Back in the Saddle Again

Been away for awhile. Had to cancel my subscription because we moved and I wanted to play it safe with the finances. Anyway, lots to catch up on. I've been paying attention to the blogosphere and Cataclysm news. The next few posts will be late to the party but up-to-date news isn't what this blog is about. It's just about my own experiences and thoughts, a journal of sorts. Something that I can return to and browse through on occasion to see how my gaming style has evolved (or devolved) and to see how my thoughts may have changed.

I would like to point out that I wasn't able to simply log in and pay up. There was an issue of some sort with my account and I wound up sending an email to Blizzard Support. But before that I went so far as to make a compromised account claim. Because, hey, you can never be too careful. Anyway, I wasn't hacked and I got a response from support within a day or two. They had to reset my authenticator I guess. Don't know anything about that, but after I read the email I was able to resubscribe and start playing again. Whew!

So, here I am. I'll have another post or two up today if all goes well.

The Collector's Market (World of Warcraft vs. Farmville)

These past weeks I have been unable to play World of Warcraft. Mostly due to a change of address, but also due to some financial issues. Mostly, I am just taking things slow and easy financially, just being safe. Just in case our numbers were wrong.

Anyway, I am currently re-immersed in Farmville and other Facebook games. Because they are free. Also, I like them.

I have also been keeping up with the Cataclysm news. And sort of scratching my head over it. When you break it down, the expansion is just more of the same. Some old stuff gets a fresh coat of paint while other stuff makes old ideas more "modern", or easier.

I think that Blizzard is missing the boat on the collector's market in-game though. Sure, they've dabbled a little here and there with the trading card game with it's exclusive pets and items and the Blizzard Store has been a hit, but they could do so much more in the collectible area...in game.

Pets and some gear are about the only things players can reasonably "collect". The problem though is that the pets are now treated like spells. There is no way of showing off more than one or two at a time. And gear must be equipped or linked to "show off".

Now, more than ever, Blizzard needs to incorporate a part of the game for showcasing collections. Housing has been a hit and miss venture in MMOs, but Farmville has take in-game collecting to wondrous heights. Not only can you "collect" awards for mastering crops, but you also get to collect rare and exotic animals and trees. Other collectibles include thematic buildings and decorations. Many functional buildings have to be "built" from the ground up via gifts from friends and neighbors. Some of the buildings "interact" with certain animals to produce adults or babies.

Blizzard really should take the time to implement an instanced mechanic for players to interact with on the scale of Farmville. I've touched on this before and I really think players would like it. Sure some players do not want a "World of Farmcraft", but millions of Farmville players seem to say otherwise. They are constantly demanding more stuff to buy with real money and the opportunity to expand their farms.

For World of Warcraft, this instanced mechanic would have to work like a seperate solo game within the meta world. But with a proper social network in place, the "solo" game would still require a lot of assistance from other players.

Want to build a keep? Your in-game characters might have to go out and kill stuff to find materials and resources. Some of the materials and resources might be profession-specific, that means more activity at the auction house. The Blizzard Store would be awash with "sparkly" items for the farm and home while slightly less eye-popping items would be available throughout the game via quests, boss/mob kills, random world drops, and reputation rewards. And what about in-game vendor shops? Load them up with basic "stuff" to get the collection spirit rolling. Maybe offer some odd high-end tidbits at exorbitant gold prices.

World of Warcraft is not just in need of more quests and monsters and exotic locals, the game also needs something fundamentally different and engaging.

Is The Game Too Fast?

This is another one that was initially a comment I left at Pink Pigtail Inn. Not sure if it actually posted though, I got 404 error. So, at least I know for sure it is here.

I don't mind the perks, I suppose, but I have to wonder: with all the issues about players consuming content too fast, why on earth would you allow them to do it faster still?

A nice corpse run makes the content last a little longer before burnout.

It boggles me that Blizzard's greatest issue is the speed of content consumption, yet the content continues to go by faster and faster.

They continue to add flight paths, increase mount speeds, navigate the maps more easily, lift death penalties, add portals...

Holy cow!

It does not matter how much content they add every two years, so long as the game goes by more quickly, the world will feel smaller and less substantial.

Allowing some of these things to affect veteran players who have played through on one or two characters seems fair: faster leveling and heirlooms are a nice touch for them, but maybe they are going too far with this stuff.

Is WoW Dying?

This is a copy/paste of a comment I posted at The Pink Pigtail Inn. I decided it was fleshed out enough to save as a post here. Also, this is my 100th post on this blog, cheers!

This is one of those arguments that just makes me angry every time it comes up.

Not because I don't believe that WoW could die someday, but because it just is not going to happen any time soon. And by "soon", I mean it is going to take several more years for it to "die".

I have been watching those "I quit and WoW is dying" posts on the WoW forums for years now. Even if WoW has reached its subscription cap and can only lose numbers, it will still take years before it is at a significant state of despair to say that it is "dying".

Even at 300-500k subs, the game will be very much alive. If other, lesser games can flourish with only 100k subs, so can WoW.

If anything, someday we might see evidence that WoW is moving into some sort of normalization. WoW's numbers are not normal. But maybe someday they will be. But it won't be a dead WoW.

Seeing numbers dropping off in the middle of summer and at the end of the end game does not mean WoW is dying.

A Blizzard of Information

World of Raids is still sort of handling the recent Cataclysm deluge of information. Sure, their last post on it was just to organize it, but that could not have been the easiest thing to do.

Larisa at The Pink Pigtail Inn posted her thoughts about Blizzard's handling of the community not too long ago. The consensus was that Blizzard simply does not communicate well with the community, if at all, anymore.

Then suddenly, the NDA on the Cataclysm Alpha is lifted temporarily and a half dozen or so news sites get a glutton's worth of information.

Yeah, thanks for that.

Instead of taking their time and doing one interview at a time so that the information could trickle out over the course of a month or so, Blizzard decided to keep things easy on themselves and in an effort to control the flow of information as best as they could, simply handed out parcels to their "invited" guests. This, of course, led to some sites reporting the same thing. But, every site had something unique. So to get it all, you have to actually follow bread crumbs from one site to the next.

It was maddening trying to track it all down. Insane even.

All because Blizzard is overly paranoid about information.

You see, they have so many people involved, and so many people who want to be involved, that Blizzard has to know who is handing out what information to whom at all times. Any break down in this totalitarian control and who knows what Ghostcrawler might accidentally say about the next Blizzard MMO?

Information is worth so much to Blizzard that they can fill a warehouse with fans and media interests. Last year they sold out of their 100$ tickets in record time. Then, because demand was still not met, they offered the fans a live feed for 40$ and a pet. Who know how much they made off of that...

This year Blizzard increased their price substantially and the tickets were sold in two batches. Each batch sold out within thirty minutes.

Blizzard it trying all it can to limit when and how their information is released to the public. They do not want to release too much freely on the internet because they stand to make so much money off of it in other ventures.

Not only do they have Blizzcon for new information, but now they have the magazine to regurgitate old information. An attempt to put together a record of previously released material and doll it up with original art work. Also, here's a hint: just because there might be an interview with someone different, does not mean they are allowed to tell you anything you do not already know.

We are playing Blizzard's game(s), but Blizzard is most certainly also playing its own game.

Killing is My Business...

One of the things that World of Warcraft has missed is the need of some players to spend large amounts of time just killing stuff.

The leveling grind has a few opportunities with gathering and culling quests. But when you are in a leveling vibe, it is difficult to break from it so once you have done the task, the players move on.

However, in dungeon crawl games such as Diablo, people enjoy just killing large groups of mobs. They enjoy it so much that they not only play to the end of the game, but they play it over and over.

So, when Blizzard said that they do not want to include achievements in World of Warcraft that would entice players to spend countless hours killing mobs, I scratched my head and exclaimed, "Why not?".

There were times in Burning Crusade that I would head over to Netherstorm and cull the blood elves over and over. That was before a daily was introduced to do just that. Then I would do the daily, but not more than I needed to acquire the book or orders or whatever. Mostly because sometimes the drop rate required me to kill a few dozen of them.

Mob-killing achievements would work the same way. For instance, in Northrend I spent weeks just killing beasts in the Howling Fjord. Part of the reason was to get some vendor trash to sell, part of it was to get quick/easy experience, but mostly I just wanted to kill stuff for a while.

It is a part of gaming that we sometimes just want to spend hours mindlessly killing things. Making achievements for such tasks is not a bad thing, but instead would give us some rhyme or reason for doing so. At least until the achievement was acquired.

One cool perk for such tasks would that after a high number of kills, mobs would drop more highly-valued items. Not gear or craft materials, just trash that is worth more to vendor.

The one issue would be AOE killers. They can tag entire zones it seems. So, to make things more fair, just add some islands or mountain flats and fill them with mobs. So if a mage is camping your favorite spot one night, you can fly off to another.

Or, Blizzard could make a bunch of instances where players are transported to small zones where they are by themselves (or grouped) and on the rampage. I played a game called Dungeon Runners a while back that was build around this style of game. Blizzard already does raid instances, so why not add solo instances?

Maybe that is fruit for another post...

The Flow of the Story

As I wrote in my previous post, MMORPGs try to translate some of the old pen and paper tropes into the digital medium, to varying degrees of success and failure. However, it is not the purpose of online games to mimic pen and paper playstyles, they are only mildly influenced by them.

That said, there are some things that could work better in online games if more pen and paper tropes were utilized.

For instance, I brought up the campaign modules from the old Dungeon and Dragons table games. Even the modern version of the game still follows some of the old standards. The developers release a "core" book (expansion) of rules for a new setting, then they release periodic modules (content patches) that adventurers will follow from a low range of levels (68-70) to a higher range of levels (78-80). The main difference being that online games tend to do all of the levels in one "module" and then the rest of the modules is for leveling up gear.

So, what about the flow of a story throughout all of this?

In the pen and paper games, the story is very linear. You never go back to an older module, but a new module might expand an older environment. Even if a high-level module placed the god-like characters into cosmic planes for their adventures, they might still have a role to play in the "old world".

This is exactly what Blizzard is doing with the Cataclysm expansion. Player characters have become like gods, and they are going home.

Currently it might seem as though Blizzard has created a problem with their story flow. I found part of a discussion at World of Raids where Blizzard admits to a "lurch" of sorts. But really, the only thing missing in the Burning Crusade is some sort of reference.

Imagine being in the midst of troubled world. You have done some heroic deeds and see hints of a god-like presence that needs sorting out. Along the way you come across an opportunity to "leave" this troubled world to give aide to another. From there you are thrust back into your original world but find yourself on a continent that you have not been to. And here is where the story actually breaks just a little bit.

You see, Blizzard has opted to place Cataclysm into a world without the Lich King. Yet adventurers must "defeat" the Lich King before coming "home". That is how the expansions have been placed.

Post Lich King--> Alien world--> Ongoing Lich King--> Post Lich King.

If this were a pen and paper game, the designers would have presented changes to everything that has come before, within the most recent module, to bring the "world" up to speed on what the players have done, and to let them "see" the effects of their efforts.

But in online games, content costs a lot more money (and time) to make then pen and paper experiences.

So, in theory, the flow of the story never needs to be broken or awkward, but the design constraints of money and time are harsh mistresses.

Blizzard might one day place some story fixes into the Lich King expansion, but they might also just decide to push forward instead. As fiction writers know all too well, sometimes you just have to kill your children and let the story go its own way.