Digital Love
It amazes me how much some people care about pixels on a screen. To Rynala, her devilsaur pet and whelpling companion are real things that have emotion too. Now that she has both of them, WoW would not be as enjoyable if she lost them. She even went so far to say yesterday "If I lost devilsaur and dark whelpling and got new ones it just wouldn't be the same for me."
Happy Thanksgiving!
Well Rynala and I are about to embark on a four hour drive to her parents house. We'll be staying there for the next three days so don't expect anything from me in that time. Everyone have a Happy Turkey and be safe.
PS: We hit level 80 last night in the middle of Sholazar. Now we have all of Icecrown and Storm Peaks left for gold. I'm happy.
PSS: Engineering is so expensive to level if you are not a miner.
Building My Dream MMO Part 4 – Leveling and Skills
This is part three of my "Dream MMO" series. If you have not read the previous parts, please read "Premise and Setting," "Factions and Races," and "Classes".
I want to start by saying in Dawn of Steam we would eliminate levels. I hate them. They are a barrier that splits friends apart. They only serve to invalidate previous content. Why was it that the horribly evil and powerful mage in the Wizard Tower was level 20 and this cave rat was level 30? When you have level systems, they usually only get expanded via expansions even furthering the gap between new players and old players.
The Dawn of Steam system would be a hybrid of Ultima Online and Guild Wars with some custom elements. Like Ultima Online, there would be no levels, it would be more about just working to build your skills up. And if you look at Guild Wars, level 1-19 are basically throw-away and the real game and story take place at level 20. So why not just eliminate that level 1-19 gameplay?
Through questing, killing and PvP you would receive points. Let's just call them "Stored Knowledge" (or SK) points. SK points could be applied to various skills to progress them. They can't be transferred between characters but are refundable. There are two different SK pools: "General SK" (GSK) and "Skillbound SK" (SSK). GSK are basically experience points that can be applied to boost any of your skills. SSK are experience points that are only applied to a specific one of your skills but are more valuable than GSK. One GSK point would be equivalent to about two SSK points. Doing most quests would give you GSK for the most part. Profession or skill specific quest would give a split of GSK and SSK. Killing with specific weapons or crafting with your profession would give you mostly GSK.
The following examples are simply that, examples. The numbers aren't balanced and are just there for giving and basic framework to the process.
Let's say your armorsmithing skill is a 1. You want to take it to 20. You know that it would take either 20 Armorsmithing SSK or 40 GSK to get it to 20. The first thing you could do would be craft some breastplates that give you 2 armorsmithing SSK each. The second option would be going and finding some armorsmithing quests. This quests could vary from crafting some armor for an NPC, collecting armor from mobs in the world and returning it to a trainer for that trainer to study, or stealing new armor plans from an enemy military. All the quests would relate to your profession and give you 5 armorsmithing SSK and 5 GSK. Another option would be going and doing random quests in the world that just offer purely GSK for a reward. No matter what way you choose, you can be working on your profession without endless crafting. (Professions will be covered in further detail in another post).
Leveling your skills is less of a "gives you huge amounts of power" ladder and more of a "opens up more options and abilities to you" process.
For example: if your dagger skill is at 1, you may only be able to do a standard slash attack with it. If your dagger skill is at 50, you might be able to do special precise attack that has a higher chance to crit for lethal damage. If your dagger skill is at 100, you may be able to learn the ability to do a deadly backstab. Your standard attacks will be no more powerful at 1 than they are at 100, but you'll have more options for special attacks that do extra damage. Your standard attack's damage is based more off the weapon you use and less on your skill in the weapon, though leveling the skill may give some passive benefits such as increased chance to hit. More advanced weapons could require a higher level in that skill.
Having your alchemy at 1 may only allow you to make basic potions with basic ingredients. As you got your alchemy higher, you could start using more complex ingredients and making potions that have more effects, longer durations, etc.
With the GSK/SSK system, you could basically play the game whatever way you would like to play it and still be building your character. Don't like spending time crafting armor? Just quest a bunch and build up your armor skill. Don't like fighting a lot? Craft for quests and build up your weapon skills.
Not only that, but all the zones would be of equal difficulty. You wouldn't have to travel through each zone in order. Imagine instead of having to start at Tirisfal Glades, you could just go start in the Dragonblight.
One other thing is player health. Instead of an ever increasing health pool, there would be no hit points in the game. Your life is based on percentages. Everyone has 100% health. Where a monster may hit a person in light armor for 50%, they might hit the guy in heavy armor for only 10%.
That's all I can think of for this entry. It seems a little muddled rereading over it as the system just came as a stream of thought today. Feel free to post any questions you may have.
The next section I plan on writing will be "Combat and Quests".
The Difficulty of Raids or Why Care About Nihilum/SK Gaming?
Didn't you hear? Nililum and SK Gaming, the two top guilds in WoW, merged and beat the game.
Personally, I love how the news sites claim the entirety of the game has been beaten when there are still raids that are going to be put into the game before the next expansion.
News came out last night that not only had the merged guild beat every raid in the game, but they had now done one of the hardest raid achievements out there.
Good. I hope they all get bored and quit the game.
WoW needs a paradigm shift and I believe it has come with WotLK. I'm going to make the prediction right now that this expansion is essentially the death knell of hardcore raiding. If you are looking for level 60 Naxxramas or Sunwell difficulty, look to another game because you won't find it here, and I couldn't be happier.
World of Raids and Tobold's blog are afire with discussions on whether or not the game is too easy and if Blizzard has "jumped the shark" with this expansion. The complaint is that if the top guild in the server can do one of the hardest achievements in the game, the game is too easy. If a guild that raided Black Temple before Wrath of the Lich King can hit level 60, quickly grab some blues and clear Naxxramas, the entry raid, in a week or two this OBVIOUSLY means the game is too easy.
To look to the future, I think it is best we analyze the past. In Tobold's post on the subject, he did say something that stood out to me:
Imagine I could measure the skill/dedication/hardcoreness/whatever-you-wanna-call it of every single WoW player on a scale of 0 to 100, and make a graph of the number of players in every skill category. Such a curve would most likely be a Gauss bell curve, with lots of players of average skill, and decreasing numbers of players toward very high and very low skill levels. Now consider having to design an expansion, and having to choose a difficulty level. Unlike single-player games, which often have a selectable difficulty, the difficulty has to be the same for all players. You can try to cover an as wide range as possible, but it is impossible to design a difficulty which is both challenging and achievable by everyone. The Burning Crusade, pre-patch 3.0.2, was designed in a way that even the most skilled and dedicated player would find the raid endgame challenging. Lowering that difficulty level in Wrath of the Lich King would make the raid endgame more accessible to more of the average skilled players, but risks making the game too easy for the most hardcore players.
So this is what we're going to do. These following graphs are all my personal opinion so you may disagree with me on difficulty. Imagine the tip of the curve as the most average player. They play at most 10-20 hours a week. They don't usually go out and look at guides or read FAQs or blogs. Most of the time they're playing online with a group of friends and prefer to do everything with this group of friends. The red dots are where I would say the amount of "hardcoreness" or dedication is needed to beat the content. Those behind the dot on the curve will see the content as out of reach, inaccessible to someone like them and just plain too difficult. Those beyond the dot on the graph will see the content as much too easy and not worth their time.
Starting with the original launch we see that raiding is mainly a hardcore sport. With probably less than 8% of the WoW population ever seeing C'thun and less than 3% ever seeing Kel'thuzad. Raids in WoW vanilla were a exercise in rigid structuring and consumable abuse. After clearing all the bosses in Molten Core before Ragnaros, guilds would often zone into Upper Blackrock Spire to mind control a caster there and give a fire resist buff to all their members. Guilds would be running lower level instances just trying to find some resist gear for fights like Huhuron and Ragnaros. When you're having to run Mauradon for gear for a fight in AQ40, there is something fundamentally wrong with the design of the game. The ladder was rigid. You couldn't just skip a step. Instances were filled with gear checks and fights like Vael and Twin Emperors KILLED guilds. Having AQ20 and ZG as the only 20 man raids and everything else as 40man put these instances just that much further out of reach.
Moving forward we see what happened with Burning Crusade. Raid sizes were slashed down to 10man for Karazhan and Zul'aman and 25man for everything else. The barrier of entry, however, was still set far too high. All of the raids had rigorous attunement process (a tradition carried over from the WoW vanilla), more resist fights, and more consumable abuse. There were still incredibly difficult bosses. Hardcore guilds could easily spend a month trying to beat Kael'thas in Tempest Keep and more to beat fights like M'uru in Sunwell. Up to the point of patch 3.0, less than 5% of raiding guilds ever stepped into Sunwell. Less than 1000 guilds in the United States beat Kil'jaeden. Sunwell became an exercise in stacking Shamans for Bloodlust and having everyone reroll Leatherworker for Haste drums. Attunements were relaxed over time and out of all of Burning Crusade, Karazhan was easily the most popular raid for it had the lowest barrier of entry.
Patch 3.0 came around a month before Wrath of the Lich King and slashed raid boss health across the board by 30% while giving people access to their talents and skill updates with WotLK mechanics. Buffs went raid wide. Debuffs were put on Bloodlust and drums. Potions got limited to only one per 5. Most classes saw an across the board DPS increase of at least 50%. All of the sudden people were running instances right and left. It was light a going out of business sale on raid loot. The Sunwell geared raid guilds would see bosses die before the boss could even use all of it's abilities. They saw this as Blizzard bending to the will of the casual.
So far we have Naxxramas. The hardcore guilds hit 80 and immediately began farming it. People cried out that the game had become to easy based on a handful of the most hardcore guilds out there speeding through the content. People forget that this is what those guilds do. Nihilum and SK Gaming also spent about two months on beta learning these raids. This wasn't the first time they had seen these places. It was nothing more than another raid lockout to them. Also, the gear reset wasn't as big of a leap in WotLK as it was for BC so since they're in full Sunwell gear that will last them until these tier 7 epics.
I hope that the difficulty increases slightly in the followup raids, but nothing to the degree we've seen before. I want majority of the players out there to be able to complete every raid in the game. Will the hardcore burn through it and complain about being bored? Yes. But they would do that anyway. I want to be able to burn through it. That way, I can play some other games when not in WoW. When you're raiding 5 days a week and farming on off days, that leaves little time to play anything other than WoW. I have Fallout 3 and an assortment of other games I'd really like to play while maintaining the dedication to raiding.
Easier raids and accessability is nothing but good for everyone. The casuals that don't get to play as much can see all the content. The hardcore that are on all the time can finally have some time to do other things. With raids at the difficulty they were at, raiding wasn't fun. It was a second job. Friends would be excluded because they didn't have the right class or spec or skill. Raids shouldn't be so hard that they kill guilds. Raids should unify guilds in a fun atmosphere.
So the question is: Should we care about Nihilum and SK Gaming? No. We shouldn't. The buzz about these top guilds is getting as bad as the celebrity gossip buzz and it is making me sick. I just hope that Blizzard keeps up this raid trend and doesn't buckle to "hardcore guilds". We need to usher in the age of casual raider.
Wyrmrest Temple Deathmatch! READY! FIGHT!
Just a quick aside for you all while I'm working on another blog post:
Go to Wyrmrest Temple's central interior on main floor and pick a fight with someone. Don't get near the guards near any of the exits but just pick a fight with comeone in the central area near the innkeeper. If you die here, you'll instantly respawn right at the innkeeper. The other night on my server we had a huge fight of about 50v50 in that room. Being instantly back into the action just makes the place chaos. Just avoid the guards. They'll start pushing through the crowd slaughering everyone. If you're in the center circle though, you should never get near them.
Reputation Done Right
After running Azjol'Nerub and The Old Kingdom last night, Rynala and I went over to Moa'ki Harbor to do the Tuskarr quests there. We only have about three quests left at the node but we're already roughly 2500/21000 revered rep with them. Since we did both Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord, this gave us a nice boost in the rep. What shocked me is how easily the rep has been coming and how great the rewards are.
In WoW vanilla and The Burning Crusade, reputations weren't something you worried about until the level cap. This made the items from the reps to be somewhat useless. When you hit level 70 in BC, most of your reps would be around 5000/12000 honored or so. One stark example of this is with the Consortium. They offer a level 62 dagger at honored rep. The problem with this is that by the time you hit honored, you'll probably be in Nagrand and about level 66-67 and by then the dagger isn't that great.
Now you contrast this with the Kalu'ak rep in WotLK. We're already a good way into revered and we're only 75. The only reward this faction offers at exalted is a new fishing pole and penguin pet so the good rewards come before that. At honored they offer eight different level 76 blue chestpieces for all the different classes and talent specs. At revered, they offer an assortment of level 78 blue weapons that are fantastic. Even though she's not 78 yet, Rynala picked up the polearm because it is better than the one you get from the Amphitheater of Anguish (the new Ring of Blood). She didn't pick up the chestpieces because she has one of similar quality already crafted from leatherworking.
Due to work and school, we haven't been leveling the fastest, but I think us being at 75.5 after one week is not that bad for speed. We'll most likely be 80 by the end of the weekend or the start of next week. The fact that we've been able to level our reps and professions up without any major distraction from leveling and get useful items from the reputations and professions that are good while leveling is a huge change and quite appreciated. Some people say that Blizzard is making the game too easy. Personally, I just think they're fixing the game to the way it should have been from the very beginning.
Leveling Quickly Is Clearly A Show Of Player Skill
I say that with the largest amount of sarcasm possible.
The amount of people looking for a faster way to hit 80 is just staggering. We've been given so much content in this expansion and all anyone ever wants to do is just blow through it as fast as possible. Case in point, the amount of traffic I received in the last week amazed me. Thousands of people looking to see between Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra, which one will get them to 80 faster.
What happened to just sitting back and enjoying the ride?
Server First!
This guy is huge, as big as a gnome.
Anyway, I'm working on some blog posts for later.
The Icy Grip of Northrend
Too busy to blog right now. Rynala and I are about halfway done with Borean Tundra. The amount of people looking for information about Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra still fascinates me. I had 1200 blog hits for from people searching "Howling Fjord vs Borean Tundra" yesterday and over 2200 already today. Incredible.
Anyway, why are you reading this?! Go play! I know I am. I'll write more soon.