Remove Int Leather, Mail, Plate and Spirit Gear

By Malchome | Published: January 27, 2012

I saw the below thread on MMO-Champion’s Blue Tracker and it I something I have thought about for a long time, especially with the addition of Monks in MoP.

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/216395-blizzard-ever-gonna-make-int-plates-useful/

I was honestly stumped on the issue until recently.  What changed you ask?  I started to play Star Wars and concepts I had thought were set in stone were changed, different and worked in The Old Republic.

What is different for those that don’t play ToR?   Well simply there is only 1 healing class that uses anything like Mana, that is the Jedi Sage healing spec, with mana being Force.  I will state now that I think one of the biggest design mistakes still in World of Warcraft given what has been said is coming in MoP is the reliance on Mana as a resource system.  Hell look at Diablo 3 even and yes we have Mana/Arcane Power like systems but then they get modified to be a little different from each other.

In ToR the Smuggler healing spec heals and has mechanics like a Rogue it was when I was healing my companion with a smuggler that I saw the realm of possibilities open up and how Blizzard has been gimping themselves for so long being tied to Mana, Mana, Mana like EQ.  I realize with how behind every project at Blizzard seems to be at the moment that this change will most likely not occur until the expansion after MoP if ever but there are many other and some better ways that Blizzard could do core mechanics and stats.

Additionally I think a new base stat would need to be added to the mix but maybe not at first.

We would then have the following for Primary stats.

Strength Plate – Warrior, Death Knight, Paladin

Agility Mail – Hunter, Shaman

Agility Leather – Rogue, Druid, Monk

Int Cloth – Mage, Warlock, Priest

The shared slots like Rings, Necks, Cloaks and Trinkets would then only have secondary stats on them and could then be more role specific not class specific.

By making the gear system simpler it also allows greater control over tuning of each spec and over all power balance across classes within a role.  Resto Druids a little behind on the overall Healing output, just tune the Agility to Healing Power Ratio slightly.  The same would be for any of the other healing classes in the Primary Ability to Spell/Healing Power conversion Ratios.  Additionally like melee classes have primary -> Attack Power everything in the end should be based on the Healing, Spell, Melee, Ranged Power and not to the Primary Stats on the character or Weapon.

I have already ranted a bit about my annoyance of using weapon damage ranges and not the universal DPS figure that already takes swing speed into account.

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WoW Metaverse Convergence

By Malchome | Published: January 26, 2012

Well at least we should all hope so.

Mentioned by myself and others recently, me here, by Cynwise here, and by Fannon here, what World of Warcraft and actually all the current generation of MMOs need to do is Converge/Merge their servers in to Environment Settings and not as individual shards.

What this means and why we need it sooner than later.

Take the list of realms for World of Warcraft at the very least all of the PvE servers that are EST should be one logical server, ideally all PvE servers within a region should be 1 super server but to allow for latency issues if the company does have multiple timezone data centers then I could understand grouping only the ones in a particular physical location.   So at the very least all PvE, PvP, RP-PvE and RP-PvP servers should be grouped with like setting servers within a specific data center so that each grouped server would act like what Elune, Sentinels, Cenarion Circle, Farstriders, Proudmore are today.

Why do we need this now or very very “soon” since soon for Blizzard still equals about 6-12 months, and has not actual relation to the meaning of the word soon.  Because if we do not get this or something like it every system in the game will need to be Battle.net centric and add layers of complexity for no good reason.

What systems am I referring, since the LFG, LFR, and BG queuing are already mostly that way, and when we get the gamer tag real id then mostly everything will be that way already.  Well yes that is correct and exactly the reason we just need to move to the next paradigm and not screw around.  There are 2 other major systems that will not be this way one really important to the solo/casual players especially the market oriented players, the Auction House for one.  A multi-realm AH would be fascinating and would help resolve availability issues of resources and crafted items for both high and low population servers.

The real 1000kg gorilla standing in the corner and is the corner stone for the in game social environment Guilds would sill be server specific unless they are completely changed as well.  If Guilds do not get the Battle.net make over like LFR,LFG,BGs then it really going to continue to be painful for guilds of any size to recruit.  Ideally membership to a guild should actually be at the Battle.net level and not the character level.  Then you also set it up such that it is a many to many relationship between Players and guilds so that the Battle.net account is not limited to one guild.  And then with the guilds and the players being cross realm enabled through real id the next logical step is server unification around environment.

I would rather see the server unification first than all of the halfway steps but I know that realistically what we have here is a 18-24 month development cycle on just these features alone.

Oh and by the way yes the same thing could be done for Star Wars: The Old Republic, Rift, LotRO, DDO any other MMO still using the EQ and earlier server design.  I am interested in seeing what Guild Wars 2 will do with these issues.

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More on MMOs TNG – Gear, Crafting and Market Systems

By Malchome | Published: January 16, 2012

After publishing I realized I focused mostly on core and social systems that would be needed in a Next Generation MMO.

While I would say that these 3 features are not necessarily going to make a game a Next Gen MMO they definitely can make or break ones experience with a game.  So in this way they are very important and if not really fleshed out for release they should be near the top of the list for the first few bug and content patches.

 

 Gear - Modifiable all the way!

This does not mean that all gear in the game needs to be modifiable in some way.  There just needs to be modular gear for most if not all levels.  This would allow a player to get a piece of gear for one item slot and update it as they level and not having to replace it every couple of levels for better stats.

3 games at the moment come to mind with something like this.

The most limited one is WoW, with jewel crafting sockets.  Some gear like this starts to become available once you hit level 60+ content since jewel crafting was first introduced with The Burning Crusade expansion that ran levels 60-70.

The second most limited is EVE-Online, actually that is how the entire games plays.  You either upgrade ships which are new complete sets of gear so to speak and then mod it out with different modules.  The modules each confer some sort of bonus which is then modified by the character’s trained skill and then there can also be a ship based bonus to 1 or more parameters.  With the exception of Strategic Cruisers there is no way to really customize your look or design in the game.  Then again that does not really matter since the point of the game usually seems to be who can kill who first.

Now there is ToR and it has at this time the best system for this that I have seen yet.  I really like just getting “orange” gear while leveling for my characters and their companions so I don’t have to do the hunt for the next piece of gear every other level to keep my stats near the content difficulty curve.

As a bonus you don’t look like a clown most of the time.

 

Crafting – Let me play the game not stand around waving my hands.

This topic and the next one Market Systems are some of the topics that I am the most vocal about in almost all games I play.  I like to make things.  I always have and always will even if the system is a major pain in the ass I will at least kick the tires on the system before deciding whether it is an activity I actually want to to do in the game or ignore.  Honestly the games with the better crafting systems end up being the games I play more often.  I know I am not a typical hardcore MMO gamer in this facet but it is definitely a facet of the MMO universe that Casual players end up participating in more.  Usually because this is one of the few systems they can actually get some sort of progression out of.  Well in most games except WoW.

I am completely disgusted with the crafting system in WoW and have been for a while now actually.  I have new hopes each patch/expansion and they are quickly crushed under the piss poor design of what materials are required and how to acquire them.  I am looking at Chaos Orbs and Dream Cloth at the moment, Titansteel while annoying at least was available.  This point of contention feeds into the next topic but as it relates to crafting.  All crafting materials need to be BoE or tradable/marketable.

Additionally Crafting materials should not usually be acquired through raiding, and if they are available in raids then all levels of raiding should have access to them no matter what iLevel the pattern is.  I am specifically referring to LFR for this part.  I have been annoyed by the raid drop only pattern and crafting material since Burning Crusade when I really started to get into the nuts and bolts of MMOs.  I started playing WoW about 8 months before tBC launched and started playing MMOs in general a few months before that with EVE-Online.

Now EVE-Online’s crafting and market system are at least an order of magnitude if not more complicated than WoW’s Crafting system.  However there is one majorly important difference between them.  In even I set up one or more production queues limited by a few character skills and I set the order and forget about it until I get a notification that my production run is done.  This is done in “real time” so simple stuff takes seconds – minutes and capital ships take Days-Weeks to complete one run.  However in the mean time you can be playing the game while your queue is processed.  I like this set and forget style many times more than the EQ, WoW, LotRO, Rift, every other EQ/WoW clone in existence style of stand around have the character wave their hands and boom 10-120 seconds later Item is done.

ToR has a system in the middle between WoW and EVE.  Your companions/crew does all of your crafting and gathering for you so once you get more than one companion you can always have them working in the background while your character and your OT/OH/DPS companion is out helping you.  This system more than almost any other thing in ToR is what has kept me playing it to the exclusion of almost all other games at the moment.

In this area I think the initial crafting system that ToR uses is similar to what should be the starting point for a crafting system in the next generation of MMOs.  It allows you to gather materials actively in the game environment or passively by sending dormant crew members out to gather for a predetermined amount of in-game currency.  The crafting process is passive in the background so you can continue to play with out “hearthing” back to town to stand in front of a forge or what ever special crafting place you need.

Market Systems – They are a game unto themselves make the user interface reflect that.

I will be brief and blunt about this.  Every MMO I have played with the exception of 1 has a really shitty in game market system with the default interface.  The only reason Warcraft’s AH is usable is by using one of 2 add ons,  Auctioneer or Auctionator.  I have not played Rift since add ons were added to the game so can’t speak of any auction based add ons there.

I like how Auctionator shows listings of the same price, the ultimate auction interface would be a mix of the 2 add ons.  The only default Market interface that I like that is not a user created addon is the market interface for EVE-Online.  CCP has made many mistakes IMO on many topics, most to support a philosophy of game play that I do not really enjoy.  It is one of the reason that I am only going to support my game time by buying PLEX in their market to burn through the 3-4B isk I still have in game.

For the starting place on the market system for a next-gen MMO it will need to have features similar to either EVE’s set up or one of the 2 auction add ons for WoW.  Other market/resource systems really will need an entire post of their own to do the topic justice.

I wanted to get this follow up to my earlier post so I could clear my plate so to speak before moving on to some other topics and these topics in greater detail.

 

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