Thursday, January 17, 2008
Online games called "spiritual opium"
Karl Marx famously said that "World of Warcraft is opium for the masses". Ooops, no, I got him mixed up with senior Chinese official Kou Xiaowei, who just said "Although China's online gaming industry had been hot in recent years, online games are regarded by many as a sort of spiritual opium and the whole industry is marginalized by mainstream society." Online game sales in China in 2007 were $1.46 billion, a more than 60% increase over the year before. There are 40 million online game players in China. So now the Chinese state wants to crack down on "undesirable elements of online games", and I don't think they are talking about gold spammers.
Looking beyond 2008
John Maynard Keynes, an economist, countered some argument on some expected development in the long run with the words "in the long run, we are all dead". That is certainly true, but shouldn't be used as excuse to only look ahead for a very short period. In his own slightly crazy and rambling way Jeff Freeman writes an excellent parody on the current frequently heard assumption that WoW is the end of MMORPG development. Some people assume that WoW lifted the barrier of entry into the MMORPG market so high that nobody will be able to overcome it. People decry the subscription model as dead, and suggest we should head for the hills of cheap free-to-play virtual worlds. Can that be the future of MMORPGs?
I don't think so. The lure of big profits will be too great. Yes, making another World of Warcraft might cost $50 to $100 million of investment, but what is that compared with WoW's current $500 million of annual profit? There aren't all that many projects with a possible annual payout of five to ten times the investemnt. Just like Jaws or Titanic didn't kill the film industry, World of Warcraft won't kill the MMORPG industry, just the opposite. We will see lots of failures like Vanguard on the way, from people thinking that because all subscription based MMORPG cost about the same monthly fee they can make a game with a fraction of the budget that WoW had and still rake in millions. Some games, like LotRO will be small successes, making a decent profit compared with their investment cost. But sooner or later we will see another big budget MMORPG with millions of subscribers. The idea that one company, Blizzard, could hold the financial and skill monopoly on making successful MMORPGs forever is laughable. Half the people who made WoW are already working for other companies.
When you hear people telling you that another blockbuster MMORPG is impossible, have a look at their background. Maybe they already produced games that weren't quite as successful, and need a good excuse to explain why they couldn't succeed. Or they have some free-to-play game, in-game advertising model or microtransaction platform for sale, and try to distract your attention from the fact that none of these business models has ever made that much money as the monthly subscription fee model. They'll tell you about the 11 million "residents" of Second Life, failing to mention that the peak concurrent user number is 55,000, or 1/200th of the number of residents. You'll make more money showing your ad in the commercial break of a TV emission of Plan 9 from Outer Space (supposedly the worst film ever) than from putting it up in Second Life!
Meanwhile Brenden from Another There finds this gem of current bestsellers at Gamestop.com, showing 7 out of 8 games in the list being MMORPGs with a monthly subscription fee. Many companies have MMORPGs that are selling well enough to make a good profit, so they are gaining both expertise and money, which they might want to invest one day in a bigger game. Even if you remove World of Warcraft from the equation, there are currently more MMORPG players than ever, and MMORPGs are one of the major contributors that keep PC gaming alive against the competition of console gaming. And while we don't know whether Warhammer Online will really be released in 2008, nobody really expects that game to flop.
World of Warcraft might be called the first blockbuster MMORPG, but it certainly won't be the last one.
I don't think so. The lure of big profits will be too great. Yes, making another World of Warcraft might cost $50 to $100 million of investment, but what is that compared with WoW's current $500 million of annual profit? There aren't all that many projects with a possible annual payout of five to ten times the investemnt. Just like Jaws or Titanic didn't kill the film industry, World of Warcraft won't kill the MMORPG industry, just the opposite. We will see lots of failures like Vanguard on the way, from people thinking that because all subscription based MMORPG cost about the same monthly fee they can make a game with a fraction of the budget that WoW had and still rake in millions. Some games, like LotRO will be small successes, making a decent profit compared with their investment cost. But sooner or later we will see another big budget MMORPG with millions of subscribers. The idea that one company, Blizzard, could hold the financial and skill monopoly on making successful MMORPGs forever is laughable. Half the people who made WoW are already working for other companies.
When you hear people telling you that another blockbuster MMORPG is impossible, have a look at their background. Maybe they already produced games that weren't quite as successful, and need a good excuse to explain why they couldn't succeed. Or they have some free-to-play game, in-game advertising model or microtransaction platform for sale, and try to distract your attention from the fact that none of these business models has ever made that much money as the monthly subscription fee model. They'll tell you about the 11 million "residents" of Second Life, failing to mention that the peak concurrent user number is 55,000, or 1/200th of the number of residents. You'll make more money showing your ad in the commercial break of a TV emission of Plan 9 from Outer Space (supposedly the worst film ever) than from putting it up in Second Life!
Meanwhile Brenden from Another There finds this gem of current bestsellers at Gamestop.com, showing 7 out of 8 games in the list being MMORPGs with a monthly subscription fee. Many companies have MMORPGs that are selling well enough to make a good profit, so they are gaining both expertise and money, which they might want to invest one day in a bigger game. Even if you remove World of Warcraft from the equation, there are currently more MMORPG players than ever, and MMORPGs are one of the major contributors that keep PC gaming alive against the competition of console gaming. And while we don't know whether Warhammer Online will really be released in 2008, nobody really expects that game to flop.
World of Warcraft might be called the first blockbuster MMORPG, but it certainly won't be the last one.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Reacting to Deathknights
Do you feel threatened by deathknights? If you are currently playing a warrior in World of Warcraft, you probably do. When recently a reader suggested that Blizzard might surprise us with a sudden announcement of WotLK coming out in 4 weeks, unlikely as it is, my first thought was "and then what do I do with my warrior?". While in the long run the class roles will probably balance out, in the short run we can expect a rush of deathknights. And I'm simply worried of not getting any invites to groups any more, because wherever I apply I'm told "we don't need a warrior, we already have two deathknights".
The specific problem is that when WotLK comes out I will have at least two, if not three level 70 characters, and I don't know which of them to level first: warrior, priest, or mage (if mage gets to 70 by then). Now some people will reply to that with the common platitude of "play whatever is most fun", but that is just rephrasing my question. I don't know which character will be most fun, because that depends not only on myself, but also on the environment around me. I have most fun in groups, thus the character most likely to get into groups usually ends up being the most fun.
I was thinking of leveling up the warrior first, as long as there aren't any deathknights around yet. I mean, there certainly will be one crazy guy somewhere leveling up his existing level 70 to 80, do the deathknight unlock quest, and level up the new deathknight from 60 to 80, all in the first week after the WotLK release. But the large inflow of Deathknights, where half the server is playing one, is more likely to happen a few weeks later. Meanwhile I could level up my warrior from 70 to 80, and already visit all the new dungeons before two much competition for the tank spot is around.
Of course it is totally possible that deathknights aren't actually competition for the tank spot in a group, but more like fury warrior off-tanks. From the announcements it appears that deathknights should be better damage dealers than warriors. It would be really bad design if they were also better tanks, because then the whole warrior class would be obsolete. The question is whether deathknights are "good enough" tanks for groups to accept them on the tank spot. Or will there be groups of 3 deathknights shouting for a tank and a healer?
Leveling my holy priest up in groups shouldn't be a problem, there should always be a demand for healers. It is more a question of timing, first leveling the warrior while there aren't too many deathknights around, then leveling the priest when there are many of them, all looking for somebody to heal them. The mage I am not so attached to. He is obviously much easier to solo than a protection warrior or holy priest. But I haven't got much group experience with him yet, as he is only level 47 and there aren't exactly a lot of groups below level 60. And of course I haven't invested thousands of hours into that character, as I have into the two others.
What do you think will the deathknight do to the class balance in World of Warcraft? Will there suddenly be an abundance of possible tanks? Or will deathknights just be one of many classes vying for the "random" slot in a group after a tank and healer has been found?
The specific problem is that when WotLK comes out I will have at least two, if not three level 70 characters, and I don't know which of them to level first: warrior, priest, or mage (if mage gets to 70 by then). Now some people will reply to that with the common platitude of "play whatever is most fun", but that is just rephrasing my question. I don't know which character will be most fun, because that depends not only on myself, but also on the environment around me. I have most fun in groups, thus the character most likely to get into groups usually ends up being the most fun.
I was thinking of leveling up the warrior first, as long as there aren't any deathknights around yet. I mean, there certainly will be one crazy guy somewhere leveling up his existing level 70 to 80, do the deathknight unlock quest, and level up the new deathknight from 60 to 80, all in the first week after the WotLK release. But the large inflow of Deathknights, where half the server is playing one, is more likely to happen a few weeks later. Meanwhile I could level up my warrior from 70 to 80, and already visit all the new dungeons before two much competition for the tank spot is around.
Of course it is totally possible that deathknights aren't actually competition for the tank spot in a group, but more like fury warrior off-tanks. From the announcements it appears that deathknights should be better damage dealers than warriors. It would be really bad design if they were also better tanks, because then the whole warrior class would be obsolete. The question is whether deathknights are "good enough" tanks for groups to accept them on the tank spot. Or will there be groups of 3 deathknights shouting for a tank and a healer?
Leveling my holy priest up in groups shouldn't be a problem, there should always be a demand for healers. It is more a question of timing, first leveling the warrior while there aren't too many deathknights around, then leveling the priest when there are many of them, all looking for somebody to heal them. The mage I am not so attached to. He is obviously much easier to solo than a protection warrior or holy priest. But I haven't got much group experience with him yet, as he is only level 47 and there aren't exactly a lot of groups below level 60. And of course I haven't invested thousands of hours into that character, as I have into the two others.
What do you think will the deathknight do to the class balance in World of Warcraft? Will there suddenly be an abundance of possible tanks? Or will deathknights just be one of many classes vying for the "random" slot in a group after a tank and healer has been found?
I think I owe Flying Lab money
On a larger scale we are used to measure the success of a MMORPG by the number of subscribers it attracts. On an individual scale the number of months that a particular game keeps us entertained is a more pertinent measure. Anything longer than three months I consider good enough, and anything over one year is huge success (only EQ and WoW ever did that for me). Pirates of the Burning Sea is in the "over 3 months of entertainment" category, but not in the "over 1 year" one. Which wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't already playing PotBS since August. I'm in the pre-order period where I would be expected to race to the level cap, but fact is that I can't even bother to log on every day. The game hasn't really launched yet, but is already dangerously close to the end of its useful life for me.
The logical thing to do for me would be to not buy PotBS. But that would send the wrong message. Pirates of the Burning Sea isn't a bad game, it is just lacking PvE content, and I'm not much interested in the PvP content. Yesterday's last-minute-before-release patch *removed* quests from the various starting areas, to make it less obvious that the devs initially had created only one set of quests and then copied and pasted it into all four starting areas. Now most of these quests will be only available to one or two of the four nations, so if you try another nation you're not playing the same quests again. Clever trick, but the devs had a point in that there were more than enough quests available for low level players, and culling them differently for the various nations made more sense than deleting the same quest for all of them. For all its flaws and third world UI, I enjoyed my time in PotBS, and wouldn't want to discourage other companies from making niche games like that.
So I'll buy the game next Monday, and recheck my interest level at the end of the free month. That's the least I owe them for playing the game half a year. My hope is that the economy develops new dynamics due to having more players than the closed beta. My fear is that lots of players means lots of ports under contention, making it harder and harder to avoid PvP. I do believe that negative sum PvP is probably the worst endgame option you can think off, but PotBS has exactly that: and endgame in which everybody will continuously lose ships, consumables, and outfittings and get nothing but bragging rights in return.
But then I'm playing the only class in the game that isn't PvP enabled: the freetrader. Imagine in World of Warcraft one class, lets say hunters, would be much, much weaker in raids, but much, much better in farming gold. Now imagine that guilds would say to their hunters: "we won't take you with us to raids, as you would weaken us. But you can stay in the guild and farm gold for us, handing it over to the raiders so they can pay their repair bills". If you can wrap your head around that crazy situation, you'll be ready to play a freetrader. Freetraders are considerably weaker in combat than the other three classes, so they have a harder time leveling and won't be welcome in guild PvP "raids". But they are better in the economic game, and some advanced ships can only be built by them. So hardcore guilds will want to have a couple of freetraders in their ranks, but wouldn't want really to play with them, but just expect them to provide the guild with advanced ships at below market rates. I don't think this setup is on the right way for a harmonious guild life.
I don't think many people will play Pirates of the Burning Sea for more than half a year. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't play this game at all. If you haven't played PotBS before, it certainly has a couple of months of entertainment value in it. And it is significantly different from past games like WoW, or the games expected for 2008 like AoC and WAR, to be considered a break from the regular fantasy MMO monotony. I'm all for highly polished mass market MMORPGs, but I wouldn't want them to be the only thing on offer.
The logical thing to do for me would be to not buy PotBS. But that would send the wrong message. Pirates of the Burning Sea isn't a bad game, it is just lacking PvE content, and I'm not much interested in the PvP content. Yesterday's last-minute-before-release patch *removed* quests from the various starting areas, to make it less obvious that the devs initially had created only one set of quests and then copied and pasted it into all four starting areas. Now most of these quests will be only available to one or two of the four nations, so if you try another nation you're not playing the same quests again. Clever trick, but the devs had a point in that there were more than enough quests available for low level players, and culling them differently for the various nations made more sense than deleting the same quest for all of them. For all its flaws and third world UI, I enjoyed my time in PotBS, and wouldn't want to discourage other companies from making niche games like that.
So I'll buy the game next Monday, and recheck my interest level at the end of the free month. That's the least I owe them for playing the game half a year. My hope is that the economy develops new dynamics due to having more players than the closed beta. My fear is that lots of players means lots of ports under contention, making it harder and harder to avoid PvP. I do believe that negative sum PvP is probably the worst endgame option you can think off, but PotBS has exactly that: and endgame in which everybody will continuously lose ships, consumables, and outfittings and get nothing but bragging rights in return.
But then I'm playing the only class in the game that isn't PvP enabled: the freetrader. Imagine in World of Warcraft one class, lets say hunters, would be much, much weaker in raids, but much, much better in farming gold. Now imagine that guilds would say to their hunters: "we won't take you with us to raids, as you would weaken us. But you can stay in the guild and farm gold for us, handing it over to the raiders so they can pay their repair bills". If you can wrap your head around that crazy situation, you'll be ready to play a freetrader. Freetraders are considerably weaker in combat than the other three classes, so they have a harder time leveling and won't be welcome in guild PvP "raids". But they are better in the economic game, and some advanced ships can only be built by them. So hardcore guilds will want to have a couple of freetraders in their ranks, but wouldn't want really to play with them, but just expect them to provide the guild with advanced ships at below market rates. I don't think this setup is on the right way for a harmonious guild life.
I don't think many people will play Pirates of the Burning Sea for more than half a year. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't play this game at all. If you haven't played PotBS before, it certainly has a couple of months of entertainment value in it. And it is significantly different from past games like WoW, or the games expected for 2008 like AoC and WAR, to be considered a break from the regular fantasy MMO monotony. I'm all for highly polished mass market MMORPGs, but I wouldn't want them to be the only thing on offer.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Happy Birthday, Burning Crusade!
Today is the first birthday of the Burning Crusade expansion of World of Warcraft. The most noticeable thing about this event is the missing expected guest at the birthday party: Wrath of the Lich King, the second expansion. Blizzard clearly failed their declared goal of one expansion per year. WotLK doesn't even appear to be anywhere close, the best guess for it's release is November 2008, 4 years after the release of World of Warcraft, and thus bringing the average to one expansion every two years. Blizzard is famous for being obsessed with quality, which is a good thing. But I can't believe they couldn't have used some of their $500 million profit to hire a bunch more people and get expansions out faster. As a WoW expansion is like printing money, a guaranteed 10 million box sales, I'm sure there is a strong business case for producing expansions faster. And the players would certainly like it.
The Burning Crusade turned out to be better than I originally thought. Nevertheless I do stand to my statement from last year that while TBC is nice enough, it doesn't offer sufficient content to occupy everyone until the next expansion. But lets have a look at what the Burning Crusade offered us over the last 12 months.
Of course on release a large number of people were mostly interested in leveling up their characters to 70. Leveling up from 60 to 70 was fun: the quests were of somewhat higher quality than those in the old world, and the loot and quest rewards were much, much better. Only point of criticism on the leveling game is low replayability: Every single level 60 character, Horde or Alliance, goes through the nearly the same quests in the same Hellfire Peninsula zone. Blizzard realized that flaw, and Wrath of the Lich King will have multiple entry zones.
At level 70 the endgame of the Burning Crusade turned out to be in many respects better than the level 60 endgame. The reputation grinds were less grindy (unless you hate instances). The number of possible 5-man instances to go to was larger. And if those 5-man instances got too easy for you, you could always visit them in heroic mode for better rewards. Subsequent patches added daily quests, which made farming money feel less like a treadmill and more fun. Crafting at level 70 was more useful than at level 60, but that turned out to be a mixed blessing: Yes, you now could craft really nice epics which weren't totally useless compared to the other loot available, and that was good. But the downside of that was that you obviously can't give out epics too easily, so getting them involves a lot of farming primals, which gets boring rather fast.
The Burning Crusade raid endgame wasn't such a big success, at least not from the point of view of the majority of players. Reducing the size of the entry level raid dungeon from 40 to 10 players didn't achieve it's stated goal of making raiding more accessible. It turned out that in an average guild a 40 man Molten Core raid contained a mix of more dedicated and less dedicated players. There was a certain amount of room for "slackers", not everybody had to be at the top of their game all of the time. While that was a bit annoying for those who did most of the work in a raid, overall the system was good for the social cohesion of a guild. There was a possibility to take less experienced people on a raid and teach them the basics of raiding on the go. The entry level raid of the Burning Crusade doesn't have room for slackers, as there are only 10 people in the raid. There is less opportunity to take friends, or to train newer players. As an added problem the higher level raids after Karazhan required 25 players. Many guilds had one A team breezing through Karazhan after a while, and a B team that was still struggling. So when the A team wanted to move on, they found that they were lacking 15 people for the next raid dungeon. Some guilds managed to organize their Karazhan raid groups better, having two or more groups of equal strength instead of an A and B team. But in many other guilds the A team left to join another guild's A team to have enough players for the following content. The system was responsible for a large amount of guild drama and reshuffling. Fortunately that sorted itself out after a couple of months, and the introduction of another 10-man raid dungeon, Zul'Aman, helped too.
But if you were to log on tonight an count the percentage of players in raid dungeons, you'd notice that there are less people raiding nowadays than in the level 60 endgame. PvE raiding is now relatively less popular, for the simple reason that PvP has become more popular. This is a simple result of PvP mudflation: Arena seasons are much shorter than the time between two expansion in WoW. And every new arena season introduces even better rewards. And to make sure that new players can keep up with people in season 3 arena gear, season 1 arena gear has been made available for honor points, and is relatively easy to achieve. While Blizzard shouldn't have allowed Tigole to belittle them as "welfare epics", fact is that it is now easier to get a nice set of epics from PvP than from PvE raiding. That confirmed a widespread suspicion that some people were just raiding for the phat loot, because now these people aren't raiding any more, they are doing PvP.
PvP being relatively more popular isn't necessarily a bad thing (even if on underpopulated servers it makes it hard to find PvE groups). After all the Warcraft background is one that would presume a lot more PvP to take place. And as a defensive move against a wave of upcoming PvP-centric games, making PvP more popular in WoW is certainly a clever idea. Unfortunately if the people doing the PvP are only there for the phat loot, you can expect a certain amount of exploiting going on, and PvP is less safe against exploiting than PvE is. There are people doing AFK honor farming in battlegrounds, people buying themselves a spot in top arena teams, win trading (also called "smurfing"). So while now more people are doing PvP, the players who actually enjoy PvP for PvP's sake are less happy now, because the exploiters spoil their fun. Blizzard is well aware of the problem, but their first attempts to stop AFK honor farming haven't been very successful, and they have to come up with new ways to stop PvP exploiting.
The Burning Crusade didn't add new classes to the game, but it added one new race per faction, and via this new race made the classes that were previously restricted to one faction available to the other. So now there are bloodelf paladins for the Horde and draenei shamans for the Alliance. With the new races came new newbie zones up to level 20. And patch 2.3 added new quests in the level 35 to 40 range, where previously there weren't enough of them. Also leveling from level 20 to 60 has been sped up with the patch. All this lead to many people leveling alts nowadays.
So all in all the Burning Crusade has reason to celebrate on its first birthday. Things didn't go flawless, but well enough. Subscriber numbers went up when TBC was released, then went down a few months later, but went slightly up again after the summer and are pretty much stable now. This was helped by a lack of serious contenders in 2007. The coming months risk being harder for World of Warcraft: if Warhammer Online is released well before Wrath of the Lich King, the combination of not much new happening in the old game and the promises of a new game could lead to a noticeable migration towards WAR. Evil tongues say that the relative release dates of WAR and WotLK are of such importance that neither side dares to announce a fix release date. Images of Wild West gunfighters staring at each other at high noon in the main street of Tombstone for hours without moving come to mind, waiting for the other to draw first. Let's hope that under these conditions Wrath of the Lich King makes it before the Burning Crusade's second birthday.
The Burning Crusade turned out to be better than I originally thought. Nevertheless I do stand to my statement from last year that while TBC is nice enough, it doesn't offer sufficient content to occupy everyone until the next expansion. But lets have a look at what the Burning Crusade offered us over the last 12 months.
Of course on release a large number of people were mostly interested in leveling up their characters to 70. Leveling up from 60 to 70 was fun: the quests were of somewhat higher quality than those in the old world, and the loot and quest rewards were much, much better. Only point of criticism on the leveling game is low replayability: Every single level 60 character, Horde or Alliance, goes through the nearly the same quests in the same Hellfire Peninsula zone. Blizzard realized that flaw, and Wrath of the Lich King will have multiple entry zones.
At level 70 the endgame of the Burning Crusade turned out to be in many respects better than the level 60 endgame. The reputation grinds were less grindy (unless you hate instances). The number of possible 5-man instances to go to was larger. And if those 5-man instances got too easy for you, you could always visit them in heroic mode for better rewards. Subsequent patches added daily quests, which made farming money feel less like a treadmill and more fun. Crafting at level 70 was more useful than at level 60, but that turned out to be a mixed blessing: Yes, you now could craft really nice epics which weren't totally useless compared to the other loot available, and that was good. But the downside of that was that you obviously can't give out epics too easily, so getting them involves a lot of farming primals, which gets boring rather fast.
The Burning Crusade raid endgame wasn't such a big success, at least not from the point of view of the majority of players. Reducing the size of the entry level raid dungeon from 40 to 10 players didn't achieve it's stated goal of making raiding more accessible. It turned out that in an average guild a 40 man Molten Core raid contained a mix of more dedicated and less dedicated players. There was a certain amount of room for "slackers", not everybody had to be at the top of their game all of the time. While that was a bit annoying for those who did most of the work in a raid, overall the system was good for the social cohesion of a guild. There was a possibility to take less experienced people on a raid and teach them the basics of raiding on the go. The entry level raid of the Burning Crusade doesn't have room for slackers, as there are only 10 people in the raid. There is less opportunity to take friends, or to train newer players. As an added problem the higher level raids after Karazhan required 25 players. Many guilds had one A team breezing through Karazhan after a while, and a B team that was still struggling. So when the A team wanted to move on, they found that they were lacking 15 people for the next raid dungeon. Some guilds managed to organize their Karazhan raid groups better, having two or more groups of equal strength instead of an A and B team. But in many other guilds the A team left to join another guild's A team to have enough players for the following content. The system was responsible for a large amount of guild drama and reshuffling. Fortunately that sorted itself out after a couple of months, and the introduction of another 10-man raid dungeon, Zul'Aman, helped too.
But if you were to log on tonight an count the percentage of players in raid dungeons, you'd notice that there are less people raiding nowadays than in the level 60 endgame. PvE raiding is now relatively less popular, for the simple reason that PvP has become more popular. This is a simple result of PvP mudflation: Arena seasons are much shorter than the time between two expansion in WoW. And every new arena season introduces even better rewards. And to make sure that new players can keep up with people in season 3 arena gear, season 1 arena gear has been made available for honor points, and is relatively easy to achieve. While Blizzard shouldn't have allowed Tigole to belittle them as "welfare epics", fact is that it is now easier to get a nice set of epics from PvP than from PvE raiding. That confirmed a widespread suspicion that some people were just raiding for the phat loot, because now these people aren't raiding any more, they are doing PvP.
PvP being relatively more popular isn't necessarily a bad thing (even if on underpopulated servers it makes it hard to find PvE groups). After all the Warcraft background is one that would presume a lot more PvP to take place. And as a defensive move against a wave of upcoming PvP-centric games, making PvP more popular in WoW is certainly a clever idea. Unfortunately if the people doing the PvP are only there for the phat loot, you can expect a certain amount of exploiting going on, and PvP is less safe against exploiting than PvE is. There are people doing AFK honor farming in battlegrounds, people buying themselves a spot in top arena teams, win trading (also called "smurfing"). So while now more people are doing PvP, the players who actually enjoy PvP for PvP's sake are less happy now, because the exploiters spoil their fun. Blizzard is well aware of the problem, but their first attempts to stop AFK honor farming haven't been very successful, and they have to come up with new ways to stop PvP exploiting.
The Burning Crusade didn't add new classes to the game, but it added one new race per faction, and via this new race made the classes that were previously restricted to one faction available to the other. So now there are bloodelf paladins for the Horde and draenei shamans for the Alliance. With the new races came new newbie zones up to level 20. And patch 2.3 added new quests in the level 35 to 40 range, where previously there weren't enough of them. Also leveling from level 20 to 60 has been sped up with the patch. All this lead to many people leveling alts nowadays.
So all in all the Burning Crusade has reason to celebrate on its first birthday. Things didn't go flawless, but well enough. Subscriber numbers went up when TBC was released, then went down a few months later, but went slightly up again after the summer and are pretty much stable now. This was helped by a lack of serious contenders in 2007. The coming months risk being harder for World of Warcraft: if Warhammer Online is released well before Wrath of the Lich King, the combination of not much new happening in the old game and the promises of a new game could lead to a noticeable migration towards WAR. Evil tongues say that the relative release dates of WAR and WotLK are of such importance that neither side dares to announce a fix release date. Images of Wild West gunfighters staring at each other at high noon in the main street of Tombstone for hours without moving come to mind, waiting for the other to draw first. Let's hope that under these conditions Wrath of the Lich King makes it before the Burning Crusade's second birthday.
Should all alts be able to start at level 60 in WotLK?
Details about the next World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, are still sparse. But from the initial announcement it appeared as if the new class, Deathknights, would not have to start the game from level 1. Instead they would directly start at a higher level, with 58, 60, or even 70 being mentioned as possibilities. Let's say 60, just to spare me the effort of writing "58, 60, or 70" or "a high level" every time.
Now there are good arguments for and against having new characters start at level 60. The advantage is obviously that if you are mainly interested in the endgame, starting at level 60 saves you about 200 hours of leveling from 1 to 60. The expansion adds little or no content for levels 1 to 60, so the option to skip those will be welcome to some. The disadvantage is that a level 60 character already starts with a large number of spells and abilities, and 51 talent points. Not having gone through the leveling process, players don't get the time to learn these spells, abilities and talents slowly, but have to start learning to swim at the deep end of the pool.
But now lets say we are okay with Blizzard's decision that Deathknights start at level 60. Then why would somebody making a Deathknight alt start at level 60, while somebody making a warrior alt, or an alt of any other class, will still have to level up from 1 to 60? The *option* to start at level 1 has to keep existing, for players new to WoW, or fans of the old world for example. But if we can start level 60 Deathknights, why not give us the option to start level 60 priests or other character classes? As I said, there are good arguments to start all classes at level 1, but if one class gets the option to start at level 60, then why not all of them? The same arguments that speak for allowing Deathknights to start at level 60 should surely be valid for other classes as well!
Now there are good arguments for and against having new characters start at level 60. The advantage is obviously that if you are mainly interested in the endgame, starting at level 60 saves you about 200 hours of leveling from 1 to 60. The expansion adds little or no content for levels 1 to 60, so the option to skip those will be welcome to some. The disadvantage is that a level 60 character already starts with a large number of spells and abilities, and 51 talent points. Not having gone through the leveling process, players don't get the time to learn these spells, abilities and talents slowly, but have to start learning to swim at the deep end of the pool.
But now lets say we are okay with Blizzard's decision that Deathknights start at level 60. Then why would somebody making a Deathknight alt start at level 60, while somebody making a warrior alt, or an alt of any other class, will still have to level up from 1 to 60? The *option* to start at level 1 has to keep existing, for players new to WoW, or fans of the old world for example. But if we can start level 60 Deathknights, why not give us the option to start level 60 priests or other character classes? As I said, there are good arguments to start all classes at level 1, but if one class gets the option to start at level 60, then why not all of them? The same arguments that speak for allowing Deathknights to start at level 60 should surely be valid for other classes as well!
Star Trek Online cancelled
Warcry reports that Star Trek Online has been cancelled. Well, not officially cancelled, but the company that used to be called Perpetual and used to have the license to make Star Trek Online had to give back the license. Some other company could now restart developing the game, but they won't get any existing code from Perpetual.
Scott Jennings calls it an impossible license. But apparently the reasons for Perpetual giving up the license are less about design possibilities, and more about financial possibilities. Perpetual already cancelled Gods & Heroes which was already in the beta and had pre-order boxes shipped to retailers. And they did some clever legal and financial engineering, including creating a new company, P2 Entertainment, and transferring all their assets including the Star Trek Online license to that new entity. People who were owed money by the old Perpetual sued them over that move. Investors had to write off their investments, as the old Perpetual went bankrupt.
For us players all that just means that we won't see a Star Trek Online game before 2015, if ever.
[Edit: Rumors have it that the new STO developer will be Cryptic Studios.]
Scott Jennings calls it an impossible license. But apparently the reasons for Perpetual giving up the license are less about design possibilities, and more about financial possibilities. Perpetual already cancelled Gods & Heroes which was already in the beta and had pre-order boxes shipped to retailers. And they did some clever legal and financial engineering, including creating a new company, P2 Entertainment, and transferring all their assets including the Star Trek Online license to that new entity. People who were owed money by the old Perpetual sued them over that move. Investors had to write off their investments, as the old Perpetual went bankrupt.
For us players all that just means that we won't see a Star Trek Online game before 2015, if ever.
[Edit: Rumors have it that the new STO developer will be Cryptic Studios.]
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