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On (or Off with) Their Head(s)
Aside from the things I previewed already, there was another dimension to the Guild Wars 2 beta: the turning of most of the classical MMO arguments on their head. You know the types, the ones that start perennial flame wars on forums? Nearly every single one showed up to the party, and Guild Wars 2 spilled its beer all over them. Stodgy old classics like:
1. Portals ruin exploration and make the world smaller!
Guild Wars 2 features Waypoints which, once discovered, can be instantly teleported to from anywhere in the world for a small fee. Here is a piece of the starting Norn zone:
Flight paths are sooooo 2004.
If portals truly do make the world smaller, you will be looking at Guild War 2’s map from an electron microscope. There were 17 Waypoints in the beginning zone alone; even assuming that number is inflated due to its newbie zone status, the World Completion box indicates there are 477 such Waypoints overall. There were more than a dozen in Divinty’s Reach, the human capital city. And keep in mind that Waypoints make portals feel like a trip to the DMV in a convenience comparison: you actually have to walk up to portals (how quaint), whereas you can teleport to Waypoints from anywhere.
My very first gaming blog post ever (originally posted on Player Vs Auction House) was a guide for people stuck in Dalaran when Blizzard removed the Stormwind/Orgrimmar portals circa beginning of Cataclysm. At the time, I felt like I was pretty clever coming up with a method that got you from point A to point B in seven and a half minutes. And it was clever, when the (solo) alternative could potentially take over ten minutes if you missed the boats. Yes, I’ve heard stories about 30 minute boat rides in older MMOs too.
With the extremely notable exception of WvW, there shouldn’t be an inch of the Guild Wars 2 world that cannot be reached in less than five minutes provided you have been there previously.
I have always argued that you make a world bigger by putting more stuff in it; size should be judged not by distance, but by density. Otherwise we can make a world 5% bigger by having players move 5% slower. Whichever argument reflects the truer nature of things, we will never get a more on-the-nose test case than when Guild Wars 2 launches. We are literally at the bottom of the slippery slope, two steps away from player omnipresence.
2. Points for losing?! Why don’t we just mail them epix?
Log in, press H, collect full suit of (legendary?) PvP gear.
This may not be an entirely fair comparison, as the implicit objection is towards “cheapening” gear progression by making it inevitable. Also, I am assuming that none of us gets uber-gear simply for turning 80 on the PvE side of things. There is something to be said though, about eliminating mechanical rewards (e.g. gear upgrades that increase performance) and focusing almost entirely on cosmetic ones. Will the PvP side of things stay fun enough in the long-run without the “crutch” of progression? Time will tell.
3. Guild leveling was needed to make guilds important again.
You can join multiple guilds simultaneously, no problem. Guild hopping to the max.
4. LFD has destroyed the sense of server community!
Server community? What community?
When Guild Wars 2 launches, you will also have the option to play with your friends on another world with our free ‘guesting’ feature. With guesting, your characters can play on any world where you have friends – with certain restrictions. For instance, you will not be able to participate in WvW while guesting. (source)
I suppose it will come down to how important WvW ends up being to you – I don’t think it’s quite the killer app, as others might – but otherwise there is no other reason for you to “stay” on any particular server. It is not entirely clear if you can “guest” yourself on just any random server, or if you have to be “invited” by friends, or join their party, or whatever. In any event, I would actually suggest this is about as close to “serverless” as a themepark can get.
5. No one talks in LFD, it’s like they’re all mute AI/bots.
Outside of WvW, this was about as chatty as I saw anyone:
Sir Booyah makes a point.
Different servers are different, betas are different than Live, and I don’t even know if that log was from the equivalent of Local Chat or Trade Chat, etc etc etc.
From my experience in the beta however, Milady is correct in being a little apprehensive about the Automatization of the Social. ArenaNet has eliminated kill-stealing and loot-ninjaing, they have incentivized resurrecting one’s fellow players, and they have successfully turned WvW into a Us vs Them affair in hiding the names of opposing players (“Green/Red/Blue Invader” is all you see). Emergent social interactions in Public Questing Dynamic Events have been so streamlined that no dialog is necessary.
And that… is kinda the rub.
I am not a huge fan of the blunt social engineering seen in old-school MMOs – “make friends or never hit level cap,” “play nice or get blacklisted and never run dungeons again” – but I am cognizant of how little purpose chatting in Guild Wars 2 will be, even in the middle of a impromptu 10-person group. Out in the world, it almost felt like I was in an LFD for questing.
In retrospect, perhaps Guild Wars 2 isn’t necessarily turning this argument on its head. What it is demonstrating is that the issue isn’t the random, transient nature of your group in LFD. Rather, it is the lack of necessity to interact that is the cause. Even the most mute LFD group in WoW had to coordinate who was standing in what beam during the 2nd boss fight in Blackrock Caverns, for example. Perhaps high-level dungeons will perform the same role in Guild Wars 2, and perhaps the nature of WvW will lead to the formation of like-minded individuals.
Out in the open world though, other players may as well be bots.
—
If it was not otherwise clear, I am not implying that Guild Wars 2 necessarily refutes all these classical arguments simply by existing. Rather, it merely appears to openly mock the collective wisdom of forum heroes everywhere. If things turn out well for ArenaNet’s gamble, there will be much soul-searching in the months following release. If not? Well… I’ll think of something.
Everything But the Dance Studio
Once you get that knee-jerk reaction out of your system, the design announcements currently going on at BlizzCon are pretty interesting.
Yeah, Pandas. They really did it. I owe someone $20. But what about the rest?
Monk Reactions
- Every race but goblin and worgen… interesting.
- Does this mean new animations for all those older races?
- GG tank balance, once again. Historically, Blizzard has never balanced tanks correctly, ever.
- “No auto attack! Devs want you to have this street fighter feel where you punch a lot.”
- /facepalm
- Seriously, that won’t work. Blizzard has spent years increasing the passive damage of every melee class because front-loading them in actual attacks leads to 3.0-era Ret paladins murdering everyone.
- Nevermind how Blizzard specifically changed Heroic Strike and other on-next-attack abilities to be more normal abilities specifically because warriors were getting carpal tunnel. Now they want Street Fighter?
Okay, fine:
Panda Reactions
- /facepalm
- Those racials suck. Nothing like how blown away I was at Goblin/Worgen racials.
- Wonder about what their racial mount will be…
- All that aside, I’m one of “those guys” whose overall opinion on the race will be determined by how the females look. My paladin is a draenei female despite it being the worst race in the game simply because I like the look, for example.
- After the disappointing direction of Worgen females, I fully expect to be similarly disappointed here.
Talent Tree Revamp Reaction
- Change is scary!
- Actually, this sounds fine.
- These choices are actually interesting. Some of them will be extremely difficult.
- Here are some examples of good ones:
Those are some interesting choices. The rogue spread boggles my mind with the possibilities, for example. Shadow Focus would presumably let you Sap, use Tricks of the Trade, and so on without any Energy cost. Meanwhile, Nightstalker would also be useful in a more general sense. Subterfuge seems bonkers to me. Can you imagine? You’re healing some dude from the bushes, and all of a sudden you get a Garrote, Eviscerate, and Mutilated before you even see where it came from. And I have to assume that Stealth breaks immediately if you start capping a flag or whatever, otherwise… very OP.
And look at the tanking spreads:
Those… are actually pretty crazy choices. The “obvious” paladin tank choice would be Ardent Defender, but I have never thought it was a compelling button to push every since it was redesigned from its (admittedly OP) passive ability – it was essentially Divine Protection v2, now with triple the cooldown. Now I have choices! Sacred Shield as a Prot tank looks really juicy even with the 60 second internal cooldown, for example. And if I were questing or facerolling through obsolete heroics, Blessed Life would let me unleash some burst DPS with all that extra guaranteed Holy Power.
Here is an example of what NOT to do though:
Yes, I noticed that Repentance technically has no cooldown and is essentially a paladin polymorph. Yes, I also noticed that “Fist of Justice” (lol) is a 6-second stun on a 30-second cooldown, ala early Wrath. Choosing between those two will be absurdly difficult… unless you are Ret paladin, in which case you are just fucked. Holy paladins never could get Repentance, so a “default” HoJ at half its normal cooldown is pure bonus, nevermind the strategic implications of trading it for a spammable CC on a different DR from normal CCs. Similarly, Prot paladins experience pure bonus. Ret paladins though? They lose either their stun or their incapacitate (e.g. their only “gap-closer”), and lose even the lame-ass snare capacity they had previously. More demoralizing is that the mere continued existence of Seal of Justice means there won’t be a snare for Ret paladins for yet another expansion.
There are probably other class examples of options actually being taken away in this revamp, but the Ret one jumped off the page and cock-slapped me. Anyway, back to talent impressions:
- Apparently Blizzard wants you to be able to change talents at any time, ala glyphs.
- Some of those talents are obviously dungeon talents, obviously PvP, etc. Not sure how that eliminates cookie-cutter builds.
- Perhaps a secondary effect of having more difficulty levels in dungeons/raids is that cookie-cutter builds would be less relevant.
- Actually, no, cookie-cutter builds will always be relevant. See: rise of GearScore in late Wrath despite high GearScore being 100% irrelevant to the actual difficulty.
Dungeon/Raid/Scenario Reactions
- “Heroic dungeons [in this expansion] will largely be tuned to be about as difficult as they were in Wrath of the Lich King, allowing players to fairly quickly down bosses in PUGs and hit their Valor Point caps.”
- Told you so.
- Okay, technically I predicted Firelands would be easier, which didn’t happen. Not my fault Blizzard is so damn slow.
- Told you so.
- Scenarios sound interesting. The lack of a trinity requirement is pretty novel, WoW-wise.
- Hopefully Scenarios will be a frequently-updated feature, since it doesn’t technically need lore or even bosses to support it.
- Dungeon Challenges, eh? Good luck.
- Christ, they put Challenges in the LFD feature?! Are they insane?
- Okay, it only matches you up with other people flagging themselves as Challenge. Not quite as crazy.
- Actually, completing a successful gold metal Challenge run entirely via LFD should be a tier higher than doing it in a premade group, don’t you think?
- I think Challenges are a pretty interesting feature, but what’s more interesting is how they “normalize” the gear. Seems pretty dangerous for a MMO to even tangentially introduce a feature that makes gear progression irrelevant.
- After all, if they can make gear irrelevant there, why not make it irrelevant everywhere?
- Other than the obvious “it removes replay value.”
- “We are currently not planning to have 90 normal dungeons in MoP.” Ballsy. Or lazy, depending.
- That seems like a clear signal to solo to cap, then group.
- Or continue soloing forever, by getting VP from questing.
Misc Reactions
- Pet Battling = Path of the Titans, Dance Studio. I predict vaporware.
- Then again… they did play the panda card so who knows anymore?
- “Oh my God. I’m back. I’m home. All the time, it was… We finally really did it. [screaming] You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!”
- If Pet Battling is real, $10 says the store pets are more powerful than normal pets.
- “Pets will be account wide.” Really? Huh. Then I guess the BoE Disco Cub isn’t such a rip-off than it was before.
- You know there will be pissed-off people who bought more than one to have on multiple characters.
- “The plan is to get people back into the world, instead of having players roam around Stormwind and Orgrimmar all the time once they reach max level.”
- And yet no real concrete plans on how they expect to accomplish that.
- Hell, Scenarios and LFR and Challenges all push people back into instances.
- Maybe daily quests with VP will get people outdoors, but that certainly isn’t much of “out in the world.”
- Interesting how there was no mention of new Wintergrasp/Tol Barad-esque zone.
In any case, that about sums it up for now. While a lot of these things sound interesting, Path of the Titans sounded interest too. Time will only tell how many (if any) of these features actually make it to live servers.
Fixing MMOs: The Social Solutions
Last time, I talked about the problem surrounding traditional MMO social structures, or the lack thereof. Today, let’s come up with some solutions.
Increase Mobility
One of the most radical ideas (or so I thought) turned out to be top suggestion from multiple people in the comments of the prior post: reduce or eliminate the tyranny of the server. I believed this to be radical because on the surface of things, de-emphazing servers necessarily destroys server communities; something that LFD is almost universally recognized as accomplishing, right? Yes… and no. The problem is Blizzard only went halfway. If a friend plays on Maeiv and I am on Auchindoun, why can’t we play together? RealID is making baby-steps in this direction, but the hemorrhaging community does not have time for that baby to grow up into a paramedic and stop the bleeding.
Here are some methods that could work:
- Free, unlimited character transfers, aka the nuclear option.
Not particularly practical (Blizzard would lose a lot of money besides), but it is technically an option. It may encourage mass migration, give shelter to ninja-looters and the like, and other such social upheavals. Ultimately though, it may be better than to simply allow people to fade into account cancellation when they feel trapped in a server “community” they no longer enjoy (and don’t feel like gambling $25 escaping).
- Free, limited character transfers.
Say, 1 character move a month with the option of purchasing more if desired. This would prevent mass exoduses, while still allowing friends to follow each other around in a measured way. It would also allow someone to “test the waters” of a server in a more meaningful way than making a level 1 toon and observing Trade chat.
- Eliminate named, permanent servers entirely.
Essentially, set up the servers like an ice-cube tray and as each server fills up, it spills over into the next server, and divide it all into game regions. One huge benefit of this would be to allow there to always be a steady population of people leveling in every zone for group questing, etc.
Example: if I went to Borean Tundra right now, there may be 1 person questing there on Auchindoun, and maybe 5 on Maeiv, and 50 on Tichondrius. Under this methodology, there would be 56, up until an arbitrary cut-off. And if the cut-off is 100, I would have it start transferring people to a second zone instance at around ~70 so the 101st guy isn’t off by himself. The key would be to make it subtle, with no load-screen or anything. With phasing technology it should not be a problem.
Of course, if you find you enjoy spending time with someone, how will you ever find them again if there are no specific servers? This brings me to my next overarching social solution:
Introduce an informal ranking system in LFD (and elsewhere).
This suggestion needs its own entire section. Ranking people in the LFD system is frequently suggested on the forums, but the point of my ranking system is different, and it isn’t even technically a “ranking.” On the forums, people believe that being helpful/geared/experienced should be rewarded with faster queues and being grouped with similarly good people. That is actually self-defeating. It is in the community’s best holistic interest for there to be 1 experienced/helpful player in every group – letting all the cream rise to the top simply makes the bottom groups congeal into a hardened lump of terribleness. I believe players need to know what they can aspire towards before they understand what social behavior the designers want to encourage.
So, essentially, my informal ranking system would be the equivalent to a Facebook Like or Google +1. This feature is something that a player will have to initiate themselves (there is no post-dungeon survey), possibly through right-clicking a player’s portrait. What the +1 does is make it more likely that they are grouped with that person in LFD, and/or otherwise present on that player’s server (under a fluid server dynamic) in the future.
That’s it. There are no rewards for having the most Likes, nor any visible indication of how many you have. Giving this +1 to someone does not notify them, nor does it add them to a Friends List (although it will let you easily do so on your own). I briefly imagined something like a title or special effect to occur if you get 100+ Likes or whatever, but it is important that there be no incentive to game the system. It’s not a democracy, it’s not a popularity contest; it is a more generalized form of self-selection.
More Show & Tell
Under the traditional MMO social model, you are frequently limited to appearance, actions, and incidental text to communicate your personality. “Err… but Az,” I hear you say, “isn’t that basically everything?” No, sir or madam! In an MMO, your appearance is limited to the gear you happen to be wearing (or a costume, if you are lucky); your actions are entirely limited to the location and time in which they are performed (typically dungeons or raids); and incidental text just happens to be whatever you have said in a particular channel, on a particular topic, at a particular time.
While you can certainly develop impressions of a stranger, especially if you encounter them in an unique or extreme circumstance, kinship generally requires time precisely because it’s difficult to give an accurate representation of one’s character in a single sitting. Traditionally, the “solution” was enforced grouping and the pre-LFD dungeon situation in which placing voluntary strangers in close proximity for long durations was supposed to spontaneously generate communities. This “worked,” just like placing soiled rags in the the 17th century lab’s corner “worked” at spontaneously generated rats.
Repetition is required for communities – people are more asocial in LFD precisely because you aren’t going to see anyone again (unless you have a ranking system, of course). We can, however, condense the process via Show & Tell. What this means in a general sense is instead of blooming into a flower in front of others over time, you do hours and hours of blooming beforehand and invite others into your garden. Some MMO methods include:
- Player Housing
Blizzard has strongly resisted the demand for player housing because they are afraid of players sequestering themselves away in instanced communities. Which, of course, makes sense in the 17th century spontaneous generation sort of way. How can players envy each other if they aren’t AFK outside banks and auction houses on the Flavor of the Patch mount?
But that’s just it: players generally have a preternatural desire to express themselves any way they can. Player housing would not be about having somewhere to chill out waiting for a LFD queue, or even arranging your trophies and armor sets in aesthetically pleasing ways. It would be about designing and decorating a virtual space for others to look at. You already know the meaning behind that piece of gear that’s been sitting in your bank for the last four years. Other people don’t know, and deep down I believe it is a common human desire for said object or achievement to be recognized and acknowledged as something meaningful.
Player housing is something that can easily be half-assed and end up making the game worse, yes. It will take development time and resources to make work right. If I cannot put that Light of Elune potion I’ve held onto since level ~20, four years ago, under a glass with a little plaque explanation, then I would consider player housing a failure, for example. But if you ever walked into a house with something like prominently displayed, you would see a facet of my personality that you likely never would have unless the topic somehow came up.
- Character/Guild Bios
To an extent, Blizzard already has this in the crippled form of the Guild Finder. Which, incidentally, you cannot even use unless you happen to be guildless.
The idea behind the Bio screen is to have a sort of poor-man’s player housing without the instancing. A simple whiteboard allowing curious passerby the ability to see what you are all about. Beyond the obvious player ramifications on RP servers, I also imagine it as a way to perhaps allow you to highlight which of your in-game achievements are your favorite, or other demonstrations of skill, perseverance, or luck. Or, hell, as a way of passively advertising your WoW blog. Unsavory characters may use it to transmit keyloggers and such, but it really is not so different than what happens in text form already. And besides, Bios would require you to be actively inspecting/looking someone up, rather than getting it forced upon you Trade Chat style.
Conclusion
This is running pretty long already, and about to be buried in BlizzCon news besides. The sort of bottom line here is that most MMOs are woefully stuck in the Dark Ages, and need to catch up to the emerging trends and zeitgeist of the day – specifically in the realm of social tools. For as much as I despise Facebook and “social media” in general (for their nefarious ways), it is worlds easier being able to locate and interact with new people from multiple locations with similar interests as yourself, while flexing your Show & Tell muscles all the while.
The sort of subscriber revolt going on in Cataclysm had many causes, but I strongly believe the #1 reason had nothing particular to do with LFD or difficulty or boring grinds per se, but with the sort of cascade effect that happens when the underlying social structure has been weakened by those (and other) things. In other words, I think LFD and hard heroics and boring grinds can be fine as long as you have the social tools to keep people together in the midst of it. A return to the vanilla/TBC model without a LFD would have been equally disastrous IMO, unless social tools were added too.
If you have critiques or alternative ideas, let me know in the comments below.
Things That Used to Work, Vol. 2
…but don’t anymore.
As with Vol. 1, these listings reflect a personal (d)evolution of sensibilities based on some recent titles I completed.
Stats Games with Invisible Stats/Debuffs
Why It Used to Work: No one knew what they were doing, technical limitations.
Why It Doesn’t Work Anymore: I am much more conscious of questionable game design.
As I mentioned before, many of these categories stemmed from a recent completion of The Witcher, but there have been other games like Dragon Age: Origins that fit into this category. [Edit: for clarification purposes, a “stats game” is one which determines outcomes via visible or invisible dice rolls. God of War and Devil May Cry are not stats games, even if they technically have stats like HP and upgraded items and such. Even Counter-Strike has HP and damage modifiers to weapons (headshots are 3x damage for example), but it is also not a stats game. A headshot in a stats game would deal 3d6+10 damage with a Fortitude save DC 20 for half, assuming you overcame the 7% miss modifier.]
The underlying issue at hand is twofold. The first is when you have a stats game built around stats you cannot see or measure. In The Witcher, the talent trees as filled with “straight-forward” items like Damage +20% in Tier 2, followed by Damage +25% in Tier 3. Are these bonuses additive? Multiplicative? Do they simply replace each other? What is my baseline amount of damage anyway? There is no formal character sheet, so there is no real way to know. Bonus damage is attractive to me as a player, but without the number-crunching followup, it is more cock tease than substance.
The other issue is when a game pretends – or, worse, implements! – debuffs (that) actually matter without giving you a very effective way of understanding them in-game. The Witcher contains debuffs like Pain, Poison, Bleeding, Blinding, Incineration, and the like along with talents that raise your resistance against said debuffs and increasing your chances of inflicting them. Good luck figuring out when they are actually applied though, as the game designers felt that character animations alone should clue you in. Something which is pretty bizarre considering a fair number of talents increase your damage while the enemy is afflicted with a certain debuff. Spending resources debuffing an enemy so as to deal more damage overall than simply bludgeoning them over and over is the first road on the way to strategic depth; the road less traveled, unfortunately enough.
A topical side note comes from scrusi from Procrastination Amplification, who talks about how hiding the numbers can lead to excitement coming from the other direction. I absolutely agree. The point I am making here though is that a game designer cannot have it both ways. By all means, hide the numbers to build excitement… just don’t sneak in Damage +20% and other numbers to get nerd senses tingling without the follow-through.
Amnesia
Why It Used to Work: Built a sense of mystery, allowed naratives to start in medias res instead of always beginning in small villages, gives options for players to reprogram established characters.
Why It Doesn’t Work Anymore: It is almost always nothing more than a meta-narrative crutch.
Amnesia is so cliche a plot element that merely saying it is cliche is itself a cliche. I get why game designers do it, I really do. As mentioned, not having to start every story with a main character at age 17 in a small village is a big draw; not every game can pull off a Fallout 3-style beginning. Amnesia also lets you bypass a large portion of potentially boring but still slightly relevant backstory.
The thing is: none of that has anything to do with actually including amnesia into the narrative itself. Did Geralt having amnesia within the game affect the game in any real way? Not at all. The designers justified it – coming back from the dead! – but it served no other purpose than letting the player choose things Geralt as a historical character with an established narrative might not have done. And that is just damn lazy.
Obviously The Witcher is not alone in this. When I think back to FF7 with Cloud’s amnesia, all I realize is how much that particular plot-point is ostensibly designed to surprise the player, rather than make any real sense. Yes, it is justified in-game – Mako! PTSD! Experiments! – but in almost every single case I can imagine the story being so much more poignant with Cloud knowing the entire time. ¹ And that is what rubs me the wrong way about taking the easy way out via amnesia: all the missed opportunity for legitimate angst.
Nevermind how the amnesia itself rarely becomes more than a sub-plot. I was more okay with the amnesia of Planescape: Torment, for example, because it was not just a plot device, it was the entire plot.
Waiting for Groups
Why It Used to Work: You had to, It Builds Character.™
Why It Doesn’t Work Anymore: Looking For Dungeon, indie games, Steam.
Way back in February, in a post about LFD and difficulty, I just sort of asserted that the WoW LFD genie is out of the bottle and never going back in. I do not think that anyone actually disagrees with that assertion, even those that actively wish LFD was rolled back or limited to specific servers. The thing is, in a real way, I believe the very concept of waiting for groups at all has been irrevocably spoiled for me.
And… I think I’m fine with that.
I played World of Warcraft for ~7700 hours over the course of four years. I started in TBC, not Wrath, nevermind how LFD did not exist until patch 3.3, i.e. Icecrown. In the course of debating Nils on the issue of LFD’s effects on WoW’s social fabric, I keep finding myself examining why it is that so many people say that they went from sociable Friends List-using fellows to asocial LFD dwellers “overnight.” Battlegrounds had this functionality years before you even could form groups for competitive PvP (outside of world PvP of course). Surely battlegrounds are being utilized by more people than heroics are, yes? What made 5m dungeons so pivotal to the community aspect of the MMO?
While thinking on that question, I tried to imagine myself back in a time when what I could do was dictated entirely on the whims of strangers. And I thought: why bother with that? Loaded up on my Steam account right now is Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Audiosurf, Frozen Synapse, Machinarium, Metro 2033, Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale, Shining in the Darkness, the two Shadowgrounds games, SpaceChem, VVVVVV, and Dawn of War 2: Retribution. Those are simply the ones installed at the moment², not the 16 unplayed games like Mass Effect 1&2, The Witcher 2, and so on.
It sort of boggles my mind now that I would literally sit in Shattrath for hours trying to fill up a group for heroic Magister’s Terrace, back in the day.
Perhaps LFD did ruin things. Perhaps more people do run heroics than BGs. Perhaps the PvE community’s social fabric was hanging by a thread that was ultimately (and ironically) cut on December 8th, 2009. Academic retrospectives aside, I do not feel there is any going back for me, to blithely waiting for groups in any game ever again. I sat through some 40+ minute DPS queues right up towards the end of my Cataclysm run, either Alt-Tabbed or completing dailies, sure. But the way I look at things now, the content at the other end of those forty minutes of waiting better be damn impressive to justify not simply playing something else.
So if nothing else, the one thing LFD did do is disabuse me of the notion that waiting is required. In a world of $5 indie games and Steam deals, it really isn’t anymore.
¹ Keep in mind that I say this as someone who considers FF7 to be his #2 favorite game of all time.
² And I’m only really playing Shadowgrounds and AC: Brotherhood at the moment. The others are simply there for convenience’s sake.
Community Aspects
Nils is reaching the end of his WoW rope in his latest experiment, and my response probably fits better in a post than comment. Nils says:
In the past there was a community, but there is no community now. WoW doesn’t actually put you into any community. Everything is random groups. Sure, I could try to get into a guild. But I don’t feel like it. Blame me if you want: I bet I’m no more different than a lot of other players.
WoW has NEVER put you in a community. At all. The most you could say is that in the early days people had somewhat of an incentive to seek out strangers because it would be impossible for them to complete (group) content otherwise – something that sounds more like Facebook games now that I think about it. The “community” could be summed up the sort of proto-typical “LF1M tank H Ramps” spam, where the alternative was having nothing to do. But if Nils doesn’t feel like joining a guild, he probably would not feel like joining a random Trade chat pug either. Or perhaps he is saying that since you can press the LFD button, one has no incentive to join Trade pugs?
Honestly, there was as much community when I finally quit as there has ever been, and I saw people trending towards tighter guild/social bonds than ever before. In TBC, the only way to see content was to “trade up,” leap-frogging Kara guilds into SSC/TK guilds into BT guilds into Sunwell guilds. Choosing friendship and sociality meant you simply dead-ended, unless you won the guild lottery and got into one that progressed. Incidentally, this was my fundamental problem with articles like the one I talked about yesterday, insofar as those never seem to be written from the majority standpoint of raiders whose expansions just end mid-tier because the guild is not good enough to progress (be it skill, drama, or other).
Nowadays, at least pre-Cata, you could have your cake and eat it too, progressing with friends at relatively your own pace without having to worry about people trading up. Yes, solo players have no “real” incentive to join guilds/groups since they can get groups formed for them. Then again… well, as we’ve seen from LFD, some of the groups you get are so horrible that there is every incentive to do LFD runs with as many people you know as possible.
OT: The Final Tanking Solution
There has been a lot of discussion surrounding the systemic problems with the LFD feature when it comes to tanks, and quite frankly, a lot of truly bizarre “fixes.”
Rohan from Blessing of Kings thinks that maybe we should move from the Holy Trinity (e.g. tank, healer, 3 DPS) to something like 2 tanks, 2 healers, 2 DPS. While that seems out of the blue, apparently it is more similar to what Age of Conan was (is?) doing. Green Armadillo at Player Vs Developer thinks that since there are more DPS than the other roles, why not simply have a tank, healer, and 7 DPS? Gordon from We Fly Spitfires thinks that simply no one wants to play those roles, and so Blizzard should either make those things more fun to do or perhaps give up on the Holy Trinity model altogether. Adam from The Noisy Rogue asks why Blizzard is bribing tanks when they could simply make running heroics required for raiding by adding a (stacking) buff for completing them. Incidentally, Adam appears to hate non-pure DPS classes and wishes them pain. Gevlon from The Greedy Goblin thinks it is an “education” issue that should be fixed by somehow teaching people how to play better (or how to tank), and that no amount of bribery will work.
And to round it out, here is actually Blizzard’s official take on the situation:
We don’t feel the tanking and healing roles have any inherent issues that are causing the representation disparity, except that fulfilling them carries more responsibility. Understandably, players prefer to take on that responsibility in more organized situations than what the Dungeon Finder offers, but perhaps we can bribe them a little.
With Great DPS-Power, Comes… No Responsibility
All of these “solutions” flirt around the two problems, outlining what is really going on in the vaguest of ways. Tanking (and healing) carry more responsibility… why? Easy: tanks and healers cannot be carried. When a tank fails, by definition, the group wipes. When a healer fails, the group wipes. There can be sloppy play, for sure, like a tank not positioning the boss correctly, or not reacting to a certain ability the correct way. However, if the group is still able to rally and defeat the boss anyway, the “failure” really is not a failure. Conversely, DPS failing generally means that the DPS died, which is not that big a deal…
…until now.
Problem 1: Cataclysm dungeons are (still) too difficult for the LFD tool.
The first time I zoned into the revamped Shadowfang Keep and saw that there were actually three separate spells that a DPS could (and has had to in two cases) interrupt on Baron Ashbury, I knew I would despise this expansion. Commander Springvale, Lady Naz’jar, Rom’ogg Bonecrusher, Corla, Herald of Twilight, Ammunae, Setesh, Rajh, Corborus, (post-patch) Asaad, Foe Reaper 5000, Admiral Ripsnarl, “Captain” Cookie… all of these bosses from nearly every single heroic have mechanics that the DPS has to take care of or else the group wipes. Blizzard actually thought they could add responsibility onto the historically least responsible role and have everything work out? Nevermind the endless mob packs that need CCing along the way.
It might come as a shock, but bad players play this game. I do not subscribe to Gevlon’s “M&S” sociopathy, but there is a full spectrum of player abilities out there, and not every one is tall enough to ride this roller coaster, so to speak, especially after jacking up the scale a few more inches. You cannot keep these players out of the LFD tool though, because there are not enough “good” players to support the function – as I mentioned back in February, there has to be a critical mass of success going on for the tool to operate at a self-sustaining level. No matter what you think about the LFD tool, it is still entirely better than trying to make your own non-guild group, as otherwise you would be doing that instead of sitting in a DPS queue for 45 minutes.
I Ain’t Got Time to Bleed
Speaking of sitting around for 45 minutes…
Problem 2: Cataclysm dungeons (still) take too long.
It is bad enough that having one (or two) bad players from the LFDisaster lottery in your group can torpedo an entire heroic run. What drives the situation into an irredeemable farce that it is today is asking raid-geared tanks to slog through perfect no-wipe, no-death runs… in 50+ minutes. All for 70 Valor Points. Every other non-raid aspect of this game is designed around being completed in 30 minutes or less. TB dailies? 30 minutes. Battlegrounds? 30 minutes. Arena games? They can technically last for 47 minutes or whatever, but most games last no more than ~3 minutes * 10 games (assuming 50% win percentage), so ~30 minutes. What happened to 30 minute heroics? As I have openly opined in this space before, where are all the players asking for 5-man raids on their off-nights?
Blizzard seems to be addressing this particular problem, e.g. 70 VP/hour not being good enough, without actually addressing the equally (if not moreso) pressing Problem 1. This is why their bribing “solution” will be a short-term improvement at best: I actually do plan on running LFD more often, but only because the Reins of the Raven Lord is something I have been farming off-and-on again since TBC was relevant content. So I will either get the mount rather quickly, or I will become so frustrated (again) at the prospect of running these heroics that I would rather be farming Sethekk Halls the old fashioned way, and getting done in a fraction of the time.
Always the Last Place You Look
So what is the actual final solution to this seemingly tanking crisis? Does it involve fundamentally changing the way the game is played, perhaps with 8-9 person dungeons with two tanks or whatever? Nope. How about rating systems, or game tutorials? Bzzt!
Solution: Tune Cataclysm dungeons like Wrath dungeons were tuned.
Problem solved! Did you, or anyone you know complain about DPS queues in Wrath? Not a chance. DPS queues were 11 minutes back then. Eleven minute DPS queues. Can you imagine? I can! Despite the low queue times, I still tanked on three separate toons because it was faster and I enjoyed tanking more. How could I enjoy tanking and it’s responsibility? Because I had control over the outcome. You could be the worst player in the world and I would carry you kicking and screaming to a 15-20 minute LFD success. And then everyone could move on with their lives.
People did complain Wrath heroics were too easy. And you know what? Those people complain that Cataclysm dungeons are too easy. There is no satisfying those people, because they have such warped perceptions as to what daily group quests should consist of that placating them is a waste of time. These dungeons were new, relevant content the first few times you beat them. After that? They are farm content. Does anyone legitimately enjoy “challenge” on farm content? That seems like a contradiction in terms, does it not? If you are in heroic raiding content, does it please you to wipe on normal Magmaw? I find that unlikely. Challenge does not consist of RNG wipefests because you happened to be grouped with a stoned college student, a stay-at-home mom changing a diaper with one hand on the keyboard, a Fan of Knives bot, and/or the social bully studying to get his minor in Sadism.
Tanking and healing will always have more responsibility than DPSing. The goal should not be to “fix” that by adding more responsibility to DPS. All that will do is make tanking/healing more frustrating, because on top of what you already have to worry about, you have to worry about whether you will wipe through no fault of your own because Worgenlol of Random Server 316 did not interrupt the one-shot mechanic of a dungeon boss.
Challenging content does have a place in World of Warcraft and that place is in organized content. Grabbing five random players and sticking them into a group that will never exist again is not “organized content.” You can even still have challenging heroic dungeons for people that want it… just don’t stick those dungeons in the Dungeon Finder. The way the revamped ZA/ZG are rolling out is a bastardized version of this, but Blizzard could do it better. Have them exist as brutal 5m content for 1-2 months or whatever, and NOT be in LFD. Then, nerf them appropriately when you finally do add them to the tool. This solution actually appeases the “save the community (that we never interacted back in vanilla/TBC)!” camp, as you could get your local e-Street Cred up for successful ZA/ZG runs while anyone else who couldn’t be bothered could still get their daily 7/week VP the (now) old-fashioned way. Between the 353 gear and the doubled (!) VP gains from ZA/ZG, I do not think there would be any danger of there not being enough people running those dungeons. And when 4.2 rolls around at the end of August when it’s ready? Glide ZA/ZG right into LFD.
No matter what you thought about Wrath, the one thing it indisputably got correct was how to make a vibrant, healthy LFD community. Player activity only went down after nearly a year without new content, and the prospect of another gear-reset expansion. Cataclysm player activity is down four months after launch. No, seriously. Blizzard talks big game about the design iteration process, but as we know from Wrath they kept the same difficulty model the entire expansion. I actually have little hope that they will turn Cataclysm around before plowing into that iceberg, and what we are likely to see is another brutal raid tier in Firelands and less reasons to feel the need to log on every day. Design decisions like “let’s require endboss kills before they can get a 4pc bonus!” sound good on paper (and quells the forum trolls), but in practice it makes people less interested in ANY tier pieces. Cataclysm difficulty? Same kind of deal.
OT: LFD and Difficulty
OT = Off-topic, e.g. no AH advice.
Chances are good that you have at some point been exposed to the debate still consuming the WoW forums in regards to the recent nerfs to heroic difficulty, the buff to Luck of the Draw, and the overall “Wrathification” of Cataclysm. The arguments are pretty rote by this time, usually coming down to “morons/bads should L2P and not have faceroll epixs” and “back in my day we wiped and liked it” and possibly “the elitist no-lifers just want exclusive content for themselves” or “my $15/month is just as valuable as your $15/month.”
All of that kind of debate is besides the point.
The point is two-fold: the DPS queue for heroics is north of 45 minutes and the completion rate of LFD groups was garbage. Period.
LFD is Here to Stay
It is interesting from a philosophical point to debate the whys and the hows, but again, it would be besides the point. The LFD genie is out of the bottle, and it is never going back. That said, LFD as a tool requires a healthy feedback loop in order to function. Players like Gevlon from Greedy Goblin might refuse to use LFD under any circumstances, even if that meant he simply was never able to do another heroic again. I would imagine that everyone else would be more reasonable insofar as they would prefer grouping with friends, but if they could just grab someone to fill the empty slot(s) they would. Sometimes only three people you know are online, or perhaps only three out of X many are willing to go. Other times you may literally be the only person online for whatever reason and want to run a heroic. In those situations, you will want the system to be there.
LFD in this sense is like public transportation. You may never actually need to use it, and you may certainly never want to, but it is still in your best interests for it to be there in case you do.
That all changes if the average completion rate of LFD pugs is 40% after having waiting for nearly an hour. Most sensible people would not bother with that, and instead take their chances with Trade chat pugs, waiting for guildies to become available, or simply going and doing something else entirely. The people who would still queue for such a LFD failure would be the terminally optimistic and those for whom a 40% chance of success after an hour of waiting is more than they achieve on average anyway. This means that when you end up needing to use LFD to avoid not being able to do what you want to do, you are far more likely to not end up being able to do what you wanted to do anyway and wasted your time besides.
What Does Not Wipe You, Makes You… Err…
Were the Cataclysm heroics too hard? Would the “difficulty” have solved itself once tier-gear was available for Justice Points in 4.1 and beyond? Is having players struggle through difficult content better for them and the game overall? Interesting questions… but irrelevant to the issue of the negative feedback loop the LFD tool was stuck on.
Success breeds success. There are highly successful people IRL who say that success is the worst teacher, that adversity and frustration are better motivators. Sure… sorta. I am not opposed to difficult content – fundamentally I believe everyone who plays wants content tailored to their skill level – what I am opposed to is the notion that a LFD system could survive the same design philosophy used in, say, raiding. If your first few forays into eBay or Craigslist ended up in scams, frauds and embarassment, how likely would it be that enough people would trooper on in the face of such adversity to make those marketplaces function on a healthy level? Even on a raiding level, success breeds success. How long would Gevlon’s experiement have lasted if endlessly wiped on Magmaw and saw no improvement from week to week?
Does the 15% LFD buff and targeted boss nerfs make people better players? Not necessarily at first. What those things do accomplish is increase the completion rate of LFD dungeon groups as a whole, which then encourages more people to use the tool, which improves the aggregate skill level of groups, which further increases the completion rates. I truly do believe that a smoothly functioning LFD tool encourages individual improvement in the people receptive to the idea to begin with, as they get a foundation of success that translates into confidence, plus the gear that takes raiding into the realm of possibility. Just think of how many potential raiders could be buried under the fail of current LFD groups, never knowing how much better they could become because any improvements they do accomplish does not translate into meaningful group success.
Collateral Damage
The final thing I wanted to briefly talk about is the following argument:
“This sort of thing is exactly WHY the 15% was bought in.
Are you saying we should all fail just because some of the peeps were scrubs?”
“No they should not reward poor play. Groups should fail sometimes people should learn mechanics. The issue is they put the bar on the floor for wrath.”
One of the root design questions of LFD is: should good players be penalized for getting randomly grouped with bad players?
There is no way to avoid rewarding poor play without also penalizing good play in the process (unless all five players are bad). Such a philosophical hardline is the same concept as the teacher punishing the entire class because no one came forward to say who threw the spitball or whatever. The idea is that by holding the entire class hostage, one can guilt either the perpetrator or someone who knows who the perp is into confessing. Based on personal anecdotes, such a gambit works approximately 0% of the time – someone with no compunction against being disruptive in class in the first place isn’t likely to be persuaded by guilt (even if they are, they are getting punished either way, so no-win), the people who knew who did it likely don’t want to be labeled as snitches and otherwise suffer retaliation later (no-win), and the rest of the class that would tell who did it if they knew are punished as though they did it themselves (no-win). Such blind, indiscriminate punishment does not actually encourage any good behavior whatsoever; the only real thing it encourages is either acting out yourself (may as well have fun if you suffer the consequences either way) or an avoidance of that class/teacher, which represents the LFD tool in this case.
Is it “fair” that bad players get carried? Maybe not. Then again, I’d say the downside of being bad is being bad. If someone is so conceited and ignorant that they are unable to recognize their own terribleness, they are not likely to learn anything from the group being wiped either. Meanwhile, I do not think anyone believe it fair that otherwise good players get punished for something they had no hand in doing.
[Should good players be penalized because of bad players?] In a word? Yes.
Because the flip side of the question is, “Should a player be guaranteed a successful run no matter what the other 4 people in the group do?” And the answer to that is, “No.”
A good point, but presumably the line does not exist at such an extreme. Should two good players be punished because three bads happen to be in the group? How about three good, two bad? Four good, one bad? And what about when the the binary distinctions are dropped, and we start adding “above average” “average,” and “below average,” to the mix?
Ultimately, I believe the changes which Blizzard did were amazingly nuanced. The targeted nerfs are nerfs, of course. But full guild groups looking for challenge can avoid the 10% portion of the buff by doing what they always did anyway: run heroics as groups. And if they ever need a 4th or 5th member to round out the run? At least they will not have their run torpedoed by a kid shooting spitballs.
In An Age 
Bold and Spectacular… Server Merges?
Feb 13
Posted by Azuriel
This news is technically more than a week old, but there was a blue post made by Zarhym that really struck me as… well, read for yourself:
My first reaction is in the title: bold and spectacular… server mergers? Assuming that is not what they are doing, well, what are they doing? What could they be doing?
I believe it was in a recent episode of The Instance that the hosts were talking about the concept of moving towards a server-less solution, or perhaps more accurately a “dynamic server” solution. We can imagine that instead of always logging onto Auchindoun or Earthen Ring or wherever, you simply log into a server. Once that server starts to fill towards capacity, people will start logging into a new server. This essentially eliminates low-pop and/or faction imbalanced servers entirely, aside from very last server booted up.
There are several obvious downsides to such a method. First, everything will be like LFD for servers; the likelihood of you making friends “in the wild” is severely diminished since you probably won’t ever see them again. A possible counter-measure would be to weight the system so that you are nearly guaranteed to be placed in the same “server” as people on your Friends List. Think that DK was a pretty cool guy when you were doing dailies? Add him to Friends, maybe see him again. What happens, though, if your Friends List network splits off to different servers based on their Friends Lists? Even if you make it possible to change servers through the UI or whatever, other issues crop up. For example, how will the AH be handled? One mega-AH, ruled by botters?
Aside from the dynamic server idea, I had the thought about simply moving towards LFR-ifying everything – not with queues, but with phasing. Imagine the following: you’re on a low-pop ghost town (i.e. Auchindoun), and you walk into Westfall for some alt questing. Instead of the place simply being dead, it is fairly vibrant… with people from other low-pop servers. Instead of an empty Auchindoun Westfall and an empty Dragonmaw Westfall, there is a kind of meta-Westfall that both servers share. Their AHs would remain separate, their Stormwinds would remain separate, their Tol Barads would remain separate, but any kind of dead zone would be shared. If a bunch of people congregated in Westfall for some reason, the servers could simply phase out the other side.
Or maybe “bold and spectacular plans” is simply LFD scenarios, or LFR Tol Barads.
All I know is that low-pop and/or imbalanced realms is a huge, systemic problem in two-faction games. In my four years, I never played on anything other than low-pop realms; any time I heard excitement over Sunwell-esque unlocking of vendors or world raid bosses or WG/TB-based PvP objectives, I always rolled my eyes. Those things do not work on Auchindoun, nor on many other servers. Fundamentally, you and I may as well be playing entirely different games.
If Mists is really focused on getting people out of cities and back into the world, Blizzard is going to have a big problem in low-pop realms when everyone is outside and they still can’t see each other.
Posted in Commentary, WoW
9 Comments
Tags: Blue Post, Dynamic, LFD, Low Population, Phasing, Server, Speculation, Zarhym