Being casual and bad

I sat down today to try out WOW's Looking for Raid feature.  I haven't played in a long time, I am barely familiar with my abilities, and I don't know how the fights in the Dragon Soul raid work, but nonetheless I was prepared to inflict myself on a host of unsuspecting randoms.  There was some wiping and dying and quite a lot of people slinging blame for the wiping and dying around at random but eventually we cleared the raid out.  I had a pretty good time and became a lot better at healing over a very short timespan!  The raid was very reminiscent of PUG raids I ran back in previous expansions and seemed to be tuned appropriately.  The really great thing about LFR is that I got to experience the final battle of the expansion without having to be in a serious raiding guild.  People used to complain that casuals only get to see the first part of WOW stories and never get to see the end but LFR really opens that up to anyone who wants to put in any modest amount of effort.

The low quality of the leadership in LFR groups certainly brings me back though.  Instead of saying "All dps need to switch to tentacles and slimes when they spawn" people invariably say "All you dpsers are noobs, wtf is wrong with you?"  I rarely found that spouting vitriol was effective but I certainly noticed that simple, clear instructions went a long way towards improving people's play and also keeping the group from exploding.  People also seemed extremely eager to quit the raid and/or boot other people from the raid with minimal to no explanation; for some reason every single boot vote went forward even when I couldn't figure out why it was happening.

I don't get that old feeling of progression though as I upgrade my gear.  LFR does let me check things out but I really don't get the rush of getting new gear and moving forward, most likely because all of the gear I am acquiring will be obsolete in two weeks and there isn't anything more difficult to accomplish other than what I am already doing.  Whether or not I will end up feeling that rush again when Mists of Pandaria launches I don't know - this is particularly true if I end up doing timed dungeons with my friends where gear is normalized and finding new rewards doesn't matter anyway!  Maybe I will just do some pet battles and timed dungeons and forget about the treadmill entirely... who knows?

I am going to get back into theorycrafting in a serious way though.  You don't need to raid to be interested in finding optimal solutions to problems.

How far down the rabbit hole shall I go?

I have been looking for a game to play.  I am pretty much done with Mass Effect 3 as this last playthrough will complete Insanity difficulty and do everything I ever missed before - importing a perfect save to do everything took a lot of doing!  The tricky thing about picking my new game is that whenever I do pick a game I tend to fall pretty far down the rabbit hole and I need to be concerned about just how deep it goes.

When I played Portal or Plants vs. Zombies there just wasn't that far to fall.  Both games were fantastic and I spent quite a few hours getting myself set up to do 65 flags on Infinite in PVZ but in the end there is only so much you can do.  There just isn't enough momentum to spawn endless forum posts and build a community like you find around big MMOs or games like Mass Effect.  Those communities are what really catch me and keep me in a game for long periods, like the years I spent building spreadsheets and running raids in WOW (elitistjerks) or my Civ V modding (civfanatics).  I have been moderately captured by D3 but it has some real issues with community in that the forums are a cesspool full of mindless whining and bumping and almost entirely bereft of interesting debate.  I am having a lot of fun with the game but I really want to talk about games with people and chatting about D3 on the internets is more awful than amusing.

All that has me thinking that I will probably relapse into WOW once again.  Getting back into the game is hard because I have to go through the newbie phase all over again.  I hate being the guy who doesn't know anything and I am not impressed by stumbling around and sucking.  I want to be perfect, I want to be beautiful, I want to play right!  I want to be the one who has all the answers, not the guy who doesn't even know what questions to ask.  That slow climb back up the hill of knowledge is painful and I know very well just how long it will take to get back to the top of the heap.

I started reading the elitistjerks forums again and it really got to me; the people there were using acronyms I don't know and talking about strategy that I can't quite follow.  They were speaking about specific fights as if I should really know and understand them and instead I am quite in the dark.  Looking into a community that I used to be an integral part of and not even being able to understand their language is a harsh reality check.  I really want to be back in that mode, being an expert player who knows all the ins and outs, but without hurling my spare time bodily at the game there isn't any way to be there again.  I should really spend my time instead writing my book or exercising or doing something else productive but all I really want to do is find a game to be awesome at again.

It seems that I will end up falling very hard, very far down the hole of WOW.  I know how far down that rabbit hole goes but there doesn't seem to be another game on the horizon that offers a gentler landing.

Damage scaling

I have been doing a Insanity difficulty playthrough in Mass Effect 3.  In Insanity monsters hit harder, move faster, and have a lot more health.  It is certainly challenging but I think I managed to hit the overpowered strategy by playing a Adept specialized in Biotic Explosions.  I really like the Biotic Explosions mechanic where you combine different kinds of Biotic powers to create big detonations because it creates all kinds of interesting choices in terms of what powers you use, what order you use them in, and how you spec your character.  It feels like a very different and very interesting version of the game when compared to the more straightforward Soldier who just shoots people in the head with a sniper rifle over and over.

The problem is that Biotic Explosions have a really bizarre damage mechanic.  Unlike everything else in the game like guns and regular biotic or tech attacks Biotic Explosions base their damage on enemy health totals.  A gunshot or a Incinerate might do 200 damage so it would take 3 attacks to kill a monster on Normal difficulty or 6 attacks to kill the same monster on Insanity.  Biotic Explosions scale with health though, so if you can kill an enemy with two Biotic Explosions in Normal the same holds through on all difficulty levels.

Scaling damage to enemy health levels just isn't a good idea.  In Diablo 2 it was just as problematic when Necromancers used Corpse Explosion to do 60% of a monster's health to all nearby enemies.  It really doesn't make sense to scale things this way when a big part of difficulty scaling is monster health - you will have a real balance problem somewhere, though where it is hard to say.  In Mass Effect 3 it seems to me that things balance out pretty nicely on Normal difficulty but thugs using guns seem really weak on higher difficulty levels and Biotic Explosions seem super powerful.

Diablo 3 managed to avoid this issue just by virtue of making the sole health-based attack be utterly junk.  Monks can blow up enemies for 30% of their health in a small radius but the cost of doing so is high and the difficulty of applying it is substantial so that ability is wretched on low difficulty levels and mediocre in Inferno difficulty.  If Blizzard had made the ability usable on Normal it would have been heinously overpowered in Inferno so they managed to do things right in this case - though it seems almost certainly by luck.  Blizzard did a really good job avoiding scaling messes in D3 by having absolutely everything scale off of weapon damage and this is the sole problematic exception so I am certainly willing to forgive it!

It shouldn't be said that these scaling issues necessarily wreck games.  They are generally fun and make you think about how you want to build your character, which is great, but they do cause havoc when you want to create a really balanced strategy game.  In D2 the Necromancer was so overpowered that crazy scaling wrecked the game and needed to be reigned in, even in a game where terrible balance was the norm.  I guess it depends what your goal is.  If you want really razor edge balance then scaling damage to enemy health is a total mess.  If you just want interesting stuff to do and crazy combos for people to figure out it works out fine.

Easy mode

In some games having an easy mode is a really good feature.  In Mass Effect 2 I screwed up the ending a couple times over my various playthroughs and it was really handy to be able to just load an earlier save, set the difficulty to Casual and wade through the enemies like a baws so I could fix my save to import to Mass Effect 3. While I beat ME2 on Insanity and had some really serious head-into-desk moments I appreciate having the option to cruise through the game when I want to.  Especially I want to be able to do the game on Veteran difficulty first so I can feel like the story makes sense and save up my dying over and over again until I have seen the whole thing first.

MMOs don't work that way.  The problem with MMOs having a variable difficulty is that character progression is the goal everyone is working towards and people are going to set their difficulty level to whatever levels them up faster regardless of what they find fun.  Just look at D3 at launch - people did terrible Resplendent Chest runs in Alcarnus for three days straight until the spawn got nerfed even though it was a miserably boring thing to do.  The advantage that the Mass Effect titles have in this regard is that progression comes to a stop.  You can get to the end slightly faster by going on a easier difficulty but you never feel like you totally wasted your time either way.

What I wonder is if there is any way to build an MMO where variable difficulty levels make sense.  Obviously many titles give difficulty choices in endgame dungeons and such but when levelling up there generally isn't any such thing.  If the endgame didn't contain progression though I could easily imagine people feeling like they want a challenge and levelling up on hardmode just to have a title or some other such reward to denote their accomplishment.  It might seem like it would feel really bizarre to have a world where one person walks up to an orc and cleaves it in two effortlessly and another fights it for a long time, barely to survive, but we already have this with level based systems anyway.  Would difficulty setting based challenge really feel any more weird than 'well, that guy has a huge integer above his picture, he can annihilate anything in this part of the world just by looking at it'?

This all relies on an end to the model of progression without limit though.  Any time you gate people's content by their progression and make the entire system about getting further along as fast as possible you make difficulty levels make little sense.  Nearly everybody will go as fast as possible along the easiest track, complaining all the way that everything is too easy for them.  I suspect that endless progression has been a huge part of what has kept WOW so big for so long though so I figure we aren't going to see it end any time soon.  I only hope that they get around to making the levelling game a lot more challenging than it was when Cataclysm launched.

A bad launch - GW2

Hobo was trying to get me to check out Guild Wars 2 when he visited earlier this summer.  I managed to be away from home during launch and I figured I would peruse the internets and find out if people think the game is good or not.  I like fantasy genre roleplaying games and I have never tried an MMO other than WOW so I am a good candidate to give it a go.  Unfortunately it looks like GW2 is going the way of Diablo 3 upon launch - lots of fun gameplay and total failure in terms of player to player communication.  It is not a good sign when players feel the need to justify your MMO's total community failure by saying that it is a good single player game.  After reading a few more reviews I decided that GW2 is not going to get my money, Free to play or not.

Awhile ago Ziggyny posted about his extreme frustration with recent game launches, MMOs in particular, when players are effectively beta testing a product that doesn't work.  Civ V needed major mechanic overhauls to be playable, FFXIV was a unmitigated disaster, and D3 and GW2 launched without functioning player communication... in games that are pitched as primarily multiplayer!  There is no arguing that game companies regularly ship games that they know aren't ready to get the revenue booked and plan on patching in necessary changes later but I don't think that shoddy games getting launched is a new phenomenon.  Old games had all kinds of terrible decisions and game issues but they just never got fixed!  The big change in the past few years is that player expectations are far, far higher than ever before.  The cost and time committment to a company to meet or exceed modern player expectations is extremely high and that means that the temptation to launch and let the players figure out what needs most to be fixed is ever rising.

What this all means is that players are incentivized to ignore a game at launch when it is likely to be buggy and wait half a year until the biggest issues are fixed.  This strategy also gives players time to avoid games that never manage to stop sucking like FFXIV and focus only on the games that get quickly upgraded like CiV or D3.  This has big drawbacks however for player community.  Many players are simply going to play at game launch regardless and waiting for six months in will often leave a player without a community.  This isn't an issue with CiV and its ilk but it is a major issue with games like D3 or GW2.  Barring me somehow convincing my entire gaming community to ignore a game for half a year I am not going to be able to arrange a 'wait for the sucking to stop' strategy.

Thankfully Blizzard has a stable platform on which to launch expansions and a solid history of smooth WOW launches so I won't have to worry about that for Mists of Pandaria.  I did kind of figure I was done with WOW when I quit eighteen months ago but it looks like there is some sort of interest left.  I want to see what it is like and I particularly want to play again if they fix their 'questing on rails' fiasco from Cataclysm.

Killing off players

Last week I got my first taste of running a DnD game in a very long time... something like 11 years, though it could be as high as 14 years.  Needless to say I was a bit rusty but I think I managed to keep the players involved and entertained reasonably enough.  I got slammed in the face by two major bits of DM wisdom that had faded somewhat over the years though:  The players will do crazy things you never thought of and Always Always use a DM screen.

I had plans for what was going to happen during the session.  The players were tasked with locating a missing scout along a somewhat dangerous frontier which often had minor monster incursions from over the mountains.  I figured they would get past the first town the scout had visited really quickly and move on to the meat of the puzzle but they ended up asking all kinds of questions I had never considered.  They wanted to investigate the room that the scout had stayed in, find out how the scout arrived in town, what sort of horse she rode, and other details that are entirely reasonable and which I had not anticipated.  That all worked out fine; the crazy part was when they decided to start a revolution.

You see, they were faced with a choice of going back to town to accuse / arrest / attack the lying, stealing, possibly murderous governor or go into the mine to kill a monster.  There was an outside chance that they would run away to try to get reinforcements; any of the above would have been fine and within my plans.  Instead they decided to try to go around rabble rousing to start a minor revolution against the aforementioned evil governor and begin a war.

But, but, but....  You guys are the heroes!  The protectors of the realm!  You aren't supposed to be dragging the peasants into the battle?  Are the peasants going to work with you?  Betray you?  Ignore you?  Argh....

You can never, ever plan for what the players are going to do.  They will *always* come up with something crazier than you ever imagined.  Apparently I am the worst for this when I am a player... sorry Sthenno.

In the first fight we had the rogue (played by InTheHat) tried to acrobatically tumble around the Crazy Monster Infested Bear to stab it in the back while the rest of the party beat on it.  This is a fine plan but he rolled very badly and the bear ended up smashing him down.  He got healed and tried to stand up again but again he rolled badly and the bear scored a critical, killing him outright.  This of course happened after we finished our introduction but were only 1 hour into our first game.  So now I have a dead player through extreme bad luck... or do I?

If I was a smart guy I would have a DM screen up and just ignored that critical.  I don't object to killing off players when they die at reasonably important or appropriate times but axing a player such that they don't get to play for the entirety of the first session seems completely terrible.  I didn't have a screen though and the players saw the critical so I just decided to make it a normal hit.  It is a crappy situation because either the players lose immersion or one player in particular has a really cruddy time - no way around that. The fight itself was completely appropriate in terms of difficulty and required some pretty wretched luck to go as badly as it did so I am pleased with my encounter design but I am very sad at the outcome.  It is hard to keep people worried and on edge in battles if they know that I will fudge the dice!

DnD next - more stuff both good and bad

DnD Next put out their next playtest package that gives the testers actual information about how to build a character up to level five (the old version just gave us premade characters) and much more refined rules.  I also got to listen to an interesting podcast where the Penny Arcade guys did a long interview with Mike Mearls, who is a bigwig in charge of Next.  In all that there were some really great things and some really questionable things; the fighter mechanics look fantastic and the rogue mechanics look questionable.

In the first iteration the fighter was a simple autoattack machine.  Nobody much liked that and the 'no thinking allowed' fighter got scrapped.  The new iteration gives the fighter extra dice to spend on things.  They start out with 1d6 and gradually get more and bigger dice up to 4d12 at level ten.  Initially those dice can be spent adding to the damage of attacks or reducing damage taken from attacks but each fighter will have other abilities they can spend dice to use.  One example is riposte - when missed by an attack, the fighter can spend three dice to make a regular attack against the enemy that missed.  This seems like a fantastic mechanic because someone who wants simplicity can simply spend dice to do more damage but if you have an interest in strategy and flexibility you can play a fighter with lots of options.

Rogues get Sneak Attack in combat and they get several mechanics to make them the masters of skills outside of combat.  The most interesting is their ability to automatically get at least a ten on any skill roll.  After rolling their d20 they simply raise the result to ten if it had been lower.  This is problematic because if the rogue can make the check on a ten they have a 100% chance of success but if they need an eleven then their chance for success is 50% and there is nothing in between!  Rogues also get many more skills and higher skill values than other characters.  This is all fine and good if you want to be the skill character but I question how much fun it is going to be.  If anyone else in the party has any chance at a roll the rogue probably succeeds automatically and given that skills use no limited resources I don't think there will be a lot of intensity in skill based situations.  Maybe I am just not used to skill systems where success is assured but it doesn't seem right.

Back when I was designing games with Iolo, Sthenno, Hobo and Full Throttle we eventually came to the conclusion that having some characters be awesome in combat and some awesome outside of combat was not a good balancing mechanism.  Not in a heroic combat based style, anyhow.  Next seems to be aiming to balance things this way and I am hesitant about it in general and don't like the rogue mechanics in particular.  The other thing that I really want to know is how the designers intend to balance high level spell casters.  Sure, you can give fighters so much damage that they are good in fights next to a wizard but if wizards can fly, go invisible, teleport, scry, etc. then eventually the wizard just beats every challenge by themselves.  More than that the wizard completely eclipses the rogue because every rogue skill gets trumped by a spell that does the same thing but better.  If you want to build a system that goes from level one to level twenty you first have to sort out how you are going to build a wizard with a classic feel that lacks the classic overpowered.