Let's Address Some Topics

The second week of Blapril is Topic Brainstorming Week according to Belghast's handy cut out and keep guide. It's intended for "the mentors among us". I didn't register as a Mentor this year but I'm not going to let that stop me.

I probably should, (let it stop me, I mean) because coming up with topics is hardly my strong suit. Or, I should say, coming up with lists of topics other people could use isn't. I tend either to have one or two ideas floating around that I'm itching to write about or else I just sit down, start typing and see what comes out.

If we take it that any advice being handed out here is only likely to be of use to people who haven't been in the game long, it might be instructive to look back at the very early days of this blog. To a time when I had even less idea what I was doing than I do now, if you can imagine such a thing.

The first two posts fulfill the original intention of the blog in that they're about inventory management. I had this bizarre idea I could sustain a blog writing about nothing else. Lasted about a week.

The next three posts are all about the MMORPG I was mostly playing back in the summer of '11, Rift. Things have really moved on for me since then, as you can see from what I wrote this Tuesday.

So much for my first full month of blogging. I managed an astonishing four posts. And they were short. Well, short by the standards of what was to come. It takes some bloggers a while to get rolling. I'd forgotten I was one of them.

In September 2011 I almost doubled my post count with seven entries. By this point, with hindsight, we can already see a pattern starting to emerge: there will be certain topics to which I'll return, over and over again, regardless of whether anyone but me is interested.

The one I'm already employing most frequently is "games I am playing". Most bloggers go for that one. Some rarely write about anything else. That can work for you or against you. If you're playing a very popular  game or the latest flash in the pan, you'll quickly pick up an audience. If it's a ten year old MMORPG or some obscure import no-one but you has ever heard of you may find you're talking to yourself.

None of that should stop you. As a reader I firmly believe it doesn't matter what game you're writing about. What matters is how entertainingly you write about it. Some of my favorite blogs over the years have focused on games I wasn't playing at the time or have never played, Wilhelm on Pokemon or EVE Online being a prime example.

The huge advantage of writing about the games you're playing is that you'll always have something to write about. Ditto books or comics or movies or music or however you choose to while away your endless, sunlit days.

I would never discourage anyone, if they're stuck for something to write about, from just bashing out a few hundred words on whatever they'd amused themselves with the day before. It's the blogging equivalent of that old staple of harried teachers everywhere, "Write an essay on "What I did at the weekend"".

Looking back to September 2011, we can already see other tropes beginning to appear, tropes that will, in the ensuing years, become all too familiar. Look! There's my first post on repetition, a topic I'll return to over and over with no apparent sense of irony.

In quick order we move on to the quality (or lack thereof) in the writing of quests, the way I play MMORPGs "wrong" (Hi, Naithin!), how great flying is, how everything was better in beta, how low level play beats endgame, how MMORPGs aren't as social as they used to be...

Need I go on? God, I hope not. Seriously, my second month of blogging and it's already a shopping list of personal hobbyhorses, gaming cliches and dead horses, every one of which I have returned to belabor and bully into submission countless times since.

And so have most of the bloggers on my blog roll, or at least all the ones who've stuck at it for a while. And yet here we all are, still reading and posting.

I believe there are two lessons to be taken from this salutory dip into the stagnant waters of the past. Firstly, originality counts for zilch in this game. Don't beat yourself up because you can't think of anything to say that someone hasn't said a hundred times before - just say it anyway! Everyone else does - that's how you came to hear it a hundred times in the first place!

In fact, take that a stage further. Don't worry if you've said it a hundred times before. Repetition is a valid rhetorical device: use it!

Secondly, don't concern yourself that no-one will want to read you if you keep saying the same things over and over. People don't remember most of what they read, far less where they read it. Chances are they won't even notice. And even if they do, all the evidence is that they won't care. They may even come to welcome the familiarity.

The key thing is what I said several paragraphs back. Be entertaining in the way you write and you can write about anything you want.  Within reason, obviously. I have yet to see anyone, no matter how sprightly and joyful their prose style, manage to make Destiny 1 or 2 sound interesting.

Seriously, if we all had to come up with an original topic every time we published a post, most of us would probably struggle to get something out there once a month. I know I would. (Now there's a blogging challenge: post every day for a month on a different topic that you've never written about before. Bonus points if it's a topic none of your readers has ever read about before either).

Yeah, well, that's a challenge I won't be taking up. I like to write about what interests me and perhaps it's not surprising that the same things continue to interest me years after I started writing about them. It's foolish consistency I can't be doing with, not consistency itself.

My advice on coming up with something new to write about when you're feeling blocked, stuck or uninspired is simple: drag out an old favorite and write about that again. If you feel up to it, try and come at it from a different angle, use different examples to illustrate your points or find some new sources to stand your argument up.

If you can't come up with any new wrinkles, though, just double down on what you said last time and the time before. At least that way you'll begin to build up some gravitas and authority on the topic. Maybe. You can hope...

I'm not advocating a tin-foil hat wearing, soapbox on Hyde Corner, the Day of Judgment is Nigh level of commitment to a theme here. We don't want to scare anyone. Just give yourself permission to return to your favorite subjects as often as it amuses you. And if you can make it amusing for your readers, so much the better.

This has been one of those posts I referred to right at the start, by the way; the ones where, to quote myself, "I just sit down, start typing and see what comes out." That's my go to for days when I have no ideas, which is often. It's always a surprise for me to hear what I have to say, even when it's something I've heard plenty of times before.

Isn't blogging wonderful?

Harmonic Feedback

Keen posted a short but revealing analysis of one of the most intriguing aspects of MMORPG gameplay (and, I guess, video game gameplay in general) - repetition. When I started blogging one of the very early posts I wrote was "Again! Again!" because I've been fascinated by the role repetition plays in entertainment for far longer than I've been playing MMORPGs or even video games.

Immediately before reading Keen's post I'd just finished Pitchfork's retrospective review of Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music", a masterpiece of supposed repetition. The experience of first hearing that album in the week it was released haunts me to this very day.

At the time I was merely mortally terrified by it although I came to love it later but I did for a long time believe the narrative that explained the double album away as four identical 16 minute slabs of noise. It's not. It's not anything like that.

Mark Richardson's review gives away something of the paradox whereby the same surface, penetrated, reveals different depths. Keen brings the same insight to MMORPGs with his EverQuest "hold a room and pull to it" example. It's one I have often called upon to try and explain why doing the same thing over and over is different from doing the same thing over and over.

Keen is searching for the line between good and bad repetition. It lies in chance. In chaos. in serendipity. If you read the Pitchfork review it refers to the way that Lou Reed placed two guitars with open tunings against amps so that they would not just create harmonic feedback but "with two guitars occupying the same space, the interactions between the instruments [would] create additional harmonics".

This is what happens in MMORPGs as they were originally designed. Specifically, it's what happens in the classic EverQuest play session, where a number of individuals are clustered in a fixed location around which mobs spawn and roam, to and from which a single player ventures and returns.

On the surface the situation appears extremely static. Having "broken" the room or the camp the players huddle in a corner and wait for a puller to go out and come back. They then unleash their spells and attacks on whatever comes along with him until it dies, whereupon they wait while he goes to get more. This they do for hour after hour.

Like Reed's unpredictable harmonics, however, the dynamics in play at the EQ camp are beyond the players' ability to predict. There are too many variables and too many of them are unknown. There's always the possibility that something will spin out of control.

For a while good players can shape the room. A good group will know the spawn times of the static mobs and the pattern of the roamers. A good puller will maintain consistency and avoid coming back with more than the group can handle, even if that means dying alone, out of aggro range.

A very good group will keep an accurate record of when each mob they kill dies, allowing them to predict the staggered and changing pattern of their respawns. With sufficient knowledge and a huge amount of concentration the process can be rendered predictably repetitive.

But not forever. No group, however skilled and experienced and attentive, can predict or control what happens outside their sphere of influence. They hold the room or the camp but the old EverQuest is a shared world. There are outside factors.

Another group or a single player may at any time disrupt the flow. Roamers can be killed, or held in combat, at far points of their range, out of sight, disrupting their patterns.

Different kinds of mobs with different strengths and abilities may spawn, randomly, unpredictably. In original EverQuest some of those unforeseen spawns might even have the ability to Charm players or their minions, turning the party against one another mid-battle. And of course, there are are the players themselves, always subject to unusual outside forces from a momentary lapse of concentration to a spilled drink to a kitchen fire.

EverQuest and MMORPGs like it were never truly dynamic, changing virtual worlds. Left to run with no players they would exhibit predictable patterns that would settle into stasis. Well, probably, although like the tree falling in the forest, who would know? Even between the faction-controlled NPCs and mobs there was always a modicum of randomness.

With players, though, nothing was ever the same. Nothing could ever be the same.

For weeks - months - around 2002/3 Mrs Bhagpuss and I would spend several nights a week in Velketor's Labyrinth. We liked Back Wall if we could get it. We'd clear and set up there with four other people permed from the pool we played with back then.

Mostly it was the same names. The spiders were always the same spiders. Every session was much the same. Every session was wildly different.

This is the good repetition that built MMORPGs. The repetition that replaced it, the kind Keen can't warm to, isn't bad. It's just different. Or rather it's not.

Instancing changed everything and yet it didn't change things all that much. I was happy to see it. Lost Dungeons of Norrath, which brought instances to Norrath, is up there with my favorite MMORPG expansions ever.

In LDoN dungeons there is only your group. It's a closed circuit. And yet, every session is still different. The parameters for change may be constrained but there's no such constraint on human behavior. 

You can zone into an instance you've done a score of times before and have someone do something you never imagined anyone would do. We once had a Necromancer respond to the first pull of the evening with an AE fear that sent everything the puller had brought scurrying deep into the dungeon, only to return with every mob they passed along the way. Things like that happened more often than you'd imagine.

Instanced dungeons with pick-up groups can be more repetitive than open dungeons with a static group. Or not. There's a hierarchy of predictability but the hierarchy can be unpredictable.


Nevertheless, as we move from the sprawling, uncoordinated virtual worlds of the late 20th Century into the silos of the early 21st the opportunities for chaotic revelation decline. As the genre pushes towards predictability, even-handedness and, most of all, solo-friendliness, the likelihood that if you do the same thing the same thing will happen continues to increase.

The tip of that knife is what Keen describes; repetition without dynamic gameplay. Which is fine in itself. As he says, his wife likes it. Lots of people like it. I like it. If what you're doing feels good each time you do it why would you not want to keep doing it?

I spend a lot of gaming time nowadays doing things whose outcome is relatively assured. Playing overpowered characters alone in closed instances I know well. It's relaxing. It can be satisfying when it leads to acquiring something desired; experience, faction, loot.

It's ironic in the extreme, though, to hear the gameplay of old MMOs described as "repetitive" when compared to that of the new. Were any developer to try and re-introduce the old kind of gameplay to an unfamiliar audience, raised on the MMOs of the last decade or so, I suspect that complaints of repetitive gameplay would be the very least of their worries.

Once More, With Feeling : GW2

Among the many changes to longstanding systems, processes and practices that came with the recent, massive update to GW2 was a complete revamp of the Skill Point mechanic. It's been a staple of the game since beta but in preparation for the upcoming expansion the entire concept has been given a makeover that rewrites just about everything, from the name itself to the utility of the skills and traits and the appearance of the UI that we use to to interact with them.

Not everyone likes everything about the new look and feel. Someone on the forums even called it "ugly" which exemplifies the old saw about accounting for taste, namely that there is none. There was a certain amount of rather more justifiable grumbling about the automated process that spent a portion of everyone's points without asking permission so we could all have a playable build ready as soon as we logged in after the patch. I thought that was a stroke of genius but I can see why it went down like bitter medicine from Nurse in some quarters.

Despite all that I think it's fair to say that the project has been received about as positively as anything like this is ever likely to be. Overly well-received in certain cases, and for as dubious a reason as if you'd found an ATM that kept spitting out banknotes without bothering to check if you had money in your account.

Some of the more spectacular bugs and oversights led to some fast and panicky patching, not least the spectacularly broken build that allowed Guardians to strut around like superheroes for a while, boasting that a single group of them running the right build could kill New Tequatl, the double-health dragon that was flummoxing entire raids. That got fixed before I ever got to see it in action.

ArenaNet confirmed that until they get all their waterfowl in a row such shenanigans will not attract the ban hammer. Good thinking. The new system is so much clearer and easier to navigate (as well as being prettier to look at, too) and it makes experimentation a lot more attractive even for someone like me, who usually can't be bothered with all the fiddling about. Let everyone try to break it and then fix the damage. Kind of what you have a Test server for, I know, but, hey, it's not like we're paying a subscription here.

It was wholly because of these changes that I happened to notice, while I was out and about in Tyria today, that several of the Challenge NPCs had acquired "I remember you from last time" dialogs. At least, I think they have acquired them. I'm not really sure.

One of my many rangers happened to pass Roj the Rowdy Butcher, one of the distressingly large number of clinically insane charr, who make Diessa Plateau the wonderland it is, and thought to challenge him to a fight. My memory is that, under the old system, you could do that. You can't now. Now he spouts a little speech and sends you on your way.

You can still join in with the fight if someone else has started it but if you turn up alone old Roj is having none of it. Neither is Shaman Purda nor the slightly worrisome thermal spa evangelist Burrison the Blue.

As I think more on it, though, I'm less and less sure that these ever were repeatable. Maybe I just imagined it. It seems hard to credit that, with all the work that's needed for Heart of Thorns right now, someone sat down and drafted new responses just on the off chance someone might try for the best out of three.

It's a pity, though. I can't really see why we shouldn't be able to spar with these folks as and when the whim takes us. Not, obviously, for any kind of credit or reward but just for the fun of it. Whenever I pass a Skill Point Hero Challenge that someone has triggered I always join in. They are fun fights as a rule. I don't see why we should have to wait for someone who hasn't done it to come along before we can have another go.

For that matter, why are Hearts one-time only affairs? A lot of them are pretty dull, to be sure, but there are a few I'd do every time I was passing, if I was allowed. It just seems like an easy route to extra, optional content to leave all of these active permanently. Just detach any and all rewards from characters who've already received them. Although, when you consider that Dynamic Events are all infinitely repeatable with rewards, maybe you don't even need to do that.

Oh, I don't know. Maybe it's just me. Maybe no-one else would ever want to repeat this stuff. I notice that a lot of people don't do every single stage of the pre-events at Maw or Fire Elemental every single time the way I do, after all. A lot of people, well, they just stand there. Some people just don't know how to have fun.

Anyway, I don't think it would hurt either my Guardian or Shaman Purda for the two of them to go a few rounds every time they meet. Where's the harm?

One More Time, With Feeling

Keen has an interesting post up about repetitive tasks in MMOs, wondering why they are fun in one game but not in another. He has some good suggestions why this might be the case for him but me, I struggle to think of any MMO in which repetitive actions aren't fun.

MMOs are built on repetition. As pastimes designed to be open-ended and unfinishable, they have to be. SynCaine, with his enviable flair for the Naming of Things, has taken to describing certain MMOs as "Play-to-Finish" but I remain to be convinced that any such thing exists. "Play-until-Bored", sure, but that's a different issue and one that says more about the player than the game.

Am I playing an MMO or reading Raymond Carver?

Adding finite, narrative-driven structure to MMOs was last year's Big Idea and it certainly helped to create an impression that games like SW:TOR, The Secret World and even Guild Wars 2 have a  beginning, a middle and an end. They don't, though. The stories devs  shoehorn into them do, but beyond those arbitrary, linear paths the same kind of worlds open up within those games as in every other MMO. (Well, I shouldn't make presumptions about SW:TOR. Still haven't played it, still not likely to, but I guess it's true even there in the Home of the Fourth Pillar).

That's not to say that MMOs shouldn't have stories, nor that narrative is a total dead-end. After all, it's just another form of developer-created content. As SoE's John Smedley has become so fond of telling us recently, user-generated content is the future. It just isn't economical to produce new, discrete, unique dev-crafted content at high-enough speed and in sufficient volume to stay ahead of even the average player's ability to consume it.

Remind me, what was in this corner last month?

About the only producer attempting the trick in the last few years has been Trion with Rift and while they've received praise for the efforts they've made they certainly haven't made such a success of things that anyone's rushing to emulate their business model. Anyway, Rift's fast-flowing content stream itself is built on repetition. The frequent events bear a marked similarity one to another. There's a very distinctive pattern, format and flavor to them that hints of the cookie-cutter. The sprinkles and spices they add to each new batch do a good job of disguising the familiar crunch but after a while even different-colored sprinkles begin to look like just what they are - more sprinkles.

Goodbye flophouse, hello penthouse!

"Everybody is content for everyone else" is Smedley's new line, and that's fine as far as it goes. I've been playing a lot of World vs World in GW2 these last few weeks and there surely wouldn't be much content there without all the other players lining up to kill me and /dance on my corpse. Other players aren't reliable though. Sometimes too many turn up, other times not enough.

For truly reliable user-generated content you can't beat resource nodes and what you make with them. As I write this I have DCUO patching in the background. It's a huge download because I last logged in the best part of a year ago. What's brought me to update it today is the upcoming "Home Turf" DLC that adds super-hero housing to the game. Forget fisticuffs - let's decorate!  Oh heck, why not do both?  Let's build houses and then fight in them. Just mind that lamp!

Watch it feathers, you're next.

Repetition and user generated content aren't the same thing but they sit closely beside each other. In a complete system you might source all your raw materials through time-consuming gathering, take ages learning the skills to craft them into components and longer still designing and building. In the end there'd be a fresh resource in the world, created by you, usable by others. Then you start again and so the wheel turns.

What the two concepts have in common, and what makes them both key to the long-term health of a true MMO, is self-determination. There's a qualitative difference between chopping at an imaginary tree for an hour because you want to make something from the logs and spending an hour getting logs to give to an NPC because he needs them for some project of his own.

Another 500 guards should do it...

It's much more palatable to spend a few hours slaughtering orcs so that the guards at the gate of a city nearby will only sneer as you sidle past, rather than charge out with halberds raised, than it is to run errands day after day after day after day (and only once every day, mind you) to collect enough tokens from the very NPC sending you out to work just so you can turn around and spend your wages in his company store. One is private enterprise, the other is wage-slavery.

Rabbits? They're just rats with good PR.

I learned to how to "play" MMOs from Everquest. It might not have been the full-on sandbox experience Smed is promising (threatening?) to bring us with EQNext but the fundamentals were all in place even then. "Here's a stained shirt and a blunt sword - go find your fortune". As I step out into each brave new virtual world it's just another step on that same journey. Exploring, discovering, building, creating, what matters is that I'm the one making the choices and (within the terms of the EULA at least) I'm the one setting the rules.

So, if I want to spend six hours logging or six days decorating, I will. And if I kill ten rats it's because I want ten rats dead and that's no-one's business but me and the rats.

Again! Again!

You can take a position on repetition. The Fall dig it. The Black Ghosts don't.

I vacillate. There's good repetition and bad repetition, after all. I would have been pretty confident in putting MMO daily quests into the "bad" basket. Until Rift.

I first came across daily quests during my brief stay in WoW. I pretty much hated them on sight. I didn't do them, I didn't want to do them and I wished they didn't exist. I like repeatable quests well enough, those quests you can do over and over as and when you feel like it, usually to raise some pocket change or get some unlikely secret society of three-foot high talking hedgehogs to trust you enough that they'll open the back of their gaudily-painted caravan and sell you some ethnic handcrafts of their people. But the point of those repeatable quests is you can do them whenever you like, so you never feel you have to do them NOW!

Daily quests demand. They threaten and whine. If you don't do me today you missed out! If you skip me this evening your a bad person! How lazy you are! Don't you have any application? As soon as I ran into these things in WoW I was convinced I would never have any truck with them. Ever.

For the last week and a half, every evening, I've been logging in eight characters on three servers in Rift and running round throwing firebombs,

Hey! This is a built-up area you maniac!

feeding pot-plants,

And that's a civic amenity!

zapping citizens

Ok now you went too far. That's assault!And you did it to me yesterday. And the day before that! If only there was a guard around...

and generally behaving like a highly suggestible four-year old with OCD. What's more, I'm enjoying it. I even look forward to it.

So, why do Rift's dailies work for me when WoW's didn't? Three reasons. Brevity, variety and lucky bags.

• Most dailies in Rift take just a minute or two. You rarely have to travel far or search hard or do anything difficult. They're "why not?" quests. 

•  They aren't the same every time. Sometimes the task varies, sometimes the result, sometimes both.

• You can get a bag! With stuff in! And it's stuff that you might want! It's like a free Kinder Egg every day.

Marty got the sweet stuff. Oh yes he do!

These things are well designed. They are fun to do. They are good repetition. And now it's almost mid-day and my dailies will have reset. So I'm off to do them again. And again. And again.