The Trouble with Trolls

And by that I mean the rehashed raids, Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman. Yes, it's a completely outdated topic, but what can I do, my head doesn't quite move at the speed of Internet.

First, a brief assessment: as I recall, ZG/ZA were meant to bridge the gap between blue gear from heroic dungeons and epic gear from normal raids. They were relatively long (though pretty linear), taking around an hour for a competent but inexperienced group to finish. And... they rewarded valor points for completion.

Let me stress that: they rewarded valor points for completion. In fact, they were the only way players could get close to the weekly valor point cap without running raids. The original Cataclysm heroics, besides dropping only 346 blues as opposed to the 353 epics of ZG/ZA, only awarded half as much valor per week. The inevitable result: non-raiders (which, as Blizzard likes to remind us, make up a large part of the WoW population) flocked to them massively.

ZG/ZA were called "long and difficult". And the problem wasn't the length or difficulty in themselves, mind you. There was a legitimate clamor at the end of WotLK for more challenge in Cataclysm. But the trouble was the LFD, a system designed to encourage and deliver fast dungeon runs.

Getting rid of the LFD was unthinkable. Too many people had forgotten how to manually move their characters to dungeons; and even more importantly, I think, the random LFD allowed for a pretty spreadsheet with large numbers of players evenly distributed over each dungeon. You know, the kind of thing that brings a smile to an executive's face ("this will look smashing in my slideshow presentation at the board meeting!!!").

The original Cataclysm heroics, when attached to LFD, had been bad ideas. ZG/ZA were abysmal. They were longer and arguably more difficult; there were only two of them; they were both troll-themed. Couple that with the race-to-the-end, daily-valor LFD mentality and you have frustration on a massive scale, followed by boredom on a massive scale.

The interesting and sad thing is, the troll dungeons could have been perfectly viable if they had been kept off the dungeon finder/daily valor scheme. The fact that not everyone raided, and the 353 epics that dropped there, were enough to draw people looking for some upgrades.

Sure, if that had been the case, ZG/ZA wouldn't have been ran as often as the LFD heroics... and that would have made the spreadsheet lose some of its luster... but it would have added diversity to character progression. The way it actually happened, it simply raised the mandatory "bread-and-butter" of daily valor up to a new, more frustrating level.

Now, the failure of the troll dungeons might have been a reason why Blizzard decided to go ahead and implement the misbegotten LFR. In their view it wasn't the LFD that screwed up the difficult dungeons but exactly the other way around... so they went in the direction of less difficulty and more LFD. Yay. That was my cue.

It's An Exogenous Variable, Really!

I know I'm supposed to be getting detox'd from WoW, but this struck me like a blow to the face:

We're with you in that the game is just more fun when you have friends and guildmates to run with. The issue we run into is, "what happens when they're not available but you want to do things?" So the most we can do is facilitate the means to get with others easily. We can connect you to other players, but we can't force people to talk or be social. It's going to take effort from the community itself to make it a more social experience by being social. I don't think what you're referring to is a design issue. And if you think it is, I'd love to hear your thoughts on how it could be improved. Just keep in mind, if you share some thoughts, they should keep in mind the current structure of the game. Without taking anything away or putting new restrictions out there, how would you go about doing it? Because as it is right now, it's easier than ever to be put into contact with other people. It's just a matter of then getting those people interested in interacting socially.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/5271781124?page=3#50

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/224603-woes-of-the-older-gamer/

It wasn't a particularly happy thread (like another poster noted, you don't have to be "old" to dislike the direction games in general and Blizzard in particular are headed), but the blue response is intriguing in that it sheds some light on Blizzard's attitude towards the "death of community". Apparently they blame the "community" itself. Players can talk to each other, plan events, run dungeons with friends, and take their time instead of racing to the end. They don't do those things because they don't want to!

Oh, right. So instant teleports to dungeons have nothing to do with the death of world PvP. Grouping with people you won't ever see again totally does not encourage lack of interaction. Also, such anonymity has absolutely zero to do with the terrible attitudes you often find in LFD and LFR. Forcing people to do dungeons they might not like, because "random heroics" are far and away the easiest source of mandatory "valor points", is completely unrelated to players wanting to be done as soon as possible. Oh, and by the way, there is nothing, nothing preventing players from turning off that 15% debuff.

It's one thing to say: "the majority of players prefer fast access to dungeons and gear over an engaging experience, so we have to oblige". That is true, I wager. Convenience rules supreme. But believing or pretending that the game's structure, built by Blizzard alone, does not affect players' attitudes is baffling. It's like Keynesians and their laughable belief that there is nothing structurally wrong with economic booms, and that they could go on forever if not for those pesky "animal spirits" and "expectations". And not unlike Keynesians, Blizzard here resorts to second-rate "psychology" to try and give their claims some credibility. Yes, people all of a sudden became less communicative. It's a "social" issue. Suure.

In short, my opinion remains the same: Blizzard is doing themselves and their players a disservice by assuming that everyone must experience heroics, everyone must have epics, everyone must have something "fun" (again, definition disputable) to do at a mouse click's distance, no matter the indirect costs. It's a condescending way to treat their players. "Here, maybe you're too lazy or incompetent or socially impaired to do this, so we'll dumb it down and force everyone to put up with it." But if this post by Nethaera is representative of the company's attitude, how can Blizzard do anything to stop the dumbing down process, if they don't even acknowledge they have a hand in it?

The Mists of Pandaria Press Tour

So I’ve been going over the MMO-Champion summary of Blizzard’s MoP press tour. One thing that drew my attention was their stated goal of bringing the “feeling of adventure” back into the game. They are talking about the original open-ended World of Warcraft, where there was no single unifying storyline (as there have been in all three expansions so far), and a lot of the things to do were not in-your-face – they required a bit of learning and preparation.

Even if you learned everything from other players or Thottbot or Allakhazam (anyone remember those? It’s strange to think that Wowhead wasn’t always there), having to get there by ground, and finding interesting (and often dangerous) things blocking your way lent a feeling of exploration and of actually being out there in the world. Obviously the fact that the game was new played a substantial part.

It’s a laudable goal, and I wish one could believe in their commitment to it, but given the devs’ behavior pattern, it’s tough to buy what they’re selling (literally). Several problems stand out embarrassingly close to their noble stated goals: flying mounts, readily available once a player reaches maximum level; this, coupled with the (forgive my candor) joke that leveling has become, essentially guarantees that people will trample each other on the race to level 90 and then proceed to farm their sacred dungeon and raid finders, seldom bothering to leave the cities and doing so in their 310% fliers when they do.

(Those things are, in some ways, like Social Security and Medicare: long-term bad ideas that nevertheless become untouchable once they’re in place. With time, their adverse effects become more pronounced, but by that point people have become, by force of habit, unable to imagine a world without them. So the farce goes on until the system dies, with either a bang or a whimper. Well, Blizzard has sold their scheme as effectively as Western governments, with the significant difference that you don’t go to jail if you refuse to pay your WoW bill.)

Ultimately, the determining factor in my negative opinion of Mists of Pandaria remains the fact that they’re very clearly moving towards a “standard pace of character power progression for everyone”. Everyone from Jackie Rendspam to Julian Worldfirst gets their periodic fix of item level increases, with the difference between them boiling down to a handful of stats and a lot of vanity. Here, come do hard modes, there’s a differently colored dragon in it for you! How cool is that, huh?

Sorry, but I’ll pass. “Bragging rights” as a reward is a concept that makes me ill.

WoW, an unhealthy relationship

Looking at what’s happening in WoW is beginning to give me a curious feeling that I only experienced before in one situation – thinking about my ex-girlfriend. It goes like this: first comes an urge to inflict physical harm, then a realization that even thinking about it makes you slightly ill with disgust, and finally an exasperated indifference. I suppose it’s a standard reaction to feeling betrayed by someone or something that once was important.

And not unlike the girlfriend parallel, coming to see Blizzard and their product for what they really are (or have become) is refreshingly liberating. It makes you wonder why people still play the damn thing when they have to grope for reasons to do so. It’s an addiction, plain and simple, just like “love”, and it becomes self-fulfilling. The player is no longer playing to level up or collect gear or defeat bosses – he’s doing those things in order to keep playing.

I think that’s the source of the dreaded “nothing to do” syndrome which (if the forums and my own experience are to be believed) is afflicting WoW right now. If you have an important goal that takes a lot of work to reach, you’re going to bend over backwards to get there. Which is why people such as myself sacrificed school, social interaction, work and a lot of other little and not so little things in order to level up, gear up and raid. The damn thing drew you in – the goal of becoming more powerful and defeating a string of complex encounters in a (considering Metzen, blissfully blurry) lore background can be intoxicating.

As I’ve said before, this “give players a goal” approach seems to have been forgotten in some back room at Blizzard. Now it’s all about the “fun”, which means playing the game for its own sake. If playing the game is the goal, there’s nothing much that needs to be done to achieve it. Just turn on the computer, fire up the program and there you are. Objective accomplished! Except now, you need to find an excuse for being there. And finding excuses is always harder than finding something that needs doing. But since finding an excuse is easier than actually doing something, it turns out to be a net win in the end, right? Right?

In EVE the only tangible goal is to make money – but it’s there, there are plenty of ways to do it, and most importantly, it’s impossible to have “enough”. I understand a lot of bored people are taking that approach to WoW. Maybe it’ll become a more money-focused MMO in the future – I can see that being a smart move by the devs, considering how messed up their “beat bosses” model has become.

The fact is that Blizzard have very clearly shifted gears from trying to draw players in, to milking the players already in for every penny they can extract. Is such a policy cause or consequence? In my opinion, both. It’s a positive feedback loop that’s certain to sink the game eventually. Maybe that’s the objective.

In any case, it’s good to feel WoW slowly washing out of my system. A guy in my guild, a really nice fellow and very competent player, even tried to “cast” the Scroll of Resurrection on me. Problem is, with the state the game is in, and having realized it, it was pitifully easy to resist. Too bad. He really was a nice guy.

Dinosaur

Fallout: New Vegas, WoW and The Witcher.

Yes, they are all RPGs - very observant, here's a cookie - but they interact in a way slightly funnier than that.

Fallout 3, New Vegas's predecessor, was significantly less than impressive for me - the only positive memory of it are the side stories, which for the most part were quite interesting (the one in the museum was really nice). Well, come to think of it, the scenery and atmosphere were actually pretty inspiring too. But that's about it.

The main quest, on the other hand, was - apologies for the bluntness - a turd. If you thought that recycling FO2's bad guys and somehow transporting them from the middle of the Pacific to Washington D.C. wasn't funny enough, well, Bethesda actually managed to recycle the Enclave's objective AND largely the method they would use to accomplish it - while adding a couple of dramatic twists that, while touching (I'm a sucker for cute, kind-hearted girls and tragic endings), weren't really very Fallouty.

In the end, I played through FO3 once and never looked back. Yet the meaning of the fact that Fallout, my teenage years' primary fantasy, had been turned into a console blockbuster - I don't mean that in a good way - was somehow lost on me.

Now, this past weekend, somehow lacking the spirit to work the calluses on my fingertips philosophizing about WoW, I found myself looking at Fallout: New Vegas. Obsidian Entertainment developed it using the Fallout 3 engine, and the result was (as is often the case with Obsidian games) praised for its story and spat on for its technical issues. Well, technical issues don't annoy me very much. I'm such a save/load addict that gameplay interruptions are really part of the experience.

So, succumbing to the whispers of that dreadful imp of consumerism, I shelled out $40 for FO:NV's "ultimate edition". Turned out to be disappointed. It's pretty much the way one would expect - nice background fiction, characters are more worthwhile than in FO3 - it's more "Fallouty" all around. But it's still miles away from the originals simply because it sticks to the abominable Bethesda RPG-FPS model. Best not go into detail. Bottom line is, it got me thinking about the drawn-out death of introspective, artistic gaming and the rise of mass production.

If you rear your head a bit to look at the overall state of gaming since the turn of the century, the trend is clear as daylight. The most noticeable thing is that the number of players boomed (and as a result, the number of games being pumped out by developers), as computers became cheaper and easier to use, and consoles even more so. The "nerdy age" (which could also be called the "romantic age") of gaming was drawing to an end.

WoW is a great example of that trend. Starting out as an "accessible" alternative to, specifically, EverQuest, it quickly rose to the stratosphere in popularity. And it continued to climb as more and more conveniences were added. When Blizzard put down their collective foot and drew a line in the sand - "it ends here!" - the market turned on them with a vengeance. Mindful of the almighty money, they quickly brought the game back on the path to Farmville.

From the moment when I stepped away from WoW because the 4.3 heroics and LFR disgusted me, up until this past weekend, I held on firmly to the belief that Blizzard could not possibly get away with dumbing down the game so much without suffering consequences. But then came New Vegas. And then what finally made my mind snap: a re-run of The Witcher.

Now, The Witcher is incredible. In many ways it goes back to the roots of RPGs, though not without making concessions to accessibility. In the game, you play a witcher (yes, really), a magical mutant engineered for combat and rendered infertile in the process, who (in theory) wanders the world killing monsters for money. But the world is changing. Humans are increasingly numerous; the elder races (elves and dwarves) are being persecuted, and their numbers are dwindling; witchers themselves are increasingly seen as freaks, and common people are largely finding ways of making do without them; plus, the secret of their creation (for it was a secret) has been lost.

It's hard not to see the parallel. Games were once something special, too. Only those willing to shun "normality" were allowed. To those outside it seemed like an arcane world, and in many ways it was: setting them up required knowledge of computers; being drawn in by them required an extraordinary amount of "suspension of disbelief"; and the difficulty was often unforgiving. Fast forward to today, and gaming has become incredibly mainstream. Every average (and below-average) Joe out there can pick up a game at Wal-Mart, stick it in their mass-assembled computer and start blasting away at the bad guys ("here! It's red! It's ugly! Shoot it!"), reveling in their newfound power. As much as one may despise Joe's simplicity when it comes to games, however, his money is just as good as anybody else's.

Mass production is a curious thing. There can be no doubt that it substantially increases the standards of living of the vast majority of people. Yet those who enjoyed something of a monopoly before the advent of mass production can't help but feel that something is missing. Is that true?

In The Witcher's world, the dying elements of a time past are without a doubt impressive: witchers with their strength and lightning reflexes, sorcerers with their fearsome magic, elves and dwarves with their peculiar idiosyncrasies. There's a clear sense that the world is, in some way, poorer with the fading away of such things and the rise of the average Joe.

It's not so clear in the real world, however. Coming from a free-market, pro-capitalist worldview, I often find myself at odds with people who bemoan the current industrial civilization and yearn for a return to the olden times. Clearly, industry made living standards skyrocket across the board. Necessity and luxury goods became available to incredible numbers of people who would have died in other, less affluent times. It's hard to fathom how anybody could want to go back to pre-industrial times.

And yet, funnily enough, here I find myself sad at the realization that gaming has passed through that exact same process of massification. And it's probably fair to say that something is lost in the process. Character and originality become far less important than digestibility and compliance with accepted industry standards.

Sad though it may be, it can't be stopped. Who knows? Maybe "mainstream" gaming is only a temporary fad that will go away. It's healthy to be a long-term optimist. For the moment, however, it's best to resign oneself to this fact of life, trying to make the best out of what the software factories produce. It's not all bad, and besides, it's useless to argue. In the end, scarcity (represented by money) wins the discussion simply by talking much louder than all the other arguments combined.

Loot Envy - root of all evil?

I apologize in advance for all the sarcastic quotation marks, but the concepts in them are so ill-defined and twisted that I can't afford to leave any doubt.

"Casuals versus hardcores" is an age-old problem in WoW. Obviously, it's an issue of envy, as it usually is with "the 99%" calling for the expropriation of "the 1%". Funnily enough, today we're through the looking glass: so many demands of self-titled "casuals" have been made reality that the "elitists" are the ones complaining.

According to "casuals", it's a case of "special snowflake" syndrome. The "elitists" are upset that they are no longer special, so the argument goes. Keep in mind the base, malicious envy with which this is said. It isn't an argument in itself, but it pays to be wary of people who gloat over others' misfortune.

Anyway, the "special snowflake" syndrome. Using this as an argument for homogenization is a classic case of begging the question: if one assumes that wanting to be special is bad in itself, why, the makers of rules have their work cut out for them. Be they Blizzard or the Politburo.

The thing is... distinctions will exist. And simply by the way the world works, these distinctions will usually result in a small portion of the population being a lot better than the bulk in some way. And that is not a problem in itself, especially if the majority are doing perfectly fine by themselves.

That's why I'm highly suspicious of Blizzard's motives in dumbing down the game. The underlying argument seems to be that players will leave en masse if they're not showered with epics. It suggests that the developers believe, on a fundamental level, that more "equality" is inherently better. But saying so assumes that envy is the prevailing feeling amongst those less successful in the game.

I dispute that. Envy is not a dominant emotion in most people. If it were, human civilization would have gone to hell a long time ago. Sure, it's there in all of us, just like base lust and hatred. But - and this should be obvious, but apparently it isn't - that darker side of human nature is to be ignored, and fought when it boils to the surface.

The fact that Blizzard is a business, not a political organization, doesn't change the basic nature of the fact: catering to envy is a bad idea. It can never be satisfied, and will destroy any system if allowed to grow.

Thoughts on progression

It's implicit in Blizzard's development and their statements regarding the topic that they see the progression of players and characters as a relatively straight line from leveling to Heroic raids. It's something like this: first you level to cap, then run normal dungeons, then run heroic dungeons, then LFR, then normal raids, then heroic raids. A few parallel activities are available but this is the basic form of the PvE game.

A major topic of contention nowadays is the LFR. Believing that it should be ripped out of the game altogether is unfortunately outside the realm of "respectable opinion" or what passes for such in the WoW forums. But what is the LFR? If anyone believed for a moment that it was meant to "teach players how to raid", they were thoroughly disabused of that notion over the weeks following the release of 4.3. The primary purpose of LFR is, clearly enough, allowing people to "see the content", so the development resources that went into making the raid aren't "wasted" on the minority¹.

The fact that the LFR is really just a glorified loot vending machine creates a gap in the road of progression. By Blizzard's own admission, normal dungeons are going to disappear and be replaced by easy heroics². After that, what is there to keep players improving themselves³ on the road to normal and heroic raiding? People end up with no incentive to play their class well, even more so than before. Of course, leveling could be made slower and less forgiving once more, but... heh, yeah, right. Like that's happening.

But I'm straying from the point. Suppose for a moment that there was a working progression path that took players from starting fresh all the way to heroic raiding, which is, as I see it, the way Blizzard want it to be. The choice of such a linear system probably stems from the theme park design of WoW.

Yet at the point in time when this model was conceived, there was no such thing as "casuals versus hardcores". True that WoW was possibly the beginning of it all, with its proposal of accessibility; but while mostly anyone could get into the game, there was no such silly thing as the notion that everyone was entitled to finishing BRD⁴ because of their hallowed $15 a month. The game was meant to draw players in and then challenge them, as per Blizzard's design philosophy of making a game accessible at the fringes but complex at the core, in order to provide lasting entertainment value.

Here we are, nearly 8 years later, and the simplistic fringe has expanded to the point where it's gobbled up most of the challenging core. The developers probably have not completely forgotten the importance of challenging players, else the game would be going downhill a lot faster than it is now. Yet they clearly place a much greater focus on extending accessibility. And it doesn't mix well with the linear progression path, as it flattens most of the difficulty curve and causes it to become exceedingly steep at the higher end.

This alienates those players who want to stay somewhere in the middle - say, someone who likes a 5-man that will test their limits but doesn't want to raid (me). It also makes players accustomed to trampling everything up to a certain point, which will result in burnout when they invariably find the first significant barrier, normal raiding. As such, it requires an increased rate of content output, but that is unlikely to be enough. Thus the model also ends up calling for the flattening of the difficulty curve further over time, which partially explains why Blizzard now assume that it's their job, not the players', to ensure progression: a lot of people have become incapable of accepting failure or even delay.

This can only end one way, if the rules of the game and players' perceptions continue on this road. And it's an ugly end, whittling away and eventually killing the significance of the "content first, accessibility later" philosophy (if it's not dead and buried already).

Some people in the forums seem to think that the next expansion pack will do away with a substantial part of the problem by implementing "sideways progression", represented by the pet battles and challenge modes. That is unlikely.

First and foremost, creating alternate meaningful development paths would imply in a major redesign of the game. The pet battles system, for example, would have to be as complex as Pokémon, or something of that magnitude, in order to have any staying power.

Second, even if there was meaningful, time-consuming progression down each and every path, they would be liable to fall to the same issue we see today in the tired old "beat bosses, get gear" model: players feeling entitled to advance but no longer able to, requiring Blizzard to change the rules in their favor.

As an aside, the pet store would inevitably bring cries of "foul!" if pet battles ever did matter. That is, if Blizzard isn't banking on boosting their pet store sales that way in the first place.

Third: besides the a priori reasons above, there isn't much reason to believe, from the information we've been given, that these new features will be anywhere near as important as traditional character progression.

I would like to believe that Blizzard are really trying to give the (apparently large) portion of the player base who feel entitled to progression, but are not really ready to work for it, something to divert their attention from PvE and allow the developers to put it back on track. But after their statement that MoP "heroics" will be more Wrath-like, and the disappointing challenge modes⁵, it's hard to be optimistic.

If the devs really want to diversify the game, I believe they would be better off adding branches to the traditional development path. I'd like nothing better than a couple of BRS or BRD type dungeons, with attunements and keys, tricky and hard-hitting trash, lots of quests from all over the world, simple but tightly-tuned bosses...

Sorry, daydreaming. Anyway, in a nutshell: Blizzard has their "on-rails" character development path, and it currently depends on fast content output + steady nerfs, a probably self-defeating formula largely because of evolving player expectations. The primacy of gear-based character progression is very unlikely to change, and if it changes while continuing with the current difficulty curve paradigm, it will add to the problem.

Perhaps I've got everything out of proportion, or perhaps Blizzard sees the problem and plans to tackle it slowly, so as not to upset the entitled masses. But when I try to be optimistic, things like that dreadful quote from Bashiok hang ominously above like a storm cloud.

¹ There may be other reasons, too. It may be that the Blizzard fear competitors' accessible content (many of them being fresher and/or F2P), and so feel pressured to make their crown jewel, raiding, available for anyone in order to retain an edge in the subscription MMO market. Or maybe they actually believe in "democratic raiding" for its own sake... here's hoping that's not the case.

²Which strongly suggests that the only thing heroic about them will be the name. And the fact that it gives valor points.

³Notice that I'm talking about players improving their skills, not characters improving their gear.

⁴A mere dungeon! Today Blizzard is scared of requiring from players even so little as the trouble of forming their own groups, and God forbid they should fail to complete the instance in less than an hour.

⁵I plan to make a post specifically about that.