Blatantly stealing a frequently used headling from Killed in a Smiling Accident, I'll experiment with a for me unusual form of writing: Just throwing out a single thought, without writing several paragraphs about it.
The thought for the day is about success, triggered by a comment from a reader who said that people who concentrate on playing a single avatar are more successful than those with alts. Yes, but only if you define success as linear progress in the end game. If the purpose of a game is to entertain, isn't the guy who is completely happy with a dozen alts more successful than the guy who has a single avatar and who is starting to burn out?
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Thursday, September 3, 2009
The power of social structures
World of Warcraft is a great anthropological example of why people tend to organize themselves into social structures like families, tribes, or nations: The social structure is more powerful than the sum of its parts. Everybody in WoW knows that a guild group is more likely to succeed at any given dungeon or raid than a pickup group. Some people think that this is because in pickup groups there is a higher concentration of exceptionally bad players. But if you have a look, you'll find that almost always everybody in the pickup group has a guild tag, and they'd all succeed if they were in a group with their guild mates. If you take 10 successful 10-man Naxxramas guild raids groups, and reorganize them into 10 pickup raids with one guy from each of the 10 guilds in each raid, you'd get 10 far less successful groups. In spite of that being exactly the same pool of people.
The little bit of extra trust the common guild tag gives everyone, the knowledge that you'll probably play together with the same people again, makes everyone in a guild group perform better, and be a lot less likely to give up. Being in a guild group makes people succeed in dungeons and raids which they couldn't have done in a pickup group.
The only disadvantage is that the added power of a guild is usually quite focused on whatever step of the raid circuit the guild is at. There are theories that the number of stable social relationships an individual can have is limited by the size of the neocortex in that species, and that this Dunbar's number for humans is about 150, which has been linked to the maximum size of guilds in MMORPGs. Whether that is true, or whether guilds simply tend towards a size at which during prime time there are enough people online to form one raid, fact is that guilds rarely get to a size where they would be able to organize several raids to different locations in parallel. My guild is doing Ulduar raids, with 10 or 25 raiders depending on numbers present, but Naxxramas raids aren't on the official schedule any more. They sometimes form spontaneously on off-raid nights, but they don't benefit from the same degree of scheduling and organization than the Ulduar raids. Which is why my warrior is pretty much stuck where he is, at pre-raid gear level, with not much hope of getting into a good Naxxramas raid. I once tried to get into a pickup raid, but was asked to link the [Epic] achievement to get an invite. Listen, buddy, if I had the complete set of Naxxramas gear I'd need for the [Epic] achievement, I wouldn't be asking for a group to go there!
So I was wondering if MMORPGs will one day evolve to offer more than the simple social structure of the guild. Wouldn't it be great to have some social structures that would allow a similar degree of cooperation and success as a guild, but also for alts? Some people suggested allowing people to have multiple guild tags, which would be one step. Another idea would be to have one main guild, but an optional additional membership to some other social structure for alts, for example a club of alts who want to do Naxxramas or heroics. How can we harness the power of social structures for our alts, instead of exposing them to the horrors of the pickup raid?
The little bit of extra trust the common guild tag gives everyone, the knowledge that you'll probably play together with the same people again, makes everyone in a guild group perform better, and be a lot less likely to give up. Being in a guild group makes people succeed in dungeons and raids which they couldn't have done in a pickup group.
The only disadvantage is that the added power of a guild is usually quite focused on whatever step of the raid circuit the guild is at. There are theories that the number of stable social relationships an individual can have is limited by the size of the neocortex in that species, and that this Dunbar's number for humans is about 150, which has been linked to the maximum size of guilds in MMORPGs. Whether that is true, or whether guilds simply tend towards a size at which during prime time there are enough people online to form one raid, fact is that guilds rarely get to a size where they would be able to organize several raids to different locations in parallel. My guild is doing Ulduar raids, with 10 or 25 raiders depending on numbers present, but Naxxramas raids aren't on the official schedule any more. They sometimes form spontaneously on off-raid nights, but they don't benefit from the same degree of scheduling and organization than the Ulduar raids. Which is why my warrior is pretty much stuck where he is, at pre-raid gear level, with not much hope of getting into a good Naxxramas raid. I once tried to get into a pickup raid, but was asked to link the [Epic] achievement to get an invite. Listen, buddy, if I had the complete set of Naxxramas gear I'd need for the [Epic] achievement, I wouldn't be asking for a group to go there!
So I was wondering if MMORPGs will one day evolve to offer more than the simple social structure of the guild. Wouldn't it be great to have some social structures that would allow a similar degree of cooperation and success as a guild, but also for alts? Some people suggested allowing people to have multiple guild tags, which would be one step. Another idea would be to have one main guild, but an optional additional membership to some other social structure for alts, for example a club of alts who want to do Naxxramas or heroics. How can we harness the power of social structures for our alts, instead of exposing them to the horrors of the pickup raid?
How much for that Blizzard all access pass?
Gordon from We Fly Spitfires doubts many people will subscribe to both World of Warcraft and Blizzard's next MMO at the same time. I think that if these two subscriptions are strictly separate, Gordon is probably right. But he also mentions the possibility of a SOE "station access" like deal, and says it would have to be at a "reasonable price point". And I think that this is the key to the issue.
The SOE station access currently costs $29.99 per month, plus taxes. Which means that you basically need to play THREE SOE games for that to become a good deal. I have no data on how many people took that offer from SOE, but I would be surprised if it was a large percentage of their players. And that is with SOE offering 8 games to choose from. Unless they'd threw in some Battle.net Diablo III or Starcraft II goodies, Blizzard would only have two games on offer, and "play 2 games for the price of 2" doesn't make for good marketing.
You'd need to be seriously weird to play two MMORPGs on two computer simultaneously, unless at least one of them is an Asian AFK grinder. With whatever your favorite MMORPG is at the moment taking up a significant amount of your time, a more likely scenario for multiple subscriptions is having one main game, and playing the other just minimally, like checking the auction house daily. Or playing WoW on raid nights, and the other Blizzard MMO on the other nights. One could also imagine people playing one game intensively for some time, e.g. after a content patch, and then switching to the other game, back and forth, after some weeks.
In any case, having two subscription is extremely unlikely to result in you playing twice as much. Thus most players would be reluctant to pay twice as much for that. A clever offer will take that into account. If, for example, the Blizzard all access pass were to cost $19.99, a good number of people would go for it, as you basically pay $5 per month for the convenience of switching between games without the hassle of subscribing and unsubscribing, or for playing a second game at low intensity.
If your favorite MMORPG company had two games, each costing $15 per month, what would you be willing to pay to play the both?
The SOE station access currently costs $29.99 per month, plus taxes. Which means that you basically need to play THREE SOE games for that to become a good deal. I have no data on how many people took that offer from SOE, but I would be surprised if it was a large percentage of their players. And that is with SOE offering 8 games to choose from. Unless they'd threw in some Battle.net Diablo III or Starcraft II goodies, Blizzard would only have two games on offer, and "play 2 games for the price of 2" doesn't make for good marketing.
You'd need to be seriously weird to play two MMORPGs on two computer simultaneously, unless at least one of them is an Asian AFK grinder. With whatever your favorite MMORPG is at the moment taking up a significant amount of your time, a more likely scenario for multiple subscriptions is having one main game, and playing the other just minimally, like checking the auction house daily. Or playing WoW on raid nights, and the other Blizzard MMO on the other nights. One could also imagine people playing one game intensively for some time, e.g. after a content patch, and then switching to the other game, back and forth, after some weeks.
In any case, having two subscription is extremely unlikely to result in you playing twice as much. Thus most players would be reluctant to pay twice as much for that. A clever offer will take that into account. If, for example, the Blizzard all access pass were to cost $19.99, a good number of people would go for it, as you basically pay $5 per month for the convenience of switching between games without the hassle of subscribing and unsubscribing, or for playing a second game at low intensity.
If your favorite MMORPG company had two games, each costing $15 per month, what would you be willing to pay to play the both?
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
The Illusion of Impact
World of Warcraft is a highly strategic game, in which players have to figure out what the best strategy is to beat a raid boss. Guilds in World of Warcraft become so famous that they get sponsoring contracts from international companies, and appear on TV. World of Warcraft is also a highly creative game, in which players make videos about how they and their friends play WoW, get millions of hits on YouTube, and end up making music videos starring themselves.
Does this sound like a representative description of World of Warcraft to you? Obviously it is not. While everything I listed there is documented and true, this is not how World of Warcraft plays for the average player. Only a handful of players figure out raid boss strategies, everybody else just follows them. Guilds with sponsoring contracts like Ensidia are few and far between. And, thank God, there aren't all that many Felicia Days making Do You Want to Date my Avatar music videos.
EVE Online is a game of high intrigue, politics, and treachery. Guilds get toppled by assassins setting up a clever trap. The universe's most powerful alliances break up when a highly placed member turns traitor. Players pull of clever scams and bank heists, and get away with stealing virtual currency they can legally sell for thousands of dollars.
Does this sound like a representative description of EVE Online to you? Obviously it is not. While everything I listed there is documented and true, this is not how EVE Online plays for the average player. Only a handful of players is engaged in high politics or intergalactic bank scams. The average EVE player logs on, does a couple of missions, gets into a couple of space fights, mines a little, transports some goods, and logs off again.
Why, oh why, are we letting the fans and makers of EVE Online get away with presenting their game as something which it isn't for the huge majority of players, and do not apply the same logic to other games, be it World of Warcraft or anything else? Every game has a few outstanding players that have a huge impact on how the rest of the players play the game. If you happen to be the first to kill a boss in World of Warcraft, and post the strategy on YouTube and elsewhere, *millions* of players will follow your instructions to the letter, or die trying. If you subvert a powerful alliance in EVE, you'll make headlines on various gaming sites. But that is not what these games are about for the regular player. Whether you could become the next Felicia Day or the next Haargoth Agamar is about as relevant for your daily life as whether you could become the next president of the United States. That isn't to say it is impossible, it just is so extremely unlikely that it doesn't really matter.
It is certainly true that World of Warcraft raid gameplay is more scripted than gameplay in more sandboxy virtual worlds. Two different raid groups killing Onyxia back in vanilla WoW did so in very, very similar ways, because the scripted behavior of the raid boss determines the players strategy. But then, if you play for example Warhammer Online and participate in several keep raids in different locations, you'll notice that there will also be huge similarities between the different events. There is nothing scripted, but the layout of the keep, plus the way the game works, ends up determining player strategy just the same way.
The whole idea that the behavior of a single player will impact the whole virtual world is a carefully crafted and marketed illusion. Just like the illusion that *you* could become president, or win the lottery. It isn't strictly false, and as there are obviously presidents and lottery winners and players influencing virtual worlds, it is easy to keep up the illusion. But you can do statistics, and see that out of 300 million Americans only 1 is president, that the chance to win the lottery is 1 in X million, and that out of 300,000 EVE players only a handful ever had a major impact on the world. To know what a game is really about, you have to look at what the average player is doing in it, not what a few exceptional personalities do.
P.S. As I had to moderate one comment on this subject in yesterday's thread, I'd like to remind you that you do have the right to strongly disagree with what I say here, but only as long as you manage to do that without name calling. Insulting me or your fellow commenters is not only not helping your argument, it will also result in your argument not getting posted in the first place.
Does this sound like a representative description of World of Warcraft to you? Obviously it is not. While everything I listed there is documented and true, this is not how World of Warcraft plays for the average player. Only a handful of players figure out raid boss strategies, everybody else just follows them. Guilds with sponsoring contracts like Ensidia are few and far between. And, thank God, there aren't all that many Felicia Days making Do You Want to Date my Avatar music videos.
EVE Online is a game of high intrigue, politics, and treachery. Guilds get toppled by assassins setting up a clever trap. The universe's most powerful alliances break up when a highly placed member turns traitor. Players pull of clever scams and bank heists, and get away with stealing virtual currency they can legally sell for thousands of dollars.
Does this sound like a representative description of EVE Online to you? Obviously it is not. While everything I listed there is documented and true, this is not how EVE Online plays for the average player. Only a handful of players is engaged in high politics or intergalactic bank scams. The average EVE player logs on, does a couple of missions, gets into a couple of space fights, mines a little, transports some goods, and logs off again.
Why, oh why, are we letting the fans and makers of EVE Online get away with presenting their game as something which it isn't for the huge majority of players, and do not apply the same logic to other games, be it World of Warcraft or anything else? Every game has a few outstanding players that have a huge impact on how the rest of the players play the game. If you happen to be the first to kill a boss in World of Warcraft, and post the strategy on YouTube and elsewhere, *millions* of players will follow your instructions to the letter, or die trying. If you subvert a powerful alliance in EVE, you'll make headlines on various gaming sites. But that is not what these games are about for the regular player. Whether you could become the next Felicia Day or the next Haargoth Agamar is about as relevant for your daily life as whether you could become the next president of the United States. That isn't to say it is impossible, it just is so extremely unlikely that it doesn't really matter.
It is certainly true that World of Warcraft raid gameplay is more scripted than gameplay in more sandboxy virtual worlds. Two different raid groups killing Onyxia back in vanilla WoW did so in very, very similar ways, because the scripted behavior of the raid boss determines the players strategy. But then, if you play for example Warhammer Online and participate in several keep raids in different locations, you'll notice that there will also be huge similarities between the different events. There is nothing scripted, but the layout of the keep, plus the way the game works, ends up determining player strategy just the same way.
The whole idea that the behavior of a single player will impact the whole virtual world is a carefully crafted and marketed illusion. Just like the illusion that *you* could become president, or win the lottery. It isn't strictly false, and as there are obviously presidents and lottery winners and players influencing virtual worlds, it is easy to keep up the illusion. But you can do statistics, and see that out of 300 million Americans only 1 is president, that the chance to win the lottery is 1 in X million, and that out of 300,000 EVE players only a handful ever had a major impact on the world. To know what a game is really about, you have to look at what the average player is doing in it, not what a few exceptional personalities do.
P.S. As I had to moderate one comment on this subject in yesterday's thread, I'd like to remind you that you do have the right to strongly disagree with what I say here, but only as long as you manage to do that without name calling. Insulting me or your fellow commenters is not only not helping your argument, it will also result in your argument not getting posted in the first place.
Dual spec for warriors
As I mentioned before, going dual spec on my holy priest was a huge success. In very short time I had a shadow spec, and spell rotation, and with just minimal changes to my raid healing gear I was easily doing 3k DPS with my second spec, both on a training dummy and then in a raid. So of course I tried to apply the same idea to my protection warrior: Follow Spink's guide of Fury for Beginners, slightly updated for a patch 3.2 fury build, use the Bloodthirst > Whirlwind > Heroic Strike rotation, and transform my tank into a damage machine. Unfortunately it didn't work out that way.
I had picked up over time some dps plate. But while my tank gear is universally iLevel 200, my dps gear is on average iLevel 187, with some iLevel 200 and some iLevel 174 pieces mixed in. But hey, everybody is telling me that "gear doesn't matter", and at least I had two good epic two-handed weapons, the smithed one, and the one you can buy for 25 Champion's Seals. So I set up Fury as second spec, my dps plate gear in the new equipment manager, and traveled to the training dummy in Orgrimmar to test how much damage I did as protection warrior in defensive stance, and how much I did as fury warrior in berserk stance. The result was a huge disappointment: On the heroic 80 dummy both of my specs produced nearly the same result, and that was less than 1k dps.
That appeared somewhat fishy, as I had previously done over 1.3k dps as tank in heroics when I wasn't even trying to maximize damage. Part of the answer of course was rage: As a tank I get hit a lot, which produces a lot of rage, powering all my abilities. But how is that supposed to work for a fury warrior, who as dps in a group shouldn't get hit at all, or very little?
I tried the two specs on regular level 80 mobs in Icecrown next. The results were better, but still there was only a small difference between the dps I did as fury, just about 10% more than I did as protection. And of course even at just over 1k dps, a regular level 80 mob dies in a few seconds, so it is hard to get a steady spell rotation going. I need an improved dummy with lots of health which hits back. Hmmm. Where do I find one of those?
A short trip to Molten Core later, I'm standing in front of two impressive molten giants. Those will do! First attempt in fury spec I'm getting my ass kicked, and need to run out, because the two giants both hit me at the same time. Second attempt as tank works a lot better. I could easily have soloed both giants, but stop before the second giant dies. Third attempt with fury again, this time against only one giant, and I'm doing fine. But the overall result is 1.6k dps in protection spec, defensive stance, and protection gear. And only 1.8k dps in fury spec, berserk stance, and dps gear. Given how much more vulnerable I am in dps gear, that appears hardly worth it.
Now I assume that if I had full iLevel 200 dps gear, I would do better, and there would be more of a difference between protection and fury. But either I'm completely missing something, or getting to 3k dps with a warrior is going to be rather hard in pre-raid gear, unless I'm farming heroics and battlegrounds for months. And then of course the question is why should I bother, if I already have a priest who can easily do dps if needed.
All in all the dual spec experience of my warrior was disappointing. Unlike the priest, where +spellpower is useful for both specs, the +defense, armor, and stamina I'm looking for my protection warrior's tanking gear is doing nothing for the dps of my fury spec. Thus a warrior needs two completely separate sets of gear to dual spec. And even when he got that, the difference in dps between tank spec and dps spec is smaller than the priests difference in dps between holy spec and shadow spec. For the moment I'm just staying in tank spec with my warrior for doing quests etc., and I'm certainly not joining any groups as dps, I'd be ashamed. I think I wasted 1,000 gold here, what do you think? Anyone got a successful tank/dps dual spec warrior going?
I had picked up over time some dps plate. But while my tank gear is universally iLevel 200, my dps gear is on average iLevel 187, with some iLevel 200 and some iLevel 174 pieces mixed in. But hey, everybody is telling me that "gear doesn't matter", and at least I had two good epic two-handed weapons, the smithed one, and the one you can buy for 25 Champion's Seals. So I set up Fury as second spec, my dps plate gear in the new equipment manager, and traveled to the training dummy in Orgrimmar to test how much damage I did as protection warrior in defensive stance, and how much I did as fury warrior in berserk stance. The result was a huge disappointment: On the heroic 80 dummy both of my specs produced nearly the same result, and that was less than 1k dps.
That appeared somewhat fishy, as I had previously done over 1.3k dps as tank in heroics when I wasn't even trying to maximize damage. Part of the answer of course was rage: As a tank I get hit a lot, which produces a lot of rage, powering all my abilities. But how is that supposed to work for a fury warrior, who as dps in a group shouldn't get hit at all, or very little?
I tried the two specs on regular level 80 mobs in Icecrown next. The results were better, but still there was only a small difference between the dps I did as fury, just about 10% more than I did as protection. And of course even at just over 1k dps, a regular level 80 mob dies in a few seconds, so it is hard to get a steady spell rotation going. I need an improved dummy with lots of health which hits back. Hmmm. Where do I find one of those?
A short trip to Molten Core later, I'm standing in front of two impressive molten giants. Those will do! First attempt in fury spec I'm getting my ass kicked, and need to run out, because the two giants both hit me at the same time. Second attempt as tank works a lot better. I could easily have soloed both giants, but stop before the second giant dies. Third attempt with fury again, this time against only one giant, and I'm doing fine. But the overall result is 1.6k dps in protection spec, defensive stance, and protection gear. And only 1.8k dps in fury spec, berserk stance, and dps gear. Given how much more vulnerable I am in dps gear, that appears hardly worth it.
Now I assume that if I had full iLevel 200 dps gear, I would do better, and there would be more of a difference between protection and fury. But either I'm completely missing something, or getting to 3k dps with a warrior is going to be rather hard in pre-raid gear, unless I'm farming heroics and battlegrounds for months. And then of course the question is why should I bother, if I already have a priest who can easily do dps if needed.
All in all the dual spec experience of my warrior was disappointing. Unlike the priest, where +spellpower is useful for both specs, the +defense, armor, and stamina I'm looking for my protection warrior's tanking gear is doing nothing for the dps of my fury spec. Thus a warrior needs two completely separate sets of gear to dual spec. And even when he got that, the difference in dps between tank spec and dps spec is smaller than the priests difference in dps between holy spec and shadow spec. For the moment I'm just staying in tank spec with my warrior for doing quests etc., and I'm certainly not joining any groups as dps, I'd be ashamed. I think I wasted 1,000 gold here, what do you think? Anyone got a successful tank/dps dual spec warrior going?
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Binding MMORPGs together
In a recent interview in Wired, Blizzard COO Paul Sams stated that their next MMO would be "significantly different" from WoW, so as to not canibalize WoW's user base. Now I have this great idea what they could do: Blizzard could do a fantasy space-flight MMO with a twist, with every planet representing a World of Warcraft server. So there would be a huge intergalactic war going on in space in the new MMO, but the outcome of PvP events on various WoW servers would have an influence on that war. The two MMOs would be bound together, each having an influence on the other, and players could communicate from one game to the other.
Of course the idea isn't actually mine. And it isn't actually Blizzard's either. In fact the idea is from the makers of EVE Online, who want to create a MMOFPS called Dust 514. Every planet in the EVE Online universe would be a battlefield in Dust 514, and the PvP in the two games would influence each other. Still early days, and a bit hazy about how exactly all of this would be working. But the idea to bind together two MMOs is out there.
Is this a good idea? I'm not quite convinced yet, because there are huge, obvious pitfalls. In spite of what EVE Online marketing videos try to tell you, already the influence of a single player on the galaxy of EVE is rather small. So who wants to play the Dust 514 grunt working for that insignificant EVE player? Or what EVE player wants to be told that his guild just lost a planet because the Dust 514 players on their side went afk? You really can't make the events in one game have too much of an influence in another game, as people get frustrated to be thwarted by actions which are not only outside their control, but even outside their game. But if there is relatively little connection between the games, then why bother?
I want you to help with a thought experiment: Imagine whatever MMO you are currently playing. How would you make a second MMO from the same company bind to your game? Where would the two games be connected, what would be the influence of your game on the other game and vice versa? Do you think this could possibly work?
Of course the idea isn't actually mine. And it isn't actually Blizzard's either. In fact the idea is from the makers of EVE Online, who want to create a MMOFPS called Dust 514. Every planet in the EVE Online universe would be a battlefield in Dust 514, and the PvP in the two games would influence each other. Still early days, and a bit hazy about how exactly all of this would be working. But the idea to bind together two MMOs is out there.
Is this a good idea? I'm not quite convinced yet, because there are huge, obvious pitfalls. In spite of what EVE Online marketing videos try to tell you, already the influence of a single player on the galaxy of EVE is rather small. So who wants to play the Dust 514 grunt working for that insignificant EVE player? Or what EVE player wants to be told that his guild just lost a planet because the Dust 514 players on their side went afk? You really can't make the events in one game have too much of an influence in another game, as people get frustrated to be thwarted by actions which are not only outside their control, but even outside their game. But if there is relatively little connection between the games, then why bother?
I want you to help with a thought experiment: Imagine whatever MMO you are currently playing. How would you make a second MMO from the same company bind to your game? Where would the two games be connected, what would be the influence of your game on the other game and vice versa? Do you think this could possibly work?
Towards a token reward system
After some difficulties your group finally did it: The last boss of the heroic dungeon is dead. With the previous bosses just having dropped blue gear, you'll finally get an epic reward. Hmmm, it's plate with +int and +spellpower bonus. There is no paladin in your group. Disenchant, and get a shard which isn't even worth much any more nowadays. Fortunately this was the daily heroic, so you also get 2 Emblem of Triumph, and you picked up Emblems of Conquest and maybe some stone keeper's shards as well if your faction controls Wintergrasp. Sure, the handful of tokens you get from one run won't buy you anything yet. But ultimately the gear you will be able to buy with the tokens is even better than the potential epic loot drop. To the point that even people who couldn't possibly find a gear upgrade in a heroic dungeon are still doing heroics for the tokens. Is World of Warcraft moving towards a reward system which is more and more dominated by tokens? And is that the reward system of MMORPGs of the future?
Epic loot drops are a bit like a lottery, and many people like lottery systems like that. Oh joy, the tanking trinket in Trial of Champions normal dropped! But the other side of the coin is the frustration of the guy who does toc normal ten times and never gets the trinket. The vendor sale value of an epic nobody needs is just a few gold pieces, the auction house values of a shard if you have a disenchanter not much better, and so there is a huge gap between getting a bad drop, or a useful epic, which if you compare it to the price of BoE epics on the AH can easily be worth a thousand gold or more. So without tokens, a heroic run is either rewarded by less money than you would have gotten doing dailies in the same time, or something extremely useful. That appeals to the gambler in us, but can be extremely frustrating if we have a bad streak.
Epic loot tables also influence who wants to go where. Trial of Champions on normal potentially giving that extremely good tanking trinket means that this is the one dungeon for which you can easily find a tank. But not necessarily a healer, because there isn't an equally attractive piece of healing gear on the loot tables. Meanwhile the healers are queueing up in front of a another heroic, where the healing gear is to be found, but can find no tank, because the place gives no tanking gear.
Add tokens to the mix, and things are looking up. Getting a group together for the daily heroic is a lot easier than for anywhere else, because of the guaranteed reward. And as everyone can spend his tokens on whatever gear he needs, everybody is equally interested. You can even use your tokens to buy gear for your off-spec, without the holy priest getting into discussions with the mage on whether the priest is allowed to roll for dps cloth for his shadow spec.
As the latest WoW patches showed, tokens can also revive content that was threatened with becoming redundant. In vanilla WoW, once you had the gear from Molten Core, there was absolutely no reason to still run 5-man dungeons. Today doing 5-man heroics is still a very big part of the WoW endgame, even for people who will find no gear upgrade on the heroics loot tables any more. That also involves more mixing between raiders and non-raiders, which can be a good thing. Instead of being stuck with one particular slice of content, the one which is just easy enough to yield loot upgrades for you, players in the end game now have a good reason to go back to 5-man content, which is a lot easier to get going outside typical raid times.
So the question now is, will loot drops become less and less important, until they completely disappear in some future WoW expansion or next-generation MMORPG? Will we arrive at a situation where ninja-looting and DKP systems became a thing of the past, because everybody just gets some tokens for the boss kill? Or is the gambling aspect of epic loot drops a necessary attraction for the end game?
Epic loot drops are a bit like a lottery, and many people like lottery systems like that. Oh joy, the tanking trinket in Trial of Champions normal dropped! But the other side of the coin is the frustration of the guy who does toc normal ten times and never gets the trinket. The vendor sale value of an epic nobody needs is just a few gold pieces, the auction house values of a shard if you have a disenchanter not much better, and so there is a huge gap between getting a bad drop, or a useful epic, which if you compare it to the price of BoE epics on the AH can easily be worth a thousand gold or more. So without tokens, a heroic run is either rewarded by less money than you would have gotten doing dailies in the same time, or something extremely useful. That appeals to the gambler in us, but can be extremely frustrating if we have a bad streak.
Epic loot tables also influence who wants to go where. Trial of Champions on normal potentially giving that extremely good tanking trinket means that this is the one dungeon for which you can easily find a tank. But not necessarily a healer, because there isn't an equally attractive piece of healing gear on the loot tables. Meanwhile the healers are queueing up in front of a another heroic, where the healing gear is to be found, but can find no tank, because the place gives no tanking gear.
Add tokens to the mix, and things are looking up. Getting a group together for the daily heroic is a lot easier than for anywhere else, because of the guaranteed reward. And as everyone can spend his tokens on whatever gear he needs, everybody is equally interested. You can even use your tokens to buy gear for your off-spec, without the holy priest getting into discussions with the mage on whether the priest is allowed to roll for dps cloth for his shadow spec.
As the latest WoW patches showed, tokens can also revive content that was threatened with becoming redundant. In vanilla WoW, once you had the gear from Molten Core, there was absolutely no reason to still run 5-man dungeons. Today doing 5-man heroics is still a very big part of the WoW endgame, even for people who will find no gear upgrade on the heroics loot tables any more. That also involves more mixing between raiders and non-raiders, which can be a good thing. Instead of being stuck with one particular slice of content, the one which is just easy enough to yield loot upgrades for you, players in the end game now have a good reason to go back to 5-man content, which is a lot easier to get going outside typical raid times.
So the question now is, will loot drops become less and less important, until they completely disappear in some future WoW expansion or next-generation MMORPG? Will we arrive at a situation where ninja-looting and DKP systems became a thing of the past, because everybody just gets some tokens for the boss kill? Or is the gambling aspect of epic loot drops a necessary attraction for the end game?
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