Yearly Archives: 2011
Mobile AH Game Changer?
[Edit: I may or may not have been a bit premature. If the change below doesn’t auto-update the price as I assumed (in a sort of reverse-eBay bidder style), it merely matches the functionality of addons like Auctionator et tal. Apologies for the excitement, although if Blizzard continues down a road of making canceling/relisting easier, it could begin to cross over into premium competitive advantage.]
This is, by far, one of the most game changing features to the World of Warcraft AH I could ever imagine:
The iPhone World of Warcraft Mobile Armory has just been updated! Check out all the improvements we’ve included in the latest version:
- Automatic price undercutting: Set the default buyout price of your auctions to match or undercut the current lowest buyout price for an item.
- etc (source)
In one fell swoop, Blizzard has introduced a premium feature that simultaneously grants an unbeatable competitive advantage that destroys an entire economic methodology AND damn near makes AH botting obsolete. And possibly even entire addons. What am I talking about? I am talking about how AH barons can become immune to undercutting for $3/month. The simplicity and genius of it boggles my mind.
Just think about the glyph industry in WoW. The entirety of blog posts and guides devoted to becoming a captain of the glyph industry revolves around pushing other players out of the glyph market. Why? Because glyphs, by their very nature, are easy to create and have trivial listing fees. If I post a glyph for 200g and someone else lists the same glyph for 199g99s99c, I just lost that sale. In order to recapture it, I will have to cancel my undercut listing(s), collect the mail, and then go to AH and A) undercut the other guy by 1 copper, B) undercut deeply, or C) engage in economic/psychological PvP to drive this guy from the market.
Simply put, this changes everything. There are thousands of articles across the internet about setting up addons like Zero Auctions (etc) in creating Fallback prices and thresholds and so on, which this change completely invalidates. Toss your Glyph of X on the Mobile AH for 300g and set the threshold at 20g (or whatever). If someone pulls a 299g99s99c, they instantly get undercut by you. While they are spending time canceling, emptying the mailbox, and relisting, you are doing nothing. Relist goes up to 299g99s97c, automatically undercut again. There is no way to beat this. No longer will you be checking your glyphs 2-3 times a day, doing 12 hour posts, posting at 6 AM or other odd hours, emptying thousands of mails, etc. Assuming you set a sale threshold you are willing to accept, camping the AH as an economic strategy becomes obsolete. I am trying to come up with historical examples of strategies that have becomes this obsolete… and I am drawing a blank. Knights in full plate armor against the crossbow? Castles as defensive structures after gunpowder? Trench warfare after the invention of mustard gas?
One of the biggest reasons to NOT use the Mobile AH feature, aside from it costing $3/month, was how it was always more efficient and convenient to use your existing addons. While I do not think the Mobile AH is particularly well-suited for heavy AH usage interface-wise, the auto-undercut feature alone makes not using it impossible in an environment where anyone is. Forget glyphs for a second… what about gems or epics or other goods with non-insignificant deposit fees? I assume the auto-undercut feature will not charge you each time (that seems too large a trap for an unwary premium feature user), but if that is the case then you can literally bleed other stubborn goblins dry as they cancel and relist items with Xg deposits. Assuming the undercut logic is programmed well, you may not even need to care what the market price is for a good at all: just list everything starting at 300g and let it auto-adjust downwards for you.
The one negative implication – aside from people who forgo the app and to whom this entire announcement spells economic ruin – is when you get one or more persons with this app in the same market: without collusion, prices will automatically bottom out at the lowest threshold. Good news for the average player, of course, but bad news for anyone looking for margins that justify the crafting time. Then again, perhaps you could bait someone with this app into automatically bottoming out their prices, buying all the stock, and then relisting higher as they blithely go about enjoying their day in the knowledge that the app is doing their work for them. So perhaps some of the old strategies can still work…
In any case, this feels like a strange new economic world, my friends.
The Diminishing Returns of Fun
I was listening to an episode of The Instance (#242) today and was struck in a rather fundamental way by what they said in the Mailbag segment. So much so, that I went ahead and captured the 8 minute audio exchange and uploaded it to Youtube so it could be more easily accessed. The reader email question itself was rather asinine, but it elicited a (brief) discussion on how the playerbase of WoW has evolved over time. The evolution of the playerbase, or devolution as some say, has been a frequent whipping boy of forums posters and bloggers for ages – Blizzard dumbing down the game, catering to casuals, and so on.
The thing is, I firmly believe that the argument has always been backwards. Blizzard is not catering to casuals, they are desperately trying to retain that ever-sliding core of veterans. Blizzard is not shaping players, the players are shaping Blizzard. The rest is worth listening to, but I went ahead and transcribed the most important portion of that audio clip, spoken by Scott Johnson:
[Repeating content] is a distinct downside to MMOs in general, and it is why I really enjoy a cultivated experience like Diablo 3 – like the Elder Scrolls games, like I am expecting with Skyrim, like a lot of single-player RPGs – where the wonderment and the excitement and the newness is always present. Because, unless you are freak who plays games six times through for no reason, everything is new as you consume it. Whereas in World of Warcraft, and other MMOs like it, as much as Blizzard tries, and they do the best out there to make things SEEM as fresh as possible. After a while, like that Blood Beast fight… [snip]
But again, I’m kinda with him. This is why I don’t pug much. Because I find that so grindy and so not fun. What I want … if I’m going to do that stuff, I’ll do it with my friends because then THAT is the newness of the experience. Because we’re laughing, Manny said something funny, Pootinky made a fart noise, whatever. We’re having a ball in there. So THAT is fun for me. The actual pugging of the thing for the 5000th time is not fun for me at all in the least. It is just earning money, currency to go get something. And that’s fine, that’s working as a system. But I’m kinda with him that you lose that cultivated experience, you lose that wonderment of walking into a room for the first time, like walking into Ulduar and going “Holy crap! Look at where we have to go and how we have to get there.” And then after a while you are “Oh my gosh, Ulduar can suck it. I hate this fight.”
That is reason the “vanilla forever!” mindset never made sense to me, nor the appeal to nostalgia that was Cataclysm; as they say, you can never cross the same river twice. People like to imagine that if everything had stayed hard, they would not have gradually lost interest in the game. But think about your favorite games of all time. Are those games still fun for you today? Would they still be fun to you if you replayed them half a dozen times back-to-back? You can never recreate that original experience – the wonderment and newness is consumed in the act of experiencing it. And as much as I agree with Scott that Blizzard does a lot in trying to keep content fresh by constant iteration and new boss abilities (etc), at some point you understand on a fundamental level that the Ship of Theseus has sailed, so to speak.
The “catering” is not to casuals, but to the veterans who have reached the end of their original experience and who, through boredom or social ties, are looking for more things to do in-game to fill the time while they wait for schedules to align. But why would veterans actually want extremely fast leveling, faceroll dungeons, and so on? Some of that is actually trying to capture the 80-90% of players who never finish games, sure. But the things like Justice Points and LFD are firmly for the vets. Nils suggests that Blizzard uses “ease” as a weapon in the form of competitive advantage against other MMOs (or perhaps in response to others doing it). Or perhaps in reaction to player “entitlement.”¹ I would argue instead that fun in games has diminishing returns. Running across the entirety of Searing Gorge each time you wipe in BRD might have given you a healthy respect for safe pulling in your formative years, but I guarantee that you would be sick of it four or five years later if it was included everywhere. You learned that lesson, and reinforcing it constantly adds nothing of further value to your experience anymore than would repeating grade school as an adult.
Ultimately, I feel theme-park MMOs are their own worst enemy. Nils told me once that it was in my best interests for an MMO journey to last as long as possible. If I was purely fixated on the eradication of my free time, then sure. I played WoW for over 7000 hours as compared to Xenogears’ 80 hours. But I never once, for a single moment, felt that the magnitude of fun with the former came remotely close to matching the latter. In fact, as is the case with any novel or movie or TV series, the extreme danger is that efforts to elongate the experience instead poisons it². More becomes less. Instead of cultivating a complete experience with a beginning, middle, and end, the theme-park MMO model demands an open-endedness at odds with its progressive narrative.
Perhaps this is merely a sign that (theme-park) MMOs are not a genre meant for me. I do not think that is entirely true though. The genius of MMOs is that they appeal to and accommodate a huge variety of players with different interests – as vapid as questing seems to be to vets, it was actually an endearing experience the first (few) times. Instead, I think designers should embrace the end of their games, incorporating a more conclusive experience while leaving the door open for an encore. Or the after-party.
¹ Entitlement is a word so abused by bloggers and commenters that it has lost most of its meaning. Entitlement should not be synonymous with the expectation of a fair exchange of value. Nor should it denigrate legitimate instances of design criticism. It’s honestly getting to the point where you cannot say something is superfluous or inelegant without being accused of feeling “entitled” to, you know, better design.
² See: Lost, Rescue Me, every Terminator movie after T2, every Alien move after Alien 2, etc etc etc.
Review: Far Cry 2
Game: Far Cry 2
Recommended price: $5-$10
Metacritic Score: 85
Completion Time: 19 hours
Buy If You Like: Novel, immersive FPS games with bad pacing and one-dimensional missions.
Get used to this. In a... bad way! Er...
Grand Theft Africa
The very first thing to understand about Far Cry 2 is that the designer intent is for you to be immersed in the story and setting. Unlike most games that also want this to occur, Far Cry 2 is unapologetic about its meta-story approach. Every single mission involves either killing a guy, or blowing something up and then killing a guy. These missions are not meant to be interesting, nor are the reasons you are given for doing them. Rather, the idea is for you to muse on what it means for you to be doing them, and why every mission is repetitive nonsense but you do it anyway.
Of course, the danger is always that too much is being read into what is objectively a beautiful, immersive if badly-paced game. I am giving the designers the benefit of the doubt though.
The premise of Far Cry 2 is that you are a bounty hunter or assassin or whatever, flying into a chaotic African nation to kill The Jackal, an arms dealer who sold weapons to both sides and arguably made the conflict possible. After an extended driving sequence reminiscent of Half-Life’s opening tram ride, you arrive at the hotel and collapse from malaria fevers. The Jackal shows up in your hotel room, taunts you a bit, and leaves just as a civil war erupts outside your window. You stumble around in your fever haze, before collapsing just outside of town. As far as intros go, it is refreshingly novel. I do wish the designers saw fit to show you being bitten by the mosquito in-game, but malaria’s quickest incubation period is 7-10 days, so I suppose that is a point in favor of Far Cry 2’s realism.
How convenient! I barely have to aim.
Once in the game proper, you are given a few “this is your ass, this is a hole in the ground” tutorial missions before suddenly Africa opens up as your gasoline-soaked, civil war-tincted oyster. To move the plot forward, you get episodic missions from both forces of this civil war, oscillating between the two factions with apparently zero regard for tact and subterfuge. Both sides see you as their “secret weapon,” and send you unsupported to deal damage to the other side, in the form of assassination and blowing things up. The problem is that “unsupported” means that the soldiers of whichever faction you are working for will shoot to kill, which is fine, but more troubling is that these faction leaders never once suggest that you should, you know, not shoot their own soldiers. At the height of Far Cry 2’s absurdity, one of the faction leaders straight up tells you that he knows you are doing missions for the other side… and then carries on like nothing happened. There is no identity between the two factions, no choice in doing missions for one over the other, no real choice in declining missions (at one point you have to blow up experimental malaria vaccines), and since everyone shoots at you, no real difference between anything whatsoever.
But again, given the meta-story that becomes more clear in the game’s final hours, it may be less bug and more feature.
Measured in raw game hours, Far Cry 2 is more of a driving game than a FPS. The game takes place in two Acts, each with their own 25 square kilometer game maps featuring realistically shitty African roads winding all over the place. There happens to be instant transportation in the form of Buses, but most of these are at the far corners of the map and generally shave off only ~20% of the driving distance at best. Given the nature of these maps, there are rarely opportunities to avoid the frequent guard checkpoints – which I suppose is a primary feature of good guard checkpoints, so another point for realism – which inevitably results in firefights every 3-4 minutes. While your enemies are decent shots out in the bush, their bullets transform into auto-tracking, Jeep Wrangler-seeking projectiles when you try to speed past them. It was originally satisfying creeping into these checkpoints, killing everyone, and being awarded (achievement-wise) for “scouting” the bases, but it has zero long-term impact on the game. No matter how many checkpoints you wipe out, it will always be fully staffed and stocked by the time you return.
Optional blue objective is (thankfully) optional.
One of the more ballsy moves on the designers’ parts was having crosshairs disabled by default. In fact, generally speaking, there is no HUD at all until you reload or take damage. This definitely gives Far Cry 2 a more primal feel as opposed to arcade shooter, even though you look down iron sights most of the time. Reinforcing this primacy are little touches like how “health kits” are morphine ampules injected into your wrist veins. Indeed, if you are close to death, “healing” becomes pulling bullets out of your arm with needle-nose pliers, yanking your wrist/elbow/shoulder back into their sockets, cutting shrapnel out of your leg with a knife or extracting pieces of rebar out of your thigh. If you recruit a combat buddy, they can even swoop in when your health reaches zero to save you from a hard Game Over, in an extended sequence of dragging your semi-conscious form to cover before stabilizing you. All this happens wherever you are, not some stock footage, and that combat buddy will still be there helping shoot the enemies that (almost) took you out. If they go down, you have the option of returning the favor by stabilizing them, or putting them out of their misery with a coup de grace.
Ultimately, it is difficult to recommend Far Cry 2 as a game game when it plays out more like an interactive, philosophical art piece. The FPS elements are solid, but you only utilize them sporadically as you drive around. The sandbox feel of the maps and interface immerse you into the setting, but all roads lead to Rome. And the story… well, the story is disjointed and awful, but Far Cry 2 successfully transported me into the mind of the protagonist by the end. To me, that sort of experience is worth something… in the neighborhood of $5-$10.
Paradox of Voice Acting
It’s fascinating to me reading this Kotaku article about how BioShock Infinite’s Actors Berated Each Other to the Point of Tears to Get the Scene. Although I would agree with some critics that Bioshock 1 was worlds better than Bioshock 2, I was already pretty excited about Bioshock Infinite from its first trailer (assuming I can actually play it on my PC). Seeing the lengths (depths?) the voice actors go through to paint a scene makes me want it more.
But then… how important is good voice acting to begin with?
Games have had voice acting for decades now, and I am not entirely sure I can even remember particularly good performances. Sure, bad voice acting tends to stand out, if only because it pulls us out of the narrative flow. But is that not the paradox of good or even amazing voice acting? The better the voice acting is, the less we remember it. This lies is stark contrast to amazing soundtracks which you tend to vividly recall.
Perhaps this is some sort of physiological thing insofar as in these games we are not concentrating on how well the actor sounds, but rather what sort of information they are conveying – we remember the words, the story, the way the narrative makes us feel, but we lose their voice in the process. And maybe that in itself, the ability of spoken words to immerse you in the narrative instead of jarring you out of it, is the mark of quality acting. That just seems… cosmically tragic, as opposed to how other forms of art usually work.
Honestly, I am trying to remember any of the voice acting in games I have played.
- “War… war never changes.” Fallout narrator.
- “James!” The wife of the protagonist of Silent Hill 2, but mainly for that one specific (but hidden) exclamation.
- Thrall and Aggra during the Call of the World-Shaman questline. The dialog is pretty bad (aside from Thrall’s Fire speech clips), but the emotion got through. In fact, Thrall’s voice acting and dialog during the Flame segment is the best I have heard in WoW and many other games.
- Well, I thought King Terenas’ acting was rather brilliant in WotLK’s intro and ending segments.
I am starting to wonder if I remember WoW’s actors more simply due to repetition than quality (although they have it too in the above examples); the Fallout narrator is the same from all the Fallouts, and each time he says that catchphrase. In any case do you typically remember quality voice acting in the games you play? Do you have favorites?
The F-Word
I was reading Stabs’ post about treasure hunting in Diablo 3, how the typical gold farmer strategies won’t work and so on, when I see Nils in the comments say:
While reading this something inside me cries out: “Why don’t you just try to have fun??”
You seem determined to optimize the fun out of it.
The first question that popped into my mind was “What if you find optimizing fun?” And Stabs replies:
@Nils Ah we’re getting back to the question, what is fun? All I can say is, for myself, I’m hyped that I’ll be able to play D3 for money, it was a game I’d have played heavily anyway, I’ve always loved theorycraft and numbercrunching, I have an encyclopedic knowledge of arcane D2 mechanics and I believe I’ll have an utter blast doing this.
I can’t really defend optimisation to someone who considers it not fun. I do suspect that you’re swimming against the tide.
If you listen to the PC Gamer podcast I linked you’ll hear them argue very persuasively that D3 is a game where everyone is a gold farmer but then go on to talk about how much fun it is to play. They’re not mutually exclusive.
I think the only fun I’ll intentionally sacrifice for optimisation is alting. I usually mess around with lots of different classes and builds when I get a new game. With this game I’ll be rushing to the end.
I have heard the phrase “optimize the fun out of it” from Nils and Tobold and others, and it was not until Stabs’ unapologetic response that I realized how asinine the phrase is to begin with. Optimization is fun. I am not going to hedge that with “can” or “to some people” because you have to fight stupid declarative statements with Objective (Self-) Truth. If you find optimization fun, then it is. Period. If you don’t like it tomorrow, then it is not fun, until such time that you change your mind again. If someone finds something different fun, they are wrong. Unless you agree with them. Is that not the implied premise in these fun discussions? Are we not justifying our favorite colors (red), flavors (peanut butter), or meals (taco salad)? I hate steak. Do I ask why people ruin their dinners with slabs of tough, bloody cow muscle? Of course not. And not just because I prefer taking a perfectly healthy salad and smothering it in greasy ground meat, nacho chips and sour cream.
I do not judge because I do not live in a solipsistic bizzaro-world where Fun is some objective Form straight out of the works of Plato. Have you read Gevlon at Greedy Goblin lately? He “refuses to nihilistically believe” that two people playing WoW can have different goals, motivations, desires. In a Battleground, he rages at the people fighting on the bridge instead of guarding a flag like he is; they are M&S (moron & slacker) for not winning in the most efficient manner. I was not aware winning was more important than having fun, but he covers that too by saying winning is the only way to have fun in the first place. I am not quite sure how he handles games like The Sims or Second Life – possibly you are M&S for not playing winnable games to begin with – but Nils, Gevlon, and Stabs all played WoW at some point in time so obviously someone was doing it wrong. Right?
The Dark Heart of the Matter
The underlying problem with “what is fun?” posts is not just because fun is a subjective thing. The underlying problem is that none of us can really be sure what fun even is to ourselves. That is, strictly speaking, an absurd statement. But the psychological fact of the matter is that human beings are damn near incapable of accurately predicting how they will feel in the future. Feel free to read along at home the article entitled The Futile Pursuit of Happiness. A choice excerpt:
Much of the work of Kahneman, Loewenstein, Gilbert and Wilson takes its cue from the concept of adaptation, a term psychologists have used since at least the 1950’s to refer to how we acclimate to changing circumstances. George Loewenstein sums up this human capacity as follows: ”Happiness is a signal that our brains use to motivate us to do certain things. And in the same way that our eye adapts to different levels of illumination, we’re designed to kind of go back to the happiness set point. Our brains are not trying to be happy. Our brains are trying to regulate us.” In this respect, the tendency toward adaptation suggests why the impact bias is so pervasive. As Tim Wilson says: ”We don’t realize how quickly we will adapt to a pleasurable event and make it the backdrop of our lives. When any event occurs to us, we make it ordinary. And through becoming ordinary, we lose our pleasure.”
It is easy to overlook something new and crucial in what Wilson is saying. Not that we invariably lose interest in bright and shiny things over time — this is a long-known trait — but that we’re generally unable to recognize that we adapt to new circumstances and therefore fail to incorporate this fact into our decisions. So, yes, we will adapt to the BMW and the plasma TV, since we adapt to virtually everything. But Wilson and Gilbert and others have shown that we seem unable to predict that we will adapt. Thus, when we find the pleasure derived from a thing diminishing, we move on to the next thing or event and almost certainly make another error of prediction, and then another, ad infinitum.
You can probably draw a line from that concept and connect it with Cognitive Dissonance, and especially the sub-set of that: Effort Justification. This is extremely relevant in MMO discussions about what is “fun” and what is not for what shall be readily apparent reasons:
Dissonance is aroused whenever individuals voluntarily engage in an unpleasant activity to achieve some desired goal. Dissonance can be reduced by exaggerating the desirability of the goal.
Oestrus from The Story of O and Nils from Nils’ MMO Blog both wrote about this dissonance in their (hopefully cynical) “What is fun?” articles. Both Nils and Oestreus argue (in effect) that fun is the resolving of the dissonance that is doing a long, arduous grind for an ultimately meaningless reward. After completion, you convince yourself that the journey was meaningful, and magically you retroactively have fun. Your brain does this because it refuses to believe that you could be so dumb to have spent all that time voluntarily being miserable, ergo the reward must have been worth it. And the sad thing is, this works. Nils even has a series of posts talking about how “great games enslave you,” not through riveting substance or fun activities (which is really salt that ruins the larger shit soup), but by pulling a Lucy and moving the football before you get to it, every goddamn time. I may be paraphrasing here.
In their defense, I do believe they are talking about great MMOs specifically, where “great” is defined as ones that keep you pressing levers for food pellets as long as humanly possible. It is the same definition of greatness, incidentally, that makes America’s Funniest Home Videos one of the greatest television shows of all time. Better than, you know, The Wire, The Sopranos, Dexter, etc etc.
On the Other Hand…
The good news is that your inevitable, happiness-based existential crisis may be unnecessary, and here is why: Think about your favorite games of all time. Now… were any of them MMOs? I am guessing no. For me, my favorite games are Xenogears, Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy Tactics, Chrono Trigger, Super Metroid, and so on. I quit playing WoW a few weeks ago after four years, and I have 7000+ hours logged; not only is that more time than I spent playing those listed games combined, it is probably more time than I played in the entire SNES era. And yet WoW will never occupy a place on my favorite game list. No doubt I had some memorial experiences, but the vast majority of those experiences were social ones that could have existed just as easily elsewhere, like in EQ, Rift, LotRO, Warhammer, etc etc. There was nothing specifically exclusive to WoW to merit associating the social triumphs with the quality of the game itself. Moreover, the very principals Nils attributes to “great” MMOs sours my memory of the WoW-specific moments of genius – Sunstrider Isle was an absolutely amazing starting experience, but it and other experiences are diluted by ~6920 hours of merely Okay gameplay. Just like a movie or book or blog post (like this one) can overstay its welcome via lack of editing and meandering structure, a game too can ruin itself by unnecessary extension.
It is for this reason that I believe the future of the MMO market is heading towards a more single-player Show & Tell experience. This was not possible when the payment model was pretty exclusively subscription-based, but now the stage is set through the legitimization of alternative payment models (F2P, but also Diablo 3 RMAH, etc) to allow developers to go back to crafting experiences with defined beginnings, middles, and ends. The end of the story is not always the end of gameplay, of course, which is where the Show & Tell comes into play. MMOs will be less about Lucy taking away the football at the last moment, and more about showing her how far it can fly.
Culpability of Questionable Design
Is Blizzard responsible for players doing unenjoyable activities for rewards? Or is the player responsible for wanting something they shouldn’t?
For the context of this question, consider the Zul heroic dungeons in Cataclysm. These represent a second “tier” of heroics that offers better gear drops and double the amount of Valor Points, at the cost of a higher level of difficulty and being longer in general. In the last 4-5 months of their release, a number of players have complained about fatigue and burnout from having run these two specific heroics seven times a week for months, as opposed to the nine (9) other heroic options available because those, while easier, offer a sub-standard amount of VP (and leaves you short of the weekly cap). The fairly common counter-argument comes in the form of Bill’s comment in this MMO Melting Pot post:
Nobody is forcing people to do ZA/ZG all the time. In my battlegroup, normal heroic queues are 2-3x faster and less stress than ZA/ZG ones . So I can do half and half. For raiders, they have the option to knock of a few nerfed farm bosses from T11 to help them reach cap.
Also, even at this point in the expansion, not everyone is ZA/ZG ready. Yes, really.
You want choices? You have choices.
I would argue that the “choice” is between efficiency and inefficiency – not a particularly meaningful choice – but it is somewhat worse than that because I get the impression most players do not have fun running heroics for VP in the first place. Is “enduring unfun things because the end result is fun” Blizzard’s fault for designing the game badly? Or is it the player’s fault for choosing to bore themselves for a treat at the end? And even if it is the player’s fault (masochism is a real thing), does that abdicate Blizzard of any responsibility in their game design?
We do know that a lot of rogues appeared to reroll DK, at least when the class was first introduced. We also think rogues were more popular back in the day before flying mounts and instance-teleportation, where ganking someone out in the wilderness was more common. We saw a surge in the popularity of hybrid classes, especially druids and paladins, as running heroic dungeons became something nearly every player did instead of a more dedicated minority. (source)
In terms of heroic dungeons specifically, I do blame Blizzard. There have been many interesting articles on the subject already, but the short version is that the role of heroics and the equivalent of VP (Badges of Justice, etc) has changed radically since their introduction in The Burning Crusade. Back then, the apparent design goal was to allow non-raiders to have a seperate, but parallel endgame gear progression path of their own to raiders. This philosophy obviously changed in the Lich King era when full tiers of gear began to be offered up on the JP vendors of that day, but I did not have a problem with it back then because A) prior tier gear was required for their episodic content model to work, and B) heroics were breezy, 15 minute affairs. That breeziness did, dare I say, make them fun in a multiplayer Diablo kind of way.
Come Cataclysm, it is clear that the Blizzard designers took the difficulty complaints as personal insults, and tuned Cata heroics up to extra-crispy levels. While they were never particularly challenging to skilled individuals and guild groups, they were absolutely brutal to pugs, whom remain the bulk of the LFD population. Blizzard doubled-down on difficulty with the Zul heroics in 4.1, which sort of makes sense given that they drop 353 gear instead of 346 and more VP besides. No one feels forced to do Heroic raids versus Normal raids for gear, right? Yes… but that sort of demonstrates the disconnect. Outside of a few BoEs, there is no way of obtaining heroic raiding gear other than from heroic raiding. Conversely, there are several ways of obtaining gear from VP (and JP) vendors. That VP gear is orphaned, unattached to any particular method of acquisition. Pressing the LFD button and waiting for the queue to pop is orders of magnitude easier than finding/creating a 10m raid group and downing bosses. And moreover, there is now a pseudo-experience point bar in our faces, reminding us how below the (weekly) cap we are at any given time.
Your life is *this* incomplete
It is in this sense that I feel that it is Blizzard, not the players, who are at fault with the state of the endgame. Blizzard took a mechanic designed to give the “more dedicated [heroic-running] minority” a legitimate progression path, and inverted the design to make heroics the endgame for everyone for an entire expansion. Then they “priced” people out of doing them during the early days of Cata, then relented, then made the same damn mistake again with trying to funnel everyone through the Zul heroics. Given that heroics are supposed to be endgame for ~70% of players… where is the beef? It will soon be four months since 4.1, and while 4.3 is slated to be released at the end of this year with three new heroics, are the two Zuls really supposed to have sustained non-raiders for the better part of a year when their endgame is designed to be heroics?
Future of Gaming: We (May) Be Screwed
If you play games and had a pulse in the last fifteen years, you have undoubtedly bore witness to the meteoric rise of the Free To Play (F2P) model, which had been preceded by the Downloadable Content (DLC) model, which had been preceded by the “new Madden game every year” model, sandwiched inbetween the 8-hour single-player campaign and Skinner Box School of Character Advancement loafs. It is enough to make a grown man cynically quip “I told you so!” as he shuffles back into the 1990s when games were games, and boys dreamed of somehow getting credited as Writer in the next Squaresoft Final Fantasy epic.* You know, when gaming was cool because it was an ultra-niche hobby that catered solely to you and your demographic – back before the industry totally sold out** and before it was considered hip to pretend you were upset that something sold out.
Well my friends, it actually might be worse than you think.
900,001; Or How Tiny Tower Killed WoW
The frustrating thing about canceling your subscription is that you never end up doing it for the reasons you want to have done it for. All of us have those little wedge issues that crop up in the process of an evolving game design that we disagree with on fundamental levels. Cash shop antics with the Sparkle Pony/Disco Lion. Heroics being too easy or too hard. Justice point gear and the availability thereof. Premium subscriptions. Racials, class balance, paladins getting nerfed into the ground every patch/not getting nerfed enough.
I had a whole post titled “The Unapologetic Grind” ready to go, talking about how the malaise that seems to be spreading in the “community” has more to do with the transition of the badge system into an “empty bar filling” system that both encourages you to grind way past your normal limits (just… one… more… bar…) and injects feelings of inadequacy when you inevitably fail to fill them. Indeed, the first day that my guild failed to hit our maximum XP cap was the day I could point to as the beginning of the end.
But… when you get right down to it, the answer is always simple.
I first came across Tiny Tower a few weeks ago after hearing Scott Johnson and friends talk about it on The Instance and The Morning Stream, two rather hilarious podcasts I have listened to for months. If you have never heard of Tiny Tower, it is a “F2P” Apple app that is objectively a pointless waste of time. There is nothing skillful or strategic about any of the gameplay, and obviously there is no plot to speak of. It exists on my iPod only because it stimulates my nucleus accumbens in a completely vapid way: it tricks my physiological drive to multi-task into believing that the accumilated time spent playing has any meaning. And yet I have not deleted the app. It is still on there.
The philosophical question of whether anything we do has value or meaning aside, WoW engages in this same remote, psychological pleasure-center stimulation. And why wouldn’t it? It is an MMO with a monthly subscription. The difference between creating enough content to occupy people for a month versus creating content it takes a person a month to complete is the difference between bankruptcy and a sweet raise. Think about those Tol Barad trinkets you spent 30+ days “earning.” That they required 125 marks and Exalted reputation was entirely arbitrary. It was not about creating content, it was about creating a time wall that needed to be dismantled brick by brick by repetitive activity which creates an illusiary value to the end-product. Something you have worked towards accumilates value that simply getting it right away would lack.
In WoW’s defense, there is actually an end product there: a trinket that you might be using the rest of this expansion’s lifespan. Games like Tiny Tower have latched onto the notion that you do not even need the end-goal, do not need a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Worse than that though, these designers have realized that the individual actions do not have to be entertaining either. These are sandbox games without the sand; play replaced by going through the motions of play, yet triggering the same biochemicals as if you were having actual fun. And having thus deluded you into believing your participation has value, they tweak the “gameplay” to make even this seem reasonable*:
Seriously. I am waiting for a Steam deal on Limbo because $9.99 is a tad higher than I would prefer, and yet I was musing on how much could be accomplished with 1,000 Tower Bux… at the low, low price of $29.99. Philip Morris has nothing on these “F2P” assholes.
As my friends started logging into WoW less and less, the weakening social ties to the game gave me room to stand from my chair and really examine what I was doing. The taste of daily quests soured in my mouth. The AH was still fun… but it was the deals and strategy and the profit, not the tedium of listing, undercutting, emptying the mailbox. Sure, I could (further) automate those actions, but that is like automating chewing to speed tasteless digestion – it misses the point. The one activity I enjoyed for the sake of enjoyment was PvP. But when I became Honor capped on my warlock, BGs ceased to be amusing nearly instantly. “If I’m going lose 5 games for every 1 win during Twin Peaks holiday, I may as well do it on a toon that has use for Honor.” In other words, character advancement and fun had been so inexoriably linked in my mind that I questioned whether they could even exist independantly. Tiny Tower demonstrated that I would do something unfun for even the vaguest of rewards, and that was when I realized I was not actually having fun in those BGs. Or rather, it was no longer immediately clear that I was.
A lot of these sort of posts smack of “I quit WoW and so should you, for these reasons,” but that honestly is not my intention. I think there are some definite missteps that the designers made in Cataclysm, and I would be happy to debate those at length any day of the week regardless of whether subs are lost or gained. The fact of the matter though, is that if I was still having an engaging social experience in WoW I would probably still be paying $15/month. Without friends, WoW falls to the merits of its single-player experience. When that single-player experience is no longer fun, it falls finally onto its time soaking skills. And in the arena of time soaking, WoW cannot hold a candle to “games” like Tiny goddamn Tower.
God save us all.
*Obviously anyone who has played this “game” will go on about how they haven’t paid for anything. I haven’t paid for anything either. But any time you looked at that Bux screen and did not laugh at the designers’ overreach is a time you ceased to “beat the system” and became one with it. Nevermind all the stupid iTunes band previews or Youtube videos you watched because they gave you “free” Bux to do it.
Always Online: Missing the Point
I still have a problem with the always-online trend, but it actually comes from the other direction. Fundamentally, I am always connected to the internet… but that does not mean I always have a connection capable of running a client/server game without lag.
Spotty Wi-Fi? It happens. ISP having issues with Blizzard’s servers? Been there, done that. Indeed, Time Warner (the only cable internet provider in my area) frequently has intermittent disconnects in the 11pm-3am time period when I am most active (I work 2nd shift). And obviously playing multiplayer games like FPS and WoW is impossible when, I dunno, I am downloading torrents, Steam/iTunes/antivirus programs decide to update, someone on the same connection boots up Netflix, and so on and so forth. Any of those other things are about 1000% more likely than lugging a laptop onto airplanes, trains, or buses.
So please don’t construe this always-online DRM as a value-added feature when it is nothing but movie executives futilely pushing 3D movies because it eliminates the majority of piracy. There are better ways of eliminating that kind of piracy, but the movie industry is choosing the one that makes them more money.
Speaking of choosing the option that makes them more money. Tobold mentions that the cash AH in Diablo 3 necessitates a constant connection, but cheating prevention is honestly a red herring as Tycho from Penny-Arcade divines:
For my part, and I’m not, like, The Lord or anything, but the gulf between able to install a Spawn copy of the game and not being able to play offline at all seems pretty deep. Don’t really know what else to tell you. I saw that Blizzard came out with a response response, expressing their surprise at the consumer reaction, when this is more or less how consumers react every single time they learn the precise circumference of their golden leash.
By their own admission, Diablo isn’t not really focused around a PVP experience; if you’re playing with someone who has duped items or whatever, all it means is that you will be more likely to defeat Satan. Without a means to gain advantage over another, “cheating” as a concept becomes substantially more opaque. Who is the cheated party, precisely? Satan the Devil? Fuck him, who cares.
Who is being cheated? This is the part of the movie where, in a series of retrospective realizations cut with you looking at your own face in the rearview mirror, you come bit by bit to the heart of it. The person you are cheating is Blizzard, Blizzard in the aggregate, with your attempts to interfere with their digital marketplace. You mustn’t play offline or goof around with your files or any other naughty business because they are endeavoring to transform your putative ownership into a revenue stream.
There, now don’t you feel better?
Diablo 3 was going to spawn a black market(place) if Blizzard did not do anything, but there were other options available. Flagging items as being offline-only, having separate offline characters*, or hell, even turn item/gold duplication into a (somewhat hidden) feature, preemptively destroying that market. If you choose to log onto some epic’d-out guy’s server, it is indistinguishable to you whether said guy hacked the items into existence or bought them all from the AH. Don’t group with that guy. This is Bashiok:
Q u o t e:
but it also has the potential to damage the game economy and overall experience for the many thousands of others who play World of Warcraft for fun
We still think that’s true for a MMO in which thousands of players co-mingle in a persistent world and vie for supremacy in eSport competitions or ‘world first’ boss kills in raids. Neither of these are true though for a co-op action RPG.
The worst that could happen is you open your game up to the public, someone jumps in wearing some awesome gear, and you don’t know if he found those items himself. But that’d be the case whether we offered an official way to buy items from other players or not.
I have a hard time reading that and accepting the premise that cheating harms anything, especially under the Diablo model of a co-op dungeon grinder. Hell, I have a hard time accepting the premise of a co-op anything that you play with total strangers all the time as opposed to with people you know, but that might just be me. I would never open up a public Minecraft or Magicka or Portal 2 or Dawn of War 2 server, for example. Competitive game modes like TF2 or Counter-Strike or WoW BGs are one thing, “intimate” team projects you cannot quickly exit are quite another.
*Blizzard did address this by saying they did not want someone leveling up to the cap, eventually coming around to the whole online idea, and then realizing that they would have to reroll completely. To which I reply: you are allowing the buying and selling of characters. Throw down $20 and you can have a fully epic’d, level-capped character to play around with online. Problem solved.
In An Age 
Dead Island
Sep 3
Posted by Azuriel
Probably old news, but this is by far the best zombie apocalypse game trailer I have ever seen:
There were parts of that video that looked like live-action. That aside, I was not entirely sure there was space in the game market for another Left 4 Dead game, but… according to this Joystiq preview it is apparently a Borderlands-esque RPG complete with “stat boosting shouts,” tank-melee-rogue-ranged party dynamic, quests, XP, and items with stats on them. Obviously that article mentions some issues with the game that may or may have been solved by the time it is released next week, so who knows.
I typically believe myself immune to marketing, but damn. Not going to buy the game until a Steam deal comes along, although I shall be easgerly following its progress in the Metacritic space.
Posted in Commentary
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Tags: Dead Island, Trailer