.brain

(Sorry no Italian translation, this time!)

WOTLK

The game is enjoyable and as much as streamlined as possible, I suppose (not really, I hope it won’t be more simplified by that). The old problems (seen as problems only by a minority of players, I guess) are the same old problems, problems like this one:

Thankfully, the road to 80 is completely soloable.

Yes, you read comments like that in forums and in reviews. Something that really beat me out is why people pay for a single player experience that is more a burden than a joy. Considering that Blizzard will start soon to ask for micropayments without dropping subscription fees, that’s still more strange. I wonder how they will deal with powerleveling and character trades when the game itself will start selling you the option to skip the useless classic content and let you start right at 55!

Sure, the game is adjusting even more to Eastern tastes and the ever-present grind, plus the huge not-expiring pay-by-time accounts shows that. If only Western realms will remain populated as in these late days!

The game remains a comfortable environment for (deluded) hardcore players and newbies of the genre (even if I started to prefer Wizard 101 to WOW when it comes to a fresh and interesting no-effort MMOG), but if you want to be challenged in anything else than investing lots of time, you may be baffled. It’s the same old grind for better items as before, with new unbalances and one of the most boring PVP out there.

What really drive me nut is why Blizzard is so passive-aggressive against communities, unless your community gaming of choice is a simple chatroom. The game is so single player/small group oriented that is really difficult to crack the shell of isolation that most players build around them. Thankfully, I have access to a lot of hardcore groups for instance runs, but most of the community is playing completely alone or grinding with a couple of friends.

One of the most concerning elements of WOTLK is the lack of original contents: WAR has PVP open zones? WOTLK too (that’s silly since PVP servers should be PVP-open zones, but nobody plays in the classic continents and most of the PVPers prefer to AFK farm in battlegrounds). LOTRO defined achievements in a MMOG? WOTLK invented them (yeah, they said that. The comparison is just embarassing, for WOW). There’s barely anything new inside WOTLK, it’s nice, it’s fun but it’s not very different from the usual grind as soon the shiny paint start to scratch.

My final gripe is the new Prestige Class system. Nice on paper but introducing a few class at time only made most of the people re-roll a 55 Death Knight creating lots of problems to players that really want to enjoy the Massively Multiplayer side of the game. At the moment I’m seeing thousands of players speedrunning a single class to endgame (with all the problems of that, like queueing for nameds and the like) in solo mode and I’m finding very difficult to find balanced groups with all those DKs around!

Mines of Moria

I hated a lot LOTRO when it first came out. Now I love it. The barely finished, ugly bastard has become one of the best around, and surely one of the most community driven around. Spontaneous player driven events are frequent, people play to enjoy the story and the game and to be successfull in epic quests you need people that knows how to play in a group. The new additions are amazing and the new epic gear system (the only true novelty of this rehash of old contents) is something that any hardcore grinder should try. It solves lots of gripes with tiered endgame items and the usual itemization problems that it carries over.

It’s a solid game ever than before, with maybe the best group system around (the quest log just screams to be used to coordinate group questing) and a very deep story-driven gameplay.

The Shadow Odyssey

EQ2 is one of my favourite PVE games. It’s difficult to beat something that can be as seamlessy enjoyable as a solo session and just more rewarding and fun when grouping. In reality nobody says that “Thankfully the game is soloable” because most of the player just groups, since the game itself rewards grouping with more XP, more AAs and generally better drops. Another unusual finding is seeing developers reitemize old contents to not create tier barrages and void any previous content present in the game. Here you still need to run the cap quest or do several labs run if you want to get to endgame with ease. There aren’t world drops better than older Epic Gears.

The new addition are simply rehash of a classic everquest system: dynamic zones that spawns quests and events according to the level of the party. Simple as that, most of the new contents are available from 50 to 80. The experience won’t be the same and even the maps won’t be exactly the same. Questlines will overlap, old enemies will resurface and so on, visiting the same zones from time to time just makes the world feel a bit more real than the classic tiered zone approach.

This year EQ2 proved to have one of the best in-game support, with tons of weekly events and storyline updates (real events, not scripted fairs or global farming endeavours) running regularly that really made the world alive and interesting even for jaded players. SOE did the right choice to invest in the community and the results are there to prove it. It’s nice to see power shifting, mobs changing places and zones evolving as soon major characters take stands in the political turmoils of EQ2. TSO will be the ending of the long story arc that was started this spring, and more will wait us as soon it’s done.

To be honest one of the best feature put later in the game is the new map: slick simple and useful, it makes third party solution in any game seems amteurish. Just imagine Google Maps and Yellow Pages meet your favourite map mod: a valuable addition since your quest log will have 75 entries most of the time and a mundane quest on EQ2 really do justice to the word, involving complex activities, lots of legwork and lots of NPCs in the process!

Conclusion

I’m sad! I have at least two major MMOGs to play to death (and the trusty WOW back-up as soon Wizard 101 will become stale) and I’ll move from my home in two weeks for two or three months! That’s poetic justice!

I’m salivating for the game, but…

• Bots. Check (Guild Wars, Everquest, others)
• Branching dialogues\questlines. Check (Guild Wars, Everquest, COX, a few others)
• Telling a worthwhile story. Check (Guild Wars, Everquest, a very few others)

Now, let’s assume it won’t be the NWN2 engine with a much higher multiplayer limit fitted on a revamped KOTOR theme and made MMO just because the old RPG achronim will not sell that well on PC. Please Bioware, don’t go the Blizzard way and stop bullshitting about things are already there: playing arrogant won’t sell you more copies. It’s sufficient to see how Mythic ridiculed Blizzard over and over in the last weeks.

Blizzard realized our worst fears: World of Microtransactions. They decided to start milking the franchise to exahustion, with lots of contents to be available as add-on commercial services. 

It will start with new appeareance options available only to people willing to pay for it, and it will stop, well, they didn’t say it will stop at all, to be honest. Wonderful: crippling for money the game you already pay a monthly fee and hefty retail prices to play. Looking at the less than enthusiast fanbase reactions I guess Activision got the MMO commercial models wrong: the fusion of two different models is not very smart, DLC on consoles proved it and publishers adjusted the pricing and aims of commercial add-ons accordingly to not leave with lots of pissed customers.

The risk is high: Blizzard took an already conservative reaction against WAR, they basically are pretending it don’t even exist, but the sad truth is that, marketing and tear-inducing quests (in WOW, lol!) aside, the latest iterations of WOW where a lot of more of the same and the new one will only extend the grind and piss off existing players (that, if you’re not under a rock, in Europe are leaving in droves due to boredom). Getting ready to battle more innovative games may be very hard for Blizzard, social phenomenon or not (just look at what is Second Life today!).

The move to let people buy three different copies of Starcraft to play the whole game is just another little money draining maneuver. The problem is that, corporate finances aside, these tactics often leaves IPs as a pale shades of themselves, often tainted by a bad reputation.

I have a bad feeling what it will be needed to play Diablo 3, let’s hope for the best.

Well, seems like the digital download servers for the European Beta of Warhammer Online are exploding, so here’s where I’m going to download the client I paid money to play early.

Peer to peer FTW!

Oh and BTW nice move EA, you screwed up, again. A file server for a hugely popular online game. That’s so 1999ish!

After several weeks of absence (mostly due to RoK burnout, man that expansion was as big as boring, leveling-wise), I’m back to EQ2 to prepare for the November expansion.

Behold the portal to the Shard of Fear, a monument to Innoruk!

I found the game in really good shape, with lots of new players and additions from the Living Legacy promotion and events, a complete reitemization for levels 1-59 to keep old contents viable even with the new level branch of RoK (70-80). Once RoK got live, the chance your old raid gear would be useful in the new continent was very very slim. Now the item progression is more organic and there aren’t dramatic changes between old legendaries and new uncommons-rares.

How i’d like to see something similar in WOW, to get the seam between classic and TBC more organic.

As soon I logged, I was instantly invited to a Shard of Fear group. I needed about an hour to readjust to the game with my Defiler!

Killing purple demons, a matter of pride!

Well, sometimes it just feels so odd: an heroic paladin sent to kill demons, that are pink, violet or purple.

It’s a matter of justice or… fashion?

Speaking about Diablo 3, developers are eager to say it won’t be categorized as an MMO:

While Battle.net can certainly support that many players at one time, the lack of a persistent world and restrictions on how many players can be within each “world” (game) would keep Diablo III from being categorized as an MMO.

Now, let’s think about the last persistent online world you saw… Mmm none? That’s the myth of MMO worlds: they are persistent.

Aside for Ultima and a few other cases, most of today’s MMOs are barely persistent, unmodifiable worlds that acts as hubs for restricted instanced contents. Unless having a common marketplace it’s your idea of persistent world, of course! Cutting trees, modifying geography and landscapes, even leaving things on the ground are gameplay elements no longer considered during MMOG design. They were the expensive part of MMOs operation in 1997, wonder why in 2008 most MMOs are free? Yes, that’s because the world you see don’t even exist in the way you experience it on their servers, it’s just a glorified chatroom background, at some extent…

Now I’m sad and nostalgic!

Age Of Conan it’s a design and usability mess. Don’t even get me started, I won’t. As I won’t even tell you anything about the huge amount of technical issues and bugs that a modern MMOG should not have anymore.

So I decided to dump the game for now, maybe returning in a 4-6 months to see if something is changed, while the morons the early adopters do the beta-test for me. There’s no reason to end my trial period before deciding: leveling in general is simply too easy to justify the waste of time and the endgame at the moment is not even playable, so why I should care? The game has not even set clear the objectives a player should be willing to achieve at the moment, everything is a very moving target, with several radical redesign decision that will need to be taken in the next few months, shuffling priorities and player interests in the process.

I still need to decide where to settle seriously, since my EQ2 guild is on “play what you like” mode for the summer and I started to feel a bit bored even back there.

Speaking of a less hardcore interest, The Lord Of The Rings Online is doing a better job to keep me interested: very well written quests, where “exploration” has a meaning and it’s not just the end of following on-screen arrows. I really like the Epic quest lines, sure they stole a lot of ideas from Guild Wars, but who didn’t? And frankly, LOTRO does Epics better than how GW does Coops.

I also went back to Asheron’s Call for a while. Damn, that game aged so well it could be a viable option if you could bare blocky models with hi-res textures, no wonder they still have a strong community. Speaking of communities, I also found several odd players, like the one who insulted me because I used the word “Vendor” while asking for advices. He said I should return to play Ultima, mixing insults with lots of “Vendor Sell”, “Kal Vas Flam” jokes I frankly don’t get anymore. Does he even know that Ultima is almost forgotten as well as Asheron’s Call, nowadays?

Does he even log off anymore?

Look here.

Well, this one really adds up to the virtual whipping I did several weeks ago about the useless hyping of EVE, giving its current, sad state of the art.

To be honest I didn’t expect CCP to be so amateur to start banning all the IP ranges from the BT download logs, they ended with lots of users angry because they were banned without committing anything unusual (you know, most of the ISPs use dynamic IP allocation for private internet access!). They may be a garage studio, but they should know how the Internet is working since they’re making money out of it.

The case really underlines most of the issues that brought me away from EVE after years: it’s mostly a collection of broken toys due to a very superficial and inaccurate feature planning (that leaves big chunks of gameplay in an unifinished state for months, if not years), aimed mostly to please the user base of control freaks and wannabe-slaves that plague the game and are the most constant source of revenues.

We may argue that the CCP financial stability is granted mostly by the biggest alliances (counted by the thousands): for the younger players the game today is mostly unplayable due to the skill power gap, broken features and the continued harassing of deep space founded splinter corps whose role it’s only to avoid the rise of new, organized power groups in the safe space.

The exploitable use of reporting linked in the cited chatlog is a real problem, too. Lots of people are banned for botting or bad behaviours just because they were so stupid to disagree with the wrong alliance in a public chat channel, just to receive a lot of forged reports for abuses on the Terms of Service.

I was one of those unlucky lads that was framed by an hostile corp for bad mouthing and personal harassing, and I had to fight for weeks to make the customer service verify that the chatlog submitted was a simple Notepad forgery…

I wonder if, aside for smug, CCP planned the game in this way. Sure, they were a PK guild on the first days of Ultima Online, and they declared to be still enamored for the original mafia-like, unplayable, castrating and bad designed PVP system that British himself ditched after a while to free players from griefers. So much for a player driven economy when you’re able to gain more than 100M ISK in an hour just shooting NPC ships in a 0.0 system (and the enemy is 20 jumps away because you are in the bowel of an alliance territory) and there’s no restriction on how those moneys are exchanged within the game. Several players hosts an alt in secure space to control inflation on entire regions, fueled by farm-bots (or farm-slaves) in deep 0.0. Every alliance economy is based on that strategy. There’s no way to match that money output (and there ere organized groups that are able to make a lot more than just 100M in an hour), making almost anything else in the game a waste of time and money. This outrageous state of the game was the result of a mission and bounty hunting revamp that never got finished and broken the economy so much to become a feature. If you plan to compete with any other 0.0 corp (even not in an alliance) your only viable option is to farm 24/7 to keep up with the war expenses. Any other mean is not only impractical and slow but also terribly stupid. And good luck if you plan to qualify for a researched Blueprint, too! Chances are that some big corp or alliance is so hogged with research points that the eventuality that someone else would obtain anything are less than nihil, and all the technological advancements will just finish in the same hands that still enjoy Aurora or other “ph4t l00t” events by the game designers.

That’s what you get when you tailor a game out of a very specific user base (or game designers simply don’t know what they’re doing). That’s why your user base can’t grow significantly even if every superficial reviewer in the world is ready to swear that the game is a masterpiece, mostly because he wasn’t able to understand anything from it.

Call it a Lynch syndrome, if you wish.

CCP is convinced that they can run EVE for half a century. While it’s teoretically possible, we must admit that the strategy of “building on top of it”, as Reynir Hadarson said, it’s a bit streteched up, because software become obsolete and sources become an unmanageable tangle if you just “build on top of it”. Most decade old MMOG out there are managed by battle-scarred skilled professionals (not just once UO playerkillers become self-made programmers who state the impossible :P) and are almost all ended in a state where it’s safer to touch the code as less as possible. If not for code quality it’s because in a decade the team has shuffled so many times that some part of the sources don’t have a direct maintainer anymore and knowledge is becoming fuzzy.

I would’ve been more positive about the statement of CCP if they didn’t managed to break every single release date they announced, in some cases with delays that spanned multiple years (if that’s not navigating on sight and improvising development). Come on I’m still waiting for the full Revelation feature set deployed as initially announced, hyped and broken almost 2 years ago!

In addition, EVE is not so rose colored when it comes to gameplay, no mattes how CCP and the superficial reviewers who spent a couple of days in the game may describe the state of things: the combat system has been radically revised at least 5 times, the economy needs huge manual supervision and the introduction of more costly products to keep inflation stable and the radical (not to mention biased) PVP view of the game is becoming more and more grim for people that aim to have a social life. Research and development often is a joke since new items are allocated manually and you may wait for months before you’re granted a chance to get a breakthrought. As said before, PVP is so masterfully balanced towards big, pointless fleet battles that bounty hunting was made completely useless since the changes of two years ago (made to promote what they call “factional warfare”, a feature that still today exists only on the designers heads but that broke a lot of more player-friendly features) and the only role for mercenary and rogue fleets is to increase the ship numbers in battle to statistically drop the employing corp losses. In other hand, if you plan to have small battles for money, just farm 100K NPCs every minute in a cheap battleship instead of spending days to catch that 5M bounty around the galaxy.

If EVE won’t manage to make fleet combat interesting (at the moment, unless you have personally offended someone, in a 100 vs 100 battle, the fact you will come alive or dead is a matter of pure luck due to lag and the shortcoming of the interface), create better ways to manage territorial control (granting a patrol made of real people up 24/7 feels like a job to me) and keep griefers away from newbie corporations, the game may stop way before its first decade: its player count is not so stellar and the number of people who run away scared from the game (and the community) unfriendliness is worrying. Accounts are counted by the millions but the active ones are by the tens of thousands (and a good portion of them are alts purchased with a discont!).

Remember, these critics doesn’t come from a green-horned gamer but from a veteran with more of 30M (almost 40 to be precise) of skillpoints behind his back, months of services in 0.0 under several major alliances and more bounties collected than anyone can imagine. I (as many other disgruntled veterans) feel a bit silly that people we pay for a service carry on tasks and development in such a chaotic way, just like they’re still working on guild tasks in their basement and still manage to be so bluntly full of nonsense when it comes to take responsibility.

What EVE needs is a professional vision and direction, the ability to grant a baseline of experience that won’t require to sell your soul to the game itself or relearn the game completely every six months. It needs a manual that isn’t years behind development and a and designer who didn’t focus only on what a minority of the playerbase wants because is that minority of hardcore gamers and the way the game is built around them that are scaring new players away!

The idea of a free, completely player driven PVP is so ‘90ish, it’s not completely bad but steps has to be taken to grant new players the time and peace needed to adjust to such a complex game. What they have today is constant griefing, mugging and menaces until they join one of the bigger corporations, because the game, in the last two years, only fullfilled the demands and expectations of a fistfull of CEOs, who practically control almost all the EVE active userbase and are the finances that back up the game.