Month: October 2011

Looking Through The Mists

Posted on by Gazimoff

This weekend has been a firehose of information. Although I’ve never been to a BlizzCon in-person (something I hope to rectify), I’ve been glued to the internet and live streams for information. There’s nothing quite like getting the latest on a games franchise straight from the source.

Like a good meal, it takes a while for me to digest and fully appreciate all the news that emerges. Now that I’m able to sit back and reflect on the dishes presented to us, I feel I’m ready to share my opinions on each delicate morsel that appeared.

There’s a lot to go through, both good and bad. From the changing pace of Azeroth’s story to the abolition of talent trees, from missed opportunities to interesting ideas, I’ll be giving my opinions on all the major topics. Grab yourself a drink, as this may take a while.

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The Declining MMO Market

Posted on by Gazimoff

There’s been a couple of great articles recently about the situation at CCP, publishers of EVE Online. The theory is that the company hasn’t been doing as well as it hoped following the White Wolf Publishing acquisition and has been losing both staff and subscribers ever since. I’d suggest reading Tobold’s summary of the situation if you’d like to know more there.

The question it creates is where this leaves MMO gaming as a whole. The general feeling is that we should be set for a decline in the popularity of the genre. Studios may end up closing doors and games may end up being taken offline. It’s a bit of a grim scenario.

There’s a question that I have to ask though – how much of this is to do with players getting tired of a particular game? If the universe you’ve been playing in hasn’t changed much in the past few years then wouldn’t you get bored and move on? Likewise, has the developer looked at chasing new customers to replace the ones that have left?

Ultimately there’s a known truth – players will only try your game for so long before they get bored or tired of it and move on. You need to have alternatives out there that players can easily switch to when that happens, otherwise they’re likely to become someone else’s customers.

You can see Blizzard do this with Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo and Titan – a range of game styles for people to switch between. It’s also been the strategy of Perfect World, NCSoft and others. This is where CCP has been stuck. As EVE becomes less popular they have no alternatives to offer. World of Darkness was supposed to be that, but it’s been kicked into the long grass.

I do agree with Tobold to an extent. The MMO market is due for a shake-up. But while I think that some games may change fundamentally, I don’t think that we’ll see any switch off completely. There’s always a way to to keep an old game running.

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Hobbyists, Indies and the Doom Moment

Posted on by Gazimoff

Have you ever wanted to change something about your favourite MMO? Maybe write your own questline or create your own models? Perhaps build your own game world or maybe even write your own game? Have you wanted to go from just being a passive consumer to an active creator within the genre?

If you do, I know how you feel. I’ve been looking at creating my own online games to play around with various concepts and ideas I have, and it’s been a real struggle. The current techniques that most MMO publishers permit are restricted to user interface addons and extensions, which is great if you want to build your own UI but not much good for anything else.

I’m a lot like the legions of other coders who’ve experimented with creating their own in-game content. From Doom through to Half-Life and beyond, some gamers have taken their games apart like clockwork wristwatches just to see how they work, before tinkering and experimenting with them to change the game in new ways.

I’m not yet sure if MMO developers and publishers are coming round to this way of thinking, but there’s a little glimmer of hope.

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How Warcraft Will Never End

Posted on by Gazimoff

As Blizzcon rapidly approaches there’s a ton of speculation about what will be announced. Hopes are high for a new World of Warcraft expansion, although details are sketchy about what it may contain. The trademark ‘Mists of Pandaria’ has been suggested as a name following trademark registration, but this was later dismissed as being ‘wildly overhyped’ by the developer.

Regardless of what the next expansion is called, the important thing is where it takes the story and what possibilities open up. Is it possible that the upcoming expansion will close the book on the Warcraft universe, or are we looking at the prelude to something even bigger?

I’ll be the first to confess that I’m no lore expert, but regardless of the story intricacies at play I think that there’s a rough way in which the current Warcraft story arc will conclude, including how it’ll be the jumping-off point for something far bigger.

As always with discussions of this type, this is pure tinfoil-hat speculation. I’m not saying that this is an accurate idea of what will happen, just that it’s an example of what could happen. Don’t go placing any bets off the back of this.

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The Kitten Standard Economy?

Posted on by Gazimoff

A while back I wrote about the possibility that Titan, Blizzard’s next MMO, would feature a real money auction house. This followed on from Diablo 3, which introduced the concept in order to provide a safer alternative to the grey market that emerged around item trading in Diablo 2.

The main argument at the time was that Blizzard would never put in a real money auction house because it would affect the core dynamic of how players gain power. There was a claim that because Diablo 3 is a dungeon loot fest with no competitive play that there’s no harm to other players in buying high quality items for real cash.

The problem occurs when you try and apply the same logic to Warcraft. Currently the most powerful items and equipment are earned through either raiding (for valour points) or PVP (for conquest points). There is no way to shortcut buying them – no amount of gold will help you, while only breaching the Terms of Use and paying someone to play your character for you will get your character geared up quicker. Not something I’d encourage.

Sure there’s a few good quality BoE items from the top tier raids that can be sold on the auction house, but they’re few and far between. As a result, would it really harm the Warcraft mechanic of playtime=power if a real money auction house existed?

My hunch is that it wouldn’t.

Of course there’s the argument that it would ruin the feel of the game, or that Diablo needs this in order to stop a grey market for items springing up. But that still doesn’t make any sense. Warcraft has its own problems, from the gold farming to account hacking. The illicit trade in gold is huge.

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No Competitions For You!

Posted on by Gazimoff

We all like winning free stuff, right? There’s that warm glowy feeling that we get when we tear open a prize parcel, or the surprise when our numbers come up on the lottery. Even the chance of winning something makes us feel better.

It’s also not much of a surprise that competitions help companies to make fans. Whether it’s making your existing customers more loyal or reaching out to new ones, giving stuff away is one sure-fire way to grab our attention. Conversely, not giving stuff away or (even worse) being selective about how you do it is a sure-fire way to lose that attention.

Say that you’re running a large multinational corporation. You sell your products globally and have offices in a number of different countries. You invest in localising your products for local markets in order to win more customers. Your products are so well-loved you have fans worldwide.

The moment of your annual corporate shin-dig is approaching, the time when you welcome fans from across the globe in order to show them what you’re working on. You’re even selling live video streams of the event internationally for those fans that can’t make it.

So you look at building hype by starting some competitions to get the fans all fired up. All’s well and good until they come across this bit of small print in the competition rules.

Entrants in this Fancypants Contest to Win Free Stuff (the “Promotion”) must be legal residents of the U.S. and Canada (Rhode Island and Quebec excluded)

Your fans doubt themselves, asking how this can be. Then they see a succession of competitions organised by show sponsors, again with that same small print. It reinforces the point – your international fans just aren’t as important to you as the ones you have at home.

The usual defence in this situation is to point to laws governing competitions and prizes, wailing that “it’s too hard” to run contests that everyone can enter. Yet you still managed to cover off employment law, retail law, corporation law and tax law when you set up your overseas offices. Surely you could have done your homework? You’d just spend the money once, draw up a contests template and away you go.

I’m not going to lecture you on how your international fans feel – read the comments on almost any competition announcement and it’s always the same. Thanks for ignoring us. Again.

Before you say that this is just some British guy with an axe to grind, think again. There’s the folks in other European countries. There’s the gamers in Australia who put up with some horrible lag just to play your game. There’s the people in China, Japan and India who are so important to you that you make localised versions of your game just for them.

Yet where are their competitions? You like their money well enough, but you’re not prepared to give a little back? Disappointing.

In the end all it takes is for a single publisher who’s done their homework to start pulling fans away from you. Don’t make their job even easier by telling international fans they’re not important to you any more. You may end up being the biggest in the US, but if the rest of the world is playing a different game it’s small potatoes.

Time to Change Quest Mechanics

Posted on by Gazimoff


I’ve recently started playing Rift again after taking a break for about four months. It’s impressive to see how far the game has progressed – talents and abilities have been revamped, the artwork has been improved and a ton of new features have been added. The guys at Trion have been hard at work.

Then there’s the bits that are harder to improve. One of my gripes about Rift is that in the mid levels (about 20 to 40) fatigue starts to set in. The game simply becomes less fun to play, with questing becoming dull and boring. I’m finding it a struggle to motivate myself to log into the game and play. Why? Because every single quest hub is made of boomerang quests.

Almost anyone who’s played through an MMO knows what boomerang quests are, but I’ll explain with an example. You approach a small group of friendly NPCs on the coastline. One of them tells you that there’s a cave up ahead filled with smugglers, and would like your help to remove them. You agree to go off and kill ten Smuggler Pirates and ten Smuggler Pistoliers.

After wading through the cave you return to the NPC, who then asks you to head back out again. Only this time she wants you to kill Smuggler Corsairs and Smuggler Captains. You fight your way back into the cave, killing more Pirates and Pistoliers just to get to your Corsairs. Annoying, right?

On your return, the NPC sees you coated in the blood and bodily fluids of the best part of fifty pirates. Not satisfied she asks you for one last thing. Kill Smuggler Chief Spalding, who resides right at the back of the cave. At this point you swear at the screen and weigh up just telling her to get lost.

But no, being the dutiful soul you are you march back into the cave and trying to sneak your way through to the back, getting spotted, giving in and going on a genocidal rampage against anything Smuggler shaped. Finally you get to where Smuggler Chief Spalding should be, only to find his corpse lying on the floor and a stack of other players waiting for him to return to life.

At this point I either hit the hearthstone and go somewhere else or quit the game and play something more fun. Like Giant Lolcat Olympics In Space.

I have two problems. The first is that it’s really, really lousy quest design. It’s boring, it’s repetitive, it’s frustrating and Rift is jammed full of them. The second problem I have is that it’s a problem that’s already been solved in other games.

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Personal Identity and WoW

Posted on by Gazimoff

Today’s article is a guest post from Bravetank.

Identity in WoW is an intriguing concept. I’ve previously written in my blog about how the “me” in game is distressingly similar to the “me” outside of the game – whether I’m playing Human, Blood Elf, Gnome or Tauren. My real self is always the underlying constant – annoyingly so for a game that should be a form of escape.

And yet some aspects of identity in WoW are more fluid. In the social sciences the term “identity” is often used to describe one’s understanding of one’s individual self and/or one’s role within a wider group setting.

Individual self identity can encompass such things as self knowledge and self esteem. What does this mean in relation to our sense of self in WoW? Self knowledge is a tricky one. For me I have very little “knowledge” of any of the characters I play beyond what buttons to press to get awesome dps (or at the very least to put me somewhere in the middle of the Recount list), to pull the mobs, to heal the tank. I don’t know any of my characters in WoW in the sense of having defined/explored their personality. I’ve never roleplayed so that part of their identity is undeveloped. In terms of their history- I know why I (the Creator!) made them, but I know very little about the history of their race, class and even faction. I casually switch from Alliance toon to Horde without blinking an eye. The other day I noticed my toon looked particularly thin (specifically her legs) and I wondered if my monitor was on the blink. Then I remembered I was playing blood elf not human! The race of the character was clearly not uppermost in my mind. That later led to further problems when I aimlessly wandered into Stormwind and tried to buy some cheese but that’s another story.

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Review: Razer Naga Molten

Posted on by Gazimoff

Last week I took the plunge and decided to order a new mouse. My trusty Logitech mx518 just wasn’t up to the challenge and I’d been eyeing up a rival for months – the Razer Naga. I’d been on the fence about purchasing one, mainly because I wasn’t a fan of the blue colour scheme. All that changed when the Razer Naga Molten Special Edition was announced.

Let’s be honest, I’m not the first person to review this mouse. The first one I noticed was back in 2009, brimming with potential about how the mouse could be used. Even the Razer Naga Molten was announced a year ago. So why the big deal about some two year old tech?

The answer is that I wanted to tackle two questions: is the Naga still relevant to the current crop of MMOs and the current way we play our games, and will it adapt to the way we’re likely to be playing MMOs in the future?

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