Levelling The Playing Field

As I have said in previous posts, I honestly believe that the future of MMOs is likely to be a hybrid of the current MMO style and a twitch type combat system, a la Huxley, Hellgate London and to a degree Planetside and now SOE’s The Agency. The problem with bringing in a twitch based system to an MMO arena is it skews the playing field. Why?

It is a fact that as we get older, our reflexes slow and there is little that we can do about it. During my occasional forrays into BF2 and CS:S, I regularly get my ass handed to me in sling, so more and more I tend to play sniper classes, as the range gives me that little bit of edge back.

In traditional MMOs, progression very much equates to time invested, in twitch games it is very much down to reflexes and dexterity. So how do you create a game, that caters for both the young and the old without disenfranchising one or the other ?

The key lies in  offering 2 different lines of advancement. One line being reflex based, out and out gung-ho, head to head combat, the other lies in stealth, planning and puzzle solving. For example if it were a martial arts based MMO, you could choose to play a Samurai or Shaolin Monk - all out, hand to hand or close quarter combat. Or you could choose to play a Ninja or Lin Kuei, planning your attacks and carrying them out using diversions and stealth. By offering the gamer alternative choices of obtaining the same goal, the playing field becomes more even.

Combine this with other choices for players, support roles as a team member - supplies, healing, engineer etc or as a solo player - saboteur, sniper, transport (most of these will translate easilly to SciFi, Fantasy, Oriental etc) and the pure twitch element’s requirement is somewhat deminished. Even in a PvP environment the ranged or stealth player could hold their own, using traps (invisible to otherplayers), smoke screens and diversions to gain advantage, whereas the pure twitch player has the element of fast reflexes and greater melee type damage. Take this one step further and you could have a duo say of a Samurai and a Magician - but the magician has the art of disguise. The Samurai appears frail under the magicians illusion, whilst the magician himself is invisible or becomes a mount - an attractive target in any PvP environment. A ninja goes for the one shot kill against what he thinks is a frail trader, only to be confronted by a Samurai with 15,000hp ! In any real battle, it is only the very strongest and toughest that flaunt their presence publicly - tanks mainly, everyone else uses camoflage, stealth, speed, strategy and planning or superior firepower to win their battles. So it should be in MMOs, ganking a mob may be well and fine, if you have the numbers and strength to do it, but trapping and poisoning it may also work just as well, but with much fewer players!

Another area that is sadly lacking in many modern MMOs is puzzle solving. The problem is, with spoiler sites being so prevalent, static puzzles are without challenge. What Devs need to do is incorporate dynamic or random puzzles, that challenge the player. Puzzle solving is not age dependant and therefore is equally challenging to both the older and younger players. Lara Croft - Tombraider is a classic example of how puzzles can work well in a game, unfortunately though, most of these type of puzzles are static and not dynamic.

Overall the model for many of the current MMOs is pretty similar, if you understand the mechanics of one, it isnt hard to translate that to any of the others the only thing that really differs are the levels of risk/reward. I know that there are a few variants emerging from the traditional MMO model, the most succesful of thes ebeing Eve, but even in that game progression still equates to time invested.

I think the problem is currently that too many investors saw the success of World of Warcraft with its huge subscriber base and expect any new investments to follow the WoW model. Well sadly I think that is a dead-end road. WoW was succesful for a lot of reasons, its mechanic being only one of many. That alone is not sufficient to create a sucessful MMO. The Warcraft IP has a long and succesful pedigree that it traded on, Blizzard had a huge established playerbase in Battlenet, I could go on, but wont. In my opinion the game as an MMO is mediocre, but the game as a game (a medium of entertainment) is absolute genius.

So what of the future? Well we have seen the death and near-death of several MMOs this year, Gods and Heroes. Car Wars, Vanguard and I predict we will see many more, as investors blindly expect developers to follow a model that is not only flawed but was unique to Blizzard and truth be told cannot be recreated, we will see another tranche of mediocre MMOs that are set to fail, even before they launch.

Only when someone with enough vision and understanding of the Massive Gaming Demographic (which is currently 18 - 35 years old, I believe) decides to move away from the EQ1 / UO / DAoC / EQ2 / WoW model and starts again from scratch will we truly see a true 3rd generation MMO with the potential to capture the hearts and minds of millions of players again.

‘Shut Up. We’re Talking’

A big thank you to Darren at ‘Shut Up. We’re Talking’ podcast.

I listened to podcast number 5 last night and he has voted Split and Defiled blog of the week. ‘Shut Up. We’re Talking’ is one of the newer MMO / gaming podcasts, but its quality is superb and is now another ‘must listen’ on my weekly list of MMO / gaming podcasts that I download to my ipod. If you haven’t listened to it yet, get over to the ‘Shut Up. We’re Talking’ website, download it and give it a listen.

Darren is also known as The Common Sense Gamer and is long time blogger and commenter on the gaming world in general. If you haven’t read his blog, I suggest that you hop over to his site and have a read.

I cant mention ‘Shut Up. We’re Talking’ without mentioning Cuppy who used to be Darren’s co-presenter on the podcast. Cuppy sadly had to leave Shut Up. We’re Talkling as she landed, what I hope, is her dream job as Community Relations Manager with Areae Games. Cuppy also has her own blog, Cuppytalk , another fantastic insight into the world of games, anothermust read for avid gaming fans. Anyway, a big hi to Cuppy

 

Finally I wanted to say that ‘Shut Up. We’re Talking’ is part of the Virgin Worlds Collective. Which is a series of podcasts about gaming and MMOs, which Brent, who hosts the Virgin Worlds website and podcast has brought under one umbrella. The Virgin Worlds podcast was one of the first MMO podcasts that I listened to and I look forward to his weekly round-ups of the Massively Multiplayer gaming news, as his knowledge and insight of the gaming and especially the MMO industry is second to none. Go listen

Busy…

Real life has been a bit hectic over the past few days, hence no posts. I just wanted to let people know, that I haven’t disappeared and that normal service has been resumed.

Jitter

Gaming Diary - Sinking Sands Carpet Quest

Jitter has been saving for a new mount. What I really wanted was either a

Mistrunner or

 

Nightmare, but it would leave me broke. So on hitting 47 I decided to go and do my Carpet of El`khazi Quest. It is a 4 part quest kiven to you by El`khazi the carpet vendor in SS. Me and another guildie, Ryuwo a 70 ‘Zerker duoed all of it upto the 4th quest (at this point I’d like to say thankyou to Ryuwo, without him I wouldnt have got as far i this game as I have already). On reaching the 4th part I called on another guildie a 52 Fury and his friend a 47 Manaburn Wizard, a 55 Wizard friend of mine and a guildie from my original EQ2 guild (Synergy) called Benjirii a 70 Monk. We wiped 5 times on the Djinn. First time his AoE hit the healers and casters and killed us stone dead. Four more wipes and I was ready to give up (the 2 tanks were mentoring to 55) so we tried on last time.

The wizzy’s hit the Djinn with everything incuding manaburn then the tanks when hell-for-leather on him, with the 2 healers out of AoE range and healing like crazy, we took the Djinn down in under 40 seconds and I got my Carpet.

Well I was told it couldnt be done with group level of 55 max, but we did and Jitter now has his carpet. I seriously do want one of the Mistrunner or Nightmare steeds, but i think that I will do the Warg quest next and get a Warg.

 Maybe one day, when I have 19pp to spare I’ll buy Jitter a horsie as well, but for now I have my new Axminster Steed and I am happy.

A big thankyou for everyone who helped me.

Raiding Guilds and Plat Farmers

Everyone who plays MMORPgs pretty much hates plat farmers (except thos people who buy plat off them, that is). Very few MMOs seem to be exempt from their presence these days and with the rise in numbers playing MMOs, since the WoW explosion, so respectively have the numbers of Asian companies Plat farming.

My question is, why do we hate plat farmers so much?

I think the answer stems from the fact that they perpetually remove, from the normal player base, those mobs, which have the potential to drop the nicest lewt. In early MMOs, such as EQ1, this was a particular issue as camps were very specific, hard to get and often had well known specific loot tables. So if you wanted a Lodizal Shell Shield, you had to camp Lodizal - the named turtle that spawns every 12 hours in Cobalt Scar. Now here lies the rub, very often Lodi was perma camped by guilds - ‘farming’ him for his shell section, so that they could gear up large numbers of their guild. This is a very noble sentiment, guild wise, but in the eyes of the remaining playerbase their action is identical to that of the Plat farmer - yet this behaviour is often more tollerated. Similarly in EQ2, Stiletto, an NPC Ratonga, which spawns amongst the giants and gnolls in Thundering Steppes drops a note which starts a Heritage Quest - Stilettos Orders Intercepted, which at the end rewards you with a Manastone, an item especially desired by priest classes. Stiletto is a difficult spawn to find, it took me 5 hours of camping his spawn area on my server to find and kill him. That 5 hours was after returning twice to find a Norwegian Guild perma camping him with a lvl 70 Guard and a lvl 40 healer - I asked them what they were doing and replied perma camping him for their guild. This annoyed me insanely, but I accepted it as part of the game, had a 4 man botting group being camping and farming him, I would have reported them instantly - for disruption of the game. Hypocracy on my part, I know. FYI on Splipaw, Stilettos Orders sell for upward of 60gp, which to me was alot at lvl 30.

Then we come onto the major contested mobs, fabled dragons etc who are perma farmed by the big raiding guilds, with the excuse tha they are gearing their guilds - which maybe true to a certain degree, but these guilds also are the ones selling many of those fabled drops on their vendors, demanding 10s even 100s of plat for items - in my eyes this activity is no better than a Plat Farmer. Yes I know that someone is going to say, raids are skilled, hard work, yadda yadd yadda - I say that is bullshit. Once a guild has a specific mobs worked out, they raid like clockwork, with almost guaranteed kills everytime - that is how they ‘farm’ the items that they need, the skill required drops very rapidly. I would argue that quad boxing a bunch of farming bots is probably as skillful as running a x3 or x4 group raid.

I realise that this article is probably going to bring a lot of hate with it, especially from raiding guilds, or guilds who farm for their playerbase, but logically their actions are no better, oftentimes, than the Asian Plat farmer who is probably earning a living to feed his familly.

Finally we have to look to our own playerbase, we hate plat farmers with almost a religious zealotness, yet we seldom hold recriminations against friends and fellow guild members who buy Plat for real world coin, so that they can buy that next Master spell, or fabled piece of gear. I know friends of mine, one who raids with top level guilds on both his WOW and EQ1 servers, who have not only bought plat but Ebayed characters as well. Do those guilds care ? Do they hell. All they care about is that they have 2 of the top specced healers on their servers respectively, which allows them to raid even harder targets, more often.

What I suggest is next time we decide to Report / Petition someone spamming you with Plat sales, see if you can report a guildie or friend as well for purchasing an ebayed toon or buying some of said Plat!! 

KK, OK ?

KK is another phrase that has become commonplace in internet terminology, but why?

Well it is something else that comes from the early days of EQ1. EQ1 had a random typing bug that irregularly would drop the first character of a sentence. When asked a question or given an instruction the respomdee would often respond with ‘K’- being an abreviation for OK. Unfortunately, due to the bug and the response being single character, the receiver of the response would see nothing at all. Forcing the originator of the question to repeat themslves and the respondee to respond in similar style - as you can see, it all becomes a little slapstick / Monytpythonesque. So seasoned vets, knowing the bug to be random would respond KK, so if the bug droppped the first character the second K would get through. As things continued, the bug was fixed but KK by now was common parlance within the game. As with many things on the web, the use of KK overspilled to IMs, chat rooms, IRC etc and soon everyone was using it, as if it were some common netspeak. Today it is common netspeak and people that have never even heard of EQ1 never mind played it, use it in common parlance. Just a bit of MMO trivia for you all

Mushii

From Newb to Nub

When I started gaming, prior to my MMO days, I started as a Newb or Newbie. This was a term of endearment, generally given by more experienced gamers to someone who needed to be looked after, shown the ropes, and helped to learn the game. I didnt mind being called a Newb as it was what I was.

15 Years on the term Newb has been bastardized to Noob and then to Nub. Today the term Nub is used as derogatory term and even an insult, generally for someone who doesnt have L337 5Kill20R5 or who makes a mistake . Whatever I play I hear the same outbursts of ‘F%$kin Nub’ or ‘U R teh Nub’.

When did Newb become Nub and when did people stop caring?

For those of you who dont remember, idiots were called llamas, a corruption of the term lamer - someone who is lame. Players who used ‘teh’ instead of ‘the’ were assumed to have poor keyboard skills, or were dyslexic and ‘pwned’, well WTF is that? Meh !

Social Networks in MMOs

After my last article, I was accused of being overly nostalgic and living in the ‘golden sheen’ of EQ1. Well it is a fact that, very much like your first of anything, you look back at it, later in life with a slightly rose coloured tint. With that said I do want to revisit EQ1 on a specific subject and look at why no other MMO has replicated what it had, and that is its social network and networking specifically.

I log onto EQ2 today and the first thing that I do is shout up in guild chat to see if there are any groups going. If ther are not, I’ll have a look in community to see if any friends are on. if they aren’t or they are busy, I’ll shout up in channel ‘ 47 Defiler LFG’, then I will put my LFG flag up and see if there are any groups LFG in the LFG finder. Then I will go and either do some solo quests, harvest or put a group together myself. At no time will I go to say East Freeport and sit on the docks and chat. And that is the difference. When I was playing EQ1 I’d regulalrly log on and sit in PoK and either chat to friends, join in any ooc conversations or sit around and offer MGB (mass group buffs). Sometimes I’d do this for a whole evening, never once even considering xp or questing. Sure if I got invited to a group I’d go and play, but mostly I’d be happy to chat. The other thing in EQ1 is I had a huge social network and I think the prime reason for this was downtime in groups. EQ1 required a lot of downtime to ‘med’ between mobs, and in that time you would chat to the people that you grouped with and got to know them. Friendships were born and you looked for these people when you logged on, sometimes to group with, or sometimes just to chat with.

Today, in EQ2, I can do a 3 hour group and barely speak 2 words to my entire group members, that is unless someone is being an idiot (like the tank overpulling continually) then I may comment, in tells, to another group member about it. Sure EQ2 has its downtime, but nothing like EQ1.

I think one of the other reasons that we dont chat as much in MMOs as we used to is the advent of AIM, MSN, ICQ etc. we now have our own personal social networks, sometimes inside and sometimes outside of the game and we use these other mediums to communicate with our chosen friends. Even more than this many guilds, especially in WoW use Teamspeak or Ventrillo to chat to one another, so you dont even have to break the flow of the game to communicate with friends and peers.

I think in many ways EQ1 was as much of a social communication tool, much like the instant messengers of today, but better in someways, than say MSN. Why better? Well MSN and other IMs are basically peer to peer, if you want group communication you need something like IRC or have to go into a chat room. EQ1 offered all of those things in one product. Peer to peer chat in tells, private channels for group chat with friends, group chat with group members, group chat with guildies in guildchat, and general chat in OOC. Except for other MMOs no other software has or does offer this flexibility to communicate with potentially such a captive audience, especially being able to talk on subject that you enjoy, ie the MMO that you are playing.

Sadly the changing face or evolution of MMOs drives us forward faster, levelling is our only aim, so that we can achieve that holy of holiest of grails - ‘the end game’. Today we strive to be that level 70 (or whatever the level cap is for your game at the time), trying to get their faster and faster, we dont want to sit around chatting  we very much ignore the social aspect of the game today and log in for one reason, character progression. Whereas many of the first generation MMO gamers came from a social gaming background, people sat around tables and played D&D or table top campaigns, had a few beers and chatted. When they migrated from real-life gaming to virtual gaming, the social aspect was a carry over, but now rather than 6 or 7 like minded people to chat to, they had potentially a few thousand and so first gen games like EQ1 were very social places to be. As may of the first gen players were diluted with newer second gen (non table top or D&D ers) the social aspect declined and so combined with changes in game mechanic the social element of MMos has declined also. I am as guilty as the next man, I have trillian running in the background, I do chat to guildies even, out of game - although it isnt always easy as I play a healer. Maybe as voice comms become more and more integrated into games and especially MMOs, the social aspect of gaming may return.

MMORPGs and the InstaClick Generation

Since I started playing MMORPGs, back in the pre-Luclin days of EQ1, the face of the MMORPG gamer has changed. Somehow the culture of an instaclick (or MTV) generation has spilled over into the fantasy world of MMORPGs changing not only the tone and feel of MMORPGs but also the way in which the community interacts and plays, let me explain.

Late 90s early 2000, EQ1 was probably at the apogee of its success and World of Warcraft was not around. I think that it is fair to generalise and say that MMORPGs were principly the domain of geeks, beardies, and the generation who spent their youths playing table-top (like D&D) and that your average teenager was more interested in hs Sony Playstation than the shattered lands of Norath. this said  there was one online gaming service that seemed to capture a large number of young and dare I say immature gamers - BattleNet. Something happened early 2000 with Battlenet which resulted in hundreds of our younger bretheren to go in search of a new home - many of them found one - in Everquest.

Suddenly an environment which had generally been quite a respectful and slightly reserved (no KSing, no training, respect for high level players and nurturing of newbies) turned into a screaming kindergarten. Hundreds of beggars suddenly appeared all over Norath, sitting outside city gates and banks begging for plat off anyone who looked like they might be wealthy. These new ‘upstarts’ had no respect for long held, but unwritten rules of the MMORPG world - KSing was OK, camps were there to be raided and taken and the OOC chat around  areal like LOIO was decidedly potty mouthed and decidedly juvenile. EQ back then was a slow grind, you couldnt get a lvl 60 toon in 4 weeks, you were lucky if you could do one in 6 months, but these kiddies wanted endgame NOW!! and they would find any method, exploit or person to help them do it Hence was born the ‘B-Net Kiddies’ - continually whining and pleading for someone to PL (power level) them and refusing to play if they couldnt find a ‘chanter to give them a fix of KEI (infact many of them found it almost impossible to play without KEI.

I think that this new generation were to spell the death of MMORPGs as we had previosuly known them, they didnt want corpse runs, loss of gear, complex quests or long grinds - they wanted instaclick gratification. These people wanted fast leveling, lots of phat-lewt, glitterythings and being uber - instantly and somebody was sitting in the wings watching all of this and taking note. They already had an appropriate IP, they had the userbase in Battlenet all they needed was a shiny product to deliver to their MacDonalds fuelled, instant messenger, text driven hoarde and they had it, it was called World of Warcraft and the company behind it was called was Blizzard Entertainment.

From this point onwards the face of MMORPG gaming had changed forever. The IP wasnt particularly new, infact very much sameole sameole, high fantasy massive persistant worlds.  What had changed was the way it was delivered, in 2 ways.

Firstly the game was very very highly polished when it was delivered, no more buggy quests, daily patches and all of the other problems that the previous generation of MMORPG gamer had come to expect and live with. This game was pretty much perfect by the time it hit beta - infact the beta was little more than server load tests.

Secondly the grind had been removed. Levelling was fast, loot dropped a plenty and the endgame had the choice of either raiding or faction v faction type pvp.

The other clever move is the game did not require an uber-rig to play on. You could even play it on a fairly mediocre laptop. This is important for 2 reasons, it opened up the whole Asian market (who play mainly in internet cafes) and the average child / youth who very often have hand-me-down pcs, which are normally a generation old, could also play.

The one last trick that  Blizzard had up their sleeve, which the like of SoE have persistantly missed (maybe in their arrogance that gaming ends beyond the shores of North America) is European Advertisement. Europe is one of the fastest growing DSL markets, with at least as many potential subscribers as North America and Blizzard had noticed this.

The upshot is ‘old school’ mmorpg gaming is dead - as Brad McQuaid found out to his cost, with Vanguard Saga of Heroes. Many of the old EQ1 gamers have grown up, have families, jobs and mortgage commitments. We cannot afford the 18 hour camps waiting for Stormfeather to pop, or the 5 hour corpse runs when your raid wiped in PoF, those days are gone. The new generation are too impatient to play ‘old farts’ games. These kids have been brought up on twitch games and consoles, they want it fast and furious and must it look cool. This new generation have the attention span of a goldfish, if there isn’t something new happeneing every nanosecond, then it is consigned to the bin of dead games and they move on to the next shiny.

So what is the future of MMORPG gaming? Probably something between a FPS and an MMORPG. Huxley I think has set the standard, but is yet to catch on in a big way. SoE’s new IP ‘The Agency’ holds some promise - but only time will tell. Brent made an interesting point on his VirginWorlds podcast a few weeks ago - why are more MMORPGs not like Tomb Raider with truly interactive 3D environments? Probably because current technology will not allow it in a MMORPG environment. Whatever it is, it is not going to be the slow and cumbersome games that we have been to date - unfortunately it is more than likely many of the older gamers may not have the reflexes to participate in the same way that we do in todays clutch of MMORPGs - and that maybe a fatal oversight for many companies. As although the kids may make up a large percentage of the market, it is the older gamers who are often parents of the ADDH generation who pay the bills and pass on their hardware for them to play on. Exclude this market and they may restrict the supply of hardware and gaming to their  gaming offspring. Currently I dont need twitch reflexes and a Razer Diamondback (although I do use one) for me to have a well equiped character in EQ2. A few friends and a little time farming harvestables gets me plenty of nice gear. But if I had to have 0.1ns reflexes to avoid a mob killing me, then I think that I would just walk away from the game and so too would many of my generation.

It is a fine line that the future MMORPG game producers have to walk, keeping the older gamers hooked, whilst bringing the new generation in and giving them both what they want whilst keeping the playing field level. It is going to be a tough call and one which I , happily, wont have to make.

Mentoring and the Epic Drop Rate

Having spent a few hours in Cazic Thule, getting, I must say, some very good XP (doing a level in about 2 hours) the group finally broke up, as the tank needed sleep. I am not sure why, but trying to find a tank in the mid 40s on Splipaw is like trying to get fabled drops off yard trash, they dont exist, anyway I digress. A shout goes up in chanel raid forming to kill x2 Epic Nightblood in Rivervale. So i send a tell to the Raid Leader and get in the MT group - Defiler always seems to be the healer of choice in a MT group. After about 30 minutes the raid is formed 50% of which is 60+ players mentoring down to me (level 45) which is an ideal level for the Nightblood. So we kill it and it drops a Treasure Chest - boo, no Exquisite or Ornate Chest. So we kill the x2 Epic Lamia around the corner - no drop at all. The raid heads over to the Enchanted Lands and we kill Cragshell x2 Epic Crab, he only drops a Treasure Chest, then run across the zone to kill the Overseer x2 Epic who again only drops a treasure chest - see a pattern ?

This is not the first time that I have seen suge a poor drop rate from highly mentored groups. Technically it shouldn’t make a difference, if a player mentors to your level, the kill should be equivalent to a group at the mentored level, but it isnt. I am not sure if it the effect of having a mentoring player that has a lot of AAs, but they do seem to help. Not once in any four of the raid targets that we hit, did the tanks health (a level 70 ‘zerker, mentoring down to 40s) drop beneath 90% health and the mobs were dead within a few minutes. Raid targets are supposed to be a challenge and these weren’t. maybe the game mechanic realises this and rewards accordingly, but I am sure that this isnt how the devs originally intended it to be.