WoW and end-game content

No, I don’t mean Black Temple or Gruul’s Lair or Serpentshrine Cavern. Those raid dungeons will not be seen by that many people to be honest.

I am talking about the end-game after level 70. Before the Burning Crusade was launched we read about upcoming 10 man raids which especially made my guild happy. We were a small guild who sometimes had problems filling a ZG raid. We hoped that smaller raid instances would actually make it easier for us to raid – without having to be as strict as so called “hardcore” raiding guilds. Our goal was to play and have fun with people we like, but we also wanted to combine that with progress in raiding.

After levelling up to 70 we realised that it hasn’t become all that much easier. My guild, which is now bigger than before, have had lots of fun together in the numerous 5-man instances, and we have slowly gotten ourselves attuned to Karazhan. But how about people who aren’t blessed with a nice guild such as mine?

There are lots of fun 5 man instances that are pretty easy to manage for a group of people used to playing with each other in a guild, but a few of them are very difficult to complete in a pug. I’ve had like 2 successful pugs in Shadow Labyrinth, but they were both with very experienced players. A “normal” pug just can’t handle it.

Some of the 5-man instances (and Karazhan) require an “optimal” group setup. If you don’t have the exact setup you just can’t do it.

What I would really like to see is a new 10-man instance a bit like the old UBRS. It was a nice instance (I never got bored with it actually) and manageable even with a pug. It would also be nice to be able to go to a raid without doing a long attunement quest chain.

In the Stratics developer chat a few days ago Tigole mentions Zul’Aman that will be implemented in an upcoming patch:

Brannoc: *anon67* Do you have plans to add more 10 or 15 man instance dungeons like Zul’Aman for casual players?

Tigole: Karazhan has been a big success and I think a lot of players really dig the 10 man raiding size. We’re going to try to make Zul’Aman for 10 people as well. It’s still a little ways off so there’s always the chance something can change but we think ZA would make a great 10 person zone.

Yes, people dig the 10 man raiding size, but a new Karazhan is NOT what the players want and I hope Tigole realises that. People don’t want long attunement quest chains, and many say Karazhan is too difficult (respawn rate especially mentioned). That is what has been said over and over again. The EU CM Ommra tried to summarise the feedback in this thread – now we can only hope the developers actually listen to what the players say.

Blue poster gone missing

And it is confirmed that Tseric quit. Or got fired, who knows.

I suspect that we will see lots of threads and blog posts about how good Tseric was and how much he will get missed. I can’t say I will miss him all that much – I dislike his arrogant attitude. As I said in a previous blog post I am sure he was doing his job in a good way, but I just didn’t like the attitude he had towards the players and the community. Sometimes there is only one thing to say, but there are tons of different ways to say it.

Mob mentality…

So a trailer for the Black Temple is released. Have a look at the two following threads. This one is posted by a blue poster:

http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=286591307&sid=1

and here is one posted by a player:

http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=286631704&sid=1

Do you notice the difference? The player post starts off with a positive comment, and most of the following replies are positive as well.

The blue post is immediately flamed with negative comments like “nice huh but we will never see it anyway waah waah”. Not saying they don’t have a point, but it is fascinating how people follow a trend like this (praise or flame). It’s a very typical forum phenomenon.

I’ll get back to the discussion itself later, that is also interesting :)

Blue poster gone wild

The WoW community hase been in uproar about Tseric’s outburst this weekend: http://wow-en.curse-gaming.com/devtracker/1/en/details/1733/

Basically he snapped and showed some of the frustration CM’s must feel about all the trolls and flamers that are roaming the forum. It all starts with his second post saying “good luck with trying to get me fired”, and it’s later on in the thread he really shows how frustrating his job can be:

“Posting impassionately, they say you don’t care.

Posting nothing, they say you ignore.

Posting with passion, you incite trolls.

Posting fluff, you say nonsense.

Post with what facts you have, they whittle down with rationale.

There is no win.”

The discussion is now heated about the state of the forums and the responsibilities of the CM’s. Some people cheer Tseric on, saying it’s great that he shows that he’s a human and not a machine. Others think he’s highly unprofessional and should get fired.

Tseric is in my opinion often trolling and has a weird philosophical view of life which he unfortunately tries to share with the Off-Topic community on the US forum (sometimes I’m just like “lol wut?” when reading his OT posts). But some blue trolling is just nice imo, and I don’t really doubt that he is taking his other CM duties seriously.

I’m a bit ambiguous to this situation though – on one hand I totally understand that the amount of pure bullshit on the official WoW forums could make anyone insane, on the other I think he handles it a bit unprofessionally. Can’t he just go out and get drunk and whine about his job like normal people? (Maybe that’s what he did, only most other people don’t have the login info to a blue account… ;p)

Unprofessional or not, no job in the world involves taking insults as part of your job description. It’s amazing how most of the CM’s (especially Nethaera) manage to stay positive most of the times with all the bullshit they have to put up with.

It’s strange how people can excuse the rudest behaviour by saying “you get paid to take my shit!”. Do these posters actually think they will change something with the game by being rude? I know what I would do – totally ignore those posters and dismiss them as whiners.

Accordian Techno – The next big thing!

Ukraine was robbed :(

It’s a conspiracy!

Caution, madness

The movie sucked bigtime, and the “THIS IS MADNESS!!!”-jokes are old and boring, but this was actually funny…

It’s been done before

Yeah. So I guess there’s no need for another “this is how it is to be a girl gamer” comment – I’ll just link to this old favourite (with emphasis on old):

OMG Girlz Don’t Exist on teh Intarweb!!!!1

I have to say that it’s pretty interesting when these topics keep popping up again and again on the WoW forum. Those threads always get at least 10 pages long, apparently it’s a very burning topic.

People always refer to the “girls” who use their gender to get advantages in-game, such as gifts and gold. I have myself never encountered such a player (*insert drumroll*) and am a firm believer that they are mainly made up stories by woman-haters, or of course guys pretending to be girls.

Who doesn’t remember this masterpiece for example? Although that is clearly made up, who would fall for *begins to sexily take off socks* haha.

Hellgates second class citizens

Well, it turns out that writing a blog is harder than it looks, with the drive to keep it interesting its very easy to say nothing at all and stay safe, of course maybe I shouldn’t worry too much since nobody much knows about us yet :)

So, Bill Roper and the team that left Blizzard to form Flagship Studios are putting the on the final touches to Hellgate:London, their first release since going their own way. I must admit I think that World of Warcraft would have a more universal appeal to ‘causals’ (by which I mean people with limited time to raid at peak times) if Bill was still onboard, simply because he has so much experience at pavlovian experiments.

The point of all this is that I misread the recent announcement about their pricing structure over at Hellgate guru (handy link) and I thought that they were using a MMO monthly subscription structure. Instead it seems they are wisely offering their version of Battle.net for free but charging $9.95 a month for ‘elite status’, with a range of what looks to me like pretty unappealing features.

The part that caught my eye was ‘24/7 phone- and internet-support’ which will probably only cover technical support, but could become very interesting if subscribers demand it matches the same level of customer support as the MMOs charging a similar monthly fee. One of the biggest problems with Diablo 2 was duping, map hackers and so on, and you always got the impression that nothing was going to get fixed in a hurry since, hey its free, you get what you pay for!

I think that even if Flagship try to distance themselves from in-game MMO support standards of today like policing behaviour and naming, people paying 10 bucks a month (which is a very hefty chunk over a year) are going to demand action when the inevitable exploits are discovered. And those without the elite status? Don’t worry, you can still player-kill the pampered souls above you, in fact I think that may be a great idea for a Clan! :)

The Arms Race

A short time ago I was reading an excellent post from Jeff Freeman’s blog which discussed the plague of spam which is threatening to drown out meaningful comment and quickly turning into one of the most effective predators in the ‘virtual’ sea.

He focussed mainly on blog comment spam, but the business plans behind the need for cheap and effective advertising are pretty similar for all the companies involved in direct marketing – find the most cost effective opportunities and exploit them to their limit. This is rapidly becoming relevant to the MMO support industry, and not just since that old EQ boogeyman Yantis is plotting to stuff the tubes full.

Jeff’s post (and Tobold’s apocalyptic April Fools post) highlight the point that these companies have no qualms about ruining the usefulness of the communication channels they hijack. It also seems pretty clear that the virtual systems employed by most modern MMOs are too vulnerable to this short term thinking, as a short visit to the WoW or Vanguard forum will quickly confirm. From previous PR posts from WoW especially it seems there is at least some kind of effort to keep the RMT suppliers on the backfoot, but as with reactive tools such as email spam filters the response to bans is just to throw more cannon fodder into the fray, since after all the overheads are minimal with trial accounts.

It seems that the worst affected company is Blizzard, perhaps unsurprisingly given its long standing market leader position, although it does finally seem to be ready to make some unspecified restrictions to its communication channels. CM Aeus snuck out a short post on the Interface Customisation forums regarding the plan for changes to whispers which indicates that it aims to make this change ‘in an attempt to reduce spam and advertisement’

The genie was out of the bottle a long time ago, and I have to wonder if this arms race is really going to be won by incremental steps which fail to tackle the demand for gold from the player base, or the dedication shown by suppliers to send out as much spam as possible.

To win this war, will the price simply be too high?

Just a short comment…

I know, hobbit feet and emotes aren’t the most important things in the world (and this blog will cover more things than that), but still! The LotRO emotes are pretty funny – although /mood_confused should be renamed to /mood_retard. But ZOMG /smackhead! Finally! Calling it /facepalm would have been a tad funnier though.