I guess it was a matter of time. I have been playing Rock Band for many months now, and I guess that my constant drumming was bound to eventually kill the plastic pedal.
Trust me, you are totally evil.
I’m not one to go all squeamish in a game. There are good guys, bad guys, and those in between. And in the end, it’s just a game and, as far as I know, no orphan souls are being used to power the servers.
But, the “Evil Elves” in Warhammer Online are pretty evil. And I’m not talking about concerted evil as a crusade against the other side which is good. I’m also not talking about “take over the world” evil. I mean “the script says really really really REALLY evil, so I’m going over the top” evil. We’re talking about total chaos. To the point that after I was in the second zone, I seriously wondered how these guys manage to stay together in an organized group. It’s rampant chaos and random acts of violence. Does the extra step of sticking heads on pikes really help our side? Or is it just busy work? If I were an evil elf starting up the chain of command, I would think that after a while I would look around and say, “Maybe the good elves are right, I don’t need every single commanding officer telling me I’m worthless and I’m a jerk. Especially after I just helped them out and saved their ass or whatever.” The defection rate has got to be really high.
I spent time on a low level quest poisoning someone, then covering up the attempt, then taking credit for killing some random dude who is being blamed for the covering up of the attempt. Even the Klingons figured out it was easier to just kill people and say, “He sucked and I have some better ideas” than to try and write plots for a CSI show. Evil for the sake of evil just isn’t a good system of governing.
I bring all this up because during my time playing the totally evil elves, I actually thought to myself, “this seems a little too evil for me.” I know that these naughty elves, as I like to call them, are supposed to be hedonistic, selfish, jerks. And, at some level I can barely make out the semblance of some desire to reclaim their homeland. I think those can go a long way for motivation as a person playing as a dark elf.
Revenge of Son of Bride of Facebook II: The Return
One of Facebook’s “features” are these applications and games that people can play. And many of them are based on how many people you can get to join them with you. Now, I am by no means a security freak, but I don’t know who wrote these things and I am not sure what kind of information I’m giving to these applications when I accept the invitations I get. I only use one non-Facebook applications, and that’s for WordPress, and I checked it out and looked at it for a few days before I decided to use it.
The people sending me the applications are my friends and family. I am very happy that they are thinking of me and including me in their Facebooking (is that a verb yet?). But, when it comes to those applications, I’m just not sure I trust them, or want them on my Facebook account.
So, no offense to those of you sending me these invites. I really appreciate the sentiment, but do not be offended if I am not joining the Zombies army or something.
Hooooogan!
I pre-ordered Warhammer Online. This act of signing up in advance to purchase the game entitled me to a “Preview Weekend”, “Open Beta”, and a “Head Start”. I think there’s also some trinkets in the game, but I don’t care much about those gimmicks.
The “Head Start” let me get in the game a couple days before the boxes were on the shelf. This was kinda nice. I figured that since I had pre-ordered, I could wait for the box to show up, put the key into the accounting system and keep playing. I didn’t realize that a day or so after the grand opening, I would find myself locked out and waiting for my retail box to show up in the mail. I guess that if I had known that in advance, I might have made some different decisions.
Overall, regardless of the quality of the game itself, the entire pre-order, beta, head start deal was a difficult to understand system. I ended up, by pre-ordered, with four keys and no real idea when and where to use them. Most of the times and dates for events to start or end were unknown and unpublished on Mythic’s web site. Would it have been so hard to have a calendar with start and stop dates for these events? Or was the game being shoved out the door too fast?
Nugget of Wisdom
If there’s one thing being a guild leader has taught me, it’s that doing your best will be rewarded by the constant reminder that everyone else cares more than you and does less than you. So don’t bother.
The WoW Killer
It wasn’t Age of Conan, was it? Puzzle Pirates didn’t kill it. How about Dungeons & Dragons Online? Nope. Guild Wars? Nothing is going to “kill” WoW. I hate to break it to the WAR fans, but WAR won’t kill WoW. It’s not a reflection on WAR at all. It’s a reflection on the mediocrity of the WoW players and the “jack of all trades” game that is WoW.
WoW is not a PvE game. It’s got the best PvE game inside it, but it’s not just about that. It’s also a pokemon game. And a PvP game. And an RvR game. And a guild building game. It’s chock full of little things to keep people busy. Like my post before, there’s no pure focus in WoW. It’s all of those things. Little by little, new games will come out and they won’t go toe to toe with WoW. They’ll offer the WoW player a slice of the WoW pie that is done better and with more intensity and focus than WoW could offer. You just can’t come out of the gate against WoW, offering people everything WoW can today. WoW has had a lot of time to bolt on PvP, faction grinds, mount collecting, pet collecting, etc. Trust me, all that stuff was not there from day one.
Now you are ready to take on a slice of the WoW pie. WAR is doing this, and it’s a smart attempt to do something WoW can not do. WAR is all about PvP. Even if WoW spends lots of development cycles on PvP, it won’t be as good as WAR. WAR just doesn’t have the same PvE end-game to worry about unbalancing. But, why should someone leave WoW to play WAR? That person needs to be able to detach from WoW, and they need to like your niche. The second part is easy. Lots of people got their PvP feet wet in WoW (or DAoC), and they have a desire to play a game where PvP is done right from the first day. But can they detach from WoW? Some will. Many will not.
Flash back to Everquest 2 and Asheron’s Call 2. AC2 is long gone, yet AC1 is still up and running. EQ2 is finally grown larger than EQ1. Even companies own succession games can not lure people away from their old games. People are attached to the familiar and they count their high level characters as valuable posessions they can not abandon. It can take a long time to get people to move to a new game.
I hope WAR does well. I would rather have WAR as a PvP option and WoW as a PvE option. I personally feel that PvP has done nothing but ruin WoW as a PvE game. So far, my time playing WAR has been above average and I plan to try it out.
If only I didn’t need to join a damned guild.
Purity of Gaming
It’s often the case that you don’t realize what you had until it’s gone. I look back at my time playing Planetside as such an example.
Planetside had purity. There was no gear to farm from a boss. There were no pets or recipes to farm for. There were no quests to complete, money to get, no mounts. There was one thing to do. Capture bases. Maybe you could capture towers, or lay down defenses, or fly planes, etc. But it all was to one end. Capture bases. No one argued over what the game was about. No one ever logged in and said, “Sorry guys, I’m going to go farm gold instead of capture bases.” If you didn’t want to capture bases, you didn’t log in. Now that’s what I call purity of gaming.
World of Warcraft has none of this. If you want purity in WoW, you are going to have to build it, and enforce it. That means being a jerk to people. Who wants to log in to work on their Arena Team, only to be told that they should be farming mats for raiding or going on a raid to gear other people up? WoW isn’t a game. It’s like twenty games, and most of them are solo games. Many of them have requirements on how many people can participate. Impure!
You did what?
We constructed a guild specifically to play World of Warcraft in a reasonable way
That’s a quote from today’s Penny Arcade. I think that’s the problem with World of Warcraft. Guilds are not there to help you enjoy the game, they are there as a tool to help you try and play the game reasonably.
And that is why World of Warcraft has such a socially gut-wrenching guild problem.
I don’t really like social networking sites. I used Orkut for a little while and I didn’t really “get it”. I saw the mess that was MySpace. Orkut ended up being taken over by Brazilian drug lords or something.
I am on LinkedIn, though. And it seems low-key and very simple. No one trying to bug you all the time. Every so often, I meet someone on there I work with and I link to them. I think the total business design of the site keeps the annoyances to a minimum. It’s all professional.
I went to a friends 50th birthday this past weekend, and I found out that lots of my old friends are using Facebook to keep in touch. I suppose that I’m not a very sentimental person in some respects, but these are people I grew up with and I enjoyed seeing them again. So, I guess I’m on Facebook now.
For better or worse.
Player versus player and MMO games
I wrote this for a forum post over at Gamers with Jobs, but it kinda sums up some of my thoughts on WAR. So I’ll re-post it here for posterity.
This is going to seem really out there, but I think one of my favorite PvP (or RvR) experiences was Planetside. I played some DAoC, a good bit of WoW, and I participated in the WAR Preview weekend. None of those three games really came close to having a real advantage to being in a coordinated squad like Planetside did. In Planetside, my outfit had SOPs for tower taking, defense, base breaching, etc. Teamwork was exceptionall important and it made a small group of people extremely effective, even in the face of overwhelming enemy opponents.
I keep thinking about that experience and trying to figure out where DAoC, WoW, and WAR are lacking. This is all just high level theory crafting about WAR and what I think is the ideal MMOPvP game.
1) Outside of some minor differences, all three realms in Planetside had the same basic equipment and gear. Your level did not limit your ability to use something, it just limited the breadth of versatility of your soldier in the field. Basically, an almost level playing field. WAR seems to get closer, and time will tell if this happens one it is released. In Planetside, you would not run into someone who was stronger, faster, and better than you in every way. This is where I see WoW really falling down with PvP.
2) The battlefields are a mess. WoW and WAR both seem to have the idea that the best place to fight is a huge, open field. In Planetside, fighting in a skirmish in the open was a huge no-no. Fight on objectives. Don’t fight in the roads. And a large part of this problem is that WoW, WAR, and DAoC don’t offer transportation that allows for maneuvering. In Planetside, we often had lots of air positioning to get drop-ships to a base, or complex cat-and-mouse driving of troop carriers to get people to the objectives. I feel like WAR, WoW, etc, are all just a huge open field that everyone runs on. This means there is an advantage to being a loner and hoping you don’t get picked off. There is no reason to band together because people will just focus fire you down. I guess it’s like fighting in pre-revolutionary war days where everyone just runs at each other.
3) There’s no tactical or strategic tools in the game. As a squad leader in Planetside, I could set waypoints, and give people some basic instructions like “Take WP1 tower!” and people would do it (if you were in a coordinated group). You can tell people to do things in WoW, but seeing a huge waypoint on your screen is much better than “Take RH!” “What’s RH?” “Relief Hut!” “Where is that?” Even in PUGs, it was possible to do some basic things with the tools that helped people out. It wasn’t perfect, but it made things easier.
4) Planetside did not have the concept of tanks (ok, they had tanks, but they were tank tanks, with treads and stuff). Everything was about suppression and damage. I realize WoW is a PvE game first and foremost. I *love* PvE. But WAR seems to have tanks as some kind of vestigial PvE idea. It’s a step in the right direction, I think. It just needs to go a little farther. Collision is a huge help here since in Planetside, it meant having a vehicle between you and a bad guy was saving your but. I just wish people between me and a caster in WAR would soak the hits and not just pass through them harmlessly. DOH! If I can’t hide behind the big guy with all the health, what good is he?
5) Population controls. WAR doesn’t seem to have them. In Planetside, each “island” had pop-locks to keep the ratio of enemies in check for good fights. Sometimes it sucked, but it mean that one side having the lions share of players did not lead to an imbalance. Some people have told me that WAR won’t repeat the Alliance/Horde issue of PvP imbalance, but I get the impression that most people who are really looking to fight seriously will go with Destruction. Maybe I am wrong, but if I am not, I don’t understand how the game will force more fair fights in the non-scenario style RvR and PvP.
To sum up, I really like the idea of a PvP centric game. But, I feel like organization and good teamwork will not be a huge influence in WAR, based on the RvR I did over the weekend in the elf area. I’m willing to admit I don’t know as much about WAR as I do about Planetside. It would be nice to be wrong.