Category: MMO Design (Page 7 of 36)

The last major patch for WoW was the introduction of the Sunwell Plateau on March 25th. While this patch was packed full of content, there are no further major patches planned for World of Warcraft until the release of the next expansion pack, which is currently slated for release probably near Christmas (ebWorld’s date is just a guess). Assuming even as early as an October release, this could mean 7 months without a major content infusion.

Last night, they released patch notes for an interim patch for WoW, and as my wife pointed out, most of it is a grab bag of small data tweaks and long-standing bugs. Clearly, a skeleton crew is manning the boat while most of the WoW’s teams efforts are focused elsewhere, probably on WotLK. Continue reading

A lot of people have pointed out to me this movie, which shows a rogue so pimped out on Dodge that he is capable of tanking Gruul’s, taking it down with a 5-man team.  For the non-WoW players, let’s just say that rogues were never meant to tank anything in a raid space.

Gruul’s complexity is that he grows in size every 30 seconds or so, with his attacks dealing more damage.  With normal tanks, this becomes untenable in about 10 grows, but if you’re being hit very rarely, you’ll survive as long as you don’t get one-shot.  Interestingly, they discovered that Gruul will reset to 0 grows after about 20 minutes – meaning the designers likely thought it was ludicrous to imagine someone lasting that long.  Mudflation makes all things possible: see also this Onyxia solo kill. Continue reading

Pretty much the entire contents of the Wrath of the Lich King friends and family beta has been leaked. Looking at the contents of it, it looks like someone got hold of the client and used various viewers to examine it. How psycho are WoW fans?  They’re already building talent tree apps to test builds.  Enjoy before Blizzard legal shuts it all down.

As an aside to my homeys over at Blizzard: if you’re going to fix Lightwell, then actually fix it.  Cast time and cooldowns aren’t the problem – the problem is the heal effect breaks on damage, and at the high level raid, the whole raid is taking damage all the time.  Currently, lightwell’s primary use is as a comedy prop.

This post is the best thing Raph’s posted quite some time. Of course, it helps that his thoughts mirror a lot of my thoughts on online worlds, especially the new meme of ‘everyone can open their own virtual world’. The fact that Raph is aware of this problem gives me a lot of hope for what they’re working on.

Chasing after and bending the rules towards casual players for an MMO ignores an obvious issue – an online community is ultimately as interesting and compelling as its members. Casual players will not give a place its own personality. Consider, if you will, how interesting Cheers would have been without Norm, Cliff and Frasier.

Once you start building a game design based on the idea that interesting social ties MIGHT occur inside a space, the designer is basically depending on serendipity to occur. This is, as one might imagine, a pretty scary basis for a business model. As such, we start putting in game mechanics designed to make the game stickier (collecting minigames), have tactical interest (PvP), take longer (levelling curves and raiding games), and forcing more positive social interactions (multiplayer-required content). Serendipity is still the fulcrum that determines whether a game (or even a server/shard of a game) lives or dies, it’s the designers job to make that landscape as fertile as possible.

I almost missed it because he refuses to get a working RSS feed, but not long ago, Claus Grovdal, producer-designer of Darkfall, poked his head out of his hole, saw his shadow, declared two more months of crunch, and scurried back into his rabbit hole.

But before he did, he boldly asked the question, “Why Shadowbane didn’t make billions”, and then went on to say, and I quote:

Shadowbane was a great concept and a great game, and the only reason it wasn’t a massive success, was buggy and outdated technology… If Shadowbane had released without all the client crashes, with a better server solution and with a graphical engine that could compete with other games released at the time, it would have been a HUGE hit.

Continue reading