Malchome's Mind on Gaming

My Thoughts on Mists of Pandaria

By Malchome | Published: November 30, 2011

I am of several minds on all of the news that has come out at and since Blizzcon concerning the next World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria (MoP).

Over the past few weeks I had 2 large posts plans, unfortunately when I did end up having time to work on the posts I was just not in the mood. Either mentally tired from work or sucked into The Game of Thrones book series. That series in itself could elect a few thousand word rant, I like it and hate it at the same time.

My overall opinion before getting into the details is very positive. I see even more potential in what they are doing in MoP than with Cataclysm. Hopefully unlike Cataclysm they will not screw it up. Until MoP comes out and we all can compare it to all of the other expansions and vanilla, I really think Wrath was the best expansion in terms of having something for damn near everyone.

New Race: Pandaran

I am pretty indifferent to the addition of this race as a playable option to the game. Ya they look cool and I find them interesting. I think my indifference to their inclusion and that they are going to be able to be both Horde and or Alliance, while a fantastic mechanic addition to the game, is really ya that is what we have all been expecting for years. Of all the races the Pandaran was the one that fit the mold the best to be neutral to both warring factions. I am now waiting for the Consortium race from tBC to be included like the Pandaran as a neutral starting race and then picks a side. I also expect in some future expansion for Naga and Firbolgs to be included, Naga for horde and Firbolgs for Alliance. Maybe also add Ogres and Broken in when we go back to the Twisted Nether to fight the Legion again through the additional portals in Outlands.

New Class: Monk

I was happy to see the addition of this class to the mix for several reasons. First and foremost it is a leather wearing trinity class, as in it wears leather and can perform all 3 major roles. That it is melee dps and not caster makes sense but is unfortunate due to WoWs encounter designers. I will be griping about that at a later point. I am looking forward to this class helping to balance out the loot distribution averages. I worry about the burst damage of their abilities that is going to be required to keep their dps competitive since they have no auto-attack. Again makes sense thematically but the devil is in the details when it comes to balancing damage.

New PVP : MURDER BALL!!!!

The arena can burn in hell for all I care when it comes to PvP, it has been nothing but a pain in the ass to PvE and class balance since it was implemented. So many complications have been added to the PvE side of the game due to this one feature that it really should have been removed from live servers ages ago and become it’s own sub game where it could be balanced independently of the PvE game, ya know that part of the game that actually brought millions of players to the game. Hell even world PvP, PvP servers and BGs are better for the game than arenas.

Now I have played a little bit of Murder Ball in Rifts when my subscription was still active and I have to say that the one battleground equivalent map that was a Murder Ball setup was really fun. I really like this type of dynamic play much better than Capture the Flag, King-of-the-Hill and node control that is all of our other BGs are currently designed around. There are some other forms of PvP/PvE play styles that would be interesting in my opinion but I will save them for a future post.

New PVE : Finally actual Mini-Games and (Skirmishes/Scenarios)

Between Diablo 3 for free with a one year commitment on one account and these 2 new features are what is keeping me active in WoW at the moment.

I have said for a long time that WoW needs some dedicated mini games to help fill the time when not raiding / pvp-ing / waiting on the finder Queue. The fact that it is a Pokemon-esque mini-game looks fun to me. I have always been interested in the Pokemon hand held games not so much the CCG, however I refuse to buy a new hand held device each time a new game comes out, or buy 3 different version of the same game to have access to all the choices at the current generation level. Now that something like it is being added to WoW is great IMO.

Having played many different MMOs now and still playing a few of them the Scenarios or WoW Skirmishes similar to LotROs is a very much needed addition to the PvE side of the game. Given the arms race that exsists between the encounter designers and the player-base that has been going on since MC days these have been desperately needed all through Cataclysm and even in Wrath. Something that will not really need a Tank and maybe even a Healer is a nice addition to small group content. Breaking the PvE Trinity by just requiring DPS and not standing in the fire or some other similar mechanics will allow greater throughput in a shorter period of time.

Actually this makes me thing of a relationship between length of content and the number of times it can be done before the player-base gets bored with it in either direction. Either they run it so many times they can not bare to look at it again or it takes so long to go through it, that it is not worth the commitment. The relationship reminds me of wavelength and frequency, meaning that there some sort of harmonic frequency or beat frequency that may be ideal to describe the relationship between the different types of content. Rate of reward would also need to be factored for each type of content. Hmm that will need more though to flesh out at a later time.

New PVE: Leveling Content and Normal Mode Dungeons

More stuff to do, more gear to get same old same old, pretty neutral to this segment of the details, other than there will be no lvl 90 normal mode dungeons like we saw with the 3 85lvl dungeons is nice to hear. That they are indicating that Scenarios will fill the gap here is good to hear however I hope to hell that lvl 90 is not the only bracket that scenarios will become available. Scenarios/Skirmishes start at lvl 20 in LotRO which is acceptable, a similar point or maybe lvl 30 would be equivalent in WoW. The more options to level the better IMO, I am ultimately getting sick of questing. Yes I have 11 85s, that is why I am getting sick of questing and unfortunately all of the xp nerfs in PvP/BGs at lower levels makes it annoying to level via PvP as well.

New PVE: Raids : More of the Same

The presentation from the Dungeons and Raids panel, Q&A was some of the most disappointing display of information about the next expansion. The analysis from them was also some of the most infuriating WTF moments of the weekend.

Ok first what pissed me off the most and at this time has me not caring about Raiding what so ever in MoP is the following summary. Essentially they admit that Ulduar and bosses like 3D Sarth were really popular but they did not like how you activated the multi-difficulty bosses in Ulduar. Ok I can accept that the activation process was a little arcane, but to then use that as an excuse as to why they can’t build multiple difficulty level bosses in the future is complete BULLSHIT!! You make the game you have control over how everything works in the end, don’t say that because you don’t like the interface you can’t do something. Here is an idea, CHANGE THE BLOODY INTERFACE to something you are happy with. They player base at the moment at least some of it can and will deal with the normal/heroic and the LFR/Normal/Heroic place that is in place now, ONLY BECAUSE THAT IS ALL YOU ARE GIVING US TO USE.

Now I have respect and understanding for every development team at Blizzard, with the exception of the WoW boss Encounter team and maybe the Devs that like to fill an instance with a metric fuck ton of trash between boss encounters.

New PVE: Raids : My Hope of Change

Now having bitched about a few things about the upcoming raids I hope that something more than just the LFR/Normal/Heroic paradigm in the next expansion. Keep the LFR at the easiest level with no toggle would be find, but get rid of Normal/Heroic and just have (LFR – Static Very Easy Setting, Premade – Variable Level of Difficult per Encounter).

Also if the main concept is War for MoP, please for the love of what ever Diety you believe in can we have Varian Wrynn and Garrosh Hellscream as Raid bosses in a raid like we had with ToC, 1 instance 2 different raids based on faction. I want these 2 characters to be dead for future expansions. Most Alliance don’t care about Varian and most players of both factions hate Garrosh.

In Conclusion

I still in the end the result of MoP will be positive, and at the moment am waiting on it as Cataclysm has been a Cataclysmic failure IMO and just want the pain to end.

Posted in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft | Comments closed

Interaction Design : Action and Reaction back to the Basics

By Malchome | Published: October 17, 2011

The Basics

This one is going to get a bit symbolic/math-y and I will be pulling some numbers from averages of personal experience and from what I can find on the web a large.

At the most basic level all game play become a simple 2 part procedure: action/reaction, cause/effect, stimuli/response. So to keep things simple for now lets completely ignore actually making a mistake and reacting in the wrong way.

This gives us this:

$Action \Longrightarrow Reaction$

We can then define Reaction Time as the average of the time it takes to convey the Action added to the average of the time to React to the Action. I use average here because there are several other things going on in both the Action and the Reaction.

Action Side of the Process

So on the action side of the equation the main compounding factor that adds time to the process is Latency. From my experience given my location in the US, the average latency that I experience to my server is about 125ms. I have sometimes had it as low as 70ms and not usually higher than 180ms. To state simply the Latency component is 125ms, a more accurate way of stating the range is 125 +/- 55ms.

An additional factor that can affect the network latency and Action timing would be processor/graphics lag. If your computer is under-powered in either raw processor power or the graphics card power it can also cause some lag especially in the graphics side.

This side of the equation is simple and the most straightforward of the entire evaluation.

$Action = (\vartriangle Latency) + (\vartriangle CPU Latency)$

Reaction Side of the Process

This is where it gets complicated and has the greatest amount of variability across the player base. This is also where the majority of the “difficulty” of the game comes into play or is at least emulated.

Interpretation of Action

When first reacting to a stimulus you first have to notice or be aware of the event to which you are suppose to react. For our purposes here lets call this factor Identification Time (IDt) and since this can vary between players in general we will be using an average which gives us the following symbol for later use.

$\vartriangle IDt$

Now if given a blank background and a high contrast visual reference or a silent room with one sound to signal the event, we can in general take it that the IDt will be somewhat consistent for any given player. However we know that this is for the most part not true. Yes there are add ons that will still play a sound when all other sounds are turned off but the average player does not use them. Additionally if it is a visual cue or effect to be aware of there are many factors that can make it hard to see or notice.

First lets talk about Firelands and that almost everything is a shade of red. You have to look for the red glowing make on the ground that is different from the other friendly red marks on the ground not to mention which layer of the texture effects separate it out of the yellow holy, green nature, and white light of the healer effects that you do want to stand in.

All of these sound and visual complications help to hide or make it hard to ID the event to react to, for sake of this discussion I will call this Event Obfuscation. Again the amount of obfuscation is varies greatly between players based upon many metrics and reasons. User Interface, Screen Resolution, Graphics Detail Settings, Particle Effects, and many others. This leaves us with the following symbol for the sake of this post.

$\vartriangle EOb$

Given that this is a compounding factor on the Identification time we end up with the following for Interpretation of Action part of the Reaction side of the equation.

$Int Action = (\vartriangle IDt * ( 1 + \vartriangle EOb))$

Decision of Response

Now we are at the point where the server has communicated an event has triggered and we have identified what the event is. What we do here is decide what we have to do about it. The simplest would be nothing and just continue on as we were. So to represent the simplest case we will say the average of just doing the same and we will call it the base response.

$\vartriangle BR$

Many times in a raid we do not have the simplest case. There is an additional complication at this step and I am going to go out on a limb here give a formula that is just my guess as to a trend in how much the number of options that are possible and parameters to consider when making an actual reasoned reaction. This would especially be true when learning new fights before the programmed and reflex memory gets taken into consideration.

If we make a fully connected graph with N nodes where each node is a variable to consider and the number edges are the processing penalty to fully contemplate a solution the time multiplier to apply to our base response. We will call it processing delay (PD).

$PD = N!$

When we go to make the decision we don’t contemplate the extraneous and extremely unlikely options so already some of the N are limited. I don’t have any numbers to prove any of this I am just thinking here so I will limit the PD to a more reasonable value as the following.

$PD = \log N!$

So our complete Decision of Response time would be the following.

$(PD)*(\vartriangle BR)$

Now about the log of N factorial as a limiting multiplier on the decision process was to keep the number realistic because there really end up being tipping points and when people get under pressure too much they will end up just picking something at random to react for the sake of reacting.

Time Required to Perform Reaction

The last thing to do after you identify something to react to and then decide what you need to do what is left is actually doing the action (PR). This is a pretty straight forward variable.

$\vartriangle PR$

Now the time to perform the reaction required can vary greatly between classes and positioning of said classes. Mages, Warlocks and Hunters have some of the shortest times, as long as the environment allows for it to work. I refer to Blink, Demonic Circle and Disengage. Most classes will need a set amount of time to get out of the fire so to speak. Now when tuning an encounter for a normal mode this time allocation should be pretty generous to allow players to have sufficient time to get out of the way. Additionally what ever warning that is given should also have some graphic representation of where the safe and the harmful zone is, especially if it is a one shot power or near one shot. This component was completely overturned at release for Cataclysm for Heroic The Stonecore or as myself and many others referred to it as StoneWhore.

So putting it all together we get the following.

$TotalTimeForEventReaction=(2*((\vartriangle Latency)+(\vartriangle CPU Latency)))+(\vartriangle IDt * ( 1 + \vartriangle EOb))+((PD)*(\vartriangle BR))+\vartriangle PR$

Or the Total Time for Event Reaction is equal to 2 times the total latency plus the time to identify the event plus the time it takes to decide what to do about the event and then plus the time to actually implement the decision, movement or cast time.

What does it all mean?

In the end not much Blizzard will do what Blizzard will do. Also the players will do what the players will do. Blizzard says that they have needed to make encounters more difficult and complex because we started to use addons. However players started to use addons to make up for limitations in the interface and to simplify their decision trees. So we have had an arms race on both sides and we ended up with Cataclysm after a few expansions.

Like and don’t like what they are doing with the random raid finder, while interesting and a useful tool it is more of a band-aid on a gushing wound. The wound needs reconstructive surgery and in one of my last posts I stated my opinion that the solution should be 1 raid size between the 2 current sizes and let the player base adjust to that one size and be done with it. I wish for that because it would then allow them to focus on building multiple levels of difficulty per each boss encounter for different amounts and levels of rewards based upon difficulty and not raid size.

I ultimately think that it is almost a lost cause for Warcraft, I just hope they learn from all of these issues with project Titan what ever it may be.

Posted in General Game Design | Comments closed

Raid Design for Next Expansion – Go Go 15-mans

By Malchome | Published: September 19, 2011

Well rather than get into a long explanation and then sum up my view I will just simply state what I want to say first.

As has been mentioned in the community before and even floated in a half-joking comment by a blue, raids need to be redesigned, at least with what ever raid tiers will come in the next expansion.

Raids need to be 1 size, ultimately I think given past analysis by the community, 15-man raids would be the best size moving forward.

I could go on more about the 10/25 man divide and the paradigm but there has already been so much said by me and others that I just don’t want to ramble for a 1000+ words on the subject.

Raiding was great or so they say in Vanilla, I did not raid then so can not comment. At that time there was 1 size of raiding, 40-mans there were also 2 20-man raids but they were side grades and not actually part of any tier progression.

In TBC we had the first major Guild shake up. Which was a reduction of 40-mans into 25-man raiding for all but the first raid instance. ZA a second 10-man raid was added later but was not really tuned to be anything other than the play thing of those in the 25-man raiding gear from SSC, TK, Hyjal and BT. So raiding was focused as 25-man and there was not real 10-man progression. This worked, because if you were serious about raiding you got into a 25-man raiding guild. What caused so much extra pain with this transition was the reduction of 40-man to 10-man for Kara to get intro raid gear and then having to size up to 25-man again. You either pushed on into 25-man raiding or you were stuck in “Kara Hell” for the entire expansion. I ended up being at this level for the most part because after changing servers to get into TK and SCC, I just said hell with raiding and continued to level a bunch of alts.

WotLK and Cata have both 10-man and 25-man version of all raids. There are 2 major differences between the expansions though.

The first, 10 and 25 now have the same gear and suppose to be comparable in difficulty. The tuning of difficulty between the 2 sizes has only been partly successful. Most of this comes to # of special abilities needed as far as interrupts or some such similar need.
The second and the real killer for the casual or relaxed 25 man raiding was that 10 and 25s are now on the same raid ID.

As a result of these difference we have seen raiding and the guilds that raid come crashing down with the sundering of Azeroth. The risk(time) versus reward factor was completely screwed up this expansion. Part of it was tuning and part of it was too many things changed all at once. Things also unfortunately continue to change at too fast a pace for the player base to come to terms with the changes.

In the end the player base would be better off with just 1 raid size. Ultimately a lot of 25 man groups think 10-man feels too small and getting 5 more to take a 10-man and turn it into a 15-man would be annoying but better than trying to make them into a 25-man. In this way everyone should be made to be unhappy with this trend and not just the 10 or the 25 man groups.

The key with 15-man would be that it is directly scalable from the 5 man ratios. The upper limit of tanks for the average raid encounter is 3. So 1-1-3 allows for 3 tanks in 15 to be the same number of tanks for the 5 and 15. With 10 mans one tank is almost always DPSing and in 25-man 3 tanks are almost always DPS.

After looking at several years of trends it just seems to make more sense to go with a 15-man design.

This also will hopefully allow for a more rapid development of content so that there is not 4 version of the same raid being made each tier. Now you could create almost the same number of encounters as 4*number of bosses but instead of it being 10N,10HM,25N,25HM it would be 4 different tuning levels of 1 raid size 15-man. This would allow for a more even progression difficulty curve as long as the difficulty settings are like Ulduar and not the stupid rules on current raid IDs.

Anyway I hope this thread gets picked up by others in the community so that a full dialog can hopefully come out of these initial ramblings.

Additionally I think the concept of the “Bench” also needs to get implemented, you can find more about that at Epic Slant.