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.

The Perpetual Epic

EQ1 introduced us to the idea of the Epic, a quested item, specific to a class that was, at the time, one of the best items in the game for your class. As things progressed, the Epic item didnt scale and slowly after several more expansions, epics became little more than trophies, but were rarely used. To combat this, SoE introduced Epic 1.5 and Epic 2 items, but again will suffer from the same mudflation and eventually they too wil become little more than trinkets. EQ2 doesnt quite have epics yet, but had the same issues with the Prismatic series of weapons, they are already superceded.

What I am proposing is the perpetual epic, an item that grows with you as you level. It wont always be the best item at your level, but it will be situational, but tailored to your choosing. let me explain. At level 10 you undertake your initial epic quest for your class. This will be a tough solo quest and will reward you with your base epic item. I am a Defiler so my base epic is called The Mace of Hate and it will have nice stats for a weapon of my level, maybe +4wis , +4int +10 to all resists. At level 15 I get the option to do a series of quests, the choice being, solo, single group or raid. But there wont be just 1 of each you may get a choice of 4, but you can only select 1. The 4 options give 4 types of reward which are all adornments for your Epic but, depending on whether you choose to do the solo, group or raid version of that quest line, depends on how nice the reward is, but not rediculously so. So for example my 4 choices are:

• Quest of Knowledge – gives a Wis adornment
• Quest of Intellect – gives an Int adornment
• Quest of Health – gives  Health adornment
• Quest of Power – gives a Power adornment

 So I choose Quest of Power, now I have 3 options, solo, group or raid. The 3 rewards may be solo gives +5 power, group gives +5 power, +20 Devine, raid gives +5 power +15 to all resists.

As you can see the differences arent huge, but big enough to reward the greater difficulty. remember you can only choose 1 quest line per 5 levels. Combined with this the item will automatically gain stats every 10 levels, so that even if you choose not to do any adornment quests the Epic will still be an OK weapon to use.

If you complete the adornment quest you will be given an adornment item, so I finish my level 15 Power quest my reward is Sparkling Opal of Power and a crafting recipe. I then have to take my Mace and the Opal to a forge, and using the recipe I combine the 2 (in a no fail combine) to produce a new Mace of Hate. At some levels the quest line maybe additional stats, sometimes they may be resists, sometimes there maybe a choice of procs or flowing thought. As you add more adornments, the stats that you gain also add, but the procs wont. the procs will overwrite any previous proc, which is logical as they become more powerful. Again the proc rewards maybe similar to the equivalent spell drops, so the solo reward is an Adept 1 proc, the Group and Adept 3 and the Raid a Master 1 version or they may all have the same proc, but the chances of it proccing get higher with the level of quest, solo 10%, group 16%, raid 23%.

This way every person gets to have an individual Epic item and the adornments that they choose at each level can suit their play style. Early on you may solo and so choose solo quests. Then at level 30 you join a guild and you can get help with your Epic quests, so you choose to do Group quests and so it goes on. Some quests may also have the effect of changing the physical appearance of the Epic., for example some adornments may give particle effects, such as fire or glowing blade, others may produce lightning or haze the weapon, others may actually change its colour physically.

As you progress in levels the choice of adornments will also improve, until at the level cap for that expansion you may get a choice of just 2 very cool quest lines. The choice for the Defilers Mace of Hate maybe a clicky effect, being either:

• Self Resurrect with 90% health restored
• Group Resurrect 90% health restored, out of combat (Area Effect Resurect, all fallen group members within 50m) or Group Resurrect 30% health restored in combat.

 These will be raid only options, as the overall reward is very significant and will make them class defining weapons. This event will only be available at the current expansion level cap and will scale. So Defilers completing it with DoF could potentially get it at level 60 whereas if they are not level 60 when KoS went live, they would have to wait until level 70 to try. This may seem unfair as you may have level 60 Players with their Epic with its Epic Adornment whereas there maybe level 69 players without it, but this is supposed to be a defining adornment and should not be available to everyone easily.

I understand that this maybe a lot of hard work for the game devs, but it is a way to combat mudflation on epics and bring a little bit of individuality to a fairly linear series of quests. It also gives players who may never or rarely get the chance to raid the ability to gain at one nice piece of equipment at any given level of the game.

Gaming Diary – Dwarven Ringmail Tunic HQ

Not too much gaming this week, rl demands have pulled me in other directions. I did some grinding and a little harvesting in the Feerrott for the first time, nice to see that all my old harvesting spots are still there. I got into a few RunnyEye groups and managed to push Jitter onto 41.

Last night I finished my 10th Heritage Quest – In Honour and Service aka Dwarven Ringmail Tunic. This is a long and tedious journey around Greater Faydark with some camping of rare-ish spawns involved. Infact KSing is alive and well in EQ2, after shouting up in zone that we were camping The Expedition Leader  (a semi rare spawn) and anyone that wanted him was free to join us, he popped 3 minutes later (after over an hour of camping) 0 we were sitting right infront of his spawn, when a lvl 27 Troubadour runs in and kills him infront of us, then says ‘oh sorry were you after him, only I have come here specifically to kill him !!!!!’ then ran off. I am not going to mention his guild, but this is the second time a member of this guild has KSed me over a mob, once more they all go on ignore. Anyway another 2 hours of camping and we finally popped him. The remainder of the quest was a cakewalk after that and we were all rewarded with our Dwarven Ringmail Tunic.

I am also in a bit of a quandry as to which AA lines I want to choose. Unfortunately when I first returned to EQ2 I didn’t have the KoS expansion so I put 27 of my 40 AAs into my defiler AA tree, since getting the KoS expansion I have been putting AAs into my Shaman Tree – currently I have 4-4-4-1 in Wis and 1 in dogdog. I want to get the final spell – Ritual of Alacrity in the Wis line then need to choose what next. My gut feeling currently is Int – as the perma-dot seems a nice damage bonus - I am not a melee priest 

Gaming Diary – Haddens Earing HQ

Sitting on the docks in Nek Forest I shouted up in channel 37 Defiler LFG, virtually straight after, 4 other 30somethings shout up LFG. So I quickly decided to put a group together and see what we could do. We were short of a tank, so I shouted up for a tank, and whilst waiting, trotted over to the Enchanted Lands to Kill Burnspear – I hate that wasp.

We decided that a romp around the Ruins of Varsoon was in order and headed over to the Thundering Steppes, at the same time, I got a tell from a 41SK – bingo we had our tank and off we went. Most of the mobs in RoV were green to us – which meant faster kills and faster xp. I think that we took down every named in RoV at least once, including Varsoon himself. Master Chests were falling like confetti at a wedding and I think it is fair to say we all left with a huge amount of ‘phat lewt’.

Whilst inside RoV I finished all the required parts for Haddens Earing, namely killing Hrath T’vol a 32^^^Heroic Skelly so when I left all that was left was speaking to Kerath McMarrin on the docks of Thundering Steppes, then killing the nasty little gnome who is Captain Krieger, a 31^^^Heroic. I recruited a bit of help to kill him, as he hits like a train and would have wiped me had I tried solo. Once dead another chat to Kerath McMarrin and was rewarded with a Fishbone Earing (+8 STA   +8 AGI   +31Health   +25 Power +202 vs. Disease   +134 vs. Divine   +168 vs.Magic,  AC 55, Effect: Water Breathing) and 27,900 Status Points

Not bad for a nights work.

Congratulations Cuppycake

Listening to the ‘Shut Up. We’re Talking Podcast’ last night, Cuppy aka Tami announced that this would be her last podcast due to the fact that she has a new job. So it is with sadness I say congratulations Cuppy, I hope that all goes well in your new position as Community Manager for Areae Inc.

Cuppy, you are a brilliant podcaster and your departure from the podcasting community will be felt by many of us. Conversley what the podcasting community loses the MMO community will gain in spades, so I hope that all goes well for you, both in your relocation to San Diego and in your new job with Areae.

You can read more about Cuppy’s new job here.

I hope that Raph realises that he has someone special in employing you and looks after you well. Best Wishes

Mushii

EQ2 and UK Distribution Problems

Since returning to EQ2 I realised that I was 2 expansions short, EoF and KoS so I decided to visit my local Game to see if they had boxed copies of either – in short they had neither. I asked if they could order a copy in for me, to be told no. So I decided to trawl the web to see if I could order a boxed copy online – not one UK supplier had a copy of EoF. One or two placed had KoS but they wanted £30 +p&p !!

Some of you may say, well just buy the electronic downloads and in the end that is what I did, but firstly I like having a box (especially all the nice little in game extras that you get with a boxed set) and secondly as EoF had all previous expansions included, why should I pay twice when I could have got everything for half the price.

So my question is what is the problem? Is it as I have always suspected UbiSoft dont give a rats ass about the MMO market in the UK. Or is it that SoE dont really care about the UK market? My gut feeling after 7 years of playing SoE MMOs is both. Anything to do with PS2 or PS3 SoE seem to move heaven and earth to fill shelves with their games – so why did they let UbiSoft handle the european distribution of their flagship MMO?

Combine this distribution issue with the lack of advertising (unlike Blizzard’s WoW campaigns) and I really do wonder what SoE’s intent is with regard to their European market. At every turn European gamers feel marginalised compared to their NA couterparts – few live events, no Fan Faire (ever), no limited edition boxed sets and now no boxed copies of games at all!! Now I am no marketing major but this sure seems like a strange strategy for a company to market its products, particularly in a market where the likes of Blizzard have shown what the actual potential is.