Wednesday, November 29, 2017

The old days are back

Blizzard announced a little while ago that they are bringing back classic World of Warcraft.  They are going to be launching servers that will be running vanilla WOW so everyone can experience the game that dominates the industry like it was when nobody knew anything.

Most of the interest in this is purely nostalgia, I think.  People have been calling for vanilla WOW servers forever and it looks to me like those calls are mostly people trying to recapture the magic of the good ole days.

I love those ole days.  I have such amazing memories of raiding back in the beginning, of exploration, of losing myself in an online world.  There are no end of friends that I felt so close to and then lost when we no longer had the game to keep us together.  But let's get real:  I can't have those days back.  Doesn't matter what WOW looks like, doesn't matter what version they are running.  I can't be childless, mid 20s, and seeing an MMO for the first time.  Nobody can give that back to me.

There are some things that Blizzard can do that would attract me to WOW classic though.  Some of the things I call for in the game are things that I remember from the early days.  For example, I love challenging monsters.  I remember having to carefully pull one mob at a time because if two came at me it was bad but if three came at once I would die.  I remember not having a quest system that highlighted my map, so practice and knowledge really came home.  These are things I would enjoy about classic WOW.

But man there are so many incredibly shitty things about it.  Whole specs and talent trees that were complete rubbish really bogged the game down.  You could be a feral druid, except that was worse than just being a regular druid who hit things with a staff and cast moonfire every 9 seconds.  One spell every 9 seconds!  Optimal damage rotation! 

But there is more.  How about boss enemies designed to be attacked by 40 players that could only have 8 debuffs on them at once, when one class was designated a debuff class that needed to cast lots of debuffs to be even remotely good?

How about parties being designed around having 1 tank, 1 healer, and 3 damage dealers, but only 1 class of the 8 classes in the game having the basic toolkit required to tank?  So basically the game is mostly sitting around waiting for a warrior to show up because no one else can do that thing that you absolutely need somebody to do?

I remember a long quest chain that took me a full day to do and cost a ton of money to finish.  I finally got to the end and the reward was a green shoulder piece with Spirit and Agility.  Nobody in the entire game wants Spirit and Agility, so I sold it for a few silver pieces and was offended.  I would have been okay with just finishing the quest chain for no reward, or okay with a good reward, but that piece of trash that is useless to absolutely everyone was just an insult.

If Blizzard actually made vanilla WOW servers that brought back the brutal open world content, slow levelling, higher difficulty level, and other things that I remember happily from vanilla WOW I would be interested.  But there is so much complete garbage tied up in there I can't see them actually producing something I want to play, or something most others want to play.

There are things Blizzard could do to convince me to play this vanilla WOW experiment, but I doubt very much that they will do those things.  They are catering to nostalgia, not trying to reinvent the wheel.

Monday, November 27, 2017

Shambling across the finish line

This past week I had my Blood Bowl quarterfinal match.  I went in with a full 12 player roster and 130k in the bank, which is a strong situation.  I am playing dwarves while my opponent was running Chaos dwarves.  The classic good vs. evil slugathon!

I knew going in that the best way to support the team long term was to save my cash, and be conservative with my use of the apothecary.  The opposing team had a dwarf with Claw/MightyBlow, and that is dangerous.  Best to play it safe.

I also knew that I wanted to win that damn trophy and that you don't win trophies by sitting back and taking it easy!

I decided to just go for it.  I blew my entire bankroll buying a wizard, which worked out because my opponent was 20 Team Value above me.

So going into this game you would definitely expect me to win because our teams were solidly matched but I had a wizard to swing fortune my way.  My opponent had better bashing though, so you would expect my team to get hurt more.

Those expectations would be right.

I received the ball and began the slow process of pushing the enemy team down the field.  I knocked an awful lot of enemy dwarves over but just couldn't land any injuries.  My opponent began to whittle my forces down, and early on I took a 'miss next game' injury.

Decision point.  If I apothecary this, I have a good chance to run a full team for my next game, and have a better second half.  But if I save the apothecary I can potentially mitigate a worse result later.

I went for broke and saved the injured dwarf.

This was a disaster as by the end of the game I had a good lineman at level 3 die, and my best dude at level 5 took a niggling injury.  Catastrophe!

But although my opponent had great luck in injuring my dudes he had much worse luck in actually playing football.  I managed to keep control of the game, despite my losses, and scored at the end of the first half.  I started the second half down several players and things looked grim, but then I dropped my wizard's fireball on four enemy players and all four lost their coin flip and fell down.  I went from thinking that we were a sure thing to go to overtime where I would continue to get murdered to me cruising to victory in a single moment.  I grabbed the ball and ran off to score again, going up 2-0, which in dwarf vs. dwarf matchups might as well be infinity-0.

After kicking again I ran my team away from the opponent and let him score at will.  Being dwarves he only managed a single touchdown and I won 2-1.

I got really lucky on the fireball.  I also got lucky that my opponent's minotaur knocked himself down as the first play of a turn, and failed to stand up for multiple turns in a row.  Basically I lucked out on winning the game, and my opponent lucked out on murdering my dudes.

So I advance to the semi finals against a team that is 440 TV ahead of me because of my injuries, and my last opponent gets to take his healthy team and wait for next season.

I even managed to roll a 1 for money at the end of the game so I can't replace my dead dwarves, and might not even be able to replace them after another game!  I went all in, and got my win, but I sure didn't end up looking like a contender for first place.

Still, even if the expected thing happens and I get butchered in the semi, at least I made the semi finals twice out of two seasons in the league.  That is a decent showing.

Monday, November 20, 2017

Bad Doctor

I had my last Blood Bowl game of the regular season this week.  I had a choice to make ahead of time: Concede, and squeak into the playoffs with a strong team, no injuries, and lots of cash, OR play the game out and hope to get experience and not get my dudes injured.

I chose to play, because the dwarfs want to snap some necks!

It was the wrong choice.

I was up against a Nurgle team that wasn't even fielding a full roster of players and which was 400 Team Value under me.  That should have made it an easy game, but things didn't work out that way.  My opponent used that money to get a Bribe, a Wizard, and a Star Player that has a chainsaw.  The chainsaw is really swingy and can easily kill itself or opposing players, but since my opponent was retiring the team after the game he didn't care - he just wanted to hurt me as bad as possible.

The basic problem I had was that the chainsaw smashed through my team.  I knocked that player down multiple times but he just kept on getting back up, and after the second knockdown he jumped up and killed my best Troll Slayer. 

No problem though, because my team has a doctor.  The doctor tried to help the injured dwarf but ended up breaking his neck instead so he was a loss in any case.  After 21 games with the team the doctor has tried 4 times to save a dwarf from death and in every single case has botched the job and the dwarf ended up getting terribly injured and then retired anyway.

Stupid doctors.

In the first half I received the ball and slowly pushed it upfield.  I lost a dwarf to the aforementioned death but then finally scored near the end of the half and made it to halftime up 1-0.  However, in the second half my opponent kept on removing dwarves and used his wizard effectively to fireball 4 dwarves and he managed to score on the second last turn.  I was fielding only 8 dwarves at this point and only had one runner so my chances to score in 2 turns were bleak, at best.  As expected I could not manage the score and ended up in a 1-1 draw.

Now I did replace my Troll Slayer with a fresh one but the old player had three levels and the new one has none.  Dwarves are pretty good right out of the box though so my new player isn't a huge liability but my team definitely took a significant hit.

I have to go up against Chaos Dwarves in the first stage of the playoffs and this will definitely be a grindy matchup.  We are going to get into a dwarf punch showdown, and unfortunately I just lost a copy of both Guard and Mighty Blow with my dude dying so my winningness is much lower than it would have been if I had just conceded.

The really scary thing is the orc team from last season that knocked me out is still there and they have levelled up a bunch, especially compared to me.  If I go up against them I doubt I will have much of a chance - they have too much strength for me to dominate the field and I can't move well enough to just zip around them.

I think my chances of advancing in this round are pretty good, but my chances of winning the playoffs seems remote.

Thursday, November 16, 2017

Come level with me

Recently Blizzard announced the lastest WOW expansion and some of the details really tickled my fancy.  The basic concept of an expansion focused around Alliance / Horde conflict is kind of meh, as I don't much care, but admittedly it is pretty hard to top the previous expansion where heroes basically went and killed Satan himself.  Once you do that, you really might as well go to war with each other, right?

The thing that caught my attention though was the revamping of levelling throughout WOW.  The old world will be changed so that all zones now level up with the player, though each zone will have a minimum and maximum level.  Noob zones will be 1-10, the rest of the old world is 10-60, Burning Crusade and Northrend are 60-80, Pandaria and Cataclysm are 80-90, and I assume the rest is being left as it is.

Right now if you are levelling you will find that you constantly outlevel zones so by the time you finish all the storyline the monsters are trivial and everything is a bore.  Plus if you are in the middle of a zone and you do some dungeons you can't go back to the zone because nothing gives experience anymore.

Also heirloom items that you hand off to your low level characters wreck the game.  They give bonus experience so they exacerbate the problems I have described above.  Gaining more experience faster actually makes the game *worse*.

As a consequence the levelling game sucks.

But when the zones level up with you this problem goes away.  Suddenly you can take breaks from a zone and do other stuff or level professions or run dungeons and then get right back to it and the zone will be a challenge and give meaningful rewards.  You can do whatever zone strikes your fancy instead of having to travel halfway across the world to find an appropriate place to be a hero.  You can follow all the storylines if you want and they won't end up being worthless or trivial. 

I LOVE IT.

I haven't wanted to level a new character in a long time but these changes are making me think about doing it again.

I do have one request though:  Make it hard.  All of these changes will be good but the levelling game right now is so trivial that it is hard to be engaged with it.  Make the monsters tough!  Let us die if we screw up.  People who don't like levelling get a free max level bonus with every expansion anyway so it hardly even matters.... just let the people who truly enjoy levelling actually have a gaming experience instead of a time passing experience.

Heck, if making the game have any challenge is out of the question then give us a hardmode.  Put an NPC in major cities that we can talk to that will make all monsters in flexible levelling zones +3 levels on us and give 25% more experience or something.  The zones will suddenly feel hard and we will have to be careful and I will *totally* do that.  The noobs can still have their mindless grind and the people who want everything to be challenging all the time can do that too.

You are doing a good thing here Blizzard.  And I know, years ago I would have told you that this idea wrecks immersion and feels bad and blah blah blah.  I was wrong.  Zones scaling with the character is the right way to be.  So do it, but please make sure that crusty old veterans like me can have our old school challenge back.  I want to plan.  I want to think.  I want to worry.  And when I fail to do these things, I want to die.

Make it happen, and I will go back to the World of Warcraft.  In 2005 I levelled up and hunter called Bluecape with his trusty wolf friend Ahortes.  It was challenging, and fun, and glorious.  Give me that again, and I will once again entrust you with my addiction.

Friday, November 10, 2017

Makin' the playoffs

In Blood Bowl this week I faced off against Fur Plus Death, a Necromantic team.  The FPD have the highest team value in the league and had killed a ton of players on other teams.  The team sported a normally statted out Necro lineup but had two Werewolves with Claw, Block, Mighty Blow, Frenzy.  They are super fast so they can hit whoever they want and they absolutely murder people, as the rest of the league can attest.

I had hoped to be able to buy a wizard because of FPD's big Team Value but the coach trimmed some zombies off the roster just before the game so we ended up with my inducing a 10k star player (Barik Longblast) and no other inducements.

I received the kickoff and began the slow, inevitable march up the field that is the dwarf game plan.  Things got a bit exciting as my opponent got the kick deep, right on my goal line, but I recovered and got the ball safely into my cage.  In the early going one of the Werewolves went after a lineman of mine and killed him - the apothecary managed to turn it into a -Str injury, so that lineman is still alive but is getting fired immediately due to being terrible.  He had one skill, so this hurts my team a little, but no big deal.

Due to my massive edge in Guard, Block, and Mighty Blow I took control of the brawl and punched the opponents into submission.  My Star Player spent his time firing his cannon into fallen enemies, and his relentless fouling killed one Werewolf but it regenerated and was waiting in the dugout for another shot at my dudes.  By the end of the half I had the board completely under control but had only removed one Wight permanently.  I scored and went into the second half up 1-0.

We both fielded 11 players for the second half, with my opponent putting in a zombie instead of his injured Wight, and me fielding a regular lineman instead of one with Guard.  Not that much damage either way, though I did get the better of that trade.

In the second half my opponent had couple of early turnovers due to failing to pick up the ball and knocking his own dude down on a block but neither really was a big problem.  The turning point came when I dropped a -Str injury on his Flesh Golem and completely opened up the board for myself.  Without the second Golem to lock up dwarves I was able to start beating up his team and putting pressure on the ball. 

Facing down an implacable wall of dwarves my opponent came up with a gambit - he rushed the ball to the sideline and tried to get a quick score.  Dwarves aren't good at defending such things, being slow and all, but I had just enough dudes to surround his advance and pin them in.  Once they were pinned against the sideline I knocked a couple dudes out of bounds, grabbed the ball, and the game was over.  There were still turns left but with me having the ball, a significant numbers advantage, and no need to actually score to win the game my opponent conceded and just left his players lying where they were.  I ran out the clock and then scored on turn 16 to go up 2-0.

I got 17 experience for the game and lost a dude with 16 experience.  Unfortunately the experience gain did not net me anything so I am slightly weaker for the next game.  I am however locked into the playoffs now, being guaranteed second or third in my division.  FPD might tie me in overall points on the season in their next game if they win and I lose but I won our showdown so I get the tiebreaker advantage.

I could simply concede my next game if I wanted to and still get into the playoffs.  The team I am up against is Ziggyny's Nurgle team, which is 390 Team Value below mine.  That advantage is massive, and I think I am hugely favoured to win.  In bash vs. bash matchups that much Team Value is *really* hard to overcome.  He could easily kill some of my dudes, but I could also rack up some experience if things go my way.

I like the idea of playing.  I want to bash things!  That said, I think a smart player aiming to go for the best possible setup for the playoffs would concede in my spot to make sure to go in with a full team and a full bankroll.  I am more bloodthirsty than smart though, so I figure to get my bash on.

Thursday, November 9, 2017

Toad

Recently the Naked Man pointed out the spell Banishment to me and asked for my opinion on whether or not it is broken.  In 5th edition DnD Banishment is a spell that grants a saving throw and requires concentration to maintain, but while it lasts the target is removed from the world.  Just gone.  This is potentially useful to run away from a single powerful enemy, but most powerful in a fight where a single enemy makes up about half of the opposing forces.  If you have two giants to fight and you banish one of them until the other is dead, you are going to win.

That seems pretty powerful to me.  It isn't always useful but unlike most crowd control spells the target doesn't get a new save every round, they just have to suck it up.  I don't think crowd control spells are much good at lower levels because of this restriction.  That is a fine design though because honestly paralyzing people and then butchering them isn't that much fun really, and it is far worse when the characters have to sit out an entire fight on the basis of one save.

Banishment requires something the target hates as an ingredient and some people seem to like the idea of making that a real pain in the ass.  Force characters to find a particular item that has significance to the target in order to cast Banishment and suddenly the spell goes from really powerful to completely worthless most of the time.  Trouble is if you do this then it will feel terrible when the characters spend five sessions finding the single item that the evil wizard hates, and then the evil wizard just makes the saving throw and the Banishment is irrelevant.

I don't like that rule much.  It has some flavour going for it but it definitely encourages people to take forever doing everything and just isn't enough payoff at the end.  The spell just doesn't warrant that big a nerf.

You know what does warrant a huge nerf though?  Polymorph.  Both spells are 4th level but Polymorph is completely bonkers.  You can turn your opponents into sheep, effectively negating them the same way Banishment does, but you can use it for all kinds of other things too.  Your rogue is beat up and low on HP?  Turn them into a Giant Ape and watch them do way more damage than before and have a massive HP pool to soak damage.  Need to cross a chasm?  Polymorph yourself into a giant eagle and ferry the party across.  Need to swim?   Turn into a dolphin.  The spell has so many uses that it would be a great pick even if the combat applications were only so-so.

But instead Polymorph is a fantastic single target crowd control spell and a powerful buff in one.  It effectively gives wizards a monster sized heal that is, admittedly, difficult to control.  Add that to the noncombat effectiveness it has and you have a totally absurd spell.  Banishment just doesn't stack up, even though it is slightly better at getting rid of a single enemy for a long duration because of the difficulty of dispelling it.

I remember Polymorph Other and Polymorph Self from earlier editions and those were usually completely bonkers too.  In 3rd edition I recall turning into a Stone Giant to take advantage of their amazing physical stats and natural armour, and while the 5th edition version is less broken it is still a problem.

One issue I do have with the system is the way saving throws scale.  5th edition wanted to keep numbers flat explicitly and that generally is a good way to go.  However, one issue with this is impressing people with magic.  If a peasant doesn't believe that you are dangerous you can Fireball them and wipe out a whole room full of people no problem.  But if you want to turn them into a sheep?  They save a good portion of the time.  We actually had this come up in our recent session where we tried to intimidate people and it failed because they just saved against our crowd control spells. 

It feels like maybe crowd control spells should have notes in them that against people of sufficiently low HP they just work, no save.  Polymorphing a giant should be hard, but doing so to a 5 HP peasant should be trivial.  Heck, it might be better to move most or all CC effects to a HP based system like that.  It shouldn't much matter against serious fights but it would make things feel better against mooks and townsfolk I think.