Malchome's Mind on Gaming

For 4-6 weeks now I have been contemplating greatly on these subjects even came up with a few catchy titles to call posts about several of them at a time. In this time we have heard a bit more information about the future of some of these topics. Additionally I have seen some other information about similar issues in other games that I follow. So rather than trying to tease apart these topics I am just going for a single summarized post. The previous titles were: “Groups, Guilds and Raid IDs”, “The New Battle.net – A New Hope or Phantom Menace”.

All of these topics orbited a concern of mine with regard to Cataclysm. We need more things in WoW to bring players together rather than to stratify them into discrete types. This massive categorization may have resulted prior to TBC, however my highest level character was 54 at launch time for TBC. So if it existed in classic WoW where it was a “Raid or Die” mentality for any form of progression, I do not really know.

In Wrath you can progress relatively well if you are willing to go at a slightly slower pace content wise through PuG-ing. So guilds only really benefit as an organizational tool, even then the tools for guild organization are more outside the game than in it. Don’t get me wrong I like and appreciate where the in game calendar is going.

From the other MMOs that I have played and read up on I will list a few general concepts that hope we see in Cataclysm.

1. Break from the 1 character/1 guild paradigm. (I think this is one area where Battle.net could really play a major role.)
   1. Move to a more direct 1 Player/Many Guild system such that the permissions of any player is the sum of their characters. So you don’t have to play Alt-Tango to get stuff between guilds and alts. When you go to access a bank or any system where you have different characters and or roles, add an intermediate interface that allows us to select the “role”/Character that we draw permissions from.
   2. Another great improvement would also be to extend all non-purchased(IRL Money transaction) BoA items to be Battle.net Account Bound rather than WoW Account Bound, it would rock for collector’s editions to also work but I would rather have Heirloom Items and instant Gold/Item transfers between WoW accounts under the same Battle.net account work first.
   3. Oh and on the subject of guilds, put in a feature to allow GMs to rename a guild, prior to guild Banks not a big deal. Now after 1000s of gold have been sunk into a guild bank that is an unacceptable loss for no good reason. Especially since all it really amounts to is an update to 1 field in a DB, if the DB is even remotely normalized.
2. Improved AH, if nothing else move each AH to a Cross/Realm per Battle-group based system. This will help stabilize economies on old versus new, and low versus high population servers.
   1. Move away from the stack based unit of quantity for materials in the AH. 1 Character can place one auction per good per price. So whether you sell 10 stacks of 20 infinite dust or 200 stacks of 1 infinite dust it takes 1 entry in the DB and only gets translated into stacks when being mailed to the person buying the materials.
   2. Add a will buy X number of Y good at Price Z into the AH, the other have of a buy/sell market. This will also help keep prices from dropping below vendor, or at least add a little extra stability into the AH.

I could go on here but I first I want to make an observation/comment about Battle.net. If the vision of what Battle.net is/will/could be is even a part of what I am hoping it to be then it will be one of the best trans-gaming community support structures ever built. I really have high hopes for it, in some ways maybe not with WoW but with a future Blizzard MMO, Battle.net becomes the place where people meet/chat and greet, the game is where they just go to play. Even further the characters could be tied to some meta Battle.net structure such that Character/Server becomes meaningless. The server is just that a server to run a shard of the game world. Thereby when a Battle-group or server goes down characters and everything else are still available to any other server to run on. You would then just have servers you prefer to run on because they are in the closest data center to you but you could still play anywhere. Now if “your” server goes down you are screwed so to speak. Not really for me as an alt-o-holic but for the average player. It is this dream/vision of what Battle.net could be that led me to the title I mentioned in my first paragraph.

That grand dream being said, realistically it is not going to happen, or at least not anytime soon. If at any time I would expect something like that coming for the “next-gen” MMO that blizzard has in the works. I also would hope after Starcraft 2 is released and Battle.net is more tested that friends within the same Battle group would be able to cross-realm invite for at least 5 man dungeons if not raids.

What all of this has in common is the need for Blizzard to create new and more ways to bring players together rather than splitting them up into different sub-groups. This is the main reason I really think that guild alliances need to be made. Maybe a charter with 100g fee and requires GMs from 2 guilds to “sign” the charter. Then the alliance could be formed and it would act as a super guild structure. Then you could have the “leveling guild”, “casual guild”, “RP guild”, “pvp guild” and the “raiding guild” all under the same banner. They would each keep their own channel but members of the alliance could “guest” into the guild channel as well as share an Alliance channel. Furthermore there should be no reason or restrictions made such that 1 guild could not belong to multiple Alliances, a 1 guild to many relationship. So 1 guild could be in a PVP alliance, Raiding Alliance, RP Alliance ect… Allowing a many to many relationship may be hell on the DB or conceptually for some but allowing the player base to truly group/ally/stratify as they see fit is in the end the best way to go. Then real analysis about the player base could be made by looking at how the players on a given server organize themselves. If at some point cross-realm guilds/alliances were ever possible to be formed it would be interesting to see how the player bases on different battle-groups organize themselves.

I apologize if this post is a bit all over the place. There were several large and complex concepts that I was attempting to express. It was also written over the period of a few days when I had time to tackle the issues. I will most likely come back to some of these concepts at a later time.

This comment on the wow forums is something that I agree 100% with and thought it would be a quick way to introduce some thoughts on the subject that will lead into my other posts mentioned in the collectors edition post.

Waxen LVL 8 Tauren Warrior from Blackhand, most likely a forum alt.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=20136602894&sid=1&pageNo=6#108

Maybe you’re too young to remember the evolution of MMOs, or maybe you’re just forgetting, but the big picture is a an UNCHANGING curve of play getting more and more casual. And the more that curve moves, the higher the adoption rate goes.

That curve goes back much, much further than WoW, sunshine. I was playing MMOs back in the early 90s when they had no GUI and everything was text commands. TBC, even vanilla raiding, even EQ raiding, was total QQcasual in comparison to what grouping in those was like. Back in the MUD days, MMOs were “just for Comp Sci majors with uni accounts and telnet”.

Having seen this progression over the last 16-17 years, trust me when I say that the WoW raider who whines about the QQcasual and quits in “disgust” are being replaced by folks like my retired father, my wife, and my non-gaming bro-in-law who are getting socialized to MMOing through stuff like Facebook and finally deciding that its not just for “24 year old guys with no friends and no life”.

The “not just for” statements will just keep getting more broad, the sub numbers will keep going up, and making the learning, gearing, and time-commitment process “loleasy” are the REASON for it, not an impediment.

Ok this whether we like it or not is the future of the MMO market.  MMOs will from my generation onward become a larger and larger part of entertainment media.  Will TV, Movies go away no, will there become a blending of all 3 mediums most likely is some way, shape or form.

I first started playing games on computers with Commodore 64s and VIC120s.  One of the early computers I played on for years before getting an early 286 processor computer was an Atari computer, with 2 – 5 1/4 inch floppy drives.  My first look a the web before it was a web was through Compuserve for about a month then dropped it because it was too expensive given where we lived.  I then got into the web and telnet MUDs when I hit college.  As for the “Hardcore” I did all of that on my console games years ago.  Now I do not want to or need to rehash the same grind every single game.

For example I farmed in FF-VII till most of the characters had around 230+ in most stats by logging 20-40 hours of just the undersea shinra plane with the materia that changes enemies into items for stat boosts.  I leveled several sets of master level materia through that process.  Then went to Emerald and Ruby weapon and KotR/Mime/Mime/Mimed for 20 minutes.  In FF-X I hated the mini games for the ultimate weapons so much that in the end I farmed the mobs and monster fighting arena, boss mobs, to collect enough Dark Matter to create 3-4 of my own versions of the ultimate weapons, or as close as I could get since it did not get the base double damage increase.  One of the easiest was getting the one shield after purifying the Cursed Shield in FF-VI while fighting dinos for xp.  Ended up with 4 characters level 90+ in that game before I went and ROFL-Stomped Kefka.

However now that people are doing no armor/no weapon runs these may not seem like much.  But then again I also have a (Fun versus (% chance of success) versus Reward versus My Time) evaluation and as I have gotten older the My Time portion trumps most followed by Fun.

Actually I will come back to this evaluation and may even expand upon it when I get to the grouping and new Battle.Net posts.

I really think this (F v P v R v T) can add to the Bartle (World/Players, Acting/Interacting, Implicit/Explicit) evaluations.  Wow a 7 dimension solution space gets a bit insane, however the 4 values that I discuss are variable and are in the eye of the beholder where their limits are set.

Well I have rambled enough here and there are a few interesting things I want to contemplate further before spouting off about them.

This is going to be a short and sweet post.  *

** Tangent ***

I have several other posts stewing in the back of my mind but I am working on how to synthesize them apart into such a way as to still be coherent by themselves even thought the topics are all interconnected.  A few tag lines that I have been mulling are: “Groups, Guilds and Raid IDs”, “Rewards: One arm Bandit style or Tokens”, “The new Battle.net – A New Hope or Phantom Menace”.

All of these subjects deal with how to group people, facilitate interaction and reward for “good behavior”.  They just differ as they focus on different aspects but those aspects cannot be taken completely in isolation like you can when you look at specific mechanics of a class.  I hope to have 1 if not 2 of those posts out by the end of the weekend.

*** End Tangent ***

Ok, now back to the regularly scheduled post.

There are 4 types of people who buy Collector’s Editions of new games.

1. Avid fans of the series and want all of the extra stuff.
2. Avid fans that only want the in-game extra assuming there is one.
3. People who just want a collector’s edition to collect such items, the true collector’s.
4. People who want to profit off of the other 3 buy getting an edition with the intent to sell over the SRP.

#4 in the list are essentially scalpers of boxes rather than tickets.

I am going to suggest a few things that I can hope will occur with Cataclysm, either way I am going to try and get several CEs for myself as I have multiple accounts and one for Lissanna.

There are 2 ways to ensure that something is limited as a limited edition.  Only produce a set number of copies or make it such that the limited editions can only be ordered within a given period of time.  Blizzcon is an example of the first and we see how well that works out.  It becomes a lottery of who refreshed their screen the fastest.  Ya good job there, at least the servers did not die for 2 days this time around.

The second is the best way to handle such high demand.  The only thing is that for it to work Blizzard will need to be clear and very public about when the time frame to order the CEs.

It could even be a direct Blizzard Store order exclusive, then the CE production costs can be pre-paid before the product is ever made.  Now I would hope they would still let the normal distribution channels still order the CE but that is neither here nor there.

This modification would let types 1 & 3 get what they wanted with no problems.

Now due to the popularity of ingame pets a new version of the game could be created.  You would then have Collector’s Edition (CE), Pre-order for a limited time.  Then make a Pre-Order Edition (PE or POE) this would only include the in-game extra.  This is only available before and at release.  Then you have the Standard Edition which would be all other copies of the installation material after release.  Yes there would be some POE and SE overlap for the first few weeks but that is not really a major problem, just make sure there is an extra sticker added to the box so that extra packaging does not need to be made.

The only tricky part would be to the timing of the pre-order of the CE so that all of the CEs can be produced.  Given what some people have paid for the CE off of Ebay, Blizzard would be doing right by their most avid fans by actually setting up such a system so that those that want to pay extra for the CE can get it at the price Blizzard intended and not be ripped off by scalpers.

Well that worked out to be a bit longer than I intended.

I was looking at MMO-Champion and in one of their posts where they collect Blue Posts I saw the following text.  It ties into some of what I want to say in this post so I thought I would include it for reference.

Blue Posts from the Forums Here.

Whenever we see comments like this, we immediately assume that you have a different vision for class / spec / whatever than we do. If that is the case, you are likely to find yourself frustrated and scratching your head a lot when our changes never make the design converge on what you think it should be.

Now, we do want Subtlety to be more attractive. All of the pure dps classes have a spec that isn’t as popular as the others. Mages may be the closest because at least Frost has a viable PvP use, but there are also plenty of mages who want to be able to use Frost in end-game PvE too.

Subtlety (and Frost for that matter) are specs focused around utility. The problem is that players understandably nearly always choose damage over utility for raiding and often choose utility over damage for PvP, unless the damage is really high or the utility just doesn’t cut it for some reason.

What we are talking about doing is sharing more of the utility among other specs, or the core class, so that there aren’t “utility trees.” To do that though, we have to make the way the different specs do damage different enough so that players might choose a play-style preference over highest damage. This is particularly challenging for rogues, who have a history of giving up a preferred spec or play style for one with a sub 1% dps increase.

I think we are closest with the Arcane vs. Fire mage specs at the moment. They play a little differently, which goes beyond just the type of magic damage they do. While Fire might still do the highest damage overall, Arcane is close enough and plays different enough that even competitive players don’t feel stupid for playing that spec. There are a lot more Arcane mages out there than I think a lot of players assume.

That is harder with rogues. “I’m the sneaky one” doesn’t translate into sustained raid dps. Assassination feels like it emphasizes poisons more and Combat feels like it emphasizes weapons more, so we’re a little closer there. Subtelty needs a stronger yet damage-oriented niche.

HaT, sadly, is not a niche. HaT has scaling problems. It’s appropriate for a 5-player group, but gets too in larger groups with all of their raid buffs. We don’t want HaT to be the one talent that pushes players into Subtlety.

Now my Opinions of Rogue Gameplay

I find the rogue class in general to be somewhat schizophrenic in tree and abilities.  Before the rogue lovers lynch me on this one let me explain more fully.

The three trees are Assassination/Combat/Subtlety and at least when I want to think of archetypes for these I would select Assassin/Swashbuckler/Street Thug.  The problem with these archtypes which the lore and theme of the trees seem to suggest is that the skill and weapon implementation don’t match up.

Assassin - Poisons, Bleeds with a nasty finisher are what this spec is suppose to bring to mind.  However when I am soloing or even in groups when playing assassination I end up putting my bleeds on to get Hunger for Blood and then just go into a Eviscerate and Rupture rotation of finishers to keep up Slice and Dice.  Now I admit to not being the best rogue out there.  Hell I am lucky to be an average Rogue but , I seem to do acceptable damage for my gear, which is all I really strive for on any of my DPS classes.  The image to the right is of the miniature of Artemis Entreri from the Forgotten Realms setting of Dungeons and Dragons.

Combat - Swashbuckler so Swords and now Axes.  So essentially the dual wielding, one handed, melee monster.  The picture I selected for this is from the movie The Princess Bride, which I am sure most reading this post will be familiar with.  Now both the Dread Pirate and Inigo both really fit into the archetype for swashbuckler.  I will get into my issues with Rogue mechanics after highlighting the theme of each tree.

Subtlety - This tree is really about getting the drop on your target.  Which is why it is one of the harder trees to get a focus on for PvE.  It is really hard to get a drop on the boss, especially when they are pretty much immune to all of your lock down abilities.  Also given all the new amounts of AoE that bosses and their minions throw around being reliant on openers is a bit of a weak spot.  Now the image icon that I immediately think of when someone say stealthy and rogue one image comes to mind.  I don’t think I need to explain the image either.

Issues with Gameplay

My first and foremost complaint about Rogue mechanics from the perspective of actually playing one, not QQing about them on the forums after getting ganked by one, deals with the their specs and abilities interact with the weapons they use or lack thereof.  To put it simply too many of their abilities are weapon specific or have multiple caveats based on weapon.

Lets look at the other melee classes.  This gives us Druids, Shaman, Paladins, Warriors and Deathknights, now I am going to ignore Druids in this exercise, sorry those coming from Restokin because Druid feral weapon mechanics make it a moot point.  The other 4 classes that use melee weapons with a very few exceptions do not have their specs and abilities drastically changing based on the weapon they have equipped.  For all intents and purposes an Axe = Sword = Mace = Dagger for one handed weapons and 2H-Sword = 2H-Mace = 2H-Axe = Pole-arm for calculating damage.  Now I know there are some weapon specializations in the Warrior Arms tree but in all of the other trees the specific type of weapon in irrelevant and only the broad category matters, 1H versus 2H.

After looking at some of the source code for Rawr, which is a very useful dps/tanking modeling program, from the equations these differences especially for the Rogue are because they use Average Weapon damage to calculate the damage value of special abilities.  This is why certain classes want a slow main hand weapon, because as damage output for such abilities increases as the time between swings increases.  This is because to maintain a consistent DPS for a tier of weapons if the swing timer goes up so must the average damage per swing.

Now when I first started looking into this I went to WoWhead and copied the names of about 30 1 handed and 2 handed weapons.  I then looked at the min damage and max damage that each weapon would do before taking anything else into consideration.  The really cool thing was that on average over all any weapon’s min and max damage when compared to the average of the 2 values is +/- 30%.  The gambit of values were between at 28.9 – 31.1 so a quick eye balling of the numbers tells you it hovers around 30%.  So what this means is that if we want all special abilities to scale equally based on the DPS of the weapon.  Then we just need to take the DPS * (.7 – 1.3) + all other modifiers.  This then removes the weapon speed component from the formula directly as it is an intrinsic part of the DPS.

If we were to base special ability damage off of DPS and not weapon damage.  Then this means that Back-stab, Mutilate and any other abilities that may have a limit placed on them because of previous weapon speed dependency can have it removed.

This was very annoying when leveling Assassination because there were so few Dagger upgrades while leveling.  Ya there are a good amount at 80 but you can get a good pair late 60s/early 70s and then one more set at 76 then nothing until you get the crafted epic or run dungeons at 80.  If you go combat then you loose several of your abilities because they are dagger restricted.  Also as a side note it is really stupid conceptually to have Dagger Main hand and  something else much larger off hand.  When ever I have been fencing with 2 weapons you almost always put the heavier weapon in your main/stronger hand.  Now you may lead with the dagger based on stance and positioning but saying you can’t backstab because your dagger is in your “off” hand is kinda dumb.   It should be as long as a dagger is equipped you can backstab.  The code just checks for first available Dagger.  If you are dual wielding daggers it goes from the main hand otherwise it uses the off hand.

Now the one thing this modification would not affect would be the benefit of a fast off hand for rogues when it comes to energy regen.  I really don’t have a problem with this, however I would say for modeling and balancing purposes that ability should go to a Procs per Minute system.  Similar to the HaT and or the Feral Druid leader of the pack restriction.

All I can say is that I hope that in the 4.0 changes Rogues get an overhaul so that each tree is focused on a couple of weapons each.  The close quarters combat daggers should be merged into the assassination tree because you almost always would go deep in Assassination then go into combat for those first 15-18 talents.  This is where with the new talent allocation screen where you see all 3 trees at once you could start putting interesting talents in the first few tiers of each tree that require talents in 2 trees.  Keep them on the edge with the associated tree.  Assume that to the left of Assassination was Subtlety and the opposite for Subtlety.

So I was planning on releasing my next post as one on Rogues that I have been working on but after seeing a few things in my blog reader I changed my mind.

Ok so I read Tobold’s post about Design principles for crafting and economic systems.  In general he has a nice summary of some of the things that need to be considered when designing a crafting and economic system in a game.  I have thought about the subject at length over the years that I have been playing WoW.  In Tobold’s post he mentions another blogger’s post about crafting interfaces.  Now I looked around Ixobelle’s site a bit and read most of the post that Tobold mentions.  I say most because as soon as I got about half way through I immediately wanted to post here about the subject.

Ixobelle has some very good ideas for a crafting system and an interface for crafting.  I just don’t think they would fit into WoW unless there were major and I mean major overhaul of all crafting and market systems.   While I see the possibility of large changes coming to crafting in Cataclysm I don’t think the changes will be that drastic.  I can also say with 100% certainty that if the crafting system was changed to something like Ixobelle suggests then I would not craft at all.  Not saying that the system would not be a good one, just that it would be a system that was so time and concentration intensive that I would not want to deal with it.

Now I now the question that some may ask is how do you know that you would not want to use such an involved crafting system.  The answer to that is simple, been there done that, thanks but no thanks.  Vanguard boasts about being able to level up as a crafter.  There are 3 facets to your character that can all have independent levels: Adventurer, Diplomat, Crafter.   The system and process that Ixobelle describes is much like Vanguard in the grind-fest that is the crafting process.

The Marketplace

Now one thing that I can agree with between the 2 posts is that WoW needs a new market system regardless of any crafting changes coming.  Also when it comes to the market place be it vendors and or the AH we need to get away from the stack concept.  What I mean by this is that items in the AH are no longer sold in stacks or as individual items.

• You list items as a total number of items sold of a given type buy a player at a given price.  No more of 3 pages of infinite dust in stacks of 1 sold by the same person.  Yes I have done it to make gold, it is a prickish move I hate everyone that does it even myself when I do it.
• All AH actions should be queued and on a 1 minute basis all in game mail is sent at once.  This will allow the AH to bundle items into a single mail of up to 12 items or multiple emails 12 stacks at a time.
• When you buy or sell items to set the number you want to buy.  You then buy that many from that user or as many as they have left.  Since someone may have been able to buy from them at the same time.
• The auction house is no longer a system of only sell orders.  Users are able to put gold in escrow with the AH to auto buy X items at Y price if a user selects their buy orders.  See EVE-Online’s market.
• All named static items are now statically listed in the AH whether there are any on the market or not.  Only thing not able to have Buy Orders placed in advance are for random generated items.  So all BoE world and Dungeon drops that are not random (of the bear) types are enumerated in the AH, additionally all crafted unbound reagents, materials, and crafted Items should also be enumerated.  Players are then able to set buy orders.
• A buy order contains – Player A will buy N Number of Items X at Price Y for the next Z hours(days).

This somewhat involved change would go a long way in improving WoW’s ingame economy.  Currently there is only a trend that over time will deflate prices into absurdity.  However with the buy side of the equation added there will also be inflationary forces in the market.  This will eventually act as a stablilizing force where the buy and sell order price will approach the same value.

Crafting System minor upgrade

Before WoW gets anything like a more involved crafting system it needs to have a bit of a general overhaul first.  The following things I would hope get considered before anything overly drastic is done with how we craft.

• Full itemization on what we craft.  All slots of a character’s gear should be assigned to a crafting profession.  Not a proposed system that will be implemented 2 expansions from now.  But all slots and item times allocated to one or more professions.
• Renormalization of crafting materials required. The items we need to craft with are the resources available at the levels we would normally be encountering them and the gear crafted is useful to characters that are actually leveling the profession.  I finally get enough Thorium to buy and craft the chest piece when I hit 60 not the level 52 that the item may be.  You would now level past the point of usefulness just by gathering the resources yourself.
• Add an intermediate crafting material stage to all professions, similar to Engineering making parts first then crafting an item later.  Blacksmithing  could have Scales, Wire, Rings, Rivits, Hilts, Guards, ect that are crafted first and then combined with other raw and processed resources.

New Type of Pattern

One of my pet ideas when it has come to crafting was the concept of Meta Patterns, given more recent terminology in WoW a Heirloom pattern.  It creates an item where the ILevel of the output is based on the ILevel of the input.

If we are going to approach a mini-game requirement added to crafting I would rather it be an intellectual exercise like a puzzle than an interactive grind-fest like Vanguard.