Seeking Better Worlds
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If you’re interested in Wrath analysis and in things shapeshifting, the Big Bear Butt Blogger has a very in-depth analysis and commentary on Bear tanking here.
Only avoid reading it in case you don’t want to be Wrath-spoiled, of course.
Matticus writes about dead WoW Blogs. I’m not dead. I was on vacation, remember?
And since Steptoe actually suddenly reappeared, I’m also back in the game and made level 54 (first level in a month or so) on my mage. Funny thing, by the way. One month without playing and you need to relearn all of the controls. I had a similar feeling a bit before going on vacation while playing a couple of AVs on my paladin trying to get the Olympics pet (and failing because horde actually lost all 4 games I was in, go figure).
Mentioning Steptoe… You remember Steptoe the Warlock, right? He wasn’t just my 2007 arena buddy, he was also my willing accomplice throughout the first TBC year, my lieutenant who tried to keep me from failing to run a guild and then bolted off Ghostlands (EU) to other places where the grass wasn’t greener but the BG queues only took half a second.
Back in January, we were getting our arses handed to us in Season 3, and after a particularly embarrassing hilarious match during which we played so badly that a team of nekkid arena dancers could have beaten us, Steptoe cut short on our cheering and told me “BRB, going for a smoke” (yes, as a warlock he has some very filthy habits. Consorting with demons and tabagism are only the tip of the iceberg, believe me). And that was the last time I heard from him until he suddenly reappeared in the comments section here.
And on Dragonmaw EU, too. Only he apparently has seen the light or something, because Steptoe the Warlock has morphed into Steptoe the Priest.
I know what you’re thinking. From warlock to shadow priest, the only filthy habit being shed is the demon consorting because they sure do a lot of dabbling in the dark arts. And that would be a perfectly reasonable thought, since everyone + dog levels priest as a tenbraic disciple of unholiness.
Like me, you’d be perfectly wrong. My bloody contrarian buddy is levelling as…
…holy.
I kid you not. He has embraced the Light as tightly as he was hugging the shadows before, and I suspect the only reason which prevented him from becoming a zealous paladin instead of a squishy robe-wearer was one year of playing together with the most rotten paladin role model you could have. Me. Oh, and the fact that he noticed I took about 4 times as long to kill anything at 70 than his warlock, but I digress.
Will there be an improbable but equally hilarious priest / mage 2v2 duo making a fool of itself to be formed at level 70? I doubt it, chances are that Wrath will be out before I make it to 70 on that mage. As a matter of fact, if the new and improved Wrath Paladin becomes easier to level that his Burning Predecessor, I’ll throw my previous prejudices in the wind and roll another one.
So if you’re suddenly looking forward to more tales of arena bungling on Altitis because Steptoe has finally finished his cigarette, you’ll be disappointed. Nonetheless, welcome back, buddy.
As you will have seen by now, the next game announced behind that cunning ice splash riddle building up to the blizzard worldwide invitational in Paris is indeed Diablo 3.
Of course, given the current temper of the Blizzard fan base, early reactions include a good dose of mutual insults between those who guessed the announcement on the splash pages (“you’re an idiot, these were NO WAY lich king eyes and ANYONE but you could see that”) and those who didn’t (“these were no demon eyes and it’s an 8-year old games with better graphics”), which actually add a lot entertainment value to the announcement.
Now I’m not going to start shilling for a just-announced game here, but there’s an official site up, with a quite long gameplay teaser movie, and rather than spend a lot of additional virtual ink on the matter, I suggest people just go there and watch for themselves.
Me, I’m a sucker for eye candy (I might have mentioned this in the past), except for when it comes to designing the template for my own blog of course. While I don’t count myself as a die-hard fan and never bothered to play the previous diablos online, I played them all and replayed diablo 2 a second time two years ago. I’ll definitely pick that one up.
Makes me almost forget that crow tastes really bad 
Most of the people’s money appears to be on Diablo 3 at the moment. At the risk of eating crow tomorrow, my take is much more prosaic:
WotLK Beta starts tomorrow.
EDIT: Crow eating time. According to MMO-Champion, it’s Diablo 3.
In one of these interesting meta-spats in the blogosphere, Tobold took exception to Richard Bartle’s statement in an interview to Massively that “I’ve already played Warhammer. It was called World of Warcraft.”
Tobold proceeded to write a withering post about Bartle’s bitterness and irrelevance in modern MMOs which, Tobold believes, the old curmudgeon doesn’t grasp anymore.
Unfortunately, Tobold apparently didn’t actually read the interview in its entirety at first, but instead reblogged and echoed another blogger’s own outrage about the above sentence. Which means that basically he’s quoting Bartle out of context and proceeds to show him:
“Well, as attempt of somebody who has become irrelevant to make it back into the news this succeeded; but now he’ll have some clever explaining away to do, before everybody considers him to be just crazy.”
Leaving aside the series of cheap shots reeking of, well, ageism, the interesting bit at the end of Tobold’s post is quite ironic in the context of the original interview:
“dismissing WAR because it shares features with WoW or other MMORPGs simply stops all evolution. Relying only on people coming up with revolutionary new ideas that found completely new genres would mean we would only get new games once every decade or so. WAR is important because it will attract a large audience, and it will evolve the MMORPG genre in some way. Discussing the evolution and the changes is a lot more important than listing the similarities.”
Now I have a lot of respect for many of Tobold’s opinions, but when you decide to take on someone else’s opinion, it’s probably better to read the source for yourself rather than reblogging just one provocative sentence. Cheap shot for cheap shot, considering Tobold’s self-professed interest in American politics, I’d expect, as a fellow “Old World dweller”, that he’d be a bit more critical of overblown gotcha-style reactions and look at the issues.
And what are the issues? What is Bartle really talking about? He’s talking about game design, and the distance which comes when you start seeing a game with a designer’s eye instead of a player’s:
“What I’m saying is as a game designer, I have terrible problems in experiencing the kind of fun the players have because I’ve gone past it. I understand it. If I didn’t understand it, how could I design for it? If I could only understand it by experiencing it, how could I understand what every single other player who isn’t me would think about it? As a designer, I’m not designing for me. I’m designing for everybody.
Because I’m designing for everybody, I need to understand how everybody likes the games.”
That kind of distance isn’t limited to gaming of course. It’s basically a common trait that for any kind of activity where a participant moves behind the curtain and gets shown the ropes. Watching an illusionist as a simple spectator is entertaining. But once you get taught the art of sleight-of-hand, you no longer watch the show, you analyze how the illusionist’s trick is working.
In gaming, we have (hopefully) public Q&A testing because not only the game devs but the in-house Q&A teams are no longer able to approach a game with a player’s eye, or, as the saying goes, with a fresh mind. As a consultant / professor who co-created the online multiplayer game genre I essentially see Bartle as two steps removed from the player experience, being the one to critique Online World Design as a field in computer science and entertainment instead of doing the designing himself. As he stated in a response to a comment of mine on Broken Toys, he sees his role in the MMO ecosystem as one who wants to provoke thoughts in the designer community, if only to actually have his audience make the willing and informed decision to design differently.
Having become a trainer myself recently, I have experienced and embraced myself the power of the Socratic method, that is, transmitting knowledge through questioning.
What Bartle is saying later in the Massively interview (and which Keen ignorantly dismissed as “After that dumb comment he rambled on for a few paragraphs talking about Age of Conan, mostly with incoherent rhetorical questions“, missing the mark by several more miles than Tobold since he actually did read the Massively interview) shows very clearly where he’s coming from:
“I might have a look at [Age of Conan] from a point of view of seeing what things – the class balances are like, seeing how they’ve implemented the – I really ought to write up a book on how to read a virtual world so that I have a vocabulary in order to explain it to people. But there are a number of things you can do with player versus player, and I want to see the way they’ve done it not because whether it’s cool or not but because of you chose that way. Now, why did you choose that way?
You chose that way because you’ve got a particular vision for your virtual world. Your particular vision for your virtual world is saying something. You made this the center of your virtual world. That tells me something already in advance. What it tells me is you want to compete with the games that don’t have it so that you’re carving your niche. But why did you choose that niche? You chose that niche or a particular reason. How did you implement it? You’re trying to rip off Dark Age of Camelot?“
And here lies the irony because that’s essentially what Tobold concludes his post with: “Discussing the evolution and the changes is a lot more important than listing the similarities.”
That’s exactly what Bartle is about. You provoke thought with, well, provocation. He percieves the information he has on WAR today as not being distinctive enough from WoW to attract him to it. Fair assessment? Probably not. From the sound of it, he certainly hasnt’ played the game yet, so he doesn’t know. On my part, I’ve had very little interest in the WAR hype so far, the only two things I managed to grasp in almost two years are:
I haven’t investigated further and won’t before it releases. But one of the only two perceptions I have of the game is actually dangerously close to Bartle’s provocative statement.
Beyond the provocation, though, what Bartle tries to achieve is to get designers to question their own motives. That a game is going to be built around several arbitrary design decisions is probably a given, but Dr Bartle wants his designer audience to think these through in terms of why they are made, what their consequences are and why these decisions are preferable to discarded alternatives.
As I snidely pointed out earlier in that same Broken Toys thread, there has yet to be a hugely commercially successful MMO based on the visions and design concepts of celebrities like Bartle, Garriott or Koster. But if the sheer gravitas of their personae gets game designers to make conscious decisions to ignore them, I do believe that Bartle, at the very least, will be pleased at a job well done.
PS.
Reblogging is bad, mmmkay?
PPS
Tobold, your line “although some of those comments might have been Richard himself, disguised as “Anonymous”, which would be more understandable” is totally beneath yourself. You’re better than that.
The thing about alphas is that anything is subjet to change. Even information already officially published, like the Death Knight Talent Tree descriptions, can be changed at a moment’s notice.
To wit:
(screenshot courtesy of worldofraids).
Considering this can and will happen to published information, I maintain that all the in-depth angst about the so-called leaks is much ado about nothing for the time being.
From the other end of the gamer spectrum, Lume the Mad offers his perspective on reaching the end of the Burning Crusade, and the meta-game represented by the world first race.
A few choice words, on the matter of quality vs. the time it took to produce:
I think the fact of the matter remains that raiders are going to defeat content faster than Blizzard can simply produce it. And faster production lowers the quality. It would be similar to asking Nintendo to put out a new Zelda game every six months, because players beat each in the first week or two. It’s just simply not going to happen. And I’d rather have a quality experience every nine months than a terrible experience every few. I know some people will disagree, but it’s funny considering people complained how BT was relatively easy and called for something more difficult. And now that something more difficult and higher in quality has been produced, people are complaining about the time it took to produce it. It’s a huge cliché, but: “You can’t please everyone.”
About Blizzard destroying the high-end raiding scene:
I don’t think there’s anything they [Blizzard] can do to destroy it [the high-end raiding scene] other than to make every single instance as easy and boring as, say, Molten Core. As long as the content is at least somewhat decent in quality and there’s a guild willing to go the distance to be number one, it will never die. People might note their surprise and disappointment about how quickly the content was defeated, but the fact of the matter is that people will still follow whoever the top guild is through that content.
Ah, heck, just go ahead and read it all here at the source.
Do you like writing WoW-ku? Are you a druid or able to harness the creative inspirational power of your inner treehugger?
Runycat at Unbearably HoT is running a druid-themed wow-ku contest. If you’re game, hop over and pounce up those rhymes!
The WoW community is currently subjected to a wave of commentary, analysis and speculation about so-called leaked talent information from the Wrath Alpha. Already the indignation runs high in some circles, while those rumours get dissected and rejected by the interested parties.
While I understand the hunger for news and the level of passion these induce, I believe this debate is premature. An alpha test is little more than a rough draft. It is absolutely not ready for public review, for several reasons, among these:
Community review is obviously important. While we might debate whether the blogosphere campaign to stop the recent Life nerfs (Bloom and Tap) really influenced Blizzard or not, we dare not entertain the notion of what had happened if everyone had simply stayed silent and the changes had gone through unchallenged.
But there’s a huge difference. The information was made public by Blizzard and the proposed changes were out on the PTR, subject to mass testing, not on limited and extremely closeted alpha test.
In starting the dissection (and sometimes already outright hostility) of elements which may actually not even be in the game, the community is essentially diluting whatever influence it may have to change things.
If TBC is any measure, there is definitely going to be a news release including publication of class changes and the proposed new talent trees. At that time, speculating on what these bring to the class and to PvP balance will be spot on. But now?
The brave knight chasing windmills isn’t really to be taken seriously. Don’t squander credibility on over-analysing alpha leaks.
I just read this story from Ego: Random Acts of Kindness.
It’s good to be reminded, every so often, that there are still many honourable and honest players in the game.
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