Champions Online Guide to Not Gimping Your First Hero

Brief tips to help you avoid building a gimped hero right off the bat:

1) Characteristic Focus: This is the most confusing aspect of the stats in CO. Here is a simple analogy:

You know how, in WoW, warriors want strength to increase their damage, while rogues want agility?

Those are their characteristic focii. The only difference is that you get to pick them instead of having them be intrinsic to a character class.

The 2 Characteristic Focus stats you pick are the stats that increase your damage.

This damage increase is in addition to whatever benefit the stat gives you (such as DEX's increased crit chance or END's increase to your endurance pool).

Starter rule of thumb: pick gear that has your Characteristic Focus stats on it.


2) Presence is the healing stat. It is also the threat stat for tanks.

3) Instead of picking a class you pick a framework. It simply refers to the theme of your powers, and not to your character's role, which I will discuss in a moment. The pre-build frameworks come with an endurance-building auto-attack power (you only get one of these per character, ever) and a nuke, as well as a starting stat layout based on a theme, such as "indomitable" (high ego and strength) to "Genius" (high intellect and presence). In most cases the stats you get are the ones that are most helpful to that framework. Though which stats you pick really only matters for your support powers and passives usually.

For instance, all of your attacks will scale with whichever super stat you pick. But your heals scale with Presence, while your passive defensive ability might scale with Constitution or Endurance, depending on framework. You're generally safe just going with the stat outlay tied to your framework, but if you want to change it (as I did with my Telekenesis hero, by switching out Constitution for Endurance) you can do a custom framework using the 2 starter powers from that set, but a different stat pick, and see no ill effects.

The 2 stats you favor at the beginning should be the ones you plan to make into your Characterstic Focus stats.


4) You unlock powers in your framework by picking up more powers in that framework. You also unlock more powers in other frameworks as you go, just at a slightly reduced rate. You can get to the big stuff faster by staying in one framework, and I recommend you do this at first. Make more varied characters and dip into other sets once you get a handle on the game.


5) Pick up talents (stat bonuses) that increase your Characteristic Focus stats. (durrr)

6) Put your Ranks and Advantages points into the attacks you use most often, at least at first.

7) As you play you will unlock Roles. These work a lot like Death Knight Presences or Druid forms. You start in a balanced role, but you'll eventually be able to get an offensive role (that increases damage but reduces defense), a tanking role (higher defense and lower damage), and a support role (improved healing and energy regen). So your powerset framework is more a theme for your character, while the Role defines how you will play in a group. If you want to be a healer, hold on to gear with high presence so you can switch into it when needed (much like putting on your spellpower set in WoW).


There. Now you can get on with the playing and learning while minimizing the risk that you'll gimp your character right out of the gate. Have fun!

Champions Online Launch Today

I'm excited to see Champions go live today, despite this equation:




crowds + collision detection =












Here's a "State of the Game" post from the Cryptic Team that's a good, short read.

I have to congratulate them on what was the most bug-free and stable open beta and early start I have ever seen, despite seriously worrying problems with the initial patcher and the complete failure of the early start's special invasion.* If that disaster is a sample of things to come, then I'll know exactly which MMO monthly fee to cut out of my budget. I'm choosing to give them the beenefit of the doubt currently, especially considering that the dev team was probably taking their first weekend off after going gold before the craziness of live release. Still, it was badly handled. The SotG reflects how responsive the dev team has been to player concerns in other areas, so I have high hopes for their stewardship of this online world.

They're also already announcing the first major content patch, which adds a new power set. Woot!

And here's a launch interview with designer Bill Roper (previously designer of Diablo 2 and Hellgate: London) that I found interesting, as well.


Enjoy Millenium City!


*The special non-combat pet available to early start players requires that they kill 100 invading aliens as part of the invasion event. At first, each invasion would last 10-15 minutes and occur every half-hour, meaning it took about an hour total to get the pet. After the first day, something bugged out and the events lasted, at most 30 seconds. So if you wanted the one-time-only pet, you had to camp the spot in the middle of a crowd for 1/2 hour, then had 30 seconds of desperate, frenzied activity, and hope you got a few tags (usually 3-4 per time) to get closer to the 100. It got the point where people were timing each shard and jumping from shard to shard to follow the event, making each spawn even more crowded.

Despite playing for hours every day of the preorder event, and in fact having been in the beta for 4 months beforehand, I still ended up with nothing to show for being there early because I refused to do the boring camp.

Blizzard's Raid Testing: Practically Nonexistent

Looks like I'm taking a ride on the WAAAAHmbulance this week. Another fun little tidbit from Blizzcon that bunched my panties up but good, taken from a wow.com liveblog of the Dungeon and Raids panel :

1:55PM Hard modes get iterated a lot because they're difficult to test.

1:54PM How extensive is your raid testing, and did anybody internally kill Yogg+0 pre-nerf? Daelo: Encounter team is 5-people, but we bring in other leads and raiders on staff for the 10-man. It's hard to get 25 developers together, but QA does those. "It's pretty much impossible for 25 people on QA to reach the skill level of a good raid. They didn't beat Yogg+0, they got spanked pretty hard by Yogg+4."

Yeah. Internally, they don't even put together a 25-man raid good enough to clear Ulduar.


My favorite part?

"Encounter team is 5-people"

Our millions of $ at work. Considering how many people play WoW, these 5 better be paid like pro athletes and worth every cent.

And:

"It's hard to get 25 developers together"

Gives you a good idea of how big their dev team is.



Don't get me wrong: the game is still worth paying for. But it could be so much better if they'd loosen the belt a notch and hire a few more people. And there's really no excuse. The content patches are part of the promise they make us when we pay the game. If they weren't doing these "free" patches, we wouldn't keep paying the $15, period. So now it's just a matter of the patch frequency and size. Both can afford to increase, given the amount of money we pay Blizzard all told.

I'll get into my Cataclysm impressions soon, but I do want to temper this post with the admission that I'm impressed with the promises they made for the xpac, and am hoping that the execution bears out my current suspicion that content is sparse right now because overhauling Azeroth is such a large undertaking. Please let me be right. Blizzard is burning through my customer goodwill at an alarming rate.

Champions and Aion, HOOOOO!

PvE v PvP: Blue Poster Screws the Pooch

Here's a nice big steaming pile for you this Monday morning, in response to "why can't I get a decent weapon from honor points?":
No PvP Weapons available for Honor points

"...because we make the assumption that since WoW was engaging enough for 80 levels of play to get to the scenario you mention that most people aren't actually that horribly offended by doing pve content (which is arguably the core of the game).

We may need to reconsider that particular philosophy if doing heroics is indeed that unappealing to many players. Although, I'm not sure how "many" players that really is TBH... forums like these are a surprisingly poor way to actually figure out what percentage of players think what about a given issue."

Oh, Kalgan. Ghostcrawler spends months countering complaints about "you nerfed my pve for pvp!" by saying "both parts of the game are important", and you turn around and cut his legs out from under him with this gem.

Straight from a dev: PvE is the core of the game. So now you can stop nerfing us based on PvP balance, right?


...right?

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

Aside from the controversy over whether a PvPer should have to do PvE to get competitively equipped, there are a few other major problems with Kalgan's statement.

To get this out of the way first: "WoW was engaging enough for 80 levels of play". Leveling play has nothing to do with level-capped play. Nothing. Most people don't even do instances while leveling.

Back to business. He says, and I quote, "doing heroics" is the way to get a weapon for PvP. First of all, weapons from heroics are not remotely competitive with raid weapons or the 1850 arena rating weapons. There aren't any emblem weapons available beyond the pathetic Heroism-level offhands. Sure, if you grind one heroic over and over that happens to drop an epic weapon that you can use, maybe you get something. Something ilevel 200 with no resilience, if it even drops. Running heroics is OK for a starter weapon, but you can't even get a halfway decent weapon until high rating, and high rating is hard to get if your team is using starter weapons and has no way to upgrade them to be competitive.

Someone who wants to compete in arena has to raid, no matter how much they don't want to. And since all of the gear they've earned from beloved PvP has resilience on it, it's ill-suited to get them into a raid, especially considering that everyone else competing for that raid spot will be geared out in conquest emblem gear, easily outstripping the ilevel of PvP gear available for those with average arena performance. They haven't been getting conquest emblems in Isle of Conquest, ironically.

He's really saying, "if you are average in arena, we expect you to use an ilevel 200 weapon, perhaps even a blue, most likely poorly itemized, and try to break into the higher rankings against people wielding cutting-edge (har!) 232-245 weapons. Have fun, suckers, thanks for the $15!" There is no in-between option for the PvPer. There is certainly no casual option. If you want to succeed in arena, you either must grind winning matches with an OP comp to get high raiting, or you can do limited matches a week, but spend the rest of your free time grinding PvE content enough to get a good guild to actually loot a good weapon to you.

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

The root of the problem is the distance between the weapon options. Either you get an absolutely terrible weapon, or a top of the line weapon, and there is nothing in between. Wouldn't it make sense to add a selection of ilevel 213 weapons with resilience on them to the honor vendors for exhorbitant honor prices, just to add a bridge? Or, perhapse even more palatable: just offer 213 weapons at lower arena ratings! Instead of the arid wasteland between 200 and 232, why not let people pick up a middling weapon at, say, middling rating (1600ish)? Will it really hurt anything? The decision not to do this really doesn't make any sense to me, especially considering how much the dev team has pushed PvP as it's own separate progression path. Not being able to get even a slightly reasonable weapon is ridiculous.


Kalgan, please take your statement to it's logical conclusions. I don't know what it is that's blinding you to this stuff, but I certainly hope you clear it up before you make any decisions that affect the millions of people who depend on you to make a reasonably fair game. Your post here was a misstep, to say the least.


By the way, there wasn't any major WoW news announced while I was on vacation last week, right?

Champions Online Beta Review: Should You Buy It?

Let me get this out of the way first:

I love Champions Online.

So now my job is no longer to tell you whether or not I like the game. My job is to tell you why I like it, and what it is about me that makes me the type of person who would love this game. Then you can compare yourself to me, and see if you might love it too.

Another thing to get out of the way first: I've spent a lot of time playing the game, but I have not proceeded past Millenium City, which is the level 12-20ish zone. I can't tell you anything first hand about the endgame or even the later leveling zones, the Nemesis system, or how heroes play once they've built up a lot of powers. Instead, between the closed and open beta, I rerolled a dozen different characters over the past few months, trying different powersets and both early zones, getting a strong feel for the character creator and the early levels.

What CO gets right:

Aesthetics: Sure, not everyone is going to love the the cel-shaded graphics with the thick black outlines, but there is an easily-located check-box in the video options that turns all that off. Then it just looks like a next-gen CoH. Not the visual revelation Aion is, but a leap ahead of WoW, and still pleasantly stylized.

But the real victory of the visuals is in the animations, the costumes, and the power effects. I can't tell you what you will think of them, but I can tell you to me, as a long-time comic-book and video game fan, they just feel right. The animations are dynamic, varied, and exciting. You really get the feel of being a powerful superhero. Superpowered punches distort the air around them with visible impact, while a sword-wielding ninja spins and flips while cutting down her enemies, and a sorcerer deployes magical circles and runes across the landscape to assist the gadgeteer's mechanical gun turret. The travel powers are really standout here, especially the spot-on rocket boots, ice-surfing, and fire flight. The costume options not only dwarf even CoX, but they show appropriate variety and even a sense of humor. You can make a hero with a cartoonish nuclear rocket strapped to his back and a "1/2" emblazoned on his chest, with tentacles for a mouth, furred cybernetic hands, mandibles emerging from his waist and boots that would be more at home in Gundam than Gotham.

The powers look good, and get bigger and flashier the more you level them up and acquire complementary powers. For instance, at level 1 your psi-blade looks a bit small and weak. Rank it up and it gets big and fiery. Pick up Ego Form and suddenly you're dual-wielding big, pulsing id- blades in a flurry of destruction.

And that's not even mentioning "power replacers" that you can pick up throughout the game to selectively modify your powers visually. The clearest example is one that changes the look of your hero's sword.

I'm someone who cares about aesthetics. Unlike a lot of other bloggers, I care what my mount or vanity pet or armor looks like, and what my character's animations are. One of the deciding factors originally for me to pick WoW over EQ was the more appealing (to me) visual style. If you are like me, and care a lot about how a game looks and feels, you won't be disappointed with CO.

Customizability: Not a lot can be said here that hasn't already been said. Character creation puts other games to shame. Powers can be recolored and have different emanation points. Powers, including weapons, can be visually replaced. The power system lets you pick and choose from any powerset at any time, with a loose tier system being the only thing keeping you from going completely nuts. There are tons of different powers to choose from. You can use any name you want, even if someone else already thought of it. You can even heavily customize the controls (even choosing between gamepad and mouse/keyboard!) and the graphics quite heavily.

Accessibility: You'd think, with all these options, the game would be hard to get into. It's not. There's all kinds of optional presets when creating a hero to help you jump in quickly, while still giving you access to the full power of the system. If you don't care to delve too far into the creator, you can be ready in a minute or two. The power set structures are easy to understand, and there to guide you, while still offering the "custom" option for advanced players who want to delve further. The game plays like others you are familiar with. It has the most lenient death penalty I have ever seen in any game. It marks your quest objectives on the map, simplifies your inventory, keeps your gear decisions limited and relatively simple, and slowly ramps up your powers and abilities. Yes, there are some partially-obscured game mechanics, but it comes nowhere close to most other MMOs, where you have to keep a guide open in another window just to figure out what your stats mean or where to go next. You get your travel power right after the tutorial and early leveling moves at a brisk pace.

CO is going to be very good for whatever chunk of time you have available, whether that be 20 minutes while the baby naps or 4 hours on a sunday afternoon alone. It's easy to pick up and play.



The thing that brings all these positives together into one package is a trick stolen from Blizzard (no surprise, given that one of the head designers is one of the early Blizzard guys): combining the best elements from other games. You're going to level up through a series of quests you get from people with yellow exclamation points over their heads. You're going to encounter WAR elements like public quests and having quest objectives labeled on your map. You're going to see statistics, and gear, and instanced group missions. In short, you are getting every feature you'd expect from a modern MMO. So really, the only questions you have to ask yourself are:

1) Do I like the way the game looks and feels?

2) Is the combat and character advancement system deep enough for me? Do I want something this accessible, or will I get bored when I'm not balancing 5 stats with my 40-talent-point build while skilling up my wand skill and juggling 15 pieces of gear?

3) Can I enjoy a "care bear" game with no world PvP or major consequences for death?




What CO gets wrong:

• The powers system is mostly good, but it builds far too slowly. You spend the first 45 minutes or so with only 2 abilities, and then only 3 for another half-hour. At level 12 you still only have 4-5 combat abilities. In most MMOs, you'll have that many by level 4.
• Lack of innovation in questing: this is a WoW-alike.
  
• Controls are a little wonky, especially targeting. I often find myself accidentally mistargeting, and having to retrain myself for the fact that I have to either use an attack or hit tab, but if I do both I won't be on my desired target. It's also a hassle to ensure that your auto-attack stays active when you want it to. Interacting with objects requires a keypress (though sometimes I can right-click a quest giver, but I can't figure out why it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't), and if you are close to multiple interactive objects, you'll get a hard-to-navigate list of them to choose from. I can't count the number of times I meant to pick up a quest item and accidentally hefted a nearby truck instead. I think this will improve as I adjust, but it feels more detached and less responsive than, say, WoW.
• Super Stats are poorly explained. They are actually very interesting, because the two super stats you select become the only stats that raise your damage. Essentially, you have complete freedom to choose which stats you want to chase, rather than, for instance, being a WoW warrior who has to gather strength and ignore intellect.
  
• The stats system has another flaw: powers often scale with specific stats, and it's easy to put yourself in a situation where you favor, say, ego and strength, and find that one of your powers scales off of endurance, and thus will always be gimp.
• PvE Balance: In closed beta, I would get decimated by groups with even two enemies in them. Every fight was a dangerous struggle, seemingly no matter what power combination I picked. Defensive powers helped, but the game didn't do enough to encourage me to pick them up even though I'd consider then almost mandatory (hint: the first power you get upon leaving the tutorial should be a defensive passive!). But even with them, the game was on the hard side. This is completely changed in open beta. I have to ass-pull three packs to even be in danger of dying, and have just mowed through even group quests as long as I have a defensive power active. The sweet spot is somewhere in between.
  

So far, replay value is mixed. The downside is that there is only one tutorial zone, so you are going to get sick of those first four levels very quickly. There are two early leveling zones, then Millenium City. The two zones are quite different from each other, but don't really offer any alternate branches for replaying, so it's a lot like the choice between the Barrens and Silverpine for the Horde. For most power combinations I tried, the first 10 levels were nearly identical. You start with 2 abilities: an weak auto-attack that builds Endurance, and a bigger attack that spends it. There is some token variation among these (some end-builders are ranged, some of the attacks can be charged up, or need to be held, etc), but the differences are minor. Upon completing the tutorial at level 5, you are gifted an orgasm of upgrades (you get no new powers during the tutorial, even though you "level up"), including a new fighting power, a travel power (what a blessing to get it this early!), a Super Stat, and a "talent" (stat boost, such as +8 Strength).

The upside on replayability is the flexibility of the character creator and the power system. Cryptic nailed the character creator. Prepare to hear raves about it in every review about the game. You can spend an hour in there, per character, and not even notice the time passing. There are enough options to make almost any humanoid you can imagine. I've seen everything from busty supergirls to robots to hulking Cthulu-lookalikes 5 times wider than the average man, to tiny people who only reach your knee, to hunched, slavering demons, to comically stretched-out beanpoles.

Combat is another mixed bag. It's a bit more action-oriented than other MMOs, and sports a much smaller pool of available abilities compared to competitors, though the block system and "roles" (similar to warrior stances) offer some extra depth. The low ability count is both a blessing and a curse: while easy to learn and pleasingly streamlined, it also has a tendency to get even more repetitive than WoW.


One thing I want to bring to the forefront concerning the beta is how quickly Cryptic makes changes and improvements to every aspect of the game. The open beta so many see today is almost unrecognizable as the closed beta I first launched 2 months ago - and even the closed beta I played 2 weeks ago - especially when it comes to interface and useability. So I'd recommend against being dismissive of the game because of minor issues. So many things I had been prepared to complain about were fixed in the open beta - and not only fixed, but brought up to exceed my expectations and surprise me. The early closed beta was a mess, but the open beta fixes almost every issue I had, and more. The costume creator makes more sense, the controls are easier to set up (the game gives you full control setup packages at the start, including one modeled almost exactly after WoW), the power tooltips are now actually informative. They must have been working hard over at Cryptic HQ to polish the game.




TL;DR version: Buy Champions Online if you:

• Want to feel like a superhero
• Care a lot about aesthetics. The game looks and feels great, and is full of visual customizability, aesthetic novelty, and vanity items.
  
• Want to play a WoW-alike with less depth but more action
• Would enjoy a further refinement of the WoW playstyle with even greater accessibility
• Like soloing as much as you like grouping

Do not buy Champions Online if:

• You think games that lack open-world PvP or "real consequences for failure" are for "carebears" (go play Darkfall instead, you'll like it!)
• You don't really like superheroes
• Strongly prefer slower and more complicated games that are a bit more work to figure out, like EQ, and dislike how accessible or action-oriented WoW is in comparison
  
• You are really sick of questing
• You don't care at all about aesthetics, or strongly dislike those of CO
  
• Are only interested in group dungeon crawls and have no interest in soloing

Champions Online is currently in "open beta" (requiring preorder or, I believe, Fileplanet membership) and will be released on Tuesday, September 1.


UPDATE (8/31/09):

The comments gave me a few good ideas of things I'd like to add.

Champions contains a mechanism for microtransactions. This is supposed to encompass things like novelty and vanity items and additional character slots. None of the purchasables are implemented yet, as far as I can tell, and little information is known about the details.

If you won't buy the game simply because it has a mechanism for microtransactions, then I encourage you to stay away from Champions so I don't have to interact with you. WoW has microtransactions too, called, for instance, paid server transfers, so you better cancel that account too, kthxbai. Learn about the prices and what is on offer before you dismiss the game. You may find you have no interest in what is for sale, and also find the game quite complete and worthwhile without the microtransactions.

There are more than enough costume options and character slots (8) available for my needs, so it doesn't bother me. If the microtransactions were blocking heavy swaths of content, then I'd be pissed. Again, consider the details of the particular system rather than dismissing something out of hand as soon as the word "microtransaction" is mentioned.

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For me, the carrot luring me through the levels is being able to get more powers to play with. If that doesn't sound exciting to you, then consider what it is that excites you about a new game before you buy Champions. Champions plays a lot like WoW. It is a questing game. You will kill ten rats, you will fedex, you will collect 15 monster teeth, you will click on 5 objects, and you will escort someone defenseless through packs of enemies. If you are tired of questing and are tired of WoW's gameplay, don't buy Champions. If you enjoy WoW's gameplay and just want a change of setting, aesthetic, and a fresh, streamlined look at the character-development systems, then give Champions a chance.

One big mistake it makes is that it starts slowly, and holds your hand through the tutorial (it assumes you've never played an MMO before). A lot of the more exciting stuff doesn't happen until the later levels, such as the Nemesis system and the meatier team missions. However, leveling is fast. The game appears to be much more focused on encouraging you to level multiple characters to try out all kinds of powers and costumes, and much less focused on getting one "main" to the endgame and grinding away. This makes me suspect that replay value is going to be kind of poor if you care a lot about content, because you'll end up leveling each character through the same zones over and over. Hopefully it won't come to that, but it is something to caution you about. Hopefully patches will expand the game laterally by adding more leveling content.

I very much enjoy Champions, but I cannot recommend it to everyone. The best way to make your buying decision is to gather as much information as you can about it, and see if those things appeal to you.

Pre-Blizzcon Roundup

I'm leaving on vacation next week, and when I get back all we'll be talking about is the revelations of the next WoW xpac, and the Champions and Aion open betas and launches. I would really like to get a "should you buy the game?" post about Champions out there before I leave, since it will launch a few days after I get back. There are a few things that got lost in the shuffle, and frankly deserved their own posts, but I just don't have time for. Here they are.

1) This weapon, the Reclaimed Thunderstrike, drops from the new Onyxia. It is flat-out B.S. Can you guess why?




Here's a hint:



Not to mention the very high stamina and agility, and the aoe threat proc. Seriously?


Here's another hint, in the form of a quote from Ghostcrawler about why the blacksmithed DK tanking 2-handers with defensive stats were removed from the PTR before patch 3.1 went live:

"The two-handed Blacksmithing tanking weapons are not going to be implemented.

Indeed, we did not want to stick DKs with these weapons forever, nor did we want to start itemizing 2H tanking weapons forever. DKs were designed to tank with 2H dps weapons.

The new sigil and runeforge enchant should help players with low defense. "

So yeah, that dodge rating has got to go, or Onyxia goes from being "fun raid to goof off with" to "OMG I have to make sure we run this every week and hope that the tanking weapon drops instead of all the other stuff we shard every week." It's going to become the new Dragonspine Trophy: so much better than everything else that people will keep grinding the boss long after they are sick of it, just in hopes of one drop. Every other tanking weapon in the game immediately becomes obsolete for mitigation/survivability, and effectively you go from having dozens of roughly-equally-viable weapons to choose from for tanking (all dropping in different places, giving you a choice), to only. one. option. Not fun. For an analogue, imagine if the only one-handed weapon with tanking stats in the entire game dropped off of Malygos. Sure, lots of tanks would just use a dps one-hander, but those players would always be inferior to the guy who got lucky when farming Maly.


2) Paladins at max level are not as simple as they were to level up. You can see my impressions here, where I discovered that leveling a Retribution Paladin is ludicrously easy, and frankly simpler than any other class. Having spent some time as retribution at 80, I can now add that doing optimal dps does require skill and quick decision-making. Leveling your character, and even 5-man instancing and 1 on 1 pvp, may be complete faceroll as ret, but executing your First Come First Served dps method while dealing with conflicts between different powers coming off cooldown at the same time brings into play a skill gap between the best and the rest. I'd still maintain that it's easier to learn and figure out than many other classes (rogues and DKs are much more complicated in their rotations for example, IMO, especially if you don't have a guide), but at least raid performance as ret requires some thought.


3) Second Skin: This documentary was pretty eye-opening for me. I caught it on Hulu during a free preview last week, but now it's apparently only available on DVD and in select theaters. I enjoyed it, and normally would recommend you go into it with an open mind. But, it's hard to talk about it without spoiling anything, so I'm just going to say what I want to say.

First of all, I thought the documentary was skewed against MMO players. It focused almost exlusively on those whose lives are dominated by the game, and perhaps even ruined. It primarily follows three different groups of gamers: 1) a clan of four guys in their early 20's who live in the same house and play WoW every waking hour they are not at work, 2) A hetero couple who met in EQ2 and spend the film meeting in Real Life, 3) A guy in his early 30s who got treated for "MMO addiction" at a shady halfway house, then moves in with his cousin. None of these stories really go well, and at the end you are left with the distinct impression that everyone who remained immersed in their game is allowing their life to crumble around them, while everyone who reduced playtime or left the game is going on to a better life. Though the narrative doesn't explicitly cast MMOs as an addiction (and frankly those in the film who use that word come across as crackpots), it does treat it like an addiction, with those who recover suceeding, and those who succumb doomed to failure. So the value of the film is certainly not in its balanced approach to all MMO players.

The film's actual value is as a window into the lives of those who do allow MMOs to take over, and inevitably catalyze the degradation of, their lives. I had heard the statistics before, but actually seeing these people, having MMO dependency made flesh, really brought the concept home to me. Until now, those people weren't real to me, they were some kind of conceptual construct that didn't really exist.

But it turns out there really are people who live in a pig sty because they can't spare the minutes away from WoW to tidy up, and there really are people who kill themselves over WoW addiction. There are even people who will speak, without irony, of "cutting down to just 3 nights a week of raiding" while their wife, pregnant with twins, looks on in horror at the prospect of having to take care of THREE children instead of just the two in her belly. This man goes on to become a community rep for Warhammer Online, and presumeably his wife's evident terror (watch her eyes - poor girl!) over raising the children herself while her husband downs Illidan was unfounded. I wish Andy and his family the best, and I think it's pretty clear by the end of the movie that he's one of the people who escapes and gets control of his life.

That's not to say the movie was completely negative. There was a moving section about disabled gamers who can socialize freely without prejudice in the game world, and who enjoy a sense of liberation from being able to walk around in the game and speak freely via text while their physical body is confined to a wheelchair or unable to articulate their thoughts.

And that leads into the best and most memorable line in the film, worth the price of admission, delivered by an author about an MMO book whose name escapes me:

“If people are enjoying these mmo worlds more than the real world, what does that say about our current reality?”

And that is a question that needs to be asked.


Second Skin is far from a fair representation of fans of the genre, but is worth a view nonetheless. It definitely made me look at this whole MMO phenomenon, and the people in it, differently. But not too differently. It's easy to watch this movie and think that every player is like that, but in reality we can't really tell how many are. Most likely special cases were selected to make the film more interesting. I'll try to keep an open mind. And next time someone griefs me, I'll imagine them as living on the floor in the midst of a pile of trash while gaining weight and losing their job and girlfriend.

But before I say anything, I'll remember that they might be a parplygic rape victim, and maybe hold my tongue.

Big week in the world of MMOs

Work is extra busy today as I try to get ahead in preparation for going on vacation next week (so if I don't post next week, don't worry, I'll be back), so I can't do a full-on post on the subjects I want to, such as Second Skin, the huge WoW Cataclysm leak (they're actually going through with what I was hoping for!), and a lot of other subjects.

This is a massive (har!) week for MMOs, with the CO open beta starting today (NDA lifted!!), the final Aion beta preview this past weekend (I tried casters!), Blizzcon this coming weekend (screw directTV and check out the coverage at wcradio.com), and 3.2 really settling in as people try the new raid and continue farming badges, badges, BADGES!

I have a lot to say on all of these subjects and more, so hopefully I'll find tons of time to post once things cool down at work.