tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13053727530225978152024-03-13T09:05:13.667-07:00Bright Cape GamerA blog about playing games, building games and talking about what makes them work or not.Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.comBlogger829125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-58162017159488785542022-03-24T17:51:00.001-07:002022-03-24T17:51:28.061-07:00Systems for systems sake<p>When a new WOW patch comes out there are always new systems and currencies. It isn't necessarily a problem to introduce these things as people do like having new stuff to do, and you need to gatekeep your new material to some extent. If you don't, people will stockpile resources before the patch, buy all the new stuff in the first 10 minutes, and then complain that there is nothing to do.</p><p>Sometimes, however, they miss the mark badly. In the latest 9.2 patch a new currency was introduced that is called Cosmix Flux. CF is acquired from everything - dungeon runs, raids, treasures, rare monsters, pvp, all these things give it to you. It isn't rooted in lore anywhere either, it just rains from the sky for no reason. I like stuff that is rooted in the world - silverleaf is an herb found in a few starting zones, has a particular look, and is used for particular things. I like that. CF, on the other hand, comes from everywhere and has no lore or meaning. Given that it totally fails from an immersion standpoint, it needs to be excellent on some other front.</p><p>It is not. The main issue is that there isn't much you can do with it. In the first week of the new patch I determined that I would need at most 12,000 CF for the near future, and that might rise to as high as 20,000 under some odd circumstances. By the time I had calculated this I had already gathered 10,000 CF without making any attempt to hunt for it. At the current moment I have 30,000 CF sitting around and there is literally nothing I can do with it. I can't specifically gather it and it has no use - why does it exist at all?</p><p>If a new currency is rare and is useful for something specific that can be a good thing. People enjoy hunting for ways to build new stuff or acquire cool toys. A generic currency that is worthless is a total waste though - it irritates veterans as it is just one more damn thing I need to scroll past, and new players get overwhelmed by new systems. For a system to be worth learning it has to have redeeming value, and this one has none.</p><p>Last week I concluded that Blizzard would end up using CF to patch up mistakes they made in this new patch. Anything that was too hard to get and which players complained about would simply be put on a vendor with a cost of CF so that people would be able to get tons of it (but not infinite amounts).</p><p>Lo and behold Blizzard just announced that two old currencies which people were complaining about got added to a vendor for a cost of 3,000 CF. It feels extremely kludgy and immersion breaking to me. They screwed up the values badly, added a pointless currency and system creep, and now are trying to fix other issues they created (which could have been neatly solved in other ways, I might add) using their screwup.</p><p>One thing about systems in games is that every system has cognitive overhead. To justify this overhead you absolutely must have a good reason that the system exists. Just adding in stuff to be adding in stuff is a terrible choice, and one they should stop doing. My currencies tab is already bursting with one hundred old, pointless currencies, and we don't need to be adding a few more every couple months.</p><p>A game is complete when there is nothing left you can trim out, not when you have added every damn thing you can think of.</p>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-70594455199188207712022-03-13T12:30:00.004-07:002022-03-13T12:30:50.989-07:00Big armies<p>In my DnD session lat night we had a gigantic battle. The scenario was us defending a small fortified keep against a swarm of zombies. I think the people designing the scenario thought we would try to defend each entrance separately and prepare elaborate traps and such, but we decided on a simpler plan. We sat in the highest room in the tallest tower that had a single trapdoor as an entrance and waited for the zombies to come up the ladder one at a time. That seemed like the easiest possible way to smash a mindless swarm.</p><p>Of course this would be a terribly boring battle to run. It is an excellent plan in terms of winning, but not much of a plan in terms of being entertaining.</p><p>Thankfully even though my character is excellent at coming up with tight plans, he has a tendency to throw away the plan to PEWPEW some enemies. I flew away through the air and chased down some zombies with fire spells, and the combat became the chaotic flowing mess through the keep that the designers had surely intended.</p><p>One issue with this sort of combat is that it can involve way too many combatants and have a lot of boring math. Our side summoned eight giant owls, and we could have spent hours rolling attacks for the owls and the zombies as they slowly clawed each other to death. While this would have been correct by the rules, it would have been a tragic waste of our time. Sometimes Naked Man has run fights on a big scale like this and we have gotten bogged down in endless slogs between summons and enemies that simply aren't fun or interesting. This time though he nailed it because we refused to roll and came up with a decent approximation.</p><p>We decided that given the stats on the owls they would do about 45 damage a round, which is enough to kill 2 zombies. The owls flew over a pile of zombies and every round 2 zombies were removed. This solution is quick and accurate enough to preserve the flow of advantage in the battle.</p><p>Shoving this sort of thing off to the side is quite useful. Some of the zombies were fast and deadly, with weapons and special powers. Rolling out the combats between those zombies and us is worth it, because each attack is meaningful. Naked Man managed to set up the fight so that the owls and slow zombies had a huge battle off screen (helped by a fireball or two), and the real fight against the tough, interesting opponents got to take centre stage.</p><p>This sort of thing is not the easiest to manage. The game doesn't provide aproximations for these sorts of things, but they are a key component in having a big battle and not having it be a chore.</p><p>In the end it was an enjoyable time. Still, if I were building the game, I would find more ways to make enemy turns quicker. Fixed damage and singular attacks would definitely figure into the list. If only somebody had made a game like that... <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/sh/fow1hinj485bss6/AACpmwaYcYDHuWqTnfqJHKv8a?dl=0" target="_blank">oh wait.</a></p>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-20875964063975799602022-02-21T18:44:00.003-08:002022-02-21T18:44:30.332-08:00Blizzard goes communistOver the past year in WOW I have spent some time boosting people. In the beginning I sat in channels advertising, and that was a terrible experience. It took a long time and I got constant hate messages from people who were outraged that I would do activities in the game for gold. Actually doing the boosting was generally fine, but the sales part of it was the worst.<div><br /></div><div>Later on I stopped trying to be an entrepreneur and joined a corporation. Lots of people realized that, just like in real life, you can be drastically more efficient by specializing and organizing. My boosting group had bankers, managers, salespeople, and actual workers. I did the actual work and was quite happy with my cut, though I am sure the people doing the awful sales part of the job made more money with less skill required.</div><div><br /></div><div>Capitalism sneaks into everything, it seems.</div><div><br /></div><div>At first glance this seems harmless enough - why not let people organize? The issue became that all those salespeople sat in trade chat constantly blasting out "Get boosted by us, bring gold" messages all day. Anyone joining the chat would get multiple messages a second posted by these boosting salespeople, and anyone else got drowned out. The group finder was also infested with them, making it annoying to use for everyone else. Just like in real life where billboards get in your face, capitalism in WOW has its downsides. There were ways to avoid this - I had a mod to get rid of all the boosting posts in my interface - but your average new user would not know this.</div><div><br /></div><div>Blizzard decided that unregulated capitalism like this was bad. Time to give back some power to the workers! They banned all large boosting groups like mine in an attempt to stop the endless spam. It is still fine for someone to pay me to beat a dungeon for them, but operating across multiple servers in a large group is no longer allowed. Take *that*, capitalist pigs!</div><div><br /></div><div>This has good consequences, but also bad ones. The good is that chat channels are going to be way less infested with advertising. The bad is that people buying boosts are no longer buying from a large group that has a reputation to protect, and which polices the behaviour of its members. I couldn't screw over somebody when I was boosting them from my group - I would get my gold taken away, and eventually banned. But if I just find a random person in chat and take their gold, I can just walk away with no consequences. Blizzard can't and won't enforce me running that person through a dungeon. </div><div><br /></div><div>People don't love big companies and their customer service people... but they are a lot better than getting totally scammed with no recourse. There is an advantage to doing business with someone who cares a lot about public perception.</div><div><br /></div><div>The other big downside is that people who want to buy boosts are now restricted in who they can buy from. It used to be that these big communities would work across many servers, so even if you were on a small server you could buy a boost from top players on a big server. Now you are stuck buying from whoever is on your server, and if nobody there is willing or skilled enough, you are out of luck. This results in more people ditching the little servers to play on the megaservers, which exacerbates an already troubling trend.</div><div><br /></div><div>I do find it funny that a big company that is thoroughly entrenched in capitalist ideology would so blatantly strike back against capitalist trends in their games. Much like in real life, capitalism creates extra problems, but it also solves problems too. </div><div><br /></div><div>In any case, there is no way I am going back to sitting in chat begging for customers. I just have to get used to being poor again. A natural entrepreneur, I am not.</div>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-50735090707411999802021-12-17T16:39:00.006-08:002021-12-17T16:39:56.283-08:00Send in the animals<p>Last time I talked about the DnD spell Animate Objects, where you attack your enemies with chairs. This time I want to look at Conjure Animals to see how that spell stacks up. Conjure Animals is a *lot* more complicated because it gives a similar choice betwen a few big summons or a ton of small ones, but there is a lot of variety in the summons. Animated objects always have the same stats, but a wolf is not the same as a giant wasp!</p><p>The two spells share the same fundamental flaw - the game is balanced around the idea that attacking once for 15 damage is about the same as attacking twice for 10 damage, which is about the same as attacking 8 times for 6 damage. This idea is patently absurd, but all the summon spells and indeed the entire Challenge Rating system is based upon it. Yesterday we saw that animating a ton of small objects is vastly superior to a big one, and with animals it is the same. Pick the big one, you get a huge, tough critter than hits for 10 damage / round. Pick 8 small animals though, and each of them hits for 5 / round.</p><p>Conjure Animals lets you summon 1 CR 2 animal, 2 CR 1 animals, 4 CR 1/2 animals, or 8 CR 1/4 animals.</p><p>Animal CR Dmg/animal Total damage</p><p>Giant Elk 2 11 11</p><p>Brown Bear<span> </span><span> </span><span> 1 9 18</span></p><p>War Horse 1/2 7 28</p><p>Wolf 1/4 5.5 44</p><p>You see the problem. Sure, swarms of animals are at risk of being Fireballed, but they deal preposterous damage. A fighter at level 5 swinging with a big sword probably does about 20 damage a round, and we don't want summon spells to completely replace fighters. Given that, I think summoning a Giant Elk that is worse than a fighter but has a ton of health is a reasonable thing. It lasts a full hour, has as many hitpoints as any characters in the group, and some animals have special abilities like flying, tracking, swimming etc that you can leverage. It is a spell I would happily cast.</p><p>However, summoning swarms of weak animals is a huge problem. If you max out on stuff like wolves your fighters are going to feel utterly useless. The wolves do several times as much damage as they do, and if the enemies do decide to start chopping through the wolves that is *great*. The wolves have 88 HP total! They will still do a ton of damage and save your group a huge amount of incoming damage too.</p><p>The solution here is simply to nerf the number of animals you get when you go for lower CR ones. Instead of doubling the numbers each step down, I would change it from 1,2,4,8 to 1,2,3,4. Nice and easy, and it actually works out well with the damage numbers. The CR 2 is the worst still, but at least the others all deal similar overall damage.</p><p>The other issue with this spell is that it is extremely overpowered when cast at higher level. If you level up Fireball from 3rd to 5th level, for example, the damage goes up 25%. However, if you level up Conjure Animals from 3rd to 5th level, you get *double* the animals. This is a problem! It makes all higher level summoning spells a joke compared to Conjure Animals, and uplevelling spells is supposed to be a way of filling in spots, not invalidating high level spells. The way I would fix this is to make the spell summon 1 more animal of CR 1 at level 5, or one extra CR 2 animal at level 7. This is still worth doing, but leaves room for actual high level summon spells to compete.</p><p>Even after both of these nerfs Conjure Animals is still better than any other summon spell in the book, I think. At 5th level it deals more damage than the Bigby's Hand or Animate Objects spells, and it makes Conjure Elemental and Mordenkainen's Sword look like ridiculous jokes on multiple fronts. Even after my suggested nerfs, I think you have to make the types of animals that are summoned be determined by the GM, and have the GM pick weak animals. I tried to pick the best animal types for my numbers above, but if you instead pick randomly the spell is a lot more fair. Many of the animals have worse attack routines than the optimized ones above, and that would reduce its power level reasonably.</p><p>I like the idea of summoning animals to attack your enemies. It is also cool that their abilities are based on the abilities of the base creatures. As usual, the theme is good, but the math sucks.</p>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-49882318777395426132021-12-15T10:49:00.003-08:002021-12-15T10:49:41.378-08:00Send in the chairs<p>The Animate Objects spell in DnD is thematically great. You are in the middle of a fight in a workshop, and you cause the bench, a couple of crowbars, and a table to rise up and bash away at your enemies. You could also use it to help carry people, break stuff, or accomplish other tasks. Awhile ago MattInTheHat came up with a *fantastic* plan for the spell - he threw some coins at his enemies, telling them to buy some better insults, then animated the coins and bashed them with them.</p><p>This was a great dramatic moment. The coins were marvellously effective. I eventually picked up the spell myself and paid for a bunch of small metal pieces with my character's initials on them so I could toss them at my enemies and do similar things. This is all well and good, except that it is hideously unbalanced.</p><p>The way the spell works is that you get 10 slots of objects. The bigger the object, the more slots it takes up, but the more damage it does. However, tiny objects are a huge outlier in terms of their damage per slot. Consider the chart below, written against AC 16.</p><p>Size<span> Slots<span> Damage<span> Hit Total Damage Dam/Slot/Round</span></span></span></p><p><span><span><span>Tiny<span> 1<span> </span><span> </span><span> 1d4+4<span> </span><span> +8 </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span>4.225<span> </span><span> 4.225</span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p>Small<span> 1<span> </span><span> </span><span> <span> 1d8+2 </span><span> +6 </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span>3.575<span> </span><span> 3.575</span></span></span></p><p><span><span><span>Med<span> 2<span> </span><span> <span> 2d6+1 </span><span> </span><span> +5 </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span></span><span>4<span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> 2</span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p><span><span><span><span><span><span>Lrg<span> 4<span> </span><span> <span> 2d10+2 </span><span> +6 </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span></span><span>7.15<span> </span><span> </span><span> 1.789</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span>Huge<span> 8<span> </span><span> <span> 2d12+4 </span><span> +8</span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span>11.05<span> </span><span> 1.381</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span>The problem is obvious. The thing that really matters is the damage per slot, and tiny things utterly dominate that metric. Large things hit hard, but there are so few of them that they do terrible damage. It feels to me like you ought to want to animate big stuff if you can, but the opposite is true. You might think that coins are perhaps too small to work, and that is reasonable. (The spell does not specify.) However, you could always just have 10 daggers on a bandolier or somesuch, if need be. </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span>The real thing we ought to figure out is how good *should* the spell be? I will use the spell Disintegrate to benchmark just how absurd Animate Objects is. Disintegrate is a single target 6th level spell that does 75 damage with a save to avoid. Animate Objects, if up levelled from 5th to 6th and used on Tiny objects does 78 damage with attack rolls - quite similar. However, Disintegrate is a single action, and Animate Objects does that damage every round! Also Animate Objects uses many attacks that can all smash enemy concentration and also will take attacks of opportunity if they enemy tries to move.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span>It is clear to me that Animate Objects on tiny objects is completely busted. It is the best single target attack, and is as powerful as a fighter, but the spellcaster can cast other spells while the objects beat down.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span>So how do we fix this? There are two basic approaches - first, to restrict how often you can use it, and second to change the numbers. The first one would entail insisting that tiny objects be of highly specific sizes. You could insist that they be the size of a sword, for example, so that having 10 of them on your person is extremely difficult, and thus you could only use Animate Objects under specific circumstances. Unfortunately there are ways around that - I would probably have a summoned minion carry around a box of swords for me to animate in that case. This approach also doesn't fix the issue that large objects are terrible.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span>The other approach is to fix the numbers. Generally small things have the problem that they have low strength so they do little damage, but these small things have massive dexterity and use dexterity for their damage rolls. I don't see any reason why we need to shackle ourselves to the listed strength and dexterity numbers. The tiny object get many attacks, which is especially powerful against casters, so their damage should be the weakest overall. Large things are harder to come by and are often restricted by their size, so they should hit hard. Here are my suggested new values:</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p>Size Slots Damage Hit Total Damage Dam/Slot/Round</p><p>Tiny 1 1d4+1 +5 1.75 1.75</p><p>Small 1 1d8 +4 2.025 2.025</p><p>Med 2 2d6+2 +6 4.95 2.475</p><p>Lrg 4 2d12+3 +7 9.6 2.4</p><p>Huge 8 4d12+5 +9 21.7 2.713</p><p>These new values look a lot better. If you have a bunch of small things they are still fantastic at bonking spellcasters many times to disrupt casting. Their damage is still good, and definitely worth casting. If you animate big stuff it is worse at disruption, but hits very hard. (But still not nearly as hard as the base version of the spell on tiny objects.) Tossing coins at people is a fine thing to do, animating swords does better damage, and finding chairs or tables or anvils to punch people with is better yet. That feels way more appropriate thematically, and stops this spell from being quite so brutal. </p><p>Having some spells be better than others is fine, but you have to keep the best ones from dominating everything. Fireball, for example, is so overpowered that it is often the best thing to cast in a single target situation, even though it is obviously designed for AOE. That is a problem. Animate Objects, as written, is similar. It is supposed to be a spell you maintain over many turns, but it is actually the best one shot single target attack.... and then it keeps doing that every turn.</p><p>Next I may tackle Conjure Animals, which has many of the same problems that Animate Objects does. Summoning a horde of wolves or bears delivers absurd damage in the same way, because the game is designed around the idea that 4 attacks for 10 each is about as good as 1 attack for 20.</p>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-31711847745920340852021-11-23T14:33:00.006-08:002021-11-23T14:33:58.811-08:00Climb on my back<p>In the past couple weeks I have been doing a lot of carries in WOW. The ways it works is I am in a bunch of discord channels and an advertiser posts a run. Boosters like me reply if the post suits them, and then we gather into a group in game and carry someone through a dungeon. The ad will tell us how much we get paid, how difficult the dungeon will be, and who they need.</p><p>This pays extremely well. I make 4 to 10 times as much gold carrying people as I would doing anything else in the game. It isn't trivial to get that gold though, as you need to have a high level of skill to do dungeons with one or two people in your group who are incompetent or even afk. The value of the gold I earn means I am being paid between 4 and 10 dollars an hour depending on the run, which isn't a great hourly rate, but I am being paid to play WOW, so I can't complain that much. In the end though it isn't like I convert this gold to dollars, I use it to pay for all the potions and food and other junk I need to play as well as my monthly subscription.</p><p>The booster community is an interesting place. People seem to think that I mostly get paid to carry totally incompetent people to rewards they don't deserve, but that hasn't been my experience so far. Mostly it is people starting off a brand new character who want some good gear but who don't want to spend months trying to work their way up. They pay some money to get carried to a bunch of good gear so they can get into the content they actually want. The others are people who are able to do the content but who struggle to find groups. They don't want to spend hours trying to find people to run with and then have the group fall apart. </p><p>Instead they pay 15 bucks so that a group of friendly, highly skilled people show up and efficiently beat the dungeon with them... and at the end, the buyer gets all the loot! I can see people looking at it like a movie ticket, where they pay a modest sum and get the experience they want.</p><p>I am not interested in buying a boost at all, ever, but I can understand people who do.</p><p>There are downsides to boosting though. The main one is that you need advertisers who sit in trade chat and group finder and constantly spam advertise their services. I could apply to be one of those advertisers, but I would be miserable. Even if the gold per hour is better, and I am sure it is, I am not interested. However, the constant spam does annoy and frustrate players who want to find groups the normal way, without paying for the service.</p><p>That spam doesn't affect me. Trade chat is useless, and is just there for people to post memes, chuck norris jokes, and political diatribes. I have it turned off. I have a simple mod that blocks all of the advertisers in group finder when I am looking, so I don't even see that. For me boosting is all upside. I don't care if other people buy boosts in general, and I like it a lot when they pay me stacks of gold to do fun activities. I play the game to do challenging stuff with my buddies, and I don't care if somebody else buys an achievement I worked for by opening their wallet. The important part is the striving and the improvement, which a buyer misses entirely.</p><p>Mostly the people I run into while boosting are a lot like the people I run into anywhere else. Generally we get along and things are fine, but occasionally I run into a jackass who annoys me. </p><p>One thing about boosting that I often see is people complaining that boosters are giving Blizzard money, and that any new and difficult content is just Blizzard cooperating with boosters do make tons of money. The idea is that if something is hard, buyers will purchase tons of subscription tokens for real money, sell them for gold, and use that gold to pay me to boost them. </p><p>This makes zero sense. If there are 1 million players who never buy boosts, Blizzard makes 20 million dollars a month. If most of those players are buying or selling boosts, Blizzard makes 20 million dollars per month. No amount of boosting can change that - everybody buys exactly 1 subscription per month. All that happens if lots of boosting is occurring is that the best players don't pay for their subscriptions because they get subsidized by the buyers.</p><p>Boosting is here to stay, and I think we all ought to just get over it. Focus on playing the game your way, and don't worry about what everyone else is up to. If you don't boost, then nothing the boosting community does affects you. Those top skilled players were not going to show up for your run anyway... if they weren't getting paid, they would just be doing something else entirely.</p>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-26490976071701931752021-11-02T11:46:00.004-07:002021-11-02T11:46:36.617-07:00Cash money<p>Naked Man and I often lock horns about money. Not real world money though, just the currency that we use in our RPGs. Recently we have been talking about how our characters interact with gold and how we would like for it to work. NM loves the idea of gold mattering to characters. He is a big fan of them seeking out treasure to buy the things they want, keeping track of expenses, and budgeting. In his ideal world we would each keep track of exactly how many coins we have of each denomination and have fun collecting old and obscure currencies that we can then try to convert into more useful coinage.</p><p>I, on the other hand, built a whole roleplaying system where player wealth is described simply by Destitute - Poor - Professional - Landowner - Mayor - Royal - Monarch. What level you are at tells you what stuff you can buy and what you can own.</p><p>I often give NM trouble because in our DnD game I do a lot of rounding of money and don't bother to keep meticulous track of it. I also complain about pricing of things when those prices don't make sense to me. For example, early on we ended up in a big city and I wanted to learn spells. The prices seemed ludicrous to me, because to learn a single level 1 spell was 1000g. 1000g could buy me a decent magical item, so the idea that it cost 1000g to just look at someone else's spellbook for an hour seemed absurd to me. Who in the world is paying those prices? The person selling the spells doesn't even expend anything when they make a sale! These strange prices often come up because we are combining sources from a variety of editions, some of which are decades old. This leads to some strange situations.</p><p>For example, in our last session we suddenly got rich. Up until this point we had accumulated roughly 30,000g between all of us. About half had been spent on various things like spell research and magic items, and the rest we were carrying around in cash. In this session we sold a bunch of items we had gotten in our recent adventure for a total of 70,000g. 50,000g of that was in just 2 items that we were selling because they weren't much use. It makes sense in the lore of the world that these items would be valuable and sought after - they had a history and were completely unique. Unfortunately that windfall makes it hard for us to take money seriously otherwise.</p><p>How do you make yourself worry about small change when you randomly stumble upon single items worth as much as all the loot you have ever seen? I think DnD has always had this sort of problem because as you level up you find more and more expensive and powerful things, and this leads to out of control inflation from the perspective of characters. </p><p>It is hard to worry about spending 100g on something when you will randomly open a box and find 10,000g in it!</p><p>This trouble is exascerbated by our current campaign style. We are on the clock trying to save the world from apocalypse. Adventurers that take long breaks and choose their missions based on monetary rewards can interact with world economics in fun ways. Do we go fight the ogres, which is easy, or do we delve into the lich's tomb, which is dangerous, but probably much more rewarding? That is a good question. However, our adventures are often part of saving the world and so we don't have a lot of choice. Chasing ogres for cash isn't happening. I suspect that interesting monetary dilemmas are extremely hard to maintain in a race to avoid armageddon.</p><p>One thing NM has wanted is for spell components to be expensive. He likes the idea of spells that have expensive components that we have to either find or pay for as a way to bleed off some of our money. That works for me, but it is a tricky balance to strike. Recently I came upon a bunch of spells, some of which had expensive components. However, the spells were extremely weak, much worse than other ones that didn't have any extra cost. That isn't going to make for any interesting decisions - why would I pay 1000g to cast an inferior spell?</p><p>After some back and forth NM decided to improve those spells and suddenly there were some interesting choices. A few of the spells were decidedly more powerful than similar free ones, or at least offered a unique perk. I like that situation, as it lets me choose between free spells or spending cash on something new and exciting. I have to decide what to prepare each day, so I face the challenges of figuring out when I will need the big guns and getting ready to spend resources on them.</p><p>There are ways to make gold interesting in a fantasy RPG, but I don't know that they end up being worth the effort. When I think about fantasy stories none of them ever involve the characters taking months off to go fight trivial opponents to collect cash. That isn't a bulletproof argument though, because we aren't playing a book, we are playing a game, and these are different things. </p><p>When I am running games I don't think I am willing to put in the effort to build a complete economic system for the players to interact with. It is just too much, and I am not interested in something half baked. NM, on the other hand, seems dead set on including an economics simulator in his fantasy RPG.</p>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-64080172744212072452021-10-07T13:29:00.004-07:002021-10-07T13:29:57.836-07:00Going walkabout<p>I recently finished running some gamers through a one shot scenario in my roleplaying game Heroes By Trade. Overall they seemed to have a great time, and the experience gave me some insight into one particular rule in DnD that I did not include in Heroes By Trade. Naked Man gave me a lot of flak for not having it, but now that I have seen people's reactions I am sure I made the right decision.</p><p>That rule is attacks of opportunity. The basic idea is that if you do something that leaves you open your opponents can take advantage and bash you. That outline looks fine, but the way DnD implements it is disastrous. The key problem is that 'leaving yourself open' includes simply walking away from the enemy.</p><p>This means that once a melee character closes in, you are stuck next to them. This is especially true if the melee character has a single huge attack, because often you lose half of your HP if you move away, so you are trapped next to them for the duration of the battle. </p><p>I can see where this comes from. Old DnD fighter design was that fighters walked up to people and bashed them. They had no options, no choices. If a ranged character was a bit faster they could simply walk away and keep on shooting and the poor fighter was absolutely wrecked. It seems kind of silly that a ranged character who is slightly faster can so trivially defeat a melee type, so the designers decided to make it punishing for anyone to walk away from a melee combatant. Walk away, you get smashed.</p><p>They solved the problem wrong.</p><p>The problem is that melee types have no options. You don't solve that by locking down ranged people so that *nobody* has any options! You solve it by giving melee characters meaningful ways to keep people in range. Unfortunately the solution they went with is to keep fighters mind numbingly boring and make it extremely hard to maneuver around a battlefield. Once people lock swords, everyone stands in a pile fighting. </p><p>The players in my test game were DnD veterans. When a monster walked next to them they wanted to move away, and then looked at me with big, sad eyes, asking if they were going to take an attack of opportunity. I said no, because my game doesn't have such a thing. Their faces lit up with glee, and they moved around the battlefield to find a better vantage point. The players clearly wanted to wander, and in Heroes By Trade you can.</p><p>Of course you do have to solve the problem of melee being trivially defeated by ranged folks who keep on running away. My solution is to give melee options. They can knock a ranged person down, preventing them from running and making them easy to bash. They can grab a slippery caster, keeping them within reach. They can dash madly across the battlefield to get in position to thump. They can't always do all of these things of course, compromises must be made, but they have ways to keep a ranged enemy pinned down, just as the ranged enemy has ways to escape.</p><p>I am extremely pleased with my choices, particularly after seeing the results in this game. Players have a lot more fun when they are actively involved. It is more exciting to choose to use Immobilizing Shot to pin an enemy in place that to simply walk next to them and have attacks of opportunity keep them close.</p><p>People want to make choices, to have control over their fate. They also like to be able to run around in a fight and do exciting things. Attacks of opportunity prevent both of these things. Good riddance.</p>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-32763667864723244732021-09-06T11:01:00.003-07:002021-09-06T11:01:41.199-07:00Bad Blizzard<p>For many months now Blizzard, the game company behind behemoths like Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, Diablo, Overwatch, and other iconic games has been mired in controversy and legal trouble. The state of California is suing them for a variety of things including sexist hiring, promotion, and pay practices, failure to resolve sexual abuse complaints properly, and destroying documents to cover up their problems.</p><p>After reading the court filing and hearing many of the complaints brought forward it is clear that Blizzard has enormous problems with entrenched sexism at the company. There was one senior executive in particular who was widley known to grope many women at Blizzcon in particular and people regularly had to pull him off of women when he was drunkenly grabbing them. Nothing was ever done about this, it was simply accepted as the way things are. There are no end of other horrendous stories though, like women being sexually assaulted and then moved to other teams to spare their attacker from facing any consequences, as well as regular events where male employees would go on drunken 'cube crawls' to harass the women working there.</p><p>It is a neverending parade of awful.</p><p>Blizzard's initial response was to deny all allegations and blame overzealous regulators in California for overreacting. The media, player, and employee response to that was *extremely* negative thankfully and the people in charge quickly decided that heads had to roll. You know you have to do something when the people playing your game are killing an NPC named after one of your executives over and over again just for spite. They fired Blizzard's CEO and the head of HR and began terminating all kinds of other employees caught up in the scandal.</p><p>That is all well and good. I want those people fired, and prosecuted where appropriate. This sort of thing is never going to be quickly or easily resolved though. Entrenched cultural norms take a long time to change, and a rapid leadership swap just isn't going to fix everything.</p><p>The question is, what should I do about it?</p><p>Complaining on the internet is my first response of course, but should I delete all Blizzard games? Should I refuse to ever give them money again? I thought about it a lot and came to the conclusion that other game companies are often bad in similar ways. Decamping to one of their games isn't really helping anything. Awful treatment of women is extremely common in that industry. Most likely what I would be doing is supporting a game company that just hasn't been caught yet.</p><p>I think the thing I should focus on is not trying to punish Blizzard, but rather to create a community in WOW that has the values I support. I should speak up about sexism wherever I see it. I should refuse to accept it from the people around me. I should do this both in person and on forums that I frequent. This is something I have always done to an extent, but I should push it harder now that I know just how bad things are.</p><p>There are a lot of people whose response was 'Burn Blizzard to the ground'. I am not going that far. I want the leadership purged, and I want to see huge numbers of abusive people get fired. I am totally willing to accept slower content updates and worse response time as Blizzard sorts itself out and restructures. I want the games I love to be built by a company whose values I can get behind. That isn't true right now, but I have hopes that this will be the catalyst for it to be true in the future.</p>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-78921487333229498972021-06-17T23:22:00.002-07:002021-06-17T23:22:38.097-07:00A great mistake<p>The newest content patch for World of Warcraft is coming in 11 days, and I am looking forward to it a great deal. Partly this is because we desperately need new stuff, but part is that Blizzard is adding a broken new legendary item in for my class and spec, and they don't seem to realize how absurd it is. The community at large hasn't seemed to grasp it either, as most people seem to think it is decent but no big deal.</p><p>They are so wrong. This new item is called Divine Resonance (DR) and it is going to break things for paladins of the Kyrian covenant.</p><p>Here are the basics. A normal legendary item should be adding roughly 5% to your overall output. On single target that amounts to something like 300 damage per second. Healing per second is much more complicated, but it is reasonable to think of them as having similar value. My current legendaries add about 300 dps on single target, and as much as 500 dps on fights with many targets.</p><p>DR interacts with a 1 minute cooldown that I already have. After that 1 min cooldown is used, it casts a spell every 5 seconds for 30 seconds, so I get 6 casts. That spell does damage, generates holy power, and has an additional effect. First I will do the calculations for my damage spec, Retribution.</p><p>First, single target. For Retribution the spell that is cast is Judgement. That does 3325 damage directly. It also makes the target take 25% more damage from my big finisher. Sometimes that will overlap with other things, so it is probably only worth about 20% on my finisher, which is 1347 damage. It also provides 1 holy power to cast more finishers, which is worth about 20% of a finisher, which is another 1347 damage. That means on average each one of those hits is worth 6020 damage. I get 6 of those hits each minute for a total of 602 damage per second.</p><p>So on single target this legendary is worth double what other legendaries are. That is nuts. However, is it any good on multi target fights? I will assume 5 targets for now. The initial hit is still 3325, but the finisher bonus is significantly worse at 930. The holy power is better though, clocking in at 4140 damage. Thus DR is worth 840 dps on five targets. It isn't as much better on multi target, but it is still absolutely my best option by a huge margin.</p><p>Retribution</p><p><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> 1 target<span> 5 target</span></span><br /></p><p>Current<span> </span><span> 300<span> </span><span> </span><span> 500</span></span></p><p>DR<span> <span> </span><span> </span> 602<span> </span><span> </span><span> 840</span></span></p><p>Now to examine how this legendary works for tanking when I am Protection spec. This mechanic is quite a bit more challenging to model because Holy Power has multiple uses while tanking. I will go with my worst case estimates though, to be cautious. The spell that is cast by DR when I am Protection is Avenger's Shield (see Captain America) which hits up to 5 targets so as we add more targets the ability gains dramatically in efficacy. Also I heal for every damage dealt by it, so I get both offence and defence.</p><p>First, single target. Avenger's Shield does 1744 damage. It heals me for 1744. Also it gives me a holy power, which is worth 237 damage and 2576 healing. As such, it gives me a combined total of 630 dps, counting healing as dps. This doesn't even describe its full power though, as this also grants me significant defensive benefits that are extremely hard to quantify. I won't have to quantify them though, as DR is so busted that side benefits aren't even needed.</p><p>On five targets things get out of control. The base healing and damage increase by five times, as does the holy power damage. The holy power healing is unchanged. The total here is 2120 dps. This is off the charts. To put it in perspective, I have another legendary that I use most of the time that is purely relevant in AOE. It does 2370 dps on five targets and is nigh worthless on single target, plus all of its benefit is in damage with no defensive ability at all. Realistically I only use that because I have no other good options. If I was using a good all around choice I would be getting roughly 300 dps overall, similar to what I would get for my other spec.</p><p>Protection</p><p> 1 target 5 target<br /></p><p>Current 250 350</p><p>DR <span> </span><span> </span> 630 2120</p><p>That 2120 number is a huge, monstrous outlier. Now it should be noted that 5 targets is the optimal number for DR. If I chose any larger number of targets it wouldn't get much better, and if I chose less targets it falls off mostly linearly. Still, at any number of targets this is a ludicrous ability. My total output is roughly 6000 dps (again, counting healing and damage both), so 2120 is inappropriate. It is quite reasonable to model this as averaging 1000 dps over a whole dungeon, making it vastly more powerful than any legendary for any class.</p><p>What is funny is that these calculations above haven't even captured the whole problem. There is a new power for the Mikanikos soulbind that reduces the cooldown of the ability that does this, by as much as 33% on 5 targets. I will almost for sure be using that, which raises the 5 target effectiveness over 3000 dps, making it a 50% increase in throughput.</p><p>So here is the question: Should it be nerfed? There are two approaches to answering this. First, yes, it is silly overpowered, and should be brought into line. Second, Retribution and Protection paladins aren't used in *any* high end optimal raids or dungeon groups. None. They are trash tier. Clearly this will help, but I don't think it will actually result in them being overpowered overall. I suspect it will raise them from trash tier to respectable.</p><p>If you are a game designer and you make a huge mistake like this but the people who benefit from your mistake are still totally in line with other groups, should you fix it? Ideally of course you nerf this legendary but buff the specs that aren't working well, but Blizzard seems set on leaving my two specs as weak, so they aren't going that route.</p><p>I don't get to decide that they should buff me and nerf this absurd legendary. They should, but Blizzard isn't likely to listen to my plan. As such, I will use the thing and be totally busted and hope that they conclude that overall I am still fair, so it should sit as is.</p>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-28993375803702198652021-06-11T14:11:00.001-07:002021-06-11T14:11:12.193-07:00Race and species<p>I got an email from the creator of Gloomhaven about his new game Frosthaven. The email addressed a bunch of changes he is making in the new game that centre around cultural sensitivity, character choice, and race. He brought a consultant on board to teach him about how to write cultures well and avoid dumping on cultures not his own.</p><p>I like this idea. Gloomhaven was a tremendously fun game but it had some issues when it came to the way the players made choices. You had to side with the religious colonizers in the big cities against the native populations, for example, if you wanted to play the game. You also got stuck massacreing children in scenario 3, which a lot of people weren't on board with.</p><p>Naturally many people were extremely angry about this and demanded refunds. The idea of treating native groups as people rather than obstacles or resources to be exploited is not a comfortable one for a lot of people. It would make them question the righteousness of their ancestors, after all.</p><p>I am glad to see a creator take a stand though. I am sure it cost him many sales of Frosthaven, but taking a public stance against colonialism and racism is a good thing.</p><p>One thing in his email of particular interest to me was talk about the way that we reference different groups in fantasy settings. The standard method is to call dwarves, humans, elves, etc. races instead of species or some other word. This is odd though, since clearly dwarves and humans are not simply races - their differences are not just minor and cosmetic. They can't interbreed and have wildly varying abilities. Species is clearly a much more accurate descriptor, and yet it is not the one we use typically. One potential issue with using the word race in this way is that it reinforces the idea that races of humans are drastically different in temperament, ability, and potential from one another. Human races are not different in these ways, and throughout history when people try to make the argument that they are this different it is to justify atrocities and position some races as subhuman.</p><p>In DnD and many other settings some different species can produce offspring together, such as elves and humans producing half elves. This is similar to the real world though, where ligers (lion / tiger mixes) actually do exist. Lions and tigers are still different species though.</p><p>This brings me to the way I wrote my own fantasy setting. I used the word race when I wrote it without thinking about it too much - it was just the standard way of talking. In my world the different species come from totally different sources as each was created by a god like entity with a particular purpose in mind. Clearly species is a more accurate way of referring to them. Interbreeding is possible in a limited way - humans can interbreed with any other species, but the children are always human. (Humans were created to embody Growth, which is why this is the case.)</p><p>The most obvious problem with calling fantasy groups races instead of species is when one race is the BAD PEOPLE and they happen to have dark skin while the group with light skin is GOOD PEOPLE. Orcs and elves are like this in DnD, and the recent version has moved away from it, for good reason. I stayed away from that trope, and gave each group different priorities and tendencies that arise from their origin, none of which is just 'This one is evil, so you can kill them without worry.'</p><p>When I look at the species in my world the ones I love to hate the most are dwarves. They are from Tradition and they value conformity, continuity, obedience, deference to authority, and sanctity. I want them to die in a fire. However, lots of people in the real world wouldn't see this as evil at all, and in fact they love those ideals. Dwarves are the group I personally identify with the least, but they definitely aren't a stand in for evil.</p><p>On the other hand, gnomes in my world are hippie free love anarchist vegetarians. I think they are great, but they would certainly be the villains for some folks, especially the MAGA types.</p><p>Overall I am happy with my design for the species in my world. They are varied and none is simply branded as Team Bad. However, species is a better word for these groups because it is both more accurate and also avoids the problems spilling over from the way we talk about race in the real world.</p><p>I guess I have some editing to do.</p>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-12442060474664588492021-05-25T17:05:00.004-07:002021-05-25T17:05:42.139-07:00Hot dates with gamers<p>My WOW guild is recruiting. We need a bunch of bodies to fill the roster for when new content arrives, and it is going to be tricky to make that happen. Primarily this is a problem because we stopped raiding, and getting new applicants when you aren't raiding is .... rough.</p><p>But this won't be a problem because the guild tapped me to help out with recruiting. Surely I can beat the odds, right?</p><p>This seems to be the way it goes. Every guild I get into lets me into raids to do damage because they need a body, they realize I am good and I become a regular, and then eventually I end up being a main tank because some other tank quits and there I am, ready to step in.</p><p>Once I become a main tank I eventually end up being asked to be an officer. The guild / raider relationship escalator seems inescapable for me.</p><p>The first thing I noticed when I started doing work on the recruitment problem is how recruiting for a WOW guild is just like a dating website and people all make exactly the same mistakes in both situations. Awhile ago I wrote a blog post about how people's dating profiles were garbage because they tried to be too generic and inoffensive. Sure, you can get a lot of first dates by being nice and friendly and asking for a partner who is kind and smart and funny, but those first dates are going to be trash because you haven't weeded out all the people you hate. You have to put in tons of dealbreakers like religion, politics, and bad habits. This will make sure that when you do end up on first dates you have a much better chance to actually like your date.</p><p>WOW guilds are the same. They all talk about their friendly atmosphere, how they want everyone to feel at home, and request people who are knowledgeable and prompt.</p><p>Useless. Nobody recruits by saying "We won't make you feel at home, we are a bunch of assholes, and we want to recruit idiots who never show up." If nobody would ever say the opposite of what you are saying, then what you are saying is pointless. It is exactly the same as "I like travel and good food." on a dating profile in that it rules nobody out and accomplishes nothing in terms of telling people what you actually want.</p><p>The raiders are no better. They are all hardworking, efficient, easygoing people, according to their advertisements. BOOOOORRRRRRIIIIINGGG.</p><p>The one thing the two groups can use to sort each other is raid times. It works out exactly like dating sites use location - you have to match that, or nothing happens. If you are in Hong Kong it doesn't matter how great you are, we aren't dating. If you raid while I am asleep, we aren't a raiding team.</p><p>I want to make our advertisement actually good. We are on a huge server with hundreds of raiding guilds, so there is no shortage of applicants. The trick is figuring out how to stand out from the crowd, and you don't do that by putting down a bunch of generically 'nice' statements and raid times and hoping. However, at this point my guild leader made it clear that she doesn't want me going off and being aggressive in our guild advertisements. I am sure that I could get great people doing it my way, but I am not the one in charge, so for the moment I have to do it her way.</p><p>The trick, I think, is that I need to be good at recruiting, make it clear I can get the job done, and then push to get let off the leash. When you first get handed responsibility you often have to put in that time to make it clear you can follow instructions and do it the normal way so that you can earn the trust to do something more imaginative. For now I will write a mostly normal recruiting post, but in the back of my head I will be creating the real one, the one I want to use when I finally get to do it my way.</p><p>Also, if you happen to want to raid mythic in WOW, hit me up!</p>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-50920470394946175052021-05-18T13:57:00.003-07:002021-05-18T13:57:38.833-07:00Temporarily dead<p>Sometimes being right sucks.</p><p>A couple of times over the past six months I made the prediction that my guild in WOW would not make it to the end of the current raid, Castle Nathria. We are a middle of the road guild and only raid six hours a week, the combination of which limits our ability to kill stuff. In previous tiers there were gradual power gain systems that kept the guild on an upward track, but this expansion those systems didn't exist. As such we ended up killing 7 of 10 bosses on the highest difficulty level and then packing it in until the next tier of content arrives.</p><p>I was pretty sure exactly this thing would happen. I think a lot of the folks in the guild are disappointed, but you can tell when things are going downhill and you have to accept that it is coming. We had been dying to boss #7 for several weeks and we were pulling in random people from the group finder or lower tier people in the guild just to get enough bodies to raid. Combine that with a lot of the core people feeling burnt out and anyone could see that we couldn't continue. The guild leader told us we had one more week of attempts and then we would quit, but just before our time ran out we finally killed it.</p><p>Everyone breathed a sigh of relief that we didn't have to give up in despair after 170 wipes, and mostly everyone logged off and isn't coming back until new stuff is out.</p><p>I am entirely okay with this. For me raiding is about community and striving against a challenge, not so much about killing any particular boss.</p><p>Still, this outlines a real challenge in game design for Blizzard. People complain a lot about gradual power gain systems that rely on players constantly doing activities in game to keep up with them. They don't like the idea that they *have* to keep doing stuff to maintain maximum player power. Plus many of the top players complain that Blizzard lets the casuals (like me) kill stuff by handing out power increases instead of just saying 'git gud nub'.</p><p>On the other hand, players love gradually improving their results. Let the players beat everything on day 1 and the players will be upset and leave - make it so they can't beat anything and they will quit that game too. Set it up so that they slowly improve enough to defeat things that formerly were impossible, and you have an experience that people will stick with forever.</p><p>It does seem kind of odd that people would feel so good about challenges becoming consistently easier to surmount so that they can get past them without any self improvement, but that does seem to be the way it works.</p><p>As far as I can tell the next tier of content is going to be the same as this one. There will be many challenges, and we will get better gear to help us overcome them, but there will not be any big, important gradual power increases outside of that. It seems likely to me that my guild will be in the same place six months from now - most of the way through the new content, but burnout, frustration, and lack of skill will prevent us from finishing it up.</p><p>I don't care much if we kill the final boss or not. No big deal to me.</p><p>What is a big deal is culture. I like these people, both socially and as people to play a game with. Each guild has different ways of talking, different jokes that are okay, and different levels of dedication. Finding a place that matches you in these regards is far more important than any boss kill, to me. After all, nobody ever got happy by killing one more boss. They do get happy by finding a peer group that brings them joy though, and this is what I found with this group.</p><p>And heck, maybe they will surprise me with greater skill and success than before.</p>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-16684921177168036302021-04-22T12:11:00.003-07:002021-04-22T12:11:57.234-07:00Ethics in video games journalism<p>A new tier of content is coming out in WOW, and with it comes a wave of terrible reporting designed to leverage outrage for clicks. Outrage journalism has been around forever, but I think the way our media consumption is structured these days amplifies it.</p><p>Given that it shouldn't be any surprise that when people talk about new content in video games they try to make things sound EXTREMELY BAD and VERY SERIOUS no matter what the thing actually is. I should be expecting this, but apparently I am not entirely jaded yet.</p><p>Recently I saw a perfect example of this when Preach Gaming was reporting on something on the public test realm for the new patch. </p><p>Characters have legendary equipment. In the new patch we were all expecting to be able to upgrade that equipment, and that is the case. The way this will work is when you go to the new zone you will be able to do quests that award tokens, and with enough tokens you can upgrade your gear. You won't be able to do it all that quickly, because these tokens are limited by how many quests appear each day. I would expect it would take a couple weeks to upgrade a legendary piece, but we don't know for certain yet. The tokens can be sold on the auction hall too, if people are so inclined.</p><p>This news is not outrageous, or even exciting. It is precisely what we would expect. However, the headline was that you will have to be rich to upgrade your gear in the new patch, because wallet warriors will buy all the tokens and leave the poor people to rot.</p><p>Outrage! Anger! Why would blizzard only let rich people do things!</p><p>Which is of course nonsense. The vast majority of the playerbase won't use the auction hall at all for this, and will just do quests to get their upgrades over the course of a few weeks. If you are broke and don't want to pay any money for your upgrades.... then don't. I certainly won't be doing so, and I have a bunch of gold saved up.</p><p>Will there be rich people blowing giant wads of cash on day 1 to upgrade gear? Yeah, I expect so, but so what? You don't need to beat everyone in the world to the punch, just wait a couple weeks and get your stuff at the same rate everyone else does. Unless you are one of the elite few pushing for world first, it just doesn't matter to you that someone else is buying a tiny bit of power for a few weeks until the world catches up.</p><p>Trouble is, saying "New system in the patch is fine, and pretty much expected. Everyone will get their stuff by playing the game normally for a little while." generates no outrage, no clicks, no engagement. It is true and boring. "Poor people will be cut out of the game and have no fun." gets a lot of people wound up, so creators see an incentive to put out that kind of content.</p><p>It is all kinds of sad. Blizzard does make mistakes, no question. Calling them out on those mistakes is fine. But if you are ranting and frothing about every damn little thing, you have to admit that you aren't actually interested in game mechanics - you are interested in villifying someone in a desperate attempt to make yourself seem more relevant and popular. You are trying to find meaning (and profit) in being part of a mob that is intent on destruction for destruction's sake. Mobs typically do proclaim that they are trying to save something sacred, but once they get going that is rarely what keeps them moving.</p><p>If you really are interested in how rich people oppress the poor, the real world has no end of examples. You don't have to make things up. But let's be real here, people who thrive on outrage reporting aren't looking for justice; they are looking for an angle to wind up their audience with lies.</p>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-27469565453109647502021-03-23T14:25:00.002-07:002021-03-23T14:25:57.851-07:00Read my lips: Gradual power gainI have said for awhile now that the WOW Shadowlands expansion has a problem with its raid. The issue doesn't spring from the raid itself though, but rather the lack of gradual power scaling in the expansion as a whole. Previous expansions had you gain power through both gear and other systems, and in Shadowlands people simply aren't gaining power through other systems, so midrange guilds like mine are struggling to kill later bosses.<div><br /></div><div>Blizzard apparently agrees with me. They have metrics about how many guilds are killing what bosses on what schedule, and they clearly are finding that people are getting brickwalled too much. Every week they push out another big nerf to a raid encounter to continually make things easier so we can keep on progressing. Sometimes they just flat out lower boss health, sometimes they tweak damage numbers, and sometimes they outright change mechanics.</div><div><br /></div><div>I agree that they should do this, given that they put themselves into a bad situation. There are two outcomes at this point - no changes, and guilds get stuck and quit, or keep on nerfing things so we can keep going. Clearly the second way is better for subscription numbers, and also for fun.</div><div><br /></div><div>However, Blizzard put themselves in this stupid situation and they need to stop it from happening in the next tier.</div><div><br /></div><div>It sucks to constantly feel like your practice doesn't matter, and the best way to progress would simply be to wait for a month till the fights are easier. It isn't a good feeling at all to know that killing bosses isn't a matter of slowly getting good enough to do it, but rather a waiting game until Blizzard decides it is time to nerf the boss. All of that is ASS.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the next tier they need to implement something to stop this nonsense of constant nerfs. In previous xpacs they had awful grinds holding back this slow power gain, but that has its own problems. People do not like feeling like they have to play trivial content 14 hours a day to get better in order to not let their guilds down.</div><div><br /></div><div>The solution is simple. Give us a weekly quest that takes 15 mins and gives us 1% more damage. Make sure people who show up late or miss weeks can make those weeks up and catch up to the current cap. The top tier guilds will be mostly unaffected, and midtier guilds like mine will slowly overpower content. We will do it at our own pace, and we will know that practice matters a lot because 1% more isn't a huge deal each week. By the end of the tier we will end up with 30% more damage though, and that will be plenty for us to kill everything.</div><div><br /></div><div>We need slow power gain. Blizzard's constant nerfing means they know that we need this. All that remains is for them to listen to me and implement it. </div><div><br /></div><div>Hopefully they do it right.</div>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-8082919261468743552021-02-26T13:31:00.002-08:002021-02-26T13:31:41.836-08:00I am not that goodThe World of Warcraft Shadowlands expansion is doing very well. Blizzard has confirmed that subscriptions are higher now than they have been in many years, and the general reception for the expansion has been positive compared to other expansions. The numbers bear this out too - Normal and Heroic raiding participation is way up, and vastly more guilds are killing bosses now than were doing so in the last couple expansions. It isn't just raiding though, as participation in all endgame content has gone way up in terms of raw numbers.<div><br /></div><div>There is one place where the numbers are lower though, and that is the peak of raiding challenge, Mythic difficulty. Numbers are down compared to last expansion, and I am confident they will get much worse as time goes on.</div><div><br /></div><div>The reason for this is the lack of a power grind in Shadowlands. In previous xpacs people got more powerful just by playing a lot and this let them overcome challenges by virtue of slow power inflation. Shadowlands has little in the way of power inflation compared to earlier times, and this means that guilds are struggling to make the numbers checks in Mythic raiding. I talked about this earlier when the first guilds were killing Mythic bosses, and now the numbers have borne out my projections. The top guilds are still able to clear raids in a couple weeks just like before, but middling guilds like mine are struggling. We are used to slow power inflation letting us beat content eventually, but with no more power inflation on the horizon we are going to have huge problems beating the harder bosses.</div><div><br /></div><div>Currently we have downed 4 Mythic bosses. We will get more so long as we keep at it, but the struggle is going to be real. It is especially difficult because these folks are used to a progression pattern where they beat all the stuff, just not that quickly. Perfectly fine for people who raid 6 hours a week and are fairly relaxed about it. A shift into being a guild that doesn't beat all the stuff will be tough to swallow, even if it is due to larger trends that have little to do with how we play. Just because other guilds are having the same struggles doesn't mean we are going to be happy about this.</div><div><br /></div><div>I like the raiding I am doing, and I intend to keep blasting away at it. If we don't kill all the stuff I am totally okay with that. I like practicing and playing on challenging content and eventually getting some kills, but I am not especially hung up on any particular goal. This isn't a big problem for me personally.</div><div><br /></div><div>Still, I don't quite know how to feel about it. Not having the pressure to constantly grind away to get those incremental benefits is a positive, but I actually love the overall system of gradual improvements in numbers combining with gradual improvements in execution leading to victories. I am glad to not have that feelings that I have to play all the time doing stuff that is boring... but getting brick walled with no way to progress out of it is not great.</div><div><br /></div><div>The biggest advantage to gradual power inflation is the social flexibility it grants you. If you get stopped by a boss you can't quite do enough damage to beat, you can either boot weaker players from your group to get past it, or you can wait until inflation gets you over the hump. Being able to keep playing with people who are fun to play with but who aren't quite there in terms of numbers is great. In the scenario where we stop progressing in terms of numbers we may well end up in a spot where we either have to accept that we can no longer accomplish new goals or be super mercenary about who plays with us. </div><div><br /></div><div>Both of those options suck. I don't want to boot good people over 5% performance. I also don't want to just stop having new things to do.</div><div><br /></div><div>This isn't some theoretical thing either. Right now I have item level 222. I am going to hit a hard cap at 226, and likely won't quite make it there. That is, I can expect to do 5% more damage from gear eventually. There is nothing else that will improve my abilities. If we are 6% off from killing a boss, that boss isn't going to die. We have finished all the grinds the game has offered us, and I don't think it is enough.</div><div><br /></div><div>I don't want another infinite grind where I am offered the chance to play 14 hours a day slowly getting a number bigger. Yuck. I just want a thing I can do every week to get myself something quite small. Just 1% more output would be plenty, since that means by the time new content arrives I will be doing 12% more than I am right now, which should be sufficient to beat the entire raid.</div><div><br /></div><div>People like slowly getting to their goals. They like seeing new things, and constant, gradual progress. We are happiest not when we get it all at once, nor when we get nothing, but rather when we get a string of victories over time. Now it just remains for Blizzard to make that happen.</div>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-74242517536417397082021-02-17T23:15:00.002-08:002021-02-17T23:15:10.124-08:00Giving away lootIn the WOW Shadowlands expansion loot is contentious. Blizzard decided to dramatically cut back the loot awarded in this xpac, and while I am generally happy with the new pace the changes have not been particularly popular. The major complaint from where I sit is that by far the best way for me to get better gear was to do pvp.<div><br /></div><div>I don't like pvp much, especially serious pvp.</div><div><br /></div><div>But I do like being the best I can be for when I am doing raiding and dungeons, so I did some pvp to get gear. A system where players who want to be optimal absolutely have to play one game mode in order to get loot for other games modes (which do drop loot of their own, just not enough) is flawed. I think there should be benefits for people who do multiple types of content at a high level, but each content mode needs its own comparable advancement path.</div><div><br /></div><div>Some numbers. First, everyone gets loot two ways. First, you can get loot as you do content during the week. Second, you can get loot in your vault at the start of each new week. The vault has many options, but you can only get one item from it no matter how much content you do. Doing more content just gets you more choice. </div><div><br /></div><div>Imagine you are a Heroic raiding type of person. Your raids drop item level 213 gear, and your weekly vault awards 213 gear. If you did pvp at a similar level you get 213 gear during the week, and 213 options in your vault. So far, so good.</div><div><br /></div><div>However, that same person is probably doing dungeons at level 12, which gives them 203 loot from each dungeon, and 220 loot in their vault.</div><div><br /></div><div>This leads to some bizarre situations. If you are doing level 12 dungeons you probably don't need level 203 gear, it is already obsolete. As such, dungeons don't give you anything except a shot at much superior gear at the end of the week. This doesn't fit with the other modes, but I do understand where it came from. Dungeons can be run over and over, and if they awarded 213 gear from every level 12 dungeon, it would be too easy to fully gear up.</div><div><br /></div><div>This also means that everyone has to do dungeons because it gives the absolute best stuff in the vault. That is, this happens up to a point. Gear caps out at 226, but from raids and pvp you can get 226 both in the vault and from doing content. Dungeon gear caps at 226 from the vault, but the stuff from every dungeon caps at 210. Once you reach this cap you are stuck, and running dungeons no longer awards loot that matters. That isn't good, and it meant that people like me ended up doing pvp because no matter how good I am at dungeons, the loot is trash and if I want to be my best self I should go do pvp so I can raid and do dungeons.</div><div><br /></div><div>I hate being shovelled into content I don't like in order to do content I do like. I could just ignore it of couse, but the fact is that my gear makes a huge difference to which groups I can get into and what things I can do. Sitting and waiting for the vault each week when I could be improving myself is not how I want to play.</div><div><br /></div><div>Blizzard has developed a solution for this. It is a bit kludgy, but it does address the problem to some extent. Their idea is that you will be able to get badges in dungeons, and you trade in those badges to upgrade your dungeon loot. At the top level you will be able to upgrade loot to 220. This is worse than pvp and raiding, but it is a big improvement over what we had before.</div><div><br /></div><div>Trouble is, 220 is still less than 226, which means dungeon loot is going to be worse than everything else. This grants an upgrade path for dungeoneers, which I like, but I don't see a reason for it to stop short. Dungeons scale infinitely, so at the highest levels they are monstrously difficult. Raiding at the highest level is hard, but a level 30 dungeon is actually impossible. You can pick some dungeon level below that which is ludicrously difficult and gate the gear behind that. There is no worry about giving it away too easily.</div><div><br /></div><div>There is one catch though. When you are getting gear from raids, that gear is random. Most of the time it has fixed stats, but every so often you get a piece that has an extra on it. These bonus abilities don't increase damage or healing directly, but they help a bit. However, since all the gear you get from raiding is random, if your Bracers of Beatdown drop, you put them on whether or not they have that extra bonus on them. However, if you are running dungeons you can run a crapton of them looking for Pauldrons of Smacking that *also* have that extra bonus. They will start at a low level, but then you can upgrade them to level 220. This means that people upgrading dungeon gear will consistently have extra bonuses on their gear, so it is a little better than the level 220 it appears.</div><div><br /></div><div>That extra bonus isn't enough. To give a proper comparison, if you were in full 220 gear with every piece with a small bonus, and someone else was in full 226 gear with no bonuses, the 226 character does about 9% more damage and has 6% more health.</div><div><br /></div><div>The 220 character gets to move 20% faster, regain 10% of their damage dealt as healing, and negate 12% of all area of effect damage they take. The 226 character is better, and realistically they will get some extra bonuses on their gear, just not as many, but those extra things make quite a difference. Of course an actual character is going to have a mix of those things, but this gives some context for what kind of tradeoff we are making.</div><div><br /></div><div>Other people mostly scoff at extra bonuses on gear. They don't care much about regaining health or speed. I like those extra bonuses a lot! I love being fast, and a lot of the time I would happily trade 6 levels on my gear for an additional 5% movement speed. I know I am in the minority in this, but I am confident in my calculation.</div><div><br /></div><div>People ignore things like speed because it doesn't show up in a simulator.</div><div><br /></div><div>But in simulators you always live to the end of the fight, and in real game play being slow means you die to stupid stuff sometimes.</div><div><br /></div><div>In any case, much as I might nitpick this, it is at least a step in the right direction. Letting everyone play their own form of content and get geared up doing so is a great goal, and I don't mind at all if doing multiple forms gives an edge - I just want that edge to be smaller than it is.</div>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-55994802346046962612021-01-18T23:08:00.001-08:002021-01-18T23:08:06.924-08:00Swords are bad, get a wandIn WOW there is always a struggle to balance melee and ranged damage dealers. Baseline ranged have a huge advantage that they can attack from all kinds of places while melee are pinned near the enemies. In theory this is balanced by melee having a better toolkit of survival and disruption abilities, and this works pretty well in 5 person dungeons and pvp. It doesn't work that well in big raids.<div><br /></div><div>This is being a serious problem right now in the Castle Nathria raid. My guild, like many other guilds, has realized that we have way too many melee. There are a lot of fights where you have to run away from the boss for awhile and stand around and this is awful for melee and perfectly fine for ranged. We aren't melee heavy in theory - our damage is split roughly even melee/ranged - but that split is terrible for the raid we are doing.</div><div><br /></div><div>It doesn't hurt that most of the top damage dealers in terms of raw numbers are ranged, so a melee has to be exceptional to get a spot even on fights where they aren't unduly punished.</div><div><br /></div><div>I am playing a melee character.</div><div><br /></div><div>I am not super worried about being booted from the raid team because I am the top damage dealer for the raid about half the time and always finish top 4. They are going to keep me around because at our level you still see large variance in performance within a spec, and I consistently deliver.</div><div><br /></div><div>But the other melee players are probably feeling worried, and their worry is justified. </div><div><br /></div><div>I don't have any good answers for them either. Swapping classes to a ranged class is possible, but catching back up isn't fast and most people don't want to swap. If we can't win with the composition we have then management is faced with the terrible prospect of recruiting ranged players and booting melee players, including people who have been around awhile.</div><div><br /></div><div>No easy answers.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is also going to compound the problem I talked about last time. This xpac has no infinite grind to increase player power. That feels good in a way, because we don't feel obligated to grind. However, it has the issue that guilds like mine are in bad shape. We have good players, but we will probably need some kind of slow power gain to actually beat the entire raid. It is made worse by the fact that we have what should be a normal mix of melee and ranged, but is bad right now. Top guilds just force people to reroll or recruit whoever they need. We don't do that.</div><div><br /></div><div>I was looking into some options for how I could fix this by respeccing out of a melee role. I don't want to play a holy paladin healer, as I haven't done that in most of a decade. That would have helped us a little. I investigated playing a prot paladin healer and I think it might actually be pretty good. Nobody in top guilds is running a tank spec player doing full heals, but I always look for these weird spots to shine and I am a believer that this could be a good strategy.</div><div><br /></div><div>Protection paladins have good throughput. My main heal is one I build up by attacking, and then BOOM it drops a huge heal. I can hit it about every 5 seconds for 21500 healing (if I am targetting someone at half health), which also puts a 4000 point shield on me. 4000 healing/sec is not enough to be a proper healer, especially because I don't bring big raidwide healing cooldowns. However, being essentially invincible, healing for 4000/sec, and also delivering 2000 damage/sec is a good set of things to do. I also have the advantage that if a tank ever dies I just step in and start tanking no problem. I am slightly squishier in my weird healing spec but only slightly, so me stepping in to tank for strategy (or to recover from calamity) is a fine thing.</div><div><br /></div><div>Mostly people don't want me to try weird stuff like this. They go with what normal raid groups do. However, I think in this case it would actually be quite strong in many fights. Sometimes you need exactly 4 healers to get through a fight, in which case this build of mine is bad, but sometimes you need 4.5 healers and I can be an excellent .5 of a healer.</div><div><br /></div><div>So far nobody has decided that we need to get rid of melee badly enough to get me to heal as a tank. I can't decide if I should wish that it would get that bad so I can try my crazy thing, or if I should wish that things just work.</div>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-43116458712265724592021-01-12T17:00:00.003-08:002021-01-12T17:00:32.242-08:00The consequence of no grindMy guild just finished up the current WOW raid on heroic mode. We are now ready to start working on mythic. This is slower than the group is used to, but that is explained by the raid being harder than expected. I like that, and I am perfectly content with slightly slower progression. In the previous expansion I landed in the middle of a patch and didn't get to experience most progression. Now I get to see the whole thing start to finish, which is great.<div><br /></div><div>However, we have some problems. Castle Nathria is a tough raid. One of the hardest start of xpac raids ever. The absolute top guilds cleared it in 8 days or so, which isn't unusual, but I am concerned for middling guilds like mine. In previous expansions there were mechanics to let weaker guilds gradually beat extremely hard content. Initially Blizzard just put in % bonuses, but those didn't feel good. Lately they have been adding in slow grinds that let players gradually get more powerful so the weaker players can slowly overpower difficult content without feeling like it was handed to them. In the previous raid tier we had Corruption, which increased my damage by about 40%. This allowed me to put out sufficient numbers to do content that the best guilds beat without that bonus.</div><div><br /></div><div>This expansion we don't have those systems that slowly power us up. There are a few small things like sockets from Venari, additional conduits, and gradual gear increases, but if the best players in the world beat the content at 220 item level, and my guild gradually gears up until we are fighting the bosses at 226 item level, we are only getting an 8% increase over them. Even with sockets and conduits we are still only going to be 15% better than them in raw numbers.</div><div><br /></div><div>That won't be enough. We have good players, and some middling players, but the absolute best in the world are more than 15% better than us, especially when you consider that they can stack classes to have any composition they want while we simply have to run with the group that we have. Given their class stacking options we might well only have a 10% advantage by the time we arrive at the final boss.</div><div><br /></div><div>It seems entirely possible that we will simply be flat out unable to defeat the mythic raid this tier. It won't be just us, either - any guild that is more than 10% worse than the best in the world isn't going to be able to win.</div><div><br /></div><div>I get why Blizzard did this. They wanted to get away from infinite grinds where players felt obligated to play forever for marginal increases to power. They wanted to just make the game about getting your gear and then being able to log off for the week if you want to. I get that, and I don't disagree.</div><div><br /></div><div>But the consequence is that if the raid is extremely hard for the best, then the pretty good cannot win, ever.</div><div><br /></div><div>If we can't beat the final boss before the next raid tier arrives, that isn't a disaster. I will just keep on practicing to beat whatever it is we can beat. Still, I bet there will be a massive outcry about this once other people realize what is happening. They haven't seen it yet because they are used to beating bosses a couple months after the cutting edge people do. When they finally realize they cannot do so, then a reckoning will come.</div><div><br /></div><div>It turns out that even though people complained about the infinite grinds those infinite grinds had a purpose. Getting rid of them has consequences that we will have to grapple with, whether or not this is a net positive change in general.</div>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-45467201035319965282020-12-28T17:39:00.002-08:002020-12-28T17:39:12.283-08:00The great failure<p>Shadowlands has been by and large a strong expansion for WOW. In particular I commend Torghast and the first raid as being especially fun. There is one thing that stands out as being a horribly designed disaster though: The new mission table.</p><p>I like the idea of recruiting heroes and sending them out on missions. Ever since this mechanic appeared in Warlords of Draenor I have been a fan. It made me feel less like an errand boy delivering goods and more like an important leader, which is appropriate considering the lore and history of the world. Each expansion has brought a new implementation of the mission table, and this new one is the first catastrophic failure.</p><p>It looked good at first glance. Heroes all have unique abilities, and positioning matters since each side has a front row and a back row. Some units attack in a cone, or attack the furthest away unit, or defend their teammates. In theory this seemed like it could be a deep tactical subgame for WOW.</p><p>In practice it is a pure numbers grind, and the numbers are rubbish.</p><p>Attacking targets in the back row *seems* like it is a way to take out casters. However, because all of your units bash into the front line and the back line has plenty of health, you want every attack to smash into the same enemy in the front. Attacking back line enemies is useless. Units have all kinds of special abilities but they can simply be summed up by figuring out their damage per round and ignoring any unique traits. All you do with most covenants is fill up your ranks with random heroes and make sure your level is high enough to plow through the enemies. Strategic decisions are nearly irrelevant to the outcome. It simply doesn't matter that enemies have a cone attack, or a bleed, or a heal. You deal with every threat the same way.</p><p>So the system is a complete failure when it comes to delivering on its obvious promise of strategy. How does it do otherwise? Since there isn't any strategy that matters, you would imagine it would be trivial to balance at least.</p><p>Unfortunately the balance is completely busted. The Night Fae have troops that permanently reduce enemy damage done by 20%. You put four of those in a group with a healer and they can beat any mission. The rest of your heroes don't matter, you just send out that one comp and it beats everything. The game has challenging plot missions and as you do them the level of the missions you face rises. After awhile of smashing everything with your broken comp none of your other heroes can beat anything and they are utterly worthless. You have level 30 heroes going up against level 50 missions and they are helpless. </p><p>The Night Fae situation is a disaster because of one stupidly overpowered ability.</p><p>Kyrian, on the other hand, has troops that are utter garbage. Instead of 'all enemies do 20% less damage, stacking', the Kyrian troops do 'a few allies take 10% less damage, not stacking'. The Kyrian don't have any powerful way to do anything, and their heroes are weak. If I want to beat a level 30 mission as Kyrian, I will need to slowly grind my way up to level 40 to even stand a chance, and I might need be level 50. Those level 30 missions can be beaten by Night Fae at level 15 without any difficulty.</p><p>Simply put, they completely screwed up the numbers. Many heroes are nigh worthless, and there are some outrageously broken ones. That would be fine if every covenant had a mix of both, but they don't. If you are Night Fae you get tons of materials, cash, mounts, pets, and other rewards. Kyrian get basically nothing. Both of these situations are wretched.</p><p>This basically comes down to the system having some cool ideas at the outset, and the numbers being written in 5 minutes by some intern. I could easily take the ideas presented in the system and make numbers that would make sense and be enjoyable for players. What players want is a way to level up heroes, defeat missions that seem appropriately challenging, and eventually earn the big rewards. They don't want to grind endlessly for seemingly nothing, and they don't want to instantly crush all opposition without thought or creativity.</p><p>The mission table is a small part of the game admittedly. This isn't wrecking it for everyone. Still, covenant choice is not supposed to work out this way, and it is clear that the subgame was incompetently built. It is so messed up though that I don't expect any fixes soon. My guess is they will just write it off entirely until a big update happens in six months and then rebuild it from scratch. It is a black mark on their record, no doubt, because this isn't some tricky thing that is tough to notice. Anyone who played it through would have seen how wretched it is, and if they didn't then either there was no testing or the testing was as badly done as the original design.</p>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-70668904650938289812020-12-14T15:49:00.006-08:002020-12-14T15:49:32.925-08:00Let them play<p><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In game communities there is a lot of judgement about how other people choose to play games. The casuals deride the hardcore players as sweaty neckbeards with no life, and the hardcore players mock the filthy casuals and their lack of skills and dedication.</span></span></p><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I got hit with a wave of this over the past few weeks as I have been carrying people through the Torghast dungeon in WOW. Torghast drops important resources for crafting legendary gear and people want their shiny loot, so off to Torghast they go. Even though most people seem to enjoy it, they often don't enjoy how challenging it can be. They could practice harder and git gud, but many of them choose instead to pay me large sums of gold to beat the dungeon for them instead.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I have no problem with this. </span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Partly this is because it is making me rich, naturally, but also I just don't see the issue. It doesn't matter to me if they could get better by themselves or if they just can't do it. It doesn't matter to me if they are doing easy content where they don't 'need' the legendary anyway. They like playing the game, they want to get more powerful, and this content is being a struggle. They would rather pay so that the experience they can have is one where some tough dwarf paladin tanks all the monsters while they shoot at them. I would rather have the experience of having 50,000 more gold, and I don't mind being a tough dwarf paladin tanking all the monsters.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Everybody wins!</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But people get really upset. When they see my advertisements I get lots of hateful whispers with people yelling at me to get out of Looking For Group chat, or making unwarranted assumptions about my hygiene, age, marital status, and general attractiveness.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When I advertise in Torghast chat I get people yelling about how anyone who can't do the content themselves is garbage, and how they should never ever pay for a carry. One conversation went something like this:</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Me: Selling Torghast carries for 50k gold.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Random person: Anyone who can't do this themselves is awful. They should quit WOW. How can they be this bad? If they need a carry, they should join my group, I will do it for free. It is trivial!</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I found it kind of funny. Even if a weak player heard it, would they really want to join a group with an entitled asshat who is busy telling them how wretched they are? Much better to pay 50,000 gold to run with someone who is helpful and non judgemental, I think.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I don't understand that desperate desire to trash talk people who play differently. Their progress isn't affecting your progress, and if they can't do Torghast themselves they aren't going to be a high ranked player in any format. All they are is just one more random person trying to make numbers go up and hopefully enjoying the process. Just accept that one person's fun is not another person's fun and move on.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There is nothing to be gained by trying to push other people down to make yourself feel higher. If you want to feel good, find a serious challenge, work hard, and overcome it. Other people not required.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Except when those people are carrying you through dungeons for large sums of cash, I guess. Those people you do need.</span></div>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-43322186924470117682020-12-13T13:10:00.000-08:002020-12-13T13:10:13.167-08:00Making the money<p>The economy of WOW in Shadowlands has not been good to me. When SL launched a lot of people talked about how Blizzard was making crafting powerful and important again because legendary items were going to require crafters in order to be made. If you want a legendary ring you need a jewelcrafter, a legendary plate helm requires a blacksmith, etc. These legendary pieces have 4 levels, and in order to learn to craft a level 2 you need to make 15 level 1s. Then 15 level 2 pieces to learn 3, and 15 3s to learn 4. These recipes cost a *lot* of gold to make. For example, to get to max level making rings I will have to spend 1 million gold on materials.</p><p>This certainly makes crafting important, but it doesn't end up being good for crafters most of the time. The trouble is that the endgame of this system is always degenerate. Either you end up with only a tiny number of crafters who make the huge investment to get to max level and they get to gouge the server savagely, or you end up with a ton of people going broke trying to get there and then none of them can make back their investment at all and they all lose a truckload of money.</p><p>Fundamentally the issue is that one crafter can handily supply the entire server with gear. The *only* incentive to being the second crafter in the market is to undercut other people. You cannot increase supply or produce alternatives, you can only provide competition. Unfortunately for every crafter who actually reaches level 4 there are 45 low level items to sell off, and there are not nearly enough buyers for that. Most people only need one or two legendaries, and they can buy rings, necklaces, cloaks, and eight different armor slots. All those crafters have way too much stock and not nearly enough customers.</p><p>A far better model for a crafting skill is alchemy. You can make potions and such, like everyone can, but if you level up a particular reputation you get a daily cooldown to make a valuable resource. Because it is only once a day you can't supply the whole server, so new people entering that market still have something to contribute.</p><p>All the legendary crafting doesn't work at all like that. You have an enormous up front cost you may never be able to recover and what you get at the end is the privilege of fighting to undercut your rivals. The people who camp the auction house win, and everyone else sells nothing.</p><p>Crafting systems that require camping the auction house *suck*.</p><p>WOW already rewards the auction house campers plenty, we didn't need more of that.</p><p>I got wrecked by this system. I realized that there would be competition, but I figured I should level my ring and necklace production up to max so I could provide stuff for my guild. I thought the auction house would be full of overpriced stuff and this would help people out. That didn't happen though - the auction house is full of rings and necklaces priced at a fraction of the cost of materials. I had guildies ask me to craft things for them and I told them they shouldn't get me to do it. Buying materials for me to craft would cost them far more than simply buying the finished products.</p><p>Right now I am about halfway through level 3 on both rings and necklaces. I have lost a good 300,000 gold so far trying to level my crafting and I have helped nobody in my guild in the process. At this point I will probably finish up and get to level 4 in the hopes that at some point I will be able to make money from it. I can't recover all of my losses so far, and I might as well slowly finish up my leel 3s any time the price of goods rises above the cost of materials.</p><p>It gets worse though. I am on an extremely high population server with a massive economy. On a small server the legendary recipes are going to be a disaster because nobody can afford to get all the way up. The lack of customers will be crushing, and so lots of people will be locked into only getting level 1 legendary items. There are so few buyers that crafters cannot afford to craft their way up, so everybody gets locked out of the market completely.</p><p>There are two fixes I can think of right away, but both would have needed to be in the game at launch - now is too late. The first is to simply change that 15 to a 5. Producing one third of the items to level up would make it an investment, but the markets would not be flooded. Crafters who put in the time would be able to sell their goods, and competition would naturally control the prices to keep them a bit above material cost. The other angle would be to change the system much more substantially and remove the learning system entirely. Have a daily cooldown to product one resource, and have crafters have to use 1 of those resources for a rank 1 item, 2 for a 2, etc. This would encourage crafters to do their cooldown and would work fine in markets of any size. Want a plate hat? Get a blacksmith to make their Special Bar of Ore for four days in a row and make it. Profit for crafters, accessibility for buyers. Best of all worlds.</p><p>Instead we are stuck with a mess of a system where a few people who gambled big get to gouge customers and the others lose their shirts, and people in small economies get screwed. Not ideal.</p>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-51842932515380013872020-12-07T22:12:00.001-08:002020-12-07T22:12:02.749-08:00The best thing<p>In my last post I talked about how the WOW expansion Shadowlands is good, and worth buying. What I failed to mention was the best thing about the expansion so far - Torghast. This is a zone you can run with between 1-5 players, and like many other roguelikes and dungeon crawlers of recent years, you do it by accumulating tons of interesting powers and upgrades and using them to defeat extremely powerful enemies.</p><p>Torghast has a bunch of different tilesets and the settings look fantastic. There are dungeons full of furnaces and lava, gigantic towers rising from the mist, and twisted, metallic halls. Torghast has different layouts and designs each time you zone in, enough of them that even if they aren't random they manage to keep on being fresh. Each wing has different enemies and themes and they all come in a variety of difficulty levels. Blizzard aimed for dark and scary and they hit the mark.</p><p>I LOVE running Torghast. I would be doing it even if wasn't fun because it drops important stuff, but I just like doing it. Many of the buffs you get are simple like +3% crit chance, but there are also lots of powerful and interesting things like "At the start and end of Avenging Wrath, cast Divine Toll." I know most people won't have any idea what that means, but trust me, it is bonkers. The best part though is the combos. Casting Divine Toll for free regularly is great, but if you also get the power "Divine Toll stuns all nearby enemies for 3 seconds." it gets hilarious.</p><p>I think the way they have done the design of the powers is great. Common powers are always useful but weak, rare ones are more powerful, but more narrow, and then there are ultra rare ones. There are specific mobs that have unique abilities and they give you new powers that are linked to their abilities in theme. You can even collect powers that let you blow up enemies and turn them into more powers, and this lets you get even more interesting and unique abilities.</p><p>There are definitely some dud powers. A part of those are not great but they are thematically cool so I am on board with them, like "Maw Rats explode on death for 2000 damage." Others are just totally worthless and have no interesting combo potential, so they are always a pass. I don't mind some powers being worse, and I don't mind powers that are tricky to combo, but I want everything to be useful at some point. There are a few things that are truly junk though, and I would fix that, if I were in charge.</p><p>However, the best thing about Torghast is the vast sums of money you get from running it.</p><p>Most people don't many vast sums. In fact they lose money. However, there are a lot of players who aren't that great but who still want the rewards. Also it is undeniable that some classes and specs are better than others. I play one of the best specs, Protection Paladin, so I can smash it easily. In fact I can smash it while towing another person along with me. A person who is paying for the privilege. Paying an awful lot.</p><p>Previous to this I was running dungeons to earn cash, making about 5k/hour.</p><p>Now I am getting customers to pay me to run them through Torghast and I am making 50k/hour instead. That is an incredible rate! The real struggle isn't the dungeon - it is the logistics. You can't trade money across servers, but you can group up across servers. Finding people on my server who want to pay is tough, so I have been making alts on other servers, accepting payment there, and then doing the runs. Now I just have to figure out ways to get that money to the server I am actually on!</p><p>I say 50k/hour is an incredible rate, but in terms of real dollars it is only 5$/hour. That doesn't sound ideal, but it turns out to be an enormous amount of ingame currency to buy all the fun things I want. And honestly... 5$/hour to run a fun dungeon with crazy powers and unexpected challenges? Sounds pretty good!</p><p>One of the best things about Torghast is the way you can just run it over and over. The previous expansion had something similar called Horrific Visions, and while that was fun, it had a cost to enter. That meant a lot of mind numbing grinding in order to get to play, and that meant that people were reluctant to help others because helping meant grinding for your entry fee. Torghast has no fee. You just go, and you are either good enough, or you are not. Also you aren't on a timer so if you need to afk to pee or answer the door you can do that.</p><p>I hope that they continue to support this new game mode. Regular updates and changes to powers, new tilesets, and added difficulty will make this continual fun and I expect they can do that fairly easily. Right now the balance isn't perfect, as tanks are particularly powerful, but since you can get a group together and do it and you aren't competing directly against other players I don't mind that so much. There won't be a competitive Torghast scene, it is just a fun thing to do.</p><p>I like that. I like it a lot.</p>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-65855426909957924802020-11-29T14:58:00.004-08:002020-11-29T14:58:39.302-08:00It is good<p> I have been playing the new Shadowlands expansion for WOW for the past week. The xpac was delayed a lot at the last minute which led many people to worry that the game was going to be a mess. A big company announcing a delay a month before launch is worrying, no doubt. The answer is in though, and Shadowlands is good.</p><p>Good doesn't mean perfect. There are bugs here and there, and the heavy population servers are groaning under the load, but by and large things work and are a lot of fun.</p><p>The levelling experience is quite narrow and on rails. You have to play through the campaign in order, visiting one zone at a time. There are lots of side quests and such to do, and the campaign story is polished and interesting, so I was happy with it all told. I don't think I would want to play through such a thing twice, but thankfully Blizzard set it up so alts don't have to do so. The zones are widely varied in terms of aesthetic and style, and I enjoyed the variety of experience. The visuals are great, and the marriage of appearance and mechanics is consistently good.</p><p>In short, if you like WOW, you will like Shadowlands. It is a strong mix of choice and direction, and could quite reasonably be described as peak WOW from a casual play perspective.</p><p>The dungeons are well executed too. There are tons of unique mechanics and themes, and the dungeons reflect the zones they are situated in extremely well. They act as the culmination to storylines, and they do this in a way that is satisfying and fun. The encounters are enjoyable, the difficulty is reasonable, and even though I just spent the week spamming dungeons all day long I am looking forward to playing more.</p><p>So how about the numbers?</p><p>The numbers are good! Blizzard had big problems trying to balance things a few months ago. They wanted legendaries and covenant abilities to be huge and mighty, but they discovered that balancing them across all the classes and specs was impossible. They resorted to making things much weaker, and I think their final pass got it pretty tight. I have gone over my legendary abilities many times and they all seem to clock in between 4 and 6 % more damage. Some favour one style over another, but nothing stands out as being overpowered. I want to build a whole bunch of them for various specs and situations, which strikes me as a good thing.</p><p>I liked the Kyrian aesthetic and abilities, and they suited my paladin class, so I chose them. It seems both thematically appropriate and powerful. Still, I can see reasonable arguments for every covenant choice if you aren't trying to min/max those last few %, which is close enough.</p><p>As to whether or not classes are balanced I can't say for sure. I do more damage than everybody else so far, but it is had to know how much of that is gear, how much of that is me, and how much is class balance. However, I am confident that Blizzard is keeping a close eye on things, and they seem willing to make adjustments to get things in line as necessary.</p><p>When the raid opens in a week and a bit we will start getting real data on class balance. There will always be winners and losers, but based on my experiences in quests, pvp, and dungeons things are in quite reasonable shape, certainly good enough to get a thumbs up for a launch incorporating so many new mechanics all at once.</p><p>There are bugs. Especially the Kyrian flying world quests have some issues, and I am avoiding some of them. However, if a major launch like this only has 'some optional quests don't work sometimes' as the big criticism, you have to consider that a win. There needs to be some work done to improve world quest text, direction, and bug fixes but most of them work flawlessly so it isn't a thing to fuss over too much.</p><p>Plus I got a new frog mount! Bugs aside, you gotta respect the frog mount.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-P92_VjCoGUg/X8Qnd-_50ZI/AAAAAAAAEgM/9pp-kiWrGJsRMHo8OoDrpAAnGO8oaosigCLcBGAsYHQ/s1920/2020-11-29.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1920" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-P92_VjCoGUg/X8Qnd-_50ZI/AAAAAAAAEgM/9pp-kiWrGJsRMHo8OoDrpAAnGO8oaosigCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h400/2020-11-29.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1305372753022597815.post-83587500806159130982020-11-18T21:43:00.001-08:002020-11-18T21:43:26.934-08:00Interface advice<p>One of the most valuable things a WOW raider can do is to have a good interface. A great player will cap out at mediocre output with the default interface, and no matter your skill level a properly built interface will make a huge difference in how you play. This is a basic bit of information about how I did my interface for those who I am going to be raiding with in the upcoming expansion.</p><p>The way I did it is not the only way. Lots of these decisions take into account things like my hand size, alternate specs, and how I have been playing for many years. I have had my stun on Q for 15 years and it isn't going to change now, no matter what else happens. Still, the principles are useful to anyone, and in any case seeing how other people build an interface can give you good ideas.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3Vjo3-uO084/X7X8DC390UI/AAAAAAAAEfc/Ol8W6OQkkdcZevsPOTgZTOLFEBF2As3sQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1920/PartyScreenie%2B-%2BCopy.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1920" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3Vjo3-uO084/X7X8DC390UI/AAAAAAAAEfc/Ol8W6OQkkdcZevsPOTgZTOLFEBF2As3sQCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h400/PartyScreenie%2B-%2BCopy.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p>This is my party setup. The basic principle is that every piece of important information has to be available without looking all over the screen. If your character bar is in the top left, you won't notice when you take a lot of damage. If you do, you won't be looking at your feet to see if you are standing in fire. You also want your important cooldowns visible without having to look at the bottom of your screen. Here is my setup:</p><p>My character health bar is in a prominent spot. Above my health bar at 1. I have all of my defensive cooldowns. If I see my health bar is low, I don't have to look all over the screen - I have my defensives right there. I have my debuffs shown below it at 2., so it is super obvious to me if I get a particular boss debuff, and it is right beside my health bar so I can check my full status all at once. The big icon near the 1. is the remaining duration on Divine Shield.</p><p>At 3. are my reminder icons. These tell me if I am lacking an aura or my rune buff. As soon as I put those buffs on, the reminder icon vanishes. This way I am always reminded before a pull to get those buffs up, and I don't have to put that on my memory.</p><p>4. is my target. It it set up to have a *huge* cast bar so if my target is casting the entire bar is taken up with the cast. I want to be completely sure that I don't miss casts. Also I put wings, my interrupt, and my stun right beside the enemy frame here. If a cast is happening, I can see, without moving my eyes at all, exactly which options I have to stop it.</p><p>5. is my rotation helper. I use Hekili because it is excellent for ret and prot paladins. This lets me focus on dodging goo without staring much at my abilities and cooldowns. Right below it is my holy power display. I recommend everyone get some kind of rotation display, but each class needs to hunt down the best solution for them. Just make sure you aren't staring at the bottom left of the screen and standing in fire because you can't see your character while figuring out your rotation.</p><p>6. and 7. are my focus and target of target displays. I want to have those just in case, though honestly I don't look at them much.</p><p>8. is the most important part of the interface, so pay close attention here - the damage meter. Notice on the bottom how Redcape has done all the damage and other people haven't. This is just how it is.</p><p><br /></p><p>Okay, so now we have what the bits are. Now how do we make them this way?</p><p>The health bar for me, my target, target of target, and focus are all created via Shadowed Unit Frames. I use the default raid and party frames though, as I find they do what I want. SUF lets you easily set up different arrangements for each frame, which is great. For example, I think it is crucial to have the cast bar for your target be extremely obvious.</p><p>The extra icons at 1. and 3. are made via Weakauras. You can find tons of weakauras at https://wago.io/weakauras so if you have a specific thing you want a icon for, hunt there. I have weakauras to show me the duration of all of my defensives, important buffs, and cooldowns right next to where the button is. Weakauras also provides the holy power display below my Hekili bar at 5.</p><p>The buttons surrounding my character frame and target frame are made via Bartender. This gives you extra bars you can rearrange, so I put bars on the screen near the frames and made the bars click through. This way they don't interfere with anything, but I can easily put buttons right next to the raid frames that they are associated with.</p><p>In raids my group frames shifts. This can be done in Interface - Raid Profiles in the default interface. In 5 person content I want all party members right beside me, in raids I need it set further away.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-I4xwOqv0zWc/X7YAQeEx90I/AAAAAAAAEfo/NQrzbANvoYIXgO_oWNRt81iyFw24aY3QACLcBGAsYHQ/s1920/2020-11-18%2B%25281%2529.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1920" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-I4xwOqv0zWc/X7YAQeEx90I/AAAAAAAAEfo/NQrzbANvoYIXgO_oWNRt81iyFw24aY3QACLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h400/2020-11-18%2B%25281%2529.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p>Now that we have the appearance out of the way, I should talk a bit about buttons. Personally I like using my mouse for all movement and my left hand for all spellcasts. This works great for prot and ret, but wouldn't work for healing. (This is part of the reason I don't heal...)</p><p>My setup is that I have my basic 12 buttons mapped to 123456qwerty. The bar above it is mapped to shift-123456qwerty. The bar above that is mapped to ctrl-123456, and then to custom buttons. This allows me to easily use 24 keybinds, and have another 12 awkward ones. I don't want to ever mouse click an ability in a fight, because that leads to death.</p><p>My mouse has 7 buttons on it. I have them mapped to back up, strafe left, strafe right, move forward, autorun, mark target as skull, and mount up. This way I never have to slowly keyboard turn, I can just mouse turn and strafe. There isn't much reason to ever use the turn buttons, as mouse turning plus strafing is all you ever really want to do. I want to be able to move and turn at full speed with the mouse while hitting abilities at maximum speed.</p><p>If you have any other questions or comments (feel free to criticize my interface if you think there are things I could improve) please comment away.</p>Skyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10723733406348223879noreply@blogger.com1