So I played Conan….

Well after SOE launched Rise of Kunark I quit playing EQ2 – it really killed the game for me. I stumbled around somewhat, playing BF2 and a bit of CSS but nothing really grabbed me. A few months later many of my guild moved over to the latest new thing Age of Conan and I decided to go and see what all the hype was about, what a huge mistake. For me if an MMO doesnt grab you by the genitalia and give them a gentle tweak in the first few hours, it is unlikely to do so later on. Conan from the outset was horrible. Character animation looked like something from EQ1, combat although novel at first was the same old button mashing and the quests – well we may as well have been back to kill 10 rats. To make matters worse, this was not an item centric game – it had no real focus on character development.

Please do not take this as being some sort of xenophobic comment – but the game felt decidedly European in its design (I am English btw). US MMOs have a style, Korean MMOs have a style Conan felt like it was designed and built by the European Union – a hotch-potch of all the worst traits of any game, decided by democratic process and built by pseudo-politicians (Euro MPs arent real politicians) and marketed bt Saatchi and Saatchi. It was a triumph of style over content (much like most of the crap that comes out of Brussels).

In many ways Conan did me a favour, it made me realise that MY hayday of MMOs is over. i will not be able to recapture those spine tingling days of EQ1, crawling through dungeons, with 5 other unknowns, grinding on mobs and trying to reach that elusive camp, waiting for a named to pop and wiping. Gone is the mature(ish) adult banter that would arise, often whilst medding, between bulling mobs. EQ1 for me was MMORPGs Magnum Opus, due to its timing, and my time of life – neither which are recoverable.

I know there are many gamers like me for whom EQ1 was their first MMO and were at a time in their lives where they didnt have the commitment of children and had time to burn. Now we are grown up, with children and what we should realise is that they are now our real life avatars. Our efforts should be spent on gaining that +1 to Int or +2 to Dex as they will be be our true legacy, not some bunch of pixels or sats on a database burried in a datacentre somewhere. Life is a much more difficult MMO that EQ or WoW will ever be and when you have children, the rewards (in general) are far more rewarding, but that is to say I still sometimes see them as hoard of evil goblins training to my zone line.

‘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

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.