WoW: Pug Bingo

Angry Gamer says: "This has to be reposted and spread about."

[the image exceeded its hosting. Ah well for anyone late for the party it was a 5 by 5 bingo card where you got a square for various comical but true pug situations such as melee hunter or the enchanter's skill is too low to disenchant and so on.]

Who am I to argue?

You win by getting a line of 5 in a row. For example all the things on the top line or a diagonal from one corner to another corner. Middle square is free. Post here saying "House!" when you have a line.

Good luck everyone!

MMOs: Stargate Worlds

As this title changes direction I find myself nodding at their good sense.

Stargate Worlds has been in development for some time as a MMO. However they have been plagued by financial problems with reports of staff not getting paid and so on. Time after time they've lurched back to business, clinging on by their fingernails.

Recently they've announced that instead of launching a MMO in 2010 they will instead be producing a shooter. I applaud their wisdom.

2010 will see the launch of Star Trek Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic. The subset of Stargate fans who do not prefer one of those IPs must be absolutely tiny.

Watching Stargate Universe over the holiday period made me think about how weak the IP is as the basis for a MMO.

I'm not saying Stargate is not entertaining, it is - as a TV series.

As a MMO IP it has serious drawbacks:

Uneven characterisation

Stargate Universe has some very well-acted strong characters that are interesting and memorable. Robert Carlyle is mesmerising, David Blue is great. But most of the actors are just bland. In scene after scene we see some big emotional drama played out and Carlyle is the only person whose face moves. It looks bizarre. Like everyone except Carlyle and Blue went to some acting school where you are told to act every part stoic and impassive. It undermines Carlyle's acting because it makes him look hammy when he is acting with a wide range of visible emotions and no one else is.

Carlyle's acting does not suit his part. He has created a strong character of great integrity and personality. Yet the script is clearly written on the assumption he is an unlikeable nerd. He keeps suggesting things in a highly convincing way and everyone rejects his suggestion because it comes from him. That doesn't make any sense, he is clearly an authoritative charismatic expert who is the only person who knows that the hell to do. They should have got Rick Moranis to play Dr Rush, not Carlyle.

The soldiers don't act like soldiers. They are continually ignoring orders and doing what they feel like instead. They act like teenagers, not professional military men and women. They are also particularly wooden. I don't believe soldiers are so impassive in combat situations, particularly not American soldiers. Kelly's Heroes is a much more convincing picture of how American soldiers behave under stress.

The home visits from outer space are ridiculous. Chloe visits her mother and Colonel Young visits his wife. Nice for drama but daft in the context of a mission in crisis. It's as if Picard popped back to London for a pint in the middle of Star Trek.

The IP is too like Star Trek

Consider:
- the guy who can fly the ship has a Scottish accent.

- a major character is brilliant but can't connect to others emotionally.

- the plotlines are resolved by "leadership" which consists of impulsively ignoring your experts, telling people to pull their fingers out and reminding everyone that "we're all in this together". This is portrayed as opposite to and superior to actually knowing what the hell you're doing.

- a perky medical officer who asserts her rights as ranking medical officer to do things the leader doesn't want.

- ship-based with away teams.

- a high emphasis on emotional interaction between the characters no matter how inappropriate to the situation. All this Eli-Chloe-Scott love triangle business. I can see it makes the show more dramatic but sometimes you really think there's something better they should get on and do rather than fixing the shower.

Stargate really is just Star Trek with different uniforms. Wait, what's that? "Ah but don't forget the stargates," you say, "they're unique!" A mysterions device that can transport people across space. Yeah right, that's never been done before. Beam me up, Scotty.

Continuity breaks

In addition to this Stargate Universe breaks its own continuity all the time. In Episode 3 an away team goes to a planet to search for cleaning powder (an exciting story if ever there was one!). First Dr Rush, who is supposed to be the unemotional genius gives his water away to Lieutenant Scott in an emo moment. Then Scott orders Sergeant Greer to keep Rush alive. Then when they're alone Greer refuses Rush water, an action likely to kill him, and hits him and pulls a gun on him. Why doesn't he follow orders? Then they get back to the Stargate and a guy is trying to get through. Rush tells Greer to shoot him. He does, and asked why he shot him "because he told me too". So he doesn't follow his own lieutenant's orders but he jumps to follow Rush's orders despite hating him and having just hit him? It's nonsense. And once they get back up to the ship Rush blames Greer for shooting the scientist, telling Young "Greer, Greer shot him!" And this doesn't get followed up. Does the Colonel just forget that one of his men is running amuck shooting civilians?

In another scene Chloe attacks Dr Rush after her father dies heroically. Carlyle acts out a brilliant and moving scene where he explains on his knees how much he regrets the death and how committed he is to saving the ship. The rest of the cast looks on woodenly. A little later Colonel Young asks him if he cares about saving the ship. Hello? As far as the audience knows Dr Rush is the only person who cares about saving the ship. Everyone else seems about as interested as teenage boys helping their mums go grocery shopping. What the series is showing to the audience is wildly at variance to what the characters are reacting to. (This is because Carlyle is too sympathetic).

Implications for game-making

The series is fine for a shooter game. It's sci fi, it's full of soldiers, tech is shown clearly and is interesting as far as game weapons go. It's more like real soldier weapons (pistols, machine guns) than phasers and light sabers which a lot of people will like.

For a MMO which requires considerably more depth the cracks start to show.

First the lore is weak. It's a fairly transparent Star Trek rip-off. Worse a lot of the story contradicts other parts of the story and the science is non-existent. For example to find lime on the planet they go running around on foot despite having telemetry on the ship that can measure chemical composition and which they use at other times to detect breathable atmosphere. Why can't they just scan for calcium carbonate with the thing that tells you the atmosphere is 88% nitrogen and 12% oxygen?

Next what's interesting about the show is to a large extent the drama and the characters. That doesn't translate. Instead of playing out a dramatic scene with Robert Carlyle you interact with nerds who tell you to go to X for a 3.4% speed buff. Instead of a romance with Medic Johannsen you get asked "wanna cyber" by some big-breasted avatar that likely belongs to a 40 year old basement dweller called Bert.

The technology is not sufficiently interesting. The gates are the only really iconic tech but you can't do much with them in game. They're essentially a load screen between instances. The ship looks cool but you can't fly it. "Ancients technology" is just lumps of rock with glyphs on them that work like mobile phones or whatever. The weapons are apparently standard contemporary US Army issue - great for a shooter but very weak for something more story-based.

The characters don't lend themselves to obviously exciting classes (as compared with say Jedi). You got soldiers. A medic who is kinda crap - her best medicine seems to be apirin or something similar and her main treatment is telling people to get some sleep. You got mad scientist that everyone hates. You got college dropout geek. You got crap scientists who are useless. You got politicians who just whine at the soldiers and occasionally use their Leadership powers to calm everyone else. And you got everyone else whose only plot function is to panic and need to be calmed down. None of these make interesting MMO classes. From what I vaguely remember of the film they had a few archaeologists too. Whoop de doo.

The look is sometimes self-defeating. They have these great access corridors on the ship, reminiscent of the Nostromo in Alien. In fact I found myself waiting for the alien to jump out then thinking "oh shoot, it's Stargate, relax, nothing exciting is going to happen". The problem with using everyone else's tropes is that by and large they did it better.

Anyway that's something of a snap judgment, I don't know the IP well, just watched a few episodes over Christmas. What I saw does not make me think, wow, wish I was a character in that universe. In fact it makes me think "they were planning a MMO? Wow!" Sometimes it really is better to just write your own stories.

Comments: English only please

I just deleted a comment in a Chinese language.

I apologise if it was on-topic and relevant but if I don't know what it is I can't allow it to stand in case it's unsuitable.

Please feel free to comment again in English if you wish to make a point.

MMOs: The fun of cheating

Jingle bells, jingle bells,
Jingle all the way,
Oh what fun it is
To get creative with your play.



Jingle bells, jingle bells,
Killing stuff is neat,
But it's even better when
You've worked out how to cheat.


Ever since the start of the MMO players have loved to push the game mechanics.

The Holy Trinity, so fundamental to the genre, may well have started as an exploit that got co-opted as a feature. In some primitive game a player figured out how to manage mob aggro and exploited this knowledge by stacking armour and defences on the character capable of holding aggro thereby inventing a much more efficient system than the Everyone Is Dps mechanic.

Many other standard MMO combat techniques are clearly methods of exploiting the AI which show the weaknesses of the program as a combat simulator. Kiting, circle-strafing, terrain exploiting and all manner of pulling. None of these combat techniques resemble what happens in real fights and it's unlikely that any of them were deliberately designed into games originally.

Sometimes the "exploit" is on the part of the developers: a field full of intelligent orc mobs who just stand there picking their noses while you pull and kill them one by one is designed as a bad simulation which is a fun game.

Why players love exploits

- it makes you feel clever.
- it creates a secret language of gameplay mechanics that "pro" gamers understand and "noob" gamers don't, thereby demonstrating mastery.
- it allows you to do amazing things not intended by the developers or expected by others.
- it allows you to progress faster and further than you would otherwise be able to.
- it makes the game look different and fresh.

How players show their exploits off, some examples


Example 1: Demon Lord Kazzak in Stormwind

Here is a video of Demon Lord Kazzak who has been dragged by a skilled Hunter to the city of Stormwind. The rampage this raid boss mob goes on is unstoppable by players since the boss heals when he kills someone. In an area full of low level players this makes him unkillable. When this boss was exploited in this way he had to be manually reset by a GM.

The Hunter had to do a tricky kiting job. Kiting such as this was generally managed by reverse jump shots. Your character moves forwards, then you jump, spin 180, shoot behind you while in mid-air, spin 180, then land pointing forwards. This tricks the game into thinking you had always been going forwards so you don't slow down while getting a shot off backwards. It takes a bit of practice to get right.

What is interesting is that although they moved this boss to prevent people continuing to do this they did not change the gameplay mechanic. It's on the long list of exploits which have become features.

Example 2: It's fun when the game goes wrong in interesting ways

This video shows an exploit where the player has managed to get the horses from the Arathi Basin stables to activate and attack the other side.

It's not amazingly powerful, the team exploiting lost this battle. It does however look interesting.

The good old days

This attitude is particularly prevalent in players who reminisce fondly about the early days of Ultima Online, Everquest and Star Wars; Galaxies. All of these games were designed (both on purpose and inadvertently) to encourage emergent gameplay.

When players say fondly that things were great back then what they are often remembering is they found interesting ways to beat the system that aren't readily available to most players in modern games.

The story of Fansy the Famous Bard, a player who killed other players by training mobs onto them is well-known and is an example of a player who received considerable recognition simply by exploiting over and over all day long.

Scott Hartsman agrees: his excellent blog post on emergent gameplay is called Emergent Play in MMOs - It's about the balance. Moorgard (developer Steve Danuser) comments:

"Locked encounters: saving the world from degenerates, (negative) one subscription at a time."

What he's saying is that it costs games companies subscribers to fix such problems because players love them.

Blizzard has been keenly conscious of this in policing World of Warcraft. Generally they don't ban players for exploiting - they just fix the exploit. Sometimes. Where they do ban people it's sometimes dependent on how succesful the player has been with an exploit.

When Wrath of the Lich King came out player Athene used his guild to help him level fast. He made level 79 in 13 hours. Then despite having confirmed with one GM that his levelling technique was legal another GM decided it wasn't, temporarily banned the players involved and reset the character to 70.

What they were doing was tagging mobs inside an instance, then the helpers would drop group and kill it while the power-levelled character went on to tag more mobs, then inviting everyone back before the auto-hearth mechanic for not being in the instance group kicked in.

After Athene and his friends were banned a player called Nymh made the world first level 80 also, and this time legally, with outside help.

Raid guild Exodus were temporarily suspended after a world first defeat of Yogg-Saron. Their take on the matter is very revealing. While they admitted that they exploited they said they'd do the same thing again and pointed fingers at many other world firsts which had been achieved using exploits and allowed to stand.

The whole issue of cheating has become such a grey area nowadays because some level of game mechanics abuse is an integral part of almost every player's arsenal and in many cases is designed back into the game as a "feature" by developers who like the way the emergent play changes the fundamental gameplay. The Ancient Gaming Noob found that only 12% of players surveyed thought that exploiting game mechanics was cheating and only 13% considered illicit real money transactions cheating.

Like it or not (and most players love it) exploiting is here to stay.

For designers the goal is a game where some exploiting is possible so that players are entertained but not so much that the game appears broken. When Darkfall released I didn't buy it because of reports of rampant afk macroing. A system that skilled you up for swinging your sword and supported macros was tailor-made for botting. Even a strict policy failed to prevent widespread abuse and I really didn't fancy a game which is played by leaving your computer on all day and overnight and levelling while you work and sleep. I hated it in SWG and didn't fancy dealing with it again in a game where it appeared to be mandatory. (They've since softened the skill curve to allow new players more chance to be competitive with veterans without exploiting).

So it's a fine line for developers - too little scope for player creativity and you follow in the footsteps of Warhammer Online. That game with its comparitively simple systems didn't allow the average player to seek advantage except through flavour of the month builds. What's worse they co-opted fotm as a design mechanic, deliberately overpowering Bright Wizards and Warrior Priests to balance the factions as Destruction was too strong. So not only was the only way to cheese the game (apart from certain keep exploits) playing a fotm build but the developers had decided which fotm build you would cheese with. This total lack of player control over their ability to cheese made the game less fun than its rivals.

EQ2: Purchase options

Everquest 2 is an excellent MMO and it's actually pretty cheap. However there are a lot of different options for buying it so here is a rundown from the perspective of a player in the UK on 20th December 2009. You should check for yourself each option as it's likely to differ, the details below should make it easy for you to shop around.

To summarise Everquest 2 it is very similar to WoW. It started out quite like WoW then as the game evolved became more like WoW over time (crafting simplified and interdepencies removed, soloing improved, a talent like system added, WoW raid sizes were changed to be more like EQ2 raid sizes etc). The games have heavily influenced each other.

The principal differences are a more polite community, a more strategic, slower combat, and a greater emphasis on inventory management and crafting. You get a lot more bag and bank space in Everquest and collecting and harvesting are typically a bigger part of the play experience.

EQ2 is a good choice if you are a veteran WoW player thinking about rolling an alt. Why go through Stranglethorn Vale for the tenth time when you can level in a completely fresh experience with new zones that are comfortably on a par with WoW's quality?

I think it is also the game I'd pick if I were playing with children. The language and behaviour of other players in WoW is just not very nice. I've barely even seen anyone swear in EQ2 nor have I joined a group wondering whether they will kick me for some reason.

OK, now to look at the different deals for the game. You may need to get the Station Launcher to view some options, it's a quick download:
http://launcher.station.sony.com/

Option 1, Recruit-a-friend, no initial cost, current subscribers only (or ask someone to recruit you at http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/forums/show.m?forum_id=2591 )


http://everquest2.com/recruit-a-friend.vm

Pros: - the "friends" can group together for triple exp. Mentoring the friend will give him an additional 10% exp. They can also teleport to each other.
- the recruiter gets a load of stuff (special mount, station cash, collectible card game boosters), free month's game time.

Cons: - your account does not get a Journeyman's Cloak reward
- does not stack with the 60 free days you get if you buy the Complete Collection.

Option 2, Shadow Odyssey, accessible via the Station Launcher. £7.99

Pros: - all current expansions and adventure packs, Shadow Odyssey AAs unlocked and AA cap raised to 200, some collectible game cards.
Cons: miss out on Journeyman's Cloak veteran reward.
Note: it costs £12 on Amazon so get it via the launcher unless you can find a box somewhere for less than £7.99

Option 3, Everquest 2 Starter Pack, accessible via the Station Launcher. £6.99

Pros: £1 cheaper than option 2.
Cons: you miss out on an expansion plus the various freebies associated with it. Miss J-Cloak.

Option 4, free trial http://www.everquest2.com/en/freeTrial.vm

Pros: you get the Journeyman's Cloak, a reward accessed through /claim which gives +25% run speed to any and/or all of your characters. Also it's 2 weeks free time unless you take the Complete Collection. So playing for 14 days, then buying Shadow Odyssey = 44 free days, Complete Collection = 60 free days.
Cons: while on trial you're restricted in many chat options, can't send people tells unless they /friend you, can't use auction house and other anti gold spammer mechanisms.

Option 5, Complete Collection, $19.99 https://store.station.sony.com/hardgood.jsp?SKU=EQ2RE-HG-BU1009-EQ2TCC

Pros: all current expansions, 60 free days, 500 Station Cash.
Cons: no J Cloak, will not stack with recruit-a-friend.

Option 6, Station Access, £18.99 per month, if you have a sub to another Sony game your game time will be converted (I got 117 free days from a SWG sub I had active). You can check if you will be given time in the Station Launcher by clicking on the Station Access option.

Pros: gives you EQ2 except Shadow Odyssey, gives you access to all other SOE MMO games including Vanguard, EQ1 (only 2 expansions), Star Wars: Galaxies, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Planetside.
Cons: you are not given the complete EQ2 or EQ1 games, it's expensive, no J-Cloak.

Option 7, wait for Sentinel's Fate (coming out Feb)
If you're in no rush prices for older expansions will drop and/or they will be bundled into the new one when it comes out.


Conclusion: get a free trial then buy the Shadow Odyssey via the launcher when your time runs out. Great value, gets you the J Cloak which is by far the most important of the various freebies offered.

I actually went for Option 6 simply because I had a long SWG sub active. I must say it's a little annoying levelling without the J-Cloak.

MMOs: modding

Modding is a hobby that players of single player computer games do to redesign the way their game works.

It's only single player games or non-massively multiplayer games that currently support this.

There are emulators of commercial MMOs that exist. They are not quite the same thing. First they are really hard to make - you have to reverse engineer the client then write code for your server to handle the jobs it needs to do then get it uploaded and running. They suffer from being not legal and highly vulnerable to cease and desist orders. These are not what I am talking about in this post although hats off to the pioneers who do them.

What I'm talking about is software that is designed to let amateurs build mmos. Possibly commercial software, possibly game engines of old mmos that are being shut down.

With MMOs there are several barriers to modding.

1) You don't have the source code. Unlike a game like Oblivion where you have the whole game in a MMO you only have a small part of it, the client.

2) Business models depend upon not letting people set up free servers.

3) People are bastards. If you set up an amateur MMO that was completely free people would turn up to try to hack it, crash it, grief players etc. This is just the nature of the Wild Wild Web.

4) They are incredibly labour-intensive to build.


I believe that over time the first two problems will inevitably collapse. This is because of Stabs' Law. No matter how pointless or bad for the gaming industry it may seem to be at some point someone who owns the rights to an old mmo will stand up and tell the world, thanks for playing, it's been a great ten years, we're shutting down the servers, here have the source code, it's uploaded and open source. Just because. Stabs' Law.

3) is a problem that is solved over time. Suppose knitting circles didn't exist and someone just now came up with the idea. There would be warnings that knitters could get mugged while travelling to the circle or that one of the members might be an axe murderer. People might turn up to them just because they are new with no motive except to be disruptive. Eventually though if people keep going along and knitting the disruption just falls by the way side, it's no longer interesting to do it.

If there are, one day, thousands of free amateur mmos out there it simpy won't be exciting to travel around griefing them.

4) is the reason I'm investigating mmo modding and beginning to communicate about it. I want to tell people what might be possible, how I'd like it to work so I don't have to do elements of mmo-building I don't like and/or can't do (for example coding or designing combat animations). We will see amateur mmos, they're going to be occasionally brilliant, they're going to become increasingly fun to make over time and they will be worlds that if you are reading this you will probably play in or create before the end of your lifetime.


I look forward to seeing some of you in Querulous Plains in about fifteen years' time!

Querulous Plains: Patent Office

It's not possible that an amateur modder can match the amount of work that can be done by a professional design team so mmo modding will depend to a great deal upon automation and player-created content.

The Patent Office is a feature that harnesses player inventiveness to have people create new features for your virtual world.

It needs to be pretty limited and it needs to be manually moderated. Still, checking whether a Goblin Wall Destruction Engine breaks your game is quicker and easier than designing one yourself.

What is elegant is that designer laziness is a feature. In common with a lot of sandbox elements players love having control of aspects of the virtual world themselves even if the way you've implemented it as a designer is by being too lazy or time-contrained to just do the damn work.

Who can file a patent?

Limited by class. There will be some sort of engineer or architect class in the game, this will be one of their unique perks.

How much does it cost?

A lot. It should be a guild or factional effort to get a patent. Looking for backers and investors will be part of the gameplay of people who want to invent things (and might be pretty fun in and of itself).

How often can it be done?

Restricted. Maybe one per week max.

What happens when one of these player-created machines breaks your game?

QP is a competitive pve game like a football game that takes 3 months to finish. It's not the end of the world if an inventor breaks the game, it will just be a feature you don't roll out to other servers.

What happens when one of these player-created machines improves your game?

It will become a game option. Perhaps an option for faction leaders to chose to enable for their kingdom (do I want a kingdom that can build siege engines or a kingdom that can build warg cavalry?). Possibly something as simple as adding the Goblin Wall Destruction Engine to the Engineer's schematic set.

Can people name these after players?

Hell yeah. I know I wouldn't fork out a million gold to finance one unless they agreed it was going to be called Stabs' Goblin Wall Destruction Machine.

The process

A player will design the suggested gameplay effect and building cost. So the Machine might take 200 Wood, 200 Iron and 50 Leather to build, be an unmanned but attackable raid accessory, be repairable on the fly by Engineers and subtract 20 from the defence of all mobs in a Tier 2 raid. I'd like them to also be able to design the look of it in some kind of editor. As a minimum some kind of concept art would be required even if it's just a photoshop of something the player Googled.

Designers have a week after it's submitted to check it balance it and ok it for production. So we might decide for this that it's not in line with the resource cost of similar machines or that 20 is too strong a debuff.

QA will be brief. The real QA consists of seeing how it performs for the rest of campaign. Forum whining will provide genuine insight into its power level much as I'm loathe to make this game yet another whine-driven MMO.

If it fits then great. Not only have you got players to do for free what most studios pay designers for you've also given people the best world ever simply because they have control over such things. Gotta love the sandbox business model :-)