Always The Same

Several bloggers I follow have been weighing in with opinions and speculations based around information coming out of World of Warcraft's Shadowlands beta. Enthusiasm seems lukewarm at best.

The last expansion, Battle for Azeroth doesn't seem to be held in much affection. The only blogger I can think of who seems genuinely fond of it is Syp, who writes "I really, really enjoyed the questing and leveling through the Alliance zones". Other than that, most people seem to have had more than enough of BfA by now.

It's hardly surprising, given how long its been hanging around. As Wilhelm points out, with an official launch window of "Fall 2020", even should Shadowlands hit the front of its time-slot, this will be the longest ever gap between WoW expansions. That might make people really keen to buy a new box or it could just make them question whether the time has come at last to climb down off the merry-go-round for good.

One big caveat appears to be something known as "Covenants". Even after reading quite a bit about them I only have the vaguest idea what they are but I do know people don't seem very keen.

Flipping through the overview of the concept at WoWHead it reminds me of Orders in Guild Wars 2. That's a concept that once seemed crucial but now rarely merits a mention. If you followed your class story back at launch, as most people did, about half way through you had to make a choice about which of three "Orders" to join. It was painted as a big deal at the time and people did get a little angsty about it but like most things in GW2 it turned out to be mostly cosmetic.

Secret hideout of the Order of Whispers. Knock twice and ask for Charlie.

Shadowland's Covenants look to be a much more substantive gameplay decision. Marathal, in the post I linked earlier, suggests any imagined choice will burn away in the fires of pragmatism: "...if you are interested in playing any end game content, you will be forced to choose from one, maybe two options. The bonuses available will be so skewed that you will be forced to take the one that gives you the best bonuses so that you can clear content more easily". Kaylriene, discussing the issue at length, hopes that a meaningful beta process will allow Blizzard to tune the system until there's "...a real choice that allows you to pick the experience you want rather than picking the mathematically best spell and being stuck with all the dressing around it".

In a follow-up post he goes on to examine the wider issue of class balance in MMORPGs and the way players work to game any percieved deviations from the norm. Talking specifically about WoW, he says "World of Warcraft has, undoubtedly, nearly always had balancing problems with the viability of talents, abilities, and whole classes. One of the recurring themes of every expansion for over a decade now has been a discussion over which classes and specs are meta, which talent choices are absolutely necessary for top performance, and things like best in slot lists and group composition guides." You could almost certainly say the same for any remotely popular or successful MMORPG during the same period.

Comparing WoW with  Final Fantasy XIV, Kaylriene points up the very significant difference in design approach applied by the two development teams. As the parse charts show, FFXIV can make a convincing claim to have arrived closer to a point of equilibrium between classes than most games across the genre.

Keep ladling it on, guys.

And yet that difference still exists. They haven't eliminated it entirely, it appears. So, here's my question to anyone currently playing FFXIV: by reducing the parse gap to 10%, have the developers successfully avoided the issues of elitism that plague almost every other MMORPG? From comments I've seen in a number of blogs over the last few years, I suspect not.

My feeling is that in any MMOPRPG that becomes successful enough for there to be a surplus of players relative to the content, the perceived importance of any relative differential in efficiency will constantly adjust to match whatever difference can be measured. If there's only 10% between top and bottom then every percentage point will matter. If the developers could balance so brilliantly that there was only 1% difference, then every 0.1% would matter.

So long as people are able assign numbers they'll use them to make whatever points they want to make, be that about classes or the individuals playing them, regardless of the objective relevance of the numbers. In most cases, whether the content in question can be completed with different classes in various roles won't be at issue. Even if it demonstrably can, the question will be whether it should. There will always be a "right" way to do everything. For some, any other way is heresy. It must be shunned by all right-thinking players.

As Wilhelm rightly observed in a comment on Kaylirene's post, all of this is primarilay an issue of information flow: "With WoW Classic we have a solved problem issue, the way we have had on the EQ retro servers. People are able to take advantage of all of the meta gear and class discussions of the past that figured out the best path forward. There is no discussion as to what the path should be, it is just a matter of digging up what path was decided on back in 2006 or so and running with that".

Wisdom of crowds, is that it?

When games are new, no-one really knows anything. The goal is to complete content any which way you can. Whatever combination of classes, using whatever mish-mash of talents or builds, if it gets the job done, that's all that matters.

Then, as time passes, if the game is even moderately successful, two things happen. First, players learn what works and what doesn't through trial and error. Second, someone inevitably comes up with a means of measuring player efficiency. Numerically. The dreaded parse has arrived.

Once people know both what should work in principle and what is (or isn't) working in practice, they can start taking names and kicking ass. Kicking your ass out of their group for not measuring up, that is.

Anyone who plans on playing nicely with others is going to have to make some kind of peace with those who don't want to play nicely at all. Even those who plan on soloing, either from natural inclination or as a way of exerting control, may end up having to contend with DPS checks margined against an optimized meta they don't follow and never signed up for.

As has been discussed many times, balance is a never-ending, ever-failing sisyphean task. It's been with us for what seems like forever. I remember talking about the folly of "cutting the legs off the table" to try and achieve balance as far back as the original EverQuest forums in the early 2000s. Put simply, true balance is never going to happen.

Except, could it? Let's try a thought experiment. What if every class - or at least every archetype - Healer, Tank, DPS, for argument's sake -  was exactly the same? 

Role model.

What if there was no choice for players to make, none at all, other than which role they wanted to perform? Neither at character creation nor ever after? What if  all skills, attacks, talents, weapons and gear were held in common? What if every Warrior was always identical in all abilities and stats to every Paladin? Every Rogue to every Wizard?

Well, for a start, with no intrinsic difference between character classes, any difference in efficiency would unequivocally come down to differences between the players, not the characters. It might not entirely be explainable by personal skill and ability - things like hardware and latency would be factors (and, for sure, excuses) - but in most scenarios the expectation would be that if the player wasn't hitting their benchmarks the only explanation would be incompetence or inabilty.

It probably wouldn't be a panacea for elitism and social maladjustment, then. I suppose it might just push some of that to the margins. Bullies and jerks are always going to find a way to be bullies and jerks but I guess it could conceivably put paid to the arguably more difficult social issue of someone helpfully sending you tells explaining how to optimize your build while they somehow manage to imply criticism of your life choices.

But it would also be a bit boring, wouldn't it? Everyone being the same? Why even have classes if they all do exactly the same thing?

For flavor, that's what. As progression and rpg mechanics you could replace statistical advantage with cosmetic advantage. Plenty of games are half-way there already, GW2 more like two-thirds. It's not for nothing the game's nickname is Fashion Wars.

No-one tells me how to dress. Apparently.

The problem with that idea isn't that people don't find dressing up sufficiently motivating. The evidence is that they very scarily do. It's that placing high value on what your character looks like actually risks making that the meta. If it feels bad enough being told you don't know how to play, imagine being told you don't know how to dress.

Maybe none of this goes far enough. If we're looking for a truly radical solution, why not set a time-to-kill on every mob then adjust it proportionally to the number of people on its hate list so that TTK  never varies, regardless of who's there and what they're doing.

It's all notional, anyway, isn't it? In almost every encounter between players and mobs in almost every MMORPG the outcome is never in doubt, only how long it's going to take. It would certainly be easier to manage your game session if you knew, to the second, precisely how long every kill was going to take.

If all of this seems unlikely, even insane, it's no more ridiculous than believing we can have multiple  classes making genuinely meaningful choices that significantly impact gameplay and yet expect that there won't be winners and losers depending on what choices are made.

Balance is a lie. Unless Covenants turn out to be true magic, after all.

Notes To Self

I don't seem to have a whole lot to say about games at the moment but I have a bunch of music-related posts cooking. How many of them will make it to the table, well that's another matter.

After last month's beyond-epic title round-up, which exhausted me and most likely pole-axed the handful of readers who might have glanced at it, had it been a quarter the length, I decided to go monthly. The first instalment on the new schedule is coming soon. Fourteen titles in the pot so far, so with ten days left I'm guessing around twenty when we get there. Sounds a lot more manageable.

Of course, I can't mention one song without linking to a bunch more, so even a month's worth is probably going to run over fifty links to the ever-essential YouTube. As each day passes it gets harder to imagine how we ever lived without it. In fact, thinking about it, I guess it's been well over a decade since I had too, which is scary, too.

Top of the provisional schedule is a covers post. It's been a while since I did one. Okay, obviously, every music post I put up is pretty much going to be a covers post anyway, since I'm obsessed with re-interpretation in all media, but I don't think I've done a pure covers collection in a while.

I was looking in my music folder and I see I've popped a load of fresh possibles in there recently. Some curiosities, some themes. Looks like I had something in mind. Can't say I remember what it was but I can fake it.

One idea I do remember having, which totally failed to pan out, was famous film directors who used to be in bands. There aren't any. Okay, there almost certainly are. I bet most directors born since about 1950 were at least in some school or college combo if nothing else. If any of them ever recorded a performance, though, I haven't had much luck tracking down the embarassing evidence.

I got the idea when I happened across a video by the Del-Byzanteens. Jim Jarmusch played keys and sang with them in the early eighties. John Lurie guested on sax, too. The Del-Byzanteens have the unusual privelige of being pretty good which started me wondering whether directors would make more of their musical talents than actors. With actors, being in a band can sometimes seem just a teeny bit like a vanity project. Just sayin'.

But no, apparently movie directors have other things on their minds than making music. Unless you count performers like Woody Allen or Clint Eastwood or composers like John Carpenter or David Lynch, which for this purpose I most definitely don't. I was looking for people who were making music before they were famous, not for whom fame opened up opportunities to make music and have people notice.

So that was a bust. But it did re-ignite my interest in the early eighties New York No-Wave scene for a hot second. I always had a soft spot for that unfashionable, unlistenable moment in time. I could spin up something around that, no trouble at all, but it seems almost cruel.

It would give me an excuse to embed a Cristina video, though, although Ze Records were Post-No Wave, I suppose. I mean, there are tunes.

I nearly put her mesmerizing cover of Is That All There Is? up when I read that she'd died of Covid19 related complications to her pre-existing auto-immune disease. For a while during lockdown I was pondering tribute posts to musicians who'd died as a result of the pandemic but it just seemed too morbid. I might think about some kind of portmanteau tribute at some point but I think it's too soon. We are, after all, still bang in the middle of the damn thing.

Another quasi-topical issue post I'm considering revolves around the song Sally Go Round the Roses. I came across it when I was digging into the history of The Jaynettes and it seemed curiously pertinent. I have a few ideas but I'm not quite sure where to go with them, so it's simmering on the back burner for now.

Then tonight this turned up on Feedly. Much as I like Gorrilaz it didn't do an awful lot for me on first listen but it did make me wonder why I've never done the obvious and put a post together featuring songs about video games. I'm gonna get right on that. Maybe.

I'd also like to do another musical death match. I was thinking of pitting a couple of cute woodland animals against each other. I started with squirrels. It turns out there are a lot of songs about squirrels but almost all of them are terrible. Terrifyingly bad, in fact. I need to give it some thought and come up with a better animal. Two better animals. Open to suggestions.

Anyway, that's what's bubbling around my brain at the moment. I'm still furloughed and Mrs. Bhagpuss is away for a week checking out her first grandchild (ten weeks old and finally available for inspection under recently relaxed lockdown rules) so I have time to sift through YouTube and play unpleasant, annoying videos at full volume all day.

Watch this space. And listen to it. You might hear something you like. It's not impossible...

Get A Job: EverQuest

I had a longish trip to make this morning. It took me out of the house for most of the day. Before I set out, I still managed to make time  to log in to EverQuest and set my Overseer dailies. I'm that keen.

Just as I was about to hit "Play" I noticed a new item in Latest News. It was short and strange: "The Nameless are searching for new blood" is all it said.

An event of some kind, perhaps? Possibly some kind of invasion? I hoped so. I like those. And I knew who The Nameless was. Or I thought I did., although the plural verb threw me a bit.

As well as being the name of a server, "The Nameless" is the name of an elder god in the Norrathian pantheon. Kind of. I think. Actually, I've never quite known exactly what The Nameless is. Allakhazam's entry doesn't exactly make it any clearer, either:

Even though I was in a bit of a rush I clicked through to see what it was all about. And it turned out to be... a job. Three jobs, to be precise. I definitely wasn't expecting that.

At first I thought the whole "Nameless" gag was just Dreamweaver being cute. Judging by the way he can't stop giggling when he hosts the Kander's Candor podcasts I would guess he's quite prone to fits of cuteness.

After I thought about it for a moment, though, it occured to me that perhaps what he was doing was obliquely explaining the underlying mystery of The Nameless as may always been understood within the company itself.

It seems no-one at Verant (or SISA or 989 Studios or SoE or whatever the hell they were calling themselves back then. You think Daybreak/Darkpaw is confusing? Nameless is clearly the last thing that company has ever been.) was expecting anyone to take the game they were making seriously. Half the Norrathian gods have anagrams for names that roughly describe their sphere of influence. Tunare/Nature, Ec'i/Ice and so on.

Even the less blatant - Solusek Ro, the sun god, for example - are punny. Sol Ro, as it's almost always shortened by players, concatenates the name of our own sun with that of the star around which Superman's home planet, Krypton, spins. Span. Is Krypton gone these days or back? I lose track...

The idea that the most mysterious and powerful of all the godlike beings, the one that "causes universes to exist" but "is unknown to most of Norrath" would be the developers behind the game fits very well with the general naming convention they appear to have been making up as they went along. If it isn't the explanation it should be.

I didn't have time to click through the hyperlinks to the job descriptions this morning but when I got back this evening and logged in to collect my Overseer xp, I popped onto the forums again to take another look. The links go to a page I really should remember to check more often: Careers at Daybreak.

If anyone's got a hankering to work there, now would seem to be a good time to apply. The three roles picked out in the forum post all involve working on EverQuest specifically but there are twenty-one jobs available in total. As I say, it's been a long time since I last looked so I don't know if that's typical or exceptional.

The thing I found most interesting were the nine openings for work on an "unnanounced project" at the Austin, Texas studios. I really can't keep track of this stuff (who can?) but I did remember that the DCUO team is based in Austin. I seemed to remember Jack Emmett saying something about it when DBG did the three-way shimmy earlier this year.

Not entirely sure what that means. (Particularly the bit about carving themselves out, which sounds unconfortable to say the least). Does Dimensional Ink "own" the whole Austin operation now, in which case the unnanounced project would presumably be theirs, too. Or are they sharing office space with some other, as yet unknown, Daybreak affiliate? Maybe, oh, I dunno, Nameless Games?

Whatever, it is a little bit intriguing, even if I don't think it's news, as such. I'm fairly sure we already heard about the unnamed project at some point. It's just that things that don't have names are easily forgotten. It's worth reminding ourselves now and again that something might be going on behind closed doors, just so we don't all hurt ourselves falling off our chairs in surprise when something playable finally appears.

As if that would ever happen.

Restless In Tyria

We're just over a month away from the eight anniversary of the launch of Guild Wars 2. It's a measure of just how long the game's been around that we can put a precise date on when it officially went Live.

GW2 has to be one of the last MMORPGs to follow what used to be the traditional path to market. There was a lengthy development process lasting several years, throughout which ArenaNet released information in bursts, revealing classes and features with great fanfare to keep the interest pot bubbling.

There were interviews and discussions across the gaming media. There were playable demos at conventions. I recall there were even junkets where accredited press and favored bloggers were flown across the country for a hands-on and a hand-shake. It was the continued coverage from Zubon and the much-missed Ravious at Kill Ten Rats that finally piqued my own interest in a game whose development I would otherwise not have been following.

In the final months before launch ArenaNet ran a highly successful promotion within GW2's precursor, the original Guild Wars. I hadn't played that game for years but I ended up buying the collected expansions, contacting customer service to get my old account restored, and playing through a fair chunk of content to build up some Hall of Monuments points.

Back in 2012 "beta weekends" were an established promotional device and one I very much enjoyed. I'd first encountered them in Rift, an experience which came too early for me to document here, but by the time we reached the same stage for GW2 (and The Secret World) I had this blog up and running.

I was immediately and powerfully impressed, particularly with how it looked. In my first impressions piece I wrote "It looks absolutely stunning. Screen shots and videos really don't do it justice. The whole thing looks like a hand-painted, animated movie".

I was happy enough with the gameplay, too: "...based on just a few hours... what I've seen is an excellent implementation of traditional, standard and familiar MMO... Guild Wars 2 looks to be a really first-class AAA theme-park...".

Everything looked so good right up to launch, but...

But there isn't really a "but". A lot's been said, no little of it by me, about how ANet reneged on the (in)famous"Manifesto" but despite all that the game goes on, much the same, not least because most of the manifesto claims were manifest hogwash to begin with. Viewed with hindsight, the official Manifesto promo video makes that clear enough. Once you've seen the provenance of those stirring scenes in the game itself it's hard to believe the hype. (Okay, they were right about the art...)

I'm not here to warm over cold complaints, though. After all, I'm still playing GW2 eight years on. It can't be that bad, right?

No, it's not. It's perfectly fine for an eight-year old MMORPG. If I'm going to complain about anything, it isn't the game itself. It's that I'm still playing it.

Alright, not even that, exactly. After all, I'm still playing several games a lot older than GW2. The real problem is that GW2 is the newest MMORPG I'm playing regularly.

In the eight years since Guild Wars 2 appeared there hasn't been a single new entry to the genre that's been able to unseat ANet's sophomore effort from pole position in my play rotation. I've played a lot of newer games in that time - Final Fantasy XIV, WildStar, ArcheAge, Black Desert Online, Blade and Soul, Twin Saga, Revelation Online, Riders of Icarus, Elder Scrolls Online, a whole load more I've forgotten. But I'm not playing them now. I'm playing GW2.

Most of those games are still around. Some of them are doing pretty well, FFXIV and BDO especially. I still drop by a few of them, now and again, to see how they're getting on, check in with my old characters, have a bit of a run around. Sometimes I even settle in for a while, do a few more levels.

But not one of them has stuck. Guild Wars 2 remains the last MMORPG I can really say I have played since Rift. And I'm finally beginning to feel it.

For years I've listened to MMORPG players talking about burnout and boredom and ennui. It's as much a trope of the genre as dodgy escort quests and elite raiding. I've been aware of it but I've never really felt it, personally. Any time I have sensed the chill shadow of disengagement on my back I've simply turned towards the warm glow of another MMO. Because there's always another MMO.

Or there always has been. Now, though? I'm not so sure.

In 2020 here we all are, blowing on the embers, or so it sometimes seems. WoW Classic, EverQuest Progression , ArcheAge Unchained, LotRO Legendary... The past sells better than the future, it seems. And even if it doesn't, it certainly feels like the safer choice, for players and developers both.

And we're all seeking a place of safety right now, even if safety also means stasis, repetition and tedium. It's ironic that, with a present that seems to consist of eternal lockdown out here in the real world (or worse, blind terror over things opening up that shouldn't), when we go in search of freedom and adventure in our fantasy lives, increasingly all we find are chores and tasks and every day the same as the last.

It was always that way, of course. Just listen to the voiceover on that video. What contempt for what the genre had to offer - "I swung a sword. I swung a sword. I swung it again. Hey! That's great. We don't want players to grind in Guild Wars 2. No-one enjoys that. No-one finds it fun." Yeah, well, see how that worked out for you, ANet, eight years on.

And that's what it comes down to, in the end. Not even just in the end. In the middle. At the beginning. When the newness is gone all that left is the same old.

Gone are al those new games coming out like flowers bloming in a rich, strange garden. Spring faded long ago and Summer, too. The first hint of Autumn chill was already in the air, eight years ago, when Guild Wars 2 opened the gates to Tyria. It's winter, now.

I used to enjoy paging through the multiplicity of lists of MMOs in development. Twenty MMOs to Watch. That kind of thing. They came out every year and there was always plenty to be excited about. Yesterday I took a look at what's out there now.

New MMORPGs 2020

11 Upcoming MMORPGs to be Excited About in 2020
 
The 5 Best Upcoming MMORPGs to Play in 2020

Perfect Ten: Upcoming MMOs to watch in 2020

Any of those doing it for you?

There are two or three I'm genuinely excited about, although we're fast approaching the point where they'll have been in development so long I won't quite be able remember why. Worse, I don't expect to be playing any of them this year, next year, maybe ever.

Some of the rest I could play right now, if I didn't care they're half-finished, buggy messes in alpha or beta or Early Access that still want my money up front anyway. A few are region-locked, which annoys me, but it's a mooot point because they're games I most likely wouldn't enjoy even if I could get at them.

And that's the big problem. Most of the games on all those lists look like nothing I'd want to play. I think it has as much to do with me as with the games. I have a very particular idea of what I want in an MMORPG and what I want is no longer in fashion the way it once was. No-one's making games like that any more. They cost too much and too many have failed.

Looks like I'm stuck with the games I already have, then. Which most likely means more Guild Wars 2, more EverQuest II, more EverQuest, probably even more World of Warcraft. A strict diet spiced only with a sprinkling of all the other ageing games that look and play just like them. I can't say it's a prospect to set jaded taste buds tingling.

See you in two years for Guild Wars 2's tenth anniversary, I guess. That should be a big one. And by then we should be starting to ramp up for EQ's silver anniversary and WoW and EQII's twentieth.

Can't say there's nothing to look forward to, can we?

Yay?

All The Trees Of The Field Will Clap Their Hands: EverQuest

When I went to log into EverQuest yesterday evening the servers were down for an update. I popped in to the forums to read the patch notes and this line jumped out at me:

"Treants in classic zones have reverted to their classic appearance."

It's a short, simple sentence but it raises a surprising number of questions, like which zones, exactly, are we calling "classic" these days? Just the ones from the original release, like in "WoW Classic" or "Core Tyria"?  Or is it the supposed "golden age of classic EverQuest", by which we could be talking about anything up to and including Planes of Power?

I'm not sure there even were any treants in Kunark or Velious or Luclin. Actually, I'm pretty sure there weren't, so I guess it's a moot point. And what exactly was a treant's "classic appearance", anyway? Blowed if I know. It must have been easily fifteen years since they changed it. I tried to remember what they used to look like but I came up blank.

Then there's the semantic value. If something's looked a certain way for more than three-quarters of its existence, isn't that its "classic appearance"? Whatever it looked like before may be its original appearance, but "classic"? I'm not convinced.

The biggest question, though, has to be "Why?" Did anyone care? Have there been complaints? Is there some kind of Treant Classic Appearance Committee that's been lobbying for a rollback ever since the fateful Day of Change?

It's not the first time this has happened, either. I remember being equally surprised a while back - maybe it was last year or the year before - when I saw a similar patch message about wolves. I think it was wolves. It might have been rats.

Whatever it was, they reverted too. I wasn't playing much at the time so I didn't follow it up although I have a vague memory of going to Velious to take a look. In which case it was probably wolves. Not many rats in Velious. Ratmen, yes. Rats, not so much.

As soon as the servers came up the first thing I did was log in my Druid. She spends most of her time hanging out with the other druids at the North Karana druid ring, just a short run from the South Karana bridge. I ran her down there and over  the river then carried on, past the centaur village, down to the old two-spawn back in the hills.

Time was when you'd need to join a list for that. Those treants had a life expectancy measured in seconds. Now they live out their days in peace, creaking and groaning in the wind. And they do indeed look like they did back when I first saw them. I remember now.

It's a very cartoonish look. I didn't realize at the time. On a 15" CRT monitor they came across as considerably more threatening, especially when they came lumbering towards you, waving their branches. Now they just look comical.

So that's the classic look. With that itch scratched, naturally I started to wonder what the non-classic look used to be. I thought I remembered but I wasn't sure. You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone, right?

I could think of a few places to check. I took my Beastlord on a quick trip to Plane of Nightmare. I'd felled my share of walking trees there, for sure, and been killed by them. But no, those trees always had their own model. They still do. I guess it's another kind of "classic". 

Over in Blightfire Moors, a zone from 2006's The Serpent's Spine, I found treants with a familiar
look. I think that's the one that's just been reverted but I can't say I'm a hundred per cent certain. I kind of wish we'd had some warning. I'd have taken a few screenshots, just for the record. It's not as if it matters but it would have been nice all the same.

There was something else in the patch notes, too. Try this one on for size:

"Painting: Tassel's Tavern when placed in housing should now correctly teleport you to the tavern in classic North Freeport."

Say what, now?

I had to look this one up. It took a bit of research but apparently there are teleport paintings in EverQuest just like there are in EQII. They come from racial "Heritage Crates". You can buy those in the cash shop. 

If you collect all of them (I think there are four) you can get an Achievement called "Human Art Collector". That gives you yet another painting, Tassel's Tavern, which will teleport you to the inn of the same name... in old North Freeport.

That's right. Not the reviled, revisionist nightmare everyone hates and shuns but an instanced version of the much-missed, original North Freeport zone. Or perhaps we should say the "classic" version.

As many people have already asked, if we can go to an instanced version, why can't we just have the classic version back for good? I mean, you just did it with the treants...

It's all getting a bit Philip K. Dick for me. I think I'm going to go and have a lie down.

Every Convenience

Belghast posted a list of his Gaming Grievances and Telwyn followed suit. I don't have any such gripes to air, being largely willing to take games as I find them, but I did spot a trend in both their lists that I thought I might pick away at, just a little.

I think it would not be too presumptious of me to suggest that both Belghast and Telwyn are a heck of a lot more social in their gaming than I am. Based on their blog posts, Belghast knows and teams up with a whole host of people across numerous games, while Telwyn has a regular cadre of friends and family to adventure with. For both of them, the facility to play with the people they want to play with seems to trump most, if not all, other concerns.

Telwyn articulates it plainly: "It’s a golden rule in MMORPG design as far as I’m concerned – just let friends play together without any barriers to fun!". Belghast says "...we as players should be able to group freely with our friends".

I don't have any gaming friends to speak of, these days. Mostly I play on my own or alone in crowds. Even so, I think I understand what Belghast and Telwyn are up against. I did spend years grouping with various people fairly regularly and at that time there were some pretty high walls between factions in certain games I played. In Rift and Dark Age of Camelot you had to play on different servers if you wanted to have characters on opposing factions. In EverQuest II, if characters had the temerity to join guilds based in the opposite faction's city,  they couldn't even get guild writs to help the guild level up.

I played EverQuest when the entire game revolved around which character race was kill on sight to which NPC faction. Players could mingle freely but only at the risk of seeing their character's reputation dragged into the dirt by dint of their choice of friends. Scabbling to drop group because someone accidentally or intentionally aggroed something on a faction you relied on was an everyday event back then. Even in more modern times Guild Wars 2 put faction at the core of what was originally intended to be its primary end-game content, World vs World.

As the years passed and the genre widened and diffused, MMORPGs have tended towards universality. All of Belghast and Telwyn's walls and barriers have been under siege and most of them are crumbling. There's plenty of data suggesting what growth there still is within the hobby comes first and foremost from within - people who play introducing and inviting people they know. Without the extrinsic growth earlier games enjoyed it's been commercially incumbent on developers to make it as easy as possible for people who already know each other to play together without hindrance or inconvenience.

And for a good while convenience was itself the watchword. MMORPGs had an unfortunate reputation for awkwardness. Not for difficulty, a term core gamers take to themselves with pride, but for irritation and annoyance. All those pettifogging details, ineligant systems, outdated mechanics. The sheer amount of reading and learning involved before you could just play the goddam game. All the nit-picking rules you had to follow when you did.

When you looked at the barriers preventing you from playing with the people you wanted to play with and those preventing your own characters from interacting usefully and easily between each other, it all seemed like too much trouble to even begin. Surely it always made sense to sweep all that away and the silly restrictions on things like class and race along with it?

Yes, well, up to a point. I was never much convinced by some of the arguments that backed up the changes as they filtered in and I'm even less convinced now, having seen the result.

The idea that game systems prevent people playing with their friends always rang a little hollow to me. It seems that about the only genuine, insurmountable barrier to playing with your pals is region-locking, the one thing Belghast's list I'm fundementally against on a matter of principle. The internet ought to be global not local.

I might not approve of it when it happens but I recognize that the primary reason companies region-lock is commercial. Not everyone is big enough or rich enough to go it alone. Local partners have be recompensed somehow. Regional exclusivity is a way of achieving global reach at affordable cost. Doesn't explain why Blizzard does it...

Outside of IP blocking , though, I've never really bought the argument that in-game faction or server restrictions prevent people from playing with their friends, be they in other countries, other states or other rooms in the same house. Back when I used to play MMORPGs with other human beings, if I wanted to play with someone new and they weren't on my faction or my server I'd roll another character.

In-game restrictions apply to characters not players. Players can always play with whoever they want. If the problem is that the person you'd like to play with is playing a faction you'd rather not play, then it seems to me the issue is with personal taste, not outside restrictions. If playing with the other person is the priority, which faction or class or race you choose to make that happen is surely incidental.

Moving from the specifics of playing with friends to the generalities of "convenience", it would seem to be even less reasonable to object to further barriers being removed. Who wants inconvenience after all?

Well, I guess I do, sometimes. Although I suspect I don't so much want it as need it. I'm no different to anyone else when it comes to an easy life. If someone offers to make something simpler, smoother, less of a nuisance I'm not going to argue with them. I'm going to let them get on with it, take full advantage, and then complain about it.

That's very much what happened across the genre over the best part of a decade following World of Warcraft's incredible break-out success. In trying to re-bottle that lightning developers cast around for anything that might be holding their games back, even though they really had no clear idea what that might be.

It seemed for a while as if Blizzard's magic dust might be ease of access. Everything that felt like grit in the machine had to be vacuumed out. Unfortunately, as we've seen with the return of Classic, the version of WoW that got the outside world's attention wasn't really all that accessible by modern standards. In quite a lot of ways it was really bloody fiddly. And yet, somehow, people couldn't get enough of it.

Of late there've been a few tentative moves in the other direction. Daybreak stopped adding color splotches to the map to direct you to your quest destination, at least in new content. Blizzard took away the right to fly then gave it back but told you you had to earn it.

Flight and quest-markers were arguably always controversial additions to the games. Shared bank vaults and account-based flagging don't seem like obviously bad things. That's because they aren't. They're good things for games and for gamers, by and large. Heaven knows, I love my shared banks. I complain a lot when I move from a game with account-based progress to one where I have to do everything separately for each character that wants it.

If I stop and think about it, though, it's the individual characters that matter to me, not the account. I prefer games that make the characters feel like individuals and where they don't I almost unconsciously try to rectify that. In GW2, the most account-based of all the games I play regularly, I've mitigated against my own convenience by running three accounts for most of the lifetime of the game.

Three accounts, eight or nine guilds, seventeen characters, all having to swap and shift and mail and trade between each other. I'm never quite sure without checking who's done what in which event. It's frequently inconvenient but I'd give that very inconvenience a deal of the credit for keeping me interested all these years.

I'm not going to trot out the old saw about the grit and the pearl. I certainly don't endorse poor design or excuse ill-considered mechanics, on the grounds that a bit of hardship makes us better people. I'm entirely in favor of sleek, seamless, integrated systems that make playing games a stressless, satisfying experience.

What I am wary of is creating a monoculture, where every game plays the same and every character feels like a cipher. It already feels far too much like that in some MMORPGs I can think of but I'm uncomfortably aware that it could feel a lot worse.

Or, perhaps I should say, a lot less.

I began this post by claiming I tend to take games as I find them. That's largely true. Only, sometimes I find myself wondering. If it wasn't for all those inconveniences, would I even remember I'd played the games at all?

Change My Gamma : EverQuest

A lot of unexpected things have happened this year. Finding myself playing EverQuest again is one of them.

I really thought I was done with the old game. It wasn't that I'd never play it again but that I'd never play it seriously, again.

By "seriously" I don't, of course, mean grouping up for dungeons or anything silly like that. When was the last time I grouped for xp in EQ, I wonder? Over a decade, ago for sure. Maybe a decade and a half.

No, what I mean is focusing on a character, levelling up, finding better gear, going to new zones, upgrading spells, researching which focus items I should be using, learning new mechanics and systems. The kind of regular soloing I've been doing, on and off, now and then, for years. I really thought I was done with all that.

I've written enough about the Overseer feature Darkpaw added back in March. I won't go over it again, save to say that without it I definitely wouldn't be playing EverQuest, either "seriously" or frivolously. I don't think I'd logged in for the best part of a year before curiosity about how EQ's version compared to EverQuest II's tempted me to take a look.

Can we get a spot on this guy?

Overseeing turned out to be both entertaining and practical. It's great to see my highest character positively zipping through the levels, if a level every couple of weeks can be called zippy. I still wasn't doing anything you could really call "playing", though. Just standing around the Guild Lobby, setting quests from the UI and collecting the rewards.

Around level 97 I went shopping for spells. By late June I had a level 100 character and I'd never used any of them. It occured to me that I was going to end up buying a lot of spells I'd never use if I carried on that way.

I started browsing the Bazaar, thinking about getting some better gear but gear costs a lot more to buy than spells. You really don't want to buy it and never use it. I thought maybe I'd see how I got on with what I had, first.

By early July I was out hunting. It was going well. I spent quite a lot of money making bags so I could carry all that fat vendor loot. It was starting to feel like old times, only maybe better.

Cogs for cash.

Not having to rely on mob xp to level makes a huge difference to how much fun going hunting feels. Soloing into three figures, at least the way I do it, remains painfully slow. I can make a reliable eight or ten per cent of a level in a matter of minutes just doing Overseer quests whereas I can kill or quest for hours and barely move the needle. The standard EQ UI now displays xp to three decimal places. It has to or you'd think it was broken.

With Overseer questing making light of the heavy lifting when it comes to xp, soloing is fun again. When I take the mage out to hunt my main aim is to make money and I always loved making bank in Norrath.

Unlike EQII, which has had Weimar republic levels of inflation for years, EverQuest still seems to retain a rational relationship between in-game income and expenditure. There are plenty of upgrades for my level on sale in the Bazaar, priced in the thousands or low tens of thousands. In EQII you'd need to add several zeroes to that.

"Tens of thousands" still sounds like a lot for one piece of armor, fifteen levels below the cap, but I can net ten thousand plat in an hour just by killing mobs and selling the drops to vendors. I know several very lucrative spots no-one else seems to be using these days. With the mobs now conning green, shading to grey, I can pull  whole rooms and AE everything down at negligible risk. Every pull brings in hundreds of platinum in gems and vendor loot.

Did you remember to bring the torch?

Add to that the numerous tradeskill materials that sell to players though the Barter system and money just rolls in. And modern EverQuest has what I'd consider to be almost ironically state-of-the-art mechanics for looting and selling.

Clear a room and all the drops on all the kills appear in a window with multiple options to take or leave. Tradeskill items self-sort into separate bags. Open the Barter window anywhere in game and you can check who's buying what you have, then sell it to them and get paid instantly, emptying your bags and filling your wallet right there at your hunting spot.

If you pick a place to hunt where most things you're going to sell to vendors stack, you can pretty much kill indefinitely without ever running out of space. It makes the whole thing feel quite zen. If mass slaughter can ever be considered meditative, that is.

As I play more I gain confidence. Today I moved on from hunting in zones I'd almost completely outlevelled to ones that are still a tad low but which give marginally decent xp. The hot zone for level 90, Fear Itself, which I wrote about a little last week, is just about right for stress-free soloing at my current level of 103.

The main problem I was having there was the gloom. It was so dark I literally couldn't see where I was going. If the mobs didn't have their names in lights above their heads I wouldn't have been able to see them either, which would have made wandering around in pitch darkness tantamount to suicide.

I should probably look at all these settings one day.

Fortunately I finally remembered what we used to do to fix visibility issues in very dark zones in EQ. Ramp the gamma as high as it would go.

It's been a very long time since I changed the gamma setting in any game. I imagine most modern MMORPGs don't even have one. EQ still does, even if it took me a while to find it, hidden behind an "Advanced" button in the Display tab in Options. Once I'd found and fiddled with it the difference was like night and day. Literally.

True, everything looks washed-out now. Granted, the whole "Fear Itself" thing is considerably less terrifying with all the lights on. But I can see where I'm going and what I'm about to bump into, which is a lot more important. It's not like I'm playing EverQuest for the graphics, after all...

I've already started researching where to go next. The final set of Hot Zones (the system finishes at level 95) will take me into 2011's Veil of Alaris expansion. That's going to be completely new to me. I should think I'd be ready to give it a try when I hit 105. Ten levels seems to be a fairly reliable margin although twelve is probably safer, when trying to learn a new zone solo.

When you start reading this stuff up and making plans it means you're invested in the game, at least for the moment. I really never expected that to happen again with EQ.

Of course, it may not last past the weekend. I kind of hope it does, though.