Flyv's Warcraft Blog

Warcraft's middle age

I see Cataclysm has a release date now. Good for Blizzard! I think it will be a big success. It's refining a lot of the old game and giving folks a reason to play the original Warcraft again, the leveling up process. And they're adding enough new endgame content to keep all the raid nerds happy. It looks good.

It also looks from the feature list that Blizzard isn't really adding anything new to the game design. WotLK brought us Death Knights, phasing, and vehicles. Vehicles were a disaster, but the other two were great game additions. I don't see any new game design in Cataclysm. Maybe guild advancement, but that just looks like another reward for grinding stuff out with no meaningful choices or challenge. Archaeology doesn't look like it'll be adding anything new, either. Too bad Paths of the Titans got scrapped. it's looking like the real big change in Cataclysm is the talent tree and itemization simplifications, but if anything that's making Warcraft more like every other game rather than a new direction.

I'm not bashing Warcraft here, far from it. It's just interesting to see a game reach middle age. A couple of years ago Blizzard took all their senior designers off Warcraft and put them on the mystery MMO (of which no details have leaked, amazing). They've got a great team keeping Warcraft going, and they'll be making piles of money for years to come, but at this point they may not be showing us anything new.

 

Ghostcrawler on over-optimization by WoW players

Fascinating series of posts from Warcraft game designer Ghostcrawler, lamenting the way Warcraft players feel they must optimize themselves for theoretical best DPS over doing things that are more fun or are useful in some way other than pure raid performance.

Posts like this make me very sad. You're portraying yourself to be at the mercy of uninformed yet tyrannical raid leaders who are quick to judge your performance based on perceived "tells." I know you need some basis to evaluate potential recruits or even pug members. But I do wish there was some way to turn around this virtual phobia of inefficiency -- this terror of being WRONG -- that we have managed to instill in our player base. I honestly think it's one of the greatest challenges facing the game. 

Minecraft temporarily free

Amazing sandbox building game Minecraft is temporarily free. The developer is having scaling problems, something to do with selling 100x more copies than he ever dreamt. So until he fixes his backend he's making the game free. Try it out! And if you like it, pay the 10 eurobucks to buy it once he's gotten his problems sorted.

My most recent Minecraft project was making paintings. Paintings require cloth. There are no sheep in multiplayer yet, so the only way to make cloth is with string. String drops from spiders. So naturally, the way to make a painting in Minecraft is to find some cactus, then take it deep underground to a spider generator and get that cactus growing. Build a cage of cactus bars separating yourself from the spiders, then wait patiently for the spiders to beat themselves to death against the cactus, then collect all the string. What could be more natural?

It takes about 4 minutes to collect 9 string to make 1 cloth. 4 terrifying minutes of spider screeching. The worst is when two spiders spawn at once and one jumps on top of the other and comes lunging at you. I lost my gold hat and boots to that trick. Now the bars go all the way to the ceiling. I also improved it later by adding a little water stream that flows through the bars; now the string just floats to me.

Pony brushing

Pony Brushing game Secret of the Magic Crystal was only $5 so I bought it and played it for an hour or so, long enough to train up my unicorn, win some races, and breed him? her? with a hellsteed demon horse. It's a terrible game. Too bad, I was looking for something amusing and different from the usual "headshot this and zerg rush that". I was totally prepared to take it seriously, respect that it's for younger people and girls and not snicker. But it's bad in almost every way. BTW, the only hints I could find online for the game were this forum thread. Either no one is playing or the audience doesn't want to share tips. If you're curious, you can watch video

The gameplay is terribly simplistic. There's really only one mini-game, a very slow paced Dance Dance Revolution. Most of the activities involve no game at all. You click, wait for the UI to respond, and go on. I understand making simple games for younger players, but even the 5 year olds I know would find this pretty lame, too repetitive and too slow. The graphics aren't particularly good, either. And there's no sound at all other than a looping music track.

The most egregious example of bad gameplay is the Gate, where you get to send your horse out in to the world. And race! And help your neighbor plough! But instead of enjoying the outside world, maybe some new scenery, all that happens is a text box pops up with random messages. "Ashleigh pulls ahead! Ashleigh goes slow. Ashleigh is in the 1 Place! Ashleigh takes the inside! Ashleigh flies by on the outside!". Then you click "OK" and wait for a tiny clock to count down before you can play again. The only excuse I can see for this complete failure of game design is the game developers just running out of budget.

The thing that does work is the grooming. It's not even a minigame really, you just take one of three tools (brush, sponge, or hoof trimmer) and wave it over the horse. But the animation is nice and the horse has a charming way of looking you right in the eyes. He'll even daintily raise his hooves up for grooming. It's very limited, but it does make a connection. I'm guessing grooming was the demo that got the developer team the funding.

Playing Secret of the Magic Crystals has reminded me of Rare's underrated Viva Piñata garden games. Those are really fantastic, rich and deep and with a lot of variety. They're too complicated for their own good, but a heck of a lot of fun. Maybe I should go back to them.

Losing

I hate losing games. I don't mind losing to the computer so much, but I hate losing to other people. I'm a sore loser. It kept me from playing Warcraft arena, and it's giving me a complex about Starcraft. I'm not much of an RTS player but I've decided to try to learn Starcraft II competently. It's the closest thing computer gaming has to a grand game like Go or Chess and I figured now was the time to learn it.

I made a mistake with my Starcraft account and won too many of my placement matches. Basically I learned one strategy, Protoss 4 warpgate rush, and then played it for 5 matches and won 3. That got me rated in the Gold Division with people who actually know how to play the game. The problem is all my knowledge ended at the rush, either I won at 8 minutes or I lost. I have no idea what to do next. I've since lost 8 matches and haven't won one, and I keep hoping the system will eventually re-rate me to a lower skill level.

There's an old saying about learning to play Go, that you have to play 100 games before you can really begin learning to play the game at all. I think that applies to Starcraft, too. Just rough when you lose them all; at least Go has useful handicapping. The good thing about Starcraft is there's a nice polite culture, even if it's expressed in acronyms like "GLHF" and "GG". At least folks aren't jerks about winning.

Minecraft > Starcraft + Warcraft

Since getting back from my trip to Oshkosh last week I haven't been playing much of Blizzard's fine products. No Warcraft. Precious little Starcraft 2. Why? Because I'm obsessed with Minecraft.

 

Minecraft is a goofy little open world building game. The core engine is managing a 3d world made up of little cubes: dirt cubes, rock cubes, tree cubes, stone cubes, water cubes, etc. Your avatar walks around the world, smashing cubes and dropping new ones to create things. And oh, what things you can build: log flumes, underwater domes, all sorts of beautiful and silly stuff.

It's a one-man indie project that's been burbling along for awhile. Recently the game turned a corner. One, he put enough dynamics in the world to make it interesting. Two, he enabled multiplayer. It's a great social experience playing in a giant world edited by you and a few friends. Mainstream gaming is noticing: the Team Fortress group likes it, so does Bethesda (of Morrowind fame), and there's a good writeup over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

What I like best about the game is that it's a simple creative game, very relaxing, with no significant competition or conflict. Well, there is a competitive survival mode with dangerous NPCs wandering around, but I enjoy the game more in the creative multiplayer mode. Surprisingly satisfying spending hours digging through stone, creating beautiful mood lighting, playing with lava flows and building elaborate castles.

There's not enough creative games out there these days. I love games like Spore, SimCity, Starcraft, Civilization mostly for the building phase, the creative urge. But to make those "real games" they always end up with some conflict, some need to fight another person or the environment, and that part I never enjoy as much. (Related: I keep losing Starcraft matches because I just don't want to build an army. Make love, not war!). Minecraft is unabashedly creative and really fun for it. The closest analogy I can think of is Second Life, only Minecraft's way simpler and there's no sex.

You can try out the game real quick in this free browser hosted version. That will give you a feel for the voxel engine and the basic design. The free version is older, single player, and doesn't have a lot of what I enjoy about the game, in particular it's actually more fun to play with resource scarcity (and of course, multiplayer). But if you like what you see go ahead and register, consider ponying up the 10€ for a full account. You won't regret it.

Docs are thin, btw, but the Minecraft wiki is pretty good. The crafting recipe page is indispensable.

Real ID post-Starcraft

Starcraft 2 is out, selling well, and a bunch of new people are signed up for Real ID. Seeing how this is playing out I think Blizzard made a huge mistake rolling out Real ID in Warcraft first.

Real ID makes perfect sense for a new game like Starcraft. It's the way to keep track of your friends, to play matches with them, to keep track of folks and chat between matches. It feels perfectly natural to use it, and the Facebook integration for finding friends is a welcome tool. There's also no identity question. You don't really have an avatar or character in Starcraft, you're just yourself, so using your email address to identify yourself in game makes perfect sense.

By contrast, the Real ID launch in Warcraft felt creepy. We already had a social network in the game, our guilds, why do we need this new thing? And the extension of our identity from Warcraft toon to real-world email made a lot of people nervous. Real ID in WoW just feels wrong, despite it being useful.

So here's my question. Why did Blizzard launch Real ID first in Warcraft? Why not launch it first in Starcraft, where it makes sense, and then later launch the Warcraft version when people were clamoring for it? My only thought is they were trying to leverage the Warcraft user base to help grow Starcraft 2. But that's insane: Starcraft 2 has been anticipated for 5+ years by gamers, Blizzard didn't need to do anything to make sure the launch was strong.

The sad thing is Real ID chat is pretty much useless in Starcraft. When playing WoW you have plenty of time to chat, it's a relatively slow social game. Starcraft is an intense clickfest. The last thing I want to do when managing my Protoss build order is chat with an old buddy.

The other frustrating thing about Real ID in Starcraft is I want a social group other than "my friends". Steam has a nice version of this, groups you can join, and it's relatively easy to play a pickup game of something like Left4Dead with sympathetic people without committing yourself to "friendship" and constant presence awareness. I don't think Real ID has something like that, a social grouping for GoonSwarm or Metafilter or OlderGamers or GayGamers or the like. That's an oversight.

Real ID: the good side

Blizzard's debacle with Real ID has mostly faded to memory. I'm hoping they can recover from their disastrous launch and some folks can enjoy the good part of Real ID.

Today I raided ICC with some of my guild friends. It was a lot of fun, a particularly epic Lady Deathwhisper fight where we pulled out a win using 3 battle rezzes and every mana and tank cooldown available. And a casual social time, cracking jokes about the Smurfs and drinking beers. At the same time I was raiding an old high school buddy was playing one of his first WoW toons, a level 20 Paladin. It's been... 21 years since high school, we haven't talked much in the intervening years, but we're RealID buddies. And there we were chatting via whispers, joking about Warcraft.

Suddenly a memory flash: I distinctly remember spending the night at his house, about age 12, and typing in the source code for Hunt the Wumpus. You youngsters should know, back in the day a floppy disk cost $10. There was no Internet and barely any modems. So you got printed books of computer games and typed them in. We must have stayed up until midnight typing that damn program in and trying to fix typos. I got tired and went to sleep and he kept up with it, got the game running to show me in the morning.

And what a game! You can try it here in original text form. It's one of the original dungeon crawlers, in interactive fiction form. It's not even a game by modern standards but it's a very important step in the development of Warcraft along with 500 point Adventure, Rogue, and DikuMUD.

I really like that Real ID enabled me to renew a years-old friendship, casually enjoyed in the medium of Warcraft. I'm hoping that Real ID will let me maintain that kind of social relationship with my new friends, my Warcraft guild friends. When I quit serious raiding a year ago I was really disturbed by what a waste of time Warcraft felt like, the impermanence of my relationships from the game. Coming back has let me rekindle some of those friendships, for which I'm thankful. Real ID may let the fire keep burning for the next 10+ years in new games yet to come.

Real ID, Warcraft, Blizzard

The new Internet shitstorm is Blizzard's launching of Real ID, linking your real life identity (as determined by your credit card and email) to your gaming identity, particularly your Warcraft characters. They're trying to walk a fine line: you don't have to share your Real ID in the game of Warcraft, so in theory you can keep your identity private. But Blizzard's making a few missteps in launching it.

1. There's a terrible bug (or design choice?) where Real ID data is available to WoW addons. In general WoW addons are safe for a user to install, they can't do much harm. Users install lots of them without fear of danger. But right now, any addon can share your real name and the names of your friends in the game: spam trade chat, etc. In fact DBM had a bug that it was dumping that data in to your own chat window. Harmless, but a startling demonstration of what could go wrong.
2. The current Real ID policy is that if someone's a Real ID friend, then they automatically share your Real ID name with their friends, too. Ie, your friends get to share your personal data with anyone they want. It's a mistake to put that control in other people's hands.
   
3. Blizzard is making Real ID mandatory for forum posts. The WoW forums are mostly a sideshow and I understand why they're trying to clean up the cesspool. But their ham-handed announcement and messaging has really pissed a lot of people off. And I've already heard from two women who say they will no longer be posting to the forums because they don't want to be harassed. That makes me sad.

Of course what's really going on is Blizzard / Activision is trying to figure out how to leverage the 12 million World of Warcraft subscribers into a valuable social network for their other games, particularly Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, and the upcoming unnamed Blizzard MMO. Every game company right now has Facebook envy, and Blizzard is making a go at social networking. Despite the nerd rage about Real ID right now I don't think they'll lose customers over abusing their expectations of privacy. But it sure is a lousy launch.

BTW, personally I have no trouble with anyone knowing my Real ID, in fact I appreciate the basic feature of making my in-game friendships transcend whatever alt and server I'm currently playing. My Real ID is nelson@monkey.org, and any friends reading this are encouraged to add me. But I'm unusual; Blizzard needs to be very careful about denying its customers the choice to remain pseudonymous.

Steam grumble

Steam is a marvel, a working, user-friendly game download store. I love how it handles copy protection without being a big nuisance. I also appreciate (and am victim to) their sales. This past week has been crazy sale time and I ended up buying Fuel for $5 just to see the procedural generation and Borderlands for $10. Second copy of Borderlands, I have it on the Xbox, but it's so cheap and I wanted to try it on the PC.

But as great as Steam is, their download system is awful. New games seem to download fast, 1.5 megabytes / second or so. But patches and DLC take forever. I'm getting only 300 kilobytes/second and that's a total botch of spikey delivery, like their bandwidth is severely limited. And the Steam client gives me four indicators of progress, all saying different things. Two different speed gauges (470KB/s and 870KB/s), and two different completion estimates (24 minutes, 42 minutes). All on the same screen!