What's the Biggest Turnoff to MMOs?

Hate to beat a dead horse here, but The Zombie Thing in WoW really highlighted what many people see as a major flaw in the MMO system in general. Rock Paper Shotgun has an article that's been getting coverage regarding the general ass-hattery found in most people, and the problem with there being more than one person to play with (everyone has to get along). And yet, I really don't think THAT's the big problem. Looking at Halo 3 sales figures (8.1m copies sold as of last January; many more since then, I imagine), I have to wonder how many are in it for the solo campaign, and how many just enjoy shooting other people in the face in multiplayer. Playing Madden online is probably pretty popular, but I'm sure a portion of the crowd buying it enjoys just running through a season offline, too.

It's not that people hate playing with each other, it's that either a) MMOs cost money over and over each month, or b) the rules are too vague. Many arguments have been made that dollar for dollar, MMOs are pretty cheap. WoW or Warhammer (or pretty much anything following the 'standard pricing model') break down to being about 50 cents a day. For the same cost as a single $60 copy of Dead Space (ooh! space zombies!) that lasts approximately 12 hours from start to finish, I could quest and raid and do whatever in an MMO for about 4 months. Four months is 2976 hours. Obviously, you can't be playing every waking second, but if you could, you could.

In a game like Madden, there are stringent rules in place. It's a game of football. You have four downs to get ten yards or the ball is turned over to the others, and this goes on for four 15-minute quarters. It's pretty straightforward, and there isn't much room to complain about 'playing it wrong'. In Halo, you shoot the other guy until he dies. Again, pretty straightforward. In an MMO, however, there aren't clearly defined goals, or perhaps there are so many that people are going to be overlapping in certain situations chasing separate goals. One person may be out to level trade skilling, while another is looking for world PvP. These two endeavors come into conflict when Larry jumps Dave, who's just picking flowers.

PvE servers have labeled that a foul, and yet, here comes Blizzard turning everyone into Zombies, and suddenly this week is anything goes. People get all upset and complain about it, because it "wasn't what they signed up for", which is actually just not true. When you subscribe to an MMO, you're pretty much agreeing to be playing a game that involves other people, and to me, that's part of the draw. No wait, that IS the draw. If WoW was a single player MMO where I could have henchmen NPCs, it would bore the hell out of me, and I wouldn't bother playing it for more than a day. The fact that every single thing I do will affect (and be affected by) other people is THE BIG DEAL. I remember seeing the purchasable DLC for Oblivion on the Xbox that changed the look of your horse, and thinking specifically 'who cares? no one else will ever see it'. MMOs have effectively destroyed the enjoyment of single player games for me. I don't care about acievements, or having the best PvP shoulderpads, but if I'm running around in a world all alone, it feels pointless.

So back to the point, which is 'why doesn't this same draw attract more people?' WoW has a lot of players, sure, but it still has this negative association with 'normal people who just play Halo'. If WAR could be marketed as not 'elves and orcs questing with occasional conflict', but as an alternate version of Deathmatch with Swords (which it technically is, or can be, at least), would that break the seal and open the floodgates? What needs to change to get more people on board, or is that anything we as players really even want?

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Introducing Static XP

Wow. This comment in a previous post deserves a second here in the spotlight:

Hatch said:

I just get annoyed when one ridiculously easy activity gives a good enough reward that it makes other fun activities not worth doing. For instance, I find raiding more fun that PvP in WoW, but since TBC there were many times where BGs or arena were by far the best reward for the time/effort investment. So tons of people ended up getting pushed into PvP when they didn't really enjoy it. Same with scenarios in WAR currently. With this system, I'd feel obligated to set up a deal with a friend, and I'm tired of having more obligations in the game due to reward imbalances. I'd rather everything reward roughly evenly, and then I can just choose the more fun activity for me.

This isn't anything new, and has been said a million times before, but Hatch gets the golden cookie, because as I was reading his comment it clicked, and made me think of a basic idea that could solve all this crap: What if you earned XP by the hour, and there was no 'best way to level'? I know it sounds stupid, but let's give it a rundown.

I've always hated twinks in BGs for the simple reason that NOT earning XP in WSG at level 19 seemed to completely defeat the purpose of calling them Experience Points at all. How is swinging your sword while hitting another player less of an experience than swinging it to hit a boar outside the city? I could see that killing level 1 boars all the way to level 70 shouldn't be an efficient way to grind, and killing level 1 players at 70 shouldn't reward rampant gankage, so let's take that train of thought a step further. Taking the 'tier' system of zones found in WAR, where there are different areas broken into level ranges (tier 1 = 1-10, tier 2 = 11-20, etc), and different BGs associated with those level ranges too, why not just have XP tick as long as you physically reside in 'your current tier'? Go pick flowers, stir up some world PvP, quest or queue for scenarios / BGs. There's no best way to level faster, so people will go about doing whatever they enjoy doing.

Fun activities that aren't as efficient no longer get penalized, because every activity yields equal reward.

Let's look at possible downsides:

People who can spend more time online will level faster. Uhh... do I really need to point out that this is the case regardless?

People will just AFK in their current zone for free XP: Make an 'idle hands' debuff like Warhammer has in its BGs that stops the ticking if you're just standing there, or autorunning into a tree. You have to be active to get XP, but it works for whatever it is that you decide to do.

What about quests? Quests will still reward gold and gear, just not XP. There will still be incentive to participate in other parts of the game (honor/gear for Arena, gold/gear for quests, rep/gear for dungeons) but Actual Experience is rewarded by experiencing the game itself! Go out there and do... whatever!... it all counts, and no playstyle is superior to another.

People would gravitate towards activities that were actually fun to partake in, be they public quests, scenarios, Arena, or tradeskilling. As long as you were doing anything, the 'no XP' debuff is removed for another 5 minutes. That way sitting in town making bracers, or posting auctions isn't a huge 'waste of time', but you can't just sit in town doing nothing.

The ONE inescapable downside I can see to this is playing catchup with a friend. There would be no way to accelerate your leveling to 'catch him' unless he logged off and let you. But that problem exists anyway. If you're ten levels behind your friend and he continues to play, the gap remains. Then again, if he's in the next tier, he could voluntarily come back to your zone (cutting off his XP), and help you play there until you were both even levels again.

On the upsides, there are plenty: No one could powerlevel to the end cap in 37.2 hours of your game being released. Everyone thats playing is leveling up at the same pace, and only those who were capable of not logging off for 2 months would reach the level cap. WoW had these kooky timed events like the gathering of Runecloth Bandages for the An'Qiraji war effort, or the farming of Sunwell Rep to open the armor smith on Sunwell Isle, but events like these would happen naturally given static XP. People would be reaching level 40 at roughly the same time as each other, and it would naturally allow the first groups to finally venture into Scarlet Monastery. Hitting level 56 to 57 would mean you might as well run Scholomance, because you won't be hitting the Outlands tomorrow if you grind grind grind.

I mean, right?

Yeah?

No?

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Someone Remind Me to Never Upgrade My Hardware

Please. I'm not sure what I was thinking when I bought a 500 gigabyte drive today at the computer shop. It was so cheap at 5000 yen (roughly 50 bucks) I couldn't help myself. Then I got home, and realized I really didn't NEED a new harddrive, and although my intent was noble (good riddance IDE, hello SATA and the new frontier of fast hard drives!), apparently I had already come to this conclusion long ago, and just didn't remember doing so. The drive I intended to replace was apparently ALREADY an SATA drive, and it's meager 350 gb was doing just fine. Room to spare on every partition, and a Seagate Barracuda, just like the one I patted myself on the back for buying today. Short term memory loss and hardware purchases go hand in hand like peanut butter and arsenic, I suppose.

Act 2 commences, with me deciding that a 32MB buffer (!) is going to make load times a thing of that past, and to create a new clone of my OLD HD, plus a fancy new GAMES partition on the new one.

Enter Norton Ghost. Or HDclone. Or Live Linux boot CD distributions made expressly for HD copying. I swear I tried (and cancelled) about 12 different options before I finally just gave up and realized YES IT'S GOING TO TAKE FUCKING FOREVER to clone my main HD. I think the problem arises from the fact that the last time I used any of these tools was when 40 gb was a big drive, and god damn if this isn't taking forever. A watched progress bar never fills, etc etc, but seriously. I'm typing this up on the laptop just to keep myself from staring at the current (and final, I surrender) implementation (Clonezilla!) slowly trickle from 49.72% to 50.

In the end, I suppose I will finally eliminate the final IDE drive (a dummy slave filled with MP3s and the like) from my system, freeing it up to go in my old P.O.S. Dell always-on box that handles media serving etc, but is having two SATA drives coming to over 800gb worth it in the end? I submit that... okay, it probably is ;). I might have been happier to just go for the full 1 TB drive (and a clean install of Windows), but I just love complaining whenever my computer is unavailable for its express #1 purpose of gaming. /sigh... 58.50% and climbing, and that's only my XP partition... bleeeeehhhhhh... ten bucks says when this operation finally completes, it still doesn't boot since the MBR for my main drive is some wonky vista / xp dual boot whosamawhatzit. :(

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WoW's Zombie Infection, and Cancelling Your Account

This is a short one, but man oh man. I was just reading Tobold's question of whether or not the Zombie Invasion is a fun idea (since it breaks up the static world), or griefing (because it allows player interaction, which is apparently a horrible, horrible thing), and came across this anonymous comment:

I just cancelled my WoW account. Glad i didn't pre-order WotLK. I chose a PVE server to avoid being griefed by asshats. Now Blizzard not only force PVP on me, they give the asshats the tools and tacit encouragement to disrupt my gameplay. Killing / curing them brings a torrent of abuse and smacktalk. This isn't the game i signed up to play.

To me, this is one of the biggest problems I have with PvE servers in general, and the people who roll on them to 'escape' the rest of the population. If you want to play alone in a bubble, play Baldur's Gate or Planescape Torment. Hell, jump on your Playstation and play Final Fantasy. The M and M in "MMO" stand for Massively and MULTIPLAYER. If you're honestly so traumatized by a non-scripted event, then you need to be playing ALONE, and actually, should in fact be playing Solitaire. Even THEN, would you still rage-quit the game because the 3 of Diamonds wasn't the card drawn at the precise moment you were ready for it? Was the deck of cards 'griefing' you?

Ugh. Get a grip, or at least some perspective on gaming. Even in fully Co-op games (which I love), there's still (usually) a common foe you're facing off against. What if the Zombie Invasion wasn't player influenced at all, and was only NPCs? Would that then make it okay? I guess I'm just confused on what people want, and baffled at the speed which people cry and call "Greifing!"

Suck it up, Buttercup. I'm honestly glad to see when I get back to poking around in Wrath, you won't be there. Jeez.

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ixobelle.blogspot.com Ready Go!

For two years I wrote stupid stories and commentary on the MMO scene over at NotAddicted.com under the name of Isobelle, the name of my original prot tank from the closed beta and susequent retail release of WoW (that's me tanking Magmadar on the left!). I've recently quit writing for NotAddicted, as I was feeling too heavily invested in someone else's project, and feeling the constant need to publish things on 'their' site so the front page had anything up there to read left a hollow feeling in my stomach. The name Isobelle was already taken on blogspot (by a totally empty site, gg), but I've begun using Ixobelle more commonly anyway as my rogue alt became my main, and Isobelle the prot tank was shelved in favor of the rogue. Also, while it's common for Isobel, Isobelle, or even Izobel to be taken, "Ixobelle" rarely is. So that's me. Anyway, enough on that, here's the deal with this blogspot.com thing:

I'm basically going to move over all my old stories from NA to the archives here on the right hand pane (just in case NA finally shuts down), but it will probably take a while to do so. Half the fun of 90% of my stories was being flamed in the comments, but after NA went down for half a year and finally came back up, we lost a good chunk of regular readership as it was. I intend to rebuild the S.S. Isobelle here on blogger.com, and one of my main focuses will be showing the world how to make an interesting MMO. I've been kicking around a bunch of ideas in the back of my head for what seems like forever. I never wanted to 'give all my secret ideas away' for fear they'd just be took and used without needing me to be there as well, but that's pretty silly. If anyone ever comes along and reads the blog, they'll know who I am, and that I'LL WORK FOR YOUR FUCKING COMPANY FOR CHEAP GODDAMNIT.

On a serious note, I've always felt that one of my strongest abilities is to look at something in progress, and offer useful feedback in a new direction it could go. It's hard to be the guy throwing out the initial build of anything, and it's easy to look at it after the fact and say 'that's not fun' or 'this sucks', but harder to nail down WHY or HOW it could be made better. Being that I'm not working for any companies making new unreleased MMOs, I can take what I know from playing other games, and offer twists that could be applied to a new project. I imagine a good portion of these will go along the lines of "looking at the WoW auction system, it would be awesome if..." etc. A lot of these ideas will sound like a horrendous amount of work to implement, but I recently heard an awesome quote from Jay Wilson regarding the rune system in Diablo 3. From Kotaku:

During a panel on Diablo III development, Jay went over some of the various examples of how runes interact with powers. By far my favorite example was teleport, an ability the new wizard class receives. By itself, it simply moves the character to a different location on the map. Add a damage rune and suddenly porting into a group of monsters hurts them. Add a multi-attack rune and teleporting splits you into multiple characters for a brief period of time.

Another example was the witch doctor's flaming skull spell, which by default has him filling a skull with fire and tossing it at the enemy. With a power rune attached, the skull leaves behind a damaging pool of fire. With the multi rune, it bounces. Bouncing flaming skulls equals love.

It seems like a ton of work, not only creating each of the skills but determining how they function with runes attached, but Jay assured me it wasn't a problem for Blizzard.

"We have a saying at Blizzard when something looks like too much work. How about we pay you? You can work on it, and every two weeks we'll cut you a check."

How fucking awesome is that last sentence? There needs to be more companies that are willing to spend the time and effort on making engaging game play elements, and less companies willing to cut player classes and capital cities out of the game right before launch in order to make some predetermined release date.

In reality, I doubt I'll ever escape the tractor beam of teaching in elementary schools in Japan now that I have a kid over here, but if anyone wants to start an MMO, get me on board, baby!

I already have a few ideas for some basic elements: solid crafting systems, gear restriction logistics (why can I use a staff, but not a polearm... two handed mace = ok, but two handed sword = no? wtf), and general quest giving XP rewards. I imagine as I beging to crank these out, more ideas will bubble up. As is often the case when I begin an article, the ending is usually totally different than what I envisioned (seriously: why do they put the title field at the beginning of the blog writing form? That's always the last thing I decide. This was going to be titled It's Good to Have a Guild, and totally became something else).

So yeah. Keep your eyes peeled, and bookmark this page or whatever. If you've followed me over from NA, make yourself comfy. I'll try to post as regularly as I can, and may even eventually iron out a schedule of sorts (M, W, F or whatever). For now, I think my main focus will be finding a theme for the layout that doesn't use so many fucking white pixels, ugh.

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Salvaging for Fame and Fortune

Tobold put an awesome article up a few days back regarding the leveling of Salvaging and Talisman Making, and I won’t pretend that the information I offer here isn’t a horrendous leech of his article. It is. That said, there’s some really good info in there, and if you’re interested in trade-skilling in Warhammer, stop what you’re doing, and go give THIS LINK a read, and be quick about it.

He basically discovered what has to be an oversight on Mythic’s part. The salvaging skill (think: disenchanting) requires a green item to salvage magical essences from, and is therefore limited from skilling up in bursts due to the random drop nature of greens in the game, and further limited by the fact that the skill required to disenchant high end gear is only gained by disenchanting lower end gear first. That’s a lot of greens you’d need to find or buy off the (ridiculously overpriced) Auction House...

Tobold discovered, though, that renown gear is totally okay to be DE’d, and even happened to discover that there’s a flukey item (Squidkickas of Vengeance) that goes for only 3s60c for some reason, while the comparable boots for any other class costs around 8s. He speculates that this is a bug, and after buying and disenchanting 55x of the boots, I’d have to agree.

The biggest deal (besides always having a readily scaling level of endless gear for pretty cheap at the renown vendor), is that disenchanting these boots ends up with Fragments (like WoW’s enchanting mats kinda, more on that later) that sell for RIDICULOUS prices on the AH. As previously mentioned, it’d be pretty rare to find a low level green that you’d have the skill to DE in the first place, and then you’d probably use the fragment that comes from it yourself to level Talisman Making, the complimentary crafting Tradeskill to Slavaging’s gathering skill.

What this means is that there are like no fragments on the AH at all. The ones that ARE there go for about 25s on my (and Tobold’s) server, and this is from a 3s60c investment that’s leveling your skill in Salvaging anyway. Do the math; wait … no. I’ll do it for you. 25s – 3s60c = 21s40c PROFIT for disenchanting an item that can be vendor purchased indefinitely.

DEing is an interesting process in that the gear itself determines what you’ll pull from it. Where WoW has basic ‘Arcane Dust’ or ‘Small Prismatic Shards’, with Salvaging, you choose the stat you wish to pull from the item. If the boots are +STR and +Weap Skill, you can pull a STR or Weap Skill fragment from the item. In this way, you can buy renown gear that has stats you want the final talisman to have (or that will sell on the AH). You also end up with magical essences that will be needed later, too. If the DE bonks, instead of essences, you end up with ‘whispers’ or ‘echoes’ of esences that can be combined to form magic essences (like motes form primals in WoW). Right clicking a stack of ten echoes makes a whisper, and 5 whispers make a full fledged essence.

After DE-ing the 55x sets of 3s60c Level 1 Renown boots, I topped out my initial Salvaging skill at 50. At that point, I need to move on to the next level of gear (level 9 renown or thereabouts). At that point, the cost becomes 14s40c per pair of boots (Cloaks, Belts and Jewelry don’t work! Make sure the tooltip for the item doesn’t label it as an Accessory!), but you’re still looking at 25s AT LEAST per fragment.. probably even more for the next level up from “noob skill fragments”. I’m using the fragments I receive so far, but once my Talisman skill topped out around 30 or so for the first batch crafted from the mats from the 55x boots, I put my leftovers up on the AH, and they’ve already started selling in the few hours since I began this.

This is an immediate “window of opportunity” thing. Once either A) people realize that this is an easy way to get fragments or B) Mythic makes it so you can’t DE renown items (similar to WoW and PvP gear) this avenue will dry up. I’m actually thinking they’ll go for B, and have stacked a few extra stacks of early mats just in case. As mentioned in a previous article, there really isn’t anything you need gold for at this point, so blowing 3g on a huge stockpile of level 1 Talisman Making mats isn’t a huge deal for me. I just got an achievement noting that I’d made 50g in my Black Orc’s career so far, so do the math. 15g for a mount, 4g for a last name (I fucked up and clicked twice, so 8g for me), maybe 5 or 6g for renown gear… you’re left with plenty of gold to burn, not even including the random greens I sell on the AH just to get them out of my bags.

The crafting of talismans is a slow process. Using the fragments you’ve gotten from DEing your boots, plus some magic essences that are leftover from the DE process as well, you still need 3 other items, all of which are purchasable from a vendor. The magic essence is purchasable as well, but you’ll likely have plenty as it is. You need a container, gold essence, and a curio. Special curios can be found with the scavenging tradeskill, but for the most part, the store bought ones will work for the first push to 30 or so… the tradeskill items themselves are rated in a fashion like ‘this can be used from level 1 upwards’ to ‘this can be used from level 25 (25 CRAFTING, not player level) upwards’ etc, so the store bought items (plus your elusive fragments) will get you up to 30, and then you’ll need an alt that scavenges, or the AH to push on further. I imagine the gold essence items are crafted as well from the Apothecary skill (maybe?), so eventually it all relies on other skills to get done. In the end, though, Warhammer doesn’t have enchants, and Talismans are pretty much the same as gems in many regards, being the only way to externally affect gear or weapon stats. Items have talisman slots, and equipping certain talismans will give you an increase in stats or resists. In the beginning, they seem really underwhelming, as they offer such minimal increases, and many are even based on a time limit… +30 armor for 8 hours. The 8 hours is PLAY time, though, not real time, so it lasts longer than you might expect. Plus you’ll have a metric fuckton of each talisman you craft in the beginning, so just carry 3 in your bags, and you’re golden.

For the initial push to 30, using all level 1 items, plus your level 1 fragments will be enough. After 30, I couldn’t seem to get skill ups using the bottom tier items, though. I grabbed some of the next level renown boots (the 14s40c ones), and got level 25 fragments from DEing those. I also got level 25 magic essences in the process, too, and using two level 25 items (frag and magic), and the rest level 1 (box, gold, and curio), seemed to consistently level me up again with each crafting.

I haven’t gotten much further than that, but I imagine that’s the way it’s going to be. Two level 50 items and two level 25 items will likely be the next ‘tier’ of crafting (I think maybe the boxes stay level 1?), and I’ll probably get level 50 fragments and magic essences from the next tier of renown gear (player level 15-20 gear or thereabouts).

Tobold has a follow-up entry on his blog as well, detailing the next few steps he took. It’s a good read, but the important thing is to act now, before Mythic nerfs the hell out of this. Or if they don’t, before everyone else figures it out. It’s not exactly a secret, but the sooner you get on it, the sooner you’ll have a head start.

Talisman making is going to be one of the few (only?) ways at end game to boost your items, so leveling it up now while you can actually profit for doing so is pretty frikkin sweet.

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Jumping the Shark

I've been out of the loop with WoW, caught up in Warhammer, but I logged into it the other day to chat on vent with a few friends on an old PvP server I left behind long ago. They asked me to bring a toon back, but the only one I could bother moving was locked away on a PvE server. Much to my surprise, they told me that Blizzard has opened the floodgates from PvE -> PvP server transfers.

Coming from their numerous adamant threads that they're 'strongly opposed' to it (forum topics decay, and I couldn't find the "never gonna happen" ones that I remember from the past), I was surprised to hear them flip a 180 on the topic.

The community is obviously split on the topic, those having leveled on PvP servers upset, while those leveling in STV with no threat of gankage are thrilled to finally 'get their PvP on' and go gank noobs in Hillsbrad now that they're safely at the level cap. It's silly, because STV and Hillsbrad will have no significance for anyone that leveled there while /wink-ing and /flirt-ing with the opposing faction.

Things like this only further seem to water down the whole WoW experience (triple XP for refer-a-friend, bind on account items that level with you, xbox 360 style achievements). I feel like they're jumping the shark as boldly and ridiculously as they can, just to make way for the 'next big thing'... like they WANT people to roll their eyes at WoW, so when WoW2 launches, no one is left wondering if they should stick with WoW1 (a la EQ and EQ2). My friends that still play WoW offered to get me an account and 'powerlevel me to 70 on multiple toons for the coming of wrath', but the whole conversation just felt wrong... so many people from the old guild had just quit WoW altogether, and here was the few remaining diehards, running around in circles on the bank roof in Ogrimmar as we chatted on vent, eager to drag me back in full force.

I intend to look back into WoW with WotLK, just to see what's changed, but I can't see shifting WoW back into the 'main playtime slot'. I still feel WoW is techically superior to Warhammer in many ways, but it's just been run into the ground. Plus, with a newborn in the house, grabbing an hour or two of playtime when I can means leveling in Warhammer's numerous BGs is a more viable option than scheduling a 6 hour raid slot 3 or 4 nights a week. WoW had it's time, and that time is past. I recognize my leaving WoW doesn't mean the game is suddenly not popular, but the notion of finally caving in on PvE to PvP transfers just makes it feel like the devs feel the window closing, too, and are just pulling out every stop before the game begins to finally wind down. I'm sure Diablo 3 isn't the only project they have in the pipe, and I'm intereseted to see what it is, but WoW's all but done, at least for me personally.

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Little Big Planet

I know this is supposed to be an MMO site or whatever, but I’ve basically just begun to think of it as my personal blog since I’m the only one who posts with any regularity, so suck it up, buttercup. I wanna talk about Little Big Planet, because frankly, that shit be off the heezy, yo.

I was apparently in media blackout mode or a week or so while I was all caught up in Warhammer, and must have missed that beta codes were flying around the intertubes. After being suspended from Warhammer for 5 days for being a little too liberal with keyboard macros, I looked around and realized people were playing LBP, and went into full frenzy MUSTPLAYNOW mode. I basically bought a Playstation 3 for this game specifically, way back when I first saw footage of the game in action in the paleo-jurassic 1987. Seriously, when you think about how long the world has known about LBP, that’s how ling I’ve owned (and not used) my PS3. I bought Motorstorm with the system, and never played it, then got Grand Theft Whatever when that came out, and didn’t play that either. I download demos from time to time just to peek in on progressing technology, but really don’t use consoles like I used to. I finally got a beta invite for reading some Playstation Underground story (I guess?), and have spent the last few days slaving over my opus of an LBP level, tentatively named “10 Rooms”.

There are already a bunch of levels that have been pushed out the door by other people, and while a few of them are pretty interesting, a bunch kind of feel like half baked slop. This is to be expected, and isn’t a horrible thing. People are still getting their feet wet with the editor, but a bunch of levels just feel like the little guy started walking, and threw down a ramp. Then walked up the ramp, and threw down some fire. Then jumped over the fire, and threw down whatever. They don’t really have any premeditation to them. While I was somewhat eager to just shove something out the door myself, I’ve exercised my ultimate restraint, and have instead sat down and actually drew up what I thought would make for an interesting level.

I knew I wanted to have typical ‘left to right’ and ‘right to left’ play, but also wanted some vertical layout as well, so I went ahead and settled on the ten room layout where you start in the lower left hand corner, work your way up rooms 1 thru 4, fall down 5, jetpack up 6, work your way down 7 thru 10, and finally reach the end. It was pretty ambitious, I think, to dive stright into a ten subzone level, but it’s really been a chance to explore a bunch of different mechanics.

Room 2 has rotating platforms over poisonous gas, 3 is a ‘get to the exit while avoiding the mobs’ type room, 4 is ‘work your way along the catwalks while avoiding a bunch of bullets (you can even see I wrote Ikaruga on the notes), 5 is the vertical fall while moving left and right to avoid the deadly obstacles (made more interesting that you can grab and hold a ‘floaty’ piece of material before you leap to slow your fall a bit), 6 is jetpacking vertically thru a maze, 7 is the ‘ride the car’ room, 8 a basic platform room, 9 is yet undecided, and 10 will be a ‘drag the blocks to various switch locations to open the final door’ kinda thing. While none of this is ground breaking or revolutionary gameplay, it’s a ton of fun to just pop back and forth between ‘play’ and ‘create’ mode and adjust things like jump gaps or platform rotation speed. Figuring things out like making a functional rotating platform:

… was a breakthrough. I know it seems stupid, but I had bolted the outer cogs into place, and when the whole thing spun around all kooky, it took me a sec to realize I needed the outer cogs spinning also, but in the opposite direction. The sense of ‘AH!’ is rewarding unto itself. At my age, the act of rescuing the princess isn’t really the driving force behind gaming. It’s little moments like this, when you figure out the puzzle. Everything you see in the included levels uses the exact same toolset as you have, so there’s nothing you can see that Media Molecule created that’s off limits. Some of the fun is even figuring out how they went about setting something up. There are ghosts in an early level that fly in a circular pattern, but nothing really ‘flies’ in the game (unless it’s hurled into the air, and arcing towards the ground), they all hang by strings. By using two different machines together (a winch chain moving vertically, and piston rod horizontally) they produced the circular arc.

Theoretically, you could throw another two short winches and pistons into the mix moving faster, and produce a curly ‘telephone wire’ path. It’s up to you how far you want to go with it.

The deeper you dive into a problem, the more interesting it gets. I wanted my Room 3 to be a ‘monster room’, but it took me a little while to iron out how to go about that. My monsters that were statically placed to begin with ended up eventually clumping up together in the corner, or tripping over themselves in an effort to chase the player. I needed to find a way to ‘refresh them’ every few seconds. There are ‘emitters’ that you can place that will shoot specified objects out into the level at designated intervals, but I didn’t just want tennis balls rolling down a hill. I finally figured out that I could create a monster with a basic AI, and then bookmark that entire complex object as one unit in my inventory. Afterwards I created my emitter, but instead of golf balls, it emitted my monster with its AI all wrapped up inside. I set the monsters to die every 7 seconds, and a fresh one to take its place, and was in business. There are layers upon layers of deepness you can achieve. I imagine if I wanted to, I could create an emitter that emitted an object that contained its own emitters. I may have to try that when I get home, actually! The AI routines are pretty basic… things like ‘chase, flee, or ignore the player’, ‘jump or don’t jump’, and the strength of the jump itself… it’s pretty standard Koopa AI from the Mario games at the very least.

The actual ‘playing’ aspect of the game, where you’re running around Media Molecule’s pre-packaged levels, or ones found in the online portion of the game created by users, isn’t horrifically deep. That’s probably the game’s one big let down. Your actions are limited to running, jumping, and grabbing. And that’s it. You can grab levers, blocks of material, or each other, but in the end that’s really all there is to do. I can dig that they’re trying to keep it simple, but simple extra moves (mario’s triple jump, long jump, butt stomp, etc) would have opened up the level building dynamic that much further.

I have to see if I can get a YouTube going of my level creation at various stages of development so I can show you guys. I’d say I’m probably about 50% done with it at this point, and the urge to shove it out there with a “work in progress” tag is tempting, but I really want to wait and polish it up, and be the first one up there that people are like OH DAMN, HE ACTUALLY MADE A LEVEL, FUCK! ...and raises the bar a bit for everyone else ;)

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T(h)anks for Nothing

Ah, tanking. The thankless task of getting beat in the face repeatedly for the good of the group. There’s no such thing as tanking solo; there has to be some other group member you’re protecting for it to technically be called tanking at all. Warhammer announced that old world class pigeonholes such as tanking and healing were going to be pretty much eliminated, and that everyone would be able to just put out huge damage when needed. While I suppose my black orc can do some damage if he straps on a 2-hander, that’s really nothing new. My tank in WoW could do the same, but my entire talent spec is still “increase my hitpoints, reduce incoming damage”. That doesn’t scream ZOMG DPS to me. The worst part about this is that Public Quests refuse to award tanks like you wouldn’t believe, and so tanking them (which someone has gotta do at one point) is just actively shooting yourself in the foot if you hope to earn any bags at the end.

Healers earn contribution points through healing, and DPS earns it through (surprise) DPSing, but the purpose of a tank is to do neither of these. The purpose of a tank (which hasn’t changed radically in Warhammer) is to soak damage and hold aggro. A few nights back, my guild went on a little Keep taking rampage all over the world map. Anywhere that there was a Keep to take, we went and took it. At the time, nobody was actively defending said Keeps, so we blew through them easily. They were like accelerated Public Quests with one phase… take the Keep!

With about eight in a warband, we would storm up to the gate, drop a battering ram on the door, knock it down, then smash up the stairs after taking out any wandering non-elites on the first floor. Regrouping on the ramp, I’d then rush into the fray and grab the Keep Lord (boss), and one or two of the four champions we had guarding him. The loose champs would be offtanked or just quickly burnt down while my pocket healer kept me going on the main guy. Besides the one resto specced shaman healer, and me (the fully prot specced main tank), everyone else was a nuke class. Just burn burn burn, roll for loots, move on to the next one.

While I feel I played a pretty crucial role in the activity (keep the main enemy DPS focused on me and all my armor), my contribution points never reached up above 3rd or 4th from last (+90 added to my roll, and a bronze medal). I was after renown points anyway, which I got, but seeing my role at the end tally of every Keep be labeled ‘not useful’ seemed kind of a slap in the face. The healer keeping me alive would usually place pretty high, because he was keeping me up and spot healing the DPS off tanks. The DPS got contribution for doing what they do, but the tank, while doing what they do, gets nothing.

This isn’t a huge boo-hoo let’s all feel bad for tanks rant, it’s simply a point that something needs to be reevaluated along the lines of class mechanics for PQ and Keep rolling determinations. If ‘damage taken’ was put into the mix for certain classes it seems like it would make a difference. Obviously, you wouldn’t want to apply it blanketed across all classes, or it would just encourage DPS to pull aggro. But any class with a taunt should be rewarded for using it to help the group. Any class that can equip a shield should be rewarded for using the shield to protect those that can’t.

If there were no elite or lord mobs to tank it would be a non-issue. But they are there, and so it is an issue. They need to be tanked; I remember when a Lord class (champion <>

Again: not crying about it, just pointing it out. I love tanking. If I didn’t love it I wouldn’t do it. My first toon in WoW was a prot tank that I played from closed beta till right up at the very end. I like being at the forefront of the raid and playing an important role. I love my healers, and we both appreciate the sacrifices each other has made in talents and specs to be able to do our jobs for the good of the group or guild as a whole.

Warhammer has a few great things they’ve done with tanking in relation to PvP (taunt works), but there are still a few kinks to work out in the long run.

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