O. M. G.

Occasionally the Acklay will drop a “carapace”. If you use the radial on this “carapace”, much like the items granted at level 14 and 26, you will be granted a quest to find an engineer who can make this item into armor. Once you find this armorsmith/engineer, he will give you a choice of the armor piece you want crafted. When you have made your choice, he will send you out for the other components he will need.

I touched on this a little in my catharsis piece, but … holy hell Batman. Just patch out the damn traders now, you know? Just rip them the hell out and put in Trader NPCs that you can buy shit from.
Here’s the bottom line: I tried to keep my cool while writing my catharsis piece, because I wanted it to be as much about the good times I had in SWG as it was a discussion of why I was leaving. This really is beyond the pale, though. This was the exact line that they very specifically did not cross back in the day. Stuff similar to this was brought up time after time during the pre-CU days and every time the devs made a point of backing down from taking power away from the crafters.

It’s fine that they’ve made the decision to dump any of the elements of SWG that attracted me to the game in the first place. Just as long as they’re comfortable with me saying not-nice things about them in public, everyone’s going to be just fine.

You find the most interesting things on Google Video. WoW Insider posted a link to a very interesting video showing off a farming Hunter’s mad phat teleport powers.

If you’re interested at all in the social aspect of MMOGs, I hope you’re already reading PlayOn. The blog there displays occasional data dumps from a team of researchings working away in the belly of World of Warcraft. Erik Nickell has put up a short run-down of some of their methods and findings over on Terra Nova.

From the piece:

World of Warcraft is not PlayOn’s first entry into listening in on a virtual world. Early in 2004, Nic Ducheneaut and Bob Moore placed bots in the cantinas and starports of one server for Star Wars Galaxies, and collected the chat logs from those environments. My own descent into PlayOn was to help analyze the gigabyte of chat logs that had been collected.

Coming to WoW, we realized that Blizzard had opened up the game programming interface so that most of a player’s in-game actions can be automated, but still preventing game-playing bots. The /who command, combined with enough patience and a small matter of programming, enables a bot which can take a census of the entire logged-in world. Worlds, in fact, one faction at a time.

Zen of Design discusses the Blizzcon revelation that Pallys are ‘Easy Mode’ for World of Warcraft.

From the slide:

Warcraft 3 Paladin
Very defensive in nature
Intended to be easy class to play
Constantly struggle between too complex versus not enough to do

Add this to some comments I’ve heard about certain members of the design team not being fans of the concept of World of Warcraft, and it confirms many of the most scathing comments you hear about the Paladin class. With the addition of the class-specific buffs for raids and groups in the 1.9 patch, I’ve seen a lot more folks asking for Pallys for raids.

Even still, I chose the ‘wrong’ class in the eyes of many players on both sides of the Horde/Alliance divide. The Switcher Video (”and then I cast FROST SHOCK”) encapsulates the way a lot of people feel about the class and the choice between Alliance and Horde. With Hordies getting Blood Elves in the expansion, I expect there will start to be a swing back in the Horde’s direction in a big way.

I guess my question is: Why does a MMOG have to have an ‘easy mode’? The game’s learning curve is already quite shallow, a favorable aspect of the game noted by many when considering WoW’s success. With even first time players getting the hange of things fairly quickly, where’s the incentive to make a class easier to play than any other?

All I know is, now that my WoW buddies are hitting 50s I’m glad my Mage is 38. She’s going to get a lot of play in the future.

MMORPG.com has a piece on the new and updated Endless Ages, which I only note because it was the first MMOG I reviewed for MMORPGDot. It sucked big hose back then. Here’s hoping new management brings it up to speed.

In the original, the items were extremely visually limiting. Rapid Reality has added hordes of weapons, armors, jet-packs and other toys for players to earn and do battle with. The game almost felt like a cartoony version of Tribes once they got suited up and started flying around.

My review for DDO is up on Slashdot.

The thin layer of Eberron that I mentioned above is mostly related through quest text, and what is offered through NPC interaction is cookie cutter and boring. Quests usually have a voice-over, from an intangible Dungeon Master, to spice up your understanding of the situation and evoke the table-top setting. In my opinion, the voice-over doesn’t add much. In truth, the storytelling that Everquest 2 and World of Warcraft manage through questing makes the story attempts of DDO look like a student project MOO in comparison. 

Via Zen of Design, a post on the Signal vs. Noise blog about complexity causing product returns. Damion brings up the topic, of course, on the basis of MMOG gameplay fundamentals.

In Ultima Online, I watched as an entire focus group couldn’t figure out how to chop down a tree (you had to click on the axe, then the tree). In Shadowbane, players had a hard time finding their first batch of monsters to kill. In DDO, I recently watched someone spend 10 minutes trying to figure out how to use a healing kit before quitting in disgust. In City of Heroes, I watched numerous new players stumble with the instanced city concept, while trying to get together and group with their friends.