WoW Patch Date Prediction.

UPDATE: So um yeah I was completely wrong on this one. On the bright side, we got the patch a month earlier, so: yay, fun!



3.2 will not be released until September.

How do I know this? Well, the true answer is that my real name is Jesus H. Nostradamus III, Esq. and I am in possession of both a crystal ball (witches don't keep a good eye out for shoplifters) and a time machine made out of a purple Dodge Omni. But the fake answer I give to the psychiatrist when I'm trying to trick him into releasing me from the mental hospital so I can protect my son from robots from the future: research, and a little bit of thought.

Here's the evidence:

Length of time 3.1 was on PTR: Feb 25 - April 14, 2009. 2 months.
3.1 had Ulduar, 3.2 has a smaller raid instance, but adds a 5-man and a Battleground.

3.2 hit the PTR on June 23rd. If it took the same amount of time as 3.1, it would go live around August 12.

So many are thinking, "3.2 will probably go live in mid-August, right?"

Au contraire. Let's add some more evidence.

Blizzcon 2009: Aug 21-22

Mark my words: there is no way Blizzard will release a patch with a new raid instance just one week before Blizzcon. For one thing, they know hardcore raiders make up a big chunk of Blizzard attendees, and there is no way they, especially those like Ensidia, are going to risk losing world firsts and rankings to attend Blizzcon. Or even server firsts, on a smaller scale. It would be a giant finger to the community. On top of that, they would be busy that week preparing for Blizzcon, and won't have time to deal with post-patch problems or, god forbid, prepare a minor patch to fix bugs. They won't have time to retune encounters on the fly every other day like they did with Ulduar.

Also, a lineup like that doesn't fit with the marketing department's schedule. Blizzcon is a giant marketing opportunity. A patch is a giant marketing opportunity. Any marketer employed by a company like Blizzard is going to know better than to let those two step on each other's toes. From their perspective, a patch would need at least 2 weeks room between it and Blizzcon. So it's either going to come out in early September, or early August. So why not early August?

Here's a reason: Ensidia v Method: July 31-Aug 2
Do you expect me to believe, for even a second, that these two guilds would agree to travel and do an Ulduar-based competition if they had any worry that the patch would come out that week? Not a chance. I would be shocked if these guilds do not have a direct inside contact at Blizzard who can give them confidential patch date estimates so they can free up their schedules. There's no way the patch comes out before August 7th, and since, as we've seen with Ulduar, guilds will be working on hard mode world firsts for months afterwards, there's no way it comes out only 2 weeks before Blizzcon. Need more evidence?


Blizzcon 2005: October 28-29
Surrounding patches:
1.8 Dragons of Nightmare (no new raid instance): October 10
1.7 Rise of the Blood God (ZG released): September 13

So there is a precedent for a patch release 2-3 weeks before a Blizzcon: a patch with no new raid instance. A patch that was so minor it came out less than a month after it's predecessor.


Blizzcon 2007: Aug 3-4
Surrounding patches:
Patch 2.1 The Black Temple: May 22
Patch 2.2 Voice Chat!: September 25 (yes, it took 4 months to do voice chat)

Here we see 2-month windows on either side of Blizzcon.


Blizzcon 2008: October 10-11
Surrounding patches:
Patch 2.4 Fury of the Sunwell: Mar 25
Wrath of the Lich King: November 13

And this one speaks for itself.

But maybe you are thinking to yourself that precedent hardly proves the future. You'd be right. So let's look at more evidence.

How about this official post regarding the removal of the 310% speed mount rewards from Ulduar:

"The rusted and ironbound proto-drake rewards for the normal and heroic Glory of the Ulduar Raider meta achievements will be removed at a future date. We currently do not have an exact date they will be taken out, but it is possible they will be removed when patch 3.2 comes out or at some point after that. When we do decide to remove these mounts we will provide about 1 month of warning so players will have time to make some final attempts."

They promised one month of warning. Warning hasn't been given yet. August 15 is one month from today. Furthermore, I'm betting when they give 1 month warning, they'll time it so they actually estimate we'll have more than that, just so they don't risk a backlash. Expect the warning in the first week of August.

----------------------------

In summary, the evidence points very strongly to an early September release date for patch 3.2.

Plus, I'm part of a psychic hive-mind from the Planet Zargon. HEED ME OR I SHALL DEVOUR YOU, PUNY HUMANS!!!



UPDATE: The two biggest MMO releases of this year, Champions and Aion, are both going on sale in mid-September. If you owned the MMO market, which of the following scenarios would you prefer?

1) New patch releases 2 months before the competitors. By the time the new MMOs hit, your players have done all of your new content and are looking for something new. Your next dose of content is at least two months away in the pipeline. That's long enough for all those people who try to new games to finish their month trial and pay for a subscription.

2) New patch releases 1-2 weeks before the competitors. Your addicted fanbase has to choose between your new content and the new games. Whispers of "sry cant play CO, gotta do my tournament dailies" ring out across the land.

I think the choice is pretty obvious here.


BTW, fun fact:

Warhammer Online release date: September 18, 2008
WoW patch 3.0 release date: October 14, 2008, juuust under 4 weeks later (the better to keep you from subscribing, my dear!). And it bears noting that Blizzard was trying to get this one out earlier, but it was so big that it was delayed.


UPDATE 2: I have to admit this doesn't bode well for my theory. I'm sticking to it until the patch is up, though.

General Laziness

Swamped at work. Here are some brief things I've been wanting to get down, but haven't put in a post yet:

Aion, overall: Best described as "satisfying" and "pretty". If you like to play WoW, and you look at pictures of this game and like the asthetic, then I recommend it. It plays well, is serviceable everywhere that isn't impressive, and actually works this early in the beta process (owing much to already being out in another country). I had fun with it.

Champions, Online: I'm worried about two things about the publicized powerset system:

1) Will it be too easy to "gimp" a character? I know they are keeping this in mind, but it still worries me. It would be very comforting to see some sort of recommendation stuff in place. Like, "it's highly recommended that you take a defensive power at level 5" or "block replacers may not look like much, but they are actually usually one of the most powerful and useful abilities you'll have" (I don't know if those are true, just making up fake examples). This goes hand-in-hand with:

2) It's dangerous to have each powerset have "hidden purposes". What I mean is: I recently read an interview with one of the CO designers about powersets, and he starts talking about how "such and such is actually a tanking set in disguise" and "this powerset won't do as much damage as this other one, even though they both look like basic blasting powers". This seems like a really dangerous route to go down. It's going to be all too common for someone to pick a powerset because it looks cool or goes with their character, then find that the higher in level they get, the more they fall behind because the powerset was designed for some other role without any indication before you select it. If you are going to design the powersets around roles, then you NEED to tell the player ahead of time what those roles are.

Hopefully these will be addressed before the game hits. If not, the open beta is going to be a clusterfuck as a massive number of people find that their character is nothing like they had every reason to expect it would be.

PuGs, being douches: I ended up the de facto raid leader for my guild because no one else felt like doing it. When I pug things like VoA, I purposely refuse to lead the group. PuGs are my time to be just another member of the raid. You know why?

Because leading the raid is more effort than just being a member.

Let's keep that in mind as we go forward, shall we? This is the reason why your entire faction can stand around the Wintergrasp portal spamming "/inv plz" when there is no raid group, and none of those 50 people will form a group themselves. It takes one person to finally give in and be the one to do the work of inviting people, just so that things will finally happen. These are the people whose impatience outwieghs their laziness. I would normally be this person, except I already lead raids for my guild for pretty much that reason.

So when someone else forms a pug, remember that they are volunteering to do an unpaid job that you aren't willing and/or able to do yourself. If you don't like the way they run the group, then that's fine. Constructively criticize, offer to help (and I do not mean "pass lead plz" after they've done all the work starting it up and you just want to invite your undergeared friends), or leave the group. But give the raid leader at least a tiny token of respect, or else they are going to feel like even more of a sucker for being the one to take on the extra work for your benefit. And pragmatically, that leads to there being fewer suckers on the server who will start a raid for you. Even if your impulse is to be a douche, or you really are just such a waste of a human that you can't be even halfway nice, at least try to stretch your tiny brain to think one step ahead to realize that the worse you treat pug leaders, the fewer of them there will be. And since you aren't willing to start a pug, that means less loot for you. Think about it, random childish pug douchebag who I'm sure doesn't read my blog. I'm sure I'm just preaching to the choir.

I say all of this because enough of my guildies and friends were all standing around WG together just after a victory, spamming "LFG VoA 10", and they started suggesting that I put one together. Which is the biggest curse of being the raid leader: people expect you to be the one who assembles pugs as well. You have members in your guild who will say "we should do ____ ", but they almost never actually put a group together themselves? They leave that up to the one sucker who got in the position of raid leader? Yeah, thought so.

So I finally got tired of waiting and just put together a pug myself. When I make a VoA 10 pug, I aim to get as close to one of each class in there as possible. Murphy's law dictates that if you don't bring a class, all of the loot dropped will be for that class. This way, everyone has a better chance of getting a drop. I was playing my resto druid alt. This becomes important later.

So I'm forming this group, and we need 2 more dps. So I say in chat, "LF2M DPS VoA 10", and am immediately inundated with tells. To be fair, the majority of them are perfectly nice. But most of them are classes we already have, so I decline, and keep advertising. One of the people who whispered me is a douchebag and someone I had recently had a fight with in a pug. I wasn't going to invite him, and it amazes me that he even bothered to try to get into a pug I was running, considering what I had said to him. I don't respond.

After a bit, he whispers me saying "Why didn't you invite me?"

"Don't you remember how a week ago I left your group because I didn't like you?"

His response was "Baby gonna cry?" which borders on nonsense. I promptly put him on ignore.


Then, I get a whisper from another druid. He says "why didn't you invite me?"

"Because I'm trying to get one of each class"

"Aha! You just don't want competition!"

"That's right. :)"

"Don't smile, that's fail!"

"Of course I don't want competition. I'm not going to apologize for it. It's not just for me, every person in my raid is happier because they don't have to compete. If you don't like it, make your own group. If you can't be bothered to do that, then you don't get to complain."

And it went on like that for a bit.

Sigh.

People were such entitled dicks to me that it made me never want to lead a pug again. And I'm pretty good at it. So good job, douches. The funniest part is that you don't even realize this is 100% your loss.

Aion Beta Impressions and Details: Part 2

The tradeskill system in Aion sucks.

OK, maybe that's not entirely fair. First of all, in the early levels it is at least as good as WoW's. Except WoW's also kinda sucks.

But maybe I'm taking it too personally. Let me explain. I'll have to start from the beginning.

Here's a shot from a "vision of my future" that I got to play out as part of the ascension questline. You see yourself as powerful flying warrior, and get to wtfpwn a few other Daevas before the cutscene ends.


So there Hatch was, having just completed a questline for an imprisoned Daeva in the starting area, and dinging level 10. He got teleported to the major Asmodean hub city, known as Pandaemonium. Teleporting gets you between the major zones, while the flight paths I talked about in my last post take you from hub to hub within each zone. It's possible there is no physical geographical link between zones; it's too early for me to tell.

Anyway, I show up in Panda, and the first thing I see is a city square that is positively mobbed with players. About half of them are seated on little stools with word bubbles permanently displayed above their heads, saying things like "Buy my stuff!" and "Manastones, cheap!" These are personal stores. Any player at any time can set one up, plop their character down in a highly-trafficked area, and go afk if they wish. Other players will be able to use them like a vendor, buying whatever specific items the player put up for sale. I ended up using some of these people to gather manastones and tradeskill materials later on. But first, I wanted my wings. A questgiver gave me a little cutscene showing off the zone (these are pretty common on the main "Campaign" questline, which has a separate slot in your quest log from "standard" quests that are just there to supplement the grind), then sent me on my way to the high priest or something.

There was a cute little ceremony, and I got my wings. At first I wasn't entirely sure it worked, because you can't fly in the city and there is absolutely no tutorial on how to use your wings. This should really be remedied before release.


After the ceremony, I got to pick which of the subclasses I would be. I chose Gladiator, because on some forum I heard them described as "devastating". So clearly that's the one for me! The trainer offered me some new skills, a very nice polearm well beyond anything I could buy at my level, and a limit break (by some other name). There was no explanation of the limit break that I noticed, either. As I kept playing, I wondered at first why the move never seemed to activate when I pressed it. Then I noticed it used a third bar that had appeared under my mana bar. This meter filled as I killed enemies without dying. It filled very slowly. I got to use the limit break a few times, and while visually impressive (I speared the foe on my polearm and slammed him into the ground around me a few times) it didn't seem to do very much damage. Disappointing, especially considering that you can't use it unless you manage not to die for about an hour of questing. Which, to be honest, I couldn't accomplish more than twice all weekend.

A few quests had sent me off to another area, and I was eager to try out my wings and new polearm, so I payed a fee to teleport there. Most quests reward you in large sums of cash, but everything you do costs a ton as well, so it evens out. At least this early in the game, the economy feels lively and getting even small sums of money is genuinely exciting and meaningful. Thoughtfully, the developers gave the teleporting NPC in the city a repeatable fedex quest that sends you to the bank and back and rewards some cash, just in case you accidentally spend all your money and find yourself unable to afford a teleport out of town.

I immediately tried flying, figuring the controls out as I went along purely from the keybinding list. During my first flight, I stayed in the air too long and fell to my death right in the middle of town. You can fly for about 30 seconds to start with, though I get the impression this extends as you level in some way. One thing I didn't know at first was that you could fly longer if you used the "glide" key. This would cause you to glide forward but stop consuming your flight meter. At first, I would continue pushing W to go forward, and gliding would cause me to lose altitude quickly. I thought that was all it did.

Then, I started questing in an area that forbade flying (all of the questing areas I've encountered so far are like this). From time to time, I'd see another player go by on their wings in these areas, much to my puzzlement. I figured out that you could at least get some air time in these areas with the glide button, but I'd almost immediately hit the ground again. Late in the weekend I was in a group, and mentioned that I couldn't figure out how other people were flying so much. Both of the people in my party, at the same time, said "don't hit forward". It turns out that glide works a lot like the flight hat in Mario 64: if you press nothing, you'll stay level and slowly lose altitude while maintaining speed. If you tilt forward, you will gain speed but lose altitude. If you pull back, you'll gain altitude but lose speed. You can stay in the air for quite a while by alternating forward and back and using the built-up speed from descending to create wind resistance and pull yourself back up. Eventually you'll land, but it's still very useful for travelling and escaping.

None of this was explained to you by the game itself anywhere I could find.

While questing, I came across ore nodes and plants that could be gathered using a skill I gained at level 10 called "gather essence". I liked that you just got the skill automatically, and the same gathering skill applied to anything you could gather. The only exception is "aether", a substance you can only gather from flying nodes high in the sky. That had it's own, separately-leveled skill. Leveling gathering worked just like WoW: every few gathers you'd get a skill up.

There is a chance to fail, represented by the fail bar, which fills in competition with the pass bar. I'd estimate I failed about 1/3 of the time.


So I did a few levels of standard questing, then made a trip back to Panda for ability books. While there, I explored a bit. There's a vendor district, a residential district, and a pvp arena. There's also a bank/auction house. The AH works, though I couldn't get the search function to operate. Your bank includes an "account warehouse" which is presumably accessible to all of your characters of that faction on the account. Nice.

Then there's the Alley of the Damned, also known as the tradeskill area. Here, hundreds of players while away their few beta hours endlessly cooking, brewing, and smacking a hammer noisily onto an anvil.

Tradeskills require no "play". Just like WoW, you click a button, and wait for a bar to fill. Except this time, the success bar is accompanied by a fail bar! Luckily, I only had a few failures in all my boring, grindy attempts.

There are a bunch of tradskills, and you aren't limited at all in how many you can try. However, you can only specialize in one and max it out to level 450. All of the others stop at around 375 or something. The ones I remember are Cooking, Alchemy, Accessory crafting, Armor crafting, Weapon crafting, and Paint Dehydration Observance. Well, OK, I made that last one up, but they are all about that exciting.

Having a hard-on for giant weaponry, I, of course, selected Weaponsmithing. After paying a fee to the trainer to start learning it, I checked out the patterns available on the vendor and noticed at 40 skill I could craft a sword that was an upgrade over my polearm. I checked the equip level against what the vendors were selling, and I saw an identical sword that couldn't be equipped for 4 levels later! "Cool!" I thought, "the benefit of weaponsmithing is you can make weapons a little bit better than what else you could equip at that level!"

It turned out I was only partly right.

Being a naive little Daeva, I went to work skilling up. One of the nice things about Aion's profession system (he says begrudgingly) is that you don't have to repeatedly make useless, unsellable items to skill up. The trainers actually offer a repeatable quest, represented in it's own tab in your quest log entitled "work orders", where they supply a quest item and you have to buy a few side mats (like sand or cooling water) from the vendor and transform the given items into something else. Then you give the trainer the new items, getting some skill-ups along the way, and receive in return a small reward of side mats. He gives a new, more expensive variation on the quest every 10 skill points. The bottom line is you spend a few hundred gold and about a minute of time, and you get one or two skill ups per quest, and a small fraction of that money back as random materials. I ended up spending about an hour and 10k gold grinding up to 40. It was not fun at all, and I could feel my minutes of beta time, in which I could have been impaling giant bear/wombat creatures on my spear, being sucked away. But thoughts of instead impaling them on a giant, more powerful sword kept me going.


Finally, I reached 40 skill, and bought the pattern for the sword. Then I realized that one of the materials I needed, some kind of weaponsmithing orb, was not available from the vendor. A quick internet search revealed that they only dropped off of random mobs, and I needed 6 of them! To the AH!

I had to check all of the personal shops and sell every extraneous item I had saved in my warehouse, but after another half hour or so I managed to scrounge together the 6 orbs while keeping juuust enough money for a teleport back out of town. By this point I was pretty tired of crafting, but looking at the sword in my inventory made it all worth it. Now to quest up those last few bars of XP so I could level to 13 and equip it!

During those 20 minutes of questing, a green-quality sword dropped that could be equipped at level 12. It was significantly superior to the one I had just spend nearly 2 hours crafting.

I hate tradeskills in Aion.


Said hatred notwithstanding, I had a great time in the beta last weekend, and I'm looking forward to the next beta event. Friday, I'll give a brief recap of the highlights and what I liked and disliked. My Aion preview: the brief and judgmental version!

Quote of the Day:

"As we've tried to balance the rewards system more, we're seeing a more natural distribution of players in terms of; they're doing activities that they want to do rather than doing activities they feel like the game is forcing them to do to get the best stuff."

-Tom Chilton, WoW's Game Director.


Blizzard, keep listening to this guy!!

Aion Beta Impressions and Details: Part 1

Meet Hatch.


Hatch is a warrior. His likes include swords and killing things with swords. His dislikes include the Elyos and togs, which are about the ugliest creatures ever created. Think of one of those ugly bulldogs with the squished-up, wrinkly faces that look like a stack of gross vaginas. Now mate that with the ugliest boar you can imagine. That merely begins to describe these fucking togs.

As an Asmodean, he lives in the inside of the bottom bowl of what was once a sphere, before some great battle felled the "Tower of Eternity", and the warring factions, consisting of humans, ferret people, and immortal "Daevas" (angels), were split amongst the two remaining bowls, with a chunk of earth extending between the two halves, creating a chaotic Abyss. While the Elyos are all shiny and pretty and would fit perfeclty into an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog shot in heaven itself, the Asmodeans have greyish-blue skin, talons, and a severe case of back hair.

Much ado has been made about the graphics in Aion, and for good reason. My computer is by no means up-to-date, but it can run most games reasonably smoothly, and I had to pump down the graphics settings to get it to run at a consistent framerate. That said, once I had the video settings squared away, this beta ran like a dream and was still quite beatiful, which is a testament to both the engine and the art direction. If you have a crap computer, you can still play the game, and it will still look good. It will look like a modern game. But if you have a state-of-the art system, it's going to look really, really good.

I pointed my camera straight up at the sky to get a shot of some beautiful art up there, and out of nowhere I caught an airship floating by.



My understanding is that Aion is already out in China, and is in the process of some serious Westernization. Though I ran across some localization errors, the rest of the game is mostly stable, given that even in this early beta I encountered no crashes or gamebreaking errors whatsoever. The only technical problem I encountered was that I would be unable to launch any programs on my computer after exiting the game, but that was easily remedied with a system restart.

The biggest technical problems are control limitations that the localization team claims to be working on. For one, you can't invert your camera controls. For someone like me, who has played FPS games for over a decade and WoW for 5 years with up being toward me and down being away from me, this makes the game nearly unplayable at first. But I really, really wanted to play it, so I just dealt with the annoyance and pushed on through, adjusting the camera as little as possible. The other is that certain actions can't be bound to certain keys. I'll get back to that later.

As I said, the art direction is top-notch. It's drawn in an eastern style, and shows many parrellels to the style of Final Fantasy, to the point that it was a bit uncanny. This is a good thing. If you like the Square/Enix asthetic at all, then you are going to like this game. The character animations sing. They just feel right and look great.

The polish level is top-tier. Like Tobold said, this game would have given WoW a run for it's money if released 4-5 years ago. I mean, even the flight paths are eye-popping, with a transparent ghostbird ferrying you from gorgeous vista to gorgeous vista:



But enough drooling. How does it play?

Gameplay is in the now-standard MMO questing idiom. After spending a lot of time in the character creator selecting hairstyles (all of them are extremely well done) and playing with various sliders that adjust everything from eyebrow height to hand thickness to neck length, you are dropped into a comfortable and pretty open field, a noobie area, with an NPC with a glowing blue diamond symbol over his head. So that's what exclamation points look like in Japan!

During this weekend's playtest, I focused on a single character, Hatch, a Gladiator that I leveled to 13. Next event, I'll make it a point to try out the other classes. At the start, you can pick from 4 basic classes, and then each of those specializes into one of two advanced classes at level 10. If, like me, you start as a warrior, you take some time to become familiar with all kinds of basic abilities, then you are given the choice between the tanking Templar and the plate/melee Gladiator. Scouts can eventually become Assassins (rogues) or Rangers (hunters). Mages grow into either Sorcerers (mages) or Spiritmasters (warlocks), while Priests go on to become Clerics (melee priests) or Chanters (paladins). As you can see, they've got everything but druids and shaman covered. Expect some kind of "Elementalist" xpac down the road.

And so Hatch and I began our journey through lower Asmodea. The quests are pretty standard "kill x gerbilmen" or "gather x fruit baskets". Quest items in the environment are easy to pick out because they shimmer, though at present the game lacks the type of map quest objective guides that are in Champions and are being added to WoW in the upcoming patch. At first, it appeared that I'd have to read through all of the quest text, but as it turns out important locations, NPCs, and mobs are highlighted in blue in the text, and clickable. Clicking them brings up a little window with basic information about them, including a rough location and other tidbits (including notes on NPCs like "She doesn't take kindly to strangers". A nice little touch.).

Here's a screenshot of the quest log:


So far the quest writing is surprisingly good. The NPCs get personalities, and there were a few points that were memorable. On top of that, the enemies and animals you fight are quite imaginative, though often based on a fusing of two real animals (fucking togs!) or screwing up the proportions of something familiar (giant spindly elephantosaurs!). I was surprised to find the lore of the game and its NPCs as fleshed-out as it was. I expected something fairly generic, and what I found, while quite standard, had enough personality and heart put into it to make it enjoyable.

Combat is, at it's base, standard MMO fare. As a melee character, you run up to the target and autoattack. And as though the game weren't already accessible enough, it will actually run up to your target for you. How courteous.

Once you reach the target, you use hotkeys to activate attacks, which are on cooldowns. My warrior didn't use the mana bar, or have any discernable resource that was actually consumed, so it appears their abilities are mediated solely by their cooldowns. This does force you to use all of your abilities, rather than spamming your one best ability over and over. On top of that, some abilities are part of escalating, branching chains. For instance, I use Ferocious Strike, and the key is replaced by a second chain ability that I can only activate after a FS. At level 13, I had reached the point where FS could chain up to 3 steps in total, and had two branches: one of them had a self-buffing "shout" at the 2nd step of the chain, and one of them was a combo of 3 increasingly spectacular melee attacks. The shout and the 3rd move were each on a cooldown twice the length of FS's cooldown, so it made sense to alternate them rather than just repeating whichever one turned out to be mathematically stronger. Because of this, combat is a lot more mentally involving than WoW. Granted, I was still low level, but I was using my full suite of abilities every single fight. And just to drive the point of "polish" home, whenever you use a chain ability, the game both: 1) flashes a border around the buttons of the next possible steps in the combo, practically shouting that they are available to you, and 2) shows the icons for those abilities right next to your character model, in much the same way a WoW addon like Powerauras or Satrina's buff frames would.

I also found myself more engaged by the combat because regular old mobs could actually kill you. It was possible to win consistently, but only if you were paying attention. And pulling two mobs at once usually meant that you either had to pop a potion, beat an undignified retreat, or get a one-way ticket to resurrection city (death sends you back to town and incurs a small xp penalty and 30-second sickness, but you can get the xp back for a small monetary payment to a Soul Healer at the graveyard). I like this tuning because soloing is very possible, but requires forethought, attention, and smart play. It also has the benefit of making grouping much more appealing than it is in WoW. Towards the end of my playtest, I grouped up for an unusually difficult quest to face down a named mob with 2 henchman (far beyond my abilities - by the way, group quests aren't labeled as such in Aion). The templar and I fared much better against the small groups of bandits, though we still couldn't be entirely reckless. He ended up inviting me to a small guild, called a Legion. The game automatically added to my outfit a black cloth displaying my Legion's crest, which was a nice touch.


The grouping, legion, and raid interfaces look and function exactly like WoW from what I could tell from my brief overview of them.

You gain new combat abilities as you level, roughly every 2-3 levels. You gain the skills from books purchased from a trainer, which is nice because you can buy the books ahead of time if you expect to ding while out in the field, and start using your new abilities immediately instead of having to take a trip back to the capitol. So far I haven't encountered anything like talent points or other character customization options (though I have yet to discover what the "Stigma" pane, which looks suspiciously like the WoW Inscription pane, does). The closest thing is gear, which works along the same lines as WoW, with each piece giving certain stat bonuses and certain armor classes favoring certain stats. You start out with only a basic sword, pants, and shirt, but over time you'll fill up about a dozen slots with different pieces of gear. Gemming is in the game from the start, with even the earlier peices of white gear sporting a "manastone socket". Manastones drop randomly from mobs, and grant minor stat bonuses.

Itemization so far runs on a very sensible tier system. You can buy white gear from a vendor that is minimally appropriate for your level. The next step up is to craft white gear that has slightly better stats at the same equip level. After that are greens and blues, which escalate predictably. I don't get the impression that anyone is decked out in even all greens in their teens, given their rarity. Here's a shot of my character pane, showing my equipment and inventory, and demonstrating how the system auto-compares my loot for me, with green text denoting where the new shield is superior to my current one.


The stat system is quite a bit simpler than current WoW. Casters can improve their magic power and MP. Fighters like Attack bonuses, physical crit, and accuracy. Survival can be augmented through dodge, parry, shield block, physical resistance (in place of armor value) and magic resistance. It's pretty straightforward.


So far, the game is beautifully polished, combat is engaging, and though the questing is cliched and derivative, it is executed well. It's shaping up to be a nice alternative to WoW. Though I can't imagine it being anything close to a WoW-killer, it has the potential to be a really fun and worthwhile game. I can't wait to see how it develops as its release approaches.

I've run out of steam for today, but check back on Wednesday for Part the Second , wherein I will discuss tradeskills, the hub city, economy, flying, and Ascension!

Friday Laziness: Day Early Holiday Weekend Edition

Quote of the day, courtesy of Gevlon:

"Blizzard could create a great game. It would have 1M subscribers. I would love it. Blizzard executives wouldn't."

That about sums it up.

Aside from RL 4th of July festivities, I'll be spending the weekend with the Aion US beta, and some time with Champions as well (though I can't talk about what I'm doing in that one). I'm really looking forward to it, even if it's going to take my gaming time away from Prototype, which I am really enjoying and highly recommend to everyone. It's available for PC and runs very well even if your system isn't state-of-the-art (but you may have to turn down the graphics settings a lot).

I've been quoting a certain song a lot, but people keep not getting it and I end up insulting people. I guess it just isn't as well known as "I'm on a boat". In an effort to spread the song around, I present "Fishin' Hole", by musical god Stephen Lynch. As always with Lynch, EXPLICIT CONTENT INCOMING:



Have a great 4th of July weekend! Even those of you in other countries, I hope you at least get a "bank holiday".

Why all the grinding? 9 Alternatives.

Inspired by recent discussions and an old Ixo post that he recently linked to: One of the main reasons WoW is rich enough to pay off the cops after going on a Motley Crue-level drug-induced binge and crashing a Camaro full of hookers directly into the front entrance of the police station, while EQ still lives alone in its mom's basement, is that WoW cut out a lot of EQ's pointless waiting, grinding, and self-flagellation. Death penalties? Kabosh'd. Travel times? Reduce'd. Camping a rare spawn for 36 hours straight while poopsocking and barely noticing while your wife moves out? Redirect'd. It still happens, except instead of camping a spawn, you grind dailies and grind instances over and over. And instead of merely getting a small chance at a rare drop, you get 12 achievements, a hundred different tokens, and handful of grape candies. I mean epics. Sorry, I keep getting those two confused because they are both given out like ... candy.

WoW's solution to the problem of keeping players interested has always been: more grinding. Ixo may have imagined a humorously hyperbolic version of the Blizzard offices, but take a step back and look at the choices they've made and you start to suspect that maybe he's not that far off the mark. This is not news to most of you. WoW is full of grinds, and as each is conquered, a new one must take its place. There are reputation grinds, daily quest grinds, raid instance grinds, regular instance grinds (grind exactly the same content again a second time on heroic!), BG grinds, arena grinds (ever tried to go from 0 to 1500? It's a lot of games nowadays) and for the truly insane, obscure gathering grinds. All of the max-level content is designed to be repeated many, many times, all apparently in the name of keeping players in the game. Every new idea, from making two lockouts for each raid (10 and 25) to heroic instances, to the badge systems, to the daily quests and their evolution, to every single version of the honor system, to the added ability to stockpile vanity items, to the holidays, to even dual speccing (grind out for two specs instead of just one!), and especially to the achievement system: every new idea has been all about adding new grinds.

But grinds have always struck me as unnecessary. There has to be a better way to keep people playing the game for the extended periods of time it takes for subscription fees to accumulate into an awesome statue of an orc on a wolf in front of your corporate office. It would destroy my faith in the Flying Spaghetti Monster if it turned out that grinds were the best possible solution to this problem.

So how else could you possibly keep people playing?

One key here is that any new solution also has to be somewhere in the same realm of cost-effectiveness that grinding is in. Grinds don't just keep the playerbase busy; they allow the devs to squeeze every last drop of paid playtime out of every piece of content they implement.

So how can we make the game less grindy without breaking the bank?

I'm not going to pretend that these are all my original ideas, as clever people all over the blogosphere have already proposed probably all of these. But I can't remember who to attribute them too, so let's just consider this a consolidation of what I've heard before along with my own new ideas and call it a day.



1) Randomization: this is the most obvious and used one. You make it less painful to repeat content by randomly changing elements of it on every playthrough.

City of Heroes tried to do this with a partilaly randomized mission system, but it suffered from a lack of content and assets behind it, making it actually more repetitive, rather than less. The same office building full of the same enemies isn't interesting even if the rooms are rearranged. Hellgate: London was based almost entirely on this concept, and did better with it despite ending up as a burning wreckage.

Blizzard has dipped their toes in this before, but they seem to really be embracing it now. Some of the dailies are already randomized, and Violet Hold is probably the most obvious example of a randomized instance. In the upcoming patch, which new dailies you get will be randomized. The new 5-man will include a boss who [SPOILER ALERT: highlight text to read] summons bosses from other parts of the game for your to fight, randomly selected from a pool of over 2 dozen, including Algalon and Hogger (!).

Randomization is a simple no-brainer of a way to cut down the grind a bit, but it's hardly a solution.

2) Reinvigorate "obsolete" content. This is one for games that are getting on in years. If the primary cost of new content is in things like art assets, then the cheapest way to get "new" content would be to make "old" content relevent again. Heroic versions of old world instances, and even level 80 versions of Outlands instances, is one of hte most-requested suggestions from the WoW community. I think one of the best things Blizz could do in the next expansion is use it as an opportunity to create an "alternate" Azeroth, through either a world-changing Maelstrom event or the Emerald Nightmare. Make it either a new levelling experience or a max-level area that takes a lot of your old assets and reuses them in fun and interesting ways.

The downside to this idea is that it has an aspect of adding more repetition. Not only are you running Sethekk Halls or clearing the Barrens while leveling, but then you have to grind them again at level 80. This idea is way better if you make changes to the original content as part of revitalizing it.

3) Focus on story. Talk is cheap (I should know). Hire me or any of my blogging compatriots for the equivalent of peanuts, and we'll write you some world-class quest text and stories to use. Stick them in the game. Cheap as balls.

The upcoming KoToR MMO is looking to be the real innovator in this area. Quests can have different endings, outcomes, and impacts depending on the choices you make. This effectively multiplies the content available and makes replays more interesting and less of a cheat to keep subscribers. There are obvious ways to apply this to WoW questlines, but you can take it even further and create instances with mutually exclusive alternate paths. Imbue the content with story, and the repetition of gameplay elements is easier to accept.

4) Encourage alting. Make each class sufficiently different that it's still fun to replay the same content while learning a new class. Obviously, this can only go so far, and works best if you can start from 55 as a Death Knight. The grind all the way from level 1 is just too long a curve for learning a new class to remain fun rather than a grind.

Also, make the content different for every class and race. This goes hand in hand with focusing on story. You can make pretty slight changes while reusing the same assets and give a very different feel to the same areas, while strengthening mental attachments to classes, races, and factions and incentivizing alting. A cheap way to keep giving people less repetitive things to do so they keep paying their subscription fee.

I've also been a big proponent of audio tutorials players can listen to while doing other things in game, like travelling or even questing. Blizzard explains the fundamentals of your class to you while you are doing the starting area. Hell, even have them narrated by famous characters of that class, such as Malfurion Stormrage for druids or Thrall for shaman. This would help players of a new class learn how to play that class well, further giving an incentive to roll a new class. I know a lot of players are so daunted by the amount of theorycrafting and outside knowledge needed that rolling a new class doesn't seem like an option.

5) User-generate content. Give the players ways to entertain each other. City of Heroes is testing this out with a mission editor (which still has some kinks), and APB thrives on this by essentially installing mini-games where you can design clothes, tatoos, cars, etc. to share with other players. A while back, Ixo had an idea for player-made quests which could be applied to WoW.

6) PvP. Yes, right now, PvP is a grind in WoW. It doesn't have to be. I still Q for AB because it's fun, not because ZOMG I NEEDZ ARMORZ LOL. It's essentially another form of user-generate content. Encourage world PvP along with BGs, because what happens out in the world can be more varied and engaging. The current implementation of Wintergrasp has some echoes of this. It's a lot more unpredictable than BGs, and most matches feel different from others. Of course, this will be heavily reduced by the WG player cap in the next patch.

APB is promising some interesting PvP by creating randomized in-world missions with a matchmaking system where you never know what kind of opposing force to expect, so each match should theoretically play out differently, making for interesting replayability.

7) Make repeated chores into minigames. Though this idea may seem inspired by efforts by bloggers such as Tobold and Ixo to make crafting more interesting, the thing that really made it come to my mind was playing Prototype last night. In Prototype, you play a super anti-hero in NYC, and you travel around using a sort of hyper-charge parkour augmented with the ability to run up walls and glide through the air. Travelling from place to place is a visceral, pleasurable game all it's own. Champions Online is emulating this to a lesser extent by making each of its myriad travel powers play and control completely differently, and as rudimentary mini-games. People run around in Prototype, or drive cars aimlessly in GTA, or play Peggle or Bejeweled over and over because they find it fun. Emulate those, and you make a lot of the repetition feel less ...repetitive.

8) Remove upgrades from the game and become a pure game of skill. This one is not likely, and and not one I advocate for most MMOs, since character advancement sits firmly at their core. But it's undeniable that shooters and RTS games where every player starts with exactly the same assets, and matches are (at least theoretically) decided by knowledge and skill, have the potential for a very long shelflife. People are still playing Starcraft professionally, for god's sake! So this is an option to create infinite replayability. I'm not particularly knowledgeable about WAR, but did that game do this a little bit by making most high-end gear relatively easy to obtain, making max-level keep battles more evenly balanced?

9) Stop incentivizing grinding so heavily. Instead, put the incentives on learning, success, and trying new content you haven't tried yet rather than re-running all the instances and quests you already know by heart. In the case of WoW, encourage alting more (perhaps even as a way to augment your main, through sort of reverse-heirlooms), and maybe add some kind of rest bonus to each activity: ie, you get more loot after taking two weeks off from Ulduar than you would by running it every day. Or maybe, for instance, give an honor bonus if you do BGs after doing a lot of raiding.

Instead of putting some of the most desireable stuff at the end of mindless instance re-grinds and pointlessly grindy holiday events, give it out for strong shows of ability and for trying out all of the content. I can tell you right now there are dozens of questlines I've never done because they didn't give rewards as good as dailies or grinding instances. Try leveraging the content you already have before you worry too much about making people rerun the handful of things that are already rewarding them.




I'm very confused about Blizzard's current motivation. First they make a grind-fest change to badges, then they also take steps to reduce the repetitiveness of other grinds through randomization and extending the raid lockout. And Wrath has been all about making grinds easier to complete while just piling on more of them. I hope that whatever new MMO Blizzard makes (and all the other upcoming competitors on the horizon) can come up with even better ideas than these to prevent repetitive grinding from killing the genre. I'm already feeling the fatigue.