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?

Breaking down MMO burnout, and ways to avoid it.

Rick over at /random expressed concern that his longtime guild may not be as hyped for WAR as he is, and that their time together in the game may be rather limited due to general MMO veteran burnout, a legitimate concern for anyone hoping to find the next ‘it’ game to play with friends.

As someone with a great deal of MMO experience, having played Ultima Online heavily at release and MMO gaming ever since, Rick’s post got me thinking about the general idea of MMO burnout. On a somewhat recent podcast, Michael Zenke expressed his jealousy for anyone able to enjoy one MMO for great lengths of time, as he himself was unable to focus on any one game for long. This brings up the question, does the appeal of MMO gaming have a limited shelf life? Do we all reach a point where we are no longer entertained by ‘kill x’ quests, grinding another level, or killing a mob in the hopes it drops the item we desire? How many times can you hit max level in an MMO before all you see is the same formula with a few twists, instead of the rush to explore a new world and see what is around the next corner ?

I think part of what contributes to the burnout is that initially, an MMO is a very different beast than all other games, especially during the initial ‘big three’ era, before Xbox live and all computer games having an online component made multiplayer fairly common. Just the fact that you logged into a world populated by thousands of other real players was new and exciting. Seeing another real player, and not an NPC, run by you for the first time was special, as was the first time you got together with other players to tackle some common task. The very basics of MMO gaming are what hook us initially, but those same hooks exist in all MMOs, and are nothing new the 3^rd or 4th time around. Your first group experience in MMO 4 is much different than it was in MMO 1. In MMO 4, you know what to expect, you know exactly why you are in the group, and worst still, you know that joining a PUG could result in disaster; disaster you no longer have patience for. What you and everyone else could once laugh about now generally results in people leaving the group at best and a massive flame fest at worst.

UO was able to get away with a LOT of issue in part because for 99% of the players, just being online was a source of newness and entertainment. When Warhammer Online goes live, what percentage of the players will view just connecting to a server and being in a virtual world as entertainment? It certainly won’t be 99%, or 50%, but will it even be 10%? Regardless of the actual number, it won’t be many, and as a result, WAR and all other future MMOs need to deliver compelling gameplay right out of the gate to satisfy the needs of a far more demanding MMO crowd. In addition, not only does that content need to be compelling day one, it also has to continue at a much more furious pace than in days past. We all want new surprises around every corner, and those corners better come at a far more rapid pace than before. MMO gamers today won’t be logging on to hit a practice dummy for hours in order to work up their sword skill high enough to kill field rats. They want awesome day one, day two, and expect that awesome to continue to deliver for months on end. In many ways, it’s an almost impossible task for today’s developers to satisfy the needs of veteran MMO gamers.

With all that said, is there any hope for all the old whiny bastards like Rick and I? Can any MMO today or in the future rekindle those types of feelings we had for our first MMO? Glass half full guy says yes, glass half empty guy is not so sure. On the one hand, playing with a great group of people in a solid environment will always be entertaining. Playing on a beer league softball team is just as fun today as playing baseball was in high school, even though the feeling of hitting your first homerun will never be eclipsed by another homerun in the future. The actual activity, while still fun, is greatly supplemented by the people you play with. In that regard, any solid MMO with good gameplay should be able to entertain us, as we hope WAR will. It won’t, however, bring the same rush you had during your first relic raid in DAoC, or the first time you tried to run away from a PK in UO. And perhaps our tolerance for the general MMO grind, something all MMO games feature in varying degrees, is a bit lower. To me, that just places an even greater importance on playing with quality people early and often, as without them, that burnout sets in hard and fast regardless of what MMO you are playing.

One year of blogging done, and what a year it has been!

It’s been a year already?

I initially started blogging for what I believe is the most common reason: to have a place to keep all my thoughts and ideas about gaming in one place. What originally started as just ‘something to do’ has slowly grown into a very enjoyable hobby and craft. Over the course of the last year, I’ve been rather heavily involved in the MMO blogosphere, be it commenting, linking, or podcasting. Through it all, I’ve had a great time and gained a huge amount of insight into not only MMO games, but my own approach to them as well. Not to mention all the great bloggers and podcasters I’ve gone back and forth with, something that would likely not have happened without the blog.

I figured the best (easiest?) way to break down my first year as a blogger was just to go over the great statistics that WordPress provides, and comment on anything I found interesting or surprising.

First up, the very top-level stuff.

Blog Stats

Total views: 104,123

Busiest day: 11,852 - Thursday, September 6, 2007

Posts: 253

Comments: 1,658

As I recently posted here, the blog hit 100k views not too long ago, a nice round number. I never gave traffic much thought when I started, but I must say I’m very happy hitting 100k in my first year.

The busiest day, way back in September, is the result of getting linked by the BBC tech page, a quote from a somewhat random post I made about WoW and the future expansion. That was an exciting day, especially since it came so early in this blog’s life. Sadly the retention rate from all that traffic was rather low, although it certainly helped. As the stats below will show, no other day/post has really come close to that huge, single hit boost from the BBC, although if the current traffic trend continues, it will happen eventually.

The total posts number, 253, is overall rather decent considering I generally don’t post on Saturday or Sunday. If my math is correct (odds are low), that means out of the remaining 261 days, I posted on average almost every single day. Clearly days with multiple posts help offset days I posted nothing, but even so, a near post-a-day average not counting the weekend is fine by me. Now to keep it up in year two!

The 1658 comments stat is what I think I’m most proud of, as to me it means people actually cared enough about what was posted here to say something about it. Comments are what really drive a blogger to continue and to stay active, and they are a great source of motivation, so thank you to everyone who has taken the time to write something. (yes, even you random troll)

Top Posts for all days ending 2008-06-25

The love and hate game, WoW style. - 16,875

Screen shot comparison. - 2,636

Looking in the mirror; the sickness that was WoW raiding - 1,918

EQ2, trial of the never-ending download. - 1,632

Throwing down the gauntlet, the great MMO challenge - 1,414

Ebolt anyone? - 1,230

Funcom to AoC players, GTFO! - 1,176

Can my toaster run AoC? - Concerned Walmart Shopper -1,143

Stuck in easy mode. - 1,059

Ghost town, population you. - 704

As mentioned above, the first post is the one linked by the BBC, and as you can see, it’s far and away the top post. The next post is somewhat interesting, in that the concept was rather simple, and it was also one of the few posts with pictures. Also of interest is that the post was about EQ2, a game that I overall spent a limited amount of time with. This trend continues in a few more examples, showing that the EQ2 community is very active, and that EQ2 itself drives a lot of MMO traffic. Top post three is one of my favorites, as it was a very personal retrospective look of my time in WoW, and in particular the endgame raiding grind. In addition to the post itself, a lot of really great comments have been left by others sharing their own experiences and methods of escaping that trap. I won’t go into detail about the rest, other than to say a few more recent posts have snuck into the top ten, and that my original post, ‘Ebolt anyone?’, is holding on strong despite originally getting very little traffic due to the blog being new. UO reminiscing still gets peoples attention, a clear sign that you never really forget your first MMO, as UO was for so many.

Referrers for all days ending 2008-06-25

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/default - 11,015

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/default - 3,159

wowinsider.com - 2,922

virginworlds.com/home.php - 1,831

google.com/reader/view - 1,288

tobolds.blogspot.com - 1,055

eq2-daily.com - 838

keenandgraev.com - 650

killtenrats.com - 499

crazykinux.com - 398

Again the BBC dominates the top spot, and even spot number two, despite that link being on the back page. WoWInsider, being the huge a site that it is, is not a very surprising number three, followed by the ever awesome VirginWorlds news feed. Tobold, the blog overlord himself, is not surprisingly the first blog on the list, along with Keen and Graev, KTR and the link-happy man himself, Crazy Kinux. Thank you to everyone who has linked me, it drives traffic, which leads to comments, which leads to happy blogging!

Search Terms for all days ending 2008-06-25

Syncaine - 334

vanguard trial - 312

hardcore casual - 267

eq2 - 259

wow progress - 219

hardcore - 195

warhammer podcast - 132

eq2 trial - 119

sotnw - 92

switch mmo - 77

shadowbane reset - 70

This list is a little surprising. Spots one and three are all about me, and you know, I’m kind of a big deal on Google (clearly kidding). The big surprise is spot number two, people looking for a Vanguard trial. How does that game NOT have a trial? Seriously, I’ve been looking to try Vanguard for a long time now, if just to see what all the fuss is about, and yet without a trial it’s never going to happen. It’s silly that SOE has not gotten around to this yet. Another random surprise is the amount of searches that lead people here about Sword of the New World (sotnw). I only briefly posted about the game, and generally concluded that while pretty, the game was an afk-grind with little point. Maybe that’s what people are looking for though, who knows…

Finally here are two charts (remember, people like pictures) showing overall traffic flow. On the monthly chart, you can clearly see the spike from the BBC link, followed by a return to the more normal, steady growth. Hopefully the trend continues, and one day that BBC spike won’t look quite as dominant.

The weekly chart shows that while monthly traffic might be fairly steady, week to week traffic is very sporadic. This is due no doubt to a combination of who linked me, what exactly I posted that week, and how active I was commenting on other blogs and generating hits from that. The one thing I have learned after a year of blogging is you can never really predict what will drive traffic. A well-crafted post (imo of course) may get little attention, while a quick post about something random will start a firestorm. The important thing to remember is to post about what YOU want to talk about, and not worry about posting the next ‘major hit’ blog post. If you write honestly and with passion, people will pick up on it and drop by.

To sum it all up, it’s been a crazy first year for me in regards to this blog. It’s been a huge learning experience, and hopefully I continue to improve and provide interesting reading for everyone. I’m very much looking forward to year two, especially since the ‘next big think’ in Warhammer will hit, and no doubt spur some good debate in our corner of the Internet. I can’t wait!

Thanks again to all the reader!

MMO history, that Bartle guy, and why WoW2 won’t blow your mind.

It seems we had a busy weekend in the MMO blog world, fueled by an interview with Richard Bartle done by Michael Zenke over at Massively. As with anything remotely interesting posted on the internet these days, the responses to the interview, and the multitude of blog posts related to it, range from the ‘you’re an idiot stfu’ to ‘exactly what I was thinking’.

The real headline grabbing line of the interview is the comment “I’ve already played Warhammer. It was called World of Warcraft“, which when taken out of context or misinterpreted is all the internet needs to jump on the nerd rage bandwagon. When clarified (Bartle was talking about the setting itself), he is actually only 50% correct. Originally WoW was indeed the Warhammer setting without the official license (they lost that at some point in development), but only until Blizzard started putting their unique spin on the world. The Warhammer IP is lacking such gems as pretty evil elves, noble aliens that are descendents of the super evil alien guys, and a world where everyone (aside from said super evil aliens) is a good guy, just misunderstood. Even the undead are good guy freedom fighters, yay! It might be a world, but outside of a magic arena, there is very little war being crafted.

Bastardized lore bitching aside, Bartle does bring up an interesting point to someone who has been in the MMO scene since Neverwinter Nights; MMOs really are fairly similar now. Think about it, when Ultima Online came out, it was totally new. So new that the term MMO was a few years off, and everyone was a damn noob just logging on and wandering around (and getting PK’ed). Then came EverQuest, and how many people looked at EQ and said ‘eh, it’s UO with elves, who cares’? Right, no one. What you did hear was ‘EQ is carebear land, gtfo newbie’. Which was accurate, EQ was carebear land compared to UO, but more importantly, EQ was radically different than UO in almost every single way. While UO catered to the explorer and the killer, EQ was designed for the achiever and socializer. The final piece of the original ‘big three’ was Asheron’s Call. When AC came out, was it considered ‘EQ in a random setting’? Again, no. And AC had its own charm and gameplay that was again different than UO or EQ. The original ‘big three’ where all successful in their own way, and offered gamers at the time three unique choices in setting, gameplay, and overall game design philosophy.

Fast forward to 2004 and World of Warcraft, and you start hearing talk of ‘a more polished EQ’. Sure the setting was different, WoW brought a huge host of design changes that later became MMO standards, and above all it was a damn fun game, but it was not the radical change that UO/EQ/AC were when compared to each other. WoW followed the EQ formula, gave it a bigger budget, and polished it until it was done.

Finally, we have Age of Conan and soon Warhammer Online, two major games that from day one were being billed as ‘WoW but with feature x’. Which is not exactly a bad thing in terms of good MMO gaming from a pure fan perspective (readers know I’m dying to play WAR), but it does say something about the current trend in MMO gaming, and what the future might hold. With budgets as big as they are today, and with so much at stake financially, perhaps the days of great innovation are gone, and the best we can hope for in a triple A title going forward is the EQ formula + twist x. Look at any major trend that blew up, be it shooter games (Doom), sports games (Madden), or racing games (Need for Speed, Grand Turismo), and what do we see? Madden (insert current year), the same game as last year but with one new gimmick. Is it really that shocking that MMO gaming, which officially became ‘kind of a big deal’, has followed the same pattern of success?

Innovation is still alive and well, but you won’t find it in games with millions of subscribers. You will find it in games like EVE, A Tale in the Desert, Shadowbane, and countless other ‘niche’ games. And has history has shown us time and time again, the niche will be culled; the best features harvested out, and ‘polished’ for the release of WoW2. And like you, I’ll be there day one, like a good little fanboi, dying to get into beta.

Cutting down the money tree, MMO style.

This is a rather amazing back and forth. Quite a long read to get the full story, but well worth your time.

It’s rather hard for me to comment on anything specific because I’ve never played SWG, but like everyone else, I’ve read plenty. I disagree somewhat in the statement that you can’t radically change an MMO mid-way in, especially one that is already approaching deaths door. But even if you do radically change it, you have to at least TRY to retain the aspects that worked, and that people loved. Assuming you listen to your player community, is it that hard to identify those features, or to keep them?

Plus explain this to me. You spend five and a half years developing a game, and then think two weeks of work is going to fix everything and magically make it better, especially when the changes dramatically shift everything around? How that even went through, or who thought it would actually work out, I would love to know.

The entire story with SWG is an odd period in MMO history though. I mean you have an IP that is almost guaranteed to print money whenever applied, from a developer that made, at the time, the biggest hit MMO, and you end up with a train wreck that went from bad to make history awful. And then shortly after, we witness the release of a game (WoW) that completely changed the market and blew previous expectations out of the water, showing us that rather than setting a goal of 300k subs, we need to think in millions.

I still don’t get how EA f’ed up The Sims Online either. That WAS a money tree, and it had to take an epic amount of effort to cut it down. You practically already had The Sims Online with all the player made content and community sites that existed, and somehow you come out with a game that disappoints all those millions of pointless expansion buying lemmings… how?

In bright sunshine news, it’s Friday, and the Celtics will be flying home with banner 17 on Sunday.

Focus = Fun?

Lately my MMO gaming time has been down a bit, mostly due to DoTA, but also from the fact that currently I’m only actively playing LoTRO, and that’s with Aria, so we don’t log in a ton of hours each week. LoTRO is a great game to take at a casual pace, as there is always something to do, and even in short bursts of an hour or so you can make significant progress.

The down time has got me thinking how much game time has an effect on game enjoyment. All my best memories of games, be they MMO or not, are from games I was heavily invested in. The peak of WoW for me was raiding MC and BWL, making progress each week on new encounters. Both UO and AC peaked around the time my guilds were most active and involved in heavy PvP. My overall gaming highlight was being ranked #1 in Myth 2. In all situations, I was playing those games a rather stupid amount of time, generally around 6 hours or more each day, 7 days a week. You have a lot of free time as a student. Having graduated, that’s just not possible right now, and even if it was, I don’t think I would want to spend my life devoting so much time to gaming, not to mention Aria would kill me.

Maybe it’s just an odd coincidence, maybe it’s me just getting old, but I just don’t have that ‘pull’ with games these days as I did before. Yes LoTRO is fun, but it’s not ‘must play now’ fun. Same with the Wii, all fun games, but not anything like getting Final Fantasy 7 and playing it till your eyes bleed, taking a break, and going right back. And I think it might have something to do with consistence; the more you play a game, even if it’s just in smallish amounts but daily, the more you get ‘into’ that game and want to finish. Part of that is overall I just have less gaming time, but another factor is choice. I have more choices now than ever in what to play, and I can bounce around from one game to another at will. It’s fun from a diversity standpoint, but not so good for actually getting into a game and finishing it, hence The Witcher remaining unfinished despite being a great game.

So I think in order to get more out of the gaming time I do have, I’ll need to focus a bit more. Non-MMO games make this a bit easier because they actually have an end, so once you finish, you move on. MMO’s and open ended games like DoTA or Civilization are a bit trickier, since they never end, but at the same time don’t require quite as much time to really get into. DoTA you get into it for the length of a match, and as long as your skills stay sharp, it works. Same with Civ, but even less, since its turn based and you just need to remember strategy, not quick combos and twitchy gameplay.

WAR crafting prediction, and Civ4 multiplayer.

Warhammer released a bit of info about their crafting system. It sounds like all other crafting systems from un-released games: awesome, new and useful. Odds are good that come release it will be like all other crafting systems: boring, old, and worthless.

Clearly I’m not a fan of crafting, with only two games featuring crafting that I thought were something a bit beyond tacked on, those games being EVE and UO. Both games feature destructible items. Hmmm…

Back before the announcement that WAR would have crafting, I had hoped Mythic’s solution to crafting would be to just go without it and focus resources on more useful gameplay systems, but ah well. At least it sounds like we won’t see random nodes dotting the landscape, and since gear is less important in WAR than other games, it means crafting is that much more irrelevant. Win in my book.

In totally unrelated news, Civ4 multiplayer works amazingly well. Having played a few games with a buddy (I know, a little late to the Civ4 multiplayer party), the simultaneous turn style works better than I thought it would, and playing with another player only slows the normal pace of Civ by a small amount. Granted one game still takes 2-3 long sittings, but that’s not entirely unreasonable, and being able to chat on Vent while playing is a huge plus.

Quest pacing, and why killing boars is cool.

Being part of the blog community, and spending a decent (read: too much) amount of time reading other blogs, you pick up on trends and common rants. Having been around the MMO block since UO, I’ve also seen my fair share of MMO launches and the general response to them. No matter how similar or different two games may be, a few common themes from the player base generally pop up, and today I want to break down one of those, questing.

In many ways questing has evolved a great deal since UO. Actually since EQ, since the ‘quest’ in UO was to get from point A to point B without getting ganked. (best quest ever IMO) EQ was not quest driven like most of today’s game, but rather the quests were side tasks you attempted while making your way to the level cap. In comparison, in WoW 1-70 almost every mob you kill, or location you see, is due to a quest goal. It’s very rare to just wander out and kill stuff for the sake of killing, be it alone or with friends. Different games today have varying degree’s of ‘must quest’, but almost all of them place a much greater emphasis on quests than EQ or UO ever did. EVE stands out (as it usually does) as the exception here, because much like UO, it’s skill based rather than level based, but even EVE has a questing system that many players participate in.

Along with an increase in importance, the overall quantity of quests has increased dramatically in today’s MMOs, with many games today having more quests than one character can complete before out-leveling them. With this increase in quantity, you very often see a complaint about quality. ‘Too many kill x, collect y quests’ is something you hear and read about constantly, the most recent example being AoC. Before a serious amount of content was added to LoTRO, a common joke was that each area featured its own ‘kill boars’ quest, each time for a different piece of boar, the quests being almost identical with the only difference being the size or color of the boar. PoTBS at launch (and maybe still?) did a copy/paste job with their quests, as each starting area had the exact same set of quests, making creating an alt rather pointless.

All that said, I sometimes wonder what exactly DO people want from quests? Almost everyone skips the flavor text in the quests, no matter how well written, so a better story would be rather tough. Any kind of tricky ‘go find it’ quest gets Googled rather than attempted, or just skipped if the reward is deemed not worth it. Tough group quests are bashed for ‘forced grouping’, so we can’t have that. Travel quests are old news, and we want instant travel now anyway, right? Well we want instant travel while still maintaining a worldly feel, but that’s another topic. So that leaves us with our good buddy the kill quest. Simple, focused, generally short, it’s not hard to understand why the kill quest is the most common type of quest we see in MMOs.

But is the kill quest really that bad, even when it’s for boar parts or rat tails? And what the hell would we do if suddenly all MMOs removed all kill quests, what would fill that massive void? Meaningful travel! Kidding…

The fact is MMO’s are generally one big grind, broken down to many little grinds in order to bleed $15 a month out of us. We love the abuse. And while we bitch and moan about kill quests, the fact is we love them as well. We love killing something and seeing our little quest tracker go up by one, or opening up the loot window to pick up one more tail/hoof/eye. How cool is it when you have 4-5 quests all revolving around boar genocide, and with one mighty kill you progress all those quests at once. Exactly, it’s awesome. We are MMO gamers, we are sick, and little numbers going up does it for us. The more +1 we get, the better we feel.

The key to questing, as well as life itself, is variety. If you do the same thing day in, day out, it’s going to get boring and old, no matter what the activity. Good quest design is not about removing kill quests, but pacing them correctly. If I just devastated the local boar population, the last thing I want Mr. NPC to say is ‘go kill more boars’. But I’m very OK with killing them in step one, then finding some boar relic, and finally facing off against some uber boar to finish it all up. And while I’m doing all that, if I also have a quest to discover some boar shrine, which just happens to be along the way, bonus for me. Just be sure to mix it up in the next area a bit (but not too much, we are creatures of habit remember), and I’ll happily continue to grind away.

Understanding what makes PvP tick.

Watching people react to all the new info about AoC’s PvP model has been rather entertaining, while also frustrating and somewhat surprising. PvP seems to be an idea that most people ‘think’ they love in an MMO, but when you provided them with the details, it turns out they don’t want to play along.

One common issue seems to be gear, and how the ‘casual’ crowd favors games without an over-emphasis on gear. (funny considering the casual king, WoW, is 100% gear based) The problem however is that in order to limit the influence of gear, one of two systems must be in place. Either you are at risk of losing your gear, or your gear wears down and eventually must be replaced. Only by forcing the replacement of gear can you encourage players not to play with their top gear at all times, and only in that type of system can gear truly be balanced. Even the sword of instadeath has to be used with caution, since if you used it on every lowbie you see, it would eventually break. The other solution is to simply give everyone equal gear (hi WoW), but that just destroys a major facet of general MMO gameplay, power progression and character growth. The two MMOs with good PvP and generally no item issues, UO and EVE, both used the above method, although in drastically different ways, with good results.

Item risk also plays into another important factor of PvP, loss. The ‘everyone wins’ system works versus NPCs because NPCs don’t mind getting their heads kicked in daily; they will happily respawn and ask for more. In order to have PvP with any kind of resolution or winner, one side has to lose, and since we are talking PvP, that means a character controlled by a player, not an NPC. The key to the equation is that the smaller the loss, the smaller the victory. In WoW, you get basically nothing for killing a player in a BG, since at most you cost them 30 seconds of being a ghost before coming back in at 100%. In the arena, the cost of death goes up slightly, as a death might cost your team a win, setting you back a bit in rank. Even then, the cost is rather small, and as such, a win is not very memorable. No one really recalls the epic battles they waged versus memorable opponents in the battlegrounds, do they? Lets contrast that to a well set ambush in UO (pre UOR), or a Titan kill in EVE, events that players fondly remember and still talk about. The major thrill of being part of a titan kill comes from the fact that you are killing something of major value, something that your enemy worked hard to produce. With that kill, you make major progress in your war, boosting your Corps moral while killing your opponents. The kill would be near-meaningless if that Titan respawned after a short trip to a virtual graveyard, not to mention you would see Titans being flown around without a care.

Another common pre-launch idea in a PvP MMO is mercenaries. Since ‘casual’ players don’t want to join a huge guild and commit to something they can’t keep up with, they instead plan to play with a smaller group of friends with the idea of being hired out by the big guilds as mercenaries. The idea is that as a mercenary, you will still get to experience all the big time PvP stuff like siege warfare without having to deal with big guild politics. In how many MMOs has the concept of mercenaries worked? Has anyone ever hired a guild in WoW to go and corpse camp an enemy? Of course not, and the reason why is fairly clear. First off, the mercenaries can’t actually hard the enemy in any real meaningful way, as corpse camping is a minor annoyance at best, and easily countered. Second, there is no tangible loss, so what exactly do you pay for if you hire the mercs? And finally, what evidence would you have that the mercs completed their job? The idea of mercs only works in games where players stand to lose something, and in games where that loss can be quantified. Mercs are very common in EVE for exactly the reasons above. If you are in an industrial Corp, odds are you have a good amount of cash, but very low combat ability. Mercs provide the perfect tool as protection from rival Corps, enabling industrial Corps to remain viable in such a PvP focused environment. You are not likely to see a guild of crafters hire another guild to taking down the top arena team in WoW, now are you?

My overall point is that in order for PvP to actually work on the MMO scale (as opposed to how it works in Counter Strike or any other game with a quick in/out setup) you must have reason to fight, and more importantly, you must have reason to win. You don’t win anything if at the end of the day the winner and loser are left standing in the same spot. The greater the distance between winner and loser, the more ‘impact’ your PvP has. When your guild is cornered and facing extinction (hi BoB), that is when you truly see epic displays of resolve, when guild pride really kicks in. Those situations create the type of memories and stories PvP fans rave about, and outsiders read and get encouraged by. Just remember that for every epic victory, someone was on the other end, suffering a crushing defeat, because without that defeat, there would be no victory.

PS: My personally definition of casual is anyone who plays less than I do, and hardcore means anyone who plays more. No further debate about that definition today, please.

PPS: Keep in mind that just because you suffer a huge defeat, does not mean it ruins your day. It’s all too common to see a defeated Corp in EVE state they had a great time in whatever war they were involved in. It is a game at the end of the day, and we play to have fun. As long as the combat was exciting and interesting, everyone wins. If you simply plow over your opponent because of gear and not skill, even the winner is left feeling cheated in that system.

PvP theorycraft, and the lessons MMOs need to learn.

Playing as much DoTA as I have lately, it’s got me thinking about the general idea of PvP, and why most MMOs can’t seem to get it right. We have seen what happens when you make it too extreme in games like Ultima Online, with full corpse looting and setting the loser back hours if not days. We also know what the opposite of that looks like in WoW, where everyone wins, and hence many people play either half-assed, or totally afk, ruining any chance at getting a decent match going.

The first point is rather obvious; in DoTA you play a hero for about an hour, while in an MMO you play your character for months. If you have a horrible game in DoTA, you will likely be gimped for that game, but the next game everyone starts at level 1 all over again. This is just not the case in an MMO, where character growth is one of the key features that keeps players playing. An MMO simply can’t be as gear-dominated as WoW is and expect to have balanced PvP. However that topic is entirely game depended, so for now lets assuming we have good power balance, and that most players have a fighting chance against others.

The key balance issues that make DoTA work is it’s death penalty, and how it relates to the item/level balance. The death penalty is not as harsh as UO in that you don’t lose items but you do lose gold and time, which ultimately means each death delays you in getting more powerful items. In WoW, you do lose time when you die in a BG, but since that time is not as valuable (since you don’t level or collect gold for items), death has little meaning.

So the balance seems to lie someplace between UO (too extreme) and WoW (too light), but can’t be exactly what it is in DoTA, since it must be applied to an MMO. The factors of the penalty in DoTA can however be broken down and applied.

First the winner of a fight needs to be rewarded. The reward must be significant enough to make combat attractive, and also significant enough to offset the risk of defeat. If we are talking about team PvP, winning must have both a personal and team impact. In DoTA, the personal impact is the fact that you yourself get a gold bonus. The team impact is that whoever you killed is now a bit weaker, making your teammates stronger in comparison. This is an important factor, as you need to both motivate the individual to play, but also need to encourage and reward team play.

Next is the penalty for defeat. It must be severe enough that players actively avoid it, but not so harsh that it overwhelms the chance of a reward from victory. It also must impact your team in a negative way, but not in such a way that a few unlucky deaths ruin the entire experience.

Applied to WoW, it would work something like this. First off, the rate of death in a BG would need to decrease dramatically, as currently players die and rez at a silly rate, due mostly to the fact that death in a BG has zero meaning. This can be accomplished in two ways; first increase the spirit healers rez timer, both in total length and in its mechanic. The current method is a 30sec timing that runs continuously, meaning if you die at the right time, you might actually rez in 1-2 seconds. An easy fix would be to make everyone rez on an individual timer, and then to increase that timer to 1 minute (or whatever would work best for balance). Graveyards would need to be moved, or protected, to prevent camping, but again that would be a simple fix, perhaps raising the GY to a one way drop platform. This increase in rez timing would not only mean a player must wait longer to return to the action, but also mean that a player killed is not going to spring right back up and return to the fight seconds later. Picking off a character at midfield would now be a useful tactic, rather than a waste of time.

The second fix needed would be a change to how honor points (I’m assuming you keep the overall honor point system) are earned in a BG. Currently you get honor from each kill you are near, along with a bonus at the end. Neither the individual honor nor the bonus is impacted much by your performance. Someone going 20-0 and someone going 0-20 won’t see a major difference in honor gain, especially in relation to the bonus. To fix this, players should gain an increased amount of honor as they do battle in a BG per kill, but each death should cost them honor points. Kills must be worth more than deaths, but only by a slight margin. Each kill should also be split between individual honor and team honor. The players who contributed most to the kill would see a noticeable honor increase, but all other players would also get some amount of honor added to their total. Players reported afk would not only stop gaining honor, but also lose a certain amount of honor from their total.

The important factor in any good PvP game is player accountability. Players in DoTA don’t run around dying randomly because they know that not only will they gimp themselves, they are also likely throwing the game for their team. In WoW, players often run around at random, and while they might cost their team the game, they currently don’t see any noticeable impact on their personal honor gain. By combining both personal and team impact, you create a system and culture which encourages winning while not crushing the loser, which is exactly what a good PvP should do.