Tag: design

Gazimoff the Librarian

Posted on by Gazimoff

I’d scarcely believe it myself, but Mana Obscura is now three months old. It’s come a long way in such a time and is an incredible amount of fun to do, but it’s starting to groan at the seams a little now. It needs a careful eye cast over it, a little tweak and clean here and there, a little bit of spit and polish. It also needs a bit of work under the hood.

First things first, I’ve changed the name slightly, dropping the pretentious “the” and just sticking with Mana Obscura. I’ve also procured manaobscura.com as an address on the interwebs, and ManaObscura as a pigeonhole on Twitter. This particular Twitter feed will only contain stuff related to the site and the occasional retweet of good content created by others, so if you’re tired of GamerGaz filling up your tweetstream, here’s an alternative for you. Of course, while you can update your bookmarks there’s no rush – the old one will work just as well for the time being. If you subscribe to the RSS feed, you should be changed over automatically.

I’ve also started seeking out mage strategies and guides from across the interwebs for inclusion in the Mage Resources Guide. There are a ton of really good mage bloggers and writers out there pumping out some really good content, but it never sees the light of day or gets shared around. Rather than trying to rewrite everything, I’m just trying to catalogue and archive links to it, to try and point people in the right direction.  If you see something that you think would help mages or if you’ve written something you’d like to share, drop me note and I’ll add it to the guide.

In fact, the guide is part of the reason why I’m doing a spot of tinkering. There’s some features that I’d like to add to the site, but none of them seem to be sitting smoothly. As a result I’m going to be working away in my underground lair, trying to work out better ways of sharing everything here. It’s possibly going to mean fewer blogposts while I’m breaking and fixing things in my test chamber, but I hope the results will be worth it.

Talking about site work, I’ve been asked to take a look at rebuilding an old realm website and get it fit for Cataclysm. This is a much larger job that’s going to have me working for several weeks, rebuilding a forum, wiki, gallery and other fun stuff for people to use. It’s going to be complicated as the software hasn’t been updated for yonks, but it’s hopefully going to be worth it for them.

So there you have it. A little bit of librarian work, a little bit of tinkering. Still, it’s enough to keep me busy for a few weeks at least. Don’t worry though, I’ll keep you posted on how things progress. And if things seem a little quiet, don’t worry. I’m probably just working inside a machine somewhere, swapping around a few cogs and gears.

Mixing Mage Mechanics

Posted on by Gazimoff

One of the frequent accusations a Mage suffers from in Warcraft is about our buttons. Apparently we have two of them and we spam them repeatedly. We ignore everything else on the screen – for all we care we could just have a couple of small icons at the bottom, with large yellow numbers appearing when we press them.

As mages we all know there’s more to our class than the robe and the pointy hat. If there wasn’t we’d be little different to Warlocks, except maybe with a better education and less irrational fear of sunlight. But how often have we peeled back the robe and looked at how our class works? When it gets down to fundamentals, do we really have the best game in the world?

The Gatling Gun Mage

If you think of a Warcraft Mage, you’re thinking of this guy. He spends his time casting spells as frequently and as potently as possible. The player can frequently be found mashing buttons, frothing at the mouth and cackling wildly. It’s one of those very pure and raw mechanics that instantly provides you with feedback on how you’re doing. Push Button, Receive Bacon.

It also means that being a mage is directly linked to your performance. If you’re the top of the damage meters you’re good. If you’re somewhere in the middle you need to push your buttons harder. If you’re at the bottom you’re a Warlock. It doesn’t matter what spec you play or what gear you have. If you’re pro it will show.

The Spellweaver

For some mages, a thirst emerged for something more cerebral and involved than just mashing buttons. A further concept emerged, where a mage would start by casting one spell, but would then elaborate on it further by drawing on additional components to make something truly special. Age of Conan was a game that demonstrated this, although it began to become more of a caster version of Dance Dance Revolution than anything else.

There is still this unmet dream of a mage pulling off some incredible spell, the skies going dark and the boss being hit with a column of fire as a devastating finishing move is unleashed. It feels counter-intuitive that the most devastating mage a spell has in his arsenal is the same one he’s been using for the last seventy four levels but just hits harder.

The Master of Buffs

For the real back-seat mage, the concept of dishing out short duration buffs and debuffs is a possibility. Working in a similar way to a healbot, your sole purpose would be to apply damage buffs to your party members and vulnerability debuffs to their target. Your job is then managing and juggling all those buffs to make sure the rest of the group still does shedloads of damage.

The problem with this model is that you become a passive and boring symbiote that cannot exist without a group to support you. You give them buffs, they give you loot.

Besides, there are no big yellow numbers. Well, none that you’ll see anyway. And life’s all about big yellow numbers.

The Ritualist

You remember those Warlocks? They have a collection of spells that require others to help them – the common ones being Summoning party members and Soulwells. To be fair though they also have a couple of other tricks up their sleeve – have you ever played Doomguard Roulette for example?

The basic mechanic is that a cluster of mages group together to cast spells in the midst of battle, pooling their power to launch a powerful attack at the enemy. Trouble is it means you’d need to take more than one mage with you into battle. It would also mean that as your mages died (from standing in the bad stuff of course), the amount of power in the pot would drop.

So if you were to build your own mage from scratch which bits would you pick? What would you choose from the jumbled box of parts in order to make the ultimate wielder of spells? What would you avoid completely – what would be the last chocolate left in the box? As always, leave your ideas in the comments.

The Composer and the Engineer

Posted on by Gazimoff

Hail to the Chief chorus music

Cataclysm

Note: Minor mention about revised levelling system. Nothing that isn’t common knowledge already.

Over the last few months I’ve been using the Refer-a-Friend system to level up some new alts. It’s been a bit of a struggle – even with the perks and bonuses I’d forgotten how much of a grind the experience can be. More to the point though, it’s made me pay much more attention to the process behind gaining new skills and abilities, and how those abilities are then put to use.

Looking at it one way, learning how to play a class could be a bit like learning music. For a mage, you would start off with your basic nuking spell like Fireball, learning the rhythm of the class. You’d then build upon that with other spells, such as Scorch and Hot Streak, in order to create a rotation. The way that your fingers beat out a patern on your hotkeys is a similar pattern to a pianist – there’s a melody there that becomes increasingly complex as you gain levels. I think that it’s also true for Affliction Warlocks, learning how to weave their spells together in a well rehearsed pattern.

Looking at it a different way, you could treat it as an engineering problem, with each ability seen as part of an engine. To start off with you have a pretty basic engine that grunts along, but as you collect more engine parts you can start building some really fancy stuff. Of course if you put the parts together in the wrong way you get something that misfires horribly. Arrange the parts well and you have an engine that purrs, delivering meaty performance and incredible efficiency.

The trouble starts creeping in when you look at how you introduce new abilities to a player. Currently you hop along to your trainer, who teaches you both new skills and existing ranks of old skills at the appropriate level. And that’s it. There’s no real advice about when the new skill you’ve just learned is worth using, or if it’s helpful to your playstyle at all. Some of the best in-game resources for helping with this are other players, while Psynister’s Guides are a great “missing manual” for players levelling a new class.

But should we need these guides at all, or is this something that the game itself should do? Should the game be teaching this stuff to players instead, either through interactions with class trainers or by an extended tooltip method? Should we have to rely on the goodwill of other players in order to help us?

I think that Blizzard understand some of this problem by removing spell ranks in Cataclysm. It removes “trainer blindness” – that bit where you’re spam-learning a ton of skills. Most of the time they’ll be new ranks of spells you already know, with the occasional new one sneaking in. The idea is that by focusing your attention purely on skills that are new you’ll be much faster at incorporating them into your routine. I’m not sure if it’s sufficient to provide all the help a player needs, but I think it’s a welcome step in the right direction.

More fundamentally than this, I think that it’s a ripe time to have a look at how classes treat their skills. Do you want to treat players as composers, starting them off with the simple things and giving them a rhythm to build upon? Or do you want to treat them as engineers, handing them a Lego bucket of abilities with which to build an engine that roars? After all, the two different approaches require a different mindset and a different approach to how they are taught.

Personally I think that both are valid approaches, as players in general are a varied bunch. Some will prefer one style over another while a few will be able to handle both. By being upfront and helping to start that process, I think that players are much more likely to find a class that grips them to the end.

Maybe, just maybe, they’ll make an engine that sings.

Mage Cataclysm Preview

Posted on by Gazimoff

On the early hours of Saturday Morning, Bashiok unveilled the planned changes for Mages in Cataclysm. Some of them represent light touch changes, while others are fundamental changes to the way the class will work. As a response, I’ve stepped through each of the key changes and highlighted the changes that they’ll bring to the class.

New Spells:

Flame Orb (available at level 81): Inspired by Prince Taldaram’s abilities in Ahn’kahet and Icecrown Citadel, this spell allows the mage to cast a flaming orb that travels in front in a straight line, sending beams that cause fire damage to passing targets. Once it’s cast, the mage is free to begin casting other spells as the Flame Orb travels. While the spell will be useful to any spec, Fire mages will have talents that improve it, possibly causing the Flame Orb to explode when it reaches its destination.

In this copy of a raid boss mechanic, I’m hoping that this will be a targetable spell. I’m also hoping that the augmenting targets will increase the damage it causes while passing as well as the final damage it does when it arrives. I’d also really like to see some interaction between this and Living Bomb.

Time Warp (level 83): Grants a passive Haste effect much like Bloodlust or Heroism to party or raid members. It also temporarily increases the mage’s own movement speed. Time Warp will be exclusive with Bloodlust and Heroism, meaning you can’t benefit from both if you’ve got the Exhaustion debuff, though the movement-speed increase will still work even when under the effects of Exhaustion.

Although this initially feels useful, it’s essentially a tweaked copy of a Shaman’s Heroism or Bloodlust abilities. It’s also a copy of the Chrono Lord Deja’s ability in Culling of Stratholme. It’s unfortunate that it’s further ability homogenisation – unless there’s a reduction to the duration of Exhaustion we’re unlikely to see both Time Warp and Heroism being used at the same time.

Wall of Fog (level 85): Creates a line of frost in front of the mage, 30 yards from end to end. Enemies who cross the line are snared and take damage. The mana cost will be designed to make Wall of Fog efficient against groups, not individuals. This spell is intended to give mages a way to help control the battlefield, whether the mage is damaging incoming enemies (Blizzard can be channeled on top of Wall of Fog) or protecting a flag in a Battleground. 10-second duration. 30-second cooldown.

This feels like a situational spell more than anything else. I can see this being used heavily in battleground PVP (as will Fire Orb), but the raid uses aren’t as clear at present. If anything I feel that it brings back an old Mage role of add management – snaring, kiting and bringing errant adds back to the main or offtank. These old-school skills used by Hunters and Mages seem to have been dropped in favour of off-tanking.

Changes to Abilities:

Arcane Missiles is being redesigned to become a proc-based spell. Whenever the mage does damage with any spell, there is a chance for Arcane Missiles to become available, similar to how the warrior’s Overpower works. The damage and mana cost of this spell will be reworked to make it very desirable to use when available. This change should make gameplay more dynamic for the mage, particularly at low levels.

This is an interesting standout – in essence it’s extending the arcane endgame raiding rotation. It also means that there will need to be a replacement for the primary Arcane nuke for mages to use as they level up. If anything I think that this will make playing a mage more entertaining – having this mechanic interact with a Fire Hot Streak spec or Frost Deathfrost spec (I’ll touch on this later). I’m also expecting the Arcane Tree to act as a modifier on this proc chance.

We are planning to remove spells that don’t have a clear purpose. Amplify Magic, Dampen Magic, Fire Ward, and Frost Ward are being removed from the game, and we may remove more.

This seems a little dissapointing – I’d prefer to have more buttons than less, and have an increased use for this. The biggest knock-on effect for this will be Incanter’s Absorption, which will struggle to remain viable. I’m also dissapointed to see Amplify/Dampen Magic go – in pure physical fights Amplify Magic was a huge boost to healing, while Dampen Magic was a great help to the solo mage farming spellcaster mobs. The biggest resistance to using these was the duration and application of the buff – if it was party or raid-wide I think it would have seen a much higher use.

The ability to conjure food and water will not become available until higher levels (likely around level 40), as we’re making changes to ensure mages generally won’t run out of mana at lower levels. Once mages learn how to conjure food and water, the conjured item will restore both health and mana.

This is another dissapointing touch – seeing a core mage mechanic being pushed out to the middle levels. One of the appealing aspects of playing a mage is the strong level of self-sufficiency, and this changes push this aspect to one side. I’ll wait to see how a new mage levels before making a final judgement, but I’m not convinced by the mention of mana regen at low levels.

Scorch will provide a damage bonus to the mage’s fire spells. Our goal is for Scorch to be part of the mage’s rotation and a useful damage-dealing ability, even if someone else is supplying the group with the spell Critical Strike debuff. Scorch will provide the mage with more specific benefits, which can also be improved through talents.

This seems to be a hark back to the original scorch mechanic, where you had multiple Fire mages ramping up the Scorch debuff on a target. I’m also hoping for some use of this by Destro warlocks as well. The two specs used to complement eachother well, and I’d like to see a return to it. I’m hoping that it’ll work by applying a debuff to the target, rather than the debuff on the player that Arcane Blast creates.

New Talents & Talent Changes:

Arcane Focus will now return mana for each spell that fails to hit your target, including Arcane Missiles that fail to launch. We want Arcane mages to have several talents that play off of how much mana the character has and give the player enough tools to manage mana.

I like this change, mainy because it ditches the +hit component of the original. I’m hoping that we’ll see Precision go the same way, either by being modified or removed completely. Depending on it’s location in the Arcane Tree, it might be something that mages with other specs will pick up.

The talent Playing with Fire will reduce the cooldown of Blast Wave when hit by a melee attack, instead of its current effect.

Blast Wave is currently one of the spells that tanks hate mages using, mainly because of the knockback effect. Having said that, it’ll be great in PVP. It’ll also be great to augment with a Frost Nova->Blink, particularly by players with an elementalist spec.

Pyromaniac will grant Haste when three or more targets are getting damaged by the effects of your damage-over-time (DoT) fire spells.

This is a really interesting mechanic change. Currently Blizzard rules the roost when it comes to applying AoE to packs of targets. This will bring the Living Bomb Tab Flamestrike back into play, with multiple targets being dotted up before dropping the big AoE. I’m also hoping that mages will benefit from haste on DoTs in the same way that Warlocks and Shadowpriests will.

The Burnout talent will allow mages to cast spells using health when they run out of mana.

This is another steal, this time from the Warlock Lifetap. It’s going to be interesting to see how the health-mana conversion works. It’ll probably best be used while waiting for an evocation or mana gem cooldown to pop, but it also presents Mages with a new way to kill themselves. As if Spell Reflection and Standing In The Bad wasn’t enough to worry about…

Mastery Bonuses:

Mana Adept: Arcane will deal damage based how much mana the mage has. For example, Arcane mages will do much more damage at 100% mana than at 50% mana. If they begin to get low on mana, they will likely want to use an ability or mechanic to bring their mana up to increase their damage.

This is going to hit Arcane Mages hard, and probably push them back into the Arena PVP role of burst damage. In a raiding situation the Arcane Mage is going to be running out of mana towards the end of a fight, and with that drop in mana we’ll see a drop in damage. When you have players warming the floor and only a few left standing, this will not help.

Ignite: All direct-damage fire spells will add a damage-over-time (DoT) component when cast. The flavor will be similar to how Fireball works; however, the DoT component will be much stronger.

This will work brilliantly with the Pyromaniac change. I’m hoping for some stacking DoTs, so that we won’t see clashes between more than one mage. I’d also like to see these interact positively with other DoT enhancing abilities.

Deathfrost: Casting Frostbolt places a buff on the mage that increases the damage for all frost, fire, and arcane spells. The only damage spell that won’t be affected by this buff is Frostbolt.

Again, this looks like an interesting spec. I’m hoping that this will play well with Brain Freeze and Master of Elements, and that the new Arcane Missiles proc will work well with this. I’m also hoping this will encourage more Elementalist specs, bringing Frostfire Blot back into play. Having a spell that would benefit from Frost talents as well as being affected by Deathfrost will be incredibly useful.

All in, it’s a mixed bag for mages. Some good, some bad, but mostly a step in the good direction. As always though, the devil is in the detail, and we won’t see that until Beta. Till then, it’s all theory, guesswork and conjecture.

Finding Our Place

Posted on by Gazimoff

As we drift towards the end of Wrath and eagerly await the launch of Cataclysm, I’ve been taking the opportunity to reflect on how magecraft has fared. From the new spells the expansion brought through to the talent changes each patch, we’ve been through considerable change. And yet I can’t help but think that we’re not as special as we once were.

What started this all off was the movie Yesterday’s News. It’s about how the Meeting Stone crafter copes with a changing world where the LFD tool makes meeting stones redundant. It struck a chord with me – I’ve been seeing increasing numbers of mages struggling to get groups with both PuGs and their own raidgroups. Even my own raidgroup only tend to miss a mage when they don’t have any free strudel – other than that, there’s not really an issue.

The current state of mages was really brought home for me by Larisa’s great analysis of Paragon’s world first kill of Arthas in 25-man heroic mode. If you look at their raid setup you’ll notice that they decided not to bring any mages. There’s a thread explaining the choice on Paragon’s forum, where they pinpoint the slightly lower DPS output as the reason. A pure DPS class would get benched, with other DPS classes and hybrid classes specced as DPS being used instead.

What about the other tricks that mages have? With the homogenisation that’s taken place during Wrath, mages have only two unique tricks left up their sleeve – polymorph and strudels. Arcane Intellect can be swapped for Fel Intelligence, while even the recent Arcane Empowerment buff can be matched by Retribution paladins and Beastmaster hunters. Crowd Control has been sidelined for much of Wrath, with AoE tanking being the preferred method for the majority of trash pulls and offtanks used for adds during bossfights.

Larisa is right to be concerned – even though the difference is slight, she’s worried that raid groups will look to Paragon’s results as a reason why their own groups are underperforming, and may choose to run without mages as a result. This argument only stacks up when each player is equally skilful at their class and you’re purely relying on statistics to minmax, but that point may be missed on those looking to form groups, raids and so on. They’ll point to the Paragon forums and say that it’s official: mages don’t cut it any more.

The whole situation is compounded further when you have scenarios like the one described by Krizzlybear on their blog. Considering that with a mage’s three talent trees that you have one that still doesn’t compete against other classes and another that’s laughed at completely, you begin to wonder what the point of playing a mage is. Even the skill of the player is discarded entirely, despite when they demonstrate that they’re just as capable of keeping up.

I’m not trying to encourage anyone to change their spec; I had to go through Molten Core as a Frost mage even though I much prefer Fire. Rather, I’d prefer to see the three specs brought in line with each other so that they all bring solid DPS but also provide additional benefits depending on the chosen tree. I’m hoping that this will arrive with the complete talent revamp for Cataclysm, so that the differences between each tree aren’t in terms of damage output but in terms of playstyle and what else the mage can do besides damage.

These things are cyclical – I remember when Warlocks, Paladins and Warriors were all in the same position that mages find themselves in now. I’ve also got faith that thes problems will be resolved and that once again all three specs will be matched on a spreadsheet (even if the skill of the players can vary wildly). It’s an agonising wait though, considering that we’re currently at the end of March and Cataclysm is predicted to land in October. We might be looking at six to eight months before the pre-expansion patch is released and all the talent trees get revamped.

Till then, mages have a job to do. It’s up to us to show the rest of the Warcraft-playing public that in the 99.99% of cases that aren’t a Lich King heroic world first kill that we still have something worthwhile to contribute.

Hitting the Reset Button

Posted on by Gazimoff

Videogames seem to be full of choice these days. It could be the moral choices presented by games like Mass Effect 2, or the theoretical choices of gear selection in World of Warcraft, Heck, it can even be something as straightforward as choosing a driver in Mario Kart. But if you lost your saved game or started a new account, would you make the same choices? Would you choose the same character and take the same path, or would you try your hand at something new?

I’m trying to tackle this question for the BlogAzeroth Shared Topic this week. For me it breaks down into three chunks – would I still play a mage, would I still do the same things at endgame and would the character be roleplayed differently? I’m only going to try tackling the first one this time round – I’ve already covered how my playstyle has changed, while my roleplay histories would be another post entirely!

I’ve tried three other MMO’s while I’ve been playing Warcraft, and with each of them I tried something different. My mage was sitting unloved and unplayed while I saw healers and tanks become the heroes and stars. I decided that when I started a new game that I’d play one of these roles – that I would be the one that everyone would be wanting in their party or raid. As a result, with Lord of the Rings Online and Age of Conan I thought I’d try and be clever.

With LOTRO I tried playing a healing Minstrel, while with AoC I rolled a tanking Dark Templar. Both ended up as dismal failures – my minstrel felt unwieldy under my fingers, while the Dark Templar didn’t have many opportunities to actually tank leaving me with a boring solo grind.

After three months of play in both games I ended up cancelling my accounts. To this day I don’t feel that I gave the games a fair chance. I’ve since tried to go back and give LOTRO another go since but keep on getting stuck on a known issue between Windows Vista and the client software.

Aion was a different story. I rolled a mage and had a great time. I levelled up, specialised for even more damage and killed things even quicker. I felt like I was in my element, and general game engine clunkyness aside it kept me entertained for a while. The problem emerged when I started looking outside of magecraft and towards other areas like professions, crafting, dungeoneering and so on. It’s strange, but although the “mage” aspect was solid, the other aspects of the game weren’t sufficient to hold me. As with the others, I eventually unsubscribed.

So if I had to start over, would I stick with what I have or would I try something new? To me it’s pretty clear that when playing MMOs I have an affinity for a particular role. I’ve even played all the other classes in Warcraft to some degree and still keep coming back to my mage. That’s not to say that the other classes aren’t as good, but it’s because I know who I am as a player. I’ve tried to prioritise other roles in other games and it’s harmed my enjoyment of that game as a result. I’ve come to learn that being honest about what I prefer to play is better than trying to be tactical about what role I select.

I think that there are other players who feel the same –who have a core role or class that they’re happiest playing, but might occasionally dabble in other roles in order to try something different. Even though we might be playing a priest or a paladin, we always know that there’s a class that we’ll go back to.

Angry Mage is Angry

Posted on by Gazimoff

I managed to get pissed off at so many things yesterday. It seems laughable looking back on it, how can a videogame get me so worked up? It’s stupid, right? I mean, I’m a grown adult, so why let a game affect my mood so much? Why let it get to me?

Right.

I’ve been getting seriously annoyed with the loading screen bug. The one which seems to have only started in 3.3.3, where you’ve chosen your character and you’re waiting for the game to load. The progress bar fills up and seems about to run then just sits there. I can hear the dulcet tones of Dalaran zone music in the background, so I figure it’s just taking a while before flipping to in-game. Maybe some data got dropped between here and Paris, and it’s just taking  while to resync. It’s like some kind of digital tease, tormenting me while it sits there and does nothing.

No point waiting though. The game has hung, so it’s back to alt+F4 then going through the whole thing again. Email address, password, authenticator code. And I’ve usually got one of those bits wrong, so I usually end up typing it again, hammering each key deliberately as if my keyboard is being held personally responsible for my failure to type.

Trouble is, it won’t stop happening. It’s like an itch that you can’t scratch, growing more and more irritating. It feels like I have to log in two or three times just to get the game to load. When I’m switching servers or hopping between my two accounts, it’s a real bugbear.

That’s just one issue though, and a technical one to boot. Getting worked up about it is a bit like having a rage against a server. Sure, you might want to pull on your steel toecapped boots and punt it round the datacentre a bit, but that isn’t going to suddenly make it work. You might feel better, but it doesn’t fix the problem.

The thing that made me throw in the towel today was just sitting around in Dalaran. I figured that after a successful raid on Wednesday that I’d try my luck in VoA. There’s badges, there’s Tier 10, so it’s worth a go. We’ve just won Wintergrasp so I pipe up in Trade and LFG that I’m looking for a VoA group. As soon as I do it, there’s something like 4 or 5 other mages all saying “Take me, take me instead!” It’s reminds me of a birds’ nest, with a clutch of mage chicklets all chirping away hoping to be the one to get the invite worm.

I don’t know where they all came from. It feels as if everyone just said “You know what, I’m going to play my mage today.” So I go sod it, I have alts, I’ll play them instead. Sod the competition, I’ll see if I can do something in the guild another time.

I fire up my priest. I figure that he’s got the tier 10 robe, so there’s a good chance I can find a ToC or ICC PuG for him to join. Earn some rep, get a few badges, maybe snaffle a few drops at the same time. I find an ICC10 group looking for a healer and tank, so I join up. I should have realised something was up when there were only 7 spots filled, but I shrugged it off. I alt-tabbed, fired up Google Reader and scanned through some blogposts while I waited for the raid to fill.

From there things went from bad to worse. An hour later we finally enter the instance after suffering numerous joins, dropouts and so on. We have a resto druid attempting to MT heal with 1FPS. A resto shaman who is watching TV half the time. Another tank who has to leave because “something else came up”. One wipe at Marrowgar later and the raidleader’s having to replace people.

We finally get a group back together with a replacement for the tank and resto druid. We’re all set and ready to have another attempt at the boss. Only the resto shaman is AFK. She’s watching TV, asking us to wait while her programme finishes. At that point, the tank that just arrived sees the group for the joke it is and leaves.

I follow shortly after.

I know this is an MMO – that it’s supposed to be Massively Multiplayer. I get that this is the point. But sometimes the biggest selling point of the game is also it’s most crippling weakness. The sheer amount of asshattery that goes on in the game is a nightmare, and it feels like it’s something that’s only become worse since the cross-server LFD tool. It means that the decent people – the guilds I’m in and the people I play with – are all the more valuable.

It also means that sometimes I just want to treat it like an RPG. Like Dragon Age without all the cut-scenes and dialog trees. I just want to choose an anonymous alt, sit somewhere and go questing. Everyone else can shove off for a few hours. Just play it like a single-player game with a chatbox and mash buttons for a while.

There are always going to be asshats. You’ll find them in every game, from Counter Strike to Checkers. No amount of programming wizardry or karma system has been able to remove asshats from a game, or to generally discourage asshattery so much that it’s no longer worthwhile. All you can hope to do is minimise the effect that they have on your game, or ensure that the density of asshats is so dilute that their overall impact is negligible.

Meanwhile I’ll sigh, shrug my shoulders and carry on playing. After all, it’s only a game.

Isn’t it?

Battling the Burnout

Posted on by Gazimoff

Last night’s raiding was fantastic. We had a bit of silliness and fun, but we cleared up to (and including) Festergut, leaving the rest of the week clear for progression work. I also picked up Abracadaver, with the additional hit and haste making that transition to a Fire spec more possible if the numbers stack up. I’m not sure if the guild will go for it though – they’re already hooked on the Arcane Empowerment change.

My raiding schedule is pretty light though – I might spend two or three nights a week in a raid. I’m also pretty much exclusive to 10-man stuff – while I might pick up a 25-man VoA or ICC rep run, it’s not essential to me. It means my time is free to do other things like work on alts, roleplay, work on crafting or whatever else I fancy. I like to mix up my game like this – it means I’ve always got stuff to do.

It’s strange in a way. Back when I was hardcore I used to log in, raid, log off. I’d then repeat this cycle six or seven times a week with raiding being the only thing I’d play for. I had other people farming materials for flasks or other buffs for me. For those five hours a night, I’d focus on the screen and nothing else. Dinner would go cold on the plate next to me. The only thing that mattered was the next server first, the next boss, the next raid.

In the end, I burnt out. Raiding was impacting every aspect of my life. I would go to sleep at 2am, only to get up again at 6am and shuffle to work for nine hours. I’d snatch tokens of sleep on the train to work, running on coffee day and night. In all, it wasn’t a great way to live and I called time on it. I ended up quitting completely for a while and going cold turkey. I think Protflashes brings out a great example in this post. It’s well worth reading because it really shows what burnout feels like – you want to change  what you’re doing, but you feel you can’t because others are relying on you. There’s this sense of moral obligation that hangs there.

Anyhow, after a while I realised what I liked about the game – what kept me playing. I’ve already touched on the people side in previous posts – the strong team spirit we had as a raidguild was something that spurred me on. But more than that, I also realised that there’s about five or six different games that I play within Warcraft. Each of these smaller games like questing, gathering and crafting, duelling or PvP, dungeoneering etc. all work together to make this overall meta-game. It’s one of the things missed by other MMOs that I’ve played, which is why people tend to play them for a short time after release but then end up cancelling once they’ve finished with the few micro-games they like.

Larisa’s got a further point about it in her post about making our own Cataclysm. She suggests trying something completely new, like trying out PvP or experimenting with roleplay. It’s solid advice because it encourages mixing things up. Similar recommendations came back on Twitter, with taking a break, playing a different game, switching focus to a different game aspect or even just rerolling a new character.

The thing that gnaws away for me is inevitability, like we’re destined to go through this cycle of play-burnout-break-play. And even though we can mix things up by introducing new elements to our game, I’m not sure if it’ll help eliminate burnout completely – it feels like it’ll just extend that time between trying something new and growing weary of it. Then again, I can’t exatly talk from experience – I don’t know of anyone that’s avoided burnout or how they managed to do it.

I’m also beginning to feel that although we each have a personal responsibility for keeping our game fresh, there’s some responsibility to the guild or raidgroup to help keep their players interested in logging in. After all, we want people to feel motivated and wanting to play, not that they feel obliged to out of some kind of moral responsibility. How that should work, I’m not so sure. It’s like I can feel the shape of it, but not the detail. Maybe I’m too distant from guild leadership these days.

I hate leaving on a low note, but it’s something I see happening all around me and I can’t help but think that there’s something broken about it. If we can understand how to avoid burnout it’ll mean we feel happier about playing the games we love. If we don’t, I can’t help but think that this cycle is going to continue. Not just for Warcraft, but for every future MMO we choose to play.

The Annoyance of Addons

Posted on by Gazimoff

Once you play Warcraft for any length of time, you end up using addons. These small pieces of software are designed to make them game better, either by presenting new information or showing existing stuff in a clearer way. But just as using some of them can enhance your performance, using them badly can be a millstone around your neck.

For me this all kicked off yesterday when I decided to try out ForteXorcist based on Derevka’s recommendation for priests. I thought the same tool could be used to keep track of Mage cooldowns such as Arcane Power and Mirror Image. This was a big mistake because of two things:

  • I didn’t practice with the addon first to get used to the information it was telling me, how it would help and how I would integrate it into my UI
  • I decided it would be a great idea to go raid ICC with my guild instead and tweak it during the raid

Seasoned veterans will probably be laughing at this right now, and yes it was a schoolboy error. More than that though it’s also got me thinking of how my overall UI layout affects my performance, both as ranged DPS and when I’m playing my healer.

Currently my UI looks something like the chart below, and by all terms it’s crap. It’s evolved over a number of years, where I’ve “just grabbed an addon” to do a particular task and just plonked it in a blank spot on the screen. Some of it’s a hangover from when I was running as a raidleader or officer, while others seemed useful at the time but are now pretty pointless.

The biggest issue with this interface is the sheer amount of wasted space. In my primary role as DPS on my mage, I don’t need to know the health and mana of everyone else in the raid. An overall snapshot might be useful, but this level of detail is too much. When I’m on my priest the unitframes show too much information – I end up having to enable Grid just to get the information at a reasonable level.

The next problem is eye focus. I should be looking at the centre of the screen, making sure that I’m on the right target and that I’m not standing in the bad. Visual prompts near the centre should be helping me in hitting my rotation and maximising DPS – anything else is clutter. I shouldn’t need to look at my button bars unless something outside of normal combat occurs – everything else should be driven from muscle memory. Having things scattered around the screen like some kind of neon buffet doesn’t help either – it means my eyes bounce around and get distracted by all the shiny.

Having to do a lot of eye movement is a bad thing – I’ve felt knackered at the end of farm runs and it’s not because I’ve been focusing. The eye strain from having a badly laid out UI is tiring, making me a slave to the goddess of coffee for the following four or five hours.

The third problem is performance – by running a shedload of addons I’m degrading my computer performance. I’m spending CPU cycles on calculating stuff that I pay no attention to anyway, when I could be spending it on making the game run smoother or look better. By cutting out what I don’t need, the technical experience of the game should improve.

What would an ideal interface look like? I’ve had a rough stab of it, so although it’s going in the right direction it’s nowhere near a perfect ideal. It basically takes the idea of getting rid of the crap I no longer care about, grouping similar stuff together and making everything else optional depending on the role I’m playing.

As a result of all this, I now have a quest. Over the coming weeks I’m going to be working to streamline my UI in order to reach that nirvana of elegance and efficiency. When I find something cool (like ForteXorcist), I’ll share how I’m using it and how it’s configured. Over time this should build up into a collection of posts on how to get the most out of your interface as well as having something that’s fit for those action shots or fraps videos.

At the end of the day, a UI has to bridge that gap between what you want to do and what the game is telling you. If you’re getting overload with information, it’s failing in that basic mission. By being ruthless about what you choose to see, the theory is that you’ll only focus on what’s important. This should lead to better performance, which is what we all want to reach.

The UI Quest Series (in progress):

It’s The People That Make It

Posted on by Gazimoff

I get up to some silly things in-game. Usually it’s just messing around with strange game mechanics like using Slow Fall then jumping from the Temple of Storms. Once in a while though, it’s something that’s shared around that’s equally silly, and makes the game even better.

I’m going to kick off with something that happened on Curio, one of my mages. I got asked if I’d help out a couple of people with making a portal to Dalaran so that they could set their hearthstones there and find it easier to get around the world. Heading over to Ironforge I picked up that this was a roleplay group, so I thought that I’d best be ready for some impromptu roleplay.

Since last year’s Children’s Week, Curio has constantly had a Gorloc pet with him. Affectionately named Ernie-fu, there’s a dialogue between them as Curio says something, then watches as Ernie emotes a response. As a result, Ernie doesn’t say very much but he does an awful lot. And one of those things is eat.

So when one of the portal-seeking roleplayers throws Ernie a hunk of bread to eat, Curio pulls out a tube (don’t ask) of jam in order to sweeten it a little. This then leads to questions being asked about why Curio has jam in a tube, which went to experiments in jam delivery systems. This then went to discussions around jam explosives, jam mortars and jam limpet mines. Curio then pipes up that he’s scared the Horde may have stolen his research, so he’s working on ways to protect Stormwind from a jam-based attack. The session finished with Curio suggesting that baking a large crumpet to cover the city may be the only way to protect it from jam-based artillery.

They couldn’t use the portal in the end – they didn’t have the Wrath expansion on their accounts.

Another one is mentioned by Ercles in his blogpost about Single Abstract Noun. Bear in mind that I’m Juplaar in the screenshot he’s included. My response was based on the question “Are hippopotamuses really hip, or are they just really cool potamuses?”

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that I do some crazy stuff in-game, from random roleplay encounters to campaigns for cheese-sculpting to be added as a profession. I get some immense fun from these moments of randomness, some real pleasure from being silly. But I couldn’t do it at all without other people to play alongside. A good set of guildmates or friends in the game are fantastic to have, and worth seeking out.

Although great game mechanics and cool effects can help to pull people into a game, it’s the people that you play alongside that will keep you hooked and eager to return. It doesn’t matter if it’s a close knit community or just some people you bump into for a while, the important thing is to have fun with others regularly.

When I’ve unlocked my last achievement and killed the last boss, I’ll still be around. As long as there’s silliness to be shared, I’m in.