Tome of Knowledge, the feature that could.

With the NDA down (it is down, right?), lets finally start talking WAR details.

The one feature that I wrote off as a gimmick when I heard about it was the Tome of Knowledge. To me it sounded like a fancy name for a quest log, and while having a decent layout for a quest log is always nice, it’s not exactly a make or break feature. Oh how wrong I was. Many have described the ToK as a ‘game within the game’, no doubt due to it’s depth and level of interaction. To me that’s a bit misleading, as you never really ‘play’ the ToK, but rather it’s always in the background enhancing everything you do. It never gets in the way, but often times will inspire you to head off the beaten path for a bit.

The feature list for the ToK is huge, and a quick Google search will no doubt provide you a nice one. What that list won’t show you is how well the ToK fits into WAR, how it pulls off being amazingly deep and amazingly simple at the same time. Want to change your title? It takes but a few clicks in the ToK. Want to read up on a new monster type you just encountered? ToK. Curious to see how many wolves you’ve killed on your way to rank 40? ToK. And just how long did it take you to get to 40? ToK.

But that’s just the surface, the stuff that other MMOs have done with /played commands or simple character profiles. Almost everything in the ToK is a link to something else. Mouse over a title, and the ToK will tell you exactly how you achieved it. Go to a beastiery entry, and the ToK will list things you have already unlocked, as well as the next set of goals. Go to the story page of a certain tier, and the ToK will tell you your influence level in each area, provide a map, and other links. Each piece fits perfectly with everything associated with it, and you can go seamlessly from lore to side bonuses to major events with only a few clicks.

It’s also clearly built for the long haul, the type of design unique to MMOs that keeps us logging in again and again. Some of the goals in the ToK are very clearly long term stuff. Kill 10,000 (and perhaps more after that) orcs? Yea that’s not going to happen in one sitting. The beauty is that Mythic allows all of the ToK stuff to continue accruing while you are out questing or doing some RvR. The kill 10,000 orcs is a general goal, not zone specific. If you kill an orc player in RvR, that counts. Kill some orc NPCs during a quest, those count too. Level 1 orc, level 40 orc, they both count.

The ToK is far more than a quest log, or a deeds log, or a character profile. It’s all those things things, plus a bunch of other stuff, all formatted and linked for convenience, and presented in perfect style. Once you have had a chance to play an MMO with something like the ToK working it’s magic in the background, I makes other quest logs and lore sections look very lackluster in comparison. Mythic did not reinventing the wheel, they just gave you a car along with that wheel, and tuned it perfectly.

Everything I want to write is under NDA.

How have all the people who have been in the WAR beta been able to think about anything else? I was sitting today trying to think of something to write about, that won’t be NDA breaking, and I just can’t. I can’t talk about how I think a certain class is awesome, why this little UI feature is gamechanging, or just how amazingly incorrect all that ‘its WoW’ talk is.

Mythic needs to drop the NDA, and quick…

It’s ok to hate bad PvP, but have you played good PvP?

What if Warhammer PvP is something PvE players do end up liking? I mean, if EQ PvP is your only example of PvP, I don’t blame you for hating PvP. Same goes for WoW PvP. Two PvE games that tried to add PvP as an extra, and in turn made a lot of people really hate PvP.

What if a lot of those ‘PvE only’ players see what decent PvP is like in WAR, and actually enjoy it? Word spreads to their PvE only buddies, and down the snowball rolls.

The major problem with the perception of PvP in MMO’s is that the biggest games had really, really awful PvP, and in turn PvP-focused MMOs were themselves bad games. EQ1 and WoW are the two big PvE games, and both had horrid PvP systems tacked on to PvE games. Shadowbane and Fury were both ‘PvP focused’, yet both were crippled by numerous issues not at all related to PvP. A bad MMO is a bad MMO, regardless if its a PvP or PvE game. Same goes for a good MMO. Even PvP diehards have likely played WoW simply because it’s a good MMO.

What is possibly unique about Warhammer Online is that, from all accounts so far, it’s a good MMO and it’s PvP focused. That’s never happened in MMO land on a mass market scale. The good news is WAR is looking very solid, the bad news is it has the ‘PvP’ stigma to overcome. The difference between 500k subscribers and 5 million might come down to convincing those PvE-only ‘carebears’ that PvP done correctly is a great way to game.

Reverse WoW-thinking.

Working on Book 3 in LoTRO last night reminded me why MMOs are as great as they are. When you get a group of people together, and everything goes well, the experience is far greater than anything a single player game could offer. The big problem of course is when you get people together, and things don’t go well, it’s often far worse than any single player experience. At best you waste a lot of time, at worst you get reminded what High School was like.

A bad grouping experience can make a player jaded, and turn them into a solo player, even in an online world. WoW provided the perfect game for those sick of pick up groups, as you could now solo all the way until the level cap. While a nice feature, the side effect is that now 4 million or so MMO players in the USA and EU view PuGs as something to avoid. WoW has taught them not to group until the level cap, where it then forces you into non-committal groups (BG) or forced grouping (raiding).

One of the things I’m most excited about with Warhammer is the ‘open group’ system, along with Public Quests. It certainly looks like Mythic is trying to get people to play together again in an online world, to work together with strangers and not fear them like the plague. WoW had a culture of bad groups, so even those that might not usual bail on a group did so because that was the culture. Hopefully WAR will foster the opposite, and the mindset of the majority will be to cooperate. Undoing the WoW-mentality will be a tough hurdle, but hopefully Mythic has the tools and design to do just that.

End-game content is not the ONLY content.

Tobold, MMOCrunch and Random Battle are three blogs which have recently talked about solo vs group play in an MMO, and everyone brings some good points to the table. One major issue during the leveling process is that far too often, grouping actually slows progress down, and hence players solo instead.

The quick fix to this would be to make grouping more rewarding than soloing, while not going as far as EQ1 with forced groups. Players avoid groups in WoW because they know they can accomplish more solo, and hit the level cap faster.

What stuck me however is not the group vs solo aspect, but the whole ‘rush to cap’ notion. Why do we just assume everyone want to hit the level cap as fast as possible?

The easy answer is, ‘Blizzard said so’. It’s no secret the ‘good’ stuff in WoW is at the level cap, at least according to Blizzard, which is in sharp contrast to what most people really like about WoW; the questing and fast paced progression.

Before WoW (yes, people played MMO’s before WoW), rushing head first to the level cap was not how most people played. No one rushed to 7x GM in UO. You blatantly could not rush to cap in EQ due to how long that whole process use to be. In Asheron’s Call, after a certain point, level gains were insignificant due to diminishing returns. DAoC had plenty of PvP pre-cap. The list goes on.

Yet today, in WoW/LoTRO/AoC (and I’m sure others), you have the ‘leveling game’ and the ‘end game’, and the two are usually night and day. Will that be the case with Warhammer Online as well? The reason I ask is because for months now, we have been reading about all these great Public Quests and PvP areas, which are zone/level specific. What if I really love doing a certain Public Quest, or enjoy how PvP works at a certain level? Will I still need to rush and hit cap, just so I can join the ‘official’ endgame of city sieges?

Unlike questing, PvP is almost endless content, and since WAR is built around PvP, who is to say people won’t slow down and enjoy each tier of PvP, instead of always looking at their XP bar and grinding out another level. Perhaps the whole ‘group vs solo’ issue will be a non-factor, as players instead focus on their current tier and battling the enemy, enjoying what is currently in front of them, instead of rushing towards the end-game carrot. One can hope, right?

Can Blizzard dig itself out of this hole…

We have a shortage of tanks, how are we going to fix that?

Trick everyone into playing a new tank class.

But people hate tank classes…

Yea but this one will be more fun, have more utility, and will have a fancy ‘hero’ title.

Hmm that sounds unbalanced…

No it’s cool, we will gimp him on the high end, so he can’t dps/tank/heal as well as focused classes, but he will be super fun in that part of the game we no longer view as important, leveling.

Blizzard’s fix to the warrior shortage, make a class that’s more fun to play than the current tank, while not being quite on par in terms of tanking, and make him more solo-friendly. That fixes EVERYTHING…

Stop bitching about skill points newbtards.

Read enough EVE-related posts and you will notice a certain complaint always being made: I can never catch up to older players.

First of all, the statement is mostly true. If you started a new character today, those pilots with 50 million skill points will always be around 50 million skill points ahead of you, give or take. Baring a complete reset, that will always be true.

The issue I have with the statement is: who cares? Yes in a 1 on 1 situation, they will smoke you, be it combat, mining, economy, production, whatever. Last I checked (this morning) EVE is an MMO, which stands for Massive Multiplayer Online. Well EVE is certainly massive, since everyone plays on one server. And it’s certainly online, as everyone has to log in to said server. And now the real kicker, it’s actually MULTIPLAYER, and not in that WoW way where you run by people on your solo-happy way to kill/collect 10 of something.

You join a Corp, work with others, compete against others, and generally try to survive. If you go about it solo, you will have a tough time, and will get really bored. The fools at CCP had this crazy notion that people would like to play together, and do things as a group, so they designed systems around that silly idea. Mining solo sucks, mining as a Corp is fun. Running missions solo day in day out gets boring, running missions with a buddy is fun. Dueling is boring, group battles are fun. See the trend here?

The other thing that EVE nails, and most other MMOs get terribly wrong, is that no matter your skill points, you can contribute. If you just created your pilot, you can join your Corp in a mining Op, and still contribute. Sure the guy flying the Hulk will mine a hell of a lot more ore, but you still did your part, and unlike other MMOs, you did not take anyone’s spot, or loot an ‘epic’ that someone else is going to be pissed about. EVE does not have a ‘raid cap’ of 40 or 25. The more the merrier, no matter the skill level. Is your Corp running missions just for fun? Bring your newbie self in a frigate and join in. Pew pew the frigates in the mission, loot some wrecks, get blown up, and have a blast.

So while you might never catch the skill point leader in EVE, you also don’t have to level to 70 and grind gear/rep/tokens to play with your friends. Day one you can jump right in, and not once will someone pick a ‘better geared’ pilot over you, while you sit around and listen to vent as everyone else is having fun.

That skill point thing, not that big an issue now, is it?

Burned out on WotLK already.

I wanted to expand on a previous post here, and go into a bit more detail about WotLK and my total lack of excitement. I still think that more than anything else, the fact that Warhammer Online is so close has really narrowed my view. Baring total failure, I know WAR will be my MMO of choice in 2009, with some EVE goodness as well.

But WAR aside, there are other issues at play for WoW and WotLK. One is the fact that graphically, WoW is aging. While WotLK will have new textures, animations, and effects, everything is still bound to the same graphics engine, and the overall ‘style’ is still the same WoW that it was in 2004. The WoW team has to work that much harder to impress us visually now, because we have seen so much already, and newer games appear fresh just by the very nature that they are new.

Another factor, and this one is a bit unique to WoW, is that most of us have played WoW more than any other MMO, and after all those hours, burnout is natural. WoW is an amazing game, and that fact might hurt it more than anything else. We have played our main, leveled alts, respecced, switched profession, pvped, raided, etc. More players have done more things in WoW than they would in other games, due to the games quality. Instead of rolling something new when WotLK is out, and playing the game from a new angle, most of us have already covered all the angles, and WotLK would have to deliver a completely new game, 1-80, to really entertain us. Sure that journey from 70-80 will be fun, but lets face it, you will still be using 99% of the same skills, which use the same animations, which have the same sounds. The fact that you are hitting a new snow beast in a new ice zone is not enough, at least not enough to keep us grinding like we did in Azeroth, and to a lesser extend in Outland. With each expansion, regardless of content, player burnout sets in faster and faster. You might have run Scholomance 50 times, because even after 30 runs, it was still damn fun. But you probably ran the Outlands instances fewer times, and the burnout for WotLK instances will be even faster, perhaps after just one run.

Which brings me to why I’m really not excited about WotLK; it’s not that WotLK is going to have bad content; it’s just that I’m already burned out on 75% of that content. I’ve seen how 5 man instance runs work in WoW. I’ve seen 10/25/40 man raids. I’ve seen pre-form PvP, PuG PvP. I’ve done the item/token/rep grind. I’ve never done it as a Deathknight, or in Northrend, but that’s not enough to pull me away from WAR, or to even make we want to drop $40 on WotLK.

It might not be out, but to whack a dead horse once more, I’ve played WotLK, it was called WoW.

Avoiding the WotLK beta.

The fact that people are actually AVOIDING playing the WotLK beta should tell you all you need to know about how much content they think the next expansion will provide.

For me personally WotLK does less than nothing. Another few tiers of the same old raiding game I finished in Azeroth, more grinding of a broken PvP system, and just ten levels of what actually made WoW great, questing and exploring new zones. If WotLK existed in a void, I would be looking forward to it just to see the few new zones, but sadly it does not. EVE is currently keeping me more than busy, and that little game called Warhammer Online is just around the corner. Between those two, and what each offers, the changes that WotLK will bring look very weak, and I think we are starting to see that feeling creep around the MMO space.

Will it do well? Of course, it’s still WoW, and clearly enough people have shown a love for the grind to do it all over again. But do I believe a significant amount of the player base is tired of TBC+1 in WotLK? Yes. And it’s that player base that helped AoC get the launch numbers it got (before they all left after the first month), and it’s that base that will at least give WAR a shot. Whether they drift back to WoW or stay in WAR just comes down to Mythic delivering on their promises.

The small stuff sometimes makes the biggest difference.

As JoBildo accurately points out, the ‘open group’ feature of Warhammer is one of those ‘no one did this before?’ types of features that just seems so obvious, especially to anyone who has played MMO’s for any length of time.

Think about it, how many times are you doing a specific kill quest, and when you get to the area you see someone else already there. Now normally, if it’s a quick quest, you won’t bother asking them to group, as the whole ask/reply/group process takes longer than it would to simply kill the 10 whatevers you are killing. If however grouping was as simple as a right-click, people would do it out of habit all the time. After the initial quest, perhaps you stick around for a few others, including some elite quests, which all of a sudden don’t look quite as painful to gather some help for.

Now if we assume that the ‘open grouping’ feature will have as big an impact on questing/RvR as it looks like it will, will this be something all current and future MMOs add in a patch? Much like instances went from being a feature to a standard, will the same be said for open groups in a year or so?