I have been dabbling in the DDO Unlimited beta for the past little while and having a fairly good time with it. The game does an amazing number of things right, and most importantly is not simply another Diku-MMO level grind. That said, DDO is not the sort of game that I can see myself playing every single day like I did with WoW, which makes the upcoming free to play conversion so appealing.

Unfortunately the launch date of DDO Unlimited has been delayed by a month; instead of reopening their doors on August 6th as originally planned, the game will now launch on September 9th.

We’ve had a tremendous response to DDO Unlimited from the players and press who are participating in our beta program,” said Fernando Paiz, Executive Producer of DDO Unlimited. “We’ve been holding a series of live events as part of the beta program and have seen an unprecedented level of participation from players. While we are very pleased with the performance of the game and are excited about the response from the players, we are committed to delivering a high-quality experience. We feel that more time is needed to deliver on this commitment. As a result, we are delaying our launch to ensure that we can support the massive increase in players that we are expecting and deliver them a free to play experience like none other.

The nerd rage on the forums came fast and furious, with all manner of subscribers freaking out over the one month delay, and many stating (bluffing?) that they would be canceling their accounts in protest. After waiting eleven months for an update, apparently reaching the one year mark was crossing some sort of line that could not be crossed.

I cannot believe this.

Did you seriously have a project meeting to decide what course of action could possibly alienate the player base most?

Is it really the intention to get rid of the people who've been resubscribing and all the people I've been promoting the game too who've joined recently?

Way to go.

This could well be the final nail. Your player loyalty has been at an all time low since the whole soon(tm) stuff first started and continually failed to deliver for an unforgivably long time. Coupled with the stagnation of the game with the last update being October 29th - you guys do realise that's a year ago, right - well, this new epic fail of incompetence will surely do irreparable damage.

For too long the loyal players have put up with failed delivery and been smoke screened with vagaries and misinformation. Some body's head should have rolled long ago as whoever the buck stops with is destroying your game.

Possibly the reason it hasn't is because they know full well that they'll never get another job in lead development with any other company. Seriously, I would have lost my job way back in January if my performance was anything like this.

The game will continue as long as you keep it open, but in one fell swoop, you've managed to kill off half or more of the players that were on the fence about staying or trying this "new" F2P game.

Grats.

I do understand that a failed launch could possibly be worse than this, but just wow. This is probably beyond the point of recovery.

To be fair, long term DDO players have toughed it out for years, and more than a few of them are understandably nervous about the upcoming changes. Announcing the delay so close to the release was a bit of a poor decision on Turbine's fault - lag issues have been apparent during peak hours for a while now so there is little excuse for only now realizing that the servers could not handle the load.

Even still - DDO Unlimited must have a flawless launch if it has any hope of maintaining the wave of enthusiasm that it is now experiencing. In the end a short delay is the lesser even when faced with the alternative of releasing a laggy game to the masses. Players hate lag, and it would drive them away in a hurry; beta testers, at least, should know enough to put up with it and ensure that Turbine's development team is made aware of the slowdowns as they occur.

Personally I'm happy to continue experimenting with the DDO Unlimited beta, and the move to release in September does not bother me in the least. It's the right call.

Update: Syp has the opposite opinion.

A few days ago Keen wrote an article asserting that new MMOs should focus on polishing and perfecting their core systems before even thinking of innovating. Although the initial draft of the story was less than clear (and led to some fairly confused comments), Keen has since updated the piece to more thoroughly explain his reasoning.

Keen's core argument is summed up succinctly as:

Games releasing over the next year (many I’m testing and surely many I’m not) do not ensure they have the fundamentals. They’re more concerned with having what it takes to slap on the “MMO” or “FPS” label. They don’t perfect a part of their game that should be perfected; instead they move on with a mediocre foundation. They ignore what worked in the past because they’re afraid of being called the same. They try and change things that are not broken or don’t need to be changed. On top of all of those monumental mistakes they try to innovate and push industry boundaries to boldly go where no game has gone before. The result will be complete failure where it could have been avoided.

While I could quibble with the strange notion that game developers have a fear of being "called the same", I believe that the this entire chain of logic presented by Keen is as seductive as it is negative to the MMO sector.

Now, let me be clear: I believe that it is important to produce a quality game that, as much as possible, perfects it's mechanics and has no glaring flaws. Producing a top notch product is vital, but is utterly independent of whether or not a game introduces any innovation.

If avoiding failure is your only goal, then Keen's reasoning is not so far-fetched. It's hard to argue that taking the safe road and implementing only proven core game mechanics to perfection is a recipe for disaster. Certainly if a game follows the patterns laid out by World of Warcraft, Everquest, and the like then it will find a sustainable number of players and will probably survive (or at least will not be an abject failure)¹.

But how many game developers set out to create a mediocre or average offering? And how many players truly want to be force-fed more of the same style of game that most of us have already seen implemented well in World of Warcraft?

Innovation is the lifeblood of the high tech industry, of which game development shops are only a small part. Building unique and interesting systems by drawing upon lessons of the past, new technologies, and creative insights is what drives technology forward. In a world where innovation is discouraged, progress is slowed.

None of this is to say that innovation is without risk - in fact quite the opposite. Every innovative hit that takes the market by storm walks a dangerous path filled with the shattered dreams of failed attempts and ideas that the populace rejected. But without innovation we will never progress.

To be fair, Keen doesn't completely reject the notion of innovating within the MMO industry, he just prioritizes it far below everything else. From his article, here is Keen's MMO development flow chart:

1) Make sure you have the fundamental elements of your game in order. The ABC’s should all be there.
2) Perfect the fundamentals.
3) Use what worked if it will make a difference. Do not toss away the past if it means success today!
4) Don’t fix what isn’t broken. Don’t remake what already works.
5) THEN innovate

Placing innovation dead last and favoring proven systems over novel developments almost entirely precludes meaningful changes to our MMOs. Instead of experimenting with unique core systems, server architectures, or game mechanics the innovations supported by Keen's model take the form of frilly addons. While these can be quite interesting - for example the Public Quest system in WAR - they do not modify the fundamental nature of an MMO, and leave the existing Diku-style game in place.

Game-changing innovations - like EVE's impressive server architecture - could never be attempted by a company too paranoid by the idea of failure to stray from market-tested ideas. Likewise, games like Wizard101, Guild Wars, SW:ToR, or Free Realms would never come to market and serve as test beds for future MMOs. It is important to remember that even if a title does not live up to the high expectations laid out for it by the community and/or publisher that the technology and ideas within it can lay the ground work for a subsequent game, and thus better the genre as a whole.

The next huge success will not be a World of Warcraft clone; Blizzard captured lightning in a bottle in a way that is probably not repeatable and we have to stop using it as a template for the type of game that will be popular with the masses. The next home run MMO will be something that is innovative on a very fundamental level, and opens everyone's eyes to something far more immersive than anything we have today. Count on it.

---

¹ - And before someone points at WoW's incredible market success as the very reason that innovation should be avoided, consider that the reasons behind Blizzard's hit doing so bloody well are not well understood; likely they were in the right place at the right time with the right game.... that's not a feat that's formulaic or repeatable.

Since late June I have been chewing through the Half Life series, starting with the original, and then moving on to the sequel. Following the success of Half Life 2, Valve released Episode One in June of 2006, two agonizing years after the original game ended in a brutal cliffhanger. Fans had been forced to cool their heels and speculate like mad until then, as Valve crafted their next dollop of FPS perfection. It was worth the wait.

Mechanically there is not a lot that I can say about the game that I did not already express in my post mortem of Half Life 2. The games run on the same engine, and look, sound, and play phenomenally. Character models are especially well done, and when seen out of the corner of your eye can seem almost real.

Without giving too much away, Episode One centers around escaping City 17 after the massive blow that you dealt to the Combine during the climax of the second game. If you had any questions about the true nature of the Combine after playing through the first game, they will be dispelled almost immediately - these are nasty nasty customers, and do not have the good of humanity in mind.

As a change of pace you are accompanied throughout the entire game by Alyx Vance, who proves to be an amazing asset the entire way.


Valve did a superb job with bringing Alyx to life in Episode One. While she was a likable character in Half Life 2, Alyx steals the show in this installment, and proves to be complex and intriguing. I dare you not to give a piece of your digital heart to the girl - I found it impossible to avoid.

Not only is Alyx a compelling character, but she is a superb sidekick, and obviously a lot of care went into ensuring that her AI was both believable and useful. Throughout the game she will wield a variety of different weapons (automatic pistol, shotgun, turrets) and I never felt like she was making poor targeting choices or moving in an unbelievable manner. When Alyx died it was usually my own stupidity, not her AI's.


Episode One also corrects one of my main gripes about Half Life 2: ammo is much more scarce in this game, and I found myself using suboptimal weapons on a regular basis after I blew through all of my shotgun shells and energy rifle rounds. One strategy I figured out early on was to shoot as little as possible when enemies were relatively far away, and allow Alyx and her infinite ammo to whittle herds of enemies down. Cheesy tactics? Perhaps.... but certainly effective.

If I had to level a complaint at Half Life 2 Episode 1 it would be that there were no massively epic battles. Throughout the game you get to take on a couple of Combine vehicles, bot nothing on the scale of what the game's predecessor offered and certainly nothing nearly as hard as taking out three or four striders or a pair of gunships at a time. The focus in this game is more on small scale fire fights and working with the resistance to escape the city than it is about over-the-top confrontations.


In summary, Half Life 2 Episode 1 is another solid game, and pushes Gordon Freeman's story forward with the gritty style that Valve built their name around. Thankfully for me Episode 2 was released a while ago, and I played my first hour of it last night. I dread running out of Half Life games......

Darren and Karen were nice enough to let me back on Shut Up, We're Talking again this week and I felt a heck of a lot more at ease with the entire podcasting experience. Speaking really requires a totally different state of mind than writing, and I found my first experience quite disconcerting.

Here is what the show looked like:

• Introductions
• Listener Mail/What we're playing
• Cheating
• MMO Travel
• Blog of the Week

"Cheating" was a topic that I brought with me, and turned into more of a therapy session for my mixed up gamer psyche than anything else. Hopefully my discomfort with the prevalence and acceptance of cheat guides/quest helpers came across well enough. I guess I'm just a jaded old guy.... sort of like the man Darren used as an example:


Of course, the very next topic - travel in MMOs - saw me transform from the grouchy old guy who is stubbornly set in his ways into the "X-Box kid" who loves all of the modern conveniences and despises the older ways of doing things. I don't enjoy trekking for hours; it's not a fun mechanic even if it does have its roots in Everquest!

After an amazing weekend I'm back to the grind today; work has not been particularly inspiring recently due to a number of factors far beyond my control. Still - it beats the alternative, and I know that there is some extremely cool projects on the horizon.

If, like me, you have some time to kill then here are a few articles worth your time:

• Epic Slant has been on a myth-busting tear lately. Questing - and people who claim that it is not grindy - are his latest victims:
  
  

  Quests in MMOs are nothing more than packaging what players call “the grind” into manageable bites. I honestly do laugh when someone says they prefer quests to the “EverQuest system” because I see no difference.

• So young, and yet so very wise beyond her years.
• Beej defends the time honored tradition of griefing..... and you know what, I think the man has a point.
• Should we fear death? Gordon thinks so.
• MMOs are dead. Erm. Right.
• If you want to read more points of view on the trinity/tank debate that raged in my comments for a few days, some kind City of Heroes player started a thread from my article, and the community has chimed in. It's a long thread, and gets fairly specific quickly.... but the first three pages have some great stuff. Massively is also discussing the trinity today.
  

It's my anniversary this weekend, and so the odds of writing in depth blog posts without drawing the ire of my wonderful wife is rather low. She's prettying herself up for the evening, and so I have a few minutes to write before we head out the door to catch the sunset ride on the Wakefield Steam Train.

Anyways, Massively has their "One Shots" feature that I always enjoy, but I figure I can one up Ms. Voecks and give you a pair of images to enjoy. Rawr!

While wandering in search of some pinecones to forage in Ryzom, I stumbled across a small cave bored through a massive tree's root. From my vantage point inside the cavern it looked like I was about to step into an entirely new world; the hanging moss only added to the surreal effect.


Later that night I came across a field filled with butterflies darting around. Unbeknown to me, as I set myself up for the perfect screen capture three Nauseous Frippo's were bearing down on me (from the right). Seconds after I took this pictures the crazed mammals were all over me, and I was forced to flee.

As much as I love MMOs and deep single player video games, it is not always possible to eke out the time to have a meaningful play session. When I get the urge to play a video game but do not have the time (or hardware!) to do so, I often fall back to browser-based games. Personally my online gaming portal of choice is Kongregate, although there are many other comparable sites out there.

Upgrade Complete is an odd bird of a game, but strangely compelling all the same. The core of the experience is a parody (or perhaps, simulation) of RMT games with a side order of achievement system spoofing thrown in for giggles. The game starts by granting the player a small allowance of in-game funds which can be spent to unlock different aspects of the game. Mind-bendingly, the first screen that you will be presented with you forces you to spend some of your money to buy the shop functionality in order to actually be able to spend more cash. That should set the tone of this quirky little experience for you.

Once Upgrade Complete's shop is unlocked you will be able to purchase a small shooting game which, when played, allows you to earn more money. The shooter is relatively basic; it consists of waves of enemies that you must kill, each of which drops coins that you must collect. Collecting coins enables you to either upgrade your in-game ship (by adding weapons and utilities) or else upgrade the entire game (by buying things like better graphics, a cooler title, the achievements system, an intro screen, etc.).

A complete play-through of Upgrade Complete takes around thirty minutes, which makes it a perfect lunch time activity. The game walks the line between witty and obnoxious extremely well, and the endless pursuit of upgrades is a great parody of the last few years of gaming. Highly recommended for those seeking a bit of mindless fun.

PvE MMOs have, by and large, been stuck in a bit of a rut when it comes to group game play mechanics since before the term "MMO" actually held any meaning. One player - the tank - forces the big bad boss to focus its attacks on him, a small contingent of other players focus on healing up all incoming damage, and the remainder of the party involved in the battle go hog wild with damage-dealing abilities to the exclusion of nearly everything else. This basic template for an MMO boss fight is often referred to as "the holy trinity".

Although there are minor variations to this basic template (adds that force multiple tanks, gimmicks that draw away DPS to deal with, splash damage to spread out the healing) the holy trinity has lorded over MMOs for more than a decade.


Challenges to this dogmatic chunk of game design are hardly a unique occurrence in the MMO blogging community, in fact the topic is a perennial favorite. Oddly enough though, tanking is rarely fingered as the part of the trinity that must be disrupted; more often than not healing is targeted for a major overhaul.

Healing has never been the problem in holy trinity games. The only reason that healing seems so off in many MMOs is that healers are forced to focus most of their efforts on either spamming life-saving heals on the tank, or else managing the splash damage that is inevitably introduced to encounters as a means of ramping up the difficulty (and keeping healers from slipping into prolonged comas).

Tanking is the source of the problem in modern MMO raid encounter design - not healers.

Tanking is absurd
The concept of a main tank, as perfected by the World of Warcraft system of PvE, is patently absurd. One single character is equipped with the skills and gear to sustain all manner of abuse from the boss that the group is battling, while every single other character present will succumb to the damage dealt by a single blow; maybe two if they have a horseshoe wedged up their battle kilt.

In purely numeric terms, a WoW raid boss will deal anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 damage per attack on the tank, and 60,000 or more to anyone else unfortunate enough to attract its ire. Health pools of characters range from 30,000 to 50,000; these ratios are not wildly off base for other mainstream MMOs. In all cases the tank will survive - assuming prompt healing - every other member of the raid will be one-shot killed.

As much as it is a fallacy to try to apply logic to a game system, the incoherence and insanity forced on an MMO by the tanking portion of the holy trinity model stretches the imagination near the point of breaking.


Why on earth should a warrior in full plate mail - but not specced quite right - practically explode in a fountain of blood and gore when a boss sneers evilly at him? Is his armor painted on? Is he totally incapable of absorbing some of the impact and living to fight another day?

What about the mage shielded by runes of arcane power that he has been perfecting since adolescence? Are they nothing more that pretty colors he conjures up to improve the mood? Or the cleric protected by the grace of her god. Or the monk trained in the art of softening impacts and absorbing blows. Should not all of these heroes be able to survive at least a modest amount of abuse? Clearly they cannot in a game where the holy trinity reigns.


Tanking corrupts logic even further when the aggro/hate system that underpins most encounters is taken into account. Briefly, an aggro system keeps track of the amount of threat that an enemy feels towards each player in the battle, and the boss uses this list to decide who to attack. A tank's job, aside from staying alive, is to remain at the top of the aggro list by employing all of the high-threat skills and taunts that are at their disposal.

The jaw-dropping implication of this system is that when your party encounters that hyper-intelligent demon prince from the nether realms, the fel lord is guaranteed to lose all semblance of intelligence. Despite possessing a shadow bolt so powerful that it can reduce the soul of any non-tanking character to its constituent atoms in a heartbeat, the overlord of the abyss spam-casts that puppy on the tank for six minutes straight. It's like the Lord of Hell was transformed into a three year old with a grudge, beating on the big bad tank who called him a naughty name.

Okay.... so maybe it's time to step back. How did we get ourselves caught up in this absurdity anyways?

A brief history of tanking
If we go way back to where it all began, the concept of a dedicated tank is no where to be found. Dungeons & Dragons contained classes that players of today's MMOs might consider tanks - warriors and dwarves - however there was no way that players of these characters could reliably absorb all of the damage that was dished out during an encounter. Resourceful players could certainly influence the distribution of damage, for example by taking advantage of terrain bottlenecks, but there was no surefire way to guarantee that a boss wouldn't grow a brain and attack the healers first.

It didn't take much time after the development of the first computer before simple games were slapped together by enthusiasts, and many of those early computer games were modeled after pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons. Single player RPGs that supported multiple party members allowed a player to arrange their characters in formation, with the players closer to the top/front of the group more likely to suffer damage from enemy attacks. While somewhat like modern tanking, these game mechanics did not eliminate the chance of any given enemy and/or boss hitting the less durable characters, they merely reduced the probability. A choice few games (like some of the early Final Fantasy series) also enabled "tank" characters to periodically use abilities (e.g. "Protect") that focused enemy attacks onto themselves, but the effect was a temporary shield, lasting only a single game round.


Alongside single player RPGs, MUDs were also evolving, although much more hidden from the public eye. While the first MUD was stood up in 1978, DikuMUD, the spiritual successor to modern MMOs, only appeared in 1991. It was here, in the dark text-based corners of nerdom, that true tanks were unleashed on an unsuspecting gaming world. Aggro was random in most DikuMUD derivatives and tanking characters were given taunt abilities ("rescue" was the stock command) that forcibly switched an enemy's target to the user. A typical MUD battle involved the tank entering the room to establish aggro, the healers and DPS following a few seconds later, and then every time the enemy switched targets (randomly determined) the tank would use a taunt to force the switch back.

When Everquest slithered onto the scene in 1999 it adopted the same encounter design that MUDs had been using for nearly a decade. Tanks, healers, and DPS classes were the norm for most MMO early players (who were largely ex-MUDders), and Verant did not hide the fact that they were heavily influenced by the DikuMUD platform. A decade later PVE-centric MMOs continue to stick to this model with a religious fervor that borders on insane at times. Sadly, there is precious little indication - if any - that a renaissance is coming any time soon.

Towards more sensible encounters
While railing about a perceived problem is entertaining, it is unproductive without some proposals to back up the criticisms. With that in mind, there are three fundamental changes to MMO game design that could eliminate the need for dedicated tanks in MMOs, and allow for much more engaging and fluid encounters.

1. Personal mitigation.
Every character - regardless of class and/or spec - should be able to sustain a reasonable amount of damage. Whereas in most games a non-tanking character will wither and die at the mere thought of being hit, a character in a non-tanking MMO would be able to take a modest beating, potentially allowing time for: (a) a healer to patch them up, (b) them to move in such a manner that the enemy can no longer inflict damage, or (c) a friendly character to assist them in mitigating/avoiding the damage in some manner.

Aside from the logical problems that are present in a system where tanks are so much more damage resistant than everyone else, there is the simple fact that being one-shot is no fun, and never seems fair. If a raider in World of Warcraft attracts the ire of a boss they are as good as dead. Allowing players an acceptable amount of personal mitigation removes this potential source of frustration and rage, smoothing the enjoyment for everyone while opening up an entire new layer of tactics and strategy.

None of precludes some characters being designed to be naturally better at mitigating damage than others; only that the disparity between a resistant character and an unresistant character should not be as obscenely lopsided at it is now.


2. Defensive blessings or interventions
A layer of complexity that should be added to any game without tanks is a rich system of defensive blessings and/or interventions that can be bestowed by one character onto another. Guild Wars allegedly has made some headway in protective measures, but using defensive abilities as class differentiators has an exciting amount of potential.

Consider this scenario: In the middle of a hectic encounter a mage casts a particularly vicious lava lance, drawing the ire of the cyclops that the group is facing. As the one-eyed menace advances the mage frantically invokes his mana shield, but clearly it will not be enough to see him through a prolonged assault from the beast. From a few feet away a priestess murmurs a hasty prayer, and a shimmering wall of stardust envelops the mage just as a warrior arrives at his side to help deflect the first blow with his bulwark shield.

A deep system of teamwork-based defensive measure would enhance many encounters, reward quick thinking, strategic deployment of resources, and heroic rescues. While perhaps not as epic as standing toe-to-toe with a demon lord for eleven minutes, the personal victories would be far more plentiful and evenly spread throughout the entire group.


3. Tactical combat and collision
Most MMOs these days do not support collision detection; players are allowed to run through each other and enemies and may stand wherever they please. This "feature" is often exploited by World of Warcraft raids, where players of often expected to stand in a nice neat pile to minimize certain types of incoming damage. The craziness of this could spawn an entirely different thread, however suffice to say that if tanks are to be eliminated from a game, then more advanced tactical combat and collision detection must be addressed.

Enabling collision detection in a non-trinity MMO would open up new layers of strategy. Like D&D sessions of old, players could exploit terrain to attempt to limit the characters that enemies can attack, and use formations to protect more vital members of the group (for example, healers or heavy damage dealers that have few protective countermeasures).

While I admit that many players display an amazing ineptitude when asked to position themselves during a boss encounter, this is in part because there is simply no reason to ever practice the skill outside of hardcore raiding in most games. If tanks do not exist from the start, then players will eventually learn the new paradigm and adjust accordingly.

Final thoughts
The holy trinity model of game design has run its course, and although modern MMOs bend over backwards to implement it, the reasons for doing so are increasingly few. Eliminating dedicated tanks from MMOs will not only lance a layer of absurdity from the genre, but a more engaging and sensible gaming experience will become possible.

Players want to feel like heroes, not fragile rag dolls; by imbuing all characters with greater survivability, granting players a host of abilities to protect their friends and allies, and moving towards a more tactical system of combat, MMO players will all be empowered to face more challenges, and will no longer be reliant on a single tank to soak up all the hurt.

In closing - and as a career WoW tank it pains me to say this - tanks should be eliminated.

The BBC had a fascinating piece yesterday about a new public database that contains records of the soldiers who fought in the Hundred Years War.

The database of those who fought in the Hundred Years War reveals salaries, sickness records and who was knighted.

The full profiles of soldiers from 1369 to 1453 will allow researchers to piece together details of their lives.

Thomas, Lord Despenser is the youngest soldier on the database, whose career began when he was aged just 12 in 1385.

Elsewhere, the career of Thomas Gloucestre, who fought at Agincourt, can be traced over 43 years and includes campaigns in Prussia and Jerusalem.

You can browse the database at your leisure here: The Soldier in later Medieval England.

I took a bit of time to update my blogroll today - check out some of the newly added sites/podcasts when you get a chance. In other news, I'm half way through the writing of a large article that I hope will stimulate a fair bit of discussion and critical analysis; look for the new post tomorrow (assuming that life cooperates and grants me the time necessary to finish it up). For now, some links:

• Would you join a guild before the beta of a game even begins? Apparently some people would. Weird.
• Emeny has been playing a bit of LotR recently, and took some time away from gaming to compare the Tolkien-themed offering against his long time time main MMO squeeze.
• What do you consider cheating in an MMO? Has it changed over time? More on this topic soon, I promise.
• Not for the easily offended: here is a completely inappropriate look at raiding in WoW. I'm not sure whether I should be pissed off, laugh my ass off, or both at the same time.
• Player Versus Developer wins for working Kingdom of Loathing into an excellent discussion.
• Beau examines the notion of real consequences for dying in PvE and PvP, and why one should be significantly more harsh than the other.
• Looking forward to DDO going FTP? Syp dug up 10 essential resources to help you prepare.
• And finally, Zubon explains why the best payment model of any game on the market right now belongs to Wizard101.
  

This week's featured Metaplace world is an example of the type of social good that the platform can be used for. 3D Squared is an American non-profit organization committed to workforce development in the game and digital media industry. I stumbled across their Metaplace headquarters after randomly entering another world designed by students of a program that 3D Squared is involved with: the
Digital Workforce Initiative in Louisiana.


(RSS readers: Click through to the site to view this world)

The DWI sounds like an amazing opportunity for the kids who were able to participate:

The Digital Workforce Intensive was held at Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise (LITE), a beautiful 70,000 sq. ft. research facility where 3D Squared has a 25-seat lab to incubate video games and other digital media. LITE is in Lafayette, a charming community of about 125,000 that bills itself as "the most wired community in America"—the city is in the process of installing a high-capacity fiber-optic network to every home and business in town.

Forty middle school and high school students spent their entire spring break at the Digital Workforce Intensive, working 12 hours per day on games and virtual worlds where the focus was on Louisiana's core social problems of education, health care, coastal restoration, and pollution.

The students came from 16 schools across the state to attend lectures, work in group labs, and be mentored by faculty and industry participants. They built prototype virtual worlds in the Metaplace online platform, and were occasionally allowed "free play" to play video games of their choice. At the end of the intensive, the teams presented their game and virtual world concepts to industry pioneers like Dallas Snell, Billy Cain, and Paul Trowe who had flown in for the event.

Also linked in 3D Squared's world is this stellar video: No Gamer Left Behind. Well worth eight minutes of your time.

Hot on the heels of completing Half Life, I made the seamless transition to the game's sequel. Half Life 2 was released in November of 2004, six years after the cliffhanger-ending of the original game; the wait must have been excruciating for fans at the time.

Without giving anything away, the sequel starts up where its predecessor left off; an encounter with the enigmatic G-man proves equally mysterious, and once it is over you are deposited in a world that has been adversely affected by the events of the first installment of the series. "Dystopian" barely begins to describe the dire state that humanity finds itself in.

Graphically I was able to crank all of the settings up to eleven (thanks to my recent acquisition), and maxed out the game looks astonishing. Characters move realistically, textures feel deep, and ambient effects and superfluous details abound. I'm no graphics whore, but for a 2004 release I was more than impressed. Sound is equally impressive, and the voice acting is top notch.

Game play in Half Life 2 is similar to the first game: it is a highly polished first person shooting experience with just enough suspense and horror to keep you from charging headlong through the levels. Using cover seemed to be crucial to surviving many encounters without suffering too much damage, and at least once I used movable bits of the terrain to survive a particularly tough sequence by building a barricade.

One quibble I have with the game is that, outside of a few select circumstances, there is absolutely no reason to use more than two weapons: the shotgun and the energy rifle. Yes, you need to use the rocket launcher to take out vehicles, and yes the bow is great for the odd sniping job, but aside from that ammo is plentiful enough that there is simply no reason to mix up your weapons. The original Half Life, by comparison, forced the player to cycle through his arsenal by limiting the amount of ammo there was to grab; this resource management metagame is a lot of fun, in my opinion, and Half Life 2 loses something for largely phasing it out.


My other minor issue with Half Life 2 is that it forces the player into gimmicky scenarios on five occasions: two driving levels, a turret sequence, a bug management section, and the final level. While not badly done, these abrupt changes of pace distract from the entire reason that I'm playing Half Life 2: it's a damned fine shooter with a great story!

Minor gripes aside, I had a blast with the game. The story is a perfect sci fi thriller, with enough plot twists to keep me engaged and salivating for more. Half Life 2's action is intense at times, and on normal difficulty is a challenge without being soul-crushing. The physical puzzles presented by the game are not always obvious, and sometimes take a bit of out-of-the-box thinking to solve - which is excellent.

All in all I was sad to see Half Life 2 wrap up, and immediately fired up Episode 1. The best, I've heard, is yet to come.

The following guest post was sent in by a reader, and former World of Warcraft guildmate, who I raided with a year or so ago. When I first met him, LRNs played a hunter but later graduated to his feral Druid tank. When I left the game he was working on a new toon horde-side, but I'll let him tell his story.

My biggest reason for posting LRNS' article is that it tells a far different tale than my own, but has a similar outcome in the end. I never tried to re-engage the game in the manner that LRNs and his group did - perhaps because I'm unable to play alts.

Since Wrath came out, my friends - like many WoW players - have expressed various degrees of disappointment with the difficulty level. We're not "hard core" players, nor are we purely casual. We want to log in and have a variety of experiences. As time marched on, all of us broke with 25-man raiding. We started spending more and more time just doing casual stuff together and less and less time raiding with our guilds. Quests, instances, achievements, and 10-mans were the name of the game and that game was losing its fun.

Early this summer, we decided to switch to our horde toons in an effort to breath new life into our experience. We had abandoned the toons way back when Burning Crusade happened. Equipped with our under-geared level 60's & a pair of Death Knights, we began to run old instances. It was fun, but much easier than we remembered.

Then the beginning of the end.

Upon reaching 70, our Prot Pally, Destro-Warlock and I (on a hybrid Disc leveling priest) blew through Utgarde Keep. This was in crappy outland dungeon blues & greens. The next night, the 3 of us went over to Nexus. It was much more of a challenge for us, but we also defeated that instance. Heck, it felt like an actual accomplishment. We had fun! It felt like a Burning Crusade instance. We also felt sad. In order to achieve this effect, we had to be undermanned, undergeared and play toons that none of us had touched for 2 years.

Now in the 70-72 range, our group picked the lock to Kara. We obliterated it with 6 players. Again, undermanned, undergeared and on unfamiliar toons. Fun, but...sigh!

Finally, the nail in the coffin.

After doing Kara for a few weeks (and trying some bosses in AZ), we returned to outland and went after instances with mobs 3-5 levels higher than us. Azjol-Nerub...pathetic. Next came Drak'Tharon Keep. At one point, I - the healer - got so bored that I ran past the tank and used SW:P to aggro 4 packs of mobs back to our tank. Nobody died!

The idea that my level 72 Discipline Priest could intentionally aggro 4 packs of elite level 75-76 mobs to our under-level party and obliterate them was too much for us. What did we have to look forward to? Our Alliance toons had 10-man Ulduar (which was still mostly challenging.) Our Horde would quickly catch up. There was nothing else. Achievement grinding is all well and good, but where's the excitement? 5-man heroics...heroic, my ass!

I wrote a survey for the group asking various questions about our various needs from our online experience & how folks felt about WoW. The answers were all the same. We played MMO's to play together. We want to have fun, but we also want to be challenged. WoW was no longer doing that. The game had degraded into two types of encounters: Mindnumbingly easy or super-impossible hardmode. One friend put it best...

That the game now only seems to have two degrees of difficulty: "Bring your A game or don't come (and you'd better not have more than 400ms latency)" and "Go ahead and face roll your keyboard, we don't care, you win, have this completely useless item."

Why would we continue to play under those conditions? None of us needed the so-called hardcore gamer experience, but none of us want to face roll the keyboard either. We took the results of our little survey, did some research and plan to adopt Lord of the Rings Online as our new MMO home for now. We should all complete our transition by September.

Some of my friends have been with Warcraft since the original beta. My wife and I have been playing it for nearly 4 years. There are been weeks & months where we did nothing else but sleep, work, WoW. I understand making WoW accessible. I liked the concept. They went too damned far.

As always, be courteous in the comments.

I don't want to spend too many words on it, but if you haven't played through the Trine demo yet (available on Steam) then you are doing yourself a great disservice. Briefly, Trine is an action/platform/physics/puzzle game that is as fun to play as it is beautiful.

The game features three characters that you can instantly swap between (their souls are magically bound together), each of which has a different set of abilities that can be used to solve the physics-based puzzles that make up each of the game's levels. The demo allows you a taste of the sweet game play, granting you access to the introduction sequence and the first (full?) level.

An example ten second slice of Trine can go as follows: Starting with the thief, you use your grappling hook to swing up to a ledge. Once up, you switch to the wizard and summon a magical block to weigh down one half of a linked platform, allowing you to jump onto the other half. You make a couple of quick jumps to clear a large wall, and then in midair switch to the warrior so that you can engage the skeletons waiting on the other side.

The genius of the game design is that the sequence described above could very well be solved by using the characters in a different order and applying other unique abilities. Everything feels natural, and as a player you do not feel constrained.

Anyhow, for more on Trine check out The Brainy Gamer, or any one of the podcasts on my side menu... everyone is talking about this game right now.

I've been a gamer for as long as I can remember - while computers may not have been very prominent or mainstream during much of my youth, I was blessed with a family that was fairly far along the technology curve and have not been without some form of electronic entertainment since we first purchased a Commodore 64.

This week's episode of the Idle Thumbs podcast (episode 34) kicked off with a discussion of California Extreme, a huge arcade show that took place last weekend. Listening to the guys discuss all of the games that they played really took me back.... I used to feed countless quarters into machines at local arcades with my friends - I would routinely blow through a roll of quarters in a session, which was a lot of cash for a young teenager.

This trip down memory lane made me want to chronicle some of the games that I played the most, so here we go, in alphabetic order:

Beastorizer - A fighting game (also known as 'Bloody Roar') that was in the Commons arcade of my university dorm. I played a lot of this game with my wife (girlfriend at the time) and she ALWAYS selected the character that turned into a bunny and would usually proceed to stomp the crap out of me. Games against dorm mates were more balanced.... my wife was simply cutthroat.


Black Tiger - A fantasy platformer that I remember being fairly difficult, and also a bit of a pain to control. Still, fantasy games that paid homage to D&D were fairly rare, so I forgave the game and played it whenever I could.


Bubble Bobble - This classic was located in a pizzeria on the south side of town, conveniently across the road from the girl I had a huge crush on in middle school. I'm not sure if it was the game, the girl, or some strange combination of both.... but some of my fondest memories of arcade gaming are my time spent mastering and eventually beating Bubble Bobble.


Bust-a-move - Speaking of gaming and women, Bust-a-move is a game that I play with my wife every time we go to the theatre to see a movie. We usually show up thirty minutes early, pop a credit in the game, and then take turns beating levels until we have to go get seats for the show. We kick ass tag-teaming this game and often have to leave our session unfinished.


Cabal - An archaic shooting game that taught you to horde grenades. The game was fairly interesting for a couple of reasons: (a) the screen "advanced" the deeper you got into the game, and (b) all of the terrain features could be blown up given enough bullets and/or grenades.


Commando - Sticking with classic shooters, Commando was a top down action game with a joystick that you had to rotate to control the facing of your character. I always found games that used this type of control to be a big pain in the ass, because it was easy to rotate way farther than you actually wanted to.


Double Dragon - The classic beat 'em up game. There was a copy of this game at an arcade that was within walking distance of my house, so I certainly played my fair share of it. Double Dragon was a fairly tough game, and getting a second player to help you our was almost mandatory if you wanted to get very deep into it. I still love the baseball bat.


Gauntlet - Speaking of classics, here's another. I was never a huge Gauntlet fan, but I have popped my fair share of quarters into these machines over the years. "The elf needs food badly!"


Gauntlet: Dark Legends - If my wife is not in the mood for Bust-a-Move when we go to a movie, then Gauntlet is our fall back game. Like most games these days it costs a couple of credits to play (boooo!) and the game does an extremely good job of forcing the player to keep feeding it cash. I try to avoid games like this, but who can argue with a woman?


Ghosts n' Goblins - I suck at this game, but I take solace in the fact that very few people are any good at it. For those who have never played it, Ghosts n' Goblins can be soul-crushingly difficult. Making it through the first level is an accomplishment worth getting excited over, in my opinion.


Golden Axe (and the sequel) - The Golden Axe games were ridiculously fun side-scrolling fantasy beat 'em up titles that I played through and won several times as a kid. In hindsight, I think the strategies behind magic acquisition and use played a huge part in why this game was so incredibly solid - it just added an extra layer to a game that was in a genre that rarely featured complexity. I really should try to get my hands on one of these cabinets.


Mortal Kombat - When it was first released, trying to get a play in on a Mortal Kombat machine at my local arcade involved queuing up.... you put your quarter on the machine to signal intent to play, and then got in line. The buzz surrounding this fighter was insane - blood, gore, and brutal finishing moves were something that was completely unheard of when the Mortal Kombat first hit the market.


NARC - Speaking of blood and gore, NARC was an ultra-bloody shooter that I guiltily admit to spending far too much money playing. I seem to remember some huge boss battles that took dollars to complete.


Splatterhouse - And more gore! To my teenage brain there was absolutely nothing wrong with a masked man wielding all manner of tools to spray blood everywhere. Seriously - isn't that always a winning formula?


Street Fighter 2 - Perhaps the most popular fighting game of its time, Street Fighter 2 was always busy at the local arcade. Players tended to master a single character and then use it to the exclusion of all others. Mine was Blanka, and I was damned skilled with that green ball of electric furry death.


TMNT: Turtles in Time - The 7-11 across town had a copy of this four player Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, and I beat it multiple times with whichever random strangers happened to show up and join in my play sessions. The game was a lot of fun, very challenging, and looked amazing for its time.


The Simpsons - At some point the aforementioned 7-11 got rid of their TMNT machine and replaced it with The Simpsons arcade game. Same style of game, with all the same winning formulas.


Wonder Boy: Monster Land - The public swimming pool had a bank of arcade games outside of the change rooms, but the only one worth playing was Wonder Boy. I played this before and after most swimming lessons. Wonder Boy had some primitive RPG mechanics - there were NPCs, shops, consumables, and upgradable weapons and armors.


WWF Superstars - As corny as WWF wrestling was in hindsight, as a kid I couldn't get enough of it, and this game catered to that youthful passion in spades. Not only were you able to beat the crap out of your opponent in the ring, but you could throw him out and start smashing collapsible chairs over his head! Awesome!


So there you have it... a little slice of my childhood laid out for all to see. Aside from the few exceptions mentioned above, I don't play arcade games any more - I just can't justify paying what most machines ask. Whereas it used to be that all arcade games were a quarter, it's tough to find fifty cent games any more - many ask for a dollar per play!

Bonus: In my trip down memory lane I stumbled across this great cabinet: Battle Shark. Check out the peripheral!

I put down money for a one month subscription to Ryzom today, despite my general dislike of subscription models. The game is $10/month instead of the typical $15, which is a saving grace I suppose.

In the end there is just too much that I still want to explore and experience in Ryzom before I commit to playing full time. Unlike my WAR concerns there is no box fee serving as a barrier to entry, and $10 isn't all that much to pay for the enjoyment I am deriving from the game's unique mechanics.

Specifically, the stanza-based skill system continue to fascinate me. The freedom Ryzom's skill system implies is fantastic, and I really enjoy unlocking new stanzas and modifying my existing skills to incorporate them.

I have a few meaningful posts in my head that I desperately want to get out - unfortunately work/life are not helping me out. All I have time for today is a quick link dump.

• Should players be able to make permanent choices that cripple their character? Syncaine thinks so. I tend to agree so long as the game makes it clear in advance that there are consequences to a player's choices.
• Michael got a little hot under the collar when he started to consider the release date antics that game publishers inflict on consumers.
• If you're a Warcraft player in search of a new game then check out Flyv's recent thoughts on WAR.
• Spinks took a long look at the idea of empowering MMO players with truly meaningful choices to make during game play. Fascinating stuff.
  
• I've read a number of blog articles complaining about the so-called death of grouping in modern MMOs.... but there are some solid reasons why any game must support solo play (while continuing to encourage grouping).
• Syp is polling his readers to determine their preferred MMO payment model. The subscription model is winning by a landslide right now, which is a shame.... it's the least fair of all the models, and discourages experimenting with multiple games simultaneously. DDO/Wizard101 do it right: they offer a subscription and F2P+microtransactions.
• Keeping with the theme of bloggers asking questions: Keen wants to know what your ideal MMO setting would be. I'm leaning towards a time travel/alternate reality game... I think that could be amazing if done correctly.
• Beau Turkey has put together 2-word descriptions for a huge variety of games. He missed EVE Online, so I'll fill it in for him: "Super slow".
• Practical life lessons from MMO gamers: the secret to marital bliss; child rearing techniques.
• MrAnderson has some thoughts about Aion that are worth a look for players considering picking up a copy of the game when it is released.

Phew. That's it for now.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Darren, Karen, Frank, and John on Saturday evening to participate in episode 51 of the Shut Up, We're Talking podcast. After I got over a minor case of the nerves and a BAD case of trying to talk and read at the same time, I settled in and hopefully didn't make too much of an ass of myself. Of course, you'll have to be the judge of that.

Show notes:

Introductions

Listener Mail/What We're playing

White Collar Crime in MMOs

RMT/Micro

Blog of the Week: Life in Low Sec

I had a rough day at work today - technology, as much as it has improved our lives, can be a real bitch sometimes. Especially when two rather large companies team up together to butcher what should have been an excellent standard. But I digress.

Depending on the type of player that you are, you may or may not enjoy challenges after a tough day at the office; some people like to just kick back and relax on days like today, but I'd personally prefer to die a few dozens times to corny Indiana Jones-style traps. Which makes this week's Metaplace of the week a great selection:


(RSS readers: Click through to the site to view this world)

Dungeons of Doom is a wonderful example of a small game that can be created within the framework provided by Metaplace, and proves that not every world has to be artsy in order to be worth a visit. The goal of the world simple: navigate a sadistic map laced with traps and killer beasts in order to obtain the golden egg that awaits you at the end of it all.

While the controls are far from perfect, they certainly suffice - like all worlds you click to move around, but you are also able to shoot (shift-click) and jump (space bar) to help you get through the traps. Collision detection with the spike traps takes a while to get used to, but once you work out the timing it's not so bad (however: expect to get impaled a few times first).

I'd love to see a concept like the Dungeons of Doom expanded on and made more interactive and alive in the future, but as an early Metaplace game it does a great job of showing off the potential that the system has to offer.

If you happen to be adverse to the concept of a $10 horse, then today is your lucky day!

Quick.... log into Runes of Magic right now!

Traditionally raiders have been slotted into two categories: hardcore and casual. Unfortunately neither of these terms are very clearly defined, and there appears to be no real consensus on the horizon. Is a "hardcore raider" someone who puts in twenty hours of raiding a week and goofs off throughout, or are they someone who spends six hours of keenly focused time raiding, comes prepared, and knows their class inside out? Or what about the player who invests twenty hours into an MMO every week but never raids? Are they hardcore or casual?

In the comments to my previous article on Raid Entitlement, Russish has proposed a different classification system for players who participate in the raid game. Russish's categorization is based on player motivation, not approach or play time.

Among the various players who play the game, I think the people who do the most endgame raiding could probably be broken down into two groups based on WHY they raid: those who want to overcome a challenge ("Challengers") and those who want to get loot ("Looters"). On first blush most people would probably break it down into Challengers = hardcore and Looters = casual, but I think it's more complicated than that.

Both groups are seeking some kind of reward, which is the whole reason we pursue any kind of entertainment. We get a pleasurable feeling from our brain when we do something that it wants us to do in order to survive. The Looters are tricking the brain into giving them pleasure for fulfilling a basic need for acquisition of resources, while the Challengers are tricking the brain into giving them pleasure for fulfilling the basic need to solve puzzles and understand the world.

Looters can be both casual and hardcore. Either way they're people who play primarily to feel more powerful due to their new equipment and abilities, and the casual/hardcore distinction is just a question of how much time they're able or willing to spend in pursuit of that. It's easy to understand why the Looters would feel entitled to see all the raid content: that gives them more opportunity to get loot!

The Challengers, though, obviously wouldn't want to have easy access to content: they want the challenge! They want to feel like when they've finally downed that boss it was the result of an epic struggle that took all the thought, analysis, and sheer ability they have.

Except that I think there exist both hardcore and casual Challengers, too. The hardcore Challengers want that challenge, and they have enough time and/or are dedicated enough to choose to spend enough time grinding gold/rep/heroics/raids to gear themselves up enough to be equal to the challenge, and are then willing to spend as much time as necessary trying out a strategy, failing, refining the technique, and trying again ad infinitum until they finally down the boss in a blaze of glory and a feeling of huge accomplishment.

The casual Challenger wants that same feeling, but doesn't have the time or dedication to achieve it in the same way. So instead of one massive feeling of accomplishment after taking down a terribly hard boss, they have to make do with a smaller amount of accomplishment spread out over a series of mildly challenging bosses. They want the same feeling as the hardcore Challengers, but they have to accept what they can get: quantity over quality.

Which is more satisfying to a Challenger? The long wait and anticipation leading up to a massive payoff that hardcore Challengers get after working on a boss for weeks, or the steady trickle of satisfaction that the casual Challengers get? I'd say it probably comes out about equal over time, but it's hard to see that when you're used to the hardcore Challenger style and are accustomed to the massive rush. It's hard to make do with enjoying the joys of daily sunrise when a drug user is used to mainlined cocaine once a week. ;)

So in my simplified model, the current design supports 3 out of 4 play styles: casual and hardcore Looters, and casual Challengers. It just doesn't support the hardcore Challengers.

(My hope (and it's purely a theory, based entirely on the way I perceive the game and its direction at this time and the people who have been taken off the team) is that the new MMO is going to be more directed toward the hardcore and scoped down to the likely lower subscriber base while keeping WoW in existence and oriented more toward the casual. That way Blizzard gets to keep all of their customers happy and focus design efforts on each game to please ONE group of people instead of two groups in one game with conflicting desires.)

Under Russish's classification I guess I would end up as a Hardcore Challenger: I'm willing to make the time to beat tough encounters, and I don't really care much about loot (except as a means to enable me to overcome even more difficultly tuned encounters).

The only guild drama that I ever provoked was at the beginning of the WotLK era when my guild started running Naxx-25 before I (and many others) were able to hit level 80.... guild leadership even went so far as to PUG a few raid spots to fill the raid, which I felt was a betrayal. It wasn't the fact that I wasn't getting loot that bothered me... it was the fact that I was being excluded from guild first kills because I was unable to hit 80 in two weeks.

---

As a final note, I wanted to thank Russish for not only the above amazing comment, but the other three solid gold comment that he left prior to this gem.

It's reader feedback like this that makes blogging such an engaging endeavor, and I am constantly amazed at the thought-provoking contributions from everyone who takes the time to leave me a note. Thanks!

I have a simple question on my mind that has been nagging me for a while. I've chewed on it, debated it with myself, and in the end still can't come to grips with it. I guess that's where you come in.

Why do players feel entitled to see all raid content?
I pose this question in the context of World of Warcraft. Why is it that a very loud segment of players believe that they have the innate right to see all raid encounters in a game simply by virtue of paying their $15 monthly subscription fee? Encounters should be easier - not harder - these players argue, and as many barriers to entering and succeeding in raids should be torn down so that everyone - regardless of skill, knowledge, time, or invested effort - has a fighting chance to kill each and every boss.

Now maybe I'm just too old school to understand this mentality, but I am continually boggled that people think like this - and moreover, that Blizzard has bought into the mentality so completely.

I grew up a gamer - I have played video games since I was in elementary school and spent countless hours earning my way through tough-as-nails games. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES comes to mind as a particularly soul crushing experience that, nevertheless, I persevered through and eventually beat. Early JRPGs were the same - challenges had to be met and conquered in order to gain progress; nothing was given for free and experiencing all of the stories and encounters that a game had to offer involved earning them.

With a rich gaming tradition of earning stories and content behind them, why is it that many World of Warcraft players feel that their game should somehow be different, and that everything should be made easy enough for the lowest common denominator to succeed at? Furthermore, why is Blizzard catering to this mindset that runs so contrary to past and present gaming norms?

Please help me understand what I'm missing here - why is WoW, or MMOs in general, so different? Why should a game that you pay $15 a month for allow everyone a free (more free?) pass to see all the stories and encounters, whereas a $50 single player game does not have the same expectations attached to it?

Some ground rules for discussion
I expect this to be a somewhat divisive topic, so do please try to keep personal insults to a minimum. I'm not an evil elitist snob, and you're not an unskilled worthless noob.... so let's keep this to a discussion of player motivations and gaming psychology, and away from the all-out flame wars that I've seen in countless places. I expect there are very good reasons why some people love really hard challenges while others do not.... but I'd really like to hear a solid explanation of how these differences translate to certain expectations of the games we play and love.

Eric, of Elder Game, published a masterful article yesterday that gives a lot of insight into the MMO development scene and then goes on to apply that industry knowledge to speculate about the state of World of Warcraft.

Here are a few snippets to give you a taste:

On product lifetime cycles

I like the “tedious maintenance stuff.” I actually prefer working on the live team. This makes me very unusual in the MMO industry. I am also a pretty good engineer with a lot of experience, which means I don’t often end up on live teams — too experienced. At Turbine, I had a hard time getting onto the Asheron Call 2’s Live Team, because I was expected to help develop their next generation MMO engine instead. I wanted to work on AC2 after it ships?! None of my managers could understand why I wanted to be demoted like that!

As a software engineer the article rings true; companies - especially larger entities - will develop new products/features using an 'A Team' of rock star developers, and then assign their less valuable and/or newer developers to maintain the final product. The theory is that the A Team will implement a solid base that is then easier for lesser skilled developers to maintain; unfortunately it rarely works out that way for a wide variety of reasons. (Skill, complexity, and vision to name a few.)

On game balance

I found that the Feral Intendant class [in Asheron's Call 2] was 30% overpowered, and that’s why so many people were playing a Feral Intendant. Yet somehow, reducing the power of the Feral Intendant to the correct level did not suddenly make the game more fun… thousands of players were complaining and nobody was telling me they were happy about the change. Weird! I double checked my calculations. They were correct. So what had gone wrong?

Turns out that the people who played the other classes available to that race had taken on an “underdog” mentality. The people who played Claw Bearers liked that they were woefully underpowered compared to Feral Intendants. It was like playing the game on Hard Mode. And the people playing Feral Intendants liked playing on Easy Mode. In balancing the game I had failed to understand the needs of the people playing it. I just ham-handedly fixed the equations, instead of solving the problem with the finesse it needed. It was one of my more serious missteps. (And it’s a great example because I think it’s pretty obvious in hindsight. Most mistakes were much more subtle.)

My experience with game balance is from the point of view of a MUD developer, and I can assure you that it is always a prickly business. The human aspect that Eric brings up is perhaps the most difficult part of the entire equation; players cannot be rationalized with raw numbers, and so it becomes very important to be tuned into all of the foibles of your player base. No spreadsheet can tell you how someone will react to their class being tuned.

On World of Warcraft

But here’s the weird thing: WoW is exhibiting the same symptoms as AC2 did when I was doing the designing. The B team is in charge.

In February, we learned that lead designer (and part-time producer?) Jeff Kaplan had stepped away from WoW, off to work on the next big Blizzard game. However, if you were watching the game before that, it was obvious that major leadership changes had already happened months earlier. My guess is that Jeff Kaplan started moonlighting on the new project long before February. And many of the other key WoW live team people have also switched over, or are working on WoW only part-time.

[...]

When we say that WoW is “polished”, what we mean is that it is surprisingly clean of linty little bugs like these. But that’s changing.

More and more little mistakes have crept into the game recently — changes that are positive on the surface, but have not been implemented with the finesse that makes them worthwhile. Mana expenditure rates have changed, rules for dungeons have been tweaked, the cost of items has fluctuated. It all seems useful. But it’s usually full of little side effects. Worse, it doesn’t take the human equation into account: it doesn’t counter-balance for the actual needs of the players very well. There are ways to meet both goals, but you have to try a lot harder at it than WoW is.

Remember when WoW class balance happened every six to eight months? Players were actually excited when their classes’ turn came around. I remember being so astonished to see players that were actually happy to have their classes redesigned. But now, every class is fiddled with every few weeks. It’s not exciting anymore. Instead of sitting on the changes and carefully honing them, the designers are just firing out every new idea they have, willy nilly, until they get it right. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter if you get it right. It matters if players are excited and having fun. Balance changes are happening too fast, and for too little benefit overall.

Although I have no proof of it, this just feels correct. In the run up to Wrath of the Lich King the Blizzard developers started making upcoming class tweaks more and more visible to the player base in advance, and seemed to be relying more and more on community feedback to find their direction.

The massive changes to feral Druid tanking mechanics are an excellent example of the B Team at work - someone got it up their nose that ferals needed to change direction, and completely turned the spec on its head. But not only that, the changes came fast and furious, and feral tanks had to constantly adapt to tanking mechanics and optimal gearing choices that kept shifting beneath their paws. Worst of all, the centerpiece of the new feral tanking system - Savage Defense - was released in a broken and buggy form and as far as I know is still not working as intended.

Final Words
All in all, an extremely insightful article by Eric, and I highly recommend that anyone interested in MMO development go read the rest - it's well worth your time.