Stabbed Up

Being part of something bigger

2012-02-05T15:47:00.002Z

One of the most interesting design choices in Star Wars: The Old Republic is the incorporation of a Game Over factor. It's actually one of the first MMOs to do this, a point which makes me smile at the people who occasionally claim the game isn't innovative. SWTOR is a highly innovative game on the basic framework of WoW-style UI. No one has set up a character's progression in terms of story before and ended it but in this game you can progress through, say, the Sith quests and become a Darth. You even (apparently) get some kind of game over for now screen.

However, and this is perhaps something for the people who have been asking for innovation in MMOs to consider, this is not the innovation we were looking for (to paraphrase Alec Guinness).

SWTOR is a game that will do very well and be a pivotal game experience in many people's lives. It's clear that there are a lot of people in the community who never played WoW or any other MMO game before.

So SWTOR represents a new branch on the MMO tree, a different direction, a parting of ways with old notions of game design. What this game is, crucially, is a finite consumable experience. You can play it for a while, then you win. There's stuff to be going on with if you want to continue in the game world after winning like Huttball and Operations (aka Raids). But really you finish once you've done your class storyline and that's something completely new.

And it's not just the casual newbie gamer who can enjoy this. There's veteran gamers who this suits perfectly.
Tesh said today:
As much as I like Star Trek Online, I’m looking forward to finishing it and moving on. I suspect it’s similar to how I’d approach Star Wars The Old Republic, inasmuch as I want to play the story and then move on to another one.
Spinks too is highly immersed in her Sith Warrior's story:
The levelling game in SWTOR has been one of the best CRPG experiences I’ve had in any game since Planescape.

For me it's been different.

MMOs spoiled me for other games. I used to play games like Planescape, Baldur's Gate, Master of Orion in the 90s. After I moved on to online games, first Homm 3 and Diablo 2 then Star Wars Galaxies and WoW I found these offline experiences too shallow. It felt hollow making a trade in a space trader game when there's no one else playing the market, it felt silly to master a craft in a universe with no customers, it felt empty to slay a dragon in the privacy of my own private world.

I need to be part of something bigger.

Raph Koster once pointed out that the much-admired harvester mechanic in Star Wars Galaxies was basically the same as the (then) much-derided farming mechanic in Farmville. The point though, is that in SWG we were collecting materials to make something which would cause someone to win a fight which would effect the world in some way. Just as a clock is something more than a handful of cogs an online world can be something more than a single game mechanism.

SWTOR's story-telling is the most polished, most expensive and almost certainly the best game mechanism ever seen as part of a MMO. However its flaw is that it's not really just part, it's the whole MMO. I find myself not logging in because the game just doesn't grab me. This is particularly sharp when I (in my story) cause massive galaxy-changing events.

This feels pretty healthy to me because I see SWTOR as the launching pad for what I truly want - a genuinely diverse MMO market where it becomes standard practice to make games for a part of the market rather than the whole, for, say, military stategist grognards rather than just "every MMO player ever".

What I'm saying is SWTOR will be a success but it will also clearly alienate a significant market sector and leave us uncatered for, wanting to spend money but unable to find a suitable MMO to spend it on.

Because we need to be part of something bigger.

Diablo 3: Selling gold guides

2012-01-30T08:20:00.000Z

We can't be 100% certain but it now seems that Marcko's ban from the Diablo 3 beta was on the grounds that he has stated an intention to produce a gold guide which he would intend to sell.

There's a few interesting points to consider.

Firstly there's the point that Marcko, famous for his Just My Two Copper blog and its associated WoW gold guide, was given a Friends and Family invite by a Blizzard employee after he mentioned how much he'd like one on his blog which is called Diablo 3 Gold Guide Blog. Blizzard then discovered (shock! horror!) that he is planning a gold guide and banned him.

Duh!

Of course it wouldn't be the first time the left hand knoweth not what the right hand is doing at Blizzard but it's certainly very silly on the face of it.

Let's have a look at what this latest message said:

"Hi Christopher,

Our Terms of Use, which players agree to prior to playing the beta, make it clear that using the game for commercial purpose, such as for selling unlicensed game guides, is prohibited. Violating the Terms of Use can result in a ban, as was the case here."

OK there's a few points that aren't clear. First, is this only a beta restriction? Because Marcko didn't sell anything during the Beta and as far as I know didn't plan to. Or are they planning to prohibit commercial fan sites when the game goes live?

It would be a huge change of direction for Blizzard to suddenly start actively banning players who are involved with commercial enterprises. For there are lots of commercial WoW sites including Curse Gaming, Wowhead, Thottbot, several hundred blogs that are monetised and hundreds of thousands of Youtube videos. If you put something on the internet it's normal for your content to generate money. That's just how Google and Youtube work. This blog is actually non-commercial but I suspect that it will be harder to put out non-commercial blogs in the future as I'm freeloading off Google and I'm sure they'd prefer it if they got paid.

Next, is there something specifically about farming gold as opposed to playing the game in other ways which is commercial? I can kind of see how people might think so because we all instinctively feel that game gold is "money" even though it's not. Virtual game currency is simply a meter, getting richer is like getting higher level. It's an aspect of gameplay and not actually real money. (Although D3 makes this murkier with the prospect that gold can be cashed out). I don't buy the argument that gold is real world dollars any more than killing power is real world dollars - both can be cashed out, converted into money but they aren't money, just the potential to earn it.

So is it wrong to give people tips on playing the game? There's certainly a lot of bitterness towards theorycrafters but it's never before been something the games company has joined in on. Advice on how to level, where to farm gold, what talents to pick all has money-making potential in a game that will be for many people about making real world money. Is it unfair to help people optimise? Immoral even? I don't really think so either.

Is it wrong to sell information in third party transactions? Well it's not an IP violation. There's no copyright in information. If you think about this it's obvious. Ford own the design of their cars but they don't own "knowing how to turn left". Information about a game isn't property of the game company, there's no legal infringement.

It is (apparently) a terms and conditions violation which doesn't surprise me at all. EULAs are one-sided, not negotiated and have grown over the years to give the issuers more and more powers. Legally an online game is basically a private club that can admit anyone it wants.

In the end banning players for making gold guides is hopelessly futile. It's pretty obvious that you can make a gold guide and not connect it with your in-game character name or the real name they have on file for you. In fact there's so much information around you could possibly make a commercial gold guide without even playing the game, just by doing online research. It's possible they could use cease and desist orders but I'm not sure on what legal grounds they could ask for people to not sell guides to their game. There's no copyright in strategies. Trademark violation, maybe. But any legal remedy they use won't stop these guides from mushrooming up again. The internet has proven remarkably resilient to being told to shut up so far.

Diablo 3: achievers beware!

2012-01-27T22:18:00.001Z

Anyone who's been part of any video game community knows that every once in a while people get banned and immediately protest that they were just playing the game normally. Sometimes they're lying, sometimes they're just lying to themselves ("I was banned because I was good, so good I went off the charts"). Many times it's simply a grey area as in the recent case of the graveyard campers in SWTOR's Ilum battlefield planet. A patch switch reward to kills, the population between sides is fubar, so Empire camped and chain killed all the Republic players non-stop at the graveyards. This resulted in several players getting banned after farming helpless respawners for hours.

I'd now like to draw your attention to the strange case of Marcko, the blogger behind Just My Two Copper and the Diablo 3 Gold Guide Blog, who has just got banned for, in his opinion, being too good at (legally) farming gold.

Of course we haven't heard Blizzard's side and it's useful to have a degree of scepticism but let's look at the points Marcko raises.

1) he was farming a LOT of gold. 6-10k gold per hour, peaking at 11.25k is extraordinary for a level 13 character. He managed to get gear with 145% gold find on and was playing a Wizard which may well be the fastest killing class at 13.

2) I don't think he's a cheat. He's a well-established blogger who writes openly about his gameplay and has done for years. It beggars belief to imagine he just dupes all his gold and then makes up detailed and workable strats for all sorts of market niches (for example farming for out of date enchanting mats from obsolete instances). The only way you could know about all those market niches really is if that's how you play.

3) If you look at the email he received from Blizzard it warns him to give customer service a call or put in a ticket BEFORE he does anything that might be construed as exploitative. That implies he was banned for something that has been contrued as exploitative. If he'd been banned for using 3rd party software the rep wouldn't have mentioned that.

This then calls into question something quite fundamental to online games. Online games have always been to some extent achiever driven. Sure pre-Trammel UO had lots of killers but they were also achievers, no one would have minded them if they hadn't been both bloodthirsty and unbeatable. In EQ achievers were the top players - they got to kill the dragon and no one else did because the raid bosses spawned in the world and were gone for quite a while when killed. In WoW world first kills have always fascinated a large part of the player base and have drawn in sponsorships and fan sites despite quite commonly being based on borderline or overt exploits. Ensidia's world first Algalon kill has over 2 million views on Youtube. Even many normal WoW boss kills rely on arguably exploitative techniques. The standard way to kill Drakkisath in UBRS in Vanilla WoW was for a Hunter to kite the boss away while the other players killed his 2 bodyguards. Surely that's not how the encounter was intended.

So with Marcko's ban, the ban of some of the Ilum exploiters and earlier similar bans for over-achievers we may be moving into an area of uncertainty that will undermine our hobby, at least for achiever types. There are two things that are very bad about this.

1) Players should be able to just play, make progress, optimise and play more. Without worrying about whether they're so good that they risk getting banned. Success shouldn't be punishable.

2) It's lazy development. "Hey dudes, some guy's making 10k an hour" "Jeez dude, it's five o'clock on a Friday, just ban him and let's get a beer." Lazy.

So could Blizzard have reasonably expected it? Absolutely. This was a playstyle even in Diablo 2 where gold was worthless.

The most gold find possible, in v1.10+, is 3890%. (Only reachable by using D2C magical and rare items with GF amounts that can't be found in later patches.) That's almost 40x the gold you would get with 0% gold find. At that level a monster that usually dropped 500 gold would drop 19,850 gold.
Source. the most popular Diablo wiki. This has existed there for over 10 years without anyone thinking it's cheating.

What will happen when D3 goes Live? Well, if you read this blog or Marcko's you'll have been warned not to stack gold find in the first couple of weeks. It does look like they may ban people for, in the words of their customer service rep, "anything that might be construed as exploitative." You're probably ok with magic find as the drops are rare. Did you find 4 legendaries this evening because of your exploitative 145% magic find or because you just got lucky? It's too small a sample size.

One of the aspects of this I find most disappointing is what it says about the modern video game beta. A beta should be about finding problems. A beta team should be DELIGHTED if someone says "if I jump in a weird hopscotch way on the roof of this building it crashes the server" because the point is to fix that shit before you go live. Instead one can't help feeling that the Diablo 3 devs have all been re-assigned to new projects and beta is being run by the marketing team. Because if there are any genuine developers still working on the game they were asleep at the wheel on this one.

SWTOR: why I'd like LFD

2012-01-20T14:01:00.002Z

OK here's what I want to do:

- indicate I'd like to play a particular Flashpoint.
- play the game and forget about flashpoint-related admin until I get a message saying my group is ready.

Here's what I don't want to do:

- stand around Imp Fleet for an hour spamming
- do /who for my level and send off fifty whispers
- maintain a Friends list of tanks and healers. My friends list is for, duh, friends.

Here are the arguments that don't persuade me:

- chat spam improves community. It hasn't at all for me, apart from people in my guild I can't even name another player on my server off the top of my head. I've done a lot of flashpoints but it's mostly low level and it's mostly people's alts. Even if I friended them I wouldn't get to play with them tomorrow as they'd probably be on a different character. In a game where everyone is supposed to alt, Friends lists don't work.

- LFD systems encourage worse behaviour. Now historically this might have been true but it isn't true now. Modern players pressurise you to speed up, whine about your gear, occasionally ninja and sometimes bail halfway. This happens all the time with the current system. WoW inherited players trained by EQ's forced grouping system to not be jerks. SWTOR is inheriting people trained by WoW and IT WONT CHANGE THEIR BEHAVIOUR in a month. It's just designers trying to play social engineer with the player base. It's egotistical and it won't work. Few of us care enough about this game to fundamentally change the way we interact with others online. We'll just go.

- "I get on fine without a LFD system". Great. I'm happy for you. I hope you continue to have fun without a LFD system when the rest of us are gone.

- "You can flag yourself as LFG". I do this and I have never got a whisper asking me to join a group in a month of playing.

Immersion

2012-01-17T14:45:00.001Z

One of my favourite games is Minesweeper, the free game with Windows. If you haven't played it it's a simple puzzle game based on calculating safe squares to clear and unsafe squares to mark as dangerous until you can clear the whole board by identifying every safe square.

It's not immersive. I've played it for years and never felt like I was on a naval frigate in the North Sea, a gale howling around the foc'sle, anxiously spotting bobbing nautical hazards.

And that doesn't matter because it's an enjoyable game.

I also play Eve Online. And that's pretty much as non-immersive for me as Minesweeper. I really don't find myself caught up with being a spaceship pilot. I log on, admire the way certain numbers have gone up, queue skills to train, queue manfacturing and research jobs, queue planets to produce resources. Occasionally I'll become more active, join a corp, do some pvp and so on. And I enjoy all that very much, it's a very good game.

(I'm aware other people do get very immersed in Eve and I think that's actually a great feature of the game: that it's valid as either experience).

When MMOs hit mainstream with Ultima Online they were based around a dichotomy that arose in Dungeons and Dragons gameplay in the late 70s and early 80s. Just like Eve there were 2 ways to play D&D. I'll illustrate with examples:

1) The player characters are in a bar. A little old man comes up to them and offers to give them a map to a horde of treasure in an old ruined dungeon beneath a castle just outside town. The players agree to investigate. This is essentially the on rails gameplay and tends to lead to numbers playing a strong emphasis, on getting better stats as that's the way to progress.

2) The player characters are in a bar. A little old man comes up to them and offers to give them a map to a horde of treasure in an old ruined dungeon beneath a castle just outside town. The players decide to do something utterly random and unrelated. One of them because he's an elf spontaneously decides he wants to find himself a unicorn and the rest agree to help him. Some Dungeonmasters would be thrown off and upset by this and would attempt to push the party back onto the rails (perhaps there might be high level bandits in the woods who would chase the unicorn seekers out). Some Dungeonmasters would put away their carefully prepared script and get on with the task of making up story and opportunities to suit their maverick players.

Debate between fans of the respective positions have raged for decades but both of these playstyles were supported by the system and I'd argue both are perfectly valid.

However MUDs and early MMOs tended to be made by the second type of players. They built worlds with forests and unicorns and all sorts of other stuff in so players wouldn't need to be fed a quest by the stereotypical old man in the pub but could play very creatively. Unlike Dungeons and Dragons there weren't really any rail systems available until WoW, players had to take charge of their own entertainment. Perhaps not surprisingly then there was a real opportunity for a developer to provide a more balanced experience and the fact that the developer that did so already had a devoted fan base and a good reputation just iced the cake. WoW, with its Christmas tree quest hub system, showed a huge appetite for a more guided playstyle.

Now what both WoW and D&D had that made them so great was a balance between the two styles that allowed the game system to support both. For me in 2005 WoW was about progression along the rails but it was also an enhancement of my experience that it was a world that supported other stuff, even quite weird stuff like making machinima, exploring every high mountain and remote corner, blogging and so on. It made it richer.

It was, dare I say it, richer than prototypes like Everquest and Ultima Online because it had the rails as well as the open world.

I don't think people have really understood this. Thus both WoW itself and other MMOs have concentrated on designing better and better rails until we've ended up at SWTOR which is a very fine set of rails indeed.

It's not going to be a great MMO though and it won't have the endurance that WoW did. It lacks world, to such an extent it made industry expert Professor Ted Castronova furious. Nor is anyone going to "fix" MMOs by designing a great sandbox where sandbox is a synonym for an online game which is missing half the stuff that should be in it for it to be a great MMO.

Because a great MMO is both a great virtual world and a great game. As deep a world as SWG where you could pick up any object and place it on the wall of your home. As great a game as Minesweeper which is on everyone's computer.

So that's why Raph Koster's recent lament that immersion is dead in MMOs seems unlikely to me. Because MMOs need it and, as I can see from my level 50 SWTOR guildies who have stopped bothering to log in but to raid, you can't make a great MMO without it.

SWTOR: Finding the Force

2012-01-09T00:21:00.003Z

After feeling a bit fed up with the game I renewed my interest by making an alt. I made a Jedi Guardian which was great fun, especially as I found that perverting a good girl is even more interesting than playing a bad boy. I took her up to level 12 and Dark Side Level 1. There's supposed to be a cosmetic change as you turn Dark and after much squinting at my character I've decided that the reason she looks different is her bunny eyes have become tiger eyes. It's subtle but it's definitely there.

I like it too that she's a solid chunky woman rather than the usual fantasy game Frazetta clone. She looks more like a P.E. teacher than a model.

Perverting the storyline of course really tests it and most of the sidequests simply bounce you right back on track. If someone is trying to give you a quest reward and your dialogue options are something like:
1) Thank you!
2) Aww shucks you shouldn't of
3) mwa ha ha you'll never placate me, I'll be back to burn your village to the ground
picking option 3 gives you the exact same quest reward with perhaps a quip about how witty you are.

They're not all like that though and I managed to find a set of dialogue options that utterly appalled my fairly amoral helper on my Imperial Agent, in fact I lost 400 points of friendship with him in under 60 seconds. Essentially this means sacrificing 0.002% Slicing Mission speed and in exchange I get to utterly crush the universe beneath my Iron Fist forever. Well at least I would be doing that but a snag has cropped up and I can't actually beat her so I'm parking and collecting rest exp and a few daily pvp/flashpoint/space missions so I can deal with this spurious problem and win the game. At least that's where I seem to be, plotwise.

Of course that brings up the more serious issue of how can 2 million players all be the Universe's Greatest Hero? To Bioware's credit you do actually forget that there are other players who matter while doing your highly immersive class quests. Of course that's also a problem once the content is finished. Do I want to give up being the most feared Secret Agent in the Universe and be subs bench dps for our raid team?

Alting is a great solution and is working very well for me. I've started a Sith Sorceror. They are, I gather the fotm class, but more importantly you really feel evil playing one, as if you're Palpatine burning people up with Force lightning. One has to try hard not to cackle.

The Sith Sorceror: there's a lot to love

I've also managed to do several flashpoints which is a high point of this type of game for me. No matter how good the solo gameplay is I don't really love soloing any more which is why I play online games. Although some people are annoying most are pretty nice. About the worst I've had is people wanting to type my keys for me, down to pedantically explaining where my space bar is in case I didn't understand how to skip cutscenes. There's also been a lot of people who are friendly and joke around.

I'm particularly glad to see people respond to jokes as I tend to make them when I group with people and in recent times they nearly always get ignored. In games like WoW I'd certainly started to feel vaguely awkward about making jokes, rather as if I told a Two Ronnies style double entendre about women's breasts to a bunch of teenagers who confusedly wonder why I don't just say "tits". (The answer of course is that "melons" is funnier - but possibly only to people over 30).

SWTOR: Banned from the official forums?

2012-01-05T10:32:00.004Z

Update: As Spinks surmised it was a glitch in their forum software. It's now working fine for me. Still, they're not making a great impression.

Original post:

I'm getting this when I try to post:

Stabs**, you do not have permission to access this page. This could be due to one of several reasons:

Your user account may not have sufficient privileges to access this page. Are you trying to edit someone else's post, access administrative features or some other privileged system?
If you are trying to post, the administrator may have disabled your account, or it may be awaiting activation.

The only possible one of those that might apply is "the administrator may have disabled your account".

Now I really don't know whether they've banned me for saying I'm unhappy about the lack of LFD tool and will probably unsub or if their forums are simply broken during maintenance and the wrong message is coming up but they seem to be doing their honest best to shoo me away.

Or possibly it's because I canceled although it seems a bit mean to shut people out who are still paid up players but who aren't willing to allow EA infinite access to our personal money.

SWTOR v SWG

2012-01-04T11:17:00.003Z

Although it's still early I think I've seen enough of TOR to offer some opinions about how it compares to the previous Star Wars MMO.

Look

Actually, they're incredibly similar, at least on the low quality settings I run SWTOR at. Running around SWTOR it's easy to forget which game you're in if you're a SWG veteran. I think the graphics are fine although I do want to gripe about performance. For a game that looks rather dated SWTOR is a beast. When I first started playing it defaulted to low on everything which was borderline unplayable until I turned shadows off. It still chugs and loads slowly.

I sometimes fantasise about running a games company and one of the things I would do is put a Computer of Death into the office. This is the weakest machine we want our game to run on, an old Pentium I found in a jumble sale. And all the staff would spend a week on it at a time. Chosen by drawing straws on Friday afternoons. Because if the people developing these games didn't have state of the art overclocked beasts to work on all the time then maybe we would see games that are play decently on a normal machine.

It's particularly disappointing after Bioware recognised that too high systems specs had previously been a problem with many games (notably Age of Conan and Vanguard) and made a special effort to ensure this game would "run on a toaster".

To be fair SWG released as a horrible buggy mess that crashed to desktop and bluescreened so SWTOR wins on graphics, just.

The cutscenes

These are very well done, beautifully produced and well acted. Some of the plot twists are amazing and some of the dialogue are clever. The acting is genuinely brilliant, you can read a subtitle and think that's not an impressive answer, then hear it spoken and think "oh yeah!"

SWG hardly had any cutscenes, just a little bit with Han Solo at the beginning as I recall and the iconic scrolling slanting text so SWTOR is a winner here. It's a good feature, beautifully made.

Pacing

That does however bring me on to a serious criticism of SWTOR, in fact what may be it's deepest flaw. The game is badly paced. Cutscenes are great but they come so thick and fast it's hard to tell whether I'm playing a game with lots of film or watching a film with interactive bits. It gets too much. I found myself space-barring them after a few days because I'd had enough of cutscenes.

More importantly there's an overall rush to SWTOR that is very unappealing. People got to 50 in a few days. Now barely 2 weeks in almost everyone in my guild is 50. You don't really learn and explore a planet because you're only there for a day or two. You don't really learn and explore your skills because you get new ones every few hours. It just scrolls by too fast.

As players we optimise ourselves to beat and push the system but we need the system to also push back to create a fun dynamic. Push at SWTOR and you win, you max out, you save the universe. It lacks substance.

WoW, remember built itself up as a game where it took on average about 6 months to max level. There were people who still hadn't maxxed out a character by the end of Vanilla despite playing regularly. When we did Stranglethorn Valley we spend a fun 3 weeks there. Now although WoW isn't like this now, and you can level very fast, that early slow leveling played a crucial part in establishing WoW's popularity. It seems people look at WoW and copy what it is now without realising what it had before that got it to the top.

SWG, despite being remembered as a sandbox, was very much a leveling game and quite a slow one. It took months before anyone mastered an Advanced Profession if we don't count Architects who mastered because a whole guild gave them Ore. Those months were some of the most enjoyable times I've ever had in a MMO.

I think SWTOR loses on this aspect as do several other recent MMOs like Rift. Content becomes meaningless when it zips by in a flash. WoW can get away with it because WoW is established but WoW established itself on a game based on slow paced leveling.

Group content

I've been disappointed with SWTOR's group content because it's quite hard to get groups. I'll admit to having been spoiled by LFD tools but I can't be bothered to send out tons of tells and slowly build a friends list in the old-fashioned way. It's annoying enough that I was thinking it's probably best to let my sub lapse and come back when they've put one in. I really like doing group content as I quest through the solo content. There's no chance of finding a group while out questing and it's a tedious process hanging around the Fleet space station spamming.

SWG on the other hand despite not having proper instances did have some fun group content that emerged out of classes interdependence. The Ranger class for instance had to make camps for people to progress so Ranger players tended to organise interesting expeditions for other players. It had caves like the Squill Cave on Tatooine which attracted crowds of people in very chaotic public raids

The Rails

To compare these two games we need to look at the rails, the system where the game channels you towards the content it chooses.

In SWTOR rails are firmly in place but nicely crafted. You can only do what the designers had planned for you to do but it's good enjoyable content. In SWG the designers had a sandbox philosophy, they put in stuff that could be interacted with but didn't necessarily know how players would interact with it.

Each side has its fans but my concern with regard to SWTOR is that the rails may simply run out. What happens when the train reachs the end of the line? You can roll an alt or raid or pvp but none of those things are quite enough for me. The sub-based model implies that the game will be your main or even your only game and will endlessly immerse you. Where I think SWTOR is heading is what I saw in my Rift raid guild. At the end of a raid people would ask "when's the next raid?" be told Tuesday then say "cya Tuesday" and not log on until then. There was no point playing.

That's a serious flaw in an MMO. SWG always had something to do so it wins clearly here.

PvP

SWG had asymmetrical spontaneous pvp where SWTOR has pvp battlegrounds that you queue up for and where you face a matched team. I'm miles in favour of asymmetrical pvp. It feels like pvp as war, with strategic depth, rather than pvp as sport.

I probably shouldn't assign SWTOR as the loser as many people prefer that instanced sanatised safe form of combat. Let me just say it doesn't particularly appeal to me, for me pvp should feel dangerous.

The economy

OK, the design teams have come from completely opposite poles and I'm going to plunge in and say that SWTOR's philosophy here was half-baked and terrible.

In Galaxies economic professions were a fundamental part of the economy and almost everything was made by players. Resources were rare, searching them out was time-consuming, the top crafters were astonishingly hardcore. Later on this philosophy, as with many aspects of Galaxies became diluted but in 2003 the economy was fascinating.

In SWTOR the philosophy is throw it all at the players so they won't whine. Have unlimited money with a gathering profession that literally just gathers cash. Level to max in a few days. Have 5 crafting characters on one with your crew of willing slaves working 24/7. Oh and the Auction House is a worse database than one I could build on Open Office freeware in an afternoon.

Some elements of it are well-designed. The crafting/missions/gathering division is elegant as is the reverse engineering mechanic and some of the item design. But the whole thing more ressembles Kid in a Sweetshop than Economic Simulation. Bioware have profoundly failed crafter players.

SWG of course had one of the most interesting and admired crafter economies ever done.

Space combat

SWTOR wins hands down. I really like the space combat minigame. SWG launched with none but then added a space game that was just too hard for me.

Player housing and cities

One of the outstanding SWG features. In SWTOR you get a ship which serves as a player house and is nice but it really feels barren without the ability to fill it with junk and decorate it.

Overall

SWTOR is too generous, too casual and simply too finite. It feels like a single-player game, like there's a point where I'll say "Done!" and I really will be done. It's very worth playing for a time, an improvement on the KOTOR series which were very good single-player games. But that's the thing - it feels like a massively single-player game. All the elements that should encourage interaction are absent or half-baked. There's a lack of cool things to find because it's all on rails. There's a lack of groups because there's no LFD tool. There's no economy. There's no war.

SWG will remain a high point of my gaming experiences. Hopefully its demise will catalyse other products that suit the people who liked it. It's a very strong influence on Dominus which I'm looking forward to more than ever now. And I feel that when SWTOR fails to retain the numbers it was built for, when it fails to "kill WoW", people will look back to older game designs and see if there was anything there that can be delivered in fresh ways to modern audiences.

SWTOR: There's a lot to love

2011-12-30T15:56:00.001Z

After being negative about SWTOR I thought it about time I concentrated on some of the positives in what is in many ways a beautifully made game

First of all I have to say I love the look. Many people don't so I've read, I do. Possibly it's because my first in-depth MMO was SWG and that's the standard by which I judge MMOs. And SWTOR does look very like SWG.

Star Wars is arguably the best game IP out there. It's immensely popular. It comprises both fantasy and sci fi so it covers all bases. If you want to be a sword-wielding Wizard you can, if you want to be a starfighter pilot you can. Droids and some of the animals and races are very charming. Or at least interesting even if technically I have to admit that Gungans aren't actually charming. It's more streetwise than Star Trek, more idealist than Battlestar Galactica.

Clothes and customisation are nicely done and I like the fact that your appearance gear isn't different from what you're actually wearing. It's a bit unimmersive if the plate-wearing tank is actually wearing 15 lbs of mithril-alloyed titanium on his head but appears to be wearing a top hat. So I'm glad they avoided going the route of appearance slots.

The music is very good. It's Star Wars style and occasionally directly from Star Wars as distinct from Galaxies which simply used film music for everything. I couldn't help but wonder about the economics. If you have access to the Star Wars IP why pay someone to compose new music? They're not going to do it better than John Williams. But if EA don't mind throwing some spare cash towards starving musicians who am I to quibble? And the new stuff is Star Wars style and nicely composed and played.

Combat is quite nicely done. On my Sniper I take cover, line up my shot and open up, with some snazzy area effect strafing, grenade tossing and pot shots to taste. My companion, when she can tear herself away from slicing missions, provides very decent support. She's Kaliyo, a somewhat paper tank of unpleasant temperament who, although she hits the deck a lot, tends to keep opponents busy long enough for me to win and then ress her. Plus she cheers enthusiastically when I do anything Evil.

The main storyline is excellent a twisty labyrinth of intrigue and double-dealing which I am scything through with the Direct Approach (tm). Conniving double agents seem to have issues when it comes to outwitting a bullet in the kneecap. The other stories are very nicely done too although sometimes when I'm tired it all gets a bit samey. Another long explanation of why I should Kill Ten Rebs? I think I'll spacebar through. I do feel that I should avoid doing too much of that though as I'm loathe to rush through too fast.

I love alting. The other classes feel very different and I enjoy picking a personality for a new alt. I have a Rude Sith Warrior who simply picks whatever conversation option seems rudest. He's very entertaining and it turns out you can be pretty cheeky to Sith Lords without getting your head stuck on a Force-pike. Who knew?

There's a space mission minigame which I really like. Now let me confess, I suck at space fighting games and flight sims. But this is really easy. Hold left mouse button down and try to keep the mouse pointer over the baddies. That's basically it. A space flight game that even I can play! (For reference SWG's Jump To Lightspeed was too hard for me).

Crafting is fun and I'm a big fan of time-based crafting. My main is primarily a Slicer, although I also have enough Armstech to load my Sniper Rifle with the latest Barrel. I have a Biochemist alt and I love that profession. I do suggest Slicing as first pick because even after they nerfed it it's still a constant stream of free money.

There's a nice account security feature. It collects data for 5 different security questions then sometimes asks you a random one when you log in. So even if you get key-logged the key-logger might well lack the answer needed to get into your account.

It's a good game and I'd thoroughly recommend it to any readers. I think sometimes there's a feeling that buying a MMO should be tantamount to getting married, that it should be an exclusive commitment involving dumping all previous games and avoiding at least 6 months worth of new releases. That's silly. It's worth a look and at £35 or so it's reasonably affordable. It's certainly a lot of content for your money even if one accepts Tobold's opinion that it's a game with lots of content but not much gameplay.

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-25T11:17:00.000Z

Merry Christmas everyone! Hope you have a pleasant day over-eating, getting sleepy, spending time with the family, getting drunk and possibly a little video game playing if it fits into the packed schedule!

SWTOR: the great subscription scam

2011-12-22T14:18:00.001Z

From the official site:

You have 29 days of play time remaining. You must sign up for a recurring subscription plan or redeem a Game Time Code before you can play. If you sign up for a recurring subscription, you will be billed automatically at the end of your current remaining play time.

Let's check that again. I have 29 days of play time remaining. I can't actually play however. I can't play because even though it's in my free month I have to subscribe using a credit card or add game time using a game card.

It's a scam. I have a free month but I don't have a free month.

I don't quite frankly mind giving them my debit card number but sadly their site isn't working at the moment and I can't even get to the page where I would enter its details.

And of course anyone who pays by game cards must buy two months worth of game time even if you had only wanted to play your free month then decide later.

I'm sure whichever accountant thought this particular swindle up is chortling his way home with a fat Christmas bonus but these things always bite back in the long run. Blizzard leads the way in MMOs because people respect the name. EA is not adapting to its competitor's success.

SWTOR: First impressions

2011-12-20T00:24:00.001Z

I've started playing SWTOR and it has to be said it's a beautifully crafted game. I have Stabs, an Imperial Agent on the Red Eclipse EU server. Level 17 now, the highest level we know of on the server is 50 (the maximum) and someone in our guild is 41.

So in terms of leveling speed it's probably too fast. Arguably the game's great strength is its beautifully and expensively made quest content. For one player that seems to have lasted him about 4 days. Is the end-game going to be enough to retain hardcore players? We'll see in a month.

As someone who loves to alt and who isn't hardcore it will certainly retain me. I'm planning to level several alts and it will probably take me at least a month to level the first one. So perhaps what we have here is a game that isn't interested in the hardcore vocal minority that gobbles up content so fast?

And that brings the question, will it attract an alternative audience of more casual people, maybe players who've never even tried WoW? I think it could. It is rather like a movie with interactive prompts at times and the pacing between running around shooting stuff and stopping to watch another excellent cutscene is good.

The economy is mildly broken with the overpowered skill Slicing. It's a gathering skill that gathers money. It levels independently of your character and my henchperson is just about never not on a Slicing mission. She's doing level 40 content while I'm level 17. I've bought my first bag slot for 5k credits and have about 17k left. If I didn't have slicing I'd be broke.

The auction house assigns a default price which I rather like and which allows for a certain amount of predatory opportunism. You see, it seems to give price more or less on item type and level. A level 15 blue item will be about the same price as a level 15 green item. This means you can search by quality and pick up some bargains very easily.

I started with Slicing, Scavenging and Investigation but I've realised I'd never get a chance to use Investigation due to permanently running slicing missions so I've changed that one to Archaeology where there's at least a chance to find nodes you can gather from in the wild. All three of those allow you to hit nodes and as a result my minimap, which I keep zoomed out, is often festooned with stars like a little round Christmas tree.

The Imperial Agent is very cool, a gadget-based action spy with a suave British accent. James Bond in space, what's not to like? I went down the Sniper tree partly as a consequence of the game's early structure. Most classes it seems build you up well in one of the areas of speciality from 1-10 then ask you to choose an advanced class. At level 10 I was a superb shot, sometimes killing mobs in one hit but I also had a fairly weak dagger attack and no stealth nor healing. So when the game asked me if I wanted to shoot things for a living or be a rogue/healer it felt like a duh! question. Yes I want to easily one-shot and two-shot my way through the game. I expected though that I'd be respeccing later but the choice is permanent. Not a disaster but certainly a surprise.

Overall it's immensely fun and very charming. There's a very strong Star Wars feel and I'm getting flashbacks to Galaxies in 2003. While it lacks some of the features of Galaxies I'd say it's every bit as good, as fun. Whether I'll be quite so hooked in the longer term depends on how the game feels after I've consumed the content. There's a danger of an extended Tortage effect. Everyone who played Age of Conan loved Tortage then felt very let down by the bland game that came after you'd finished Tortage (the starting city). There's clearly a lot more than just a city but it's still consumable content and in some cases it's being consumed at astonishing speed. So will the game hold people who hit level 50 before Christmas and don't want to make an alt? It will be interesting to see.

Eve Online: a new home

2011-12-15T00:57:00.001Z

A new home for my armada of PI alts. I'm sending a scanning ship and 5 cloaky haulers off to a new wormhole. This one has lots of lovely planets and is very quiet. According to DOTLAN there have only been 2 players ships and no pods killed in the last month. No jumps at all in the last couple of weeks and combat against NPC seems very occasional.

I check everyone has an up-to-date clone and an insured ship. In one case I repair the armour and half the structure of an exceptionally fortunate Badger. And launch 3 clients and have them all autopilot while I type this. I also send them 200 million isk each to cover set up costs and export taxes for the next several months.

Once I've placed my ships inside I'll scout their POS with my cov ops and get the corp ticker. I'll use that to work out their timezone with the idea of only exporting PI goods when they're all asleep. For good measure I'll add any name I can deduce to my watchlist for extra hauling safety.

At some point they may decide to put up POCOs at which point it will be time to move again. Until then I'll pay 17% tax and like it!

Eve Online: Poco wars, part 9 (this time it really is final)

2011-12-14T16:33:00.000Z

I moved a fleet into the wormhole yesterday morning during a gap in their coverage. A Talos Tier 3 Battlecruiser, an Oracle Tier 3 Battlecruiser and a Rifter tackling Frigate. The ships were fitted to be able to pvp and to deliver sustained dps.

Late last night I noticed only one of my opponents was on. I decided to start killing pocos as I felt confident against a single opponent.

I spotted a Hound stealth bomber on D-scan, then a bit later spotted some core scan probes (he was scanning for the way out) and orbited the office shooting it, with orbits set to optimal range so if he tried bombing he'd be unlikely to catch all 3 ships.

He dropped in with a Drake battlecruiser at 60 km and started shooting the Talos.

I flubbed my response a little, not being used to coordinating alts in pvp. I sent the Talos towards him, alt tabbed sent the rifter in, back to the Talos, locked, scrammed and webbed him and started shooting, over to the Rifter, locked scrammed and webbed him and started shooting, alt tabbed to the Oracle, sent it towards him slowly (it wasn't fitted with a propulsion module). A ship started screaming, alt tabbed saw it was the Rifter, ok no worries it's a noob character in a cheapo frigate, he can have that one, went back to the oracle to see if I could lock him yet, another ship started screaming. My Talos was in trouble - doh! I'd left the microwarp drive on. By doing so I'd massively increased my signature radius which meant his missiles were hitting me super-hard. I watched for a few seconds to see if the armour repairer would cope with the incoming damage, it couldn't. OK, time to leave. I turned the MWD back on and burned toward a random point in space to get out of his warp disruption range and hit Warp. Unfortunately I hit warp too early and was still pointed, so nothing happened. I rather panicked and aligned to the Sun and left the MWD on. Unfortunately the sun was back past the Drake so my ship turned around, its MWD making it bulk up huge, and headed back into the enemy fire. Argghhh! I turned back around and tried to run off but the ship blew up. I warped off in my pod, alt tabbed to the Oracle, still 38km from the enemy and warped off in him.

I lost:
a T1 fit Rifter (about 40k isk value after insurance)
a pod (no implants no re-cloning costs)
a Talos Tier 3 Battlecruiser (about 60m isk value after insurance)

Big kudos to him. I might have misplayed my fleet but he took on 3 ships with one and played really well. It took both balls and skill to do what he did.

So I had a rethink. My pressure on their pocos was based on the idea that they'd need a few people to stop me because I have multiple accounts. If one person can beat me 1 vs 3 then I'm probably wasting my time. Also it means that I'd only be able to operate when none of them were on if I wished to continue my campaign of asymmetrical warfare. (I had anticipated being able to kill a poco one day when not enough of them were around). That now escalated to having to spend time reinforcing a poco then needing none of them to be on in order to kill it without getting my butt kicked.

Better to cut my losses, pull out, find another wormhole with its Interbus customs offices still up and farm that paying 17% tax. So I've decided to throw in the towel and pull out.

I'm not unhappy, it was enormous fun and the pvp fight was really exciting. I also learned important lessons about pvp, including my first ever attempt to coordinate 3 accounts in a fight at once. I'll evac late tonight or tomorrow night once all good Russians are tucked up in bed and then start scouting. I'm tempted to try to find a corp but with Star Wars starting and having just been rejected from one I wanted to join for "being a spy" it's probably best to aim for a low maintenance low profile Eve gaming style.

SWTOR: my guild,

2011-12-13T11:24:00.000Z

I recently applied to join a SWTOR guild which my friend Faylon has joined. I filled out the template then they asked me to tell them more. I rather liked what I ended up writing, it turned out to be a nostalgic review of a life in gaming. The guild is Rising Darkness, we're European (if Brits are still allowed to say that) and the server we're on is Red Eclipse. Recruitment is closed but will open up again when the game goes Live.

OK, let me expand.

I started gaming with Chess when I was about 4 and graduated, in those pre-home computer days, to crawling over the carpet with a tape measure moving lead armies about.

When I was about 15 video games were starting to become popular. We were supposed to volunteer to garden for old ladies on Wednesday afternoon but often they cancelled or we managed to bunk off and head up to Victoria for the amusement arcade and the magic of Space Invaders. Swarming mob-handed into the arcade, our pockets bulging with 10p pieces, in our school uniforms with our shirts hanging out and our ties loosened and flipped over our shoulders we saved this planet from countless swarms of implacable alien invaders.

In due time much more sophisticated games came out such as Asteroids where you could spin your shooty thing and Galaxian which had more than one colour!

Later in the 80s I worked professionally for a play by mail game company where you could send your panzers into France and patiently wait 3 days to find out how they got on. I got an Atari ST which had sophisticated Dungeons & Dragons style games like Bard's Tale and Dungeon Master. I even logged on to my first MMO, a text mud. All I remember about that game is I met someone who was in frikkin New Zealand. How awesome was that?

In the 90s I stayed with someone who actually owned a proper computer and I fell in love with a game called Master of Magic. I had to have my own computer, life would not be complete without access to Civilisation, Populous, and UFO: Enemy Unknown.

I went on to play online games being quite a mean Homm3 player and a very sociable Diablo 2 player. By this time I'd picked up Faylon at some dingy roleplaying club and he became my partner in crime in D2, achieving the impossible and amazing the people we played with. He once had a character with every possible speed buff that was so fast no one else could control it. Only him. (Until he drove him into a wall and splatted).

After Diablo 2 Faylon, a Star Wars nut, persuaded me to follow him into the new Star Wars game coming out in 2003. I played every class I think, as did any SWG vet who remembers the godawful hologrind. I also ran a fashion armour line that was in high demand, ran a guild, and destroyed the top pvp guild on the server after one of them spat at me (with a little help from my friends).

We tried EQ2 for a few months then WoW which we really liked. We played twin Rogues and were pretty hardcore levelers - there were 6 of us who were ahead of everyone else until about 55 when we slightly burned out (ie reduced our playing times to about 12 hours a day). We managed this despite rushing off to Stranglethorn Vale once every 3 hours for a chest that spawned in the arena there. You needed to win it 12 times in free for all pvp which was enormous fun and utter carnage. Eventually the top Alliance guild focused full time on stopping us at which point we called in a few favours, stomped them and Faylon (Waz as he was known then) became the first Arena Grand Master on the server. I was the second.

We co-founded the top Horde guild and did some raiding in Molten Core. Then we had to stop for RL reasons, came back a bit later and joined another guild which we helped get at far as Broodlord Lashslayer in BWL. Raided on and off after that with several guilds seeing most raid content up to 5/6 Sunwell in TBC and 3/12 Ulduar in WotlLK.

I began playing Eve about 3 years ago too which I like for its crazy stunts and incremental gameplay. I've also dabbled in loads of other MMOs.

At the moment I'm mainly playing Eve but the nice thing about Eve is if you dont have time to play much it doesn't really matter. Skills go up, planets grow cows, datacores accumulate and orders sell. Best of all by not playing you manage to avoid getting blown up.

What I'm looking for in SWTOR is to experience the game to the full. I'll probably level reasonably fast although I'm no longer up for the 16 hour a day playstyle we did in 2005. I love crafting. I like posting on forums and theorycrafting. I'm a pretty good rogue and think I'll get a good handle on the Imperial Agent. I'll probably try alts out at some point. I'm quite prepared to be flexible and help out if the guild needs me to take a different spec, I'm a very experienced healer and a competent tank.

Eve Online: CCP Christmas gift, a tip

2011-12-13T08:22:00.003Z

[Edited after CCP diddled about with how remaps work]

The best thing to pick is probably the bonus remap. Bonus Remaps now work separately from the standard ones so it can just sit there for years if you like. If at some stage you sell the character it will add value. It could also be valuable for an area of study like Drones (MEM/PER) which don't really match any other skill groups.

If you don't need a neural remap, and are pretty sure you will never ever need one, pick the Aurum so long as you already have the 5500 free AU they've handed out over the last 6 months.

Aurums are quite a cunning choice. Analysis of the clothing market suggests that price tanks for anything that falls under the free AU threshhold (currently 5500). If you take your AU to 7500 and they introduce new stuff or give us more AU you will have access to things only a tiny handful of players can buy. That increases the value of your Aurum, not just the 2k you get as a Christmas present but all the other aurum too.

In other words it's very significant being 2k in front of the pack.

Suppose CCP give everyone 2000 AU at some future point. Going by the figures from this analysis, it would mean everyone else is able to cash in their AU for around 20 000 isk but you can cash in 9000 AU for 66k isk each by selling a Field Marshall Coat for 600k isk.

So you could pick random Christmas gift worth 60m + sell 7k aurum at 20k isk each for a total of 200m

Or you could sell a coat for 600m (slightly less perhaps as a few other will also pick AU as their gift diluting the market).

Still as CCP add more stuff to the store and particularly when DUST launches giving us a new market of players and a load of new stuff anything in the cash shop that is out of reach of the people who just accumulate the free points will sell at premium prices.

Eve Online: poco wars, part 8

2011-12-12T23:38:00.000Z

It's 11.24 in London. Which means my targets are tucked up in bed, 3.24 their time if they're around Moscow. Probably too cold to sit up in the small hours at least if their homes are as draughty as mine.

I go to work.

Step 1 is checking if they're on using my contacts list. One is. Not one of the industrial corp that live in the wormhole but one of their military friends. Talking to a Locator agent using my cheapskate tip reveals he's in w-space.

An internet search of killboards doesn't show him as having killed or lost in a different wormhole recently so he could be in mine. (Well, technically his mate's but I've decided now I own a stake in it).

I could be brave and scan down the exit and fly out to high sec to pass around bookmarks but there's no need to. My gameplan is to maximise their risk and minimise mine. If he's really good he'll be sitting by the exit with a drag bubble up and cans scattered around to decloak his opponents.

There's just no need to risk it.

So back to watching TV, as often in Eve the best move is not to move. I'll check again tomorrow night.

Eve Online: poco wars, part 7

2011-12-11T19:01:00.003Z

Ah well, they didn't buy the negotiating in bad faith and destroyed my pocos. Which is a shame. They have, however, put up their own. Which is great.

You see, if the opponent is determined enough, these things aren't really defensible by small groups. I have these guys on contacts on watch list. If they all log off I'll put their pocos into reinforced. When the pocos come out of reinforced what will probably happen is about 10 of them wait for 2 hours to defend while I do something else (play SWTOR probably). Then the pocos will be ok. Until they all log off again and I put them back into reinforced.

So you see the only defence is having enough players that you always have someone online. They could possibly get me if they have characters I don't know about but my assault force is enough that they'll probably need at least 3 to win a fight and once they do that I add them to watch list. In other words they have to burn character names to beat me, once burned I'll never attack when that character is online while I only have to update my pods and get new ships if killed then I'll go back in with the same characters.

Eventually they'll stop defending them. At which point if they're online I'll still wait but someone else, passing through the system might think "hay I can kill this thing" and then do so. If the pocos are coming out of reinforced and these guys are offline then I'll blow them up.

This is the core of asymmetrical warfare. What I have to do is occasionally log on and if I can see my targets are undefended blow them up. What they have to do is always be online all the time forever. Asymmetrical.

Because my target is an industrial corporation who call in favours from friends when they need military power there's a definite limit on how long they can sustain a defensive campaign. Every time I put the pocos into reinforced they have to call in a favour and get their mates to drop what they're doing and come help, help consisting of 2 hours doing nothing.

On the other hand it means I may need to adjust my Eve play. What I've been doing is semi-afk missioning in high sec. However once I antagonise these guys I need to leave them no target. Possibly missioning will be ok, I don't know if it will be possible to suicide gank a battleship if I fit it to run missions while being hard to gank. It's probably best simply to avoid giving any target at all. I might focus on station trading in Eve and other games out of Eve.

Alternatively I could just walk away. But I think you have to do something in a game like Eve other than just farm money. And if I achieve the diplomatic result I want I'll be able to do PI in their wormhole in peace forever. And I can't see how they can stop me harassing them unless they get very lucky and I lose both of the cloaked ships I have in the wormhole as scanners.

Eve Online: locator agent tip for cheapskates

2011-12-11T11:21:00.000Z

One thing I've picked up in the recent poco wars is a way to get intel on someone's whereabouts without paying.

Normally Locator agents charge 25k isk. However if the target is in a wormhole the agent tells you he won't be able to trace him before you pay the money.

So if you're in conflict with players and you want to know which of them are in W-space you can do so for free using a Locator agent. Just cancel if he offers to find them for you in return for payment - because that means they're not in a wormhole.

Eve Online: poco wars, part 6

2011-12-11T11:01:00.001Z

3 hours to go until my pocos come out of reinforced and I'm scouting the wormhole. The static to high sec has a tengu and a tornado sitting on it with a medium warp bubble. The bubble is just to hold people coming through the hole, it's not a trap for cov ops like the last guys laid. So not as professional a bunch. (If they had caught my cov ops there would have been a realistic chance that I wouldn't be able to find the hole again.)

Still it's a problem. The names of these two pilots are different from the pilots who attacked my pocos the day before last. So there are now at least 6 players involved. It's too many to fight alone.

So I adjust my strategy. It's diplomacy time.

I got talking to them and eventually the guy I convoed managed to communicate I should use Google translate. I did and fired off random Russian. They dont want to put up their own pocos. I offered them 50m for the chance to take my pocos down.

While waiting for their responses (they were very slow) I did some research. The corp that lives there is almost completely pacifist, they have not killed anyone in the last 3 months despite some actions in their own wormhole. Their friends do their combat for them. The friends (the guy I was talking to was ex-Stain, a fairly strong nullsec pvp corp) have taken down 2 poses in the last 3 months and killed a few people. They're certainly out of my league.

However they only defend. Which means that potentially I could just close my PI facilities on the 2 planets I put pocos up at, open new ones at planets that still have the Interbus offices available and continue to ninja PI. I'd have to pay 17% tax but that's still 83% profit assuming average prices for my product. Also these guys won't allow anyone else to move in, effectively protecting me. Tourists are always a danger in a class 1 with a high sec static but no one will live there except some pure pacifists. Also I have all of them as contacts on watch list. So I can fly my PI stuff out when they're not on.

15 minutes to shut down and the conversation has stalled again. Did I mention they've VERY slow at responding. However that may work in my favour. After downtime they'll have to decide whether to kill my pocos or continue the negotiations.

Ah - they've offered 50m for each office. I've agreed. However I expect they'll want paying first which I won't agree to. (Because they'll just keep the money and nuke them anyway, well at least that's what I would do). And if they let the offices go out of reinforced I'll take them down and not pay.

9 minutes to shut down. I've agreed a deal with them and they haven't said anything about wanting the money now. If nothing else is said I think there's a good chance they won't demolish them after downtime. Well 50/50. Which is better than what it was an hour ago. If they demand money now I might try the "wait I need to sell something at jita first" stall.

I'm due to go out anyway in about an hour so no need to log on. They'll have a decision to make - do they kill the pocos or do they trust me to send 100m when I take them down if they leave them?

Ah, trust, there's not enough of it about.....

3 minutes to downtime and he just typed "waiting for the money". I told him "I need to sell something at Jita, on my way."

49 secs to downtime, he just told me "Hurry up". I replied "I don't think I'll get there before downtime".

BING

Server down!

Now I'll head on out for some lunch and to watch a game of football and come back later to see if the pocos survived. If the timers are bugged like last time there'll probably only be 30 minutes for them to be attacked, they may not manage to get it done even if they decide they want to kill them.

Eve Online: poco wars, part 5

2011-12-09T17:51:00.000Z

These things were introduced into the game to promote conflict and they certainly seem to be doing that!

My pocos, after surviving the attentions of the high sec griefers, have now been attacked by the Russians who live in the wormhole. It took them more than 3 hours so they have about half the firepower of the other guys (who had 4 oracles). These lot do have a XL ship assembly array in the wormhole so they could potentially have very big ships available.

They wouldn't talk to me unfortunately. Requests for convos were ignored. Still the nice thing about the mails you get is that you get the first person to shoot each time and you get a lot of mails. So I got 4 names. Added to contact and watch list, allowing me to terrorise them when they're not online should they blow up my POCOs and put up their own.

Eve Online: poco wars, part 4 (final - I hope)

2011-12-09T12:09:00.001Z

I logged on quickly after downtime and checked out the wormhole. I got the error message that the solar system is not loaded yet which I always love to see because it means you're first.

My POCOs were in reinforced but the timers were messed up. They should, according to the settings have been in reinforced from 11-1. Instead at 11.29 one was showing 30 minutes left and one was showing 6 minutes left.

I had a couple of ships by the way in with microwarp drives so I thought I'd have a go at collapsing the hole. I jumped in with MWD turned on for that fat signature rating boost. Found a mobile warp bubble deployed by the Russians who live there. I didn't like it being there so I nuked it, huzzah for T3 Battlecruiser dps! Jumped out. Jumped back in again.

One of the enemy logged on (I've added them as contacts on watch list) so I decided I didn't really fancy jumping in and out with an enemy fleet incoming. I'd not done much damage to the wormhole anyway, it was still registering above 45%. You get a timer if you jump through too much, in fact I had 2m 50s to kill before I could jump out again. I warped from safe to safe then left.

I then checked my enemy's killboard. They killed a couple of people in a different wormhole yesterday. That seems promising as you really need to commit at least one character to take down w-space pocos. Could they have got distracted? Even if they weren't were they too late because of the buggy timers? One poco was already out of reinforced by now, the other had 20 minutes left.

In the end all was pretty quiet as I watched the clock run down from a cov ops. (I'd made better bookmarks this time so I was able to move it much more safely, first to a spot 1000km below the poco then zooming in to 200 km below so as to be safer from drag bubbles).

And the clock ticked down, my pocos are safe and it's all a tad anti-climactic.

......... for now!

Eve Online: poco wars, part 3

2011-12-09T08:04:00.002Z

With just over 3 hours to go on my 2 pocos I have just been emptying the planets they export to - well in advance of enemy preparations I hoped.

The high sec griefers weren't around but on my last hauler I bumped into an Iteron V leaving the wormhole as I re-entered. Oops. Fortunately he hadn't spotted me as I was still cloaked from the jump. I really like the new session timer as it gives you a ten second window where your cloak hasn't dropped yet but you can jump out if you get into trouble.

However, as so often with surprise pvp instinct takes the place of wit. As the Itty jumped out I warped to my safe. 2 ships landed and I quickly started taking damage. What I should have done is cancel warp and hit Jump. What I actually did was Warp to the Sun, assuming the ship was dead and I might as well save my pod. In fact they took me into structure on the first volley but I got away before their guns cycled. Must have been artillery or something. Never let people tell you tank on Tech 1 Haulers is wasted! Also always put something that stops people warping off if you think you may pvp.

Learning from a previous fiasco I didn't log him off once I'd got him safe. If I log off after being shot I think I can be found for a while now. That's what happened last time. He's sitting in a safe, cloaked, and he'll be quite happy there till downtime.

I identified one of them as from the Russian corp who are the real owners of this wormhole. They have a massive POS there with XL ship assembly plant - that potentially means they have carriers in a system where anyone else has at best battlecruisers or HACs. Unfortunately the person immediately logged off and I got no response when I talked to them in Local. Pity I don't speak Russian really.

Still I can't help but wonder if they'll turn up to contest the POCOs. If they get someone to talk to me I'll cheerfully blue them and set +10 tax rate to zero giving them free PI in return for their help.

Eve Online: poco wars, part 2

2011-12-07T22:05:00.002Z

After a couple of hours busily blowing up my 2 pocos the enemy leader got back to me.

[19:09:23] E > hi
[19:09:47] E > larst charns or call in the fleet
[19:09:54] E > 6%
[19:10:01] E > thats not bad u have a lot mor to loos
[19:17:58] Me > sorry mate was afk
[19:18:03] E > np
[19:18:19] Me > yup, you go ahead I'll just move hole
[19:18:22] Me > good luck
[19:18:45] E > wow but u have a hell of a tol in there ...
[19:18:53] Me > tol?
[19:18:54] E > sham to blow it up
[19:19:00] E > lot
[19:19:05] Me > what's a tol?
[19:19:08] Me > oh
[19:19:16] Me > no, i just had the 2 pocos
[19:19:16] E > carnt speel for shit =/
[19:19:27] Me > the tower is some russian dude's
[19:19:34] Me > i've never seen him
[19:22:19] E > k i see
[19:22:57] Me > so what exactly do you guys do in game?
[19:23:09] Me > i thought TEARS were basically ninja salvagers
[19:23:45] E > they r
[19:24:15] Me > you're collecting tears blowing up pocos?
[he left]

I wonder how much money they make doing this. I guess a lot of people must fold at the first threat of violence.

Eve Online: poco wars

2011-12-07T18:30:00.002Z

Ah well, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley. A force of 4 oracle tier 3 battlecruisers and a purifier stealth bomber has paid a visit to one of my shiny new Customs Offices. It's from a high sec griefing guild and they started out with an extortion attempt.

[17:54:06] Me > hi
[17:54:06] E > hi
[17:54:49] Me > you convoed me :)
[17:54:58] E > your going to los your CO or hand them to us
[17:55:23] Me > ah
[17:55:39] Me > i'd prefer to negotiate a deal, want to be blue to us?
[17:55:48] E > is u do it b4 the ferst 1 gos into RF then ill do the tax at 4%
[17:56:18] Me > handing them over isnt an option
[17:56:38] Me > and if you nuke them I'll keep the wormhole clear of customs offices permanently
[17:56:53] E > if u do it arfter then they will b 6%
[17:57:06] Me > you're not listening :)
[17:57:21] E > and if u dont hand them over we bern ur system
[17:57:31] Me > that's fine, bring it
[17:59:08] E > if u transfer the u will blue to us
[17:59:16] Me > is there anything else I can help you with today? :)
[17:59:34] Me > no sorry, you can't have them
[17:59:51] E > you cood give us a fight if u whont

Proof you don't have to be a quick typer or a decent speller to do well in Eve.

My friend checked them out in a cov ops and got caught by a very professional drag bubble trap. I don't think I've got much chance of stopping them so it's just a matter of moving my extraction efforts.

Fair play to them. Blowing up people's customs offices could make them a lot of isk since I'm sure some people will prefer to hand over the customs office rather than lose it.

It might be a good time to look for a pack to join again.

Eve Online: Adventures in Crucible

2011-12-07T07:49:00.000Z

Eve's had a dramatic year culminating in a Save The Game expansion which intends to put right a year of tepid development.

And it's really good.

Unlike some of the other good expansions there's no particular theme to this one - it's a collection of things they thought would be cool. We have a new Tier of battlecruisers specialised in damage, we have player-owned customs offices (part of the infrastructure development for upcoming partner game DUST514) and loads of little things and artistic improvements.

The game looks really pretty now. This patch is full of little artistic touches. My Amarr Impairor (noobship) mounts a cannon on top of its hull - it now retracts the cannon when going into warp. A little touch but very cool and very nice looking.

I have built some of the Customs Offices and placed them on sale for a rather expensive price. No one has bought one yet but I think they will. I don't think we've really seen the player run planetary materials economy supporting a time of major nullsec war. Nullsec war is largely about killing opponent structures and setting up your own. If the war that everyone is expecting occurs then we will see a lot of structures blown up. I don't think the player economy will cope which means that prices will spike. In the long run that encourages more people to enter planetary production but in the short term it means large profits for yours truly.

As well as gouging off other players I've also deployed two of them for my own planetary production efforts. I produce planet goo in a class 1 wormhole which is occupied by a Russian corporation with a large and impressive Player-Owned Station. However they never seem to be about and I've been happily farming their planets for several months.

I've gone a step further now and placed something that is both visible and attackable. I think what will happen is they will just use my Offices and pay me tax (a modest 7.5% as compared to the NPC default of 17%). Possibly they may contact me and talk to me in which case I'll try to negotiate blue standings. They may kill my offices in which case I'll simply nuke every Customs Office in the wormhole for weeks until they come back to the negotiating table. Essentially no one will be able to extract anything which will make it rather hard for them to run their POS. Hopefully we can work something out.

It's a class 1 wormhole which means it's difficult to bring force to bear. The low class means you can only enter with quite small ships, frigates cruisers and battlecruisers. Which brings me to my new toys: an Oracle Amarr Tier 3 battlecruiser and a Talos Galente Tier 3 Battlecruiser. In a class 1 wormhole, unless someone has actually constructed a powerful ship inside the wormhole from scratch these Tier 3 ships are effectively the Top Predators. A Tech 3 strategic cruiser is equally powerful but costs about half a billion isk, it doesn't make financial sense to risk them against Tier 3 battlecruisers. Hull plus fittings was about 90 million isk which for me is a very small amount - they are throwaway ships, I'm quite happy to risk them. Which is what I had to do because I had them shooting the NPC Customs offices for several hours yesterday.

Theoretically a Tier 3 battlecruiser can do over a thousand dps. However with my rather indifferent gun skills I was no where near that. My Oracle does about 500 dps with large pulse lasers, I'm training up for Tech 2 ones which will be a significant upgrade. However it can shoot for 8 hours without burning out a single crystal which is very useful in W-space. My Talos does about 550 with large neutron blasters plus can hold a flight of small drones which add another 100. However I used about 1400 cubic meters of ammo. It has a cargo hold of 600 cubic meters so I had to use its cargohold, the oracle's cargo hold and fly some extra in to supply it.

I really enjoyed using these ships and am looking forward to the skills for Tech 2 weapons. It's good to be eager about skill training again. Once I can handle some decent guns, who knows, I might even seek out some human opponents again.

The fascination of passive gaming

2011-12-06T17:30:00.000Z

I've realised that what I missed most about not being able to get online for a month in gaming terms are passive gameplay features. The skill queue in Eve, PI in Eve, spell research in EQ2.

That's partly because I'm in an unsociable phase. In a couple of weeks I'll be playing SWTOR with a close real life friend and a promising looking guild so I've avoided the commitment of other MMO guilds for the last several months. I like gaming with other people but I'm perfectly happy playing alone too and this happened to be a period when I was soloing (it would be very annoying to be cut off for a long period when a fresh game launches and everyone is in leveling frenzy).

But it has got me thinking about why I play and what I like. I really like the set something off and come back in a day gameplay. I loved it in Star Wars: Galaxies when running my harvesters. I suppose blogging is kinda similar, one reads or comments then comes back in a day to see if there's been a reaction. I think I'll enjoy SWTOR's companion resource collecting and crafting much more than I ever liked mining in WOW.

And of course other people like it too - it's the essence of most social Facebook games although they're gradually changing.

Yet I can't help but feel that it's not esteemed the same way by many players as active gameplay. Running about shooting someone, that's real gaming, setting a harvester running then coming back with a hauler a few days later is rarely championed.

I never played Farmville and don't think I'd like it because it's only passive gaming and seems a bit meaningless when isolated like that. But as part of a complex and sophisticated MMO? Yeah, give me passive gaming!

(In the time it took to write this my Eve character gained 1000 skill points and my planet farms churned out 30 Transmitters).

I'm back!

2011-12-02T13:25:00.000Z

Finally I have internet operational again. Operation Harangue Customer Support is over, now it's time for Operation Argue about the Bill. Anyway that's probably as tedious to everyone else as it was for me to spend a month without internet.

I'll post something more relevant to MMOs soon.

Life without internet

2011-11-07T19:19:00.001Z

I've been quiet for the last week and a half and part of it is that my internet access stopped unexpectedly.

I'd been having intermittent line faults so I canceled my ISP (British Telecom) and arranged a new one (Tesco). I was told they could cancel my old ISP for me when they set up the new one and that sounded fine.

It wasn't!

Learn from my mistake, never ever let anyone have permission to cancel your broadband. Get both up and running then cancel.

Instead I had to run a gamut of vague excuses, improbable promises and outright lies while I wait for a router to arrive through the post. Apparently the mail now is slower than it was in the 1st century BC. I think they deliver by sending out pack-snails which are preceded by a man waving a red flag. Ho hum.

What I'm writing about, as well as to explain my absence, is the rather fascinating psychological process I've undergone. At first I was quite angry and bullishly made phone call after phone call. I moved on from Anger to Desperation and tried to get my old BT router set up to carry my new provider (it appears to have been sabotaged by BT in case traitors like me attempt to do that though). Then I moved on to Calm. One doesn't really need the internet. There are other things to do. I've read a lot, phoned a number of friends who I was semi out of touch with and watched more TV in 10 days than I'd previously seen in a year.

I found games to be astonishingly thin on the ground. I thought I had tons of games: there's my MMOs, my Steam games, my old Win 95 and 98 games that need patching to run on modern machines - all completely useless without internet access. I played Warcraft 3 (and a big Ha! to people who claim the Warcraft series has always been frivolous, it's a sombre tale of obssession and betrayal told with utter sincerity). I played Diablo 2 although it took a little adjusting to not being online, especially not having banks of dummy characters for item storage. (Although I believe there are patches for that kind of thing - if one is online). And I played Minesweeper. A lot of Minesweeper, took me ages to clear the biggest map, my naval skills are sadly rusty.

All in all it's been quite a nice break, it's let me re-assess my leisure time rather than predictably running through the same motions over and over.

I do begrudge the missing Eve skill training time though.

Do any gamers act on principles?

2011-10-27T23:54:00.000+01:00

I caved in yesterday on a stand I'd taken regarding SWTOR. I was annoyed they closed SWG just to stop it competing so I had decided not to buy SWTOR. Yesterday an old friend phoned and told me he'll be playing SWTOR so I decided to pre-order it.

I feel in some ways like I've made a righteous decision to make a stand then ceded defeat partly because of the social tie, but also if I'm being very honest partly from greed for the new shiny.

How does everyone else feel about gamer ethics? Are we all just sluts, sleeping with whichever game promises the next gratification? Or are some of you out there headstrong determined people who often take a stance on a matter of principle and stick with it?

Children's stories?

2011-10-24T12:34:00.000+01:00

When I was 17 my English teacher said to the class: "The Hobbit is a great book for children and The Lord of the Rings is a great book - for children."

It was his attempt to steer us back to the established literary world of Shakespeare and Joyce and Orwell. And it was pretty successful, LOTR went from being wildly popular among us to being something we'd grown out of.

Looking back now I think he was wrong, that books aren't really for children or adults but there can be a childishness about them, an accessibility, an escapism that may appeal in general to a demographic but there's no hard and fast rule for individuals other than those which we form ourselves.

So what rules have I formed for me, myself and I?

The first is consistency. A story needs to operate in a world with clear principles. In a Tarantino film you know what will happen when people start losing it. And it's part of the story running through his oeuvre, his collection of work. In Tarantinoland when people get cross they shoot each other. It's kind of charming in its predictability, it's how his world works and it adds to the appeal.

In the latest Fry's Planet Word Stephen interviewed Peter Jackson who said this of Lord of the Rings:

What Tolkien did great with his stories and especially his use of language was that he treated them as historical.. that was a door that we entered when we went into the movies, that this isn't made up, it's not a piece of gobbledigook set on the planet Zog or some such thing. Every name, every place name, every plant name that Tolkien wrote about he based on some form of language. It was a language that sometimes he created himself it was an archaic old middle English form of language

F: like an oaken shield

J: yeah. Everything meant something, everything had a reality, it was almost like he did literally create history.

And of course he literally created a history, after his death his background notes on the fantasy world were published as a book almost as long as his trilogy.

I grew up reading heroic fiction. Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Gemmell, Cherryh, Nevyn, all full of wonderful heroes in lovingly realised worlds. Consistent worlds. Worlds that didn't make sense in relation to our world but which did make sense in relation to their own world.

To many people, including my English teacher those are worlds that are childish and trivial, but the power of stories is their effect on the hearer and everyone hears the same story differently. You can't tell another person they're wrong to be inspired by something, it's their call.

If any readers are inspired by Pandaren then good for you. Best of luck to you, I wish I was.

The reason I'm not is that, rightly or wrongly, I've seen WoW as a continuation of a story that began in my cot, a continuation of the bedtime fairy tales, the teenage sword and sorcery, a lifelong love of alternate escapist worlds. Each world varies but within itself it has consistency.

WoW has exhibited a tendency to play games with that consistency, to undermine it and surprise you. It's a gimmick that goes back to Warcraft 1. It's a gimmick that's actually quite pervasive in WoW but for the first time I think the gimmick has overtaken the world's consistency. If a quest giver in vanilla sent you to kill ten orcs with a Rolling Stones reference it didn't overpower the adventure of fighting to save the village. Nor do I think the Taurens were immersion-breaking, it's a fantasy trope that goes back to Theseus. But increasingly WoW has jettisoned the underlying theme of a fantasy world at war for more and more jokes and silliness. I don't like the holiday events, it's an intrusion of this world into the fantasy. I don't like panda-people as heroes. I don't like the purchasable My Little Pony or the children's TV zaniness of the goblin starter area.

And it's a shame that I don't because if I did I would have more fun.

Fortunately people are making games for me and people like me. Eve is rather dark, so are forthcoming titles Prime and This Secret World. Age of Conan and Lord of the Rings both do a great job of capturing the feel of their original authors' works.

So as the blogosphere draws lines in the sands over WoW's inclusion of pandas I respectfully wave to those capable of seeing the fun in head-kicking panda people in the bright shiny Azeroth future as I head towards grimmer shores.

WoW: pandas... /facepalm

2011-10-21T21:30:00.000+01:00

Well with 3 days left on my month's sub news comes in that the new Expansion will feature a new race Pandas and a new class Monks.

Too cute by far for me, it killed my will to play. I tried logging in and playing and actually got to an instance but I couldn't face it any more and logged off halfway through.

I feel like the Warhammer-based dark fantasy has become a game aimed at toddlers.

It's not the first sign of course, draenai are basically smurfs and the cash shop pony is My Little Pony, the Goblin starter area is very much designed to entertain young children.

But enough is enough. WoW is simply not a game for my demographic any more.

Eve Online: a harsh winter in Georgia

2011-10-20T10:33:00.001+01:00

I was very sorry to see that Eve's owner CCP Games has had to lay off 20% of its staff. 120 people have lost their jobs mainly in Georgia, USA staff who were working on World Of Darkness. WoD is not canceled but its future must be in some doubt.

It's a horrible time of year to lose your job as it's tough to get a new one in the pre-Christmas period. My very best wishes to all the staff affected.

It must be a very bitter time for the former White Wolf staff. White Wolf was one of the top tabletop RPG companies. Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Forsaken and Mage: The Awakening are superb games that took the genre away from its high fantasy roots. They must have felt when they merged with CCP in 2006 that the titles were in safe and loving hands.

So what went wrong?

Basically CCP over-extended. Hiring more and more staff based on a tradition of exponential growth it ended up too bloated. It's not complete disaster, Eve is a cash cow and will I think have a favourably received Expansion this Winter. I expect it to push back to previous subscriber number and concurrent user highs. Hopefully they'll be a little more restrained with the extra cash if so.

In the longer term I have my doubts about DUST 514. It's a PS3 only shooter that affects the Eve power structure. I think it will attract some Eve power gamers (Something Awful for instance will encourage a strong DUST guild to support their very strong Eve guild) but generally speaking console players don't stick to one game for long. They need to attract both Eve players who don't usually console AND console players who don't usually play MMOs. I do think though there's some satisfaction to be had from the feeling that fragging a load of reds is contributing to carving out an empire somewhere. DUST may feel more significant than your average shooter.

Once DUST is released though they will be in a much stronger position. Games always need more staff to develop than they do to manage live. And even a disappointing launch will bring more revenue in than pre-launch when you don't get any.

Hopefully at that point investment in WoD will pick up again.

One of the casualties of the cuts has been the customer service team, including forum moderators CCP Fallout and CCP Zymurgist. A lot of players are confused by this as they see the cuts as a consequence of bad customer relations.

I don't think the cuts are really a consequence of bad customer relations although that didn't help. (And the players who in June urged everyone to unsub for "the good of Eve" certainly contributed). CCP was over-extended and was relying on growth to pay the bills. The disappointing summer expansion meant the subscriber base didn't grow. People haven't lost their jobs because there was a riot at Jita people have lost their jobs because the game failed to become more interesting.

The cut of the CS team is similar to something I saw when I was working in the City of London as a librarian. When companies are in trouble they cut peripheral staff. The banks kept bankers and sacked librarians (even though we were terrifically cost-effective). CCP has kept people who develop Eve and sacked people who manage the perception of Eve. Equally understandable, equally short-sighted.

Is there light at the end of the tunnel?

Yes.

This Winter's expansion looks like it will be really fun with a new problem for industrialists and a new target for pvpers in the form of player-owned customs offices. Popular re-balances are coming, particularly a capital ship nerf and a hybrid turret buff. I think it's an Expansion that will boost numbers. DUST, as I've said, will provide more money once launched than it does while in development, that's axiomatic. And WOD will eventually, unless complete disaster strikes, get back on track. There is room for a stylish, sinister Vampire roleplaying game in the MMO market.

Best wishes to CCP staff, present and former.

What to play, what to play?

2011-10-17T09:56:00.000+01:00

Like most of the bloggers I regularly read the last few months have seen something of a lull. The year started with Cataclysm which lured most of us back for a look. Rift was fun for a bit then palled. Since then it's been awfully quiet in MMOland.

Over the last couple of months I've played WoW, Eve, Titan Quest, Diablo 2 and Everquest 2.

I invested £9 in a month of WoW in anticipation of the LFR. I actually thought it was coming sooner than it really is. It seems unlikely it will be here before mid-November now as it's on the Public Test Realm and there's still a lot of work to be done.

So I pootled around with other characters, mostly doing PvE with the LFD system. I leveled a Warlock to 40. I liked the Goblin starter area, it has a lot of charm. Even so my tolerance for Kill Ten Rats quests is at an all time low. Even though the quests are now miles more varied and interesting than before I get fed up very quickly, I was struggling to stay interested till level 15 (which is achieved in a ludicrously short time). I think that's me, not WoW. After a decade of excessive MMO questing I'm just about quested out for this lifetime.

The low level dungeons were great fun and the queue time was incredibly short. We're talking 2-5 minutes wait as a dps. I played with a level 1-40, a level 35-44, 80-82 and a level 85 and in each case dps wait is really low. So much better than Rift where it was possible to queue for 5 hours without a group happening.

I tried tanking and burned out after about a dozen. The problem was that many in the WoW community are very rigid about how things should be done. My view is that if I'm tanking, I'm driving the bus and other people should just follow me. Unfortunately this seems to be everyone else's view too so you get shouted at for going the wrong way after picking Option B of two equally valid options. I followed up my game experiences by reading the forums and it's clear that tanks are expected to be "thick-skinned" and that screaming at the tank is normal, in much the same way that one might curse a jam jar lid that is reluctant to come off. OK, fair enough, I don't want to be anyone's jam jar lid. Dps on the other hand is more laid back than ever and the game actually plays like Diablo 2. Race to the monsters, unload with everything, grab what sparkles, race to the next lot. Occasionally the train falls off the track but while it's on the rails it's a lot of fun.

Unfortunately it becomes less fun at higher levels. The higher you go the more stressed people are, the more particular the monsters are. "Did you stand there to kill me, no no no, sorry, I absolutely refuse to be killed unless you stand 2 inches to your left." I did a ZulGurub with my 85 Death Knight and people were most put out they couldn't votekick me. I played just about every boss wrong and it didn't matter until the last one where we wiped after I didn't realise you have to stand under some domes. We got him at the second attempt though. It was a little unpleasant to feel my dps was terrible. Apparently 14k dps is borderline these days and I was doing 7k. Oddly the standards players impose have no relation to whether they are winning or losing. One shotting every boss is not enough these days, people expect specific metrics.

So that's WoW. I may have another month at some point next year when short of interesting games, sadly it's very low on my ranking of fun games (and not really more fun for me than EQ2 or Lotro, it's just the very short wait times for LFD make it a solid option).

Eve I play in a very passive way. I really like the routine of training skills and doing PI and market orders. Occasionally I'll have a burst of pvp enthusiasm. The issue I have with Eve pvp is that I'll inevitably get ordered to fly a ship I haven't trained and people will get pissy about low participation. It's annoying to be bollocked for not showing up in a Zealot when I can't fly a Zealot (nor can half the corp). Still Eve is a great second game as you feel like you're progressing along nicely even when you're not really playing it.

EQ2 has liberalised its gathering via a new AA tree. Historically rares really have been rare, there's now a AA skill you can take that gives +1% chance per harvest to find one. One per cent more when previously you were at 0.001% (or that's what it felt like) is awesome and I've been hoovering up resources to level up my stable of crafters. This I found surprisingly addictive. I probably did about 150 levels of crafter in September across several characters. There's also a LFD system imminent which I'm looking forward to trying after my WoW month runs out.

Diablo 2 and Titan Quest I've played in order to fend off my Diablo 3 angst. I stopped playing D2 for a bit as they're resetting the Ladder on 25th October and a new Ladder season is quite exciting. Titan Quest is a very fun and very Diablo 2-like game set in Ancient Greece. It's actually a little difficult. There are 3 difficulty settings and I'm on the easiest and getting absolutely mauled at about level 5. I've rolled up a different class however and that's probably the best way forward. I had a brief dip into multiplayer and the first mob I met utterly murdered my level 1 character, I think I'll stick to single player for the time being.

So that's it for me for now. The next few weeks hold WoW, TitanQuest and Eve. That's a 2004 game, a 2006 game and a 2003 game. Let's hope there's some gems in all the exciting unreleased games we're currently reading hype for.

Otherwise I'll probably be reduced to Facebook.

Eve Online: Game down, evegate down

2011-10-08T16:55:00.003+01:00

Navigating to Eve's official forums gets you this message:

We'll counter-attack as soon as
we properly outnumber them

Attempting to log into the game gets you this message:

CONNECTION FAILED

Proxy not connected to sol servers

I assume sol means shit outta luck. Good to see fanatical nerds everywhere are still raging at CCP. For one moment I thought all might have been forgiven.

Eve Online: End of an Ice Age?

2011-10-02T21:06:00.001+01:00

Another interesting week in Eve.

The Goons have decided to strangle the production of an obscure fuel so that they can make large profits while upsetting a lot of other players - both very much in keeping with their stated Alliance aims.

The Ancient Gaming Noob reported it a couple of days ago and the Gallente Ice Interdiction is proceeding according to plan. Jita Oxygen Isotopes price is up from 400 a couple of days ago to 800 with a high point of 5000.03. Yesterday evening it was 1300. I sold some of mine for 1200 and some for 1000.

The detailed version of the plan is explained by Mittani but in simpler form this is how it works. Most asteroid belts have minerals but a small amount have ice, great big icebergs in space. These can be mined by players. Each of the 4 Empire powers have their own racial ice type that is found in their space and in nearby nullsec. No ice is found in W-space.

The Goons are trying to prevent anyone from mining Gallente ice in quantity. While some ice belts are in unfriendly nullsec even these can be interdicted by an afk cloaker. But nullsec ice is not significant to the market. The main concentration of effort is on 17 high sec Gallente systems.

Part of the strength of this move comes from the nature of ice mining. The gameplay is that you turn your lasers on and about 6-10 minutes later you find a couple of blocks of ice in your hold. Depending on your mining style you may click and drag it at that point. (I ice mine with a cargo expanded ship and just dock it when it's full). It requires no more attention than at most a glance and a drag n drop once every 10 minutes or so. It is essentially an afk playstyle, it's like watching paint dry.

Because no one pays attention when mining ice this makes the people who do it very vulnerable to gankers. What's more many ice miners are bots anyway.

It's perfectly feasible to gank people in high sec with a cheap insured ship. If you ferry ships out to a safe spot you can even do this with a character with negative 10 security status (nominally a game feature to stop people ganking infinitely, clearly not quite working as intended). It's the kind of gameplay that, like so much of Eve, has a lot of built-in downtime in this case partly because you have to wait out a 15 minute timer after each gank.

It seems perfectly feasible to me that Goons can keep this up practically forever. Even if they're fighting in nullsec on one account they can have an alt account or two locking down the ice belts in high sec. Out of 7000 players in their alliance they need just 17 to park an alt at each belt to watch for miners. The only thing that might stop them is getting bored. And even if the Goons get bored someone else might gank the ice miners.

This means the fuel they are interdicted will rocket in price. I happened to have some on expensive sell orders, they've already been snapped up making me 1.5 billion isk. (The equivalent of about 4 months free game time).

Every commodity in Eve is extensively stockpiled as a general rule of thumb. So even if they completely stop supplies reaching the market it will still take a while to completely run out. But the price has already rocketed.

So how many kills have there been?

Well the Goonfleet killboard is here: https://killboard.goonfleet.com/shrugged.php It doesn't have a total but it credits the top ten killers with 174 kills. Over 75% are Mackinaws, a fitted Mackinaw was about 180m before this started (the price is soaring). So about 200 kills from Goonfleet plus more from allies not shown on that killboard (like Test Alliance).

That may only be the tip of the iceberg (ho ho!) however. In Deninard, an ice system in high sec Gallente, there have been 525 Ship Kills and 42 Pod kills in the last 24 hours. That's just one system out of 17! Brapelille has seen the deaths of 511 player ships and 22 pods.

A poster on Kugutsumen estimated it takes about 30 hours of ice mining for a Mackinaw to pay for itself. If the life expectancy of a Mack dips below 30 hours we can expect to see people stopping mining. Once some Macks stop the life expectancy of the brave few who continue decreases so with a little effort we could soon hit a point where just about no one mines ice in Gallente high sec and the few who try are almost instantly killed by hordes of bored gankers with nothing to gank.

Can the ice supply be replaced? Well stockpilers may be liquidating their stockpiles now as the price has already tripled. The Drone russians have access to nullsec Blue Ice, as of course do the Goons and their allies. Both I think can be expected to mine and sell. It is however relatively easy to interdict. Take a stealth bomber alt to an ice system and sit there cloaked. No one will mine and if they do you get a free kill. The miners aren't really defensible as it's so boring an activity. No one's going to sit there all day in a combat ship on the chance that the neutral in system is going to have a go at an ice miner.

To add to the intrigue Goons are using their position on the CSM and their influence with the development team to try to get ice further restricted. After some talk of removing it from high sec completely the devs are looking at depletable icebergs, at belts that can be exhausted.

So what lessons can be learned?

First there's probably a very good investment opportunity in Oxygen Isotopes even at the inflated Jita price. Some speculators are cashing in but it's very likely that it will keep going up. It may not seem true in the short term if a lot of people cash in but stockpiles are finite and many Oxytope consumers are locked into that fuel type (supercap pilots and Gallente POS managers).

Next there's a busy secondary market in Gallente space selling to both sides. Mackinaws and Brutixes are going to sell very nicely for the next week or two. The cheapest Mackinaw I saw in Essence Region was 199m (usual price about 125m). Likewise for modules and even implants - many miners are getting podded. Be careful supplying Macks though - at some point the market will crash as people realise there's no point undocking one.

Next if you're building a POS or training for capital ships if possible avoid the ones that use Gallente fuel (Gallente control towers, Erebus titan, Anshar jump freighter, Moros Dreadnought, Thanatos carrier, Nyx supercarrier). Fuel will get expensive and may simply not be available at all at times.

There may be knockon effects like a rise in the cost of moon minerals and T2 products but that's less dependable.

It hurts POS managers a lot more than supercap pilots. Most supercap pilots are very rich and all of them are backed by their alliances.

You may be able to ninja salvage in Gallente ice belts. There will be lots of nice dead ships. Be careful though - there will be loads of suicide gankers about!

Diablo 2: Ladder reset tomorrow?

2011-09-25T22:36:00.002+01:00

EDIT: Apologies all, I didn't do my homework.

Blizzard posters have confirmed that nothing is imminent although they haven't forgotten about D2 players.

We're holding off on a reset to figure out some things. We'll let you know as soon as we do.

Just wanted to let everyone know we haven't forgotten about you, we're still working some things out to determine when a reset may occur, and we'll let you know as soon as we do.

If anyone else is passing the time until D3 with the older versions of the game then it may interest you to try the D2 Ladder if it resets tomorrow.

Ladder resets are due every 6 months, however there's been no official announcement. So it's a bit unclear whether we get one or not. Let's hope so.

It's been ages since I played the Ladder seriously but I remember it being fairly easy to place so you get to see your name. And it's quite fun to level up under a sense of time pressure. You see yourself as, say, 41st, play for an hour or two log off and bam, you're 38th when you log off.

I'm going to try the Hardcore ladder because that gives the additional spice of seeing your place rise because someone above you has exited the race (mwa ha ha). I'll play a Barb for the fun of it, a Druid if he takes an early bath.

While there's always a fair amount of cheating and duping in D2 this is a time when it's at its absolute minimum - people can't dupe until they've found something to copy in the first place.

Pacifism and video games

2011-09-24T07:03:00.005+01:00

Pacifism, the philosophy of non-violence, has a long and distinguished tradition in human thought. Jesus Christ was a pacifist. Mahatma Ghandi. Compassion for all life, human and nonhuman, is central to Buddism and Jainism. The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century gave rise to a number of pacifists sects including the Quakers and the Amish. The Quaker province of Pennsylvania was essentially unarmed and experienced little or no warfare during the 75 years from 1681 to 1756. The nineteenth century saw more articulation of this position, including the thoughts of Russian author Tolstoy. The rise of socialism based on the theories of Marx saw an opposition to war which was seen by many socialists as exploitative of the working class for the benefit of capitalist profiteers.

The First World War featured "conchies", conscientious objectors, who refused to fight. 16 000 men were recorded as conscientious objectors in the UK of whom 6 000 were sent to prison. They were often despised by the general public, with a white feather being handed to them (signifying they were cowards). In World War Two there were 60 000 conscientious objectors of whom 5500 were imprisoned. Many conchies were given work in non-combatant military service such as the Royal Army Medical Corps. 350 of them even volunteered for bomb disposal work.

In real wars pacifism is an important consideration. In politics and diplomacy peace is often sought as a desirable goal. So why are games so bloodthirsty? And do they always have to be?

There are two main reasons that games are bloodthirsty. One is tradition, the other relates to game mechanics.

The traditional accent on war in games goes right back to ancient civilisations and is, I think, influenced by the availability of equipment. There are of course games with free or cheap equipment - any kid can grab a feather and run around tickling the other kids, any kid can find a stick and throw it. Dice are fairly cheap to carve from wood or bone. But more sophisticated games such as chess, go, and draughts required leisure to produce, leisure which was only available to those who could extract the labour surplus - the warlords. While the peasants toiled in the fields the warlords and their knights waited, bored, for a fight and devised ways to pass the time. These pastimes reflected their interest in war and were a way to pass their military wisdom to their heirs.

Computer games directly inherited this theme. The early uses of computer for gaming was a dream of building a computer so sophisticated that it could beat a human at chess, seen as one of the most intellectual of achievements during the 1950s and 1960s. The other big influence on computer gaming was Dungeons and Dragons, a combat game that evolved from tabletop wargaming.

Computers are particularly suited to game mechanics that are based around fighting. In life the alternative to fighting is talking, whether to playground bullies or around the diplomatic table. Talking was particularly difficult for early computers to handle as they were machines built to process numbers not language. I wonder if this is still true. While computers are based on numbers deep down we have so many sophisticated programs for dealing with language that this technological limitation may no longer apply to these tools. Google applies sophisticated algorithms to search phrases that may be linguistically inelegant and still finds relevant results even where the search is clumsily phrased. Virtual worlds are used for language learning with over 200 universities or academic institutions using Second Life.

So is it time for a pacifist game, specifically a pacifist MMO?

Here's a design framework.

The game world is based on modern society. Players start as young people entering the world of work and must develop careers as the main game play mechanism with pacifism as the goal for most players and war as the goal for a small minority. So advancing your career is how you play, completing your career without war is how you win if you're a pacifist, causing a war is how you win if you're a hawk. One possible way of motivating people would be Winners Play Free - if you win you get another go. This of course would mean that the company doesn't make much money when the pacifists win, that doesn't necessarily matter and shouldn't influence game design.

In the pacifist gameplay you have a role that is basically firefighting. So a journalist might need to write an article condemning a military solution to a crisis contrived by the game engine and exacerbated by the hawk players. The article could be tested using metrics software - how many people Like it, how long do people spend reading it? (If people glance at it for 2 seconds then hit Like that's not going to count for much). Hawks have career advantages in that they have dirty tricks options. So they can blackmail, bribe and beat up people to advance their careers.

The gameplay can be extended to real world social networks with the ability to make Youtube videos, to tweet, to create social media pages in game. So for example you could give a speech in game, upload it to Youtube, get a million hits and 100k likes in the real world and that would influence your character's success in game. Speeches and videos would also be matched against a google type algorithmic pattern searching program to see if the speech matches peaceful themes or warlike themes. If a speech is given that is warlike, even if given by a pacifist player then all those hits advance the cause of war.

Career paths that players could choose should reflect influence brokers and power in modern society. Politicians, political lobbyists; businessmen and women, military officers, secret agents, journalists, union leaders. Affiliation would be secret (although players might guess based on someone's actions). Most spots in the game would be doves. This may well not reflect what players want to do so two things would be needed to keep the matches balanced. First players don't have a choice - they pay their money they draw a card, if they get their preference great, if they don't they can pay to draw again if they want or play what they drew. Next activity needs to be monitored. If 40% of your doves are inactive you need to add more doves to the match. This is fine since it means that people in the game will be at different stages of their careers.

Everyone's allegiance is secret but there should be some solid advantages to being overt. A pacifist newspaper might be able to wrack up a lot of Peace Points. A hawk newpaper getting a lot of Likes and Time Spent Reading could be really dangerous.

The timeframe of a game is the length of someone's career. If we says they start at 20 and retire at 65 that gives us 45 years. A reasonable length of time for a match might be 9 months, so we have 5 years of career progression per month.

Working title? How about "Peace in our time?"

Diablo 3: Item Affixes

2011-09-16T10:59:00.007+01:00

Today I'm going to have a look at item affixes in Diablo 3.

Affixes are a bonus, usually to a single stat. +2% chance to crit is an example. The word affix means a word or phrase that goes before or after a word. If I'm Sir Stabs of Goldshire Sir is an affix and so is of Goldshire. An affix that comes before is called a prefix and an affix that comes after is called a suffix.

Magic items in the game will have a number of affixes determined by the item type. I'm expecting that rare and standard magic items will work similarly to Diablo 2. In D2 a blue item had 1 or 2 affixes and a rare item had 3-6. This generally meant that rares were better than blues. (There were some exceptions but as Jay Wilson said in an interview rares would be the best items we'll ignore those for the point of thinking about D3).

In this picture from D3 Beta we see two blue items. Both of them have two affixes, one each of suffix and prefix. So if we look at the names it breaks down to:

Prefix=Oak Item type=wand Suffix=of the Oracle
Prefix=Ferocious Item type=Great Axe Suffix=of Mutilation

Rares don't follow this naming convention, they have names that are not connected to their item properties.

In addition there are crafted items. Crafted items usually have some fixed properties and some affixes. (It will say random properties, which is a synonym for affixes).

In this instance there aren't any fixed properties. When you make this wand you get 4 random affixes. The damage probably varies a little as well.

This will change each time you make an item using the recipe. Even the same recipe will usually produce varying items.

In this picture we can see two pairs of gloves made using the Journeyman Chain Gloves (rare) recipe. The amount of armour clearly varies as do the properties. We've got some properties that are the same on both (eg Attacker takes damage) but it's not possible from this screenshot to say whether the recipe gives 4 random properties or a mixture of fixed and random since it's possible that the gloves have the same properties through chance. Note also that the exact numbers vary on most properties. Here one Attacker takes damage is 5 the other is 6. That's just luck.

Better affixes and different affixes are added into the mix as the level of the item rises. (Level of the item will usually be similar to the level of the area it was found or the level of the player crafting it). Some affixes won't be available at all at low levels and some will have relatively small numbers until later in the game.

And there are also legendary (unique) and set items. Legendary items are generally fairly strong and may have properties that aren't on the standard affix list. Set items are like legendaries but in addition have bonus properties when multiple items from the same set are worn. Most set items in D3 are I believe made by craftsmen using rare recipes dropped by monsters.

One of the many mathematical peculiarities of D2 was that some very similar sounding affixes worked in very different ways. For example + enhanced damage was miles better than + enhanced damage to demons even against demons. This is because the first one got factored into the equation at an earlier stage so it got multiplied by skills and stat bonuses rather than just being added at the end.

We won't know how D3 functions mathematically until people theorycraft by doing practical tests. But just bear in mind that many of the numbers in D2 did not do what they claimed to. +20% attack speed did not make you attack 20% faster, +100% magic find did not double your magic find chance.

For now my best advice is expect it to do something similar to what one would expect but maybe not exactly. I do expect D3 to be less inexact, the D2 mathematics felt rather botched together. I remember Peter Hu, one of the D2 designers explaining a system to us on a theorycraft site and he sounded almost embarrassed.

We have details of what affixes do in Diablo 3, some from beta screenshots and some from this site. Bashiok mentioned the gold find radius affix in passing a few days ago - from this screenshot we see it's not just gold but health globes too.

Looking at the datamined list we see that prefixes and suffixes unlike Diablo 2 are about the same list. I'm now going to classify addons into types:

+ stats
+ damage
+crit chance
+gold find
+gold and health globe pickup radius
+magic find
+resists
+block
+ fast cast
+ improved attack speed
CC reduction
Damage reduction
+ defence
+ experience gained per monster kill
+ fury/spirit gain (as a leech effect possibly)
+ health/hatred/mana/spirit regen
+ health globe (drop chance?)
Life and mana leech
Item cost increase (appears to make the item vendor for more gold)
+mana/life per kill
+ maximum Discipline/Fury/Mana/Arcane power
+ run speed
+ salvage (chance for more mats?)
Sockets
Attacker takes damage (very useful for zookeeper witchdoctors with the passive that extends this to their pets)
plus a few that I couldn't figure out

So there's a lot to choose from and when you find a rare you could luck out and get 6 good ones or you could be unlucky and get some of the turkeys and/or get less than 6. And don't forget that if you don't like what you see there legendary and set items may have properties not on that list.

One thing that does occur to me - I can certainly see myself having a +salvage alt or gear swap and melting everything with a character who has + salvage in every slot.

Diablo 3: Who's who in the economy?

2011-09-14T07:36:00.011+01:00

The Buyers

The Veteran - Most buyers I think will be ambitious experienced players wanting to be a little bit stronger. Someone like me in fact - if I spot a good deal on a +magic find item I don't mind dropping a few pounds on it. Maybe it'll pay itself off. Some of the systems in the game seem very cleverly designed to get people to spend just a little. For example the skill planner I've been playing with recently uses level 7 runes which are ilvl 58 and presumably only drop in Inferno. Some of the builds I made need the full bonus of the rune to make the build work, my Teleport build would be much less good if a cheap rune was in the Teleport spell and that meant you had too short a window to find your next destination. So you can build something on the planner, get all excited, realise you can't make it work with what you're finding and be drawn to the RMAH to make your build work. People will get sucked in.

The Noobs - Tobold thinks the market will be driven by people who are not very good but want to disguise that by paying for success. He's right that it's a factor, I'm not sure this will be the biggest driver of the economy though. They can pay huge amounts. One DDO player spent $200 on mana pots from the cash shop in the first month of free-to-play. He could have kept them healed using wands bought from vendors cheaply for in-game gold. He didn't know about that and didn't want to tell the others he couldn't keep on healing them.

The Traders - some people will buy items they have no intention of using simply because they think they can sell at a higher price. Sometimes they will be right and make money, sometimes they'll get it wrong and lose out.

The Narcissists - some people will buy items because of the appearance. Dyes, flashy spell effects and cool looking armour will have value to them.

The Big Spender - anecdotes abound of That Guy. You know of him, you've heard about him. He's the guy who spent $6m on his house in planet Calypso; the guy who bought over $100k of plex in Eve or the celebrity whose wife owns a Spectral Tiger in WoW. Of course what these people are really buying is celebrity, the fact that they value owning something that other people can't afford is a phenomenon that gave rise to the unfortunate cash shop monocle in Eve. Count on hearing stories of spectacular extravagance in D3 (because the whole point of spending 1000 times more than anyone else is to have people notice "wow, that guy spent 1000 times more than me").

The pvper - competitive pvp generally forces people to min/max. While there is some scope for coming up with an original and powerful build early on the scene quickly becomes a matter of using cookie cutter builds with specific optimal gear. Anything on the gear list of the most successful cookie cutters will be in high demand.

The Sellers

The regular players - by far the biggest RMAH input will be from normal unremarkable players turning surplus loot into cash. Most of the time these people will never use the AH either to buy or sell but occasionally one of them will find an item that people tell him is worth a decent sum. And he doesn't want to use it. Not individually very economically busy but so many of them that they will dominate the market supply.

The amateur farmer - someone who farms and sells it because it's a minigame. The profits are a way of keeping score. This will be a popular playstyle and a significant source of supply. This is where I'd classify myself.

The trader - buying from other players and re-selling at a profit. I think this will start off quite popular but will burn a lot of people. There are players who think they're incredibly shrewd based on WoW or Eve who are going to get burned when they start playing for real money. It's like someone who usually beats the family at cards over Christmas thinking he'll be great at Poker in the casino. Some people will make money of course and quite possibly a handful of people will make a lot of money.

The Chinese gold farmer (blue collar) - traditionally MMO gold farming has been a low skill low status job in the Asian economies where this has become an industry. The worker moves his character to a zone with non-elite monsters intended for soloing, presses a couple of attacks and collects loot. For hours. At the end of his shift he sells off his loot for anything he can get and a replacement worker starts a shift (selling off anything his colleague failed to liquidate). I think this business model will fail in Diablo 3. Not completely, these guys can farm Nightmare or early Hell but late Hell and Inferno will be too hard for them. The way they share the characters in shifts means workers will sell off all of the character's gear at the end of their shifts which will really mess up the character's ability to farm. The tendency to solo hurts them and the tendency to view this as skillless menial work. There simply won't be much money in mindless farming. We may see these guys turn up in random pugs as magic find leeches.

The Chinese gold farmer (white collar) - currently white collar work in the industry includes things like customer service where the worker has to be a bit more switched on and clued up. (Especially if the exchange of goods is accompanied by social engineering aimed at getting the client's password). Diablo 3 will surely see a new era of professionalism in gold farming where gold farming teams start recruiting good players, where people have sole access to a character, where they keep some of their good gear, and where they play in synergistic teams. I don't think many such teams will be ready to go on Day One but I do think we will see a transition to this format during 2012 and 2013. A feature of this business will be that they trade through Blizzard's system, effectively they're real players who just farm all the time and don't do anything outside the EULA nor behave different from most other players.

The Chinese scammer - scamming, phishing and hacking is the fastest growing part of the RMT industry. This business model is dishonest all the way through. Typically they pay for an account with a stolen credit card number, offer item selling or power leveling that is mainly an attempt to get passwords, phish for passwords, then after a few months log onto their clients' accounts and strip them. These guys will sell D3 items cheaper than the RM auction house to get people to visit sites where they'll use trojans and keyloggers to steal player accounts. They'll get cleverer too so we'll start seeing informational websites and forums that look like they're done by an English-speaker which are actually attempts to steal people's information. Do be careful, I think this sector will get more sophisticated and more desperate because I think Blizzard's model marginalises them. A lot of people buy items in games, most of these will use the obvious in-game system. These businesses can't trade on that system if I'm right in assuming that Blizzard won't let you take real money out until your credit card has cleared. They have to lure people to third party sites.

Diablo 3: Thriving on chaos - a Barbarian build

2011-09-13T21:10:00.004+01:00

I was intrigued by one of the runes for Wrath of the Berserker. Wrath of the Berserker is designed as a powerful short duration buff. Normally it buffs you for 15 seconds and has a cooldown of 120 seconds. Adding a golden runestone gives the following effect: Every 9 Fury gained while Wrath of the Berserker is active adds 1 second to the duration of the effect.

Here's the six million dollar question: can you perma-Wrath?

If we can gain 9 Fury every second all the time then this buff never runs out. That's +10% critical hit, +45% attack speed, +20% dodge and +20% movement speed always.

Let's start by looking at the passives.

There are quite a lot that improve Fury generation and I think the most intriguing is No Escape which improves the damage of Weapon Throw by 100% and gives us 20 Fury every time we kill an enemy with Weapon Throw. OK, so now to perma-wrath all we need to do is kill an enemy with Weapon Throw every 2 seconds or so. We'll add in another couple of Fury-generators: Animosity and Unforgiving. Now we get 22 Fury every time we kill an opponent with our double damage Weapon Throws and we regenerate 1.1 Fury every 2 seconds.

Now let's look at our actives. We already know two of them.

1) Wrath of the Berserker runed for perma-Wrath.

2) Weapon Throw runed with something that gives us more kills.

Mighty throw rune boosts its damage which is nice but there's two even better choices.

Ricochet allows it to hit 8 extra foes which is very strong but I think there's something even better than that.

Dread shot will spend all remaining Fury to do a huge aoe to all opponents in 22 yards. As long as that kills something we get 22 Fury back and can cast it again. We have a huge spammable AOE that keeps us in perma-Wrath for as long as there are things to kill. Assuming the passive applies this does 18% damage of weapon damage per Fury point and a full Fury globe on this character is 120. So OVER TWO THOUSAND PERCENT OF YOUR BIG TWOHANDER'S WEAPON DAMAGE TO EVERYTHING IN 22 YARDS. And if you kill 6 things you get another go with a full Fury bulb. In a Diablo series game where much of the combat is about fighting small weak creatures that's astonishingly good.

3-6) OK so we know how we want to kill things - Weapon Throw. As long as we keep killing with Weapon Throw we don't need to use Fury builders and we do massive aoe damage. So most of these extra skills I've picked for mobility. Staying in perma-rage will be a race against the clock, we have to be moving fast, killing fast all the time. Note too that we don't want to kill with these skills, it suits us much better if we set up Weapon Throw kills because they give us more Fury.

3) Furious charge glyphed for bonus Fury generation.

4) Leap Attack. Our signature mobility skill, it allows us to jump over obstacles like rivers without having to run round the long way.

5) Sprint. Because sometimes you do have to run round the long way and it's good to get to the next pack before Wrath drops off.

6) Frenzy. Decent Fury builder for times when we don't have any Fury plus we move faster when it's up.

Here's the link.

Diablo 3: Waste an hour on the skill planner

2011-09-13T20:15:00.011+01:00

Blizzard have updated their Diablo 3 website with a skill planner and it really is a whole toy in itself. Thanks to Diablo3farming.com for the tip and to Marcko for the tip about Barbarian loot skills.

These are the characters I've made so far:

Lootmaster Barb

Runed Hammer of the Ancients gives enemies 55% chance to drop treasure or health globes when you crit them with the Hammer. This means crits are loot so we'll take the Ruthless passive for more crit chance. Runed Battle Rage gives you 20% chance when you crit them with anything and you only need to cast it once every 60 seconds with the Inspiring Presence passive. It also boosts all attacks. That passive also helps Threatening Shout which coats nearby baddies with a 22% improved treasure drop. That one not only helps you but helps your mates too. Treasure find Barbs are going to be a popular party member.

For gear we want high crit and fast weapons. Fast weapons take more swings to do the same job and more swings is more crits is more loot. That's why Frenzy is a good complementary skill it gives more swings. It can also be runed to move round the map faster.

Teleport Wizard

Let's face it teleporting around was what made the Sorceress in D2 the premier magic find class. The developers of D3 claimed they'd made the sort of teleport spam we saw in D2 not possible in the new game. I think they were wrong.

Firstly Teleport can be runed with Wormhole that puts a delay before the cooldown is applied. In other words as long as you keep teleporting Teleport doesn't have a cooldown. You Teleport, the clock ticks, one thousand and one, one thousand and two, and doink, Teleport has a cooldown. If you're quick enough to find a new destination and go you can spam it as long as you have enough Arcane Power.

So let's build in some Arcane power. Astral presence and Prodigy are two AP-improving passives and your signature spell can be runed to give arcane power every cast. Once runed a Magic Missile gives 19 AP as compared to Teleport's cost of 15 so if we run out we just need to stop and nuke something a couple of times.

OK so we have a build that can move about a lot, make it a bit tougher with an armour spell and add some damage. We're done.

The Butt-Kicking Monk

I built this Monk around the Seven Sided Strike skill. With rune and passive this is what the skill does:

Teleport between nearby enemies 7 times striking for 234% weapon damage every hit. Heals Monk for 3195 life. 75 spirit, no cooldown.

That gives a simple playstyle of building up spirit until we've got enough then destroying everything with our big uber skill.

The spirit generating attacks give 6 spirit per attack, 7.2 with our passive if we use a two-handed weapon. We'd want to use a two-handed weapon in any case because our big attack is based off weapon damage. Not dps, damage.

I picked Fists of Thunder and Way of the Hundred Fists for the spirit builders although to be honest they all seem pretty similar tactically. Runed one of them for faster spirit generation and the other for a short duration buff. So we'll hit things with Hundred Fists until we have 3 stacks and then use it once every 5 seconds to refresh the stack, using Fists of Thunder the rest of the time.

Mantra of Conviction pairs beautifully with Seven Sided Strike allowing us to set up a pack to take more damage before we unleash our big hit. Breath of heaven allows us to do a big group heal instead of a Seven Sided Strike which could be useful and certainly will be desired in parties. In hardcore especially it's good to be able to keep a disconnected player alive.

Rocketwoman

Rocketwoman is a Demon Hunter based on the passive that gives rockets 100% bonus damage. Rockets are gained by glyphing certain skills and generally the rocket version does about the same damage as the vanilla version before the bonus is applied.

She also incidentally has gold-sniffing ferrets. In England in rural areas we have a sport known as ferret-legging. Your friends put a ferret, which is an animal like a thin small cat, into the bottom of your trousers and tie the leg of the trousers closed at the ankle. The frantic animal then wriggles around and probably bites. They usually climb upwards. The main interest of the sport is watching to see if the animal will bite the participant in the bollocks (it's always men who play this sport for some reason). So perhaps D3 is making a nod to the sport here with the ferrets running up your enemies' trousers to bite their trouser pockets where they keep their purses and their secret codpiece gold stashes to cause them to drop more gold for you to find. Even if I were not designing these characters with a view to gold and magic find that's a pop culture reference too wonderful to pass up.

I was once offered a go by sniggering farmers while on holiday in Somerset. I declined.

Let's talk about rockets. Not only are rockets phallic and thus fit the comedy theme of the build but they also come in quite a variety of types and seem rather powerful.

Sentry gives us a passive rocket-firing turret, Strafe allows us to fire rockets on the move, Multishot is a massive volley of arrows and rockets. We'll take Impale too for a single target fight and Marked for Death for a damage buff.

Big Bad Zoo Zoo

This is an attempt to re-make one of D2's most popular builds, the Zookeeper Necro. Zookeepers were very good indeed in D2 because they were one of the most gear-neutral builds. They rolled over everything except Act Bosses (which were specially adjusted to do disproportionately high damage to summoned minions). That's less of a problem in D3 because it's much easier to group, you don't risk being PKed (player-killed - the end of the road for Hardcore characters) and we've no reason to believe that minions will be similarly gimped on Act bosses. The goal is to keep a big army of monsters up that passively kill the monsters for you while you run around picking up loot, breaking urns and opening chests.

Dramatis personae:

Enter 4 Zombie Dogs, stage left. 3 from the basic spells, 4 with the passive which also makes them tougher. From youtube footage it seems like these are always out and follow you around. The core unit of the army.

Enter one Gargantuan. A big zombie. It may have a limited duration as there's a rune that makes it last only 20 seconds (possibly implying that the vanilla form lasts more than 20 seconds but not indefinitely).

Enter one big fat spider. The mother spider births spiderlings and lasts for 22 seconds.

Enter one big fat toad that swallows enemies whole.

Enter one army of dagger-wielding fetishes. It lasts 20 seconds and can be cast every 38 seconds thanks to cooldown reductions from rune and passive.

Enter one ritual dancer who buffs all the others.

That's quite a cast. Basic tactic is move to somewhere near some monsters and while your dogs buy you time drop some creatures on them then ignore the fight and hoover up loot. Wearing Thorns gear causes the monsters to beat themselves to death on your pets which gets the job done even faster. But it's probably simpler to just wear magic find in every slot.

What are they doing with OUR money?

2011-09-12T14:36:00.001+01:00

Anyone who haunts MMO blogs and forums sees some variation of these words a lot. The devs are "neglecting" the game, they've stopped caring, they're developing (gasp) different games (which is an infidelity like cheating on a marriage).

I actually don't like the idea at all that MMOs are an investment and we are somehow buying ownership of them.

Imagine if you did it when you bought a beer. "Hey buddy, are you going to re-invest those $3 in new brewing technology? You better not be wasting my money or I'll stop drinking and make all my friends stop drinking too."

But Eve in particular is full of people who do precisely that, most notably of late The Mittani.

I think you should buy games like you'd buy a newspaper or an ice cream. Is the value of the item in excess of the value of the money you could save by not buying it?

Of course it's a means of exerting player power and as such it's even getting meta-gamed. However in the long run it's not healthy, players don't make sound holistic decisions that improve the game for everyone else and it generates an emotional knot that has people rage-quitting over the most irrational reasons. How many long standing Eve fans will never play Eve again after a monocle they would never have bought became available in a cash shop they would never look at?

It's just plain daft.

Diablo 3: latest in phishing

2011-09-11T01:22:00.000+01:00

I just got this email. Apart from the instruction to reply to noreply@Blizzard.com it's really very clever.

--- On Sun, 11/9/11, diablo3 wrote:

From: diablo3
Subject: Diablo III beta test invitation!
To: me
Date: Sunday, 11 September, 2011, 0:41

Greetings from Blizzard Entertainment!

We’re gearing up for the forthcoming launch of Diablo III and would like to extend you an invitation to participate in the beta test. If you are interested in participating, you need to have a Battle.net account, which you can create on our Battle.net website.

We will flag you for access to the Diablo III beta test when we begin admitting press. You do not need to go through the opt-in process.

To secure your place among the first of Sanctuary’s heroes,Please use the following template below to verify your account and information via email.

* Name:
* Battle.account name:
* Password:
* Country:
* E-mail Address:

Thanks and see you all in the Burning Hells!

Yes, I'll see you in Hell too.

Eve Online: A genuinely magnificent blog post

2011-09-10T15:51:00.002+01:00

Enjoy!

Understanding liquidity - how to play the markets in games

2011-09-08T15:49:00.006+01:00

I want to talk about liquidity. Liquidity in the economics sense means converting one item into another item easily. For example gold (real gold) can be sold for dollars and dollars can be traded for just about anything.

In business, economics or investment, market liquidity is an asset's ability to be sold without causing a significant movement in the price and with minimum loss of value. Money, or cash in hand, is the most liquid asset, and can be used immediately to perform economic actions like buying, selling, or paying debt, meeting immediate wants and needs.

Source: wikipedia

When I started playing Eve I realised something that I still find utterly astonishing - almost everything in Eve is liquid in the financial sense. Your battleship = 100m isk = a Sovereignty Blockade Unit. Stuff isn't perfectly liquid, there are transaction fees, price fluctuations, issues of location and so forth. But pretty much everything is at least 90% liquid. If you have a spare battleship and need a SBU you can exchange them without significant loss of value. Of course in certain circumstances such as price gouging and other market manipulations you may lose value but these are exceptional.

In WoW most items are not liquid. Your bind on pickup epic may be worth 1000 gold but you can only vendor it for 20 gold or at best disenchant it for 50 gold's worth of mats.

Let's now have a look at Diablo 3 where we will see some astonishing factors of liquidity. Just about everything not only can be converted to gold but also to real money (unless you play hardcore). Understanding liquidity in the game could have a profound effect on the way you play it. I'll illustrate with examples.

Example 1: non-liquid inventory management.

Barb character - loot discovered = one Barb sword, one Wizard wand, 5000 gold, 20 junk blues and rares, 5 assorted gems.

Barb uses sword and the damage gem, stashes the Wand in case they want to roll a wizard one day, vendors the junk blues, saves the gold, stashes the spare gems.

Example 2: liquid inventory management.

Barb character - loot discovered = one Barb sword, one Wizard wand, 5000 gold, 20 junk blues and rares, 5 assorted gems.

Barb uses sword. Trades the unwanted gems for damage gems and cubes up to make a really strong damage gem. Sells the Wand and buys a second Barb sword for dual wielding. Spots that crafter mats are expensive on the RMAH, salvages the junk blues for crafter mats, buys extra crafter mats on the gold AH, sells all of these crafter mats for real money.

This Barb has an extra weapon, a better gem and has stored his surplus in a more mudflation-proof currency than the first player.

All because he sees that anything can become anything else. Alternatively he could have used his RMAH profits to outfit his Barb better without spending more real money than the guy who just casually slings it into his stash.

If you take this to the highest level you monitor values across a range of markets and play them. Gold is selling high? Vendor/auction everything you don't need and sell the gold. RMAH legendaries are cheap? Raise real money using other surplus stuff and buy an uber weapon to kick butt with.

In a game where everything is liquid there is huge advantage to be gained by trading, selling to expensive markets and buying from cheap markets. What you shouldn't do is sit on value. Let me give another example:

Example 3: Non-liquid Barb player discovers a Windforce, an uber elite legendary bow. It's the first Windforce in the game and will sell for £2000. However he decides he wants to make a Demon Hunter. He rolls a new character and spends the next 2 weeks leveling his Demon Hunter, finally reaching level 60 and equipping his magnificent bow.

Example 4: Liquid Barb player discovers a Windforce, an uber elite legendary bow. It's the first Windforce in the game and will sell for £2000. He decides he wants to make a Demon Hunter but knows he's best cashing in now. He sells the Windforce for £2000. He rolls a new character and spends the next 2 weeks leveling his Demon Hunter, finally reaching level 60 and buying a Windforce, (several of which have now been found) for £200 He equips his magnificent bow and ponders how to spend his £1800 remaining funds. Maybe he'll wallpaper his house in Blizzard T-shirts. (Warning: RL Blizzard T-shirts are probably not very liquid).

Eve Online: Player participation perverted

2011-09-04T07:40:00.003+01:00

In which the head of the CSM, who also not so coincidentally is the head of the Goons in Eve, reveals that he has used the CSM to push through changes to the game that allow his alliance to beat their enemy alliances.

In his words:

"The fruits of our political efforts in March - winning the CSM and then establishing dominance there for the good of the game - are finally being revealed in public: not only is the focus of the next expansion on issues championed by us, the supercap nerf itself is almost word for word what we have advocated.

...

Our memories are long, our knives are jagged, and our hate is yet unsated."

In that article The Mittani gives a lot of credit to CCP employee Stoffer. Stoffer is an ex-Goon who got a job at CCP to work the system from the inside. Here's a forum post from a couple of months ago.

"Hey Stoffer,

We won man, its game over now. You got in and trolled from the inside and nothing can never top that. Goons won the game.

Quit your job, and we can dissolve Goonwaffe right now then duckwalk back out of this ***** being all smug.

Everyone else,

Remember when Goons gave a presentation and said we weren't out to ruin THE Game, [but] YOUR game?

We totally lied."

And on that note see how The Mittani ends his piece on Kugu?

"We will not stand idly by as an alliance while our subscription money goes to waste, watching the game we pay to play spiraling into entropy due to the folly and neglect of CCP's management. It is not yet time to start a fire, but get your gasoline ready."

So how did it all happen?

Well for one thing CCP has a policy to recruit from its player base where possible. There's a lot of sense to this as it assures a supply of knowledgeable committed staff. Notably they recently recruited former Goon CEO Darius Johnson to be in charge of their security. Here's an interview he gave EveNews24 about security in the game. So there are senior Goons in very powerful positions inside CCP.

The Goons have adopted the same policy of infiltration and subversion towards the actual real world games company and the player council as they famously adopted in-game towards their play opponents. (The in-game antics are documented in great detail by The Mittani himself at Ten Ton Hammer).

So what does all this mean for the game?

Well it seems that the conflict of interest that ex-Goons who are CCP staff members now may be damaging the good of the game. It's not worth playing if one can't be competitive and who wants to play a video game so hardcore that you have to infiltrate real life agents into a company in Iceland to keep up?

As for the CSM Goons dominated it partly by organising all of their members and allies to vote for their selected candidates (and they determined internally who everyone would vote for so as to have the greatest tactical impact). They also used a dirty tricks campaign against rivals like Trebor. His opinion:

"Over the past few days, I've been the target of a big smear campaign by The Mittani and his goons.

It's the usual bullshit. Quote mining out of context, character assassination, ad hominem attacks, the big lie -- all the classic techniques. They even started a campaign to have my wikipedia page deleted (currently failing horribly) and twice vandalized the page.

And that is exactly why The Mittani and his buddies are running for CSM. He's realized that it is actually very, very effective at influencing CCP, and he wants to try to use it as a vehicle to advance his own petty in-game interests, at the expense of the vast majority of the players of EVE."

So it seems that the CSM is broken. Kudos to the Goons for getting all of their members and friends to vote their candidates in but an advisory body, called a stakeholder in the game by CCP should not be a tool of an alliance used to beat opponents. After this no one will ever stand for election on a public service agenda, election will all be about metagaming.

One thing it does show is how extraordinarily dedicated Eve players can be. Internet spaceships is serious business!

Rift: back for 5 days

2011-09-01T01:20:00.006+01:00

I spent 5 days back in Rift and it was educational for me.

I found out two main things.

1) Rift is a superb game of its type with a number of clever features that I remember and some new ones that I don't.

2) It's not my type.

I have a number of characters spread across different servers, the most advanced being a level 50 with raid/t2 gear. Which I barely touched. There seemed no progression because the character can only progress through loot, can only get usable loot from raids. I've advanced that one too far to be able to do anything with him on this type of casual visit. And I didn't really fancy progressionless play.

Server transfers have come in since I stopped playing. I am in a battlegroup which has all the busiest servers EU-side so after some investigation I decided not to move. I was pleasantly suprised that many very active servers were available for transfer. It's not at all like the rather desultory offering in WoW where you occasionally are invited to move to a server which is deader than a parrot. (For example Argent RP-PvE server was there).

I played my Rogue a little but the main thing I wanted to do was dungeons and they weren't popping. Rift has cross server LFD now but it's still possible to queue for 4 hours on a Friday night as dps in the busiest EU battlegroup and not see a group. (That might have been a one-off. I got much better results with my low level mage even when I queued as pure dps).

So I mainly played a mage, which started at level 28 and finished at level 33. I did a little questing but i'm not terribly interested in questing these days. I did quite a lot of warfronts and those are quite fun. Somewhat pale compared to Eve pvp though. There don't seem to be any stakes at all, or at least that's what I felt. Everyone progresses and the winner progresses a tad faster. I have no sense of who I played with or against. A lot of what makes team sports fun has been sacrificed for accessibility. I found myself seeing the battles pop and missing them or clicking Ignore because I couldn't be bothered.

I did like the LFD. I was limited to 2 possible dungeons and farmed them fairly heavily. (As I leveled precisely which 2 I had access to changed). I probably did around a dozen dungeons runs. The wait is much longer than it was in WoW if I queue as dps only. However the wait wasn't bad at all when I queued as Healer, Support and Dps. Better yet, it lets you alt tab and the Rift tab at the bottom of the screen will flash when your group is ready if you're doing something else in windowed mode. That's very convenient. (It also does this for warfronts).

Probably the most interesting part was respeccing the character. I tried all sorts of different builds and still have new ones to experiment with. As someone who likes creating characters in different ways Rift is one of the most entertaining games out there. It's also taught me that games where you have to spend a significant sum to respec are less fun for me. I want to tinker constantly with my builds.

Would I recommend Rift? Very much so. It remains as far as I'm concerned the pick of the diku-types. It's better than WoW, AoC and Lotro.

Would I play it? No. I have problems with the content and progression:

solo pve (quests, rifts, etc) - bores me quickly

world pvp - no one does it much. I murdered one guy in a level 30 area, he got me back and I got him back again which was fun. But I had to initiate it, I don't think he would have attacked if I hadn't. And no one builds groups to go off fighting.

group pve (dungeons) - excellent, waiting is a lot less excellent. I do like the alt tab feature but I'd rather play a game that kept me playing because I'm hooked, than a game that makes waiting around more bearable.

group pve (raids) - still too much investment for the fun returned. Having had two raid guilds collapsed I don't want to sub and try to get into another one. Plus starting at the bottom of someone's dkp system sucks. Plus I guess I'm too burned out still. I see raids as a close community and tend to feel committed. Having had two collapse 4 months ago when I played Rift is very offputting. If I were to raid at the moment I'd rather raid casually perhaps in WoW's cross server raid pugs. I cba to work hard for a raid guild unless I feel there's the prospect of longevity.

group pvp (warfronts) - ok but aimless. It can be fun dotting people, burning people and the heal by nuking rift mage gameplay. But it doesn't suit my need for a strategic sense to pvp. How does running around what is basically a football field playing sport lead to us conquering their capital, burning their villages, seizing their treasury? It's not player AGAINST player, it's player WITH player in an endless round of pat-a-cake.

I'd certainly play another Trion game, it's a beautifully crafted game of its type. But playing this made me realise how much I want Diablo 3 and Prime instead. In fact after a few days I found myself thinking don't play Rift, play Diablo 2 and had to make myself get the maximum out of the free time instead of playing a game that's always available to me.

Blogger commenting problems

2011-08-30T14:48:00.002+01:00

I've been hearing that people have been having problems commenting. I've changed from embedded comments to full page, relaxed moderation for comments for older posts and allowed anonymous commenting.

Please let me know if you have any issues. cvorn@live.co.uk

That's my spam collecting email addy so I don't check it very often but I do usually skim the titles. Title your email BLOGGER COMMENT PROBLEM if you need to use it.

Diablo 3: The economy in numbers

2011-08-29T19:55:00.007+01:00

It may perhaps come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I've been thinking about numbers.

In particular I've been thinking about this comment of Loque's:
"Now... for what concerns the "making money in D3" I don't really think it will happen for 99.9% of the players."

Why 99.9? Why not 80% or 99.99999% Can we attempt to figure it out?

Here goes

The virtual currency market is currently estimated at over $2 billion dollars annually and predicted grow to $5 billion by 2011. (Source)

Older but more trustworthy data states:

" Figures

While reliable figures for gold farming are hard to come by,^[11] there are some estimates of the market for in-game currency.
In 2005 The New York Times stated that there were over 100,000 professional, full-time gold farmers in China alone.^[5] And in 2006 sales of such virtual goods were thought to amount to somewhere between 200^[12] and 900 million USD.^[4]
Another estimate, drawn from 2005/2006 data, valued the market at not less than USD200 million per year^[13] and suggested that over 150,000 people were employed as gold farmers with average monthly earnings of USD145.^[13] This same report estimated that 80% of all gold farmers were from China;^[11] a fact which has led to prejudice towards Chinese players.^[14] 2008 figures from the Chinese State valued the Chinese trade in virtual currency at over several billion yuan, or nearly USD300 million.^[15]"

An academic analysis by Richard Heeks includes mention of speculation that as early as 2006 the market might be larger than $1b. And this is a market that has seen and is seeing non-stop growth.

Updating his figures in 2009 Hecks mentions that Nick Ryan put the Chinese RMT industry alone at $10b:

"Estimates of 400,000 people working in China on gold farming/trading are seen as very realistic, and the number could be 500,000 up to 1,000,000 (the latter figure is also estimated in Nick Ryan's recent articles on RMT, which claims total turnover for Chinese RMT operations of US$10bn per year). There are many brokerages in all major cities in China (Ryan's article estimates 60,000 in total)."

So in Diablo 3's first year is it fair to suggest that at a conservative estimate the global RMT market might be somewhere between $2b to $5b?

What's Diablo 3's cut?

I think there are a lot of reasons why D3 players will be more inclined to buy items than players of other games. First it's legal. Second there's the allure of believing that if you make yourself just that bit more awesome you'll be able to recoup your investment. Third it's the successor to WoW, Blizzard's first new avatar-based game since 2004 so it will inherit a lot of players who bought gold items and characters in World of Warcraft. Fourth the game provides significant blocks (difficulty level changes, pvp) that many people will only overcome by buying items.

So let's guess $5b gets spent and D3 players spend a fifth of it.

Diablo 2 sold 4 million copies. I strongly suspect that Diablo 3, launching on the back of WoW will sell more than that. There are simply more gamers around these days as well as a much higher number of older gamers. Also Blizzard has done really well with opening up new markets for WoW in places like Brazil, Russia and particularly China. Add in the allure of being able to get paid for playing, whether it's naive or not, which will draw in many more customers and I think it's not a stretch to say a big chunk of PC gamers will be playing D3. I'd guess about 10 million. I think at least 5 million is almost certain.

So if D3's real money auction house is going to turn over $1b in its first year and it has 10 million players that's $100 per player each year.

It won't distribute like that.

Hardcore mode (permadeath) players will get nothing through the legal AH. There will of course be a secondary market. (I suspect the existence of this black market will eventually push Blizzard into authorising RMT in D3 Hardcore).

The majority of players will never reach endgame.

Not all farmers are equal. Roughly a farmer's income = monsters killed * magic find bonus worth of magic items plus monsters killed * gold find bonus worth of gold.

Luck plays quite a big part, causing profits to deviate from the average that any particular playstyle might suggest.

Game knowledge can also play a big part, for instance a better method of killing fast (such as Javazons in the Cow Level in D2) or a better farming route.

Cheating (duping etc) can play a spectacularly big part but overall diminishes the game as there's less point being so interested in a game where people are able to cheat and hack and dupe. Hopefully Blizzard will keep cheating under control.

Game difficulty will play a big part. If the game can be farmed by under-geared characters in a relatively brain-dead way then uneducated Chinese labourers are perfectly effective. If the game is more difficult then players will need more grounding and understanding of the game. I'm speculating it may be hard for the typical Chinese gold farmer we saw in WoW to do this, ie it will change from a blue collar job to a white collar job. I'm sure they'll get up to speed in time but gold farming businesses that are not prepared may have a very rough first year. The current system of sharing characters in shifts with the guy on the next shift selling anything that isn't nailed down will be completely useless for farming Inferno.

All forms of arbitrage aren't actually significant in relation to the turnover figures. Arbitrage moves profit from one economic agent to another, it does not actually increase turnover itself.

Conclusion: if you're a skilled player who farms Inferno a lot with magic find gear on I think you'll earn over $1000 per year playing Diablo 3. If you also arbitrage effectively you will earn more. It won't support any but a few as full-time professionals but it's a financially significant hobby.

Or to put it another way if you're a reasonably competent gamer you will pay back the cost of the box at least if you do some magic finding in Inferno.

Diablo 3: my time is free

2011-08-29T13:20:00.002+01:00

It seems to be my week for challenging MMO truisms. Anyone who's played the economic game in any MMO has almost certainly heard the expression "my time is free" usually applied with scorn to people who are selling for lower than production cost. In Eve for example someone might take 150k isk worth of mats, build a ship and sell the ship for 125k - that's obvious not very smart. But a second player might mine the mats, build the ship and sell it for 125k - all it cost him is time. At this point people rather unkindly call him an idiot and point out he could have skipped the shipbuilding and got more for his time spent mining and point to it as an example of the "my time is free" fallacy, of a lack of understanding of opportunity cost. And they could be right but they're only right if isk-making is the be all and end all of the game.

In Diablo 3 I'll be playing to have fun trying out all the moves and mass murdering monsters while playing with my friends. That's the objective. That is, as I define it, leisure as opposed to work which I do for pay.

So what does that mean? That means, my friends, my time is free.

Beating the market is for me an additional part of the game, an additional entertainment, as fun as figuring out how to beat Diablo or how to make a class kick arse. I won't be playing Diablo 3 for money, I won't aim to be a professional gamer, I will play for fun.

Any revenue I get on top of that is a bonus. So if a Brutality Blade should sell for £3.50 but I sell one for £2 I haven't lost £1.50 I've gained £2. My time is free, any income I get is extra to the fun which is the reason I play.

I've seen many commentators giving dire warnings about no one will make any money on the game because we can't compete with Chinese gold farmers. They have it backwards. Chinese gold farmers can't compete with me nor with the 10 million others just like me. Our time is free, those RMT businesses have operating costs to pay and cheap labour is still more expensive than free labour.

I do expect to make money in the game but it's not why I'm playing the game and it doesn't matter. Viewed as a commercial concern my Diablo 3 looks like this:

Money spent = zero (I own a computer anyway, I would have bought the game anyway)
Money earned = 100% profit

That's a dream business, an I can't lose business. And I'm not worried at all about auction house manipulators or Chinese gold farmers because no one attempting to be professional in this game can match my overwhelming economic advantage:

My time is free.

Optimising the fun into gaming

2011-08-27T14:06:00.003+01:00

I was intrigued by a comment Nils made here yesterday suggesting that by optimising I'm removing the fun from playing Diablo 3. (Not offended by the way Nils, I'm glad to have the discussion).

You see if I had picked any of a number of alternative ways of playing no one would have the temerity to suggest that my way isn't the One True Fun Way. If I roved the world looking for photogenic screenshot opportunities or concentrated on collecting minipets or made mosaic art by dropping items on the ground in tasteful arrangements I don't think anyone would come here and say "That's not fun."

So what is it about the optimisation process that draws this reaction?

I think there's a number of elements.

It's about maths. Lots of people really don't like maths. I do. When I'm bored with nothing to do I sometimes work out long division or squares or other mathematical puzzles in my head just to keep my mind busy. I appreciate this isn't usual. But it's clear from reading gaming theorycraft sites that many of us enjoy the maths of a game just for the sake of it. It's another aspect, enjoyable to some, that is actually a lost opportunity to those who never appreciate it. It's as if someone plays but never talks to another player or never takes a screenshot or never stops to appreciate how their character looks or never reads the lore. None of that is mandatory but none of those things are mutually exclusive and I would argue there's a richer experience if you appreciate all of them.

It's about immersion. When if an awesome legendary axe drops you find yourself thinking "shall I make an Axe Barb?" I can see it's disconcerting to see other players are looking at the drop thinking "woot! £3.50!" I think though there's a level beyond living off the land gameplay and that's the trading game. Let's suppose Player A finds an awesome Axe and makes an Axe Barb. Player B finds an awesome axe, knows that the market is over-pricing axes right now, sells the Axe on the gold market for 10,000 gold, turns the gold into £6, uses the £6 to buy an awesome mace and uses the mace to make a better Barb than player A. Who is having more fun? And I don't just mean because the character is more powerful but the process itself seems more fun to me. I do see that it's less immersive but I think in this case immersion is not the same as fun. Besides is twinking a hand-me-down to an alt really immersive? When did Conan's big brother ever turn up and hand him an uber sword that he had spare? Surely all trading is not immersive including trading to yourself via the shared bank.

And lastly and perhaps most importantly it's about competition. When some of us theorycraft it forces other players into one out of three positions all of which are detrimental to them if they don't like theorycrafting. 1) they can ignore the theorycrafters and the cookie cutters and just be less effective than us. That's probably going to be rather an unpleasant option in D3 because D3 will inherit a huge amount of its players from WoW and WoW players are very suspicious of people not pulling their weight. Anyone who seems underpowered is going to find people being rude to them in public groups. 2) They can follow the theorycraft but in the early stages of a game theorycraft to the non-mathematician is gruellingly horrible. When a game ages you get short pithy synopses that show you all the maths you need to know in a page. Early on however the theorycrafters aren't sure yet so you get 20 page discussions of the attack speed formulae. Generally people won't summarise anything until the facts are established by extensive time-consuming testing and peer review. 3) they can figure out the best way to play by themselves while ignoring other theorycrafters. There's a couple of problems with this. Peer review is immensely important. Theorycrafting is very time-consuming, I remember hitting a zombie outside Hell Rogue Camp 1000 times and writing down each result back when I was helping figure out D2. It took me about 6 hours to conduct and write up my experiment and it was for something rather obscure (I forget what). Even the best theorycrafter in the world doesn't solve every problem. Plus if you make a mistake it gets incorporated into your dataset and is very hard to find for yourself.

Few things we've seen in gaming before will be quite as competitive as D3 money-making. We're going head to head with sophisticated corporations and huge businesses - perhaps even the Russian mafia - that want to make fortunes doing this and what's more almost everyone will be doing it. I realise there are a few purists out there but most regular players if they get a Bow worth £25 and their character does not use bows will sell it. Some will even sell it if their character does use bows. So the supply of goods in general is close to infinite because players will find more decent loot than the AH system can possibly sell which will drive the price of a bow which is good but not the best down and down. So ambitious achiever players like me plotting to maximise income are taking money out of the pockets of other players.

And are we also taking fun away?

I think so. Clearly if a fairly casual inferno player finds a mid range legendary he's going to get a lot less for it because of intense farming players. He's going to be less effective at selling it because of auction house manipulators. And it's going to be less exciting to say "Wow, omg, I found a Windforce!" if people like me are finding 10 Windforces a day and they're worth 30p.

But I'm not optimising the fun out of gaming. I'm optimising the fun into my gaming and out of yours. That's competition, baby.

Diablo 3: Treasure finding

2011-08-26T10:25:00.002+01:00

Treasure hunting Bah!.. Treasure finding...

(The Necromancer on defeating the Countess in Act 1 of Diablo 2)

I've been thinking about item farming in Diablo 3 and I've come to realise that a lot of the stereotypical gold farmer traits are quite the opposite of how it's best to go about this.

In games like WoW gold farmers work in shifts. They have a quota of gold to make each shift so they will often strip the character of any decent items or stored wealth during their shift and tend to be a bit desperate towards the end of the shift. They farm specific areas thought to be high yield for this sort of activity. (At one stage it was the owlbears in Winterspring). They tend to be loners although they did sometimes cooperate in self defence when we were persecuting them on a pvp server.

I've realised this is pretty much the diametrical opposite of how we will need to play in D3 to be successful item farmers. (for as PC Gamer's delightfully witty podcast said in Diablo 3 Blizzard has solved the problem of gold farmers by making everyone a gold farmer).

First off that kind of shared account is really unsuitable because items are not bound. You can't progress to the most challenging content if people who share your account sell your items and gold. Next farming high yield areas is likely to be less effective. And lastly lone wolf seems significantly inferior to group play.

Let's address these in turn.

Gear

Diablo 3 is at least as much a gear progression as a level game and once you hit 60 it's wholly a gear progression. And Inferno difficulty, which is where virtually all of the decent loot will be is intended to be challenging.

So if you sell too early you're trading progress for quick cash. In a game where almost all the money is made deep in end game. That's not smart.

Challenge in D3 is up in the air at the moment because we don't know how hard players will struggle with the difficulty. Diablo has a tradition of insane challenges. Just reaching max level was an epic story in itself in D2, with a team of players from Germany racing a team of Russians for the honour that many at the time believed not humanly possible. Drop rates on some items were insanely low, I played pretty solidly for 4 years without seeing one of the top 5 runes drop. Even if we look to WoW to see how current Blizzard philosophy is a lot of WoW is brutally hard. Hard mode raids especially, very few people have completed the content. As for the Starcraft series, it's an e-sport to “maximise” your SC2 status you have to be the best player in the world.

I think many people will hit a wall at Inferno difficulty where they just can't get started.

And that will be great for anyone who can cope because how are those players going to get past that wall? - they're going to buy gear.

In fact I'm planning to buy gear too.

Now that may seem odd for someone who wants to turn a profit playing Diablo 3 but my reasoning is this. 1) The real money items are in Inferno. 2) They will sell particularly well while most of the player base is struggling to get to grips with Inferno. 3) It's worth investing some gold and cash to get to Inferno farmer status as quickly as possible because that's an investment that will pay for itself.

I aim to have two sets of gear, both of which I'm prepared to spend some gold and/or pounds on. One is my most effective killing gear, a balance of damage and survival. The second set is my magic find set. I'm reasonably confident Blizzard won't let the economy collapse, either because of duping or because they've made it too easy so I really do think a little early investment will amply pay for itself once I'm zerging through hundreds of Inferno level monsters. And it's possible that I'll make enough gold and money through arbitrage that I won't need to put any additional real world funds in but I don't mind either way.

Farming areas

Blizzard recently announced the Inferno difficulty levels and explained that every monster would be level 61 and drop more or less the same loot so as to discourage path of least resistance farming. Of course it won't do that, it will just channel players to areas with high density of easy monsters. Certain monsters are quite tricky for many builds. In D2 there are imps in act 5 that teleport to safety when you damage them. They can be tedious to hunt down and kill if you're melee. Conversely the Bloody Foothills is an insanely easy area of high density mobs. It became the most farmed area for a while just after D2's expansion came out.

One twist though – Blizzard also explained that they would be monitoring playing patterns and if areas are being heavily farmed they would tweak the loot tables. We don't know at this time whether this will be announced or done via undocumented hotfixes. If they do clandestinely fix over-farmed areas then you could spend days or weeks farming sub-optimally without realising it. For this reason I'd recommend farming areas that still meet the desired criteria of high monster density and easy monsters but aren't the focus of public games. There were lots of areas of Act 5 that suited – at a time when most people were doing foothills runs I was running Nilathak's temple for example.

Grouping

We don't quite know how grouping affects drop rate. For example if I'm playing with 3 afk leeches and I kill 10 mobs do I get 10 drops like I was soloing? Or do I get 10/4?

Other than that grouping has everything to recommend it. If you're high level early on pugs generally are really good. I've been a fast leveler in a number of games including WoW and Rift and the early pugs are awesome, brilliant fun, very competent and determined. A lot of abilities are group abilities so if the Barb buffs defence for the group that's pretty useful. Why solo when you can have a Barb buffing you and a Monk healing you?

Tactically groups handle difficult content much better. 4 of you can do things against one boss that one soloer couldn't like have 3 people in a safe spot nuking while one tanks and so on. Or swapping tanking/kiting duty.

Another aspect that's up in the air is the role of magic find in groups. There's speculation that playing a magic find leech will be possible, it's hard to see quite how Blizzard could design around it at this stage. Personally I'll go for some compromise between magic find and being able to cut the mustard, no point running zones while being completely useless and just leeching, people will not want to play with you. Also generosity, although counter-intuitive to a magic item farmer, serves you very well. Hand a Windforce to a Demon Hunter and she might become a lot more open to you coming along on runs decked out in magic find gear.

RIFT: play for free - but there's a catch

2011-08-25T16:45:00.000+01:00

I've had an email from Trion inviting me to play Rift for free from August 25-31. Very nice of them and I'll certainly take them up on the offer.

Bizarrely though the small print includes this detail:
If user subscribes to RIFT during free gameplay time, user’s credit card or pre-paid game time card will be charged immediately, and any remaining free gameplay time will be forfeited.

Heaven forfend anyone pay them money!

Storybricks in pictures

2011-08-19T21:13:00.000+01:00

This is the drives window. You assign a drive to a NPC. So for instance you might decide the older Princess is mainly interested in Fame. This means that in addition to the default actions of Greet, Talk, Persuade and Confused that any NPC can have she can also show other reactions because the Drive Fame unlocks the moods Heroic, Sarcastic and Boasting so she can offer help (perhaps coming along as a companion), ask for help (standard quest giver role) or mock or just show off.

Her younger sister is more romantic. She still likes the idea of being Famous but she also has the Drive Love. So she gets all of the options you can see above, that's a picture where both Fame and Love are ticked.

(This information is new, I think it's a Stabbed Up world exclusive).

Here's a storybricks panel showing some basic story blocks. It's quite easy to get one's imagination flowing from these quite simple beginnings. Should snooty noble Baldwin get his come-uppance? Alfgar seems like just the man to help the players do it.

I admired the way the blocks have different shaped connectors depending on what type of action is being performed. It uses a heart shape for feelings and a square for relations with objects. Clever and economical.

Now we can see the system being used to write a story involving the player. As in so many classic RPG scenarios the player starts in a cell and the story starts with the need to get free. The story blocks above demonstrate the use of the tool's adverb system as Alfgar sneakily joins the player. It may well be that Storybricks leads to or supports a system where all the dice rolls happen under the hood, invisible to the player. I didn't think to ask but I think it would be quite strong in a storytelling game. After all we don't need to know Aragorn's To Hit chance to find his heroism exciting in Lord of the Rings.

In this story a nasty noble and his thief henchmen may poison the nice noble. However a peasant has the antidote. You can get the antidote off him by causing the local innkeeper to feel friendly towards him.

Here's a simple example of a motivation for a NPC that will cause him to be favourably inclined to an action beneficial to the player.

Here's another classic story re-told in Storybrick form. Get the love potion from the crypt and the grateful shopkeeper will give you a Blade of Smiting.

This story is an example of how the system can drive conflict and complexity. NPCs will be able to remember what you, the player, have done in the game and future interactions will be affected by the way you handled the past one. If we upset Guard Aylmer it may come back to haunt us - or perhaps it could unlock new plot that wouldn't have been accessible.

Moreover the system will feature factions so maybe if we want to tread carefully we could do something that pleases the Guard faction so both Guard Dunstan and Guard Aylmer would regard us more favourably.

It's actually very reminiscent of 90s games like Daggerfall and Planescape: Torment. We played those by reading the text carefully and thinking hard about consequences because what we chose mattered.

Storybricks: Q&A

2011-08-19T20:34:00.000+01:00

Namaste were kind enough to answer some questions that I sent them:

Storybricks questions

Stabs 17.8.11

We've seen the gist of the system from your blogs and publicity and other people's reports. I'd like to get under the hood. Could you start by telling me how many players you anticipate being in a game world at once?

We’re still working out the details. Our goal was to get an early version of the tool out for people to give us feedback to avoid releasing a tool only to have people point out a flawed assumption we made long ago. As we develop the tool, we intend to let a small group of people share the same world. In the future, as we add this tool to a larger game, we will see what sorts of limits we need to impose. But, there’s no reason why we couldn’t use this tool in an MMO-like game.

I would like to ask some questions about the system's vulnerability to griefing and also about the persistence of stories in a massive online environment. So for example what if someone sets up a story of The Guard: Wants to: Kill: The Queen in a world where a lot of other people's plot depends on the Queen being there? Can you design plot that contradicts other people's plot?

Obviously as you get more players participating in the world you’ll need restrictions. There was a collaborative storytelling setting called Thieves’ World that different authors contributed to. There were some restrictions on what authors could or couldn’t do with characters other authors had established, such as not killing them off.

So, as you get more people telling stories in the same space, you’ll need to set boundaries. It might be “no disintegrations” or “don’t get attached to a particular character”. Depends on what feedback we get.

You could create a story that contradicts another but what that means has yet to be determined. We’re currently discussing what effects from one story can carry over into another.

Would a murder of the Queen create opportunities for new storytailoring perhaps investigating the crime or would everyone split off into parallel universes where the Queen was never murdered?

Certainly. This is one reason why we’re hesitant to say what the exact policy would be. Some people might like writing new stories where the world can change in radical ways, where characters can die. Of course, that might have an interesting consequence where the players might be able to die, too….

And what happens to the guys who were halfway through a story that ends at the Queen? Is their work just wasted?

Depends on how the story is organized. I could see that if we allowed characters to die, it might be possible for authors to substitute in another character. So, if you were running quests for the Queen and she died, perhaps her sister the Princess would help you in her stead. This is where relationships between NPCs become very important.

How will Storybricks games manage people who design stories in such a way as to annoy other people? For example unsolvable mysteries or endlessly recursive quests?

We’re considering this very seriously. Dr Richard Bartle, one of our advisors, has repeatedly warned us of this danger. And, Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green is a very experienced MMO developer who has seen griefing on a regular basis. We’ve discussed having players rate a quest and having a mechanism to let others discover new quests based on their ratings; this might work similar to how Netflix or Amazon recommend things to you based on what you’ve bought/watched and rated in the past. A quest like this would probably be rated low, and even if a griefer got all his friends to rate the story high, unless you had played a lot of the same stories as they had you might not be affected by the rating. We’ve also discussed plans to “curate” some stories and give them extra attention if they’re highly rated and look particularly appropriate.

Another issue is if someone accidentally creates an unsolvable quest. We’re looking at that problem as well.

I have a dream that one day, despite my poor programming skills and lack of any artistic talent, I will be able to create my own virtual world using low cost off the shelf tools. Does the Storybricks system bring that day closer?

If we were merely salespeople, we would guarantee this and tell you that we’ll even make you a better programmer and artist. ;) The reality is that we hope Storybricks lets people who want to tell stories be able to build and share those stories with others. What form that takes depends on the feedback we get from people.

So, we won’t guarantee that you’ll be able to create your own World of Warcraft competitor, but we do hope that you’ll be able to tell your own story in a multiplayer world without being an ace programmer or artist.

The best way to ensure the tool is usable is to help us test it now, when we’re at the beginning.

Storybricks: Executive overview and key information

2011-08-19T20:24:00.005+01:00

I had the chance yesterday to see the new Storybricks system and to meet online with two of the Namaste staff: Brian "Psychochild" Green and Kelly "Ophelea" Heckman. I've long been a fan of Brian's blog and it was delightful to talk to them about what I think is one of the most exciting innovations in online gaming for many years.

So why is this system so exciting?

Because there's the possibility of games that are fully immersive stories that we participate and make as we play. Because to a large extent players will get to drive the direction and content of the story. Because the stories aren't scripted but emergent where our choices as players may change the outcome of the story.

Now let's go back to what we have now - the kill ten rats style. (Sorry SWTOR fans, make that kill ten womp rats for you guys). The reason people don't care about the quest text is because it doesn't matter. Quest text is merely a barrier between opening a dialogue with the quest giver and receiving payment for a completed job. Back when WoW came out in 2004 people were surprised that so many players skipped quest text and that a player mod that allowed us to skip it instantly rather than wait for it to scroll was popular. Actually this was completely rational, there was nothing the NPC would say that matter beyond the essential minimum of kill/fetch/click on .... rats/logs/wolves.

Storybricks is a system for building what amounts to a huge NPC memory of what they want to do and who they like. What the player will perceive as a quest will be the answer to a complex equation based on information in the system about the player, the NPCs and everyone's goals and drives.

That's huge. In fact this has the potential to be the Google to conventional MMOs' Alta Vista. Simply smarter.

If you read this blog you've probably already seen other similar bloggers talk about Storybricks already: Spinks, Tobold, Kiasa, Toldain, gamersinfo.net have all covered it. Ben sees it as a way to play his beloved Shadowrun (and it's very suited to that world with its murkiness and sinister Mr Johnsons). Eric Heimburg was thinking on the same lines for the game he's developing but decided to drop it to concentrate on core features. Now that's interesting because in the future the Storybricks system may have the portability to allow designers like him to incorporate it in their games, possibly it might be less work to import a sophisticated and interesting Storybricks set up than to design a home made but simplified NPC interaction system.

Which brings me neatly to what I think might be the greatest strength of the system - that amateur and semi-professional gamers may be able to create story and upload it to an Apple store type system. That gives two very interesting aspects that I think many players will be excited about. First we can tell our own stories and get paid a small amount of cash for it. Nothing is set in stone yet obviously but an example might be an app selling for $1 of which you, the writer get 70 cents and Namaste your publisher gets 30 cents. Add in an ebay/netflix style rating system and maybe your story will be popular and lots of people will want to play it.

The other aspect that I'm excited about is that it allows us to collaborate and create shared worlds.

So are you interested?

Here's how you can get involved.

Go to their site and sign up as a tester and to receive their newletter. http://www.namaste.vg/storybricks/
Brian told me that they're planning to have a very small number of people in to test fairly soon then a more public beta in about 4 to 6 months. Please note (and this is just my opinion, not from Brian and Kelly) if you do join you should be looking at this as a roll your sleeves up and help do the lifting type beta not a free trial. Remember it's a tool not a game. I'm expecting the sort of beta where you might spend an evening messing about with something just so we can all say "cool, that kinda worked" rather than some kind of isn't my character uber? experience.

They are also looking for investors. If you want to be involved in that way contact the company.

Diablo 3 grouping vs WoW's LFD

2011-08-17T09:55:00.003+01:00

As WoW attempts to solve its issue of horrible pugs by making the tanking role as brain dead as the dps role Diablo 3 is poised to take over as the default method of having a fun group experience in an online game.

In Diablo games everyone is dps. If you want to pull just shoot something, no need to wait for someone else. If you're taking too much damage just run back behind your team for a few seconds. Mobs in Diablo games have an in-built hesitation mechanic so if you move they hesitate very slightly, allowing you to reduce the damage you take. Friends can help by ping-ponging aggro, by overthreating your threat value so monsters stop chasing you. It's a more agile more immersive playstyle.

Diablo 3 will take a lot from what Blizzard has learned over the years in WoW. Instead of the freeform games of Diablo 2 (for example Baalrun95) D3 players will set up games by choosing where they want to quest and how many people they want to quest with and the system will build a party for you to suit that. Which is quite similar to how LFD works in WoW, just without the queues.

Does it lose tactical depth? Yes, but WoW is withdrawing from the style of tactical depth as fast as it can. Who would want to play a game for the tactical depth of trinity gamestyle where it's impossible to rip aggro off the tank? That's not tactical depth.

In other ways D3 is simply streets ahead of WoW. Let's look at loot.

- in WoW you will see nice things drop and someone else will get it. In D3 if you see it, it's yours.

- Diablo games drop more loot that WoW-type games. Monsters are individually much weaker, you can kill a swarm in the time a WoW player would kill one mob.

- some WoW loot drops as currency which you then need to save up until you gradually save enough to buy an item. It's loot by installments. In D3 if it drops it's an item and you can use it immediately if you like.

- WoW loot is usually Bind on Pickup. In Diablo games if it drops any of your characters can use it. In D2 I quite often had the experience of finding an awesome item and thinking, "Wow, I've got to go make a Sword Barb now!"

- in D3 if you don't want it you can cash it in for real money or game money or crafting materials.

The unbearable darkness of online communities

2011-08-16T21:30:00.002+01:00

Spinks has written a thoughtful post today about the end of a golden age in online gaming, an age of cooperation and consideration for others which she sees as being replaced by a more individualistic culture, perhaps for good.

I'd like to examine her points then move on to a prediction about the way group play is going.

Competition and Cooperation

Let's start by looking at competition and cooperation. Both are I think fundamental forms of play. Both, I suspect, pre-date the human species. If you throw a stick for a dog that's cooperative play, if you play tug-of-war with the stick when he brings it back that's competitive play. Animals combine both forms in their play - there are even scientific studies about the proportion of each type. As humans we've had both for a long time and we'll always have both, at least for the rest of our lifetimes.

In MMOs the balance between them has not been quite so straightforward. The ancestors of MMOs, MUDs, tended to be more freeform more sandbox. So what happens if you let players do what they want? Well in MUDs you got the Bartle types, that is, you got 4 distinct types of play: Killer, Socialiser, Explorer, and Achiever. Let's look at the two social ones - killers which is interacting with people by trying to make their game experience worse and socialiser which is interacting with people by trying to make their game experience better.

Many people who aren't killers simply can't understand the motivation. Why follow another player around killstealing their mobs or nicking their drops until they log out in frustration? My answer would be that some people are intensely competitive and want the feeling of beating someone else. In a game where pvp is limited or non-existent some people may derive more satisfaction in making another person log out in frustration than in killing them within the normal expectations of the game. Killing someone in a WoW battleground for instance is fairly meaningless as killing someone doesn't do any damage to them, it just moves them and imposes a very brief time-out.

Some people regard competitiveness as extremely unhealthy. An article from a writer on this states:

"Competition is to self-esteem as sugar is to teeth. Most people lose in most competitive encounters, and it's obvious why that causes self-doubt. But even winning doesn't build character; it just lets a child gloat temporarily."

In addition to damaging participants the competitive instincts of players can be very damaging to the businesses of the companies running games. If someone's personal playstyle is to get people to log out and never log back in that's clearly an uneconomic player.

One player describes an event in WoW that unexpectedly turned out to be a great time for griefers:

"Yesterday, I spent some of my limited game time to log into WoW, and work on a new Dwarf character I started about a week ago, so he’s still hanging around Ironforge for the moment. So I run up to Ironforge to check out a couple of vendors, and I discover a scene of griefer ecstasy in front of the auction house. Hundreds of player corpses littered the ground from high level zombies killing anything that moved, especially low level people which they seem to get a perverse joy in ganking repeatedly. They chose the auction house because that area is by far the most crowded area of the city. One of their favorite tactics is also to kill off the flightmaster NPC, so that no one can get a griffin out of the area, causing additional people to bottleneck."

Cooperation on the other hand in addition to being a playstyle a lot of people find fun is intrinisically beneficial for the people running online games. Raph Koster says:

"Community ties are the single biggest predictor of retention. And in the subscription game (really, in the microtransaction game too, though the effect is more complicated), retention = money. Therefore, community ties = money."

The direction of the last decade

So if community = extra money and griefing = less money then one would expect designers to design for community and against griefing. But they don't always and the reasons are complex. I'll try to give a brief overview.

One of the big strengths of massive online games is emergent gameplay. Players do unexpected things that turn out to be better and more fun than what the designers had originally foreseen. This happens quite a lot and many designers deliberately encourage it. In Eve while people have achieved spectacular acts of in-game criminality people have also done amazing and benign things. One player circumnavigated the universe over a period of years, one player founded a graveyard. In fact the company has created a site specifically to archive and document the amazing and emergent stories the players have - if you have a look you'll quickly see it's not all corp theft and can flipping.

The next element is personal progression. I'll let you into a secret that many players either never knew or forget. The numbers on your character sheet, on your gear, they mean nothing. A weapon that does 200 damage is neither intrinsically good nor bad. A 10 damage weapon hits a 100 hit point monster every bit as hard as a 1,000 damage weapon hits a 10,000 hit point monster. Numbers are relational and only relational. And since they are relational, it doesn't matter how much damage your weapon says it does, what matters is if it does more than your friend's weapon. The only meaningful metrics are "Am I better than him?" and "can I kill stuff easily?"

And players have become very attracted to personal progression. WoW beat EQ, SWG and UO for market share because it was more fun. Fun mainly being a matter of my character feels cooler. It did this by much faster gear upgrades than earlier games.

Personal progression is always competitive rather than cooperative. The only way to tell if you have a good sword is to see if it kills things faster than the guys with you. So the shift from the earlier model of highly challenging encounters where you cared more about doing everything you could to help the group win to relatively easy encounters where people care more about topping the meter is a shift from cooperation to competition.

What does the future hold?

I think two things are going to happen in the MMO gaming space. In fact they already are happening, in the future they will just get more obvious.

Firstly we have been getting and will get more types of games. Case in point, SWTOR is a highly directed theme park space PvE MMO. Launching in the same quarter against it is Prime BFD, a sandbox old school PvP MMO developed mainly by guys who loved Dark Age of Camelot and wish to re-create that experience in the modern market. Years ago you simply didn't see that diversity - a MMO was what it was and if the style didn't suit you then tough. You need to liberate yourself from being swept up by whatever is the most hyped game but if you can do so then you can play just about any type of game you like.

Second, there's a rubber banding effect. Games are very often a reaction to what was bad about the games before them. WoW was an immensely liberating experience after the forced grouping of EQ and the sandboxy aimlessness of SWG and UO. The horrible aspects of WoW are going to drive game development over the next decade. Expect to see games designed to address the problems of tank shortages, horrible rude pugs, gearscore epeen measurers and people who always stand in fires.

Prime BFD: Everybody wins...

2011-08-11T23:01:00.001+01:00

... if you entered the bug report contest that is.

Sanya Weathers said:

I've blown a stupid amount of time trying to decide between awesome and awesomer.

So, as with the haiku, EVERYONE WINS.

This is not going to be a habit with us. My next contest, I'm going to make sure an actual winner will stand out.

But congratulations, bug reporters!

http://forums.primeonline.com/index.php?/topic/711-bug-report-contest-i-give-up/page__pid__20387#entry20387

Our prize is a place in phase 2 of the Beta

Phase 2 invites will go out, we hope, next week. If not next then definitely the week after.

I probably won't be able to say much (this information is public however so I'm pretty sure I'm safe to tell you this).

It's a really interesting game and I'm really looking forward to helping develop it. If you're interested then do get involved on their forums, Sanya said there will be more contests in the future.

Original post, and my rather poetic entry here:
http://forums.primeonline.com/index.php?/topic/572-contest-bug-reports/

Diablo 3 to be localised for chavs

2011-08-10T06:47:00.000+01:00

Following personal intervention by UK Prime Minister David Cameron, Irvine CA-based video games developer Activision-Blizzard will create a special localised version of its forthcoming title Diablo 3 with Britain's fractious underclass in mind.

Players will see a living room rather that the usual paper doll and will have to outfit their living room from loot drops of TV sets, Xboxs and Nikes. The Caravan will include a bling merchant who makes jewelry and a Man With a Hat who provides potions and elixirs. Loot can be sold in a special area called the Back of the Pub.

Act Bosses are replaced with crowbar wielding shopkeepers and zones will contain special burnable vehicles.

We spoke to Mark, a representative of the Peckham chavs and he had this to say:

"Gotta beta key?"

Diablo 2: it's cool to go back in time

2011-08-07T00:14:00.000+01:00

It had been a long time since I played Diablo 2 so I fired it up and rolled three characters. I'll freely admit the D3 real money AH news has got me thinking about strategies.

There have been quite a few changes since I last played in 1.11. We're up to 1.13 now and some new end game content has been added that sounds very interesting.

Having played hardcore D2 for quite a long time last time I played I had forgotten how tough softcore is in this game. I died a few times on my barb. My stuff was on the ground (please don't fall over BNet), as was almost all my gold, I was naked and couldn't afford the price of a merc ress.

I've made a Barbarian, at first with polearms then I respecced him to swords. It's nice that you can do that now.

I made a Werewolf Druid.

I made a summoner Necromancer.

I quickly realised that the game is far more comfortable with more advanced gear and that one of the first things I want to do in D3 and want to do on this revisit is magic find. I started remembering how that's done.

With an untwinked character you can hardly do better than a summoner nec. They can play pretty effectively regardless of gear which means I can concentrate on magic find and gold find gear. They can spend fights kicking pots and opening chests and gathering up loot. And they're very powerful.

This has got me thinking for D3 - most of this will probably remain more or less true, a summoner should be able to kill safely while wearing magic find and gold find even untwinked.

Public battlenet games are horrible because of all the level 1 bots that come into your game and spam advertising. I am getting around this in two ways - playing in passworded games or making a game with level restrictions. My first one I was level 12 and set the level restriction to within 11 but that proved too wide, level 1s could still get in. Next game I set it to 10, game was blissfully peaceful and several people wandered in to bump up my monsters and give me better exp.

BNet also proved very easy to access. I thought I was going to have some awful time of proving I was the person who legally owned my copy because the email I used 11 years ago is now defunct but you don't need any email at all, it's just optional and you can give the current one.

I had a look around the wikis etc for the game and was pleased in one case to see that theory I'd researched 10 years ago is still being used. However I don't think this time round I'll be so active in the theorycrafting. I'd rather keep most of my research private. Sometimes it can help to go public to get peer review of stuff you're not sure about but if I discover something awesome I'd rather sit on it.

Diablo 2 in general has held up really well. It looks fine. The animations, the little winces, grimaces and one-liners the characters come up with are superb. I think this is one of Blizzard's key strengths - the characters act in interesting ways. The Barbarian's Leap looks good and has an engaging grunt. Most games that aren't Blizzard games don't quite have such engaging mannerisms.

Another strength is the item system. Very early on I found an rare axe that was ethereal (+50% extra damage, but can't be repaired) and self-repairing. That's a really good item. And it's not unusual to find pretty exciting loot. I'm a big opponent of the Best In Slot philosophy that's arisen in games like WoW and Rift. BiS philosophy is figuring out from a site like EJ or Rawr what gear you should use in each slot for maximum mathematical efficacy, getting it and then.... what? WoW without the gear chase or the leveling is just meh. D2 and D3 are and will be different because there's no upper limit on gear quality. You can always get something better. This is also true of Prime BFD another game in development I'm looking forward to.

D2 gives you very significant quest rewards. After the kill ten rats quests of MMOs it's nice to do a quest that gives you a permanent skill point for killing all the monsters in The Den. In fact the reward's been upgraded since I last played - it additionally grants you a skill and stat respec now.

So yup, playing D2 has reminded me what made Blizzard a great games company and now I'm even more interested in Diablo 3.

Diablo 3: there's far too much nonsense being talked about tax

2011-08-05T21:32:00.002+01:00

Reading the comments and forum posts of people I'm realising there's an astonishing amount of ignorance about how tax works.

For the full picture check the website of your local tax office. But here's a short summary of how it works in most Western countries.

- you are liable to pay tax on your income. All income, certainly including AH profits. If you find a penny in the street you are liable to pay income tax on it.

- you cannot retroactively decide you're a business and your expenses (buying the game, your computer etc) are tax deductible. If you want to do this you will usually have to let them know you're a business.

- you cannot hide this income or stay under the radar. It's online run by companies who are obliged to give details of your transactions to the tax authorities.

- it's your responsibility. Not Blizzard's, not Paypal's not your tax authority's.

- in some countries (for example the USA and the UK) you may be able to avoid having to pay if they accept that this income is from a hobby. D3 item selling is likely to be a very borderline case and they may decide either way. They may even analyse game logs to see if you did magic finding runs. If you did and then sold the items for real money you may be deemed to be a trader.

If Al Capone played Diablo 3 he'd avoid paying tax.

OK those are facts, now I'll move to speculation.

- I think most tax authorities will realise a huge untaxed trade is occuring. If a million people sell items worth $20 over the course of a year and they pay 25% tax as their highest marginal that's $5 million lost government revenue. In an era where every country is desperate to balance its economy all of our governments are going to want high to perfect tax collection efficiency.

- I think the most likely first starting point for the tax authority will be a public awareness campaign. It's kinda absurd to jail people for selling a Sigon's Boots for $2. This is the point at which you should make sure you're compliant if you haven't done so before.

- they will probably then move to a targeted phase. You might get a letter or an email stating that they think you have undeclared income. DO NOT IGNORE THIS. Sort it out and pay what they ask.

- the last step is enforcement. They will take some people to court. This could be really expensive and damage your credit rating and employment prospects if you let it get to court. Don't, ask to settle with them out of court. If you fight it you will lose anyway and get a judgment recorded against you on your credit score.

Advice

- trade in gold not money. In particular don't regularly cash out money. Someone who takes £20 every month looks much more like a trader than someone who plays the game for a year then cashes £240 out. Be aware though that gold will deflate much faster than normal currency so keep your wealth fluid (for example buying cheap gems then selling them on all the time).

- consider buying stuff from the Blizzard store. This may help prove that your earnings are part of a hobby.

- don't ignore any official communication.

- don't expect any of your dealings to be kept secret from your tax authority.

- do accept that it is your personal responsibility to pay tax. I'm not suggesting you phone them every time you sell a rare but you should be aware that if you sell a lot you need to sort it out with your tax office.

- stop posting these stupid BLIZZ GONNA BE IN TROUBLE WITH THE IRS posts. They won't, you might be.

Diablo 3: initial thoughts on how the economy will play out

2011-08-05T05:25:00.005+01:00

Early adopter bonus

The Diablo 3 economy is, as Tobold explains, likely to be front-loaded. If you find the best bow in the game and are the first one you will be able to sell it for a lot of money. If you find it but you're the 1000th one you'll receive pennies or perhaps a few quid at most.

This translates into an early adopter bonus. If you get in on the headstart if there is one you'll make a lot of money. Beta keys are going to ilicitly trade hands for a lot of money as although the items won't survive you will have the opportunity to learn how to item farm. Power leveling of various types will be a sought after service.

If you work but are thinking you'd like to be a D3 financial magnate you might want to book a week or two of leave.

The regions are going to vary considerably.

The game will be divided into markets by its regionalisation.

When asked about the regional breakdown of the shop, Pardo said, "The primary reason why we're doing the Auction House per [real world] currency is for usability, and in some cases, with legality -- it's the easiest way to do it... There are going to be so many items in each auction house in every currency that there shouldn't even be need to shopping around in different currency houses."
Source

So that sounds like for UK there will be a pound-based national server network. This may mean it's the first ever online game here to be national, it almost doesn't make sense or at least it hasn't before to be both national and online.

What I don't know is whether we'll be able to play in other countries' regions. Here's a list of countries by GDP, if you want to play abroad for a better market the highest GDP at the moment belongs to Qatar and the highest English-speaking country is the United States of America. Both have things to recommend them for the professional D3 player - Qatar's wealth is concentrated in the hands of the superrich so we may see extremely high prices paid, USA of course has both a cultural and a constitutional commitment to hedonism.

I have no idea whether we'll be able to choose our region. I think I'm inclined to play in my real region rather than roll on a more lucrative one but if I find myself making decent money I would be tempted to get extra copies of the game to expand the business multinationally.

Taxation

Tax (for UK residents) is explained here if you receive a salary. It's "income from casual earnings, for example, tips or commission" If you're an employee or receive a company or personal pension you can receive up to £2,500 extra income in a year and still pay tax on it through your tax code. For amounts greater than £2,500 you'll have to complete a tax return and pay tax through Self Assessment. You receive a PAYE coding notice before the start of each tax year and let them know on that how much you expect to earn or you can contact them to let them know you earned over £2500 and need to pay through self assessment. It works just like income so if your work pays you £20,000 and Diablo 3 pays you £1500 you'll be taxed on an income of £21,500. (This is not professional tax advice and if you want to be completely sure contact HMRC).

It's entirely possible you may pay less tax if you register as a business because you will then be able to defray expenses (the cost of the box, a proportion of the cost of the computer equal to the extent to which the computer is used in pursuit of the business, banking costs, electricity etc). It's discussed here.(In the United States from a brief look I took it seems to be the other way around, it's better if they think your game items sales are proceeds from a hobby than from a business).

Most people will simply not report it anywhere and not pay any taxes. If you're seriously into item selling this could be a very bad idea if you're successful and they catch up with you. As it's all online and as this is the very game that's likely to make the Revenue wake up and start chasing trade in virtual items that's quite risky. In fact we're right in the middle of a special Inland Revenue campaign to detect online trading that doesn't match tax returns. With robots :-)

Item value

Value is going to concentrate on a few high end items and particular bonuses. The nature of Diablo is that you can only wear a finite amount of items while finding lots of them. Except for a rush at the start when any decent item will have a fair amount of value there are going to be just a few items that are worth significant money. In D2 people tended to value percentage-based damage reduction over almost anything so that is an example of a stat that would fetch a premium - if D3's mechanics play out the same way then the new equivalent of a Vampire Gaze will sell steadily. For a trader understanding the game is a key element in understanding the economy. And both play into each other, if you see a market spike in an item with an unusual bonus type there may be more to that bonus type than appears at first glance.

Value will be shaped by end game activity as follows:

- Magic find runs. Lots of people will do this with their high level characters and will see magic find and gold find as investments. It will certainly be worth spending a little to add a few percentage to either find percentage early on if the market is vibrant.

- Gold farming.

- Leveling. It's possible D3 will be a lot easier to hit max level in than D2 but it's unlikely to be as easy as WoW. We do know the level cap is lower but that doesn't necessarily mean the last ten levels won't take ages.

- PvP. PvP in this sort of game is only really viable with the best gear. If you're serious about trading you should learn the pvp game just so that you can understand the market. Every serious pvper will obtain full best in slot if possible.

- Arena. A specialised type of pvp. Blizzard has the opportunity to make insane money if they can make this successful. You see, it's all very well having a game where people can sell each other stuff but if that game were also a Magic: The Gathering type game where people are passionate about tournament play to the point they will spend thousands the two elements synergise extremely well.

- Elite encounters. While many boss level encounters will be fairly random it's likely that players will farm certain bosses in preference to others. And if there's an advantage doing that boss with a certain item people will maximise that. So if most people like to run King Leoric, and say he does a lot of cold damage, people might place a premium on cold resist gear. Wyatt Cheng explains boss encounters here.

- Crafting. Crafting sounds like a huge resource sink and what's more produces variable loot. This makes it a kind of lottery - there might be thousands of people in your region crafting rare rings but you could still get THAT RING, the one with perfect bonuses and the right bonus types. Top end crafted stuff will always sell for a decent amount as long as the game stays popular. And some people will buy up cheap junk by the tons just to level their artisans and obtain crafting mats.

- Crafting mats. Some crafting mats apparently are rare drop.

- Gems and Runestones. These will always sell as they can be converted to higher types. There may even be arbitrage opportunities where you can buy 3 gems, cube them, and put the higher one back on the market for three times what you paid. It takes 19,600 of the lowest level gem to make one of the highest level.

- Achievements. People will want to complete their list of achievements so items may sell based on their usefulness to this. For example if there is some jump you have to do people might buy items with a stat that boosts jumping distance. This will be a short term market as most people will buy the item, do the achievement, then sell it.

- Followers. Your persistent followers can wear gear. In D2 there was a trick where you burned down a boss like Mephisto with your 500% magic find then let your merc with his 200% magic find get the final blow for a 700% magic find kill. People will want to buy decent stuff for their followers.

- Other end game pursuits. Blizzard have been muttering about awesome end game activities. The gear needed for these will certainly sell.

What won't factor

- Ladder resets. There will be none.

- Hardcore mode. May as well call it "I went through all this and I didn't even get paid" mode. I'm put off from hardcore mode although I loved it in D2. What if I find an item that would be worth £10,000 but I found it in hardcore mode? Too annoying. I think eventually Blizzard may cave in and allow real money trading in hardcore mode but for now it's the last haven of the amateur.

Playing the market

First this market won't be like any previous markets and will more ressemble real world markets. In WoW if you kept track of the market fluctuations and downloaded some useful addons you were playing a different game to most people and what's more you might be one out of only a handful of people on your server playing it. In D3 there will be tons of people playing the market, there's quite possibly going to be phone apps so people who can't log in to the game while at work or traveling will still be playing the market. Just as in real life it's quite hard to play the commodities market because people really do know where surplus value appears so too will it be hard to play the D3 market because so many very smart people will be competing against you.

That said experience of playing the market in games like WoW and Eve will certainly be useful. One of the most expert players of the WoW market is Marcko, owner of Just My Two Copper. He's already put up his D3 gold site. I think he'll make a lot of money just selling gold guides and from internet advertising revenue, never mind his actual in-game profits.

He's pretty good even if he has been outed for being somewhat unethical once or twice. He's worth a look imo although I wouldn't recommend buying his gold guide or anyone's. You can get just about all of the information for free from websites including Marcko's blog and forums. I guess think of the guide you pay for as being at best an executive summary. If you don't want to read around you can get a short version for money.

Regarding the market let me explain some broad MMO economic principles.

- buyers have an amount of interest in buying that peaks around their most intensive playtimes. Since most buyers will be people with jobs this means that peak buying interest will occur in the evenings, on weekends, on holidays and at times when people usually take annual leave. A buyer who plays a lot, say taking two weeks off at Christmas is very likely to buy during that period because he or she becomes so immersed in the game (and because of a cultural tradition of spoiling ourselves at Christmas).

- sellers have a different schedule, it's more or less constant. Sure some sellers will be at school or at college but even there people will sell from their phone because sellers tend to see themselves as players of the market.

- information about the market has tended to be poor which means people have no clue what to sell things for. This will remain true for a lot of players in D3. They generally will look at the auction house to see what to price stuff for. This means if an item spikes low most suppliers will continue to undercut by a small margin.

- value will degrade very quickly early on. However a lot of people won't know this and will think their Windforce is worth £2,000 just because the first one sold for that.

- casual players will not cross-reference the gold AH with the real money AH creating opportunities for arbitrage both ways. You may be able to buy something for £5, sell it for £10 worth of gold, use the gold to buy an item on the gold auction house that sells for £15.

- learning the auction house and keeping detailed records will be extremely useful. It's possible third party apps may emerge to help track ah details but be very careful about downloading anything that isn't official. One of the best ways for other people to make gold is to steal yours.

- new opportunities emerge every time the game is changed. If the devs says the next patch will improve fire damage then buy up fire damage items to sell on patch day.

- people will manipulate the markets, possibly to the extent of spending thousands of pounds. The basic example of this is the monopoly. Say I buy all the Lemon Fist Axes available then list one or two at a very high price. Ideally I supplement it with a post on the forums about my amazing Lemon Barb. As demand grows I release my stock, ideally at the high point of demand and the low point of supply. A word of caution - this is not a beginner tactic. I've tried it a few times in Eve without any real success, you need to really know the market. What tended to happen to me is I would buy something that didn't have many sell orders and people would just replace it at the same price. In a market like this there will be a lot of stockpiling, a monopolist's day can easily be ruined by someone spotting the price rising and having a big stockpile of the commodity.

- undercutting. The 1p undercut (1 cent, 0.01 isk, 1 copper) is the default method of selling for most players. Max revenue for least amount of thought. You can manipulate this by listing low then buying out the people who undercut you. I suspect though that in D3 if you try that you will just see your item sell immediately. Deep undercutting, a strategy Gevlon popularised for WoW, is unlikely to work well. He used it to intimidate other crafters out of the glyph market. He was dealing with one or two suppliers. In a game with thousands of suppliers, many of them very sophisticated you won't be able to do this so easily.

- information is power. Revealing specifics, or even a general post like this one, reduces profit.

For all that if anyone makes a fortune in Diablo 3 it will be those playing the market. The game is effectively creating a new unregulated stock market, it is going to be a financial Wild West.

Prime BFD: New screenshots

2011-08-03T06:43:00.001+01:00

http://www.primeonline.com/media/screenshots/

Here's the one I picked as my new desktop:

Diablo 3: who wants to be a professional gamer?

2011-08-01T23:14:00.009+01:00

And the heavens shall tremble reads Blizzard's Diablo 3 website. Well the games press is certainly trembling today as Blizzard announces that players will be able to sell each other in-game items for real world money in forthcoming title Diablo 3.

And Lo! Lord Pardo decreed that their bank balances shall tremble!

The Washington Post covered this story in their business section, presumably they consider this news may affect Activision Blizzard's share price.

Gamasutra heard it straight from the horse's mouth, Mr Rob Pardo explaining the details in a press conference at Blizzard's Irvine CA office.

Then for the big news. Pardo began by discussing the importance of trading items in Diablo, how it had been done online in Diablo II: via manual exchanges, forum posts, or IRC, and "shady third party sites full of gray market stuff." He said, "We can make it better."

With the Diablo III Auction House, players will have a fully-integrated marketplace that allows them to buy and sell items, gold, and components with real-world currency (tentatively divided into U.S. dollars and euros, among others) in their respective territories. According to him, it's based on the World of Warcraft Auction House, but with refinements. Diablo III's iteration allows for auto-bidding and instant buyouts, smart searches based on class, a shared stash, and secure item transfers.

Pardo was swift to mention that it's not an official "Blizzard Store," but a clearinghouse for players to have an open market to facilitate the trading of in-game items with each other. Players will be anonymous during trades, and there will be restrictions on the buying and selling of goods with real-world currency for those who choose to play in Hardcore mode.

He then outlined initial details of transactions. There will be a fee for both item listings and sales. Should players accept in-game currency, their payment will go toward their Battle.net e-balance, which covers auction items, WoW subscriptions, and pets. Should players decide to cash out their items, a currently-unannounced third-party payment provider will handle the transaction and take a percentage of the sale. There won't be any limits on item trading, but there will be a 24-hour cooling period before players can resell a purchased item.

Pardo intimated that if Blizzard didn't take the steps to bring e-commerce in-house, someone else would step in and profit from it. "Players want this... We could take a harder stance, but with Diablo, we think [the Auction House] will end up being a good thing," he said. The fact that in-game bartering and selling had "become a metagame of its own," in his words, was another motivator for launching the new feature.

This post was brought to you by the Activision CEO and the Powers of Darkness.

This move incurs a number of legal risks which I believe Blizzard is prepared for and wants to tackle head on.

This article on Eve Online covers some of the implications that follow virtual money becoming real money.

In particular I would draw your attention to the part where the author discusses the games developer becoming effectively a bank.

Under Blizzard's proposed system a player would send them real money, that they would keep in escrow in an account assigned to the player until s/he found items that s/he wished to purchase whereupon they would transfer money from his/her account to the seller.

If it's a real account with real money in that rather sounds like a bank, doesn't it? Sure it's a bank with rather unusual restrictions but I can put money in, take money out and authorise payments to third parties.

There's also the gambling issue. If I do a Pindleskin run knowing I will probably get nothing but I have a 1 in a million chance of a Windforce worth $2000 then isn't that essentially just a reskinned online fruit machine? Do gambling laws apply?

I think that Blizzard is trying to push back the legal restrictions on what is acceptable. This may result in no one really complaining in which case practices considered somewhat shocking now will become commonplace and can later be defended on the grounds that they are usual practice. They may be bitterly contested by lobby groups or class actions in which case Blizzard is likely to throw an army of lawyers into the arena (and they'll be able to afford to from their cut of all the transactions). Blizzard may lose in court in which case they may try to lobby the legislature for law reform.

It's even possible that Blizzard may establish this as normal practice by buying off court actions by settling them. If what they are doing is enforcably wrong but no cases ever get to court because they always settle then after a while what they are doing becomes standard industry practice, is adopted by their competitors and is suddenly much harder to root out.

It makes sense for games companies to take over the third party market. It wouldn't surprise me if more money has been made on World Of Warcraft by people who are not Blizzard than the company itself. It's worth a lot of money to take control of this business.

Whatever happens the MMO hobby will change. I do think the rest of the industry should let Blizzard be an early adopter in this and let them take the risks. But imagine if in a few years this is a battle Blizzard has won for the developers. Imagine crafting in Prime knowing each master crafted epic is worth $5 real cash that will clear a few days after you sell the item. Very interesting eh?

Prime BFD: the dark art of murdering resource collectors

2011-07-31T02:36:00.002+01:00

My main motive in Prime BFD is crafting. I've been thinking about life as a crafter in strategic terms and come to some conclusions:

IT'S ALL ABOUT THE STUFF

Harvestables, my precious, precioussss harvesssstablessss.

By stuff I mean resources, which get pumped out of the ground by harvesters planted by members of all 3 factions all over the map and which in many cases will be collected by a solo and distracted player.

First off, how do I get my stuff without getting ganked

- I should play a class that's able to collect harvestables and get them to safety without getting ganked. We know a bit about "safety" from something Sanya told us regarding the auction house system, that it's accessed via the "mailbox". In other words if I reach a mailbox and post it to myself (or post it as an over-priced auction I can later cancel from a safe place) that let's me move stuff safely.

- I should be able to steal schematics from the other faction.

Now I want to play a Salent Antelis as my main but how am I going to manage the crafting? Well my main will be an armourtech which means I will need an alt to harvest with (or more than one alt). And surely that alt can be no other class than a Rogue type. Rogue types are the ones who get the ability to steal schematics and they also get stealth.

Let's have a look at the Salent Rogue-type: the Wraith. It has the following class skills:

Biofuse: A heal, becoming a group heal when maxxed.
Thrust: Probably a melee attack
Blast: Presumably a ranged attack
Cloak: stealth
Impair: the icon is a grappling hook, I'm guessing this is a snare
Carve: probably a melee attack
Phase Port: a short duration teleport, mentioned by Warren as a way of closing distance.
Slash: presumably a melee attack.
Exploding shot: presumably an aoe ranged attack.
Incapacitate: some kind of CC, the icon is rather humorously some poor chap going arse over tit over a tripwire.
Disarm: I expect this does just what it says.
Frenzy: I'm guessing a short duration dps buff.
Override: confirmed as the CC break skill that all classes get.
Sniper: ranged attack.
Analyze Enemy: I'd guess it allows for a more accurate version of the standard conning.

So as a harvestables carrier/schematic thief the 6 maxxed abilities should be:
Cloak
Incapacitate
Phase Port
Override
plus two others, probably Impair and some kind of attack. Complete emphasis on escape and evasion. If Frenzy is a speed burst then that might be one to pick up too.

The main point of danger is at the machine emptying it decloaked. Anyone camping the machine will make their move. You can only cloak once per fight so if they start cloaked they can't recloak during combat and for a few seconds after but I can cloak. So it's important to Override any CC, Incapacitate them then Cloak, possibly phase porting first then Cloaking. Gearing is basically for stamina, I want the maximum survival time to get myself safe before one or multiple gankers manage to kill me and loot me.

It's likely that if you're collecting from harvesters in dangerous areas you will occasionally meet targets you can murder for their harvestables. This is a rather nice bonus. So that's a secondary consideration for this build - once he is maximised in effectiveness at sneaking in and out with stuff he can work up his assassination skills. It's always possible of course that any solo player harmlessly bumbling around his harvesters is in fact bait for an evil gang of invisible gankers.

An even more sneaky idea involves using a Human character. The game has a black market which may allow a certain amount of cross faction trading. The game does prohibit rolling on multiple factions with one account but they don't stop you playing more than one account. I could have a Salent main and alts plus on a second account have a Human Spy.

So possibly I could steal schematics with the Human from my own side and somehow get them across to my main. This would allow me to catch up rival armour techs who don't want to share. Since I play Salent I can see from looking at the auction house which Salent armour tech is able to make the Uber Helm of Uberness and /friend in these games usually allows one to track him down. Also having a Human alt tells me which Humans my Salent wraith alts should rob for their schematics and having a Salent character tells me which Salents my Human alt should be robbing.

Human Spies make amazing thieves because they have the ability to Disguise themselves as someone on a different faction. There's also an Interpret ability which I'm guessing is the ability to talk cross-faction. (You'd be a bit obvious if you couldn't talk). That's an utterly evil ability as you could do things like make a party of main + alt + noob harvester, take him round all his machines collecting his stuff as "bodyguards", go afk for a bio to see if he will too (people usually do) gank him with the spy while he's afk and steal his stuff, then come back and go "we beat them off but you died, is your stuff ok?" and walk back to town whistling innocently, listening to him whine, his stuff unnoticed in your alt's backpack.

Milder forms of metagaming may include intel on Human harvesters for our side to go gank, rumourmongering, dirty tricks on rival Salent crafters (mainly ganking their harvesters) and military intelligence. Best of all with a Human Spy alt I can infiltrate the Rodons and find out where their guys harvest too.

Hopefully whoever gets into Beta will have a chance to test this sort of metagaming as people will certainly ruthlessly exploit any weaknesses after the game goes Live.

Eve Online: It's cold and dark out there

2011-07-29T16:14:00.001+01:00

I've ventured into the arena of small gang warfare in Eve. Although I have quite a progressed character I never seem to be able to fly the right ship. Fortunately the corp is reasonably relaxed about what you fly as long as you don't expect reimbursements for it. We have a list of fits that one theoretically gets reimbursed for losing but at the moment we don't have reimbursements as we've lost all our moons.

We live in NPC space and in calmer times the higher ups drop POSes on moons which collect money apparently. Some of the people we've been annoying though have developed a nasty habit of blowing them up so we took them down.

Our main gameplay is just flying around looking for fights. We're very territorial about our little corner of space even though in game mechanic terms we don't own it. It's actually owned by a Minmatar sub-faction called Thukker Tribe who are kinda halfway between nullsec pirates and empire carebears as NPCs go. Anyway they do a lousy job at shooting passing tourists gankers and gang roams so we've manfully stepped in to fill the breach.

Any new pilot to zero zero is well advised to fly tackle and this is what I've been doing. Tackle means small fast ships that can stop other ships warping off and slow them down. The key mods are a warp scrambler or warp disruptor and a stasis webifier. You also need a microwarp drive to have a hope of catching anything.

My ship of choice is the Crow, a Caldari interceptor.

My weapon of choice.

Crows are fun, fragile and relatively cheap while being very useful. I've lost 3 so far but shot a lot of ships. My isk ratio is something like 94% according to the killboard site but those sites cheat awfully by counting every kill you had a hand in as full value to you. (So if 5 of us kill 5 10m isk ships then all die we'll end up 50m isk damage done and 10m isk damage taken). I'm still well ahead.

I forget what the first loss was, think it was just a big gang on gang thing and I didn't respond to the "marines, we are leaving" order quick enough. My second was a heroic volunteering to go bravely forth and act as bait against a solo Crusader camp. I think that was a skill issue - I got too close and too straight I needed to point him while orbiting at 20 km. My third was a well spent sacrifice - two of us gave up interceptors to stop a Dramiel escaping. I very nearly had a fourth loss when I tried to solo a Rifter. Although only a tech one Frigate Rifters are very powerful and it utterly demolished my speedy little tech two ship. I managed to escape with no shields, no armour and only 30% of my structure left. Fortunately the gentleman was kind enough to wait around while I flew home, smoke pouring out of the back of the ship, docked, boarded my Drake and went back after him with 5 of my mates. You can never be too sure against Rifters as this gentleman will attest.

Prime BFD: crafting web page updated - close analysis

2011-07-28T01:19:00.001+01:00

PitchBlack Games have updated their website with new info about crafting in Prime. The screenshots tell us quite a lot about crafting in the game over and beyond what the captions say.

Here's the site:
http://www.primeonline.com/game/professions/

First, a recap

I'm going to recap some things that we already knew for the benefit of those who haven't been following the game. We know already:

- Prime will heavily depend on player crafters for gear. Mobs won't drop gear and NPC vendors will presumably sell white loot as unexciting as in every other MMO.

- Gear decays and eventually breaks. You not only have to buy gear from players but you have to keep buying gear from players.

- Character progression is skill based and you will only have enough points for 6 maxxed out skills. We don't know for sure whether professions will use one of these skills but it seems quite likely. If so then most professions will require both Harvesting and another skill (eg Armour Tech) and quite possibly Invention too.

The professions are:
- Armourtech
- Biotech (buffs)
- Weapontech
- Harvester
- Inventor (new schematics, this function can be performed by stealth players who steal tech off the other factions)
- Chemist (seems to be another buffer)
- Soldier for Hire - receives cash from the government and can use special illegal weapons.

Now, about this new professions tutorial:

1. There are varying grades of materials.

There are varying grades of materials.

I enlarged the picture and zoomed in. The highlighted item is Titanium, Grade 80. This suggests a simplified SWG like system using resource stats. This fits with the resource finding system we've already been shown.

In other words if you've been finding Titanium, Grade 80 you can make better armour if you can only find a better spawn. Next week a new spawn of Titanium appears but it's grade 75 so barely worth harvesting. The week after some Titanium grade 90 spawns. This is so good that not only do you put all your harvesters on it but you ask your guildies to harvest some too so you can grab as much as possible before the spawn vanishes.

Also interesting in the picture is the large backpack. It has 7 by 9 spaces. It is open to page 2 of 3. That suggests that the total backpack space is 189 squares. We have been told we would be given a generous amount of backpack space - it certainly appears to be true. We have also been told that weight isn't a factor so if we want to jetpack around with 189 stacks of concrete it appears we will be able to.

The dialogue in the picture says:

AverageJoe45: hey Maximus where you at? Can't wait on you all day.
Maximus: Relax I'll be there in a minute, I'm taking a screenshot for the website!
DragonofPeace: Hurry up these Rodons aren't going to kill themselves!
Maximus: :)

I now want to play a Rodon inventor and invent black mascara and Joy Division.

2. The grade of material you use in making an item determines its quality.

The grade of material you use in making an item determines its quality.

The blue text on the selected item reads
Grips of Deflection
Rare
Hands
Armor 45
Dexterity +5
Deflection +8

OK so it looks very likely we will see a Green for Uncommons Blue for Rares Purple for Epics colour code system. And we can see that the combat system will use multiple defensive stats like WoW's.

3. Carrying out your profession is accomplished by pulling up its in-game interface.


Carrying out your profession is accomplished by pulling up its in-game interface.

The picture of the crafting interface shows us a number of interesting elements.

It says Armortech Workstation level 600. Presumably that's the skill level of the player although it is possible that different workstations apply different bonuses as they did in SWG.

Crafting schematics are grouped logically by type which will be a relief to those of us who have struggled with some crafting interfaces in MMOs.

The Schematics Selected has one space for a schematic (ie a blueprint) a space of the schematics name then up to ten boxes for materials. It is likely that more complex items may use more materials.

There's a box for a Working Est., probably a working estimate of time it will take to finish the craft. This doesn't look like a quick crafting system.

I have no idea what the little dolls with white marks indicate. They don't correlate to the list of armour types on the left.

Not sure what the boxes at the bottom are.

And last you can Create or Experiment. The obvious uses of these buttons are that Create makes one item, experiment has a chance to create a new pattern based on the item, maybe we could experiment on those blue gloves schematic to make some epic gloves. In SWG however Experiment was a way to tinker with the properties of an item to make it better and all decent gear was experimented for quality improvement.

4. You can create items by using materials and known schematics from your library.

You can create items by using materials and known schematics from your library.

In the Library list on the left the hands section is opened and shows 5 recipes:
Cobalt Grips
Heavy Grips
Grips of Malice
Iron Wall Grips
Grips of Deflection (the blue quality gloves we saw highlighted earlier).

Cobalt Grips is selected and is green texted. I'm guessing they're Uncommon. 6 of the resource boxes are filled each with 1 resource. The first appears to be Tritanium.

We're looking at a system that is considerably more complex than WoW's. Where the basic green quality gloves in WoW might use 2 copper bars this uses 6 resources of variable stats. And later on the webpage we're told the crafter's skill plays a part (I think this guy is 600 skill out of a possible 1000 max) and we're told that stats may vary even for identically produced items.

5. Only "Unique" items will not be craftable. Everything else can be reverse engineered and crafted by a player.

It's not clear whether reverse engineering is done by the Inventor profession or by the profession relevant to the particular item type (eg Armourtechs for armour).

6. You can also acquire many schematics from other Expert NPC's or advanced players.

You can also acquire many schematics from other Expert NPC's or advanced players.

OK the Working Est box now says 2.29, presumably 2 minutes 29 seconds to create one pair of green quality gloves. The squares under it show the materials actually used I assume (as distinct from the resources required by the schematic shown above).

The control panel on the bottom right of the UI has two of its panels highlighted. I'm guessing the panel at 11 o'clock opens your inventory and the panel at seven o'clock opens your workstation.

7. You can also experiment by changing one or more of the components in an existing schematic or by trying your own unique combinations.

You can also experiment by changing one or more of the components in an existing schematic or by trying your own unique combinations.

In this screenshot he's experimenting. No item is selected from the schematics window because he's trying a unique combination and doesn't know what he will get. Expected time is 5 minutes. He's put 6 resources in the window, I guess it could be any random resources, he's used the ones he had in there to show us the recipe from before.

It sounds like he could have decided instead to keep the Cobalt Grips selected and experiment based on that schematic rather than going for something completely random.

8. When you successfully create an item from one of your experiments it is automatically added to your library of schematics.

When you successfully create an item from one of your experiments it is automatically added to your library of schematics.

He's invented an item, a green quality hat called an Assassin's Helm. The new schematic uses 4 resources to make, one of which is Titanium. It appears as though the system looked at the resources he was playing around with and found some that make a recipe. So a key to experimentation might be that you need to have all the resources present that go to make up the item you hope to discover. Presumably players will very quickly put up lists and inventors will go to the crafting interface with an "I need one of these plus one of these plus one of those to invent this" attitude rather than the exploratory gameplay we see implied here. Of course if you want to explore just don't research the answer first.

The helm seems to match the doll with the white lines on its head so maybe those dolls in the middle are signifiers of the location the item is worn.

9. About Items.

Durability - Items have a finite lifespan.
There are ranges even within each quality. One rare item will more than likely have different stats from an identically produced and named rare item.
The skill of the crafter does play a role in determining that final stats on an item.
There is a skill requirements in order to make an item but not for acquiring its schematic.
As a faction progresses, special schematics may be introduced that advances their technology. So it is very possible for one faction to possess technology and schematics that another one does not.
There are schematics in the game that will be discovered through experimentation and invention. In other words, the items will not exist in the world at all until the players discover the schematics and create the items.

This is only an introduction to creating items in Prime Battle For Dominus. Once you get started, you can experiment to find the finer nuances of each profession. There are a wide variety of professions to help you find your niche in the economy.

Prime BFD: fan fic

2011-07-22T22:14:00.002+01:00

Decided to try my hand at fan fic. Hope you like it.

8th Platoon, Proud Members of the glorious 134th fighting Foot

Most of a soldier's life is dull. Don't get me wrong mind it's not all dull. Only 90%. There's the other 10%, the days where it isn't dull, you just wish it was.

Let me tell you about one of those days.

It started with a bang. A huge bang a great explosion that jerked me out of sleep rolling sideways into the brush my hand on my gun barrel trying muzzily to get my bearings.

Big Willy walked back into the clearing where we had been camped. A giant of a man he was our heavy weapons specialist. He looked like a big affable goon but he had a mean streak like a cornered weasel and assumed anything he couldn't understand was some kind of snide insult. As he wasn't terribly bright this caused him to lead a life of some considerable bitterness. And as if all this wasn't bad enough God in his infinite cruelty had made the poor sod Scottish.

“The wee slen'karj just pooped on ma heid,” he whined.

Sure enough his hair was decorated with a white gloopy substance that was beginning to dribble down over his left ear. Behind him an alder tree burned fiercely.

“Let me get this right,” the Old Man said coldly.

“A bird pooped on your head,” the Old Man said coldly.

“So you shot it,” the Old Man said coldly

“With a freaking MININUKE?” the Old Man asked, his voice giving way to mild hysteria.

The Old Man as we called him, Sergeant Forbes to outsiders, signalled the Move Out and we slipped away from the clearing packing our belongings as we marched. Ghost our scout had disappeared somewhere up ahead. Big Willy avoided meeting our gazes.

As we marched away Tasha, our medic, began to berate Big Willy. I couldn't quite hear the conversation as she was whispering quietly but urgently while Willy massaged bird poop into his scalp. I thought I could make out the words “reckless” and "alert the enemy”. This wasn't going to end well.

“A WEE BIT O' RADS NE'ER HURT ANYONE!” shouted Big Willy exasperated eventually. The Old Man glared back at them and they both fell instantly silent. I beckoned Tanya over to me, mainly to keep her from provoking Big Willy into getting us all killed but also partly out of sympathy. I'm a nice guy at heart.

“Your first tour?” I asked quietly out of the corner of my mouth, not wanting the Old Man to catch us whispering.

She nodded.

“Big Willy's all right, he's just a bit thick.”

She nodded unhappily.

“One thing though. Do not ever under any circumstances in any situation if your life depends upon it ever ever call him mental.”

She looked at me a little wildly.

“It really annoys him,” I said apologetically.

Just then the Old Man glanced back and we shut up.

I didn't know if there were hostiles around. In the hills above New York City we'd lost a few patrols, everyone assumed to lizards. Everyone needed it to be lizards. Because the Shimmers they were our friends. Intelligence told us they were our friends. We all really hoped they were our friends despite certain rumours that got themselves shared after the camp fires went out.

Ghost was waiting up ahead. He gave us the Quiet, Hostiles signal. We melted into the bushes, I couldn't hear a sound from the others.

Standing procedure was for me to move to the right flank and wait. Combat waiting is like boring waiting but much, much sweatier. The mugginess of the day, the heaviness of my battle armour, the weight of the cannon I was lugging around wasn't helping me. After a while I began to hear Duncan, our Engineer, constructing a few surprises and made a mental note not to go back into the front part of the copse in the vale again.

I waited about half an hour, no sight or sound of the others except for the occasional gentle metallic tapping from the copse and then it all kicked off. There was a huge explosion from about a mile ahead followed by a chain of smaller explosions. Then came a really big explosion, from up ahead smoke pillared into the sky like some satanic genie.

There was a brief lull then the sound of gunfire. Lots of gunfire. I felt a rising panic that I knew wasn't natural – damn, they had psykers. It settled, Dennis, our own Telepath damping out the psychic waves from the hostiles. Weirdos playing table tennis with my soul. It really wasn't helping me relax.

I could see down into a valley at the bottom of which was a copse of trees. Scattered brush and hedges and brambles covered the slope. It began to sway in places, erratically. Almost time to start work...

There was an explosion in the brambles, someone on our side had tossed a welcoming grenade and it all kicked off for real now, up close and personal. As they stood I realised there were a couple of dozen lizards, we were badly outnumbered. Time to make a difference.

I began with a tactical nuke, airburst, just above the officer's head. Nukes ain't just for tweety birds. It vaped the officer's head, his headless torso ran off for a few seconds before collapsing twitching and it killed or knocked out several nearby lizards. I followed up with a brace of fragmentation grenades. As some of them escaped upwards I launched a salvo of drunken missiles the trails weaving madly in the sky as they chased the jetpackers down.

All kinds of badness was raining down on them now, the slope had become a blazing inferno of fire, explosion and bullets. Plus some psyker stuff – one of the lizards lost interest in the rest of us and began clawing out his eyes to escape from whatever demons Dennis had dropped into his head.

After ten minutes the Old Man yelled “Cease Fire” from somewhere off to my left. The gunfire stopped. The brambles burned with a cheery crackle, festooned with blackened and killed Rodons.

I didn't move for five minutes. No sign that anyone else did. Then I headed back towards where I thought the others were. I felt I ought to check on Tasha, our rookie.

I found her in a forest glade, lying in a pool of her own blood, her eyes staring wide in horror. Something had gutted her from behind. Big Willy emerged from the bushes, his face sombre.

I respectfully closed her eyes. Couldn't do much about her entrails though. I took her tags and her water bottle. Willy took her rations and her wallet.

“Tell yer what, I was right about one thing,” he said, handing me a biscuit.

I looked at him inquiringly.

“She never died o' cancer like she said she was gonna.”

Prime BFD: thoughts on crafting

2011-07-22T04:51:00.002+01:00

Here's a repost of something I said on Prime's forums.

I'm going to make a long contribution because I love crafting and have given the matter a lot of thought.

Let me preface things with a short summary of my crafting career in games.

I started crafting with Lego, age 2, and it was neither M, nor M, nor O. I quickly moved on to baking jam tarts at nursery school, age 3, and while it wasn't M yet it was certainly M although not O.

After adoring the magic item making interfaces in Demon's Winter (Atari ST) and Daggerfall I spent weeks making Daggerfall potions. Daggerfall was M in that there were a lot of other people doing the same thing, it wasn't M, but it was just at the start of games being O as we potion obsessives compared recipes on forums.

I moved on to Diablo II an adventure game where almost as a throwaway they allowed us to make magic items in our Horadric Cube. I achieved what is perhaps the pinnacle of success for experimental players when after a post I had written on playing an almost invulnerable Barbarian in hardcore permadeath mode using a full set of crafted safety items appeared on the front page of a fan site Blizzard radically nerfed Cube crafting. Nerfing, not imitation, is the most sincere form of flattery. Gameplay was now Massive, I played with hundreds of different players, Multiplayer in games of up to 8 and Online.

My first MMO that was widely recognised as such was Star Wars: Galaxies which I played for most of 2003, occasionally surfacing to pay bills, eat food and reluctantly attend family events like Christmas.

In Galaxies I started out as a Medic, soon becoming a Doctor. In fact I was the first Master Doctor publicly buffing on my server in a game where hardcore players relied on buffs and buffs were insanely good. I would receive twenty tells while loading into the game and hunting meat to make my buffs with was mostly a matter of explaining to people when I would next be back in Coruscant. Perhaps unsurprisingly I burned out, changing to Master Armoursmith. This became one of the most interesting crafting characters I have ever played.

SWG was designed around player interdependency. You needed medics and doctors to heal you, entertainers to heal a different bar and crafters to get stuff. Dropped and vendor loot might as well not have existed it was so weak. What's more there were no alts – one character per server. If you didn't want to personally play a Droid Engineer as your main you had to buy your droids from someone who did.

What's more all quality was concentrated at the top. There was armour made by a Master Armoursmith who was a skilled player who worked hard on resource gathering and there was crap.

I became the second best Armoursmith on the server and was widely considered the best because of a gimmick I came up with – designer armour. “”Designer” has become one of those words that just means “good” but originally in the rag trade it meant something quite specific – clothing made to the designer's specifications rather than the customer's (that stuff is known as “tailored”). Everything I made was a specific design, a rather snazzy black base with red lapels and stripes. Every piece of Armour I made had the exact same design as every other piece, people would offer me millions to make them a suit of purple armour and I'd send them to a competitor.

People adored it, I couldn't make stuff fast enough and I was as popular as the top man whose stuff had clearly better stats.

What I liked about Armoursmithing was not just the adulation of the masses but the minigame behind the making of it. To make good armour I had to tour the galaxy every week checking patiently for each type of mineral on my shopping list on each planet. If I found a good resource I'd either scan it down and drop harvesters (if it was a resource that lurked beneath the earth) or run after it hitting it (if it was a resource that ran around sqwawking). I would arrange with friendly player tailors and artisans to buy crates of certain sub-components that I needed.

Making a suit required a number of separate sub-component crafts many of which themselves involved sub-components made by myself or other types of player crafter and each craft was a turn-based minigame where I could make decisions about how to play the minigame that might alter the stats of the final item. Making the final combine depended on carefully spending “experimentation points” to alter stats. I could make the armour more resistant to falling apart, easier to wear or more likely to keep the person inside alive. People wrote extensive theory about armoursmithing on websites, we even invented a name for the science of SWG armourcrafting theorising: Layerology.

It was the most fun I ever had in a MMO and a very memorable character.

So to Prime. (Hey you – wake up, I'm being relevant!)

Prime is going to launch directly against SWTOR. They are broadly similar games. SWTOR has many advantages – it's a more famous setting, it's had a lot of money spent on it and it's from a well-regarded veteran studio. For Prime to succeed it needs to not fight SWTOR on its own turf, it needs to look at how SWTOR is deciding to do things and do things different.

Particularly crafting.

SWTOR is launching with a dumbed down version of WoW's dumbed down crafting. Hell, it's not even crafting imo. You get your stuff and click a button and it pops out. If that's crafting then clicking a clip into your Sig & Sauer is manufacturing a pistol.

Crafting is a major opportunity for Prime BFD to blow the pants off off the competition.

A good crafting system and a good player economy is zero sum game design. Every decision that makes the crafting game good, every decision that makes the economy interesting makes someone else's gameplay less fun.

In WoW everyone is a master crafter. In WoW no one is a master crafter. If you make crafting so painless, so accessible, it ceases to become gameplay and just becomes a chore. No one in WoW loves crafting the way I loved my armoursmith. It's just something you grind for +40 Stamina.

So this is how I think crafting in Prime should go:

yes to complexity
yes to no upper limit (you can always get better)
yes to rewarding those who hunt down the best resources
yes to stats on resources
yes to crafting being miles better than dropped loot
yes to crafters being dependent on combat characters to get the best resources (Prime, but also resources harvested from dangerous animals like Rancor hide
yes to crafting optimally requiring multiple maxxed skills (so you don't just have maxxed Master Weaponsmith then five maxxed skills to be awesome at combat with).
yes to item decay and destruction
yes to variations in stats from piece to piece
yes to crafting requiring a turn-based minigame
yes to kick ass killers developing friendships with awesome crafters
no to squirrels being discovered on death to have been carting suits of plate mail around.
no to best in slot
no to everyone being a master crafter
no to WoW's crafting system reskinned

Seriously folks, let's support a Prime that blows SWTOR out of the water on gameplay. So we're playing a “I've been saving this Kalameshi 3.09 Sniper Rifle for a special occasion – take it and cover me I'm going after his stash” game while they're being told to kill ten rats by a Welsh-accented thesbian.

Prime Battle for Dominus

2011-07-19T00:43:00.004+01:00

An avatar-based sci fi game is in the works from PitchBlack games of Phoenix, Arizona. Sub-based MMORPG.

Their site is here: http://www.primeonline.com/

With superb timing it manages to be highly evocative of Star Wars: Galaxies and also brings back DAOC's much-missed three way faction brawl. It also seems to be taking a leaf out of Trion's book in terms of professionalism (although early to say that, hope that doesn't come back to haunt me!). It certainly is looking more streamlined than the games that have influenced it.

The game has three factions that are unique races, 2 alien and one human. Each race has 6 classes. The alien classes are original and interesting while the human ones are very reminiscent of SWG including medics wielding stim packs and commandos wielding assault cannons. I think I'm going to play an Antelis http://www.primeonline.com/game/classes/antelis/

Character progression is a hybrid of class-based and skill-based. You will progress your skills by filling up boxes with experience points.

PVE is all of the expected standard fodder plus also dynamic events managed by a member of staff. They do this in Eve, there are quite frequent Live events, I got blown up at one recently. I just wonder if this features implies that they're aiming for a single server game. They haven't said so anywhere else but managing hand moderated events in a structure like Rift's (which had ninety-something servers at launch) would be a nightmare. Another key element of the PVE is a mission system - does anyone else here miss running 'naff missions out of Coruscant in SWG?

Another element I like is this: "There are a few "instanced" PVE areas that require a small group of 6 players, but most of Prime's encounters are open world and therefore it's up to the players themselves to decide how many players should comprise the group." I found in Rift, where I ran a raid guild it was much more comfortable all round doing 5 and 10 man raid rifts in the open world where I could bring any number up to 20 than trying to herd my cats to the specific demands of 20 man instanced raids.

PVP consists of open world pvp as you grow more powerful (I guess they mean higher level areas are more likely to be contested), large scale world faction battles, an arena system and a bounty hunter system. You can gain renown by surviving with high bounties on you.

The professions page implies a rich crafting system. Interestingly it states "Players will travel far and wide to purchase the weapons of a high-end Weapontech." That is not the case in WoW where everyone and his brother is a master crafter but it was the case in Galaxies. Of course that may just be marketing department flavour text. The resource surveying system is demonstrated in one of the videos (linked below). Looks like players will be in for a lot of resources hunting and that certain areas may be rich in specialised and valuable resources - an interesting design feature in a gameworld carved up into 3 pvping factions.

Combat is a straight forward tab target hotkey based system although there's no autoattack. Players have a health bar and an energy bar, HAM has not been brought back to haunt us. You drop harvested resources when killed - I can see an emergent playstyle already!

A blog piece is here (and is how I heard about it): http://www.keenandgraev.com/?p=5208
Interestingly Keen took one look at the SWG-style hotter/warmer resource scanning system and thought "I'm in." It's the little things...

Youtube has 6 videos that I found, 3 interviews (well technically I think they're monologues as no questions are asked) and 3 demos of gameplay:

Interview: Warren Weems CEO on the corporate and production background.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPp1m2lDu0o&feature=related

Interview: Lee Phemister Art Lead talks about the art team.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT3GrBrvEqg

Interview: Zyad Khadri Art Director on the look and the feel of the art and design.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOPD838vg7w&feature=related

Short demo: Character creation. Pretty cool sci fi armour for the humans, nice monster look for the Rodons.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijSDIyzJxGc

Short demo: Start area, UI, mob combat, resource surveying.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MP0KIFOfUE

Long dev Q&A (55 minutes)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UVodT1PPCU

They have a careers page which currently has 2 jobs on it:
http://www.pitchblackgames.com/home/jobs.cfm

AoC: For Blood and Glory!

2011-07-08T01:51:00.001+01:00

I tried Age of Conan's new Blood and Glory, ultra pvp server tonight and had a really fun time. The server was due to go live earlier today, was cancelled, then got green lighted after 3 hours of downtime. I logged on with a friend at about 8.30 UK time and have played for 5 hours, reaching level 14.

For the first few levels the main difference to regular AoC is the chat. It's jocularly obscene with lashing of extra smack. We were chuckling quite a few times although it's not for the delicate. It's really not like any other chat in any other MMO I've seen. People take the M rating to heart even after the game has gone Unrated (or maybe especially because it's gone unrated).

I could have quaffed a 100% bonus exp potion at level 1 that's some kind of veteran reward but I didn't because my friend didn't have one. Otherwise I would have, this is not a server on which one wants to stop and smell the flowers. It's a server where the higher levels crush the lowbies the newbies the noobs and the freeps and hear their lamentations in General Chat. It's interesting that the game is available free to play, I'm looking forward to seeing how non payers get on. I suspect they will do well before max level.

We managed to get to about level 14 solo then we had to dip our toes into our first pvp zone: a choice of White Sands, Underhalls or the Acheronian Ruins. We wanted to avoid getting too badly murdered so we debated which would be the tamest. White Sands was out - it was a notorious gank zone early in the life of AoC and is no doubt full of nostalgia tripping serial killers. Underhalls tends to be vicious, we'd poked our nose in at level 9 to grab a couple of bottles of wine and there was a fight in progress at the entrance. So it was off to the Ruins.

The entrance wasn't camped when we got there. Let me rephrase. The entrance wasn't camped until we got there. As stealthers we were able to move into the mobs by the start which meant solo players zoned in, saw a pack of 2-3 mobs, pulled them, got to half life then discovered us. We enjoyed that situation for a few minutes chalking up 3 or 4 ganks.

We then decided our next objective was the graveyard about 200 metres away. We made our way over but my friend fell off the ladder and died so I charged over past a brutal fight at the bottom of the stairs, just reaching the graveyard before random passers by murdered me. We then lurked around the graveyard for a little while making the acquaintance of the local gankers. We snuck out of the gank zone, got spotted by mobs and killed, snuck out of the gank zone again and found a nice quiet questing spot where solo players were free to indulge in a little productive pve.

Until we got there.

Murdering some kind of warrior and a rather impressive caster (who still should have known better than to aoe grind 5 mobs at a time in a zone full of hidden Rogues) we pacified the area sufficiently that we were able to get our quests done. We then snaffled another tasty couple of morsels from the Great Gods of Ganking before the locals sent a bait warrior in followed up by a large angry and rather high level posse.

I ressed by the entrance, my friend ressed in a different place, in the graveyard gank zone we mentioned earlier. He snuck to me but was pursued by a level 17 Warrior up the long long ladder out. I found an angle where I could snipe him as he climbed which made him rather panic - he almost fell off in his shock. He went down, changed his mind and climbed up, then bottled and climbed down as fast as he could. I got him to 60% before he got out of range, Warriors are tough!

We zoned out into the safe zone and agreed to call it a night.

Eve: thoughts on recent events

2011-07-01T22:30:00.000+01:00

There were a few problems with CCP’s management of events leading up until riots of the last weeks.

First was the degree of player power. As someone who grew up playing games mainly as sports in a school setting where strict teachers were the referees it astonishes me how little MMO companies want authority over their games’ rules. Nevertheless this has been the pattern in a great number of games and CCP more than most with the extraordinary manifesto they announced when creating the CSM, a player council that would be a partner in the game’s development.

So the players felt it was THEIR game, not CCP’s.

A related aspect to this issue was that CCP has tried to be on the players’ level rather than a remote authority. Many former players have been recruited to staff, many former staff still play and are active in the community. CCP staff sang a rap song HTFU to us last year (which I rather enjoyed) and have co-opted the Northern Coalition slogan Best Friends Forever for their development team. It’s too close, you can’t be both peers and in charge with any grace.

Next is the economic simulation. Eve has an inward-looking complex economy which plexes do not quite disrupt. However the cash shop breaks the fourth wall. It’s the developers peering out from behind the spell of immersion that the game creates and saying “Want to buy something cool?” It breaks immersion in a game where many players spend weeks and weeks perfecting their spreadsheets to manipulate virtual trends in a make-believe economy.

The last issue is the sense the player base has that the main thrust of the development effort is to something we see as superfluous fluff – walking in stations. It’s like someone improving chess by developing a cosmetic design feature for your Queen – it misses the point of the game. Of course Eve aims to be a world not just a game and a virtual world is more what these MMOs intended to be. So it’s certainly arguable that walking in stations is a good feature, it’s just one that many of us are underwhelmed by and since we feel its OUR game not CCP’s = powderkeg, lit recently by some rather greedy decisions.

Eve: Free Helicity Boson

2011-06-24T21:22:00.001+01:00

One of the wonderful things about Eve is that it is a sandbox where anything can happen. Most of what makes the game remarkable is down to the imaginative and innovative players this game often attracts.

One of the more controversial events is Hulkageddon a regular festival of suicide ganking when honest miners avoid undocking and bots die in droves.

The organiser until now has been Helicity Boson; the event also has sparked a carebear response called Griefergeddon organised by Mechanoid Kryten. She was interviewed on No Prisoners No Mercy recently .

Regardless of which side you take in these bun fights they are a perfect example of emergent player conflict and add depth colour and complexity to Eve. Helicity is also a member of the Python Cartel, a number of whom have added their own take on Eve to the blogosphere.

Helicity was permabanned today after he was involved in the leak of a CCP internal newsletter to the public and was rude to CCP staff on the forums. His take on it is here.

Eve is a game played by an adult community with intense and aggressive gameplay. It's a pvp game. Emotions run high. It also has a culture of strong language - the Bozocast podcast was on the extreme far end of NSFW but it's funny and lively. Scrapheap/Failheap Challenge, the Goons they all believe in explicit language. That's the culture, that's the community.

Banning Helicity for expressing anger in the language of gamers is just not right. People should be able to use moderately strong language. There was clearly no real life danger to the member of staff and I would be astonished if he or she felt genuinely unsafe. Please post on the Eve Official boards in support of Helicity and ask for the ban to be rescinded. Then we can go back to hiding from him :-)

Eve: the rag trade

2011-06-24T06:36:00.001+01:00

There's been a lot of controversy over the high price of the cosmetic clothing items introduced into Eve this week.

This is simply a look at the market at Jita so far. Notional values are based on one plex to 400 million isk. This isn't the case right now as in the wake of the cash shop fiasco plexes have spiked down. Cheapest sell order is currently 378m, highest buy order 373.2 million. But I'm guessing that plex will move back up to 400 million because the only downward pressure Incarna introduced was a loss of market confidence over the cash shop and it did introduce upwards pressures (the loss of the ability to be unscannable means less income from pveing in dangerous space).

Looking glass ocular implant (Right/Gold)
12000 Aurum, notional isk value 1 371 432

3 have sold so far at Jita, one per day for 1.4 billion, 1.25 billion and 901 thousand isk. The cheapest Jita sell order is 1.2b the top buy order is 901.5 thousand. I estimate they're worth 1.37 billion so it looks like people are selling them under cost. At a guess the first two sold on sell order, the third was sold to a buy order in response to the failure of this market to take off. The outrage from the player community has meant this item has not sold the way speculators expected.

I have a horse in this race - mine is sitting at 1.645 billion, a 20% markup over the nominal value against the plex. I don't expect it to sell soon but I do expect it to sell eventually. There may be some risk that CCP lowers the price in response to player rage in which case I'll take a hit.

Men's 'Sterling' Dress Shirt (olive)
3600 Aurum, notional isk value 411 430

One sold on the first day for 600m, one on the second day for 117m. Sell orders are currently a few isk under 600m, buy orders are 119.99m.

This is very overpriced. Someone can't do maths and 4 other people blindly followed him, There are 5 orders within 30 isk of each other all at around 600m, almost 150% of the notional value. As with monocles one speculator has panicked and cut his losses.

Women's 'Sterling' Dress Blouse (dust)
3200 Aurum, notional isk value 365 715

4 have sold. Day one: 100m and 385m, Day two: 275m and 357m. So generally this is selling under value. The reason may be that this is the most expensive thing you can buy with a single plex. So people may be testing the market then cashing out.

Men's 'Commando Pants' (black wax)
3000 Aurum, notional isk value 342 858

6 have sold. Day one: 46m, 46m, 400m; Day two: 69m; Day three: 100m, 400m. Sell orders are around 400m with 8 of them on the market. Buy orders are at 69m. Again this looks like people went in then got cold feet. 3 people panicked and sold to sell orders at a huge loss.

Women's Impress' Skirt (gray)
3600 Aurum, notional isk value 411 430

5 have sold. Day one 400m and 500m. Day two 300m and 454m. Day three 456m. Cheapest sell order is 445m, highest buy order is 12m. 12 mill eh? Just a sec..... Highest buy order is 12 million and one isk.

This has mainly sold in line with what speculators would have wanted. There's one low one but it's not massively low. Maybe women's clothing is a better risk than men's.

Women's 'Sterling' Dress Blouse (platinum)
4400 Aurum, notional isk value 502 858

3 have sold. One per day for 500m, 500m, 603.4m. The last one was mine, a 20% profit over the notional value. There are no sell orders, highest buy order is... wait a sec.... 18.912m and 1 isk.

I was quite relieved this sold. The cash shop has been a flop but now all I need is for my monocle to sell and I'm substantially in profit, even if my boots never sell. I think this item is doing well because it's an awkward aurum price. It's not worth cashing in 2 aurums for but it's too dear for one aurum. It doesn't hurt that it's for female characters.

Men's 'Precision' Boots
1000 Aurum, notional isk value 114 286

12 have sold making it the second most popular item on the Jita market. 9 sold on the first day for 60m-105.5m at an average of 91.2m; Day two 80m and 113m; Day three 50m. Lowest sell order is 112.997m, highest buy order is 40.1m. There are 19 available from sell orders.

This bodes quite well for the market. It's the cheapest item and it's been selling reasonably well. I thought this one would tank because if you speculate and have less than 2000 Aurum left this is the only thing you can do with your Aurum other than sit on them. But it looks like quite a lot of people want to goosestep in stations wearing jackboots. I shouldn't mock - if mine doesn't sell for the inflated price to which I feel entitled I may become one of them.

Women's 'Greave' Knee-Boots
2400 Aurum, notional isk value 274 286

The most popular item on the market with 15 sold. 13 sold on day one for 233m to 269.5m at an average of 235.5m. 2 sold on day two for 240m and 298m. Cheapest current sell order is 300m, highest buy order is... wait a sec... 19.6m.

People love boots. Especially women. This item is going the way speculators anticipated with a lot of interest and the market outstripping supply. It helps it that it's at a slightly awkward aurum price, not much over half an aurum. If you're buying an aurum you want to spend it all, not 69% of it. It also helps that it's women's clothing and possibly slightly kinky.

So there you go - the most popular item can never be seen by anyone else, is presumably selling to men who like dressing up in women's clothes online (as most Eve players are men) and has a hint of the dominatrix about it. People must be having more fun in their Captain's cubbyholes than I thought was possible.

Eve: a new order in New Eden

2011-06-22T09:02:00.002+01:00

Walking in stations

Eve Online expansion Incarna is here, the long-awaited walking in stations content patch. And you can, actually, walk in stations. Not terribly far and as yet there's no point to it. You are on your own, you by default stand before a table with various machines on that open up all the menus Eve players are used to including a ship tool. You can leave your table walk back into the hangar look around and find - a ship tool! It's the same as the one on your desk but it's in your hangar.

Movement is WASD and feels rather clunky. I guess I'll have to get used to keyboard turning again.

Action Man is here!

Most Eve players I imagine spent a couple of minutes looking around and then turned their attention elsewhere. Where, you ask? To the new wardrobe feature, a cash shop that allows you to buy very expensive cosmetic clothing. There's already been a certain amount of uproar about the prices but oddly enough not about the look. The reason I find it odd no one's mentioned the look is because it is a very Nazi look.

Goose-stepping in stations

You can have a monacle reminiscent of the Prussian Officer Corp. You can have a shirt that describes itself as olive but is very dark, reminiscent of Black Shirts. And you can set the whole thing off with a pair of jackboots.

They've been rather naughty too with some of the descriptions. The monacle strongly implies in-game advantage:

A common implant found throughout New Eden, the Looking Glass ocular implant offers vision enhancement or replacement beyond the capabilities of low-profile prosthetics. Filters, lenses, NeoCom interface, and blackbox video recorders are all standard issue with this implant.

Naturally I felt I must make my own quiet protest about this trend so I did it in a time-honoured Eve fashion - exploiting the customers.

I did this buy buying plex which are sky-rocketing on Jita but still just under 400m in more remote regions. I bought 5 and cashed them in for Aurum.

So if 400m isk buys 3500A = 114286 isk per A

Monacle (12000A) = 1 371 429 isk

Platinum Blouse (4400A) = 502 857 isk

Jackboots (1000A) = 114 286 isk

I added 20% for my trouble and listed them at Jita. The monacles are already being offered much cheaper as a wave of similar profiteers all strive to undercut each other. I'm not too worried about not being lowest, I think these will sell out later in the week.

The blouse market was empty, I'm the only seller there.

The boots have shot downwards in a vicious fury of undercutting. They are now going for less than the plex value. No doubt it will sort itself out in time and mine will eventually shift. Not much else I could have done with 1100 points.

Like all fashions this market will be heavily influenced by what players see of other players. The monacle's good because it shows up in Local, as does the blouse. But people won't really start buying them until they see other people wearing this stuff. There may be a buying frenzy soon or it may wait until walking in stations has a bit more point to it. When you can walk past other people in stations this market will spike.

Probing - just when you thought you were safe!

Another interesting little feature of this patch is that previously unscannable ships are now scannable. This has been done by introducing a cap just above unscannability. Unscannability used to be achieved by getting your sensor strength very high relative to your signature radius, in other words taking a low sig radius ship and putting ECCMs on it.

As well as the cap you can now analyse points from more probes - up to 8 with Astrometrics 5. Essentially this just makes scanning easier.

It's still going to be very difficult to scan down ECCM fit T3 cruisers but the days of afk running guristas missions with local full of hostiles are likely to end.

The effect of this cap will for the most part be more psychological than actual. I don't think many previously unscannable ships will be in all that much danger. However players will think they can't mission or rat safely and so change their patterns.

In terms of the market this means more expensive pirate ships as there will be less loyalty points generated. If you've a few bill hanging around you don't know what to do with you could do worse than turning it into Machariels.

EQ2X: Quote of the day

2011-06-18T06:33:00.001+01:00

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of bronze and silver subs cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

Fwister, 1-9 chat channel

Thanks SOE for the Gold access, it's certainly been popular.

Copyright and MMO communities

2011-06-16T16:48:00.003+01:00

With CCP's announcement that they intend to licence apps and websites related to their product Eve Online there has been a lot of concern about who will have to pay them $99 a year to continue to operate. Other MMOs may follow of course, this is an industry where everyone watches the competition obsessively.

Let's look at some of the legal background.

1) News is not copyright. If I report here that in Eve Online Goons got blown up by some rivals that's news not a copyright violation.

2) You are allowed under fair dealing to excerpt short portions of a work for criticism or review. You are allowed to do this even if you are commercial. This is why publishers are allowed to publish books of literary or musical criticism. So if you want to talk about Eve's nullsec system you are allowed to do so. Criticism does not have to be balanced fair or objectively right. If I say Eve sucks and everyone who plays it is a massive doodoohead that's possibly defamation but certainly not copyright infringement.

3) You acquire copyright in works you create. This is legally quite fascinating. If you make up an original story set in someone else's IP who has copyright? It's a legal grey area, in other words you wouldn't know until someone goes to court over this. I wrote some derivative fiction recently and was careful to pick something public domain. In the Eve community the contents of people's blogs and software utilities are quite possibly intellectual property both of the creator and of the owner of the game. It's worth noting that MMO companies don't seem to have realised this, WoW for instance has always cheerfully stolen the best ideas of its addon community and co-opted them into the standard game.

4) There's no copyright in ideas. So if WoW took the idea of instant quest text from an addon creator they can't be sued. There can be copyright in method. If Blizzard looked at the lua script for an addon and stole the method of programming for use in WoW that's probably copyright theft. There is a defence if it's the only or the logical way to program it. So for instance if the addon were programmed in a highly idiosyncratic way, perhaps it has spelling mistakes, and Blizzard's software added later also showed the same idiosyncracies and mistakes it's fairly obviously plagiarised. If however the programming language supports one obvious way to program a particular function and an addon maker used it first then Blizzard used it, it's not plagiarism, it's just what anyone using the language would do.

5) Certain things are not normally enforced. If Eve asked for $99 from anyone who has ever mentioned them on the internet it would simply not be practical. Enforcement requires a legal process which is fairly expensive. For Blizzard to cease and desist people they've generally done so when they've been fairly sure the person is making significant income.

6) As far as I'm aware a EULA is not enforceable for actions outside the game. Although I've accepted a EULA when I play Eve I don't think it's binding on me when I'm not playing Eve.

7) Isk isn't money. You don't pay tax on isk income. For CCP to argue that sites that receive isk are commercial they would have to prove that isk is real world money which opens up a world of pain for them (for a start the Icelandic government might take it amiss that someone is operating a private mint). Performing real world services for isk is non-commercial gameplay.

8) The law around addons and apps is very sketchy. Eve for instance could be considered an addon for Windows. You have your basic Windows it's a bit dull, but by installing this software your Windows program is modified into a space game that's marginally less dull. You're still in Windows. Yet Eve doesn't need to pay a licence to Microsoft for permission to operate in Windows. So why should Evemon pay a licence to CCP for permission to operate in Eve? Very little of this has been tested in court.

9) Declaratory judgments in US law are held in the jurisdiction of whoever files the suit first. (I don't know how they work in Icelandic law). In other words if CCP sends a US citizen a Cease & Desist and he decides to fight it he can file a case in his locality and they will have to find a US legal firm to represent them and fight it near where he lives. The US also suffers from the peculiar practice of each side paying its own costs so even if they won they may have incurred more expense winning than they are able to reclaim from the defendant. (In most of the world loser pays both costs). They can outflank that by always filing a case before each c&d letter but in practice that's too expensive. People rarely fight Cease & Desist letters. It is a problem for them and a possible workaround for the players. If I don't fancy fighting a court case against them in the UK where they'd probably win I can ask my guildie who lives in a remote Chinese village to host my opinions on his blog for me. Good luck finding a law firm in Tibet, CCP!

10) Most law falls under one of two types: civil and criminal. Criminal law deals with that which is morally wrong. Civil law which would apply to most of the situations here usually looks only at monetary gain and loss. So if I make an addon that is adjudged a violation of CCP's intellectual property the court would look at how much money I made. If I made something like £2.50 the judge would be really pissed off that he had to spend an afternoon sorting this out and could refuse to award costs to CCP. So they might spend £10,000 to claim £2.50 from me. If I made more but offered a reasonable settlement then the judge would also take a dim view of them forcing a court case when there could have been a settlement. Say I made £250. They sue me. I offer to settle for £150 and they tell me to get stuffed, they want their day in court. The judge would feel they should have accepted, it costs a lot of taxpayer money to run a court service and it's not for egomaniacs to prance about in. So effectively because this is civil law you can generally buy your way out. "Sorry, have some money" isn't acceptable in murder cases any more but it should still be good for commercial copyright infringements.

Patent infringements are even worse from an operational point of view. The alleged infringer can choose the jurisdiction and venue.

Conclusion: This is what I think will happen.

- most likely of all is that CCP will to some extent back down in the face of player outrage.

- if they don't several prominent apps and fansites will simply close well before getting any cease & desist letter. They won't want the hassle and stress of possibly getting sued.

- nothing will ever reach a court. If it does CCP would probably lose unless they tackled the most blatantly commercial of sites. I would have loved to have seen more of the Blizzard cases go to court as I think they would have lost several of them. The two most famous court cases involved absolutely blatant abuse and even then Blizzard are only clear winners in one of them. They won against Scapegaming who were charging for a private WoW server (well duh). They lost the copyright part of their appeal against Glider, a bot program, but were saved by the DCMA (a catchall Act that makes almost everything online illegal). In both cases there is a common sense moral case for the game developer, one was clear piracy, the other cheating. It's much less clear that something like Evemon violates the public good which is an aspect judges consider. You see courts don't really work like games, nor even like TV court dramas. The judge applies his sense and wisdom to the law. You get occasional situations where the judge has to allow an injustice because the law clearly supports the wrong side but that's incredibly rare. So if something did get to court put it somewhere central and get dozens of Eve fans to come and support you. Call them all as witnesses. Can you see why CCP would not want this to occur in front of an eighty year old judge in some random foreign country?

- we will probably see some game advantage addons being aggressively marketed. Eve could really use a Fleet Commander addon. Or a Deadly Boss Mods style fleet pvp addon with WARP OUT NOW! plastered in big letters across the screen at appropriate moments. There are some very rich players in Eve and there's potential for people to spend lots of money. We will see some quite game-breaking addons and have to decide whether to pay for them or whether to just buy new ships after losing to people who use them.

- we will see much fewer addons. People will worry that CCP may ban their accounts. Eve being Eve some players will Give Money to an innocent addon maker then report them for secretly charging for their addons to get them banned (lulz!). It's simply less of a headache to just not contribute.

- if I owned a popular Eve addon what I personally would do would be to continue to make it available (even if I thought I was in the wrong) until I received a cease and desist letter and then immediately take it down (even if I thought I was in the right). I would also keep meticulous records of any revenue received.

- I'm still going to blog about Eve. Even if I write for a site that pays me. So neer!

(Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, this is just opinion and if you get into a legal mess after reading this it's not my fault. No course of action is recommended here, text that may seem to indicate such is mere literary hyberbole).

Raiding - the bad and the ugly

2011-06-13T10:36:00.003+01:00

In my last post in this series on end game raiding I talked about the positive sides of raiding. Now I'd like to look at the other side of the coin - the problems with the current raid structure.

It's divisive. It's divisive in a number of different ways and all of these are negative.

It divides people simply by being a different game style. Many players who are perfectly competent to raid simply choose not to - it's a playstyle not to everyone's taste. When raiding gets introduced at end game not everyone wishes to switch game styles.

It's exclusionary. The game design parts friends. This can be truly appalling as when Larisa of the Pink Pigtail Inn felt she couldn't continue with her guild. Her account of it made uncomfortable reading even though the rift was healed. And even though the rift with her guild was healed she ceased blogging not long after, these things take a toll. It's important to note that in this case it was not raiders being elitist jerks, the natural way to progress in the game is to pressurise players in your raid guild to improve and Larisa's story will be widely repeated because it is an inevitable result of the way the raid game is designed.

The other side of that is that sometimes someone who could get a strong guild stays with an underperforming guild because of real life attachments. This is a subtle way of poisoning people's real lives outside of gaming - "not only do you never do the washing up but you also stopped me from raiding with the server firsters!"

It's a team game where you "win" by succeeding on an individual level. While raiding is clearly a team activity for most raiders real success is measured personally, particularly by the acquisition of loot but also for some players by topping damage meters. This contradiction means that raids often feed on themselves. For someone to get loot everyone else has to miss out. One of the earliest player modifications of the game design was to introduce DKP systems in an attempt to smooth out a deeply flawed mechanism but it doesn't go far enough. There will always be times in a raider's life when he or she feels bitterly disappointed that a coveted item went to someone else in the raid instead of his or herself. Built-in disappointments are a bad game mechanic. It's become unusual for players to support their team over their character - would you rather your guild killed two bosses and you got nothing or that they killed one boss and you got an epic? Most raiders would pick the second choice. This is a trend that has markedly increased over the years, guild shopping and server transfers are becoming routine. From a certain perspective if your guild is stuck at 5 out of 13 bosses guild-hopping to a 9 out of 13 raid guild is progression for you. And that's becoming quite common in WoW.

It's judgmental. Not only do we get judged but we also get judged on partial or faulty information. A healer who pads his meter score by healing other healers' assignments may beat them on the meter while letting his tank die. Who gets blamed? The schmuck who came bottom of course!

It's attendance-based. Raiding requires a commitment that doesn't exist in other parts of the game or in most other competing entertainment. This is a real downside. No one thinks that TV on a broadcaster's schedule is better than TV on demand or TV you record and watch at a time that suits you. What are you doing next Sunday at 7pm? If you collect minipets in MMOs you don't need to worry but if you're a raider you may need to arrange that.

It's deeply vulnerable to churn. Losing players can be devastating to a raid guild. Many raiders actually spend their game time in a succession of canceled raid nights and getting stuck on old content because recruits aren't as good or as geared as the people who left.

It's afk-unfriendly. It's considered very antisocial to afk and leave 19 other people waiting for you, bored. For many people though they may play for 4 hours but that will include time spent cooking or minding children, they don't want to be utterly shackled to the PC when playing.

It multiplies failure. In most of the game if I screw up I'm the only witness and the only one to suffer. If I fail a task and wipe a raid everyone suffers for my incompetence. Is it fair on 19 people that they wipe if I make a mistake? And is it fair on me to put me under that spotlight?

It encourages players to bully other players. For many players driving underperforming players away by being horrible to them is a perfectly valid method of game play. It's no surprise that the most visited raid theorycraft site is called Elitist Jerks. The irony of Elitist Jerks is that their name is utterly unironic.

It encourages mudflation. It's become an industry standard that each raid must have gear miles better than found anywhere else to attract people to the new content. The only thing this is good for is the egos of the Live team. Imagine a WoW where the content that gets released didn't supercede the old content. So you could go anywhere to any instance for roughly comparable loot. Would you prefer to upgrade your gear in UBRS or Karazhan? Outdating old content is an abomination of game design that only crept in because of terrible project management. It's downright ridiculous that a game such as WoW which has created so many great raids over the years has only 3 viable raids which most players are rather bored of. Mudflation also creates other problems such as the breaking of the mana system in WotLK and the subsequent failed attempt to fix it in Cataclysm. Another downside of mudflation is that gear stops mattering when you know it will get outdated soon.

It's gimmicky. Each boss has a different gimmick to wipe you and some of them are lame. One may have an enrage phase where the tank has to run away because the boss does too much damage. Then mudflation happens and people tank it through the enrage and get called face-rollers. A lot of the gimmicks are silly or too similar. There are many variations of "don't stand in fire" and most of them simply change the colour - it's brown and the gimmick instead of "don't stand in fire" is "don't stand in sludge." These gimmicks are annoying to some players - Tobold refers to raiding as Mario.

It's too much to learn. When we tried Kael'thas in Tempest Keep our raid leader gave a pre-fight lecture that lasted 40 minutes. I had to take notes and refer to them during the fight. It was a 5 phase fight and each phase was highly complex. This boss was arguably the most difficult in WoW's history - he's the only boss that no one killed before the next Tier went live. One of the worst experiences as a raider is to join a more progressed guild. I remember joining one such guild and we did Blackwing Lair. I knew the first 3 bosses. We galloped through the raid on what was a farm raid to everyone else but a nightmare to me as I made my first impression on my new team by dying on every boss (even the ones I knew). Every single one. I did better afterwards but that was a truly horrible evening. Now it's even worse because the new content comes so fast. In Rift I'm just about clear on Greenscale's Blight and Gilded Sanctum in that I know my job but would like more practice to feel comfortable; I'm still somewhat at sea in Ros in that I've killed a few bosses but some I haven't seen and I'm not 100% confident of knowing what to do on the ones I've killed and we're about to get Hammerknell too. It's too much too fast, it's hard to remember them all and I feel like there's no farm content I can relax on and just have fun while gearing up.

It relies on third party amateur work. Now that's worked ok for WoW with EJ, Tankspot and the addon community but as more games come out designers need to realise they are dependent on getting lucky here. Also this type of effort is only likely to be done for the top game. In Rift even though it's current number two there's a lot of bosses no one's done a guide for yet. If part of your raiding player base is guide-dependent then they're boned without Ciderhelm or someone like him. Another problem is that anyone who doesn't use the right third party sites may not measure up to the raid's standards.

Conclusion: there's a lot wrong with the modern raid game. So much that this area is simply crying out for a creative re-think. I do like raiding but it could become so much better than it currently is.

Codemasters hacked

2011-06-10T16:51:00.002+01:00

I'm sorry to report I had this email today, it speaks for itself:

Dear valued Codemasters customer,

On Friday 3rd June, unauthorised entry was gained to our Codemasters.com
website. As soon as the intrusion was detected, we immediately took
codemasters.com and associated web services offline in order to prevent
any further intrusion.

During the days since the attack we have conducted a thorough
investigation in order to ascertain the extent and scope of the breach
and have regrettably discovered that the intruder was able to gain
access to the following:

Codemasters.com website

Access to the Codemasters corporate website and sub-domains.

DiRT 3 VIP code redemption page

Access to the DiRT 3 VIP code redemption page.

The Codemasters EStore

We believe the following have been compromised: Customer names and
addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, encrypted passwords and
order history. Please note that no personal payment information was
stored with Codemasters as we use external payment providers, meaning
your payment details were not at risk from this intrusion.

Codemasters CodeM database

Members' names, usernames, screen names, email addresses, date of birth,
encrypted passwords, newsletter preferences, any biographies entered by
users, details of last site activity, IP addresses and Xbox Live
Gamertags are all believed to have been compromised.

Whilst we do not have confirmation that any of this data was actually
downloaded onto an external device, we have to assume that, as access
was gained, all of these details were compromised and/or stolen.

The Codemasters.com website will remain offline for the foreseeable
future with all Codemasters.com traffic re-directed to the Codemasters
Facebook page instead. A new website will launch later in the year.

Advice

For your security, in the first instance we advise you to change any
passwords you have associated with other Codemasters accounts. If you
use the same login information for other sites, you should change that
information too. Furthermore, be extra cautious of potential scams, via
email, phone, or post that ask you for personal or sensitive
information. Please note that Codemasters will never ask you for any
payment data such as credit card numbers or bank account details, nor
will Codemasters ask you for passwords or other personal identifying
data. Be aware too of fraudulent emails that may outwardly appear to be
from Codemasters with links inviting you to visit websites. The safest
way to visit your favourite websites is always by typing in the address
manually into the address bar of your browser.

Unfortunately, Codemasters is the latest victim in on-going targeted
attacks against numerous game companies. We assure you that we are doing
everything within our legal means to track down the perpetrators and
take action to the full extent of the law.

We apologise for this incident and regret any inconvenience caused.

We are contacting all customers who may have been affected directly.

Should you have any concerns or wish to speak to a member of our
Customer Services team, please email them at
custservice@codemasters.com.

You have been sent this email as part of your Codemasters Code M
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The fun of raiding

2011-06-07T15:14:00.002+01:00

It seems to me that in the debate over raiding one very important point gets obscured: that raiding is fun. It's a deep rich game that applies all the things you've explored and discovered on your character in a more testing and more rewarding environment.

Consider play. Wolf cubs play so that they might become more effective wolves later in life. Children play hide and seek and shoot each other with water pistols so that those who grow up to be soldiers will be able to survive battlefields. Play is a fundamental part of who we are, of how our species is made. Play tends to be progressive, competitive and educational. It satisfies us deeply.

Raiding is a natural development on from the general gameplay that precedes it. You'll have learned leveling up how to kill things. You'll have discovered in 5 man groups who to hold aggro if you're tanking or not rip aggro if you're not tanking. Things learned while soloing apply, especially if you were soloing and something went wrong and you had to be resourceful to cope.

Raiding rewards a deep knowledge and understanding of how to play. Tanks need to understand how to best hold aggro, dps need to understand their class well enough to be able to play different builds of it to maximum potential (as the best build changes over time), healers need to understand which of their spells is best used when. In addition there is a general requirement of situational awareness and specific requirements for each fight to understand what is going on and what your role in the fight will be.

Raiding rewards players by giving raiders better loot than anyone else has. In particular sometime you get different colour loot - which players are very excited by. Going from blue gear to purple gear is fun but going from purple to orange? Wow!

Raiding rewards players socially. Raid groups tend to form tight teams that know each other well. Some raiding guilds have lasted many years with most of the original core players intact. Raiders also attract interest from strangers with people asking where did you get your staff? and where did you get your mount?

Raiding is often the culmination of the lore. In Rift at the end of River of Souls you fight Alsbeth who's been a nemesis since the early game. In Wrath of the Lich King you got to fight the Lich King as the last boss of the last raid. You will experience a lot of story and complete your own personal hero's journey that began when you killed ten rats for a farmer at level 1 and now you're saving the world.

Raiding is very much about learning. Generally speaking each raid boss is different and playing a raid competently is a matter of learning and adapting your role in the fight. Let's take Duke Letareus, first boss in Greenscale's Blight as an example. His main mechanic is that 4 times per fight he will enrage and become untankable. While enraged he can only be dealt with by kiting and there is a mechanism for slowing him down to make this manageable. 4 frogs are in the corners of the room and release a purple cloud of gas when killed which slows Letareus. The trick is to line up the frogs, a little distance apart, and then kill them just as he reaches them so there are 3 or 4 gas clouds for him to run through. You will need to reduce him by about 10% of his health to take him out of enrage so the frog clouds are a kind of timer, a dps check. It's a fight of some finesse. Additionally there are three types of adds that spawn each of which has to be dealt with. He's a very satisfying boss to kill because killing him means a lot of people did a lot of tasks correctly and well.

And he's typical of a modern raid boss. Each raider has a considerable amount of personal responsibility it's much harder in the modern raid game to "carry" people.

So to sum up the rewards of raiding are as follows:
- great, testing, gameplay
- learning through play
- great loot
- social status and inclusion in a group of select players
- lore
- a series of interesting challenges

Later this week I'll look at ways in which the game designers and communities are failing to deliver this fun to the majority of players.

Ignorant players or bad game design?

2011-06-03T15:48:00.004+01:00

My Rift guild Serenity is no longer a raid guild. We managed to kill Duke Letareus, the first boss in Greenscale, but after that attendance went down, our best raiders started talking about leaving, one of them did leave and the people gearing up and leveling up were doing those things very slowly. I've seen this stage before in a casual raid guild and it's usually a slow drawn-out painful death. So I called it, sent the raiders to a more progressed raid guild and told everyone else that Serenity will continue as a social, expert-running and pvp guild but that we wouldn't raid again.

We had at our peak about 80 level 50 players so why were we not able to field 20 for our progression raids?

The simple answer is that most people in the guild simply didn't play the game as raiders in the sense of researching their characters, optimising, using consumables to boost performance and so on. And because they are almost all veteran MMO players who get what the raid scene is about they preferred not to raid rather than to turn up and raid poorly. What's frustrating for me is that we could have beaten these bosses had people shown up, the bar is lower than people think it is. You don't need 1000 dps to beat bosses in Greenscale, the Rift entry raid, you need people to turn up, to learn as they play and to pay attention.

I think I know why so many MMO players make such bad raiders and the roots of it are in psychology.

Harvard Prof Robert Cialdini told a story in his excellent book Influence about a woman acquaintance who was selling gems. She left a note for an assistant to half the price of a slow selling stock of Jade. He mis-read the note and doubled the price. Suddenly these gems that no one wanted sold out. She asked Cialdini why?

Most people have no clue about what makes a good piece of jade. Actually we have no clue about lots of things but our brains have evolved a mechanism to cope. What we do is we take mental shortcuts. In the case of jade we look at the price.

Jewelry is a very personal present. We tend to buy it for someone close to us - a wife, a daughter, a mother. A $25 piece of jade is a bit too cheap for most people to buy as a present. A $50 piece of jade is just right. It doesn't matter that it's the same piece of jade in both cases, we equate quality with price a method that works 99% of the time.

Raiding is considered something the hardcore do. People who are not hardcore avoid the trappings of raiding. I had an experience recently with my raid team just as baffling as Cialdini's jade-selling acquaintance. One of my guildies, having played every evening while leveling and doing experts told me rather indignantly on the night of our second raid that she puts her family before the game and wasn't going to apologise for that. I was left thinking "what?". We had two optional raids per week and I'd stressed that people didn't need to come if they didn't want to. How had this person got so flustered? Why did she go from playing every night to never logging in once we started raiding?

The very notion of raiding threatens a lot of people, so much so that they see an enormous baggage of mandatory attendance, intensive theorycraft and high pressure gaming right from the start.

Raiding has become a closed club. I know of no raiders in Rift who weren't serious raiders in WoW and other games. And Rift isn't unique, I think most MMOs are getting raiding wrong. It has become a closed club.

It's just too hard for people who aren't used to raiding to adjust. In my guild I saw massive non-attendance and drop-out for fear of having to play a high pressure game. Ferrel writes from the other side, about the frustration raid leaders feel with "wilfully ignorant" players.

What's wrong is that too much changes at once for players. They go from a comfort zone of running 5 mans to a blame game of screwing up in front of 19 other people. This leads to several undesirable outcomes:

- non-attendance. The best move if you can't raid competently is not to play.

- "willful ignorance". People who are suddenly out of their depth in a game will generally become more conservative. This is especially troubling because the correct solution is to adapt. However new raiders aren't adapting and the reason they aren't adapting is that they're out of their depth. When you're out of your depth you stick to what you know.

- anger. People who "get it" get increasingly annoyed at new people who are lost in the complexities of raiding, seeing them as freeloaders.

- deception. New raiders sometimes try to bluff their way in, claiming experience they don't have, agreeing to things like flasking for every boss they aren't going to honour.

- division. Is it any wonder with all this going on that players start to despise each other? And of course if your non raiders start to see raiders as no life nerds as a defence mechanism then they shut down their ability to receive guidance from them even as the game steers them into hardcore raiding when they run out of other things to do.

I'll continue this with a look at design solutions and player solutions. For now I'll leave it here with the conclusion: almost everyone is reasonably smart and is behaving in a way that makes sense from their point of view. Of course even the smartest human approaches life by means of a self-devised system of shortcuts and abbreviations, the guy who doesn't pay attention on Teamspeak is using a system that worked fine in every piece of pre-raid content and hasn't managed to adapt when paying attention is suddenly vital.

Rift: cleric best in slot dps/healing lesser planar essences

2011-05-27T16:23:00.002+01:00

This is the stat weighting I use for evaluating cleric items:

Int = 0.75 (based on sp and sc value, ignoring mana)
Wis = 1.0 (sp with an extra 0.25 added for the mana regen which I'm a fan of)
Spell Power = 1.0
Spell Crit = 0.5

These are the lesser planar essences with a value in my weighting system over 30.

Burning Wisdom 35
Corrupted Growth 32.5
Dark Growth 35.25
Dark Rites 35.25
Deep Knowledge 33.75
Falling Firestone 33.75
Flowing Power 33
Focused Heat 31.5
Grave Knowledge 33.5
Knowing Seeds 33.75
Last Rites 35
Lively Spark 35.5
Living Hunt 34.75
Living River 35.25
Mystic River 34.75
Northern Winds 33.75
Oceanic Force 34.5
Pyro Spark 33.75
Radiant Inferno 34.75
Seeing Stone 33.5
Southern Winds 34.75
Spectral Hunt 34.75
Spirit Noise 34
Static Buildup 34.25
Tidal Wisdom 35.25
Timeless Sands 34.5
Timeless Watcher 34.5
Wisdom Roots 35

Source: ZAM database search on level 50 epic essences with Wisdom > 1

The top 5 are:

Lively Spark 35.5
Dark Rites 35.25
Dark Growth 35.25
Living River 35.25
Tidal Wisdom 35.25

The top item, Lively Spark is not unique and is bought from the Fire planar vendor in Sanctum or Meridian. So to get full best in slot lesser planar essences just run the daily raid rift quest over and over.

Rift: cross server transfers

2011-05-25T12:10:00.000+01:00

Just a passing thought. If the server I play on turns out to be one of the destination servers I'll become very very rich.

Any alt can buy cheap mats off the auction house, transfer in, dump it, collect some plat then transfer out on an alternate universe-hopping bargain hunt.

Not that I'm short of a plat or two. Going gatherer to start with gave me all the money I could really want.

On the nature of fantasy

2011-05-23T14:59:00.000+01:00

I have just read two novels by R Scott Bakker and very much enjoyed them. If you enjoy books by Joe Abercrombie and GRR Martin these should be right up your alley.

I next read an article by Bakker called the Skeptical Fantasist which I felt was relevant to us MMO players. In the article Bakker argues that epic fantasy is the other side of the coin to science fiction - that where sci fi uses science to explore the future, epic fantasy uses science to explore the past.

What's that you say? This guy thinks Hobbits are derived from science? That's nuts.

Or is it?

The sciences they and other epic fantasy tropes derive from are anthropology, sociology and human psychology. Humans have a tendency to explain the universe and we do so according to specific and identifiable rules. The Bible is based on the cultures of the people that wrote it, our affinity with Elves and Rangers is based on a cultural weight that those tropes possess that far outweighs completely original and distinctive creatures.

The best MMOs, like the best epic fantasy novels, select and refine those tropes. We see Elves Goblins and Wizards as anthropomorphic representations of the past; we see Space Marines and X Wings as anthropomorphic representations of the future.

Further it's by adhering to these tropes and refining them that games best appeal to us. Games based on unfamiliar creatures and weaponry will have less appeal because we are wired to accept the familiar even if intellectually we know it's nonsense. That's why we don't see games based on the work of China Mieville and Michael Moorcock - their tropes are too original, unfamiliar, and obscure.

Rift designer Gavin Irby recently said:
Actually, it's been very useful. One of the cool things I get to do as a designer is created new cultures, with their own languages and mythologies.

Having a strong background in anthropology, history, and languages turns out to be really valuable.

Interesting eh? Although we see ourselves as individuals what we like can be extrapolated and delivered to us. Of course we already see advertisers doing this online - all those Like buttons are to collect information to improve product development and advertising.

Now this doesn't mean that competent game designers will never give us anything original. There are plenty of unexplored tropes that would make great games. How about a Sherlock Holmes MMO, requiring players to exercise deduction and intellect? Sure third party sites revealing solutions are a problem for that style of game but that's a technical hurdle. How about a UFO MMO? XCOM had a lot of fans back in the day. How about MMOifying the Romantic Novel genre? Spurn v Seduce pvp ladies and gentlemen, red roses are a weapon in the right hands!

But I think what it does mean is that we'll never see a mainstream game where the ffrggnn of the Planet Xredfg have to use their Nurghyst to Xmorgify the Qeff of the Anterwunni. And if you're a game designer you probably should avoid making such a game.

WoW: Tanks and healers ride free

2011-05-19T12:38:00.000+01:00

Much discussion has raged on the blogosphere over Blizzard's announcement of their intention to introduce a premium service allowing players to form cross server dungeon groups with their RealID friends.

Here's how I see it working out:

- it will be very popular, like the Sparkle Pony.

- a small amount of people will use it for the obvious purpose - to connect to genuine friends whether from real life or early times in WoW or other games to play together. These players won't have much effect on anyone except themselves, they're a tiny demographic and will have roughly the same split between tanks healers and dps as the rest of the populace.

- a large number of players will game this. Tanks and healers won't need to as they don't have significant barriers to getting groups nor, despite what some people say, does the quality of dps deposited in their groups under the random dungeon finder matter that much. However dps players will adopt this by the thousands - their own private tank and healer pool allowing for instant dungeon groups.

What this will mean is that a statistically significant number of tanks healers and dps are removed from the LFD system. When you remove tanks (shortage class) healers (secondary shortage class) and dps (a glut class) from the pool you reduce the proportion of tanks and healers relative to the number of dps. This should significantly increase dps queues.

This is a problem for which there is a solution: subscribe to the premium service and collect your own network of RealID tanks and healers after a few LFD pugs.

So this leads me to the following prediction:

LFD Premium - high sales
DPS Premium - no more queue issues
DPS Economy - sucks to be you
Tanks and healers - ride free.