Does The End Game Really Matter?

This post over at MPOGD.com has me thinking; does the end game of an MMORPG matter at all in its ultimate success or failure?

If you take the raw number of players that actively participate in end game raids in World of Warcraft and simply remove them from the total number of subscribers, World of Warcraft would still hold several million players. So, doesn't that mean that World of Warcraft would be popular without that end game content? Seriously, it is estimated that less than 2% of WoW's NA/EU user-base has actually stepped foot into an end game instance.

World of Warcraft is just one example, both of a game and of an end game model. What other models are there and what do they mean to the game as a whole?

Please discuss.

Dear Blizzard, PvP is a Mess

Dear Blizzard,

PvP in World of Warcraft is an absolute mess.

Players that were not fortunate enough to participate in the first two Arena seasons are now at a distinct disadvantage. E-Z mode epics are no longer attainable for lesser geared players to become competitive. Alas, the tried and true MMORPG rule, exploit early, exploit often (or abuse early, abuse often), is proven once again.

Also, the Arena system is severely imbalanced towards OBVIOUSLY overpowered class and skill combinations. It does not take a rocket scientist to look at the number of each class represented in the top 100 teams to recognize the problem.

Yet, for two full seasons these problems have been ignored and players have been allowed to gain superior quality items with little effort. But now, anyone coming into the system will not have the same opportunity.

The battlegrounds are in no better shape. Warsong Gulch is a bore fest; either ending extremely fast or going for hours on end. Eye of the Storm rarely actually fills with enough players for both teams and usually ends due to lack of players.

Alterac Valley has been designated an AFK zone for Horde players. Patch 2.2.0 was supposed to fix this, but alas your "AFK flagging" system was a broken design that is now punishing honest players while AFKers simply "buff a guard" to collect honor. On top of this, the map in Alterac Valley is still heavily skewed towards the Alliance.

Fortunately, Arathi Basin is somewhat balanced and still fun to play. Unfortunately, all the fucking rewards for battlegrounds absolutely fucking suck compared to the Arena rewards. Would it be so hard to update the fucking rewards?

Sadly, open world PvP is the worst aspect of World of Warcraft PvP. There is almost no point to playing on a PvP server. Rarely do you find any PvP in the open world that is not just someone getting ganked. Ganking is not PvP. Very little honor is gained for open world fighting compared to the immense amount that is given for battlegrounds. Also, most of The Burning Crusade objective-based PvP encounters are boring and exploitable.

Blizzard, you suck at PvP.

Yours truly,

Heartless Gamer

PS. Warlocks really need another way to make players run around helplessly as they die.

Down With The Sickness

Everyone seems to be getting sick lately. My boss was sick, my co-worker is sick, two of my instructors are sick, and everyday friends are dropping. Hell, even our dog was sick (but because of surgery, not the flu). Even the mighty Zonk may soon fall!

Worst of all, I am sick and it's been up and down for two weeks now.

World of Warcraft Patch 2.2.0 Today

World of Warcraft is patching to version 2.2.0 today. I will hopefully post links to WoW Patch 2.2 downloads later.

The biggest new feature is voice chat:

Voice Chat - The new Voice Chat feature is now available in game. Players will need to go into the options menu under Sound & Voice to activate it. Volume sliders are available for the microphone, speakers, and game-audio fade (which automatically lowers the game audio when a voice communication is received), as is a “push-to-talk” setting. Right-clicking on a player’s name now includes the option to mute or unmute that player. Muting another player blocks all voice chat from him or her; the ignore feature now blocks both voice chat and text chat from that player.

It should definitely be a good week for WoW parody websites, WoW comics, and most definitely for the guys over at Ventrilo Harassment. However, for me it will probably be more than a week before I even have a new mic to use. I was never a huge fan of voice chat, but it definitely has it's advantages and I can't deny that I will probably be using it.

Oh, and a side note, they nerfed Shamans again:

Earthbind Totem: This totem will no longer break Rogue stealth.

Because all the Shamans in WoW know how useful totems are for popping rogues. I just don't know what to do as a shaman with half of my crowd control now somewhat nerfed.

Green Bay Packers

I am a huge Green Bay Packers fan. I was born near Green Bay and my blood runs cold, dark, and green.

The Packers took home a win today against the San Diego Chargers and in the process, Brett Favre tied Dan Marino's all-time touchdown mark. Congratulations Brett. I will always be a fan.

Following Failure With Failure

It seems that closing the doors on Auto Assault isn't the only thing Netdevil is up to these days. MMOsite has the news that Netdevil has announced another post apocalyptic MMOG, entitled Warmonger. The basics: Warmonger will be an action-oriented MMO FPS set in a post apocalyptic future.

The kicker? It won't just be vehicles this time. Players can blow shit up and stuff, but not with vehicles. Understand?

The bigger kicker? It will be available for digital download on October 16th, 2007!

So, why will this be a failure? Because it is built around the AGEIA PhysX processor, perhaps the most worthless piece of computer hardware ever invented for gaming. Don't get me wrong, I am sure all 250 people worldwide that own an AGEIA PhysX processor will be just tripping over themselves to download this baby.

Fortunately, the AGEIA PhysX processor has dropped to somewhere in the neighborhood of $130, not terribly unreasonable. Players will just have to pretend they are buying the AGEIA PhysX card for access to it's vast library of enabled games. It worked for FFXI and the hard drive for the Playstation 2!

Why Is World of Warcraft So Popular?

People will always argue about the reasons behind World of Warcraft being so popular. Some argue that Blizzard just spent a ton of money. Some argue that Blizzard has a massive following who will buy anything they put in a box. Some argue that WoW benefited from word of mouth. Some argue that WoW just got lucky.

Wash all of these reasons from the chalk board. Then, sit down, and play World of Warcraft for five minutes. The controls and camera are absolutely smooth. The UI is clean and simple. Tasks and goals are laid out from the start. There is almost no decisions to be made until level 10, when a player receives their first talent point. If a player dies, they run back as a ghost with no experience or item loss. The game NEVER punishes a player until that player is willing and able to avoid the situation.

Fundamentally, WoW is just a pleasure to sit down and play. Take all the reasoning for why WoW is so popular and compare it against this question. If this is truly the reason, then why do people sit down, play, and continue to play?

For WoW, the devil is NOT in the details.

RIP Robert Jordan

Author Robert Jordan, whose "Wheel of Time" series of fantasy novels sold millions of copies, died Sunday of a rare blood disease. He was 58.

Jordan, whose real name was James Oliver Rigney Jr., was born and lived in this southern city most of his life. He died at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston of complications from primary amyloidosis with cardiomyopathy, his personal assistant, Maria Simons, said Monday.

UPDATE: Check out TarValon.net for a great tribute.

Metaplace is Official

Raph Koster and company have made it official: Areae unveils Metaplace, Web 2.0 with a bit of MMORPG mixed in.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Metaplace.com!

It has been incredibly hard keeping quiet about this for a whole year. Everyone here on the team is really excited about what we're making. And we're really honored to get to launch this site as one of the TechCrunch 40.

Right at the outset, when we launched the original Areae, Inc. website, we told everyone that we were out to reinvent virtual worlds, and to make them work more like the Web does. We also told everyone that the cartoon on the website was our business plan. It's been amazing to watch the speculation out there about what exactly we meant, but now you know: we meant it completely literally. Metaplace works how the web does, just about top to bottom.

Our goals are sort of idealistic. We think there are all kinds of things on the Internet that would be improved if anyone could have a virtual place of their own. Right now, there aren't enough good games, for example, and they all seem to be about elves in tights or soldiers in battle armor. Metaplace allows more diversity. Right now, there are lots of people who want to use virtual worlds for research, or education, or business, but it's just too darn hard to get one going. Now you can create a world in just a few minutes and start tailoring it to your needs. Basically, we wanted to democratize the process of making online spaces of all sorts.

As part of that, we also committed to an open markup standard for our network protocol - anyone can write a client for any platform they want. We decided to use Web standards for everything we could, which is why you can have a game world that is also a website, or use Web data to populate your world. The scripting language (we call it MetaScript, of course) is based on Lua. You get the idea - no "not invented here," no closed proprietary approaches.

We knew it was all coming together when one of our team made a game in a day and a half. And then stuck that game on a private MySpace profile. You can inherit someone else's world (if they let you) and use it as a starting point. You can slurp whole directories of art and use them as building blocks. Cut and paste a movement system or a health bar from one world to another. Use an RSS feed for your NPCs. We made puzzle games, RPGs, action games... and set up doorways from one to the other. Basically, coming to work in the morning is a lot of fun.

This isn't all hypothetical, either. We fully intend to be customers of our own product. We've already started work on our first big game - a "worldy MMORPG" with what we hope will be a ton of fun game play. What's more, we figure that some of you who have been looking for a game like that might want to help us build it.

We have a lot of plans for the future, and we hope you'll check back every week to learn what we're cooking up. As you can see, we're taking alpha applications. We expect to ramp up the number of testers a lot over the coming months. So keep an eye on the site - it will be growing a lot.

Overall, I think what we are most looking forward to is surprises. We can't wait to see all the amazing things you will build with the Metaplace platform. It's time to see what the world really wants from virtual worlds.

We'll be updating this blog at least once a week. In the meantime, see you in the comments thread!

Right before leaving work, my co-worker and I discussed what was potentially coming from today's announcement. We both agreed; this is pretty much what we and many others expected. Areae is building a better Second Life. A Second Life that makes sense. A Second Life that doesn't treat players like caged chickens.

I guess the real kicker is that this is more of a service, than a game. So, it is a bit hard as a gamer to get any excitement out of this announcement. Until I get to see some of the games in development for the service, I will have to hold comments on the gaming potential.

What worries me about Metaplace, is the fact that most user generated content is just absolute junk. I've played Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2. I've played countless MUDs that allow for user submitted content. I've played countless video games where players could make and contribute something to the community. I can count on one hand how much of that content has actually been worth my time.

It's the whole signal to noise thing again. How much crap will Metaplace members have to shovel through before getting to the good stuff? I honestly don't see many people, myself included, willing to pay "meta dollars" for the chance to play a crappy game. Early adoption is going to be a tough hump for "armchair designers" to get over. Then its a fight to make sure your ideas don't get copied/stolen and sold for a lower price.

So, thats my negativity on the announcement, but don't let my jaded gamerness overshadow what Metaplace could turn into. Afterall, as stated, we still haven't seen the games :)

Areae Announcement Tommorow

From Cuppy:

Hey all =)

Just wanted to let you know that tomorrow Areae is making our announcement on what we are making. We were picked to be one of the TechCrunch40 and are demoing our product tomorrow.

Keep an eye on Metaplace.com tomorrow! =)

It will be interesting to finally get an idea of what Raph Koster has been working on over at Areae, but at the same time I know it will be a disappointment to many fans of Raph's previous work still holding out for a Raph Koster MMORPG. It is pretty evident that Raph is trying his damnedest to separate from the "old-school MMORPG" crowd without actually severing the link completely. I guess we will all know how far he has gone tomorrow.