I agree with Gevlon, a rare thing

Gevlon and Tobold both just posted about their problems with WOW.  Normally I dismiss most of what Gevlon says as sociopathic nonsense designed to prop up his self esteem but this time I actually liked what he had to say.  In both cases these articles talked about their dislike of the raiding game and their dislike of the levelling game and how these two games make no sense together.  Whether or not an individual likes either the raiding or levelling game I don't think it can be argued that in their current incarnations they are a very silly and annoying hybridization.  If someone likes the raiding game they are looking for a game that requires practice, good reflexes, teamwork and organization to say nothing of substantial time commitment.  In order to start this up they have to level up for hours and hours doing things that require no skill, practice, reflexes, teamwork, organization or time commitment.  Of course the other side is true too and anyone who loves levelling can hardly be expected to enjoy raiding when they get there.

I remember levelling up various characters and doing so was interesting in the old days.  I recall levelling up my rogue and hunter in particular and having to use traps, stealth, and cooldown management to beat pulls with more than one enemy in them.  If I pulled too many enemies or missed too many attacks I had to run away so it was always important for me to watch what I was doing.  Playing better and being clever *mattered*.  Of course there were also levelling abominations like my paladin where I had no abilities that did anything so I just sat there waiting for enemies to die, healed myself and walked to the next one.  There were plenty of incredibly stupid things about levelling too, like the lack of quests, quests that sent you all over the world for trivial rewards and elite areas that you couldn't find a group for.  Some of the solutions to these issues were done really well in recent years like adding more quests, giving all classes interesting mechanics and flattening the monster levels in each zone but some were disastrous like making all monsters trivial in difficulty or making an entire zone a linear questing experience.

I like the idea of having lots of things to do.  I also like the idea of quests and monsters being *hard* and requiring thought and planning to some extent.  Even the old quests that sent me all around the world didn't necessarily need to be removed forever, as long as the rewards were increased such that it actually made sense to complete them.  If you want me to fly across two continents then I should get a big XP bonus at the end to make it feel like it was worth it.  Even the endless complaints about outdoor zones with elite monsters didn't necessarily need to be dealt with by removing all of them but rather just by making them optional.  If there were quests to kill elite monsters that required a group but there were also sufficient solo quests that you could avoid the elite ones as necessary then people would have the option to dial up their difficulty for big rewards if they were interested.

In the new levelling scheme there is no feeling of accomplishment at getting to max level.  Any monkey that can hit one button and accept quests could be nearly as efficient as I was at getting there.  In order to really have fun you need a challenge and there needs to be a difference between how fast a pro and a fool can get things done.  Since you can always go back and do easy, underlevel zones there is no risk of people getting stuck but with no challenge at all there is no accomplishment.

I got to thinking about what it would take for me to be interested in resubbing to WOW to level some characters again, and here are my initial thoughts:

1.  Nerf heirloom gear by ~30%.  Make it good enough that it is better than greens but worse than blues.  I say this even though I have pretty much a complete set of heirlooms for all toons.

2.  Buff monster health by 60% and damage by 90%.  Combined with the heirloom changes this should mean that monsters take roughly twice as long to die and do double their current damage for heirloomed characters.

3.  Add in a bunch of dangerous stuff.  Wandering patrols of 3 monsters, elites that have 4x the health and 2x the damage of regular monsters and enemies that pull in groups of 2-3 would be a start.  Ideally I would like monsters with more dangerous abilities and spells as well as some Elite areas but that would require a lot more work.

These sorts of changes get me kind of excited - I think I might actually resub and play some WOW to tool around on random characters and see all the new Cataclysm levelling content.

Earthquake!

It is an experience anyone who plays a lot of board games knows all too well - some player slips, drops a piece, or bumps the table and the whole board suffers an Earthquake!.  Pieces shift, tiles move, everyone curses and then people try to reassemble the board from the ashes.  Some games are worse for this than others of course, and the games where the board itself is constructed of many pieces are the worst.  Settlers is by far the best known of this group and recently I found a Kickstarter project where a guy designed and built laser cut wooden boards for Settlers to prevent exactly the Earthquake! events I am talking about.  His design certainly works to keep the Settlers board intact (and his video with his friends acting out Earthquake! events in Settlers is worth a laugh or two) but that sort of design wouldn't work for my situation unfortunately because an FMB board takes up a huge amount of space and wouldn't be especially practical to carry around as a single piece.  FMB is particularly bad for this because there are so many pieces to move that are in contact with the board and people have a really serious habit of counting unit movement by touching the board and causing constant Earthquake!s.  This week I found a solution to me having to constantly fix the board during games - making the board pieces all interlocking.

Here is a picture of the old board after a normal Earthquake!.

Here is the new design of the side pieces alongside the old design:

The new board as a whole:

And here are some pictures of the new board vertically up against a wall and still holding together:

Now that I have an Earthquake! proof board I just need to figure out why it took me a year and a half to come up with this design... though I suppose it does give me a real appreciation for why it takes Blizzard so damn long to put out really polished, complete games.

HOMM 6 - Good and bad in the demo

Initially I was looking forward to the release of Heroes of Might and Magic 6.  Yesterday I downloaded the demo and now... not so much.  Not to say that HOMM6 looks awful, because it doesn't, but it doesn't look nearly as good as I was hoping.  The graphics are pretty and the world rendering is clearly a cut above the old titles in the series (though there are still some glitchy graphics issues I assume will be ironed out for release) but pretty isn't what I am looking for.  I want enduring mechanics and endless variety!

I don't know that I will be getting that.  Instead of 8 factions HOMM6 has 5.  Instead of 9 resource types HOMM6 has 4.  Instead of the necessity of carefully figuring out which cities to recruit from and what sort of army to build you can just convert any city into the faction type you want.  There will be no more ferrying troops around the map and worrying about logistics either since you can recruit every creature available anywhere in your empire in any city at any time.  Your heroes can teleport all over the map too so positioning is going to be drastically less important.  In the old HOMM3 (the classic!) you could eventually set up your hero to be able to move about the map with extreme speed but it took a lot of time and a massive investment in skills, stats and resources to make it happen.  So are these good things?

The main thing that is undeniable is that these changes will make the lategame much faster and involve much less clicking around.  No longer will you have to manage 6 'delivery boy' heroes who just carry troops around the map to the main army.  No longer will you have to spend turn after turn slowly walking here and there - in the late game you will get your troops and go wreck or be wrecked by your enemies.  In some ways this is a great thing since I always found the exploring of the early game to be the strongest point of the HOMM series and the intense micromanaging needed for a large empire became tiresome.  On the other hand I wonder if making positioning much less relevant is going to make the game less fun.  One thing for sure is that these changes will make the AI much better at playing the game.  It was clear that the AI had issues with long term planning and positioning and making it more feasible to have just one army that goes wherever it is needed will make outsmarting the AI more difficult.

On the other hand I lament the reduction in choice.  I want more factions, I want more mines and resources and *stuff* to find and think about and do.  It seems like many of the complex decisions of the past will be made trivial and I don't know that I like that much.  Do I hire another random hero to go collect all those mines or just use the cash to raise more troops?  Do I add these off-Faction troops to my army even though it reduces morale?  Which city do I try to attack first?

There are plenty of things in the demo and beta that are downright bad.  Magic heroes are useless, Faction balance is horrible and there are plenty of bugs.  On the other hand this is exactly what a beta is for; to find the bugs and help the devs locate balance problems.  Maybe it will be fine.  However, HOMM6 is definitely going on my 'wait and see what the reviews say' list.  Maybe the changes will just make the lategame faster and make me enjoy HOMM even more and maybe it will just feel like a chopped down game with pretty pictures.  Hard to tell.

D3 skills

I have been mucking around with the new Diablo 3 skill calculator.  Even though D3 isn't easy to model in a spreadsheet and I don't even know what a lot of the abilities do exactly I still have a desperate itch to start calculating things and figuring out what the optimal builds are.  One thing I must say is that I absolutely love the design of it.  You get six active abilities, each of which can have one of five different runestones.  The runestones modify the abilities in all kinds of crazy ways.  Some make the abilities generate more mana, some make the abilities hit harder, some add extra effects and some completely change the way the ability works.  You also get 3 passive abilities that aren't modified by runestones and which aren't cast a spells but just add to or change your character.

I set out to see how flexible characters could be and I was very impressed.  Check out this Tank Barbarian build.  I built a Tank Monk too and they are both really powerful (well, tough) but in very different ways.  The Monk stacks Dodge effects (85% !) and has powerful debuffs and self healing effects.  The Barbarian has enormous health, armour and healing but his Dodge is absolutely wretched.  I played around with all of the classes and I am pleased to report that in every case I was able to find many really interesting builds with all kinds of choices.  I built a ThrowBarian, who is awesome because he is a Barbarian who has no melee or AOE skills at all and relies on zooming around the battlefield blasting people with savage ranged attacks and summons.

The thing that is really telling is that I constantly need just a little bit more.  I always build a character and have to make difficult tradeoffs like deciding if I can allow myself to build a Wizard without Teleport.  Who can play without Teleport?!? but yet if I cut it I can set myself up to do more damage and be more flexible in combat.  I liked the Witch Doctor as a summoner using stacked AOE debuffs and Blizzard seems absolutely savage as the Wizard but no matter what build I try I am always rebuilding it trying to figure out a new way to squeeze a different ability or extra effect onto my character.

That is a good sign.  I suspect you will see huge variety in character builds in D3 because so much of the build is a judgement call.  Are you good enough to be able to drop a defensive ability for another offensive one?  Can you afford to drop an ability that generates mana to get more utility or will that additional downtime be annoying?  This design is much, much better than a talent tree like D2 or WOW boasts and for my money is the best character customization design for a pure combat game I have ever seen.  It is very easy to get started and make some reasonable choices and understanding the rules of the system is trivial but finding the absolute best build is extremely difficult.

Easy to learn, hard to master.

A beard again

Blizzard has issued a formal challenge to all hardcore Diablo fans - grow a Diableard.  This is, of course, the most ridiculous beard you can grow prior to D3s release with the intention of shaving it off on launch day.  Dude, I think I need to grow a beard again.  Blizzard told me to!

Complaints about WOW

For some reason I still read lots of blog posts about MMORPGs.  I find the viewpoints of bloggers on WOW intriguing because so often their experiences are so starkly different from mine.  My WOW subscription has lapsed and I have no intention of renewing it so I cannot be so much accused of being biased towards a game I don't play but normally I find the various criticisms levelled at WOW to be entirely spurious.

One of the most common ones is the idea that WOW is entirely twitch reflex based and not strategic.  Tobold and Gevlon, among others, seem to have this idea that as long as you click fast in WOW you are going to be awesome because nothing else matters.  I just don't see how that makes the slightest bit of sense.  Clearly when playing a fast moving game you have to make rapid decisions but strategy comes up all the time.  Healers moreso than others need to be monitoring their mana and their casting patterns to find more efficient ways to keep the group alive.  That said, everyone has cooldowns to use and things they have to choose timing on and figuring out when to do that is important.  Regularly when my guild was tackling hard content we sat down and had discussions about how many DPS to put on a task, which ones, and who would take special jobs.  Clearly at the end of the day you are going to have to click a bunch of buttons really quickly but there was huge amounts of time devoted to strategy and people who couldn't plan ahead were obvious because they failed at their tasks.  

Although much of the button pressing thinking is offloaded to mods these days I don't know that this removes the strategic element to hitting abilities.  I spent hundreds of hours building and maintaining my spreadsheet to tell me exactly how to play optimally and many of the choices that ended up being the best were not at all obvious from the outset.  Though it is true that the average player usually does simply download the appropriate mod and accept whatever the theorycrafters say I would point out how often my theorycraft slightly differed from others and that these small differences were relevant.  Doing the theory myself was important and gave me a real advantage over those who just went with whatever they found online.  I suspect that much of the complaints of WOW being all twitch based come from people who simply never did much hard content.  If you are doing easymodes you rarely get pushed to the limit of your potential - as long as you can do 80% of the optimum you will win as long as you don't stand in the fire.  When you do hardmodes with minimal gear though you end up being forced to never stand in the fire and also deliver 95% of optimum and doing that requires a ton of information, strategy and thought to achieve.

The second big complaint I see is that you don't get to use your class abilities as you raid.  I totally get this one as I recall vividly going into AQ40 back in the Classic days and being awed that I had to actually Hammer of Justice things.  No monster in the preceding dungeons was affected by anything aside from autoattack so I really only needed 3 buttons on my bar - Flash of Light, Holy Light and Cleanse.  In AQ40 not only *could* you use all kinds of 'levelling' abilities you *had* to use them or you would die.  There was a huge increase in the number of abilities you needed to use to be effective and I thought it made the game a lot more fun.  In modern raiding this still holds true - I loved fights where the monsters were brutal but could be slowed, interrupted, stunned, etc. and we had to use all kinds of crazy tactics and spells to solve problems.  I remember really enjoying the challenge of piecing together how we would solve particular problems with the raid members on hand and having to be aware of all the neat things stuffed away in our spellbooks.  

I think the raid design team is doing a MUCH better job than they used to at incorporating more class abilities into fights which I find pretty hilarious when I compare it to Tobold's recollection that BWL was the best zone ever for forcing him to use his abilities. The BWL I recall was one where mostly everyone stood in one spot casting either Fireball, Frostbolt, or their single most efficient heal.  Nothing came out of your spellbook aside from the 3 basic things you needed to do - there is no question that modern fights require far more in terms of skill, output, flexibility and using all of your abilities than the ones in BWL did.

WOW isn't perfect, as is evidenced by the fact that I don't play it anymore.  However, there has been a major improvement in making use of levelling abilities in endgame and the level of strategy required for the challenging encounters is extremely high.  You *can* get by with minimal strategy and you *can* ignore your spellbook but only if you are doing easy stuff.  If you want a challenge, it is there... and if you don't agree with me I want to see your list of heroic mode final boss kills that were done before the boss was nerfed!

A threesome

Just recently I read a book called Hunger Games which is the first of a 3 part series.  It was a book about a dystopian future with a very interesting 'death game' involved.  Here is the way the game works:

1.  24 people chosen mostly at random from the ages of 12-18 start in a large circle with no equipment whatsoever.  In the middle of the circle is the Cornucopia, which is a huge stash of weapons, food and survival equipment.  The contestants are then let go to do whatever they want but the catch is that only one can leave alive.

2.  The area they can move about in is large, perhaps 10 kilometers on a side, and each night they are told which contestants died the preceding day.

3.  The contestants are drawn from 12 distinct regions, 2 each, and anyone outside the game can spend a ton of money to send them gifts during the match so if you can be appealing to the people watching on TV you can potentially be handed really powerful advantages.

So what do you do in this sort of scenario?  The book presents the idea that normally half the people end up fighting over the Cornucopia and ~8 of them die right away doing so but the victors of that battle get supplies and control over the weapons.  The rest run away and some of those die to starvation, cold, bee stings, traps set by the gamemasters or whatever else.  The gamemasters have the ability and mandate to force a victor so there is no possibility of simply ignoring the others and living off the land indefinitely - you will eventually be forced together by fire, monsters or whatever else they please.

This is a pretty interesting thing to think on.  First off, obviously any alliance is extremely valuable but also short lived.  As soon as you get to the point where your alliance can handily beat the rest of the field there is a massive incentive to strike first and take out one of your allies.  My feeling is that the best strategy in this situation would be to set up a group of three.  In a big group you will quickly run out of anyone who could stop you and get right down to murdering each other in no time.  In a group of three though you have a really enormous advantage against any solo people because you can sleep safely (you hope!) as well as find food, water or shelter while having someone be a lookout.  Of course you also have the advantage that three vs. one in combat isn't much of a fight.  Three is also enough that if there is a large group you are likely to injure or kill some of them if attacked and almost certainly aren't a soft target.

I think three is also much better than two, but for different reasons.  In a three person group it is challenging for one person to decide to kill someone.  For one, the third person would have it easy in deciding who to assist (or to just kill/injure both) and it would be hard to know who would really back you up when you decide to backstab.  In a two person group whoever decides to backstab first pretty much is guaranteed victory so I suspect that alliance would be much more unstable.

Obviously all of this would be extremely random and depend on the personalities involved - young people forced to kill or die aren't exactly going to act predictably!

My personal plan would be to rush the Cornucopia to grab some stuff and try to get at least one nearby person to ally with me.  Hopefully a group of three, but any group is better than solo I think.  It is a risky play at the start but I suspect that my woodsman skills aren't remotely up to the task of surviving in the wild and risks must be taken.  Given the ability of people outside to influence the game I would definitely want to put on a show and act like a contender - it is possible that being up front and getting things done would be critical in keeping me alive.  The other contestants would be more likely to try to eliminate those that are a threat, I would think, but they might also be afraid of an overconfident show.  If you are going to bluff, bluff big would be my credo.

Picture from wikipedia.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_Games