It’s becoming a running trend for me not to note MMOG Nation’s birthday (Jan 9th) as it goes past. I was either sick or on the road in early 2007, and this year I was both. I have had the creeping crud lodged in my chest since I got back from CES, regrettably. That’s been really good for MMOG playing, and really bad for things like working. Which, as you may have noticed, is something I enjoy doing.

In any case, to commemorate the site’s second anniversary I thought I’d drop a headpat on few personal favorites things from the past year. I’m not going to even tongue-in-cheek call them ‘awards’ like I did last year; these are just the things that made me well pleased in the past twelve months.

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The death of Vanguard, or rather its slow decline, is a noteworthy point in a number of 2008 prognostications around the blogosphere. I tend to think that’s a freaking shame. If as nothing more than as a testament to all those newbie designers, I really like the idea of Vanguard sticking around. So what can be done at this point?

What can put the brakes on this game’s freefall? In my mind, I think about the only thing left is an influx of new players. A sufficient parachute of players might make this game’s time in the air a little longer - and certainly more interesting.

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I was lost and now I am found! I’ve been whinging on about my frustrations with EverQuest 2 for the past few weeks, and now I’m happy to say they’re resolved. See, I’m a bleeding idiot.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Last week we put in another rote grinding session, this one based in Klak’anon. We managed to get a quest completed, but it turns out we’re a few levels shy of full access to that dungeon. The ^^ fights were very, very tough. We did have more fun than just randomly grinding, though, and so I was willing to call last week a tentative success.

The problem was that it was very tentative. It was still kind of weak sauce, and there was still a lot of frustration there. Cut to earlier tonight, and we found the cure for what ailed us: actually playing the game the way we’re supposed to.

See, I’ve allowed WoW to spoil me way more than I thought I have. The danger of World of Warcraft is that it’s good to the point where you can start to get tunnel vision. “Not in WoW” syndrome is probably the best way to look at it. Leveling in World of Warcraft is primarily accomplished by completing quests and killing mobs about your level. Killing mobs at your level was crazy talk in the EQ days; when you ground, you ground on things a few levels below you to make sure you could do it longer before camping.

And so should we have been, as Brian our Shadowknight pointed out last night. He lead us to merry old Rivervale, which is now wall-to-wall with demons. Demons that are just about four levels below us, and which we can churn through at a prodigious rate. Despite the lower level, the XP of the elite critters more than makes up. Most of us got between 50-60% of a level last night. My wife and I even managed a simul-ding, both of us getting the shiny graphic after a particularly challenging fight.

I’m honestly excited; we’re almost to 50, and tantalizing close to the high-end content from Echoes of Faydwer and Kingdom of Sky. Kunark is still a long way off, but we’re rededicated … and I think we’re really going to make it. :)

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It’s not often I stumble over new things. Mostly my life as a writer is about regurgitating previously announced information, or coming at that information in a new (often more personal) way. So it was kind of a pleasant surprise when Smedley passed on word of the “Share the Wealth” program.

I’ve got a two-part interview up on Massively today discussing the future of FreeRealms’ buy-in program, and one of the reason why they raised those damned Station Access rates.

We are having ongoing discussions inside the company about making station access an all-inclusive pass. Everything that we have, you get as a customer. Station Access subscribers would get every expansion pack for every game, as well as future expansions for every game as well. For the same price now, without raising the price. We have two problems, though. One: we have third parties involved in this. LucasArts, for example, will have to buy off on this, as would others. Second is the less obvious one: Promising future stuff is the meat of the problem. We haven’t found the right way to word things yet. To be honest other priorities have gotten in the way. That’s what we want to offer people.

They’ve been working on the right language for that Access program for over a year. Faster lawyers, kill, kill!

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Michael Zenke of MMOGNation, 1UP, Massively.com and, of course, Slashdot.org (/.) who makes some of the best points of any podcast guest co-host I’ve ever heard, will finally get a microphone that has some level of hardware compression and will now be understandable when he gets excited about something instead of sounding like a buzzer that’s about to explode. The world will rejoice and at last there will be peace in the Middle East.

Ouch. :)

Your point is well seen, Mark. I need a new harddrive, and I think I’m going to go looking for a new headset when I pick it up.

Also. For serious, go check out his real predictions at the end of the post. They’re really, really good. Darren asked me in the last SUWT if I thought anyones were particularly bad or good: I think Marks are almost great.

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I am apologetic for my now-frequent wanderings into the podcasting genre, if they bug you. Just the same, I feel obliged to note that I’m in the most recent episode of Shut Up We’re Talking (episode 17). We mutter about the whole recent cheating discussion, as well as preview stuff for 2008. Plus there’s a Back to the Future quote at the start. Always awesome.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about D&D 4th Ed. lately, and not just because of the interview today. I’ve been reading the preview books sent out by Wizards of the Coast. They’re total rip-offs, price-wise, but they’re chok-a-block with the kind of content I love. One of the statements made by designer James Wyatt in the Races and Classes book seemed to fit perfectly with a frustration I have about grouping in Massive games.

He was discussing the new focus on mutiple enemies in encounters. In 3rd edition (to make a quick aside) combat was balanced so that a party of four level x characters took on a single opponent of level X. If you wanted multiple critters in a fight, you’d either need to throw weaker creatures at the PCs, or make it a ‘tougher-than-normal’ fight. This lead to encounters designed by pros in recent years which feature ‘weak’ monsters with crazily unfair advantages; heavy DR at low levels, for example. In 4th edition, the assumption is that a given encounter is a number of critters equal to the number of Player Characters. This will make for much more interesting experiences, and allows for some interesting mixing and matching as well.

The overall focus here, said Mr. Wyatt, was to “challenge the party, not the player”. As an example to illustrate this, he pointed to a scenario where a monster with a unique damage reduction (like cold iron) would attack the party, and only one PC had the tool required to take it on. This would lead to the one-man-band, with the other PCs playing backup parts to the properly-equipped character. 4E is going to be all about every PC making a contribution, every round.

You might be wondering how I’m jumping this thread to MMOGs. After all, most games do just that; no one character class is specially equipped to handle a threat in most games. You’re probably going to want the holy Trinity on hand but beyond certain high-end dungeons/instances, most games don’t demand overly specific party builds. What most do require, though, is a very specific number of people. Lots of folks have complained about this, talking about alternatives for high end content and the specificity of raid events.

What I want is that kind of scalability at every level of the game. In short, I want a challenge for the party I have, not the party the designers want me to have. Again, I understand needing a semi-balanced party, but why penalize players for being one or two people short of a full group? Why not allow duos to take on dungeons? Why not allow scaling for three players, or ‘ten-man’ zones for five?  If you feel the need to compensate players for commensurate risks, I guess I can understand that … but why not make a dungeon ‘as dangerous’ as it would be for the full group, but tune it to a smaller number?

I’m not talking about soloing here - I think many companies have grasped the finer points of soloing and are doing a pretty good job with that passtime. What I’m talking about are the husband and wife teams, the dad with his two kids, the trio of high school chums - why can’t they have the daring adventures so common to these games? Why do they have to fall back on content technically designed for one person to handle alone?

During the discussion this month about cheating the blogosphere has grappled with the issue of designer ownership of the game; they are the ultimate gods of these tiny worlds. Within the confines of that chess game, though, wouldn’t it be nice to decide how many other chess pieces you need to have a decent chance at checkmate?

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