The Shrine

I don't even play WoW anymore, but recently I read the 'optional' raid boss, Algalon the Observer, in the newest dungeon can be fought for exactly 1 hour every week. After that's up you don't even get to attempt the encounter again.

Apparently devs have said this guy is supposed to make you cry about why you can't beat this guy and how it sucks, which is why winning gets you the achievement: "He Feeds on Your Tears".

It seems to me Blizzard is totally out of their mind. I don't care how hard this Algalon guy is. He can't be harder than the several encounters in MMORPG history that are actually impossible. But in a game that tries very hard to bill itself as accessible to everyone, you make a boss that basically says 'haha you suck'?

I cannot see how this encounter can possibly do anything positive to the game with such a stupid restriction. If this guy actually turns out to be pretty easy, then having a 1 hour limit per 7 days is obviously no obstacle at all. But presumably you don't just put something like that without making the guy very tough, so I foresee most guilds will take a couple stab at it and then realize they're never going to come any closer to beating this guy because you only get say 20 tries at him (20 weeks) before the next patch comes out that'd obselete both the gear and the sense of accomplishment you get for winning. I don't know if that'll cause people to quit, but I don't think it's something people will feel good about.

Yeah it's pretty stupid.

Also would like to take a moment to comment on Blizzard lore. I think apparently the lore justification for this mechanism is that if you didn't stop Algalon from transmitting the Reply Code Omega in 1 hour, the Protoss Carriers (err, Titans) come and nuke the planet and destroy it, and then it probably takes a week before the Bronze Dragonflight goes back in time and undo this event so the planet is not destroyed and you can try again.

For such a successful company, Blizzard must have a retard writing this stuff up. I know some people apparently worship Metzen, but I don't see how you can go something like:

Warcraft 2: Sargeras was a good guy who was corrupted by the Eredar and turned evil.
WoW: The Eredar were a race of good guys who were corrupted by Sargeras and turned evil.

I mean this isn't stuff you can retcon your way out of like 'Boda Fett crawled out of the pit after everyone left'. The two events are mutually conflicting. If you make a screw up like that you should at least have the dignity to apologize and say "whoa guys I'm sorry I totally forgotten what I wrote 10 years ago." Instead it seems to me Blizzard's fame has this guy thinking he's the second coming of Tolkien so he didn't even need to apologize or even attempt to rectify two obviously conflicting statements.

lol, there's no lore reason given for how raids work though Don, it's just a mechanic of the game.

Raids reset weekly, period, not clearing an entire raid instance just means you don't clear it.

Metzen DID apologize for the Sargeras screw up.

http://www.wowwiki.com/Metzen_on_Lore

I saw that article, he was talking about how this world is all big and complicated, but that's really no excuse to screw up. It's not like he missed a minor part of the world view that someone later modified. The Eredar were the bad guys and that was pretty set in stone from the start.

I like things that do stuff. especially when that stuff involves other things that do other stuff that do things with stuff

Many raids have week-long cooldowns, though there's not a lot of hour-long fights. Is that for the entire instance, or just the boss fight? Hard fights can be frustrating, but when you get the pattern and logic of it, it makes it worthwhile.

SineSwiper wrote:Many raids have week-long cooldowns, though there's not a lot of hour-long fights. Is that for the entire instance, or just the boss fight? Hard fights can be frustrating, but when you get the pattern and logic of it, it makes it worthwhile.

Its just for that particular boss fight.

SineSwiper wrote:Many raids have week-long cooldowns, though there's not a lot of hour-long fights. Is that for the entire instance, or just the boss fight? Hard fights can be frustrating, but when you get the pattern and logic of it, it makes it worthwhile.

I assume you mean when you actually win a raid it has a week-long cooldown. You see Algalon spawns when you walk into his room, and he is only up for an hour at the time you triggered him. If you fail to defeat him in that 1 hour, he is gone for the entire week regardless of whether you beat him or not.

To put things in perpsective, it was said that Yogg-Saron in the same instance took the top guild in WoW 10 hours of learning to beat. If the same criteria was applied, it'd take that guild 2 months to beat the same encounter because you'd only have 1 hour per week to attempt this. And presumably Algalon is much, much harder than Yogg-Saron, so the time needed to learn the encounter is much higher.

Ahh at first I thought you meant he appeared for only 60 minutes during the week and that's when everyone could kill him.

I see that as being kinda a cool challenge... perhaps make a way to reset the instance if you lose, but having only 60 minutes to beat a boss is interesting. They seem to only put him there for the hardcore OCD gamers, so if you're not one of them why care so much? It's entirely optional... LOTRO kind of did this with a set of instances where they all have a "hard mode" in which to get better loot-- get to the last boss within 15 minutes, don't kill minions, etc. Sure they have it so you can restart as many times as you want but that's because it's not as optional as this sounds.

Tessian wrote:I see that as being kinda a cool challenge... perhaps make a way to reset the instance if you lose, but having only 60 minutes to beat a boss is interesting. They seem to only put him there for the hardcore OCD gamers, so if you're not one of them why care so much? It's entirely optional... LOTRO kind of did this with a set of instances where they all have a "hard mode" in which to get better loot-- get to the last boss within 15 minutes, don't kill minions, etc. Sure they have it so you can restart as many times as you want but that's because it's not as optional as this sounds.

Yeah, don't kid yourself. Hard mode is not "optional".

There's nothing optional about a mob that will probably drop the best loot in the game. This isn't like Omega Weapon in FF where all you get is a T-Shirt that says you beat Omega Weapon.

SineSwiper wrote:

Tessian wrote:I see that as being kinda a cool challenge... perhaps make a way to reset the instance if you lose, but having only 60 minutes to beat a boss is interesting. They seem to only put him there for the hardcore OCD gamers, so if you're not one of them why care so much? It's entirely optional... LOTRO kind of did this with a set of instances where they all have a "hard mode" in which to get better loot-- get to the last boss within 15 minutes, don't kill minions, etc. Sure they have it so you can restart as many times as you want but that's because it's not as optional as this sounds.

Yeah, don't kid yourself. Hard mode is not "optional".

It IS if there is something else in the instance you're going for..class quests, reqular quests, farming for loot, keys, etc

I think it's a great idea.

One of the reasons I don't play many MMOs is - you play long enough, eventually you get to the level cap, and as the game progresses, everybody gets to the level cap. It's not a function of skill. It's a grind. Then the world doesn't feel realistic, because you have a tremendous number of godlike players running around who aren't actually all that good at the game, but because they're willing to play for hours every day, the game makes them think they are, and gives them the stats to match.

WoW does much better than the rest about having unique kinds of loot you can go after, but it's still pretty much the same in the end. Role-playing-game worlds were never supposed to have everybody guaranteed to become a god in the end if you play long enough - in the original versions of D&D, it took a HELL of a lot of skill to make it up to, say, level 9, much less level 20, and even if you hit level 20, the most powerful items and spells came with severe drawbacks. Anyone else recall how the Wish spell took a year off your life? And I don't mean the One Piece kind of "oh sure 2/3 of my lifespan lulz" kind.

The problem is, of course, that on a commercial level most players will whine and bitch if they can't get to the highest power levels just by playing forever. It's the MMORPG equivalent of grade inflation. Take it on long enough, and the curriculum gets really stupid and everyone at least gets a B-plus.

I personally want to throw the dominant paradigm in a trash can. The other reason I don't play MMOs is - I was already doing that shit years ago in text MUDs. It's really sad to me that the gameplay HAS NOT CHANGED between me playing the SlothMUD DIKU years ago and WoW today. I remember trying WoW last year just thinking "It's an amazing update of graphics on top of the same tired paradigm."

Instance dungeons, spawning, random loot drops - all of that shit should have gone out with the birds years ago. It's like a Disneyland animatronic ride in terms of the interactivity. We ought to be seeing genuine monster economies and modeled populations with reproduction, where adventurers can't just come in and clearcut the entire dungeon once an hour and wait for a magical respawn. There should be real player positions of power in in-game guilds tied to actual game events and scripting - i.e., you can join and gain power in a mage's guild and at the higher levels of responsibility actually change fields of magic that have an effect on players over a wide area radius semi-permanently, something besides the immediate battle - maybe something like building or destroying magical walls that actually stick around between two competing provinces. Or join an army as a fighter and actually issue generals' commands to armies of monsters which start a real offensive across a whole territory. "Death" needs to start meaning something for both monsters and players, maybe not complete permanency, but somewhere between that and "lol rez plz". Capturing territory shouldn't be this stupid "capture the flag" shit, it needs to introduce dynamic change in the game world. And much as it might hurt, you can't just make it guaranteed that if you play long enough in the right guild eventually you'll get to the level cap.

What I hate is that, ultimately, you can be the grand high VIP of your server and put everyone else to shame, and basically what you have are fancy numbers on your stat sheet and shiny armor. The game was the same before you got there, it will be the same after you leave, no matter how much of a bad-ass you are, were, or ever will be. It's a slightly more interactive amusement park ride, but not much. For me to want to play an MMO, I would want to feel like I could ALTER THE WORLD somehow. And offering that experience to thousands of players at the same time is not easy, but it IS possible, and it would be incredibly exciting.

The problems inherent in doing this are - 1. the VAST majority of developers out there are stuck in the same "on rails" kind of thinking as the games are, when it comes to programming. A lot of videogame programmers that I've met are arrogant as all hell and think they're so cool for being able to do what the rest of the industry does that they have no incentive to try to do something different than the rest of the industry does. As Don and I talked about on another thread, everyone's working so hard to polish animations, graphics et cetera that the idea of a gameplay toolkit to introduce a dynamic world is just not on the table. Might screw up the milestones, somebody might not like the innovation, so - work on the next incremental graphics increase. And, 2. the vast majority of MMO players have gotten so used to the "grade inflation" so to speak that a game that required more actual skill would be likely to induce a lot of complaining. I think that the "play long enough and we'll give you a biscuit" kind of gameplay that the industry has developed to try to attract as wide a userbase as possible has really cheapened the interactivity something awful. But when you're putting out the kind of money these projects are, you don't want to risk offending the vast segments of the user base who DON'T want to have to play skillfully, who DON'T actually want a challenge - just the illusion of it to bolster their own egoes.

But I still kind of don't understand it. I played a game something like twelve years ago called Magic Carpet, which was this kind of third-person flying game where you flew around an area and cast spells, but the spells you could cast ALTERED THE PLAYFIELD. You could cast a volcano, and it wouldn't just pop up and spit fire and disappear. There would be a big volcano there for the rest of the stage altering the way you played out the rest of the level. And it was single-player and not an MMO, so obviously it was much easier, but I haven't seen any game like it since that's innovated the gameplay around having a dynamic playfield instead of just the stats and loot tables. And I wonder why.

We need smaller, riskier projects with less development costs where it might be okay to lose out if you actually do something innovative, and where you can feel okay with your revenue if you just attract the kinds of players who want genuine interactivity, not just a number on the level gauge that increases with playing time.

*huff huff huff end rant*

Rereading my last post there, I think I can summarize it to three sentences:

I don't like a gameplay paradigm that amounts to "play long enough and we'll give you a biscuit".

I want an MMO with a dynamic, not a static, playfield.

And I probably won't seriously immerse myself in an MMO until that happens.

To Replay:

What you say isn't necessarily a bad idea, but remember WoW is the MMORPG that invented the 'grade inflation' so to speak. This is the game where the term 'welfare epic' came from, basically essentially no matter how suck you can apply to WoW's Welfare System and get some uber loots for just participating. And looking at the success of WoW, it's pretty clear that grade inflation definitely works.

In EverQuest, the Avatar of War is only up for one hour every week on the entire SERVER. So this is fairly similar, except Avatar of War has no gimmicks in it. It's a mob that dishes out an impossible amount of melee damage and ntohing else. He has like a 5% chance to kill the best tank on any given round against perfect healing (and much higher if your healers screwed up even a little bit) and he has enough HPs to last about 10 minutes, so it's a test of perfect healing and a little bit of luck. Ignoring stuff like this guy was first killed by an exploit or that people can grief you by purposely spawning him and wipe, this is indeed a pretty awesome encounter. If you had a Blade of Carnage everyone know that means you're awesome, or you had a lot plat to pay for one.

Problem is that Avatar of War has a learning curve of about 10 minutes. After he killed you once it's pretty clear you have to both heal perfectly and have a little bit of luck on your side. Even when he isn't up it's not hard to practice how to heal perfectly. So really the fact that he is only up 1 hour per week just limits the number of tries. You already know the exact strategy to beat him after 1 try so then it's just a matter of execution.

Now you move to WoW, most encounters are gimmick based. There will be this environmental effect that you must move in a certain way to avoid, or everyone dies. There's going to be some adds that do ability Z, that will totally kill you if you didn't counter it was Y. Sometimes you need a Nightelf to double jump in air or everyone dies. When you wipe to a gimmick, it's not always immediately obvious what the correct counter is. Unless you have developer friends, most of this is discovered by trial and error, which requires a lot of time. The best guild in WoW needed 10 hours learning Yogg-Saron, and if you look at the fight mechanics, a lot of the stuff you have to just doesn't look like anything you could possibly figure out without trial and error. That puts it at a converted 10 weeks using the 1 hour/week scale, even though Algalon is supposed to be way harder than Yogg-Saron.

Then there's also the fact that WoW runs on a model where every 3-6 months all previous content is obseleted. If you're generous and say it'd take 6 months before the next uber+1 content comes out, that leaves you at most 27 hours to work on this guy. So if you can't beat this guy in 27 hours of total time, then the content is obselete. And let's not kid ourselves. Most people only do this stuff because Algalon drops the sword of 1000 HP uberness. If the uber+1 content has easier mobs droping sword of 1100 HP uberness, people will move on. So then you have wasted content.

I can guaranteed you if this guy remotely lives up to Blizzard's claim as a raid destroyer, you'd just see the vast majority of guilds figure 'why bother waste time on him when you can just wait for the uber+1 patch?' Sure the guys who eventually beat him will be quite impressive, but from a dev point of view you've wasted a good deal of resources designing an encounter that will become irrelevent in 6 months and maybe only beaten 10 times. That can't be an efficient use of dev resources, and this is no way to earn player support.

Many suspect the real reason why this artificial timer is in is because otherwise the top guilds will beat him in the first week if given unlimited time to die, because then all the gimmicks will be figured out if you got enough time on your side.

Grade inflation, or loot/level inflation DOES work. Most people in life are content with just coasting in the dominant paradigm. I love that term "welfare epic". It's better than "play long enough and we'll give you a biscuit".

It just doesn't advance the genre.

You're never going to have a massive hit with a truly dynamic world, not at first. I doubt even 10% of players want a truly dynamic world. But I and the other players like that as a demographic DO want that, and a lot of us don't play MMOs as a result. No, you can't do a massive-budget MMO and expect it to hit. You have to be willing to target a far smaller userbase, and probably put up with a lot of pointing and laughing from a small part of the crowd who thinks that "big and rich" means "we win and you suck".

But you always do. If you innovate, you always have to put up with mockery from the people who think you suck because you try to be smaller but more creative. The kind of people who think they're complete badasses for kicking ass at an on-rails system are also usually the kind of people who think that makes them better than other people who aren't part of the dominant paradigm. That self-selects for egotism.

Note that I'm not dissing on anyone here, or anyone who plays WoW and has a level 80, or the VAST majority of WoW players. Most people don't cop attitudes about it and I've certainly never seen it from anyone on here. If you're just playing for fun, and you like the game for what it is, that is wonderful and I wish anyone nothing but the best with it.

But, still, there is a dynamism that I sorely miss.

You'd basically need a very small server, like maybe 50-100 people can go out and 'rent' a server where you're the only ones on it, so you can actually leave your dynamic effects behind. Otherwies, in a server with 10K people, if something can only be done once, chances are it won't be you. And of course you still got to be able to have enough people to keep a viable economy going, and enough so that you can actually find people to group with for obscure stuff. It's not clear to me if we even have the technology to do this. You'd probably need a world server of 50-100 people, but have cross server capabilitiy for anything that requires thousands of people to do (e.g. large scale PvP, grouping).

And on top of that your game has to be absolutely balanced or you'd run into a logistic issue like 'our world of 50 guys don't have 4 (super class) so we'd never be able to do anything cool'. In fact EQ is sort of approaching this in that the game world is basically shrunk to the point where you really only have your guild as an entity on the server, but the drawback is that if your unit doesn't have the classes the game expects then you're screwed. Now it's easy to say 'just make the game balanced' but we know how hard that is.

In short, you need to create really tough content, that is not dependent on:

1. # of people you've present
2. Combination of classes present (we'll assume the class based system is going to stay for a while)

#1 requires people to replenish the people you lose, because people obviously stop playing for whatever reason. #2 requires the game to be balanced, which is something nobody has ever figured out while still maintaining challenge (obviously things can be so easy that the class mix don't matter) or just making classes all the same. So it's definitely very tough.

Perhaps the solution would look something more like Diablo than a MMORPG. Maybe you get 10-20 guys to sign up for a 'server', that will last for about a month. At the end of the month you'd have saved the world from gods and Super Saiyans and that'd be *done* in terms of dynamic stuff. You can continue to try to get even more uber stuff by farming the bosses that will have a respawn schedule similar to any MMORPG, or start over again if dynamic stuff is your thing. You can still do this like a subscription model, and expansion would mean this time you can stop Super Saiyan 2 instead of just SS1s. That'd be a very ambitious thing to try, though, and obviously no guaranteed it's going to work, so I don't think you'll see it happen anytime soon, which really sucks.

What if you kept the class system, but made it more like FFT: you can change classes at will? That might work.

I would actually find a smaller scale MMO appealing.

OK, as I have been into Ulduar a few times at this point, let me talk a bit about what Blizzard did with the raid. If any of this has been stated above and I missed it, I am sorry.

Ok, first off, Ulduar itself is designed to be a challenging raid. Even the trash mobs can kill you if you aren't careful. There are 14 bosses, and its broken down into wings so its easy to divide the raid up over the week before its reset.

As I said, there are 14 bosses. 11 out of those 14 bosses have optional things you can choose to do before the fight to make the fight easier. The bosses all have great loot either way, but you get more drops and some better gear when you beat a boss on its "hard mode" by not taking the optional targets out. Personally I really like this, as one of the biggest complaints that was out about WotLK raiding was the fact that the content wasn't particularly challenging. My guild isn't espically hard core, and we were blowing through Heroic Naxxramas in less than 5 hours.

I know most of the guilds I know are excited about getting a shot at the hard modes for the improved gear, titles, etc. You get bragging rights for em. I know when I got my champion of the frozen wastes title for clearing all heroics and raids, I got props for it from people I didnt know. People will see me with my new mace out of Ulduar and give me props for it. For completing Obsidian Sanctum on hard mode, everyone in the raid gets twilight drake mounts, and very few have em, so people tend to look on em kinda in awe. Getting the title for this boss will be a reward in and of itself.

Kupek wrote:What if you kept the class system, but made it more like FFT: you can change classes at will? That might work.

I would actually find a smaller scale MMO appealing.

If you can change your class will that's sort of like just making all the class the same in the first place (which is sort of what WoW does). Another problem is even if you can change class at will, you can't change your gear at will. Presumably the 'tank' gear isn't going to be the something that's useful as 'healer' gear assuming the healer is even capable of equipping it (most likely not).

It's an ongoing problem with class based games. You want to make the classes different, because otherwise why have classes? But if you make them different and make challenging content, it's almost certain at some point you'd get content that is only possible with class X and Y and never Z. And if you don't got X and Y in a small scale MMO, that'd really suck, because you'd have no way out of it unless you rerolled.

Let's say all of us signed up for a small scale MMORPG. Sine is the only member of class X, and then he decided to stop playing. Even if we could magically change some guy to class X, we probably don't have gear plus whatever else in game commitment you need to get a strong character of class X. Now normally in a MMORPG you get around this by being big. Either you've enough people so you got 3 class X to go through, or you try to recruit class X from rest of the server. You lose that if you're to confine your world population, but you have to have a small population for anybody to leave a meaningful mark.

Oh yeah the talk of classes makes me think of one other thing that goes hand in hand with Ulduar. Its a whole new mechanic that radicly changes the face of WoW in my humble opinion.

Dual Talent Specilization.

You can actually have two seperate talent builds that you can toggle between when out of combat. So someone who is say, a warrior tank, can switch to DPS if they want to, or a Frost mage can change to another element in a fight that Frost wont work well in.

It only costs 1000 gold to train it, which at level 80 isnt that hard to earn.

Don wrote:If you can change your class will that's sort of like just making all the class the same in the first place (which is sort of what WoW does).

I think that's only true if you continue to have an emphasis on gear - which is a tendency I've always thought makes MMOs continuous feedback loops. You go on quests to get better gear, which lets you go on better quests, which yield better gear... Single player RPGs do this as well, but eventually the game ends and there's some feeling of resolution.

If you change the carrot from specialized gear for a particular class to something more generic but just as desirable, then there would be benefit to being able to change classes at will.

I don't agree, Don, the point isn't "you can only do something once".

You don't need a small server. You're still thinking in terms of a static world, and "events" that react to a static world. Everything has to be more dynamic, from the player profiles to the mobs to the spells to the terrain itself.

What you need is a world that is CONSTANTLY CHANGING, that players can change, but that other players can change right back. You have to make the world itself capable of reacting back to the change, the way the real world does.

Model things like terrain erosion. Dungeons where you can have dynamic rockfalls that change the pathing through the dungeon. Dynamic terrain mesh changes are quite possible on a small scale already - I could show you how to program something like that. If someone casts a decent-size explosion, you need to alter the terrain mesh for the zone. You need to update everyone's player map on the fly, and that's hard. It's far from impossible, it just takes very, very good network programmers, and there aren't more than a few thousand network programmers who could attempt something like that in the world at any given time.

Let powerful players summon a volcano, but make it something that you need to have an entire guild prep for a week or two to be able to do. The degree of change allowed has to be proportional to the power that the players have developed through skill as well as the length of time it takes to accomplish the footwork for any given "change".

Instead of having dungeons that raids can wipe easily, make it HARD to go clear out a goblin nest, make it something that the town has to come together to do. Make the goblins reproduce over time and actually mount an attack on the town themselves, and have the capability to take it over if the townspeople don't react. Then, wiping out the goblin nest might allow all players access to a tunnel to a new, more advanced area that nobody had access to before.

The genre HAS to move past "spawning" and "respawning" and the traditional concept of "zones" if things are going to move forward.

There might be things you "can only do once", and they would be things that several high-level guilds would have to form a coalition to do. VERY, very hard. And it would change a large part of the game world - maybe triggering the "next expansion" or whatnot that the dev team has been prepping for months. But imagine how much cooler it would be to be part of the team that toppled the equivalent of a Tarrasque or Omega Weapon and LEGITIMATELY started a new era in the world instead of just having a feather in your cap and a shiny new bow to brag about...

The backbone of this is that you need both an engine and a team that can respond to player actions and alter the game world themselves on the fly. It's a lot more like being an old-school Dungeon Master who can think on his/her feet when the players do something unexpected than it is being a modern GM who has to a corpse retrieval when some hapless nubbish falls off the ferry. It's got to be very dynamic, and it takes whole new approaches to programming that a lot of programmers would just get confused by. Sadly, there are a lot of coders out there who can't cope with the idea of dynamically changing rules.

People might say "no, this is impossible", I can tell you that it's not. But people have to FULLY adopt new-generation polymorphic programming techniques and create really dynamic objects. Nobody wants to take the risk or maybe even understands it. People are "hidebound" by the dominant paradigm.

The biggest challenge is that you need a constant stream of data exchanging between the players and server in order to reflect the changing terrain and world. But you already have that in terms of player and mob positions. I just think the obstacle is that a lot of developers and programmers think in terms like "players and monsters move, the world doesn't move", and that would require a paradigm shift.

Now, a small server would be great to RESEARCH this stuff, and that is probably how the techs will eventually be developed.

It's a very, very hard problem, so most people don't try. But I still maintain there are people out there who won't play an MMO until it happens. Roberta Williams has said this is the kind of thing that she's interested in, actually, and I worry that she might not live to see it.

Kupek wrote:

Don wrote:If you can change your class will that's sort of like just making all the class the same in the first place (which is sort of what WoW does).

I think that's only true if you continue to have an emphasis on gear - which is a tendency I've always thought makes MMOs continuous feedback loops. You go on quests to get better gear, which lets you go on better quests, which yield better gear... Single player RPGs do this as well, but eventually the game ends and there's some feeling of resolution.

If you change the carrot from specialized gear for a particular class to something more generic but just as desirable, then there would be benefit to being able to change classes at will.

I've definitely thought that MMOs have needed more dynamic job trees for awhile. I don't understand why no one's done a "class tree" instead of just a skill tree yet, particularly when Final Fantasy ONE had the concept of upgrading to a more powerful class in some way.

In terms of the general discussion, there was a mod for Warcraft 3 called "Legendary Monsters" that I'm intensely grateful for. It's like WoW Lite. Same carrot, same stick, just ghetto-ass graphics. The guy who made it (and it's one guy) uses the WC3 units, but the more badass heroes are bosses, you start as like a cloud of smoke and stuff. The whole thing maybe takes a group of talented players three weeks or so to clear out and get the most powerful twink gear instead of, like, two years. It's a funny mod, too. Most of the crappy gear you get is quite genuinely crappy. You find rusty armor that gives you tetanus and shit.

And I'm so happy about it because when I finally got the last piece of super-awesome gear I wanted in that mod, I felt a tremendous sense of depression, because there wasn't much reason to play anymore after that. Luckily, because it was all "lite", it went away after a day or so. But I absolutely am convinced it would have been the same thing if I'd been playing WoW for two years and finally got all the gear I wanted, only instead of a mild letdown lasting a day I'd probably be ready to shoot myself in the brain.

(The saving grace would have been ordering a FigurePrint, which would be kind of cool. But then again...)

Well say you raise a volcano and it took 40 guys 2 weeks to do it. Is the effect good or bad? If it's good then it's going to be done only once unless the volcano magically goes away in 2 more weeks, but in that case you're not really changing the world. If the effect is bad (maybe good for you, but bad for rest of the server) then someone will probably try to get rid of your volcano, and if they can do this again it's not dynamic anymore. You'd have your volcano up and then someone else will have to do their anti-volcano spell to chop it down and you repeat forever.

In WoW you can capture PvP objectives that's supposed to give you an edge. But usually there's one side per server that is much stronger, so after a while people just figure there's no point to fight the stronger side who will always have those objectives, and then the dynamic becomes the static.

And if you're talking about stuff that's truly world changing, obviously everyone will show up for it, and as far as I can tell no MMORPG can handle 100+ people events with any reliability. In this case the guy making a difference is most likely the guy who didn't lag out.

I don't think you can 'make a difference' in a large world even from a design point of view, but even if you can figure it out on a design level, current technology has no way to handle 500 guys showing up to your world-changing event. So you have to start small until technology matures.

Kupek wrote:

Don wrote:If you can change your class will that's sort of like just making all the class the same in the first place (which is sort of what WoW does).

I think that's only true if you continue to have an emphasis on gear - which is a tendency I've always thought makes MMOs continuous feedback loops. You go on quests to get better gear, which lets you go on better quests, which yield better gear... Single player RPGs do this as well, but eventually the game ends and there's some feeling of resolution.

If you change the carrot from specialized gear for a particular class to something more generic but just as desirable, then there would be benefit to being able to change classes at will.

Then it almost sounds like you have something in DBZ where you just have a 'power rating' on gear, like 'my helm is 800 units uber' or something like that. I can't think of a reasonable system that can make a helm that's both good for a melee or a caster otherwise. Even in a game like Diablo 2, there's no way an item that's good for a casting archtype is good for a melee archtype and they try to be relatively flexible with gear in that game compared to most.

M'k'n'zy wrote:Oh yeah the talk of classes makes me think of one other thing that goes hand in hand with Ulduar. Its a whole new mechanic that radicly changes the face of WoW in my humble opinion.

Dual Talent Specilization.

You can actually have two seperate talent builds that you can toggle between when out of combat. So someone who is say, a warrior tank, can switch to DPS if they want to, or a Frost mage can change to another element in a fight that Frost wont work well in.

It only costs 1000 gold to train it, which at level 80 isnt that hard to earn.

Problem is dual spec doesn't get around the gear issue unless the function of the two spec is the same. You're not going to tank in DPS gear, for example, so you still need a separate set of gear for that function. It works fine for classes where one set of gear fits all function, like say a mage whose only function is to do damage. But it won't work well on say, a Paladin or a Shaman who have 3 totally different function depending on the spec.

Don wrote:Then it almost sounds like you have something in DBZ where you just have a 'power rating' on gear, like 'my helm is 800 units uber' or something like that.

Again, you're stuck on gear as being an integral part of the game. I'm saying deemphasize gear both as loot and as stat boosts.

Don wrote: I don't think you can 'make a difference' in a large world even from a design point of view, but even if you can figure it out on a design level, current technology has no way to handle 500 guys showing up to your world-changing event. So you have to start small until technology matures.

I absolutely disagree about the design point of view. Couldn't disagree more. You're still thinking in terms of "events" and "raids". I'm not talking about static event points. I'm talking about terrain and levels and enemy groups that can adapt to your players' actions. You're thinking of this like a 500-person raid against a single boss. Stop thinking like this is WoW I'm talking about. You might have the top few hundred people showing up against the "main" part of the boss, but the boss would probably spawn a few hundred or thousand minor enemies that could engage smaller groups across the board.

The technology point is quite valid. But pipes are getting fatter all the time and a project like this would take years to do anyway. By the time you got done with something like this the tech would have moved up a notch as it is. You also don't have to squirt every vertex change to every player. You can squirt the event type that changes the vertices as a really pretty small packet and do things client-side. Get rid of a lot of the inefficiencies and you have a lot more room for this stuff. The big problem is that people use static meshes to do just about everything. It needs to be more procedural. Instead of creating a tree, you can do a lot if you teach the computer procedurally how to make a tree.

I think, as I said before, the main obstacle to all of this isn't design OR tech. It's a shortage of programmers and designers who can think outside the box. That one's very, very real. It will clobber you harder than either of the other two. Hiring is very, very hard, and like I said before, people who can understand both the rigidity of machine computation and the flexibility needed to translate that to dynamic human interaction are ridiculously rare. I think it's more the labor base that would have to come up more than anything to make it work.

I mean, thinking about this more - no, the technology isn't there yet. But it would be nice to see some efforts somewhere between where I mentioned and what's presently out there.

At the very least, I really wish we could get away from "spawning". The tech is easily there to model real dynamic monster populations if nothing else. Spawning just kills it for me, it ruins the illusion that I'm in something other than a grind-for-loot experience.

Replay wrote:I don't like a gameplay paradigm that amounts to "play long enough and we'll give you a biscuit".

Getting to level 50 or 60 can be done without much skill, but once you're at the cap, you're on a level playing field with everybody else, and the smarter people are actually going to get the good loot. If you're not smart enough to think through the problems, you're going to lose, you're going to make your entire group lose, and you're eventually going to kicked out.

Nobody likes stupid players. There are scores of them on WoW (so easy to use, no wonder it's #1), but not so much on LOTRO.

Replay wrote:The big problem is that people use static meshes to do just about everything. It needs to be more procedural. Instead of creating a tree, you can do a lot if you teach the computer procedurally how to make a tree.

You're talking on the order of designing a brain at this point: "Don't teach a computer how to talk, but create something similar to the human brain so that it learns how to talk based on inputs."

That shit is really hard to do, and even harder to troubleshoot. What happens if one of those trees interferes with the landscape? You can't adjust the tree. You have to adjust the code that makes the tree. What if a "dynamic" enemy is too hard? You can't change that enemy. You have to change how it creates the enemies.

Sine, I could write an algorithm to make procedural 3D trees within about a month, probably. No, it's not that hard, and nowhere near as hard as natural language processing (your example), which I've also looked into.

Even that, though, seems like we ought to be seeing the rudiments by now. If the industry spent a quarter of the money they spend on graphics development on something like NLP, we'd have rudimentary conversation generators now (there was a game that used a text-parser version of it, and it was very hopeful to see, but it was seriously indie and nobody really cared)).

WoW had something like that before Naxxmas launched. You got these Necropolis landing and you got to take them out, and sure they were static at certain places but it's not like making the location dynamic would've been very hard. But the problem is you got an event where you got to like kill 100000 zombies and destroy 100 necropolis, and after about the 10th one it gets pretty boring. The Aqn'Quiraj (no way I spelled that right) opening again was a server effort because you got to build up war supplies, and apparently the army needs like 1000000 bandages and 1000000 fried chicken made with tradeskill and stuff like that. Again after your server has delivered its first 10000 bandages most people just want this to get over with instead of continuing to make bandages for the war effort. Also, think about how silly to get recognize for this... like does the person who made the most bandages get a title? So the guy who bought the most bandages gets a title???

And there's probably some epic battle event at the end, but obviously that's one where everyone on your server shows up too and then you get a logistical issue because currently we cannot handle an event where 100 guys show up let alone 1000 or whatever your server has.

Now there's one part of the AQ opening where you need to like kill some boss in under 3 hours after the instance started or whatever, that part can be done on your own time and I think that was necessary to start the final event. So you could say that'd leave a mark behind in the world but then I doubt anybody still remembered who was the one who opened the Scarab Gate or whatever the event was called. Besides, even here you're talking about a guild that must have at least 40+ people, so who do you get to decide which out of the 40 guy is the one who gets the credit? I suppose you can figure out who is the most valuable member and all that, but even then it's still kind of arbitrary.

From a population point of view, it's something like 1% of the WoW population was in a guild that can do the final quest, and let's say you got 50 people in a guild, that means exactly 2% of the guys (1) was able to get the final honor. So that's 0.02% of your total population, which certainly makes the accomplishment meaningful, but chances are you are part of the 99.98% that will never see this content. So you've wasted a lot of resources for basically an irrelevent portion of the population.

Of course, on the other hand, you also have stuff in like WoW where you kill say the evil Dragon soandso, and then you turn in his head, and you got the feeling the guy is saying like "Thank you for saving our world soandso, I'll put this evil dragon's head next to the pile of 25 other heads brought in this morning." That also feels rather anticlimatic. But if only very few people can do it (say, less than 1%), then it almost certainly won't be you just due to sheer probability. That's why I think if you want dynamic, you got to be able to scale the world to a very small place. If your world only has 100 people then you could have 10 guys leave a significant impact, and asking players to excel at the top 90% percentile isn't much. Asking people to excel in the top 99.9%, which is what you'd need in a current MMORPG, is simply too much.

I agree that a small game world would be best to test out the concepts. When it gets higher, the way I think you solve the top whatever% problem is by making it so it's not a linear path to a single top. It's like - in real life, you don't have one badass human who's just the best. You have careers and people get to the tops of various fields with differing purposes. You can be trying to be the best doctor, or lawyer, or retailer, or whatnot in real life, you don't have to be one thing, and it would be silly to try.

MMOs don't necessarily have that yet - yeah, you have different classes, but they're all ways to team up to kill things, in the end. Crafting is a good start, and there are rudimentary attempts at this stuff, but mostly it still comes back to the level grind and no one's put a real emphasis on it yet. I think things need to be improved with genuinely different job paths with different objectives.

For me, I'd love a game where I could play something like a priest in a temple who, at higher levels, had little to no personal contact with any sort of combat, but who gained experience by practicing diplomacy with other guilds, managing temple resources and whatnot, just because TBH I'm sick of fighting being all there is in these games. You really could have someone whose job it was to practice diplomacy, make treaties, ensure the temple's resources and building were going steadily. Lord knows that the concept of building things in a gameworld has been around since Simcity or before, no reason THAT tech can't be put in an MMO sooner rather than later. That classpath would have experience bonuses from diplomatic skills. Another path might be scouting, and exploring, rather than just killing stuff. People love to do that - Lewis and Clark instead of Conan, and if you're the "scout" class you get a LOT of bonus exp for exploring, not just a little. They have scout-gain in WoW but it's static for everyone and kind of boring unless you're an achievement whore, and it doesn't solve the "linear path to the top" problem anyway. You could also have dedicated healers. Bounty hunters who get more exp for killing players who go rogue and disrupt the social order than for just grinding. Professional gamblers who gain from playing things like Tetra Master or whatever. I really think job specialization and experience differentials for different tasks are key - that way you're not just trying to be part of the adventuring group that happened to be lucky enough to kill a god or whatnot.

Also, special events where you spawn 100000 of the same monster are not the way to go. That's not really what I'm talking about either. My whole point with this is to try to get away from a repetitive grind.

You made some good points there, though, Don, and you're making me have to think about this. I really like that, so thanks.

As far as the dragon's heads accumulating in a huge pile...

Well if you have any game where stuff is primarily obtained by combat (even tradeskill requires you kill stuff that drops the stuff you need to make your materals out of), it is almost certain the top will be dominted by the same group of guys. People like to say people at the top are just a bunch of no skills no life guys, but the fact is that they're probably at least well above average with a ton of playing time, so against this kind of advantage in both skill and playtime it is difficult to see anybody but the same guys with the highest combined skill + playtime at the top. So let's say you have something only 1% of the population gets recognition, but you got 10 such events. Well, most likely all 10 events will be won by the same 1%, and that's too exclusive.

WAR had a pretty interesting way with the Tome of Lore where you get XP and titles for exploring and doing some fairly odd things, but ultimately learning Orc history or whatever isn't going to make you the most effective guy at PvP which is the game's primary focus. Out of current games on the market, I don't think you have anything that's big enough to support multiple style of playing. EverQuest is the only game I can think of that might be big enough to support multiple styles of playing, but that's got 10 years of content in it. You can't expect a new game to be that big, since you just won't have the resources to do that.

When the 2nd to last expansion first came out in EverQuest, my brother and I were the first to finish getting to ally to like 5 out of the 7 major factions in the game. We didn't even play particularly high hours. It was just everyone else was in a ubergamer mode of trying to max out XP ASAP in the old world zones and figure they can put off faction later, while we just messed around in the new zones. Now that was actually pretty fun, and while there is no official recognition for 'first guy in the world to ally to faction XYZ', since EQ doesn't have a way to preview faction reward, what we did helped the guy doing the info site to actually narrow down which faction has what rewards. So that could be one kind of 'first' that's exclusive but not necessarily dependent on crazy playing time or skills.

Of course, then you have to ask, what's the reward for getting first worldwide for faction? Advancement of human knowledge? I guess that's true but there sure aren't any tangible rewards, and we know ahead of time that the faction rewards aren't going to be too great anyway since EQ is a game where gear acquisition is almost solely tied to killing bigger and bigger mobs. I actually have a lot of fun, but then my character was once one of the most powerful in EverQuest so material gain, to me, is meaningless (fallen behind now but I realized being #1 in stats on the uberest boards doesn't add anything to my gaming experience). Unfortunately the general playing population is shallow and want immediate gratification. 99.9% of the playing population figure if getting ally with Rebel Brownies doesn't yield you a sword of utter destruction then it's an utter waste of time.

And even if it's just for fun, if you're in a combat-based, gear-based MMORPG (which is pretty much every one of them), you probably would want something to show for your effort. So say you offer a cool title or even some loot for doing this... but then in that case the guy playing 24 hours a day would want to do it too, and obviously he'd hit it first since it's not exactly rocket science to grind faction. And even if you can somehow make faction that involve a bunch of interesting stuff, chances are more than likely an above average skilled player, playing at 16 hours a day, will easily beat whatever you can do at 4-8 hours a day. So if you actually gave out meaningful award, then again that same 1% guy with high play time, decent skill will dominate.

I'm reminded of a section in HXH when the main characters are on Greed Island, which is basically a Live Action MMORPG. Killua and Gon went past a village of sick ninjas. The ninjas need to buy this special medicine to control this fever, and it costs exactly equal to (amount of money the two characters have) zenny. So Gon and Killua talks about this.

Gon: "Should we help these ninjas?"
Killua: "You ALWAYS help them in RPG, because they'll give you better stuff than what you give up!"

And then it turned out the ninjas just took all of Gon and Killua's money to buy their medicine and didn't give anything back. And I think that captures the mentality of the average player very well. If there was some quest where you got less than what you put in, people will say that was a dumb quest. Every action has to have a measureable reaction that is strictly greater than the input, and that really limits what kind of game you can make.

The problem is the "primary focus". It's the idea that a MMO has to be "____-based" (gear, xp, PvP, whatever). That kind of a design paradigm always leads to a linear path to a given "top". We need more diversity in design.

Well, when you're not "based" on something, you suck at everything. PvE games that also feature PvP generally suck at one or the other.

At least Turbine was smart enough to have PvMP with a customizable set of classes that could be adjusted without changing the dynamics of the PvE play.

EQ2 had a system where the spells simply did totally different things depending on if it's PvP for PvE. For example, a taunt in PvE works like what it's supposed to (make mob hit you unconditionally). A taunt in PvP works similar to how WAR does, i.e. if the target that's taunted doesn't hit you a few times, he takes significantly elevated damage from you. It's not perfect but it's a lot better than say 'well taunt does nothing in PvP because you can't force someone to attack another guy'.

SineSwiper wrote:Well, when you're not "based" on something, you suck at everything. PvE games that also feature PvP generally suck at one or the other.

At least Turbine was smart enough to have PvMP with a customizable set of classes that could be adjusted without changing the dynamics of the PvE play.

I don't think this needs to necessarily be true in the future. The point isn't to be everything to everyone, it's just to get away from the grind. If a game tries to be the be-all and end-all of PvE, PvP, etc., it's going to fail. You can't simultaneously offer diversity and have a "who's the biggest badass" thing going at the same time.

Took a month and a half, but Algalon is dead. 2 Guilds killed him the other day.

Very cool encounter

http://files.filefront.com/AlgalonEnsid ... einfo.html

Eric wrote:Took a month and a half, but Algalon is dead. 2 Guilds killed him the other day.

Very cool encounter

http://files.filefront.com/AlgalonEnsid ... einfo.html

Why the fuck do people encode in video other than DivX? DivX is THE standard. I can't even play this on my dual-core 3GHz. It's not the video card that is choking, but the MP4 decompression.

SineSwiper wrote:

Eric wrote:Took a month and a half, but Algalon is dead. 2 Guilds killed him the other day.

Very cool encounter

http://files.filefront.com/AlgalonEnsid ... einfo.html

Why the fuck do people encode in video other than DivX? DivX is THE standard. I can't even play this on my dual-core 3GHz. It's not the video card that is choking, but the MP4 decompression.

Pfft, you and your gimp computer. :p

Here's a nice Youtube link for you non-uber types http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv_b1-bsN5o&hd=1

And Method's world second kill a few hours later.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUSSMXAJRks&hd=1

My PC is not gimp. The video card isn't the greatest, but it's not a video card problem.

SineSwiper wrote:My PC is not gimp. The video card isn't the greatest, but it's not a video card problem.

Gimmmmmp!

Anyway, interesting battle, though I noticed a lot of the interface additions. Tanks have an aggro meter? You can see what spells the boss is recharging? It seems like it takes some of the fun out of the game.

EDIT: Yeah, a lot of the UI stuff is pretty lame. There's a recharge bar that shows which skill is ready. I bet they just have to hit one button to activate the last recharged skill.

And you say it took a month and a half? That's, what? Six tries? Hell, it took a while to figure out the how to kill the turtle, and he's not even the hardest boss. Watcher 2.0 is kicking everybody's ass, even with a complex FAQ on how to beat him.

The only strategy I saw with this boss? Move your people to the big hole. Whooo.

EDIT: Sorry, I was talking about LOTRO with the turtle and watcher.

Let's say they tried him in 9 tries, that's 9 hours, so like people suggested, if this guy was up as is he'd probably be beaten the first day. As far as I can tell all that fight involves is spacing out when you kill adds (they blow up for 10K when killed, but will commit suicide at the same time if you leave them alone), and you jump down the black hole before Algalon does his Big Bang (instant kills anybody).

WoW's interface is really an arms race now. It's because they know you got interface that basically tells you everything you need to know that they have to make raids stupidly difficult, and this is also why every WoW encounter seems to have an element of 'got to move to the right spot or die' since an interface add on can't move your character for you (yet). Of course all that does is encourage people to come up with an even more powerful interface to compensate. Looking at the WoW videos sometimes I feel it's the interface playing the game for you, not you playing the game.

You know, there's an easy fix for that: ban all third-party interfaces. They should have never allowed them in the first place. There are no third-party interfaces for LOTRO, because Turbine would just ban the interface and that would be that. It's easy enough to protect your own section of memory, or simply drop any known "cheating" devices.

FPSs have been protecting against cheating bastards for many years.