For $29.99, You Too Can Know Just What's Going On!

Another massive complaint that's been coming out of the dissatisfaction on the forums is Blizzard's insistence on using out of game mediums to conduct the heavy lifting in this expansion. There's a large gap between what Blizzard allowed to be used in out of game mediums in BC, and what they began to allow in Wrath, and what they proliferated in Cataclysm.

The earliest attempts at out of game mediums for Blizzard consisted mostly of backstory and sidestory. The War of the Ancients Trilogy talked about history of the Night Elf heroes. Tides of Darkness just rehashed the cannon plot of Warcraft II, likewise Through the Dark Portal did the same for the expansion. The Sunwell Trilogy just gave the specific minutia of the Magister's Terrace and Sunwell instances. Arthas: Rise of the Lich King rehashed a lot of plot lines from WCIII, and gave some insight into Jaina and Arthas, but it wasn't anything that wasn't also apparent in the questing in Icecrown or the ICC 5 mans. The Death Knight Manga told us the specifics of the backstory that was covered in quests in both the DK starting zone, and in Northrend.

This is an example of what out of game materials should be: supplemental, optional, an enhancement to the plot already in the game. They should cover stories that are already portrayed in game, or stories that don't have enough significance in the major narrative plots in the game to be done justice in game. The Death Knight Manga was a particularly good example in my opinion. Playing through the game, I knew that Thassarian was a cool character. I knew he became a DK when he shipped over to Northrend with Arthas' expeditionary forces. I knew he had a skeleton buddy named Lurid. I knew Falric and Marwyn were captains under Arthas' expedition. This is enough to know in game to propel the plot. It's still nice to know the little details, but that's what the Manga was for. It was in the Manga that you find out that Falric went searching for Arthas after they defeated Mal'ganis, and when Falric failed to return with the prince, Thassarian went looking for both missing men. He found Falric in a cave, already turned to the Scourge. Falric turned on his former charge, and slew him, raising him as a Death Knight. It's a good story about the fall of a good man, but Thassarian isn't as important to the plot to warrant having such small details handled in game, at the expense of moving other, more important story arcs along.

Then came the WoW comic. A comic is a different animal than a book or omnibus manga. In order to produce a successful comic, it has to be something that people are willing to purchase every week. In order to get a fresh weekly comic off the ground, you need a killer story. So Blizzard took one of the biggest hanging threads from in game, and sold it out to the comic, The Missing Diplomat. The Missing Diplomat was an Alliance side quest chain that led the character in search of a diplomat who was kidnapped en route to a peace conference with the Horde. It served a pivotal function within the game, it was the primary means by which non night elf Alliance characters made the transition from Eastern Kingdoms to Kalimdor. It was also known for its abrupt ending. There were little things here and there that led people to believe that it would be picked up in the end game, most notably that the Missing Diplomat, who was actually the King of Stormwind, was rendered in game in the basement of a building on Alcaz Island. All of the opportunities to revisit that quest line were cast aside, and if players wanted to know what happened, they had to go buy the comic.

This began a new era of Blizzard expanded universe media. This is a problem because story arcs that are begun in the game should be wrapped up in game. Jumping the story across multiple formats creates a jarring narrative that will be incomplete for the majority of the people who experience it. Blizzard then began doing this for every incomplete story line that they had in the game. Malfurion's been asleep since WCIII, and Fandral's curiously asking for more and more Morrowgrain while the Emerald Dream corrupts itself and Teldrasil is seeded with that corruption. Green Dragons are rampaging through the world, and Ysera is trapped in the Emerald Dream. That was the status quo through Wrath, and suddenly in Cataclysm, all those threads just disappeared. What happened? Stormrage happened. Cataclysm gets released, and major faction leaders have suddenly shifted, or died, or turned into a giant diamond. What the hell happened? The Shattering happened. The Horde and Alliance are suddenly back at war in Kalimdor? What happened? Wolfheart happened.

Throughout Cataclysm, Blizzard has been outsourcing their lore to books and comics. There are a couple possible explanations for this. They might simply feel like their story is too big to be constrained within the confines of an MMO, which has specific leashes on what you can try and accomplish. They might have made their story too ambitious to implement in game on their budget. A raid into the Emerald Nightmare to rescue Malfurion would have been amazing. Having the fight between Garrosh and Cairne play out like the Duel between Thrall and Garrosh before Wrath would have given some weight to the extremely weak pre Cataclysm event. Perhaps the most insidious possibility is that Blizzard looked at the Arthas, and the success that that novel had, and saw the opportunity to made money at a higher profit margin. It costs much less to produce and publish a novel than it does to do the same for an MMO the size of WoW.

Ultimately, however, by outsourcing the story to these other mediums, it alienates a large portion of the playerbase who do not purchase them for whatever reason. Be it a lack of financial security (cue players calling out "This game discriminates against the poor!" in Commander Shepard's voice), a lack of interest in the other mediums (Books just aren't for everyone), or they're simply busy spending their reading time reading better books (I'd rather read American Gods for the 11th time than read Wolfheart again.).

By What Measure is an Exploit?

There's been a bit of a Brouhaha occurring due to the exploitation of the Looking for Raid tool by many of the upper crust guilds, who utilized it to gain access to their 4pc bonuses much earlier than should normally be possible. This entailed one of several methods to circumvent the "one shot at loot per boss" rule which Blizzard had been extremely clear about. Some guilds simply traded items once they had been looted. Other guilds would zone out and zone back in once everyone had passed, and still other groups had their ineligible players DC before the loot was rolled out.

This has provoked a wide range of reactions, from those who blame Blizzard for launching a flawed patch, to those who believe that those who exploited should be permanently banned from the game. Blizzard's response fell in the middle. They stripped the offenders of all items gained through the exploit, and banned them for 3-8 days, dependent upon previous behavior.

I believe that Blizzard did the right thing here. My firm belief with regards to punishment of any sort, is consistency. Without the presence of precedence and consistency, any authority will break down into tyranny.

Of course, to establish consistency, one must have precedence, and one must have measures for the offences committed. In this case, Blizzard has employed the permaban before, and just as tellingly, they have opted to have limited suspensions or even no punishments before. However, Blizzard has been, for the most part, consistent in their punishments, and from that, we can draw conclusions as to what categories Blizzard views things.

Top guilds tend to be the most visible examples of glitches, exploits, and the dreaded "creative use of game mechanics". Ensidia, in particular, has had a laundry list of offences. They got the world first Lady Vashj kill when she unexpectedly died, despawned, and respawned with something like 5% health left. No one was quite sure what happened, but Ensidia, then Nihilum, received no punishment. Later, in Ulduar, in order to beat the insane two minute timer for Hodir Hard Mode, they kited mobs from Freya's room and had several mages spellstealing a damage buff from the mobs to deal obscene damage. The buff was hotfixed to prevent it from happening again, but Ensidia received no punishment. In ICC, on their first Lich King 25 kill, they used Saronite Bombs to rebuild the platform in Phase 2, rendering the Val'kyr mechanics moot. Ensidia had their achievement and loot stripped, and were given a three day suspension.

Of course, Ensidia does not hold the monopoly on questionable actions. In Ulduar, Exodus used a Holy Pally and Warlock to cause all the Immortal Guardians of Yogg-Saron to evade glitch, allowing them to kill Yogg+0 well before any other guild. They were stripped of loot, achievements, and given a three day suspension. Paragon, in addition to the current loot controversy, caught flak for their use of eleven feral druids on their world first kill of Heroic Nefarian. At the time, the buff worked differently, it only effected the next attack you made, so Paragon stacked feral druids, who, at the time, had the highest damage attack in the game, Rip. The buff was quickly hotfixed to not affect certain abilities, and was later changed entirely in favor of a simple +damage buff for a set duration. Paragon received no penalty for Nefarian, but it can be assumed that they have for the LFR debacle, considering that they issued an apology on their guild site.

Which brings us to the events that got Blizzard to hand down the permaban. Back in Vanilla, a guild called Overrated was the most progressed Horde guild in the world. They were farming AQ40 on a regular basis, and were rightfully sick of dealing with the stupid amount of trash and annoying bosses prior to C'thun, who was the only boss that they cared about. This led to them modifying the game files to remove a wall from behind the Prophet Skeram, alloying them to skip nearly the entire instance. Everyone who was there was permabanned. The other prominent permaban was back in Ulduar, where a disgruntled GM mailed a player an item call "Martin Fury", which had an on use which killed everything in 100 yards. It was an item that was never intended to fall into the hands of players, and he used it to one shot bosses throughout the raids available at the time. He was permabanned, and presumably the GM who gave him the item was fired.

From these examples, you can see that events such as these fall into three categories. "Creative use of game mechanics," these are acts where everything works the way it says it's supposed to work, but Blizzard didn't foresee the implications before the players did. These will be fixed, either through a hotfix or a patch, but those who used the technique will not be punished. Then there are exploits. These involve altering your behavior in some way that causes aspects of the game to break, be it resetting terrain constructs, evade glitching mobs, or circumventing loot rules. Exploits will be punished with a suspension, and the removal of all loot and achievements associated with the exploit. Then there are hacks. When you use something from outside the game to modify the working of the game, such as removing a wall, or getting an unobtainable item, then you will be permabanned. Those are the precedents, and there is no reason to break them now.

I laud Blizzard for sticking to their principles on the manner, and handing down a fair punishment to those who exploited the game. The guilds in question did not hack the game, everything they did was done through the game client, therefore, it is not a hack, and not something that warrants a permaban. They have had their loot removed, and they have lost their chance at multiple world firsts. That's punishment enough.

When Your Reach Exceeds Your Grasp: Rushed Development Hurts the Story

One of the prominent points I made in my previous post was that the rushed development cycle of Cataclysm was extremely destructive to the cohesiveness of the Alliance story line. I listed two prominent examples, the Twilight Highlands and Worgen starting experience. There's a prominent disconnect between the story that you could see Blizzard trying to tell, and the story they wound up producing.

Twilight Highlands is especially egregious. The Alliance story in TH is disjointed, and incoherent at times. After the wacky ride with Fargo, you wake up in the unfinished Alliance base (which never actually gets finished) under attack by the Horde. After fighting the Horde off, you go to the shore where you are attacked by the Horde again. After defending yourself, you then proceed to spend the rest of your time in TH planning a Dwarf wedding, trying to save your alcohol from the Horde, and eventually making it to the Red Dragonflight, who are really angry at you for some reason.

The whole zone is spent pushing to Bastion of Twilight and Grim Batol in an offensive against the Twilight's Hammer. The Horde attacks are barely acknowledged. The closest Alliance players come to replying to the constant attacks is when they steal a bolt of cloth from a goblin zeppelin, which is used in the Dwarf wedding. There's also the puzzling problem with the Red Dragonflight being so pissed off at me. What did I ever do to them, besides assist them against the Mad Aspect of Magic in Northrend, and rescue Calen from that dank pit in Silithus?

The problem lies in unfinished content. This video has datamined sound files from the Cataclysm Beta client. The first half are lines from Thrall that eventually made it into the Goblin starting zone. The second half are lines from Varian in what was supposed to be the Alliance's Twilight Highland's intro.

Varian was supposed to uncover Benedictus as a traitor in a quest line that echoed of the old Great Masquerade quest. A high ranking traitor using their influence to spread dissatisfaction among the people of Stormwind? That links together most of the internal problems that were faced in the Human starting zones, in particular in Westfall. Furthermore, note the direct instructions to not engage the Horde. That fleshes out Varian as a character, and most importantly, it ties the entirety of the Alliance questing experience in TH together. You're not lashing out at the Horde because your King commanded you to focus on higher priorities. That little scene was the keystone for pretty much the entire human questing experience in Cataclysm, and Blizzard dropped it for a cheap reference to the lead quest designer. Way to go.

This still leaves the unusual welcome you get from the Red Dragonflight. I'm a hero to Alexstrasza, Exalted with the Wyrmrest Accord, and I get treated like I've been associating with someone who kills baby red dragons for fun and profit like the Dragonmaw Clan. The quest makes complete sense for the Horde players, who just spent the whole zone rampaging with a group of orcs best known for imprisoning the Dragonqueen against her will and using her children as weapons of war, to be used until broken, and then discarded. Blizzard just never got around to making an Alliance version, and the Alliance story suffers because of it.

Just as painful was the treatment of the Worgen experience. Everyone remembers the plans for the Worgen District in Stormwind, it was planned to be in the park. It made sense, because after the Gilneas set, then the Worgen players could quest in Duskwood, WPL, EPL, and the Blasted Lands, you know, the parts of the game that have Worgen involved quest lines? Instead, Blizzard deleted the park, and sent them off to Darnassus where they sit in a tree and get handed green and grey quests in Darkshore, where the quest givers call them Night Elves. That was how rushed the transition was for Worgen players. They didn't even code the race into the drop box for some of the quests in the zone they exiled that race to.

What I find most frustrating is that they had the tech to make it a compelling story. Hell, they had the story to make it a compelling story. Instead of blithely shipping the Worgen off to Kalimdor, what they should have done was make the Worgen's next questing zone another phase of Gilneas. Instead of the Night Elves showing up, have the 7th Legion show up. Leveling through Silverpine, one of the most chilling moments was during the phased incursion into Gilneas, when you find a field strewn with shattered Elite Abominations and the dismembered corpses of Deathguards, with one survivor left, who recounts the story of the men who came and destroyed them without mercy, and left him alive just to spread fear among the ranks. Through the magic of phasing, the worgen players could have been there, fighting the ugly war, the guerrilla war. Give them phased incursions into Silverpine, just as the Horde players got into Gilneas. While the Horde players rez Godfrey, Walden, and Ashbury and tear through the Alliance forces, the Alliance players should be stalking them with Crowely and Ivar, seeing the damage they wrought, and seeing the story out to its conclusion, the forced withdrawl of the GLF to Stormwind. It would have been great, it would have set the tone for the Alliance quests in Shadowfang Keep, and it would have put the Worgen in a position to experience what little questing they had outside of Gilneas. Just a couple more phases, and a few more quests. That's all that was needed. But they ran out of time.

These mistakes break down the fabric of the story. They break immersion, and make things much less interesting for the players who have to deal with these jarring, fractured, and frayed transitions. Perhaps more damaging than the damage to the story is the damage that things like this do to Blizzard's reputation. Cataclysm took a lot of luster off Blizzard's good name. There was a running joke when it came to Blizzard, Soon™. Much like Valve's "When it's done!", Soon™ meant that Blizzard wouldn't do this. They wouldn't rush an unfinished project out the door to make it in time for the Christmas rush. When players asked a question and got Soon™ for an answer, they knew that they were in for a wait, but they knew that the wait would be worth it (Except for Starcraft:Ghost, but what's a little vaporware between friends?). With Cataclysm, Blizzard has lost the trademark to Soon, and with it, they've lost the trust of the player base.

Patch 4.3: Dragon Soul - First Impressions

So, Legacy took their first look at the new raid that we're presumably going to be spending the majority of our playing time in for the next eight to twelve months. I've got many thoughts on the instance. Blizzard did a lot of things here, some of them they did well, some things they did poorly, and some things seem to be ugly, but they work.

Let's start with the criticisms:

The big elephant in the room is the tuning. I can't speak for heroic modes yet, which is where my focus tends to go, but normal mode seems to be drastically undertuned. We walking in on our first night and one shot Morchak, one shot Yor'sahj, three shot Zon'ozz, one shot Hagara, three shot Ultraxion, and took three pulls on Blackhorn before running out of time. Seven wipes on the first six bosses. We wiped more than that on normal Halfus, normal Magmaw, and normal Shannox each. The instance feels like its on a level with the post nerf cataclysm raid instances in terms of difficulty, and closer to Raid Finder difficulty than it is to the pre nerf instances. I don't think this is a great move.

I fear that this will produce one of two scenarios when the transition to heroic comes up for most guilds in the coming months. Either heroic difficulty is akin to heroic difficulty in post nerf firelands, where it's six joke bosses and one brick wall, or its going to be like ToC, where 85% of guilds cleared the instance on normal, and less than 25% of guilds could take the next step in logical progression and defeat heroic Beasts of Northrend. Neither of these scenarios produce healthy tiers of raiding. T12 and T9 are pretty much universally reviled.

On lighter criticisms, the trash before Ultraxion is annoying, and the cinematic before Spine of Deathwing causes some annoyances, if someone cancels the cinematic early, the fight starts, which can be a problem if your tank, or all your healers are still watching Blizz recreate Point Break.

But all is not fail and anguish! Blizzard did some things well here:

I think that the instance itself is very well designed. I enjoy the multiple stages that it employs, and travel throughout the instance is quick and easy. Going across diferent thematic zones is very engaging, going from the war in Dragonblight, to the Eye of Eternity, to the Skies of Northrend, to the Maelstrom keeps the instance from falling prey to the orange on orange on brown malaise of Firelands.

Aside from the endless drake waves before Ultraxion, which I think is a decent concept, it's just twice as long as it needs to be, the trash in Dragon Soul is well done. It doesn't have the endless fields of trash we saw in Firelands. The trash is engaging, often informative about the boss it guards, and not excessively painful to two heal. I always thought it odd when the trash was routinely harder to heal than the bosses were.

All in all, I don't feel this instance is Blizzard's best work, and I think it would be a mistake to leave us here for an extended duration, it is a refreshing change of pace from Firelands.

Blizzard, Forum Angst, and the Confluence of Events

So my previous post on the implications of Theramore's destruction with regards to the narrative path of World of Warcraft took off. I'd meant to follow up on it sooner, but NaNoWriMo's deadline was bearing down on me. So I put things off so that I could hit my mark on my Novel. But it's no longer National Novel Writing Month, so I'm back at the blog.

Since Blizzcon, the forums have been absolutely on fire with disgruntled Alliance players. Accusations of Horde Favoritism abound, and speculation into the future storyline of Mists of Pandaria have been prevalent. CMs have been summoned, and it's drawn the attention of at least the Lead Quest Designer in the developer's camp.

This is essentially "Occupy Azeroth". It's a disgruntled and disenfranchised mass of players attempting to make their concerns known. There's one problem. Like the Occupy Wall Street movements, they're complaining about a host of concerns, many of them legitimate, some of them not so legitimate, and it comes out in a dissonant cacophony that, while great for snaring attention, does a poor job of actually conveying what they're upset about. So I'm going to attempt to enumerate some of the more significant issues that people are taking up arms about., at a later date I'll explain each issue in a more in depth post for that issue.

1) Content for Alliance players is not as compelling as it is for Horde players.: Horde players get far more face time with their leaders in the new leveling experiences. Garrosh and Sylvannas in particular are all over the place, and their characterization is pushed along by the content. Baine is decently involved in the Tauren starting zone, and Vol'jin got a heavy spot with both sides in 4.1. The Alliance, not so much. Varian never leaves his throne room, the Council of Three Hammers takes one quest, Velen shows up for 12 seconds in Swamp of Sorrows, Geblin never never leaves the starting area, and Tyrande got a cameo in one instance which is designed to show people how badass she used to be. Alliance players spend more time questing for Vol'jin and Thrall in Cataclysm than they do questing for their own faction leaders.

2) Content for Alliance players was unfinished at launch: This was most evident in the Twilight Highlands intro and Worgen experience. There were a lot of things that were planned in beta that got cut. I don't think Blizzard realized how important what they were planning to communicate in the Twilight Highlands intro really was. It was the keystone for the entirety of the Cataclysm leveling experience for Alliance, and they abandoned it for a wacky ride with a drunk dwarf.

3) The current story line in not sustainable, and has already been pushed beyond what the writers can control: I already covered this in the previous post. Blizzard isn't going to destroy either side. So portraying total war is very amateurish storytelling, because they can't end it in a logical manner.

4) Too much Thrall: Fargo touched upon this in his dev blog. Thrall was particularly poorly written during this expansion, and it made it very difficult for Alliance players to relate, or care, about his end of the storyline.

5) Extremely unprofessional corporate communications on the part of Blizzard: I'm astounded by how bad Blizzard is at communicating with their player base at times. All too often they make unprofessional, and often counterproductive press releases. I'm not sure if it's because they don't know any better, or if they just don't care, but it's a serious problem. This came to a head with the Corpsegrinder fiasco at the 2011 Blizzcon. That video managed to offend all but a rather small subset of their client base.

6) Excessive Reliance on out of game mediums for story progression: Blizzard has taken the books and comics and manga from being a supplemental means of story development, that is to say that they would advance side plots too small to be given fair treatment in game, to a seat of primary story development, which is to say that they are now covering aspects of story development that should be covered in the game, and it is diminishing the game's immersive quality in the process.

All of this has come to a head, and combined into a firestorm that's burning the forums to the ground. I find it interesting because it's not about numbers this time. It's not about content being too hard or too easy, or something being unbalanced in PvP. This is the first time that players are outright unhappy with the product being put out by Blizzard, rather than harping on minor tweaks to numbers within the game. This has been the biggest conflagration on the Forums since the RealID Fiasco, and it would behoove Blizzard to take a hard look at the product they're releasing, and the manner in which they're communicating with their player base.

NANOWRIMO!

So, like many other in the Blogosphere, I've been participating in NaNoWriMo. I've fallen a bit off the pace, floundering at about 17k words, but I'm confident that I can catch up. If any of my readers would like to read an excerpt, or buddy me on the incredibly counter-intuitive NaNoWriMo site, here's the link.

http://www.nanowrimo.org/en/participants/the-renaissance-man/novels/a-soldier-s-tarot

Shared Topic: What Would You Bring Back?

The only constant is change. This week's shared topic at Blog Azeroth has been put forward by Mia, of the Chronicles of Mia. She's wondering what changes have been made to the game that you'd like to see rolled back.



World of Warcraft is a persistant world, it goes through constant changes, abilities are changes, or removed entirely. Bosses are arbitrarily adjusted to be harder or easier. The technology of creating a ring to put keys on is suddenly lost to the world, like very mundane greek fire.

I thought about writing about some of the many changes that Blizzard made that I didn't quite agree with. The overhaul to Prot Pally AoE in Cataclysm, the loss of some great quest lines like the Scepter of the Shifting Sands, or Battle for Undercity, the aforementioned Keychain. There's a lot of things that Blizzard has changed over the years that diminshed the game somewhat in my eyes. It's tough to narrow it down to one thing. So I began to really look at why I played the game.

I raid, almost exclusively these days, but there really isn't enough going on in the raid game these days to keep me interested. I'm really not a fan of where the story's going these days, so that's not what's keepig me around. So it's neither the gameplay, nor the story that has me playing. It's the people. It's my raiders, my guildies, my friends, who keep me anchored to Azeroth.

Just as much as Blizzard's changes to the physical constraints of the game changes Azeroth, so too do the decisions of the player change the social landscape. I once wrote about what I sacrificed to get Legacy from a lousy trade chat guild to one of the best ten man raid teams on the server. If there's one change I could get, it wouldn't be bringing back quests, or Naxx40, or rolling back the Firelands nerfs. I would bring back all my friends who raided for me in the past and for some reason or another, can't do so anymore.

I want my best friend back in Azeroth, I was the best man at his wedding, and we still talk about the game and the guild when we get together. It's not the same without him.

I want the Illinois Trio back, who formed the backbone of both my ranged DPS and my tank healing team for almost the entirety of Wrath, and into T11.

I want Jenny and the Exiles back, who always gave the raid a youthful exuberance and always pulled their weight.

I want my Co-Tank from Wrath back, one of a very small number of tanks whom I trusted to handle the heavy lifting.

I want our slightly crazy feral druid back, he put up great numbers, but apparently can't open a pack of Hot Dogs without ending up in a psyche ward.

I want Heather, my mage, my confidant back.

I want the quiet DK who once topped the meters in naxx after getting hacked; he was nearly completely naked and was wielding a Runeblade of Demonstratable Power from the rep vendor, and he still pulled 3K DPS.

I want my silent canadian priest back, no matter how much I yo-yoed her between holy and shadow, she was always ready, willing, and able.

I want the guild drunk back, regardless of weather he was on his paladin, priest, warrior, or druid, his boistrousness in vent always brightened my day.

I want my original hunter back, who came with me from GDiR, to Mean Machine, to Legacy.

I want my DK Bro back. He reminded me of my college days.

I want them all back. They mean more to me than anything Blizzard could ever do to change this game.