In robotics and 3D animations there is a hypothesis called the uncanny valley, which states that people accept robots or 3D avatars that either look exactly like humans, or that are very different from humans, but that they are revulsed by them if they are "almost human". I was wondering whether a similar "unfamiliar" valley exists for MMORPGs, and in how far that valley will hurt Rift.
My theory starts with a personal observation: I do consider Rift to be a perfectly good game, but I feel no desire whatsoever to buy it. I did buy Cataclysm, because it is exactly like World of Warcraft, and I will most probably buy Star Wars: The Old Republic, because it is sufficiently different from World of Warcraft. But for Rift I would have to relearn a lot of stuff, e.g. how the different classes and stats work, and I would have to level up new characters, find a new guild, make new friends, all to finally end up doing pretty much the same as I'm currently doing in World of Warcraft.
Now that could be just me, but I'm wondering if that feeling isn't more common, in view of comments I received on my previous Rift post. Cataclysm famously sold millions of copies in the first 24 hours, indicating people do want "more of the same". But an expansion offers that "more of the same" bundled with familiarity. Cataclysm changed a lot, but not so much that players are now unfamiliar with the new World of Warcraft. A lot of the knowledge of the game they have is still valid, and in spite of the gear reset they still have access to a lot of the committment they invested in World of Warcraft, be that in the form of character development, or in the form of social contacts.
If you switch to a different game, you will be unfamiliar with many things. You might be able to apply some of the knowledge from previous games (e.g. a mage in Rift still pulls mobs from maximum distance of his fireball spell, just like he'd do in WoW), and you might bring a part of your friends or guild over to the new game. But there are certainly things that you will have to learn, because the new game is somewhat different, and your circle of social contacts will be different in the new game as well. You might be willing to accept that unfamiliarity, if in exchange you get a sufficiently different game experience. But are people willing to accept the unfamiliarity just for minor variations of the game experience? Or is there an unfamiliar valley between "more of the same" and "something completely different"?
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Warrior tanking in Cataclysm?
My "main" in Cataclysm is supposed to be my holy priest. I do like healing in dungeons. I'm just not currently getting anywhere with that priest: I'm 85 and all decked out in the best possible gear one could get from running "normal" dungeons, but my guild has a serious tank shortage, and I haven't finished a single "heroic" dungeon yet. I could try to pug heroics, but from all I hear that isn't really a good idea right now.
My warrior is already level 84, and that without questing. I only did a few Vashj'ir quests to get the seahorse, and some minor quests for opening the portals to the other new zones. I made some xp with collecting herbs, but the large majority of my xp came from doing archeology. I'm only skill level 300, but I have already nearly a thousand troll fragments in reserve. The idea is to level to 450 using only the other fragments, and then use all the troll fragments in the hope of getting the epic 2H sword, Zin'rokh - Destroyer of Worlds. And yes, I know, even with a thousand fragments I'll still need a good amount of luck to get that one. But hey, at level 84 with rest XP every time I find fragments I get 30k xp, so in 100 dig sites I'll be level 85.
At which point the question poses itself of what I want to do with that warrior. I hadn't really planned to run dungeons with him, but if tanks are in short supply, tanking might be my best option if I ever want to complete a heroic. I'm just not sure whether warrior tanking is any good in Cataclysm. In WotLK I always felt as if my warrior tank had a big red floating label over his head saying "GIMP", because tanking was so much easier for druids and paladins. But as my druid and paladin are still level 80, I can't yet say how this works out in this expansion.
Do you have any experience in warrior tanking in Cataclysm 5-man dungeons? Is it still horribly inefficient compared to paladins and druids? Or has Blizzard balanced warriors better in this expansion?
My warrior is already level 84, and that without questing. I only did a few Vashj'ir quests to get the seahorse, and some minor quests for opening the portals to the other new zones. I made some xp with collecting herbs, but the large majority of my xp came from doing archeology. I'm only skill level 300, but I have already nearly a thousand troll fragments in reserve. The idea is to level to 450 using only the other fragments, and then use all the troll fragments in the hope of getting the epic 2H sword, Zin'rokh - Destroyer of Worlds. And yes, I know, even with a thousand fragments I'll still need a good amount of luck to get that one. But hey, at level 84 with rest XP every time I find fragments I get 30k xp, so in 100 dig sites I'll be level 85.
At which point the question poses itself of what I want to do with that warrior. I hadn't really planned to run dungeons with him, but if tanks are in short supply, tanking might be my best option if I ever want to complete a heroic. I'm just not sure whether warrior tanking is any good in Cataclysm. In WotLK I always felt as if my warrior tank had a big red floating label over his head saying "GIMP", because tanking was so much easier for druids and paladins. But as my druid and paladin are still level 80, I can't yet say how this works out in this expansion.
Do you have any experience in warrior tanking in Cataclysm 5-man dungeons? Is it still horribly inefficient compared to paladins and druids? Or has Blizzard balanced warriors better in this expansion?
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Played any good, new sandbox MMORPGs lately?
I thought I was stating some obvious facts, but apparently some people considered my remarks about sandbox games "troll bait". So in order to not derail a thread that was about something completely different, I'd like to discuss the current state of sandbox MMORPGs here, and give you all the opportunity to correct me if I am wrong.
What I believe the state of sandbox MMORPGs to be is the following:
1) The most successful MMORPG with a "sandbox" label is EVE Online. It came out in 2003, and grew steadily to now over 300k subscribed accounts (with players having multiple accounts being quite frequent). Nevertheless CCP stated that over 80% of the EVE players never leave safe empire space. And over the years there has been a lot of PvE content added to EVE. For me it isn't obvious that you can count all EVE players as "sandbox players", as obviously a good number of them is mostly engaged in activities like agent missions, which aren't fundamentally different from running quests in a themepark MMORPG.
2) Sandbox MMORPGs released after 2003 all have less than 100k subscribers, all together. Darkfall is estimated to have about 20k, Mortal Online has less. Furthermore there are about ten times more themepark MMORPGs released than sandbox MMORPGs. I'm calling that "unpopular". That doesn't mean that the people who like sandbox MMORPGs aren't feeling strongly about them, just the opposite. But it appears as if the sandbox MMORPG genre does attract a significantly smaller number of players than the themepark MMORPG genre.
3) I would not consider Minecraft to be a MMORPG, but it certainly is a sandbox game, and it certainly is successful, especially considering that it is a one-man operation and not a big budget game. That opens up a discussion of whether a sandbox MMORPG could be successful if it was more like Minecraft and less like Mortal Online.
Please, try to argue with facts, figures, and rational arguments. If your only argument is that you love sandbox MMORPGs and hate everybody who plays something else, and you just reply with a bunch of insults, your comment will be deleted. But if I made any factual errors, feel free to point them out, preferably with links to proof of the opposite. And I'd like to hear your ideas how a post-EVE popular sandbox MMORPG could look like, and why there isn't one yet.
What I believe the state of sandbox MMORPGs to be is the following:
1) The most successful MMORPG with a "sandbox" label is EVE Online. It came out in 2003, and grew steadily to now over 300k subscribed accounts (with players having multiple accounts being quite frequent). Nevertheless CCP stated that over 80% of the EVE players never leave safe empire space. And over the years there has been a lot of PvE content added to EVE. For me it isn't obvious that you can count all EVE players as "sandbox players", as obviously a good number of them is mostly engaged in activities like agent missions, which aren't fundamentally different from running quests in a themepark MMORPG.
2) Sandbox MMORPGs released after 2003 all have less than 100k subscribers, all together. Darkfall is estimated to have about 20k, Mortal Online has less. Furthermore there are about ten times more themepark MMORPGs released than sandbox MMORPGs. I'm calling that "unpopular". That doesn't mean that the people who like sandbox MMORPGs aren't feeling strongly about them, just the opposite. But it appears as if the sandbox MMORPG genre does attract a significantly smaller number of players than the themepark MMORPG genre.
3) I would not consider Minecraft to be a MMORPG, but it certainly is a sandbox game, and it certainly is successful, especially considering that it is a one-man operation and not a big budget game. That opens up a discussion of whether a sandbox MMORPG could be successful if it was more like Minecraft and less like Mortal Online.
Please, try to argue with facts, figures, and rational arguments. If your only argument is that you love sandbox MMORPGs and hate everybody who plays something else, and you just reply with a bunch of insults, your comment will be deleted. But if I made any factual errors, feel free to point them out, preferably with links to proof of the opposite. And I'd like to hear your ideas how a post-EVE popular sandbox MMORPG could look like, and why there isn't one yet.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
How different is different?
Rift announced a release date for the first week of March, and from what I've seen in the third beta event, this might actually be a game that is ready for release. At the very least "more ready" than the last half a dozen MMORPGs that were released. Nevertheless that doesn't save Rift from controversy. Pete from Dragonchasers isn't happy with some of the early reviews of Rift, especially not the one from Massively saying that after just one hour "it was more than enough for me to realize I’ve played this game about a hundred times over the last few years".
The fundamental problem of that controversy is that Pete and the Massively guy aren't actually talking about the same thing. Pete is perfectly right in saying that Rift has a number of unique features, most prominently the "rifts" after which the game is named, but also the soul system, and that in one hour you can't possibly have fully explored all these features. But Massively is also right in as far as one hour if totally sufficient to tell you what type of game Rift is. Imagine somebody let you play a new game you never heard about for one hour: Maybe you can't fully judge that game after one hour, but you most certainly will be able to say whether it is a first person shooter, a jump-and-run platformer, or a turn-based strategy game. And if it happens to be of a genre you personally don't like, you'll be able to say that too.
Rift is what I'd call a "quest-based MMORPG". Massively calls it "on rails quest grinder", others would call it a "theme park MMORPG", cynics would call it a "WoW clone". All these terms are loaded to some extent. But whatever term you use, there is absolutely no doubt that Rift is the same type of game as World of Warcraft, as Warhammer Online, as Lord of the Rings Online, and as dozens of other games. The controls are the same, the basic gameplay of doing quests to kill ten foozles is the same, even the combat system of targeting and using hotkeys for various special attacks is the same. The difference lies in the details: The Rift souls system is different from the WoW talent system in the details, the Rift "rifts" system is different from the WAR public quests system in the details, etc.
What is actually surprising here is that some people are complaining about Rift being of the same type or genre of game than other MMORPGs. It is like complaining that the latest Call of Duty game is yet another shooter with similar gameplay, controls, and combat like other shooters, just with different locations and some minor variations of features. Or complaining that Mafia II resembles Grand Theft Auto. I'm sure the experts can discuss for hours the similarities and differences between Blur and Need for Speed, or between Dragon Age and Mass Effect. But outside of MMORPG reviews you rarely find anyone complaining that a certain game is of a certain genre, and not something completely different.
Personally I love turn-based strategy games. Now if I review a new real-time strategy game and spend most of the review bitching about the fact that the game isn't turn-based, the review will end up being pretty useless. And for Rift reviews that is exactly the same: A review that is only complaining about the fact that Rift is part of the most popular and most widespread type among MMORPGs, whatever you want to call that sub-genre, is pretty useless. Yeah, Rift is not a sandbox MMORPG, get over it. Rift is also not a first person shooter, not jump-and-run platformer, not a turn-based strategy game, and not a racing game. But nobody ever claimed Rift was anything but a quest-based MMORPG, so there is really no reason to whine that it isn't something else.
To review Rift, one has to accept the fact that it is of this quest-based MMORPG genre, and compare it to other games of the same genre. What does Rift do well, or even better than other games of the same type? What does it do not as good? What innovations does it bring to the quest-based MMORPG genre, and are these new things actually fun?
If, like the guy from Massively, you hate quest-based MMORPGs, Rift obviously isn't for you. But people like that should maybe spend their time reviewing sandbox MMORPGs, if that is the genre they prefer. There are some interesting questions to answer about sandbox MMORPGs, like why they are so extremely unpopular, and why in the few games with a "sandbox MMORPG" label that have more than a handful of players, over 80% of those players are actually doing quest-based MMORPG-like content instead of sandbox content. But only complaining about yet another MMORPG being quest-based instead of sandbox isn't actually helping in any way. Why aren't all these sandbox MMORPG fans reviewing Mortal Online instead of Rift?
The fundamental problem of that controversy is that Pete and the Massively guy aren't actually talking about the same thing. Pete is perfectly right in saying that Rift has a number of unique features, most prominently the "rifts" after which the game is named, but also the soul system, and that in one hour you can't possibly have fully explored all these features. But Massively is also right in as far as one hour if totally sufficient to tell you what type of game Rift is. Imagine somebody let you play a new game you never heard about for one hour: Maybe you can't fully judge that game after one hour, but you most certainly will be able to say whether it is a first person shooter, a jump-and-run platformer, or a turn-based strategy game. And if it happens to be of a genre you personally don't like, you'll be able to say that too.
Rift is what I'd call a "quest-based MMORPG". Massively calls it "on rails quest grinder", others would call it a "theme park MMORPG", cynics would call it a "WoW clone". All these terms are loaded to some extent. But whatever term you use, there is absolutely no doubt that Rift is the same type of game as World of Warcraft, as Warhammer Online, as Lord of the Rings Online, and as dozens of other games. The controls are the same, the basic gameplay of doing quests to kill ten foozles is the same, even the combat system of targeting and using hotkeys for various special attacks is the same. The difference lies in the details: The Rift souls system is different from the WoW talent system in the details, the Rift "rifts" system is different from the WAR public quests system in the details, etc.
What is actually surprising here is that some people are complaining about Rift being of the same type or genre of game than other MMORPGs. It is like complaining that the latest Call of Duty game is yet another shooter with similar gameplay, controls, and combat like other shooters, just with different locations and some minor variations of features. Or complaining that Mafia II resembles Grand Theft Auto. I'm sure the experts can discuss for hours the similarities and differences between Blur and Need for Speed, or between Dragon Age and Mass Effect. But outside of MMORPG reviews you rarely find anyone complaining that a certain game is of a certain genre, and not something completely different.
Personally I love turn-based strategy games. Now if I review a new real-time strategy game and spend most of the review bitching about the fact that the game isn't turn-based, the review will end up being pretty useless. And for Rift reviews that is exactly the same: A review that is only complaining about the fact that Rift is part of the most popular and most widespread type among MMORPGs, whatever you want to call that sub-genre, is pretty useless. Yeah, Rift is not a sandbox MMORPG, get over it. Rift is also not a first person shooter, not jump-and-run platformer, not a turn-based strategy game, and not a racing game. But nobody ever claimed Rift was anything but a quest-based MMORPG, so there is really no reason to whine that it isn't something else.
To review Rift, one has to accept the fact that it is of this quest-based MMORPG genre, and compare it to other games of the same genre. What does Rift do well, or even better than other games of the same type? What does it do not as good? What innovations does it bring to the quest-based MMORPG genre, and are these new things actually fun?
If, like the guy from Massively, you hate quest-based MMORPGs, Rift obviously isn't for you. But people like that should maybe spend their time reviewing sandbox MMORPGs, if that is the genre they prefer. There are some interesting questions to answer about sandbox MMORPGs, like why they are so extremely unpopular, and why in the few games with a "sandbox MMORPG" label that have more than a handful of players, over 80% of those players are actually doing quest-based MMORPG-like content instead of sandbox content. But only complaining about yet another MMORPG being quest-based instead of sandbox isn't actually helping in any way. Why aren't all these sandbox MMORPG fans reviewing Mortal Online instead of Rift?
Monday, January 3, 2011
Tol Barad exploit, and the path of least resistance
Heroic dungeons in Cataclysm right now are considerably harder than heroic dungeons were at the end of Wrath of the Lich King. The WoW blogosphere is full of horror stories of pickup groups failing horribly (and then unfairly blaming the healer). While the people who spent most of WotLK wailing about how WoW was far too easy haven’t manned up enough yet to admit that Blizzard did something right with Cataclysm, at least they mostly stopped complaining. But the “let’s optimize the fun out of games” brigade is already hard at work to circumvent any challenge that Cataclysm might hold. And the way they are using is exploiting Blizzard having made a massive blunder when designing PvP for Cataclysm: Tol Barad.
Tol Barad is a zone which works a bit like Wintergrasp, a PvP zone which can change hands in a battle every 150 minutes, winning which gives access to an extra raid dungeon. So far so good, but somebody who apparently had no idea about how PvP works in World of Warcraft designed Tol Barad so that the attackers need to hold 3 points to flip the zone, while the defenders just need to keep one of those points to keep it. It is easy to see that if both sides try equally hard, the defenders always win, and Tol Barad never changes hands. Statistics showed Tol Barad only changing hands once every 11 battles, the defenders to attackers win ratio was 10:1.
So Blizzard “hotfixed” an already bad idea with an even worse won: Defending Tol Barad successfully gives 180 honor points, but the reward for successfully attacking it was increased to 1800, ten times as much. In what Spinks calls The Miracle of Tol Barad, players immediately realized that this could easily be exploited by match fixing. Defenders simply lose on purpose, thus turning into attackers two-and-a-half hours later, and getting much more honor points than if they had defended successfully twice. While that is technically a bannable exploit, in practice Blizzard can’t punish anyone. In every battle the ones getting rewarded are the attackers, and they didn’t do anything illegal. And on the defenders side it would take enormous manpower and effort to find out exactly who was actually trying to defend, and who was just pretending to.
As a result players now have the choice between doing hard heroics for a random chance on an iLevel 346 blue item or doing Tol Barad without resistance for enough points to buy a guaranteed iLevel 352 blue item of their choice (they cost between 1250 and 2200 honor). Of course the honor point items have resilience on them, but the other stats are good enough to make these PvP items perfectly useable in PvE. And even just carrying them in your backpack counts for the “average iLevel” that WoW now calculates for each character to determine what dungeons they can go to. So by exploiting Tol Barad, players can either gear up enough for raids, or at the very least use the PvP gear to make heroics easier. And because so many players *do* exploit Tol Barad, it has become virtually impossible to play that PvP zone as intended. If many defenders lose intentionally, a few defenders trying to actually hold Tol Barad won’t be able to do so. And as the theorycrafters from Elitist Jerks pointed out, it is a variation of the prisoner’s dilemma game theory problem, which is more unbalanced towards cooperation than the original prisoner’s dilemma, leading to a snowballing of cooperation once a certain threshold of exploiters is reached.
While the situation is certainly interesting from the point of view of social engineering and game theory, it is pretty bad for Cataclysm in general. Players having found a path of least resistance is removing some of the challenge Blizzard added with the new heroics. And it isn’t even obvious what Blizzard could do to fix that. Even if they were able to quickly fix Tol Barad, the genie is out of the bottle, and it is nearly impossible to reverse the situation and take all the exploited PvP gear back out of the game. As the exploit is a collaborative one, Blizzard could never selectively only remove the PvP gear from people who willingly participated in the exploit. And if they just removed all honor point gear, they’d punish everyone who gathered honor points in a legit way.
Tol Barad is a zone which works a bit like Wintergrasp, a PvP zone which can change hands in a battle every 150 minutes, winning which gives access to an extra raid dungeon. So far so good, but somebody who apparently had no idea about how PvP works in World of Warcraft designed Tol Barad so that the attackers need to hold 3 points to flip the zone, while the defenders just need to keep one of those points to keep it. It is easy to see that if both sides try equally hard, the defenders always win, and Tol Barad never changes hands. Statistics showed Tol Barad only changing hands once every 11 battles, the defenders to attackers win ratio was 10:1.
So Blizzard “hotfixed” an already bad idea with an even worse won: Defending Tol Barad successfully gives 180 honor points, but the reward for successfully attacking it was increased to 1800, ten times as much. In what Spinks calls The Miracle of Tol Barad, players immediately realized that this could easily be exploited by match fixing. Defenders simply lose on purpose, thus turning into attackers two-and-a-half hours later, and getting much more honor points than if they had defended successfully twice. While that is technically a bannable exploit, in practice Blizzard can’t punish anyone. In every battle the ones getting rewarded are the attackers, and they didn’t do anything illegal. And on the defenders side it would take enormous manpower and effort to find out exactly who was actually trying to defend, and who was just pretending to.
As a result players now have the choice between doing hard heroics for a random chance on an iLevel 346 blue item or doing Tol Barad without resistance for enough points to buy a guaranteed iLevel 352 blue item of their choice (they cost between 1250 and 2200 honor). Of course the honor point items have resilience on them, but the other stats are good enough to make these PvP items perfectly useable in PvE. And even just carrying them in your backpack counts for the “average iLevel” that WoW now calculates for each character to determine what dungeons they can go to. So by exploiting Tol Barad, players can either gear up enough for raids, or at the very least use the PvP gear to make heroics easier. And because so many players *do* exploit Tol Barad, it has become virtually impossible to play that PvP zone as intended. If many defenders lose intentionally, a few defenders trying to actually hold Tol Barad won’t be able to do so. And as the theorycrafters from Elitist Jerks pointed out, it is a variation of the prisoner’s dilemma game theory problem, which is more unbalanced towards cooperation than the original prisoner’s dilemma, leading to a snowballing of cooperation once a certain threshold of exploiters is reached.
While the situation is certainly interesting from the point of view of social engineering and game theory, it is pretty bad for Cataclysm in general. Players having found a path of least resistance is removing some of the challenge Blizzard added with the new heroics. And it isn’t even obvious what Blizzard could do to fix that. Even if they were able to quickly fix Tol Barad, the genie is out of the bottle, and it is nearly impossible to reverse the situation and take all the exploited PvP gear back out of the game. As the exploit is a collaborative one, Blizzard could never selectively only remove the PvP gear from people who willingly participated in the exploit. And if they just removed all honor point gear, they’d punish everyone who gathered honor points in a legit way.
Why do we play? - Killing Time
I recently read a review of Call of Duty: Black Ops, in which the reviewer estimated that the time it took to play through the single-player campaign was about 6 hours. Of course one can play the game through several times, and spend a lot of hours in the multi-player part as well. But compared to the nearly 6,000 hours I’ve played World of Warcraft for over the last 6 years, modern single-player games sure appear to be extremely short. Or, seen from the other side, the fact that MMORPGs are extremely long in comparison to other computer games seems to be one of the defining characteristics of the genre. If a reviewer of CODBlops wrote his review of the single-player part after 6 hours of gameplay, few people would complain; after all, he played the game through from start to finish. If somebody tried to review a MMORPG, saying he played it for only six hours, he’d get a lot of nasty comments telling him that it is totally impossible to judge a MMORPG in that short span of time.
Now World of Warcraft is a huge game. But whatever measure you use, be it gigabyte on your hard disk, or number of zones, WoW is not 1,000 times bigger than CODBlops. Playing through CODBlops in 6 hours will be an action-packed experience. Playing WoW for 6,000 hours by necessity will have periods of less action, as well as repeating the same content many times. The length that defines MMORPGs makes repetition and slow periods unavoidable. Even the most action-packed parts of a MMORPG will be repeated many times. If you are a raider, just check your stats for how often you killed the first raid boss of a typical raid dungeon; and that’s not even counting the wipes you probably had. Over the years you’ll do thousands of rather similar quests, and kill tens of thousands of monsters in rather similar combats. And even if you switch to different MMORPGs, in most cases you’ll find yourself doing more quests, and killing more monsters, in combat systems that resemble each other a lot.
In 2009 I wrote a series of posts on Why do we play?, discussing factors of storytelling, gameplay, challenge, character development, rewards, social interactions, and learning. But all these factors together give something that could be described as “entertainment”, or even “killing time”. Unless you work for a gold farming enterprise, it is most likely that you play a MMORPG to kill time in a fun way, being entertained by the factors listed above or other game features. And that you pay for the privilege of being thus entertained. The rest is just details. Whether you play for virtual rewards, for social status among other players, or for feeling leet is ultimately not important, those are just different ways of deriving entertainment from a game.
The worst case scenario for playing a MMORPG is spending a lot of time without gaining any entertainment value. Unfortunately that isn’t always possible to avoid. If for example your main entertainment interest lies in end-game activities like PvP or raids, you’ll have to spend time to level up your character, even if leveling up is something you enjoy less. If, on the other hand, leveling up is what you enjoy, and you don’t like PvP or multi-player PvE, you’ll find your enjoyment of your character diminished when he hits the level cap. MMORPGs are full of “to do this, you first have to do that” chains of activities. Many of the rewards handed out by a MMORPG are in fact keys to other activities, and so players frequently find themselves doing something they might not thoroughly enjoy, just to gain access to the rewards opening up content they do enjoy.
It is well worth to stop sometimes, and spend time to think about what you really want. The chains of activities leading to other activities pose a major danger: Putting the game on rails, which players follow, sometimes without thinking. It is easy enough to map out the steps necessary, for example in World of Warcraft, from creating a level 1 character to killing the game’s current final raid boss. Most of the steps are a purely mathematical problem, with a given theorycraft solution for maximum efficiency, and ample documentation advising you on that optimal path. What is not possible to predict for any given player is whether that path is the one of maximum overall fun. What if it turns out that in fact you don’t enjoy raiding all that much, or that killing the game’s final raid boss only gives you 5 minutes worth of satisfaction, having cost you hundreds of hours of activities you didn’t enjoy?
Once you realize that the overall goal is killing time, or being entertained, you can have a look at the factors I mentioned above on why we play. How much does each of these factors contribute to your own, personal entertainment? How much preparatory activity does each of these goals require, and how much do you like or dislike these necessary activities? It is possible to chart a path through a game, or even through a series of many different games, which would maximize entertainment value and fun. But that path is highly individual, and you can’t find a theorycrafted solution for maximum efficiency for your personal path of maximum enjoyment. Solutions like “play several alts” or “switch between several games” can well contribute for you to enjoy MMORPGs more, in spite of not being on the theorycrafted optimum path for maximum leetness and efficiency.
Of course your path is usually not something you can plan out long in advance. A big part of it is just trying out new things, and to see how much you enjoy them. For example I do like the new archeology activity in Cataclysm, but I’m certainly not going to level it on more than one character, and I still need to decide for how long I want to pursue it, before the activity becomes so boring that it isn’t worth the potential epic rewards any more. And with raiding changing so much in every expansion, I have to re-decide every time how much raiding I want to do this time.
I might not have the most efficient or most consistent path of advancement through World of Warcraft, having tried a bit of everything at various times, having played numerous alts, and having taken breaks to explore other games. But the overall effect is that I don’t regret the nearly 6,000 hours I spent in this game. It was time I had available, without taking sacrifices in my personal or professional life, and WoW was a good way to kill that time. I see so many players calling their time spent in a game “work” or “grind”, that I believe not regretting the time you spent in a game is already a goal not everybody reaches. I can’t tell you how you’ll get there, but I’d sure advise you to find your own path, and mistrust the readily available “most efficient” option.
Now World of Warcraft is a huge game. But whatever measure you use, be it gigabyte on your hard disk, or number of zones, WoW is not 1,000 times bigger than CODBlops. Playing through CODBlops in 6 hours will be an action-packed experience. Playing WoW for 6,000 hours by necessity will have periods of less action, as well as repeating the same content many times. The length that defines MMORPGs makes repetition and slow periods unavoidable. Even the most action-packed parts of a MMORPG will be repeated many times. If you are a raider, just check your stats for how often you killed the first raid boss of a typical raid dungeon; and that’s not even counting the wipes you probably had. Over the years you’ll do thousands of rather similar quests, and kill tens of thousands of monsters in rather similar combats. And even if you switch to different MMORPGs, in most cases you’ll find yourself doing more quests, and killing more monsters, in combat systems that resemble each other a lot.
In 2009 I wrote a series of posts on Why do we play?, discussing factors of storytelling, gameplay, challenge, character development, rewards, social interactions, and learning. But all these factors together give something that could be described as “entertainment”, or even “killing time”. Unless you work for a gold farming enterprise, it is most likely that you play a MMORPG to kill time in a fun way, being entertained by the factors listed above or other game features. And that you pay for the privilege of being thus entertained. The rest is just details. Whether you play for virtual rewards, for social status among other players, or for feeling leet is ultimately not important, those are just different ways of deriving entertainment from a game.
The worst case scenario for playing a MMORPG is spending a lot of time without gaining any entertainment value. Unfortunately that isn’t always possible to avoid. If for example your main entertainment interest lies in end-game activities like PvP or raids, you’ll have to spend time to level up your character, even if leveling up is something you enjoy less. If, on the other hand, leveling up is what you enjoy, and you don’t like PvP or multi-player PvE, you’ll find your enjoyment of your character diminished when he hits the level cap. MMORPGs are full of “to do this, you first have to do that” chains of activities. Many of the rewards handed out by a MMORPG are in fact keys to other activities, and so players frequently find themselves doing something they might not thoroughly enjoy, just to gain access to the rewards opening up content they do enjoy.
It is well worth to stop sometimes, and spend time to think about what you really want. The chains of activities leading to other activities pose a major danger: Putting the game on rails, which players follow, sometimes without thinking. It is easy enough to map out the steps necessary, for example in World of Warcraft, from creating a level 1 character to killing the game’s current final raid boss. Most of the steps are a purely mathematical problem, with a given theorycraft solution for maximum efficiency, and ample documentation advising you on that optimal path. What is not possible to predict for any given player is whether that path is the one of maximum overall fun. What if it turns out that in fact you don’t enjoy raiding all that much, or that killing the game’s final raid boss only gives you 5 minutes worth of satisfaction, having cost you hundreds of hours of activities you didn’t enjoy?
Once you realize that the overall goal is killing time, or being entertained, you can have a look at the factors I mentioned above on why we play. How much does each of these factors contribute to your own, personal entertainment? How much preparatory activity does each of these goals require, and how much do you like or dislike these necessary activities? It is possible to chart a path through a game, or even through a series of many different games, which would maximize entertainment value and fun. But that path is highly individual, and you can’t find a theorycrafted solution for maximum efficiency for your personal path of maximum enjoyment. Solutions like “play several alts” or “switch between several games” can well contribute for you to enjoy MMORPGs more, in spite of not being on the theorycrafted optimum path for maximum leetness and efficiency.
Of course your path is usually not something you can plan out long in advance. A big part of it is just trying out new things, and to see how much you enjoy them. For example I do like the new archeology activity in Cataclysm, but I’m certainly not going to level it on more than one character, and I still need to decide for how long I want to pursue it, before the activity becomes so boring that it isn’t worth the potential epic rewards any more. And with raiding changing so much in every expansion, I have to re-decide every time how much raiding I want to do this time.
I might not have the most efficient or most consistent path of advancement through World of Warcraft, having tried a bit of everything at various times, having played numerous alts, and having taken breaks to explore other games. But the overall effect is that I don’t regret the nearly 6,000 hours I spent in this game. It was time I had available, without taking sacrifices in my personal or professional life, and WoW was a good way to kill that time. I see so many players calling their time spent in a game “work” or “grind”, that I believe not regretting the time you spent in a game is already a goal not everybody reaches. I can’t tell you how you’ll get there, but I’d sure advise you to find your own path, and mistrust the readily available “most efficient” option.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Locked out
Steam was just the beginning. Once I came back home from traveling, I found that both Blizzard and Facebook had blocked my accounts for "suspicious activity", caused by me having logged in from a different IP. Facebook was especially annoying, demanding I identify my "friends" from their photos to be allowed back in. Unfortunately I'm "friends" with 288 people I found via this blog, none of which I ever met in real life, and there are only a handful among them from which I know the face. On a second attempt Facebook then allowed me to identify myself via e-mail instead, otherwise I'd still be locked out. Both Facebook and Blizzard required that I change my password.
The Blizzard message that my account was blocked was displayed prominently when I tried to log into World of Warcraft. I had also received an e-mail notification, but my highly intelligent spam filter had promptly discarded that one into the spam folder, seeing how I get fake e-mails about "your WoW account has been locked" every day. Only this time it was for real. I get a lot less Facebook phishing mails, but I have already seen some of those too.
Between all those phishing e-mails and various companies immediately locking my account if I log on from a different location, I'm starting to think that online account theft must be a huge problem these days. I hadn't even realized somebody might be interested to steal my Facebook account, but given that it might contain virtual currency that can be sold, I understand now.
Of course criminal activity causes companies to react with safety measures, and those safety measures usually end up annoying regular customers more than they hinder thieves. I'm starting to wonder how I can travel in the future without getting locked out of various online accounts.
The Blizzard message that my account was blocked was displayed prominently when I tried to log into World of Warcraft. I had also received an e-mail notification, but my highly intelligent spam filter had promptly discarded that one into the spam folder, seeing how I get fake e-mails about "your WoW account has been locked" every day. Only this time it was for real. I get a lot less Facebook phishing mails, but I have already seen some of those too.
Between all those phishing e-mails and various companies immediately locking my account if I log on from a different location, I'm starting to think that online account theft must be a huge problem these days. I hadn't even realized somebody might be interested to steal my Facebook account, but given that it might contain virtual currency that can be sold, I understand now.
Of course criminal activity causes companies to react with safety measures, and those safety measures usually end up annoying regular customers more than they hinder thieves. I'm starting to wonder how I can travel in the future without getting locked out of various online accounts.
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