BP News -
Blizzard will begin offering premium subscriptions to their popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft, once they have completed their server re-configurations and can provide stable gaming environments for every realm. Many of these services have not been announced yet, but one employee, on the condition of anonymity, revealed plans for a 'playground' server. For a small monthly fee (which would be in addition to the current monthly fee), players can create a character on a designated realm that starts at level 60. The player begins with basic gear (level 40-45 armor, weapons, etc), can choose two professions which start at the maximum skill level 0f 300, and distribute all 51 talent points as they see fit. Players will also receive a free level 40 mount based on their chosen race. Once the character creation process is complete, the game proceeds just like a normal PvE server (enabling your PvP flag is optional, but also encouraged on the premium playground server). Blizzard realizes that all players might not make it to level 60 on a normal realm, and wants to give players the option to experience high-end content without the grind. One employee also notes that the playground server is a great place for people to test player vs. player (PvP) character templates.

"This will be a great way for me to test out end-game characters, spells, abilities, and trade skills." said Rojo, a resident of the Gilneas realm. "This is perfect! I play on a PvP server, but haven't figured out which class stands the best chance to pwn all the other classes in PvP. By playing around with a variety of level 60 character templates, I'll be pwning people in hillsbrad in no time!" said Awrune, a resident of the PvP server laughing skull.

Supposedly more premium services are in the works, but Blizzard is keeping a tight lid on new ideas for the game until they stabilize their server environments.

I've been hammering away at World of Warcraft for nearly 3 weeks now, primarily on weekends. Blizzard has released a game that has led to my relapse into the MMO world. I was free of these cursed games from 2000-2004, but now that has ended. Damn you, Blizzard!

WoW - Pros
The Graphics. Some people will tell you that they fail in comparison to EQII or other high-end graphic games out there, and those people are right. If you're looking for a game that is going to push your card to the limits, push ungodly numbers of pixels, or look photo-realistic, WoW is NOT going to do that. What WoW will do is amaze you with it's art direction, with each location having a very distinct pallet of colors that creates a certain ambiance and atmosphere. The art direction for this game follows with other Warcraft games. Brilliant.

The User Interface (UI). Blizzard continues to release games with intuitive UIs. I think this is part of the reason this game is doing so well. MMO newbies can pick it up and feel at home in less than a half hour. Plus, you can customize the UI, or download apps. like Cosmos that customize the UI for you.

The Quest System. This might be the best aspect of the game (and the worst on rare occasions). Right from the start of the game, you feel like you're a part of the world and the environment. Whether it be slaying 5 wolves and collecting their fangs for a potion, to slaying some elite creature, you're always part of the lore.

Instances. The instances are used sparingly, primarily for high-level areas and dungeons. This works out well in that most of your game time is spent in the company of many other players, so grouping and socializing is easy. But for the very difficult quests, you need to have a tight group of players who know how to work together in difficult zones...without the fear of getting ganked.

The Rest System. By not playing WoW for a couple days, upon logging back in, I can raise my experience very fast because my character is considered 'rested'. Fabulous idea blizzard! This makes keeping pace with friends, even if they play more frequently then you, much easier.

WoW - Cons
Ganking. In any contested level (that means a level where both horde and alliance quest and is open to player vs. player combat), you can easily be ganked by another character, regardless of their level. Once you reach ~level 25 or so, you have to go to these areas to continue questing. So in the middle of a quest, some random chump 10 levels higher than you can walk by while you are fighting a creature, wait until your HPs are low, then decide to jump in and kill you when you're already close to dead. There's really no reason for this in the framework of the game (no rewards or incentives) but a lot of players do it anyway. If you want to fight someone, at least try and fight someone close to your level.

Quests (only a fraction of the time). Certain quests are just flat-out impossible to find, and or very confusing, or worse yet, bugged. Granted, this is the minority, but nothing is more irritating than not being able to find a quest, or completing a quest but not getting credit for it.


Overall, this game is very good and addictive. I'm sure I'll spend loads of time playing this weekend, hopefully avoiding the alliance gankers for the most part. This will probably be the last post of the year, so have a happy holiday, and be sure to check out www.fromthebasement.org at some point. If you're into podcasting, or just looking for something to listen to on your MP3 player, give it a whirl.

I had a nice entry cooked up yesterday dealing with the rapid decline of email use in Korea. The only game related piece is that students find using IM and SMS more like playing a game, while they compare email to completing a chore or work. Not big surprise that email is on the downswing (in a big way in Korea) as I have some friends here in the states that don't use email at all anymore and rely 100% of IM. Anyway, blogger ate my post and it vanished into the ether.

Anyway, what I wanted to blog about today is intelligent match-up systems for multi-player games. Halo 2's system is supposedly working better now, but I haven't played in a while so I can't confirm. Microsoft is reporting that over 28 million hours have been spent on Xbox Live since Halo 2 was released about a month ago. WoW. A lot of my friends are still hooked on Halo 2's multi-player feature, and many lament on the fact that most matches are very competitive. I think this fact alone needs some exploring. Do these match-making systems, that pit you against players of similar skill, encourage more players to participate in multi-player matches? Do these systems help retain players after the initial foray into multi-player games? I'd probably say yes to both, but obviously there's no proof yet.

Games like Counter Strike, Unreal Tournament, and others don't have any intelligent match-up systems. I think if such a system was implemented, a lot of people who get turned off after getting pwned over and over again would actually stick around and play the game longer over time. The recently released Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth uses such a system. I probably would never try any RTS online, b/c I'm horrible at those games. But with a system like this, I'd definitely try it out.

So who's going to take the Halo's Xbox system and port it to FPS PC games? I'd really like to be able to play CS:S with people of my skill level more often, as opposed to getting stuck on a shitty team for 15+ matches and just getting pwned all over the place.

After all the turkey was digested Thursday, I took it upon myself to go out and pick up World of Warcraft on my way back into town Friday. I used to be really into Ultima Online from about 1997 through 2000 or so, then gave it up once I started my career.

So I know how addictive MMOs can be.

That being said, I probably made a bad decision buying WoW on the weekend leading up to my final week of classes, which include a 15 page paper and a video project that hasn't even been started yet. O well...I convinced myself I needed to play WoW to further my research. Anyway, the game is pretty dam good. I started out as an Undead Warrior (which I played through some of the beta), and began questing. For the most part, the quest system works very well. Occasionally, you end up looking for 30 minutes in the wrong place for a quest, but this is only a small percent of the time. Most early quests you can complete solo, but some you'll need to group with other players to complete. I also had my first taste of PvP (playing on a PvP server). For some reason a dwarf decided to show up at an undead quest cite, and was quickly ganked by my group of 5. Not sure what the little guy was thinking...

World of Warcraft is probably the best designed MMO I have come across. Aside from UO, I have limited experience with EQ and DAoC. None of these games measure up to WoW so far. The beauty of WoW is that you can play however you want to play. Want to do solo quests? No problem. Need a group to complete some other quests? Easy. Feel like PvPing? Just head south from Sepulcher. Feel like crafting and selling items? Just train from an NPC and start collecting materials, then go to the auction house.

This game really appears to have been designed for all types of players, regardless of playstyles. The only negative I have come across are the servers. You'd think since UO's debacle in 1997 in terms of lag and server support, the others in the industry would plan a bit better. Nah. Blizzard was definitely not prepared for the onslaught of traffic their servers had to handle during the first week of WoW. They actually almost doubled the number of game servers after the first few days the game was released...and some of those servers are already full too! Blizzard's latest press release is that they sold 250,000 units over the first few days, with 200,000+ players registering new accounts. It's off to the races...

I've recently discussed the issue of balance in multi-player games with colleagues, and how important it is for the players to have a balanced gaming experience. I actually had a whole post on this that I saved as a draft this morning, but it appears it was lost to the blogger ether (blogger has been performing and acting fairly poor of late). So here's the re-hash...

To date, most multi-player games have done little to ensure a balanced playing experience when playing online. I'll focus on FPS games, since these are the games I have the most experience with.

Example 1: Counter-Strike:Source. I didn't get into CS until CS:S was released a few months ago. CS:S is extremely fun, and an extremely well designed mod (if you can even call it a mod anymore). But there aren't any mechanisms in place to ensure that teams are balanced in terms of skill. What CS:S does have is a system that balances players per team. Whenever the discrepancy between teams is >2, the server automatically moves players from the larger team to the smaller team to even things out. It appears the player(s) moved from one team to the other are picked at random, not based on skills. Some CS:S games I've been involved in end up with one team winning 15 rounds in a row...obviously the skilled players are on one team. CS:S doesn't have any mechanism in place to remedy situations like this, or even try and prevent the same thing from occurring on the next map.

Example 2: Unreal Tournament 2004. I really like the UT 2004 system. Upon entering a game, you are automatically placed on the team with smaller players. But once you finish out a match, when the next map loads, the server will try and create teams evenly based on the scores of the players from the past match. This usually works 75-80% of the time (NOTE: this is based on my experiences in Onslaught matches). The only problem with this system is nothing takes into account players leaving mid-game. If 3 people from your team bail in the middle of a match, you're pretty much hosed. The server won't dynamically shift players to the smaller team to even things out.

Example 3: Halo 2. So far, I haven't been overly impressed with Halo 2's match-making abilities. Bungie boasted that Halo 2's xbox live system would always be able to match you with other players of similar skill levels. From my limited experience with the game, this hasn't been the case. I'm hoping if I participate in more online games, the system will get a better feel for my skill level (not very good), and start making better decisions on who I should be playing against. At this point, the quick matches in Halo 2 take forever to load, so I've been playing primarily arranged/party games with friends, that only take 10 seconds to load.

So where is all this going? It's my opinion that if these types of games had a solid balancing system, ensuring that players are competing with people at a similar skill level, players would play much more often. These unbalanced games actually might present a barrier to entry for a lot of people. Getting into CS:S at this point, as many reviews noted, is very difficult and intimidating for newcomers. It took me about 3 weeks to be able to hold my own in that game, and come out even or on the positive side in terms of death/kill ratio. Many gamers, particularly older gamers who don't necessarily share the same mindset as younger gamers, just don't want to spend weeks getting pwned on every server. They want to be competitive within hours of the new experience. This problem of balancing is alienating a lot of gamers who would otherwise really enjoy competitive multi-player gaming. I also think a clean balancing system would keep players engaged with a game for longer periods of time.

Here's to hoping Halo 2's system begins to work like Bungie predicted it would.

So I recently picked up Halo 2. I won't sit around here and tell you it's one of the best games ever, you can read all that on your own if you'd like. It's a fun game, especially the multi-player aspect if you just want to run around with some friends for a couple hours. One thing I'm a bit disappointed with in the single player campaign is the level lighting. At least in the early levels. I don't think this has to do with my TV, because my TV seems to display most games, even games that are a bit darker in nature, just fine. But some of these early levels just seem to dark. In the sewer, on the ship, in the subway...the lighting just isn't bright enough for my tastes. Squinting at the screen to try and see if something is lurking in a corner just isn't fun (NOTE: all multiplayer maps I've played don't suffer from this issue).

So that got me thinking of recent trends in the game industry. Some newer games seem to be peddling this idea of a 'Darker' game. This doesn't directly refer to the lighting and setting, but more the attitude and feel of the game. For instance, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within is being marketed by Ubisoft as being a much 'Darker' game than it's predecessor, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. In terms of Darker, they are referring to a hardened protagonist, more brutal fighting system, etc. But at the same time, the levels and the look of the game has plainly become much darker, with more shadows and grays.

I guess what I'm getting at is: is this a good thing? Why are so many games trying to both feel 'Darker' in nature, which inevitably leads to games looking darker? Doom 3 was almost impossible to play on my old Gateway monitor because the environment was so dam dark. I had to go out and buy a new monitor (which I needed to do anyway) to enjoy that game. Killzone, the recently released FPS for PS2, is also very dark. Haven't we seen enough corridor shooters with low lighting the last 5-7 years? Why can't games start breaking out of that mold? Far Cry is one of the best looking games I've seen in a *long* time, and a lot of that is due to the vast, tropical, COLORFUL landscapes it presents. Even Counter Strike: Source looks very bright on nearly every machine I've tried it on. Judging by the trailers, Half Life 2 appears to be the same way. Do these 'Darker' games have to have darker lighting? Could the Prince of Persia: Warrior Within achieve the same 'Dark' feel if it took place in the streets of Cairo, colors abound?