Who's to blame?

In an interesting turn of events, I just got evicted from a group. Context:

In an alternate life, I'm a bear tonk. I have enough armor/defense/hp to tank heroics. Just about. I'm still in blues and greens, but that's good enough, as you start getting epics in heroics.

The others in my group were all Tier 5+. This means they're a full two sets of gear above the gear I'm at. So on the first pull, chain lightnings went flying all over the place, and I lost agro lots. Who gets blamed? I do, for being undergeared.

However: I have nearly the best gear a bear tank can have before starting heroics. I'm missing a couple of group quest rewards (blech), but could survive the damage. The only way for me to improve my gear is to.... run heroics.

Now, if I was on my mage, now happy at over 1000 spell damage in T5+ gear and was grouped with a fresh tank, I'd be using less powerful abilities less of the time. I'd be tempering my damage to the threat available, probably surfing the 30% above the tank's I have to play with. I'd still be doing damage comparable to what's expected for the instance, just less than rushing through it with an awesome group.

Am I the only one who wants to be a group player? Seems everyone just wants to mash their worky buttons with no regard to anyone else.

Also, zomg updates!

First!

Beta patch notes are up

Just wanted to be the first person on my RSS to report it :)

Delurk mode activated

Unmothballing for a moment here, I'm quite hacked off at everyone complaining about Dr. Bartle comparing WAR to WoW.

No, WAR is not a WoW clone, but it is still a graphical DikuMUD requiring the killing of ten foozles to get an extra level to get extra abilities and some abstract points to put into some kind of alternative advancement tree, then a gear grind and mudflation at the top end. So is Conan. So is Vanguard. City of Heroes. Guild Wars.

There is very little virgin territory separating most current 'mainstream' MMOs (as ever, with the exception of EVE). As far as upcoming and current games go, Chronicles of Spellborn seem to be the most innovative with its rotating skill bar and lack of gear making any difference, but even thats just Guild Wars with a couple of small tweaks. MMOs are stagnant, thats the point I believe Bartle was making.

Now to get back to lurking, or perhaps actually trying to post again. Again.

Warriors

I've recently started a cow warrior to play with some friends. It starts with a two handed hammer. Yet I can still rend, and eventually hamstring using a blunt weapon. What?

The Price of Gold

(oh man, this post is going to get gold selling spam out the whatsit)

I managed to find elemental plateau completely empty: it was 5am server time I guess, which was an advantage. I thought I would perform an experiment.

I figure that elemental plateau is probably the most profitable place to grind money. Maybe there's somewhere with cloth and gold drops that beats it, or a better drop rate on greens, but whatever. Auctioneer tells me that primal fires sell for the most on my server, at about 22ish gold.

So I killed fire elementals for half an hour. The results:

68 elementals killed dropping:
26 motes of fire
68 grey elemental bits, worth a total of 7 gold, 97 silver, 5 copper
1 grey weapon worth 2 gold, 58 silver, 2 copper
2 greens, which I put on the auction house, call them about 5 gold each, sold to disenchant

So two primal fires, for about 45 gold, 10ish gold of greys, 10ish gold of greens, grand total of 65 gold for half an hours grind.

5200 gold divided by 130ish gold for an hour comes out at about 40 hours of straight grinding.

Fun.

Headcrabs

I just finished the Ravenholme section in Half-Life 2 (yes, the original, not one of the episodes).

If I hear that screech again, it'll be too soon.

On the Impact of PvP

Tobold and Syncaine (and I will openly admit I haven't come across his blog before) have both made a post on so-called "impact pvp", pvp that affects the world in meaningful ways. The general conclusion from both is you can't have "impact pvp" and successful pve in the same game.

I'd like to disagree. I think that there isn't such a game at the moment, but that there could be. It would need a complete paradigm shift from current game design though.

Firstly: multiple factions would probably be needed. As in, 5 or 6 distinct factions, which have allegiances and enmities. These can quite happily be mutable by player actions, but there needs to be locations you can go to which are flagged 'friendly'. Zero-sum the system so that each faction is always flagged friendly with at least one other faction so that there are a several varied places you can go to without getting ganked by enemies. Let people migrate from faction to friendly factions via some kind of rep function. Have capturable locations, etc. Something for pvpers to do. Have raid zones that are defended/guarded by factions, something for pve-ers to do. Also, something for them to work together on.

Secondly, regular resets of the server. This may seem a biggy, but if its written into both lore and mechanics, it should be fine. Focus on titles, something everyone seems to be implementing these days, and other intangible rewards. You can even have tangible rewards if you want.

Thirdly, a low level cap. If you, as a level 5 newbie, are wandering around when suddenly a level 568 elite pvper comes along, you have major issues and might quit. If your level cap is 20, and you design the scaling so that the level 5 still has a chance (if not a huge one), and a group of level 5s can almost certainly take down a single 20, you don't end up with the 'I was ganked, I'm going to quit' issue, especially as you can level up relatively quickly to be the same level, have the same power level abilities, and can get revenge.

Of course, none of these things excluding the level cap (in Guild Wars) are in any MMOs at the moment, and I find it unlikely that the other two would really gain acceptance individually in current MMOs as they are currently structured. If we want this style of impact gameplay, both pvp and pve, it needs to be built from the ground up to encourage it, rather than saying 'We are pvp', or 'we are pve'.

It would also be quite the risk, making me think its not going to happen any time soon.