World PvP and Why Not

Every time a new MMO is released there is a long hard cry about how it is another “theme park” MMO and how it has no RvR or world PvP.  Every time this argument comes out my personal response is always, good.

In this article I intend to argue that large scale world PvP is bad and people should not want large scale PvP elements.

A World PvP Story

I remember when I was doing Tempest Keep progression.  We were the only guild on the entire server that was progressing through content.  We were getting very very close to getting an A’lar kill.  A’lar progression wise is the second last boss you do, and he/it is a tough one.

We were somewhat of bragarts on the forums about our progression and so the entire server knew who we were and what we were about.  It also just so happened that our guild had the gladiator 5v5 arena team in our guild.

If being a bragart doesn’t get you negative flak, having people who win will.  In our 5v5 team was two warriors and three healers, the gayest of all 5v5 arena compositions.

Tempest Keep is a rather unique dungeon.  It flies in the air and requires a flying mount to reach.  Well it was unique at the time.  Now we have all sorts of dungeons that require flying mounts to get to.  The graveyard for Tempest Keep is on the ground and easily accessible.

So half of a rival horde guild are sitting at our graveyard on one of their off nights (and our raid night) farming us down as we wiped.  We would have to ghost to the nearby town, mount up and run.  Eventually they killed off town guards and there was no place to run.  People were being camped for miles.

Eventually our guild organized, threw on our PvP gear and wiped them out.  We waited until they were at their progression boss (one behind us) and we struck.  We used the exact same tactic and indefinitely delayed them by one boss.

Every progression night afterwards would involve our guilds farming each other out and mutual raid nights would involve random wipes at the same time and random PvP encounters.

The end result of this was that our server’s progression was stunted and eventually both guilds would break up out of sheer frustration.  People left the server en mass for PVE servers and this place existed as a server wasteland.  It is still a wasteland.  Blizzard tried so many times to resurrect this server but it’s still dead.

A dead server all because there was an odd world PvP element accidentally placed in the game.

Argument #1: Because of Interruption

When you ask people what they think world PvP is they explain to you it is these big epic battles between two sides that randomly occurs.  People will mount to the defense of their allies and force off their enemies.

But that’s not what it really is.  World PvP is when two or more random people meet up in an environment and fight each other.

That is all it is.

It’s VERY easy for developers to facilitate this.  All they need to do is create a tightly packed questing zone that all players will have to go to.

In this sense world PvP is player initiated disruption of the normal planned activity.

So here is a scenario.  I go to a particular zone, let’s call it Tarren Mill in order to do quests.  But someone else there of the opposite faction is also doing quests.  He attacks me and I kill him.  He calls his overpowered Level 50 friend to help him.  I have to have a level 50 friend or I’m screwed.  If I do then we’re even again.

But at the end of it I am still pissed as I was unable to finish my quests.  I am then required to return to this zone again tomorrow and no doubt have the exact same situation happen.

The same is true of most cross-faction zones, they just become areas where Level 50 players ‘gank’ lowbie players.  Some zones became so notoriously bad for it that people would opt to just kill mobs for XP instead of quest there.

Thankfully when Warsong Gultch was released it saved most of us from the tyranny of overgeared Level 50s having nothing to do.

For 99% of gamers world PvP is nothing but a nuisance.  Since all of the emphasis has been on end game content people want to get to max level and world PvP represents an interruption of service.

Argument #2: Because of Imbalance

So let’s say you do get this massive world PvP engagement you are dreaming about.  You call your friends and they call their friends and suddenly the zone is erupting into a giant mash of PvP glory.

You bring your 10 friends and they bring…. 40 friends… oh shit.

I cannot think of a game that has launched with servers that had balanced faction representation.  But it happens most indefinitely.

You will NEVER have a fair fight in world combat.  It’s not possible.  There will be varying numbers of people and varying numbers of levels.  Let’s not even talk about class imbalance.

The fact is the larger the fight is the largest imbalances in the game become obvious.  This is the main reason why developers have shifted to try and shrink down large scale battles to smaller ones.

There have been many attempts to try and control the balance of PvP.  Most notably was the Wintergrasp system developed by WOW.  This system would give the side with less players a special buff that would give them more health, damage and healing.  So if there are two of you.. that’s fine because one of me is just as strong.  The encounter would cap at 40 so it wouldn’t get too out of control.

But is this REALLY what people wanted in world PvP.  Isn’t this just another battleground?

The fact is in the mass of numbers there is no skill, just zerging.  If you get killed by 10 people are you really going to feel like this is something fun to do?  Probably not.

Argument #3: Because You Have Better Things to Do

When Ultima Online was first released it came with all sorts of cool stuff.  However after everyone just hack and slashed each other to death in crowded areas the game developers were forced to instead of making small quality stuff create large expansive worlds.  This was one of the first real world PvP elements.  People were having fun with it.

Many people remark the world PvP of these early pre-WoW MMOs.

Most notably of these is Dark Age of Camelot from Mythic Studios.  Here is a game that had 1.5M players (a lot for the time) and was the only MMO able to take a chunk out of Everquest and Lineage.

They did it because at the time everything was open world events and they were going to design the greatest open world events game.  Mythic realized that faction vs faction fights would always be imbalanced, so to counter that they created a game that involved three factions.  This way you always sort of had to worry about that third guy.

Mythic even invented a realm vs realm concept where people would fight for property.

Everyone involved in these games felt THIS was the epitomy of online play, player vs player combat. Every game that was being developed on its 5-6 year cycle would feature some large open world elements.

World of Warcraft was originally designed to be a large open world just like Dark Age of Camelot.  A lot of the zones were purposely made smaller so that player vs player combat was bound to happen.  Tarren Mill became notorious for its world PvP.

But then tragedy struck, Tarren Mill was deserted. Blizzard released its first conception of end game, Molten Core and Warsong Gultch.  People were in shock as they had thought Tarren Mill WAS the end game.  No Blizzard had more in stock for them.

As it turned out people were only doing world PvP because that was the funnest thing they could do in this game.  There were some who would go to Tarren Mill in hopes of hitting these big epic battles… but they were never as big or as epic.  As time went on these areas would dwindle.  Instead of spending their time in Tarren Mill people would settle themselves in trade chats looking for groups for dungeons, waiting in queue for a battleground, or farming the plains for resources they would need for raiding.

Two AAA MMOs since then have come out stressing world PvP, Age of Conan and Warhammer Online.  Both of these were abysmal failures.  Both Funcom and Mythic missed out on an important aspect of the success of Dark Age of Camelot… people were doing it because they had nothing better to do.

Scarlet Legacy vblog #7: Sunwell Plateau Reflections

In this video I reflect on the my experiences with Sunwell Plateau in World of Warcraft.

World of Elfcraft: A Never Expanding Genre

When World of Warcraft posted numbers exceeding 14M people everyone decided it was time to get into the online game.  The gamer market is roughly 250,000,000 people.  Out of that 250,000,000 about 80,000,000 play MMOs.  Out of that 80,000,000 you have 14,000,000 people playing World of Warcraft.

That leaves sum total 66,000,000 gamers who could potentially be courted to play your game.  Or you can choose to court the smaller player base, that is 14,000,000 people to try and get your slice of the World of Warcraft subscription monies.

World of Warcraft represents a very small and niche market, fantasy.  If you look at the top 10 books of the last year (2010) you will find that only one of those is fantasy.  And one is only slightly fantasy, it is more of a Christmas book than a fantasy elf type thing.

The problem with fantasy is that it is something that has been here for all time.  Fantasy is the single most published fiction genre.  it is a market designed to attract the attentions of young men who are rather uncertain with themselves (geeks) and young girls.  I mean that’s all Twilight was about right?  Girls wooing over two different gentlemen.

This literary tradition transitions over into the MMO market as well.  People have been making fantasy games for all time.  I can remember the first Windows 95 game I played, Baldur’s Gate.  Here is a fantasy RPG that did well and since then the market has bloomed full of fantasy RPGs.

Fantasy RPGs do terrible in the gaming market.  You need to have a massive blockbuster game to even make a dent.  Elder Scrolls is a pretty big exception but for the most part people just dodge RPGs like there is no tomorrow.

So why is that exactly?

#1: WoW Did It

When you play a fantasy RPG it has a beginning and an end.  It is a fairly short experience usually not exceeding 80 hours of play.  It is a central focused story that you must follow along with.  In this regard a standard RPG is going to have a chance in the market because it is telling a single narrative designed to interest a specific gamer type.  The game is, targetted towards people who like these games.

This was the case with Final Fantasy 4 which offered you a rich narrative involving a radical group of individuals using the powers of some sort of magical being to beat back evil.

But when Final Fantasy 4 ended, that was it.  That was the end of the game, you moved on to the next one.

With the MMORPG though you have a central focus and then you have an almost infinite number of sub-stories.  Each fantasy MMO will have a central focus.

World of Warcraft had Illidan, Naxxramas, Arthas, and Deathwing as different central focused stories for each expansion.  But with every single expansion came 20-30 sub-stories involving various factions having their own personal grief.  I forget their names but there were these furblog people and these froggy people in the Basin.  They were at war with each other and you chose a side.  They redid this a couple of times and it got repetitive.  They had stories of knights, undead knights, disease spreaders, ghouls, goblins, bears, tree people, night people, old people, ancient people, Egyptian people, spider people, and stone people.  There are so many factions with their own stories in WoW that they have almost put themselves out of a job in writing lore.

WoW has even moved on to the panda people just because they’re running out of stuff to write about.  On top of that they have had to rewrite tales and expand stories.  I have two examples of this.

In Eastern Plaguelands there was a faction of people who wanted to cleanse Naxxramas and purify the land of undead influence.  This had to be reinvisioned to create a combined faction of undead knights and knights of the light.  This new faction would push into the frozen wastelands of Northrend to try and take out Arthas.  They removed tones of quest lines involving the former faction trying to wipe out Naxxramas, moved Naxxramas to Northrend and reworked the story to make it more dynamic.

A second example is the Cenarion Circle factioned featured in the vanilla game.  These were keepers of the woods who were interested in keeping the world in tact.  They fought with you against the AQ dungeons and the various spider and gargoyle bosses that came out of it.  This faction moved to Outlands and was given the name Cenarion Expedition where they were dedicated to stopping Lady Vashj from destroying the natural habitat of the marsh she was occupying.  As you found out she was taking water from the lake and pumping it out for some reason no one really understood.

So then comes Northrend.  Blizzard decides to re-imagine this faction of tree people fighting evil who were destroying this world as extremist environmental degredation protesters.  They were given the name “P.E.T.A.” to explain this.  You were given subtle hints that these druids were the same ones since you would get Cenarion rep for completing these quests.

The big problem is, WoW did it.

Matt Stone and Trey Parker ran into the same problem when they were having problems coming up with show ideas, because Simpsons Did It.  it’s a problem when there is a king of a genre who does everything possible.  It has come to the point where Simpsons is on and off with blandness because they are repeating themselves.

WoW has invested in damn near every single story line possible to the point where no matter what you do, it will look pretty similar to what WoW did.

#2: Fantasy is Limited

There are only so many types of stories a fantasy world can cover.  For their second expansion World of Warcraft did the mixed fantasy-scifi theme that a lot of fantasy publishers are forced to do to keep alive.  I mean look at Final Fantasy’s whole series, it is a fantasy game that involves guns and lasers.

Fantasy is a very limited genre and is best played in short RPGs.  This is because the very beginning of the game is designed to limit the game so that you can make sequels involving more fantasy themes.

What does fantasy offer?

Vampires-werewolves

Elves-dwarves

Goblins-ghouls

And then… that’s pretty much it.  Fantasy authors are always struggling to tell stories because they are entering a very limited realm.

I think I’ve said before in one of my blogs that I have watched a single Harry Potter movie and never read a single one of these books.  The one movie I watched was Deathly Hollows Part 2.  This is a great example of an authorship having nothing else to write about.  From what I gather from the other books they introduce the school, the minor villains and it all leads up to this final vision.

SPOILER ALERT!

There is this dark haired school teacher who the whole time has been kind of a douche to Harry Potter.  But in a sudden plot twist it turns out he was being a douche to be his friend.  The author ran out of creative juices and decided to throw in this massive twist that absolutely made no sense and the story of the movies did not have anything to do with.  And then it is suddenly forgotten almost instantly and does not matter.

Fantasy is really hard to write because you really only have so far to go with it.  You run out of a lot of room to work with and you slowly write yourself out of content.  You have to finish up the story and then write an expansion to try and tell another separate story of this adventurer.  But that story is extremely limited too.  The expansion is going to be themed and so everything should be expected to fit into those parameters.  Rift for example is limited to these rift invasion creatures who you are preventing from destroying the world.  Well that limits the sort of mobs, the sort of stories, and the sort of encounters.  The game starts (as Defiant) at the end of the world where Regulos and Aselbeth have destroyed the world.

Once you have played one fantasy MMO it almost feels like you have played them all.  You need the same sorts of classes and the same sorts of characters.  If you show up in a fantasy MMO with something radically different it will not appeal to the limited fantasy MMO niche market you are attempting to get at.

#3: Nobody Likes Elves

Let’s get this out in the open… nobody actually ever likes elves… ever.  Every single elf in every single book, movie, or feature are always assholes who think they are better than everything.  They are always douchebags that emphasize how much better they are than everyone.  Sometimes elves are spiritual in nature… but they still have that sense of being better than everyone.

Think of Lord of the Rings.  The premise of the elves was that they thought of themselves as so high and mighty that they abandoned mankind to Sauron in favor of protecting their people in some distant land Sauron could not touch.  Why not just take all of the humans and all of the land with them?  Why fight at all?  They thought themselves so high and mighty and so special.

Yet every single fantasy MMO out there features some sort of elf or elf-like race.  They are tall.  They are skanky.  They are ‘clever.’  They think of themselves as being out of this world.  And they were for some time, insanely popular.  This popularity has dwindled over time and this is because we are over-exposed to elves now.  It is no longer cool to be an elf, in fact people hate elves.

There is an odd popularity for elf-free games.  Global Agenda advertised specifically on being elf-free:

The scifi-space genre has become more popular for story telling because it is elf free.

The main problem suffering from the fantasy genre is that of elves, the same stuff ad infinitum.  The fantasy MMO genre really has nowhere to go, it is mostly capped in the number of people doing it right now.  Yet more and more fantasy MMOs keep coming up every month to try and steal away some profits.

The World of Elfcraft is diluting me thinks it is time for developers to look elsewhere.  Hopefully Ubisoft decides to go elsewhere for their upcoming unnamed MMO.

 

Allure of Freemium Service

World of Warcraft selected to extend the free trial period from Level 10 to Level 20.  This essentially doubles the free to play experience in World of Warcraft.  Certain controls are still in place to slow down the crusade of gold spammers.  This change has made moe people question, is WoW heading towards freemium?

What is Freemium?

Although I can’t be sure who coined the term freemium it has been around since at least DDO (Dungeons and Dragons Online).  Freemium offers an odd combination of free to play and subscription basis.  Basically the game is offered to players for free.  However premium services are offered to players.  Premium services can include a subscription fee for ‘bonus content’ pay access to dungeons/raids, item shops, server transfers, class changes, and about 100 other possible options.

Freemiun service emerged as a transitional tool for companies to switch between Subscription service and free to play.  Basically games with a subscription base have people who are willing to pay a monthly subscription fee for their product.  By switching purely to a free to play model these companies would immediately lose money as their existing revenue stream would suddenly cease to exist.  All the while they would be waiting for their cash shops to slowly pay off.  On the other hand by not offering free service their only way of expanding their existing clientel was through advertising and expensive developments on expansions.

Instead the freemium model offered a way to keep existing subscriptions while providing a platform for new gamers to play their product and eventually get suckered into paying for the premium service.

So Why WoW?

WoW for many gamers represents the last bastion of the subscription video game.  Before MMOs there really were no subscription games.  There really never was a need.  Much like Guild Wars people purchased a game played through it’s content and bought the impending expansions and sequels.  A good example of the difference is Starcraft: Brood Wars vs Starcraft 2.  The expansion provided extra content that you HAD to get in order to play the game while Starcraft 2 was stand alone from Starcraft 1.

World of Warcraft followed a pattern of MMOs that provided games for subscription fees.  Most of the post WoW MMOs have gone free to play.  Most of the MMOs before WoW are either free to play…. or dead.  World of Warcraft is this interesting ‘pivot point’ in gaming where it has done insanely well with the subscription basis.

Blizzard Entertainment has not and cannot ignore the pattern of newly developed MMOs.  Games like Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, Star Trek Online, and Hellgate London which were all hyped up as WoW killers… failed.  They failed all the while the games that had switched to the free to play model or came in as free to play were actually in competition with WoW.

When I walked into Walmart today I saw something that shocked me.  While purchasing my items I looked at the giftcards and there it was…. a Perfect World Entertainment gift card.  Worst yet… they were almost sold out and the cashier informed me that this was one of the most popular gift cards they were selling.

PWE is a company that is becoming more and more popular in North America.  PWE provides the following title:

• Perfect World
• Forsaken World
• Rusty Hearts
• Jade Dynasty
• Battle of the Immortals
• Ether Saga Odyssey
• Raiderz
• Torchlight
• Legend of Martial Arts
• Heroes of Three Kingdoms
• Blacklight
• Star Trek Online*
• Champions Online*
• Neverwinter*

* Titles are offered through Cryptic Studios which is owned by PWE.

Perfect World Entertainment is doing better economically than Blizzard Entertainment and many of its games are out performing World of Warcraft.  It’s a sort of revelation that very soon World of Warcraft will go in competition with Asian companies.  There’s a historical short falling in America to buy from Asia because they are willing to work for less.  I think MMOs is a very easy transfer to this historical truth.  Literally American MMOs are going in competition with people who are giving it for free.

No doubt Blizzard adding on another free ten levels is an acknowledgement of who their real competition is.

We often look at games like…. Rift… and think this is the game that might some day replace WoW.  In truth Rift is an example of why the fremium model is looking more appealing.  When people saw Rift they thought it would be a game like Age of Conan or Warhammer Online which posted strong openings and diminished.

When launch day came for Rift sales were underwhelming.  I don’t think anyone expected Rift to perform as poorly as it did.  But as it eventually came to be known, Rift ended up being one of the worst selling games of the year.  Fans of Rift HATE to hear this.  I made a post stating that Rift had only sold 130,000 copies in it’s first month and it’s players simply would not accept that fact.

Compare that to say, Prius Online which is only six months old and celebrating it’s five millionth account. Prius Online isn’t nearly as good of a game as Rift.  It is filled with awful translation errors, mass punctuation where grammar ought to be and a traditionally bad broken Engrish.

Freemium Isn’t for Baddies

Freemium service is not made for baddies.  Freemium service is for great games that failed to attract an audience.  Most recently Age of Conan and DC Universe Online have both converted to mixed freemium services.  Each of these will let you know the benefits you would have gained had you premium service.  For DC Universe the reminder is there every time you vendor stuff.  It indicates to you how much extra money you would gain if you promoted yourself to premium.  On top of that it will tell you that you can get all of this money if you only convert to premium service.

Age of Conan has an option called rested days.  This will give you free levels for time spent offline.  When you log on next it will tell you how much extra XP you would have gained from logging on or how many extra levels you would have gained.  It’s very generous, 1 level per 2 days offline.

This model of business is more attractive to the casual gamer market.  It is telling you that you can play this game for free and have less… or you can take it easy and pay some dough for more.

The other thing these games offer that is huge is DLCs.  DLC stands for downloadable content.  The concept is simple, you will gain access to large clusters of content if you either subscribe to the premium service or if you purchase this content separately.  DLCs are generally fairly easy to make and will usually involve a few videos and a few levels or zones that are designed with a content customization model.

Many people feel that if Rift moved t o the freemium model they would have far more success.  They are producing so much content and getting so little for it.  They are sitting at a player base of 300,000 and producing content designed for a population of 2,000,000.

Will Rift feel the allure of freemium service?

Will WoW the last bastion of the subscription convert to freemium?

It’s doubtful.  At best WoW will continue to offer more free stuff to lure people into paying for a full subscription fee.

Many people have indicated that Star Wars: The Old Republic is going to be the last game that will have a subscription fee.  This is because freemium games are making too much money.  SWTOR was made based on a time where people were willing to pay subscription fees.  There are 80,000,000 people playing MMOs now.  Only about 20,000,000 of those are playing games with subscription fees.

Times are changing.

Leveling Guide: Part 3 – Generic Tips

Well I knew I would eventually be doing this. In this article I hope to write a guide involving only generic tips. These are tips that I think might be helpful but aren’t meaningful enough to resemble a theme for a full article.

1. Don’t level as a tank or healer: I don’t know how many people do this and they always think of some stupid logic to it. Some people suggest that by being a healer they never need to drink or eat. By playing a tank they feel the damage they reduce leads them with less down time. It just ends up being a lot of bollocks. Always go as the max DPS spec or a PvP spec with high burst. The server first in any game is always a DPS, it’s not a coincidence.
2. Be aware: Your DPS rotation is probably something stupidly simple, so being aware will pay off more than focusing on killing something. While you are doing something your next thought should always be “what’s next.” First is check your health/mana to make sure you don’t need to drink up (or use a CD to the same effect). After that you should be looking around for your next objective.
3. Know thy class: In every MMO there is generally a multi-class system. So before you start leveling make sure to know what your race is about. I mean it’s really cool to be the ranged warrior or the melee hunter but that’s not really what those classes are about. Every class will have a description. If you play within that description you will do well. The game designer will constantly redesign that class to fit its original intent so as long as you are playing within that description you will be better off. Now if you want to check out websites and forums, that will help to.
4. Use Cooldowns: Every single DPS class and spec in every single game is balanced around being roughly equal to each other. It is presumed in the PvE fights they are balanced around that you will use every single cooldown on cooldown, so why not do the same while leveling? If you don’t use your cooldowns on cooldown, don’t save them because you need them for an emergency. It is always going to be better to one-shot something than two shot.
5. Don’t Hoard Supplies: This is similar to using cooldowns. Don’t hoard on to raid supplies. That level 50 healing potion is not going to seem as valuable to you at level 60, that Level 9 healing potion is especially not going to be valuable at Level 60. I used to pop potions just so I wouldn’t have downtime from drinking, it’s a good idea, especially if you are a mana user.
6. Don’t Level PvPing: No matter how game developers make games they never make PvP into a viable way of leveling. The problem with PvP is that it is entirely group performance based leveling and there are almost always going to be people sitting there doing nothing at all. Even when you get a premade you will always have a moocher who is less willing to level in this way.
7. Only Group Level in Dungeons: Dungeons are a pretty good way to level because you are constantly killing a bunch of mobs with greater and greater efficiency and on top of that they’re always supposed to be comparable to quests. If you have a full group of people, level in dungeons. You guys will upgrade your gear together and will stay dedicated to running 100 9-minute dungeon runs for fast XP. In the Wrath of the Lich King expansion I leveled four levels in Utgarde Keep (9 minute runs) and three levels in Draketheron Keep (12 minute runs). If we didn’t have a full guild group of friends this would not have been possible. If you are leveling alone only do dungeons if you have quests, otherwise they will just slow down your progression.
8. Just Frigging Kill It: Mobs give experience. Kill mobs. One of the things that bothers me are the quest Nazis who feel that if they don’t kill something they are being slowed down massively. If you have something in your way, dismount and kill it (unless It doesn’t give XP). This rule is of course exempt in the World of Warcraft since you just fly everywhere. But for every single MMO don’t be afraid to get a little bit of extra XP from killing a mob.