserving certain content for people who pay. World of Tanks doesn’t have such a wall, everybody has access to all the maps and tech tree tanks in the game. Instead WoT has something I’d rather describe as a payslope: The high-level game becomes very tedious if you don’t pay.
The effect is first noticeable around level 7 (out of 10): Starting from this level regular tanks on regular accounts tend to spend more credits on ammo and repair than they get as credit reward at the end of the battle. There are some variables there, winning earns you more than losing, and dealing a lot of damage also earns you more. But with level 8+ tanks costing millions of credits, money definitely is getting tight at the higher levels.
I am not opposed to game designers being paid for their quality products. I am, however, opposed to intentionally hobbling the player’s game experience to “trick” them into paying to continue playing a game they found fun. If World of Tanks did not have a Cash Shop or RMT, do you think they would still have a point in the leveling curve where it became extremely tedious to play? Maybe. You would rightly call that bad game design however. Same deal with MMOs and systems designed to take weeks of repeated content to complete.
Blizzard stated that Diablo 3’s loot system was developed before they decided to add an AH with RMT options. I have no choice but to accept that statement on face value. But given the carnival ticket structure of money in Battle.net accounts, it is abundantly clear Blizzard stands to make an absolute killing by implementing RMT even without considering the Blizzard cut on both listing and successful auctions. Even if you are a pro AH goblin and amass $10,000 without yourself ever paying anything into the system, that is $10,000 (+X% of whatever Blizzard cut) sitting in a Blizzard escrow account earning interest, all of which would have been “left on the table” otherwise. They repeatedly said they will not be selling anything or setting prices, but it would be incredibly naive to believe that future Diablo 3 balance decisions (drop rate, etc) will not directly affect Blizzard RMT profits, and/or Blizzard would not ever make changes with such things in mind.
Bottom line: you can only really trust someone who makes you pay everything up front. Provided they actually deliver the product you bought, you will know that they had no incentive make an inconsistent experience. And inconsistent experiences make for the worst videogames.
*In reality, Time as an advantage is just as “unfair” as Cash could ever be. Just ask anyone who has typed the phrase “no-lifers” or “you just live in your mom’s basement.”
**Even more interesting to ponder is whether Blizzard intends to limit the gear from Nightmare and Hell difficulties to only being wearable by players of those difficulties. I mean, I can only assume gear dropped from Hell difficulty would be better than Normal mob drops. It is possible they intend the level cap of 60 to only be achievable on Hell difficulty, although I imagine it would be almost as tough a sell as the opposite – not everyone can/wants to play on that level, but do you simply not give the average player access to the coolest spells? Or are the gaming veterans stuck with merely upgraded spell stats instead of abilities?
The Problem With F2P and Microtransactions
Are you someone who almost never engages in microtransactions, has no real issue with people that do, but nevertheless feel like you are losing something whenever a game company starts to embrace them? Do you get the sensation that the purchasing power of your money is decreasing the longer a game goes on, seemingly for no real reason? Do you think cash shops are just plain wrong but have difficulty expressing it in words? The good news is I finally remembered the name of the economic concept behind the sensation: consumer surplus. The bad news is… so have game companies.
Consumer surplus is the difference between the maximum price a consumer is willing to pay and the actual price they do pay. If a consumer would be willing to pay more than the current asking price, then they are getting more benefit from the purchased product than they spent to buy it. An example of a good with generally high consumer surplus is drinking water. People would pay very high prices for drinking water, as they need it to survive. The difference in the price that they would pay, if they had to, and the amount that they pay now is their consumer surplus. Note that the utility of the first few liters of drinking water is very high (as it prevents death), so the first few liters would likely have more consumer surplus than subsequent liters.
The description is pretty self-explanatory, but I think the graph is a bit more useful.
And why not, here is a Greek college professor talking about it.
Do you want some videogame examples? Think back to multiplayer Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3. When I bought Diablo 2, it was because I wanted a quality dungeon-crawler experience similar to Diablo 1 – that there was an entire multiplayer experience attached was pure consumer surplus for me. Same with thing with Warcraft 3. Would I have paid an extra $5 for access to multiplayer? Probably. That $5 that I would have paid but did not have to amounted to Blizzard “leaving money on the table.”* Non-game examples includes Netflix Streaming, where you can access hundreds of movies at any time for $7.99. In spite of the “controversy” surrounding them raising prices of dual streaming/DVD plans, I think it is rather obvious that most Netflix customers would actually pay $10, $15, or even $20 a month for the service, especially since Movies On Demand-style services can cost upwards of $4.99 per movie.
The entire premise of microtransactions is dividing your content into smaller chunks to (re)capture and monetize every ounce of consumer surplus. While it is true that overall the game and it’s various monetized components are still worth buying – it falls within the bounds of the Demand Curve, which by definition means you value the game more than the money used to purchase it – it is equally true that literal value has been extracted from you. In other words, microtransactions remove value from games by reducing your consumer surplus.
Now, there may be the open question of whether the sort of microtransactions Blizzard is doing “counts” as consumer surplus mining. If Blizzard could/did not charge $25 for a mount, for example, would they have made the mounts at all? Would Blizzard have never made the Mobile Armory and/or the premium RealID grouping features if those did not tack on an extra subscription fee? I think they might not have developed those features and mounts, but that is more of an issue with the lack of credible competition** Blizzard faces than anything else. Indeed, competition generally engenders the greatest amount “value-added” consumer surplus since direct price wars are untenable. Then again, I might also bring up the Red Queen argument in that, much like raiding content, Blizzard has to continually be moving forward to maintain its present position. The artists that made and animated the Disco Lion would have been working on something either way, so if not adding that mount in as a PvE/PvP reward of some type, the effort might have been directed into a Titan or Diablo 3 model instead (increasing consumer surplus in those games).
In any case, I find the F2P and microtransaction model somewhat disturbing, yet inevitable. It obviously has the power to save games that would not exist otherwise (e.g. LotRO, APB, etc), and thereby opens the possibility of radical innovation in the types of games we play. Similarly, the rise of Steam and iTunes (and Facebook for that matter) as content delivery services makes indie games/music possible that could not exist in a typical retail box store. That said, the existence of that hitherto unexploited consumer surplus also leads to worse games, like Tiny Tower***. Meanwhile, instead of growing the industry, we have the major players pumping out sequals and squeezing the blood from what rocks are left instead of, well, mining for new rocks. This same phenominom is going on in the movie industry, with parallels like making movies 3D not because that adds value, but because A) they get to charge more, and B) it makes the movies nearly impossible to pirate.
The way I see it, the more game companies fall over themselves trying to monetize every corner of our consumer surplus, the less they fall over themselves giving us quality entertainment. Eventually, there will be some break-point beyond which lies an Era of Subsistence Gaming where we get exactly what we pay for and not one whit more. And those will be very bleak times indeed.
*Except Blizzard did not actually “leave any money on the table,” since that implies there was no value to Blizzard for giving consumer surplus. As we all know, it is the exact opposite: we as players give that value back to Blizzard in the form of brand loyalty and positive word-of-mouth recommendations. Part of that comes from the (historic) quality and polish of their games, but the feeling that we are getting more plays a non-zero part in the calculus.
**Blah, blah, Rift, LotRO, etc. Rift peaked at 600k subs and is now hovering around ~480k. LotRO peaked at 560k and is now at 360k. If you add both Rift and LotRO numbers at their peak, and then multiplied that by two, WoW would still have had more players than that in just North America… in 2008. Lost subs are lost subs, but I bet the Disco Lion made more money in the opening day it was released to cover a year’s worth of lost subs.
***Worse as in psychologically designed to exploit your nucleus accumbens, and essentially disprove the economic theory of rational consumers single-handedly.
The Single-Player MMO
Syncaine made a very interesting footnote in a recent post:
*It’s a multi-layered joke. One: Immersion is a long-running inside joke. Two: While I jokingly say that I’m looking forward to playing an MMO solo, the sad truth is many today hope for just that in their Massively Multiplayer games, and SW will make Cata look like a sandbox. Three: Barrens chat will look tame compared to SW general chat in the first month or two. Not only are SW nerds the worst nerds of all, but you just know every Huntard is going to take their unique brand of ‘gaming’ to SW and making the most (worst) of it.
I do think it is an open question about whether gamers actually want an MMO versus a single-player game with (optional) MMO components. Unlike Syncaine however, I do not think people playing MMOs as single-player games is “sad” at all – it is more indicative of the lengths gamers are having to go to find meaningful entertainment. In other words, I think it is a lack of quality games that have driven this segment into MMOs in the first place.
This is not to say there hasn’t been quality single-player games, but rather there are not enough being put out. Outside of the game-crippling bugs and sloppy design in several areas, Fallout: New Vegas was absolutely amazing and I spent 70 hours in there, loving every minute. I spent a similar amount of time in Dragon Age: Origins. Portal 1 & 2 both fantastic, both over in ~10 hours. So… that is 160 hours out of the 20 I play each week, or amusement enough for about two months. What about the other ten months?
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| I quit smoking when I bought WoW, joking I would trade one addiction for another. I have not smoked in 4 years. |
My 4-year WoW anniversary was last weekend, having started 8/17/07. Adding up all the days /played across my toons, I ended up around ~322 days, or 7,728 hours. Depressingly that averages out into 5 hours a day, every day, for four years. I played more when I was unemployed for a year, of course, but it is still shockingly bad. Then again, that also equals $0.087/hour as far as entertainment goes. Or imagine buying a $0.99 app and getting 11.38 hours of gameplay out of it. I find it unlikely that I would have done something (more) productive with my time had WoW not existed, so with that in mind perhaps I should be instead celebrating all the money I saved by switching to Geico playing the everliving hell out of WoW.
I have heard and agree with many people who suggest that WoW will be their first, last, and only MMO. Although I am a storied veteran of games that require other people to play with, e.g. pen & paper D&D, split-screen Goldeneye, Magic: the Gathering, etc, the common denominator was a group of people you enjoy hanging around with. In the absence of friends, WoW is a pretty shitty single-player experience once you reach the endgame. And while this problem can be “solved” by making new friends, actually shifting through all the bullshit is a lot of work* for the payout of challenging gameplay that comes in the form of hoping people that are not you do not screw up, e.g. raiding.
In this light, I do not particularly think the trend of companion AI or whatever is necessarily bad. Having played Minecraft for a while now, I have reached that plateau where you want nothing more than to show off the cool biodome tower you built or the Pit of Doom you dug or the cross-Atlantic powered railroad to someone, anyone else capable of appreciating the amount of effort/vision it took to do so. Of course, the thought of trying to do what I have done on a multiplayer server where anyone could wreck my house and steal my materials at any time is mortifying. I want a Show & Tell, not a group assignment. I want a single-player MMO.
And until then, WoW (with liberal playing of Steam games) will have to suffice.
*As outlined in this three year-old Cracked article, which is still pretty dead-on.
Valor Back on T11
Per recent blue post:
Due to some recent player feedback we’ve made the decision to implement a hotfix that will put Valor Points back on the bosses in Blackwing Descent, Bastion of Twilight, and Throne of the Four Winds (except Argoloth).
We agreed that players should have some additional options for earning Valor Points beyond Firelands, Zandalari dungeons, and tier 11 Heroic difficulty raids. We don’t want raiding guilds to feel like they have to raid Firelands AND the old raids every week, but we do want players to feel like they have some options besides running ZA/ZG over and over.
Bosses in these raids will award 35 VP on 10-player normal difficulty, and 45 VP on 25-player normal difficulty, to match the rewards currently offered for the Heroic versions of those encounters. (Source)
That is correct, ladies and gentlemen. Now you too can experience the wonder of cobbling together a group of nine other people in a specific configuration and killing 12 (nerfed) raid bosses, walking away with your whopping four-hundred and twenty (420) Valor points. And then perhaps continuing to do your normal routine of seven heroics a week and still not capping out. Or, you know, solo-queuing for three ZA/ZGs and getting the same amount of VP. Admittedly, with the state of ZA/ZG queues you might actually spend longer in LFD than going 12/12, but hey. One of those two options requires a wee bit more organization than the other so I guess it “cancels” out.
I did not post last week because A) I barely played WoW, B) honestly there is not a whole lot more that can be said about making gold that hasn’t already been beaten into the ground, and C) I now realize how much I painted myself into a corner calling this Player Vs Auction House when I would rather have gone meta and fostered some cross-blog debate on some of the crazy–ass posts people are making.
The irony I suppose is that I could have phoned in some filler episodes on my acquiring two (2!) Obsidium Cleavers cross-faction for < 15k apiece, a 10x return bringing over a 359 BoE chest from Horde-side, or my experiences in the Vial of the Sands market. Then again… why? I probably spent in the neighborhood of $140 in Steam games over the last two weeks of deals, and would rather be playing those and/or Minecraft and/or even goddamn Tiny Tower instead.
Speaking of foreshadowing, I would tell you to stay tuned for a post three months in the making, but I am not entirely sure when it will be finished.
Honorgate Solved: Mark Your Calenders
In true, inane 24/7 News fashion, I hereby coin the PvP fiasco of this past week “Honorgate.” Ladies and gentlemen, allow me also to bring to you a truly groundbreaking Blizzard solution to this controversy. From blue lips to your eyeballs:
We’ve been working over the past few days to evaluate and determine the best course of action to offer players some kind of compensation for those who were caught off guard by the new gear. The plan we’ve found to be achievable within an acceptable amount of time is to provide players who were affected with 4000 Honor Points. This extra Honor would function similarly to the currency down-conversion in that it would stack over the cap, but you would not be able to earn more until you spent under the 4000 cap. (source)
You read that correctly: four thousand (4000) Honor points. The announcement is hedged in “this is still uncertain” and “things could still change” but to come right out and say they would be giving out 4000 Honor and then not doing so would likely cause more problems than the initial screw-up. The other thing Blizzard mentioned is that the most likely date of this distribution of wealth would be July 19th, which is about a week and a half from now. I recommend marking your calenders because there will likely be thousands of players on your server getting 1-2 pieces of high-level epic gear that will need gemmed and enchanted. This is about as close to a patch day AH run you can get without it actually being a patch day.
Honestly, this post by Blizzard rather floored me. The solution I thought they would go with would be to simply reset the purchase timers on all of the Season 9 gear bought in the last week. You know, this thing:
After reseting it, you could simply sell it back to the vendor and recoup your Honor points to purchase the 371 gear. Perhaps that is more technically complicated than I am aware of, or maybe they did not want to run the risk of players missing the announcement and playing for 2 hours while the timer expired. Other solutions suggested were to add the ability to purchase the 371s with the S9 pieces like they sometimes do when you upgrade heroic raiding gear. Then again, that would require a vendor to always have that available, lest they remove the option and get bitched at by some clueless player a few weeks later. The “let them eat cake” option is truly unprecedented especially considering they decided to grant 4000 regardless of whether you just bought a 1650 Honor belt, or similar.
It will be intriguing to see whether my warrior ends up getting a 4000 Honor stimulus package despite my having gotten the S9 Chest refunded already. I must say though, this solution almost makes me sad that I did not “waste” Honor buying more S9 gear across my other toons.
Welcome the C Team
I think I will allow Blizzard’s C Team speak for themselves here:
You are correct. The season transition and introduction of new PvP items was different this time around, and we apologize for the lack of advanced warning.
The Season 9 set was removed today. The items available for purchase with Honor Points are now considered lower tier Season 10 items. They are still the same items from Season 9 in terms of aesthetics, but the item level and stats are slightly higher to ensure that the Season 10 honor gear has the correct item level relative to the Season 10 conquest gear.
It’s likely this is how things will work going forward and we’ll be sure to make that more clear when the next season transition takes place.
New basic transition flow:
1) Season X ends and rated play is unavailable; Season X gear becomes available for purchase with HP; CP is wiped.
2) One week later Season Y starts and rated play is available; Season X gear is removed entirely; Season Y introduces a low tier of items which replace Season X vendor items and are available for HP; Season Y introduces the new top items available for CP and rated play. [source]
If it is not entirely clear from the above, or the 51-page post-capped thread, the basic gist is anyone who bought S9 epic gear in the last week got punked by Blizzard. The 365 gear that previously required Conquest Points, then required only Honor points – this is what you would expect in an universe of forms and logic and elegant game design. In bizarro-Blizzard C Team Land, taking the 365 epics and obsoleting them one week later with strictly better in every conceivable way 371 gear, for the same Honor costs even, makes sense. Here is a visual:
On the right, the 365 PvP chest that was 2200 Honor as of June 28th (gemmed and enchanted as you’ll notice). On the left, the 371 PvP chest that is 2200 Honor as of July 5th, about 168 hours later. Luckily enough, I had not played my warrior all that often after purchasing the chest, so I still had time remaining to sell it back to the vendor for a 2200 Honor refund, and then buy the new 371 version. Whether the stat upgrade seems like a big deal to you or not really depends on how much you PvP, but one way of looking at it is that the 371 pieces give you 6% more stats.
And, you know, the whole fact this was such a huge designer “Gotcha!” moment; a fitting insult to the injury of literally wasting dozens of hours across hundreds of thousands of players. That is the other way of looking at it.
This is par for the course for what I can only imagine is the C Team. Remember when they accidentally did the Conquest –> Honor conversion a week early without raising the Honor cap, resulting in thousands of Conquest points being turned into relatively useless gold? Or when MMR values were so FUBAR that they made the 2200 weapons require level 86, then delayed returning them to normal for months because not very many people were clearing heroic T11 content?
It is hard finding a stickie thread that is not also an apology for some massive screw-up.
Achieving Zen
So I warned you about certain crafted BoE epic gear and how the new Firelands dailies would essentially obsolete them entirely. At the time, I was under the impression that the vendors with these 365 epic gear would be gated behind 25 days worth of dailies. That is not entirely the case, as you undoubtedly witnessed yourself on Thursday if you have been doing them daily.
Our good friend Zen’Vorka here has some goodies for anyone who fights their way into the Firelands. The items themselves are Matoclaw’s Band (Agility ring), Nightweaver’s Amulet (Intellect necklace), Fireheart Necklace (Strength necklace), and Pyrelord Greaves (Tanking Plate boots). I knew the Pyrelord boots were going to obsolete the BoE JP boots, but I thought that was going to happen closer to the end of August, not the beginning of July. Speaking of surprises, though…
Blizzard snuck in a stealth hotfix allowing you to unlock Firelands on Day 1.
What ends up happening now is instead of ending up with 8 Marks of the World Tree when you get to the point of unlocking the “outside” dailies, you have 16. After doing a single set of dailies, you will end up with 4 more Marks, unlocking the Firelands portal after one more quest. At that point, you are a mere one elite mob away from unlocking our friend Zen’Vorka and his goodies for your alts. The entire process takes ~35 minutes from zero to epic 365s depending on the dailies you get stuck with.
It is an open question as to why Blizzard made this change, and it will be even more interesting to see whether they end up doing something similar once “phase 3” starts being unlocked by people. And that is on top of the question as to whether or not it will actually take another month to unlock all the vendors or if they will be more like our friend Zen.
In any event, if the thought of doing 50+ dailies a day was stopping you from pimping your alts, the way has officially been cleared. Get out there and get geared.
OT: The pre-4.2 Numbers
I think it is a bit early for a more formal “postmortem” on Cataclysm’s first tier of content, but for posterity here is a screenshot of raiding progression as it stood at nearly 4am Tuesday morning, before the numbers could be “sullied” by the 4.2 nerfs.
Since there is no 100% boss, some reverse engineering of WoWProgress’s numbers shows that there was a total of 62,405 guilds that killed at least 1 boss this tier. A further breakdown estimate goes something like this:
1/12 – 62,405 – 100%
9/12 – 44,107 – 70.68%
12/12 – 23,122 – 37.05%
13/13 – 812 – 1.3%*
Depending on how many raiders you associate with a raiding guild (15-30), this means roughly between 589,245 to 1,178,490 players who started this tier did not finish it on Normal. WoWProgress pulls its data from NA, EU, TW, and KR servers, which comprise roughly ~6.5 million subscriptions per MMOData. This means that at the upper end (30) the raiding pool this tier is about ~28.8% of all accounts. Or, 71.2% of all subscribers did not raid, and of those who did raid, 62.95% did not kill all 12 normal mode bosses.** In this context, seven bosses in Firelands may almost make sense.
The other thing I want to mention briefly is that I expect Blizzard’s Q2 investor call to either look absolutely amazing, or completely terrible depending on timing. As you may or may not have heard, Blizzard sent out emails to existing accounts which essentially contains a free copy of the original WoW game, 30 days of game time included. Secondly, Blizzard is poised to release Cataclysm in China July 12th. Finally, and perhaps more earth-shatteringly from a subscription standpoint, Blizzard increased the Recruit-A-Friend XP bonus from 1-60 to 1-80. If you are an alt person as I am (or was, considering I have a full 10 character slots on Auch), this is about as close as Blizzard seems willing to get to letting you buy a Cataclysm character. Back when RAF originally came out, I had two instances of WoW running and essentially spent $5-10 to get a level 60 rogue, priest, and hunter (with the gifted levels) in about two weeks of leisurely play. And for that month, for all intents and purposes I was two subscriptions to Blizzard. Of course, Blizzard recouped $25 or whatever it was when I decided to transfer the RAF priest to my primary account before shutting the RAF account down.
So, basically, depending on when the Q2 sub numbers are compiled Blizzard will likely be seeing huge growth (due to 4.2 being released, dual-boxing RAF accounts, free copies of games going out, new expansion in China) or further drops depending on when the numbers are locked in for the report.
*Apparently Heroic Ascendant Council is more difficult than Sinestra based on number of guilds having killed it: 812 vs 926 (Sinestra). It might be that people were racing for Sinestra kills before the patch, but it is interesting nonetheless.
**By contrast, only 42.32% of raiders who downed Marrowgar did not also kill the Lich King. It is entirely possible we will see more 12/12 after an equivalent amount of time has passed, of course.
Fate of Crafted Epics in 4.2 (and more)
I talked about about this subject in a general sense with Fire(lands) Sale where I pre-lamented the death of the Darkmoon trinkets in the face of easy-to-acquire alternatives. Due to a reader’s request, I have decided to focus more on what crafters can make right now and whether it might still be a good idea to make post-4.2.
Chest/Legs
This is perhaps the most obvious category of crafted epics at risk in 4.2. Players will be able to purchase T11 chest and legs for 2200 Justice points on Day 1 of the new patch, and I find it very likely many will do so immediately with whatever amount of JP they have stockpiled. Do not forget that you will (still) be able to turn Honor points into Justice points, easily bypassing the 4,000 cap if you choose. Three weeks of ZA/ZG runs later, they will be able to further purchase T12 (same slots) with their Valor points.
Belts
The situation with belts is more complex. Players will not be able to purchase any belts with JP nor VP this patch. Instead, there are two other sources of belts: a small sample from the Molten Front dailies after ~25 days, and a complete set after hitting Honored with the Avengers of Hyjal.
The three belts in the Bad category are Elementium Girdle of Pain, Light Elementium Belt, and Lightning Lash. All three have ilevel 365 analogs available after unlocking The Armorer in the Firelands dailies. The rest of the belts will not be replaced until you get a raid drop or hit Honored with the raid reputation. Last time I checked, the word on the street was that you could hit 11,999/12,000 Honored with the Avengers from farming trash – how difficult this will be or even if it is possible will remain to be seen. I find it likely however, that someone farming Firelands raid trash will probably want to do it with a purple belt in the meantime.
Trinkets
Already talked about this before, but…
The Darkmoon trinkets have given me a lot of AH mileage so far this expansion, but I stopped making the cards a few months ago. Players logging in after 4.2 will have the option of getting 359 trinkets immediately for 1650 JP and/or doing ~25 days of dailies for the 365 trinkets off of the vendors there. And if they hit Revered with the raid reputation, hey, more trinkets.
That covers the crafted BoE epics, but why stop here?
Cloaks
There are no crafted epic cloaks, but I am referring to any BoE epic cloaks from T11 content and/or ZA/ZG drops you may have in your bags. Sell them. Sell now.
Although I missed the chance to warn you before the Midsummer holiday arrived with its free 353 cloak giveaway, the 353 and 359 cloaks were still technically as good or better than what you could get stolen by a scrub for an off-spec they will never use from Ahune. This all changes in 4.2. Namely, every single player will be sporting 365 epic cloaks for completing the Thrall Got Zapped quest-line. Price your antiquated 359s to move, lest you get stuck with a 12,000g+ “investment” that you will have to dupe people into buying for even 800g. Indeed, I recently sold a Drape of Inimitable Fate and Zom’s Electrostatic Cloak for ~6,000g each and the buyer immediately relisted for 12,000g. If he can snag a sell between now and Tuesday, more power to him. Meanwhile, I just made nearly half of his possible profit with 0% of the risk.
If 365 cloaks from a quest chain was not bad enough, you also have Valor cloaks for JP and 378 cloaks after however long it takes to get Friendly with the Avengers of Hyjal. Move those capes like they’re hot.
Boots
Specifically the BoE epic boots you can buy with Valor today, and Justice on Tuesday. Seems pretty obvious that these would be bad deals to get, yes? Well… not quite. Ask yourself if you would be willing to buy Justice points for gold at, say, a 1:2 ratio. In other words, imagine spending 8000g to get 4000 JP. Would you? I would. You cannot get 4000 of course, as the boots are the only items that work this way and they cost 1650 JP. Point being, even though I can grind up the 1650 JP and get them “for free,” I could also simply buy them off someone who values their time less than I do and spend those same JP getting something else. Similar to belts though, there is a small kink in the plan: boots from dailies.
The three boots in the Bad category are Boots of the Perilous Seas, Rock Furrow Boots, and Moccasins of Verdurous Glooms. All three have 365 upgrades available after a scant 25 days worth of dailies. The other boots will not be replaced outside of raid drops so you will probably be able to sell them on a decent basis. Of course, so will everyone else capable of running heroics/grinding BGs but if you have nothing else to buy with those currencies, it is better than buying and vendoring Wrath epic gems.
Rings/Necklaces
Is anyone still making this garbage? Please, stop, what are you doing?
The mat price for the 346 rings/necklaces was ridiculous even on Day 1, but there were still chances at sales and (low) profit margins. Generally people will tell you to make the Elementium Moebius Band because it’s the cheapest but actually pretty good for any tank. Problem is that there is not one, but two epic tanking rings from the Firelands dailies. From the same vendor! I guess Blizzard’s thought process was that since the one ring had Parry on it, that a 2nd one was necessary for the Feral tanks. Except now if you are a Plate tank you have easy-street access to both. Did I mention they are on the same vendor? Non-casters are in the same boat with two separate Agility rings AND two separate Strength rings… on different vendors this time, but still. Spellcasters and/or healers got the shaft though, with only one ring.
So you have the option of the Valor rings being bought with JP, the new Valor rings bought with actual Valor, the crafted blue PvP rings having a difference of a whole 90 stats for the equivalent of ~1500g in mats, the 365 rings from the Firelands dailies (which covers every spec), and eventually the 391 rings at Exalted with Avengers.
Necklaces are in a mostly similar place as rings. Spellcasters get a Firelands daily option as do Strength DPS however. Missing here are Agility and Tank necklaces, which means you may have a market for Brazen Elementium Medallion (assuming people didn’t just get the Hyjal reputation neck) and Elementium Guardian. There are Valor necklaces available post-4.2, but I doubt the neck slot will be at the top of peoples’ lists to replace for quite some time.
Conclusion and Caveats
The mark of a good goblin is being able to make gold when it is not especially obvious that it is possible. Although I am labeling some items as Bad and Fire Sale and so on, it is entirely possible that you or someone who likes to sweat by the AH will make money where money ain’t got any right being made. Maybe that dude who bought my cheap cloaks will move both by Tuesday and laugh his way to the bank. That’s fine, I’m already at the bank giggling myself. The only real loser is whoever gets stuck with the item when the music stops, and presumably that person paid for the privilege so I guess everyone wins… until that guy does those 10 quests and replaces it.
So, yeah.
If you are looking for some quick and dirty advice, I would say: clear your stock, stop making/buying more BoEs. Worst case scenario you will still have your mats, and can go back to ignoring whatever I say on Wednesday. Goblins strike it rich all the time by taking on risk that no one else does. Goblins like myself also strike ~80% of the richness of the other goblins, with 90% less effort and less than a quarter of the risk. Do what you like, and we’ll all see how it pans out next month.
In An Age 
The Underplayed Piece of D3 News
Aug 3
Posted by Azuriel
You can buy and sell characters.
The screenshots (from MMO Champ) are fairly low resolution, but it does clearly show Featured Heroes results, the drop-down box for the class, narrowing your search to level ranges and, of course, three listings of level-capped toons for sale. Apparently the market price for a level-capped Witch Doctor is 10,000g. I would recommend buying out all three and relisting for $20 apiece.
…things are going to get fun, aren’t they?
One quick item of note (that may be old news to some):
I would say that this will be the last post about Diablo 3, but honestly Diablo 3 is the most interesting thing that has happened in weeks. Other than Limbo being released on Steam.
Posted in Commentary, Diablo
3 Comments
Tags: Diablo 3, RMAH, Selling Characters