In their world, everyone is a winner

In my recent post about DAoC2, I mentioned that if DAoC 2 were to ever appear, while I think it would be very successful, I don’t believe that it would be a WoW beater and in fact neither will any RvR or PvP based MMORPG ever. So what’s my reasoning behind this?

It’s really quite simple. People don’t like to lose. 

Games were not created to favor the loser. It is strange to think people are sitting in video game design classes and dreaming of games that punish the victor, even if those designers are not the best gamers. Especially as games become more involved and advanced, those playing will spend days or even weeks working past what is giving them trouble.

In a PvE centric game like WoW it’s completely possible to play the game for years and always win. You will clear the dungeon, beat the bosses and emerge victorious. Even if learning new raid content and having to spend a few days wiping on a boss, you can be assured that you will eventually beat it to a pulp. No matter how difficult a particular PvE challenge is, a player knows they have a 100% chance of beating it should they put the time and effort in. You also know that you will have it on farm status at some point in the near future. Whether you win or lose is entirely down to you.

PvP and in particular RvR is very different. They might not like to admit it, but even the biggest epeen waving prick loses fights in RvR and bloody often too. I know because I’ve seen them lose :P Situations will arise that are impossible to win, it doesn’t matter how well you play or how well you’re prepared, you will lose and there’s nothing you can do about it. At some point your elite warband of doom will ride round a corner and straight into 4 warbands of OMFGZERGDOOM from the enemy faction and BLAM! You lose, simple as that. Sure, you can put up a good fight, get some kills, stay alive a long time and perhaps claim a moral victory, but it will still boil down to you respawning. Battles and campaigns will be won or lost and whilst you can influence the outcome, you cannot decide it with 100% certainty.

That huge mass of casual players that in reality bulk out the big name game’s subscription fees don’t want the results of their valuable gaming time taken out of their control. They want to consistently achieve and have a sense of progress; they need to be in control. They log in, do their daily quests and log out, safe in the knowledge that they’ve taken a step further towards item A, B or C. They do a dungeon, they want item X, but if they don’t get it they know if they go again and eventually they will. And hey, they still got a token/plaque/whatever, so no time was wasted, the winning end result is inevitable. They don’t want to log in and get their arse kicked for an hour and come out of it with nothing and have no guarantees that this won't happen again tomorrow, or every day for ever...  where’s the fun in that? What a waste of their precious time and I don't mean that sarcastically at all, because yes time is precious. And while I say this regarding casual players, it also applies to a great many more hardcore gamers, they will quite often be even more demanding of constant and reliable progress. What they are winning is relative to their different goals in-game and the time and effort associated varies, but the expectation of consistent winning crosses the boundary of casual to hardcore players.

Whereas the dedicated RvR gamer is far more comfortable with just taking part in the challenge itself. They of course will also be interested in character progression and winning their campaign, but they will also revel in those moral victories where the only reward is a smile, a bit of epeen bolstering and perhaps some banter. To play RvR games for a long time means you must have accepted defeat and enjoy what may turn out to be impossible challenges. Perhaps they are playing for the fun of the fight itself and the utterly valueless epeen internet glory.

I don’t mean to imply that the RvR gamer is better than PvE gamers in any sense, it’s just people have a different set of desires, levels of patience and just what they’re willing to accept and enjoy in life. The majority of people want to win and given the choice between two good games where one supplies reliable victory, but the other you are only able to influence a result, then obviously more people will opt for the fun victory. For most people that question would be a total no-brainer.

Just look at EVE, a game that is rampant with RvR in the form of player run Corporations battling each other for territory and power. EVE is an extremely well made, very high quality and all round excellent game. On the pure quality stakes I would say it can comfortably stand next to any other MMO. It also has regular FREE expansions. Yet, it isn't even vaguely close to WoW's sub numbers. It's just too harsh for most players. You can get your arse kicked, have everything you own destroyed or stolen and the perception amongst non-EVE players is that this happens all the time and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Which is potentially true, it's the nature of these type of games and as EVE's infamous history shows, no Corporation is invincible... That's a horribly risky style of gameplay for most people. The masses want their win and in WoW, RIFT and other PvE centric games everyone is a winner!

So then, what'll it be for you? The taking part or the winning?

Me, I like a bit of both.

Official WAR Euro Forums - The Lyceum or Bilerot Burrow?

Official WAR Euro forums open on Wednesday, starting with a forum beta.

So how long before they turn into a hate driven flame fest?

Oooh I'd give that about say 30 minutes. Another 30 minutes after that they will become a heavily moderated land of locked threads. And that is probably a good thing.

Having had to live with unofficial forums and the hate spawned drivel over most of them I just can't be arsed with it anymore. I don't want to hear from the WoW is teh LAW! crew, the people blatantly pretending to have played other old MMOs (particularly regarding DAoC) using their made up past "knowledge" whilst ranting, the obvious Blizzard employees and horde of people with ridiculous expectations for a young MMO.

Die Mythic! Die! and 'OMFG I quit!11!1' attention seeking posts will not help anything. WAR's got it's problems, some big, some small, but nothing that can't get sorted out. It's also got a lot of great things about it. Constructive criticism will only help improve the game. Look at the WoW forums, fuck all productive ever comes from there either, just the same nerf this, nerf that, I quit and hate posts. Though due to sheer bulk of posters there are some decent bits of information regarding talents, etc. Something that would certainly be helpful on the official forums, if people manage to stay civil enough to let the quality posts come through.

Of course should GOA/Mythic heavily moderate the Euro forums to try and make them more readable, we'll just see lots of "OMFG!1! they locked my post about calling you smacktards! You smacktards!" :P

Will the new forums turn into the Lyceum or Bilerot Burrow?

Hidden behind a monitor

Watching Obama's inauguration today got me thinking about a lot of things, most of which had nothing to do with gaming, but it did lead me to think about racism in MMOs.

It's something I've seen in every MMO I've played and alas WAR has not proved to be the exception. It's strange that when you have someone hidden behind a monitor they consider it acceptable to be try and insult other people online with racial slurs. And nearly always in region chat to make sure they get as wide an audience as possible.. You can bet your arse they wouldn't shout it out on the street in real life. But thanks to the protection of their monitor, its all safe and well, worst they get is a ban from a game. If people said some of the crap I've seen online on the street here you would most likely get nicked and/or or a slap.

So far in WAR I've only seen this sort of crap once and thankfully the GM's responded quickly and got rid of them. I'm hoping that will be my only experience of this in WAR, because in WoW I saw racist nonsense far, far too often. Particularly against Jews, which considering the events that happened in Europe not that long ago, I find particularly disappointing to see on our servers. I used to think sometimes WoW needed footage of Belsen included in it's manual.

Is it a sad fact that racist twats are inescapable or is it just ignorant kids trying to show off? I dunno... but I just wish that part of the real world didn't make it into our online ones.

Crap player=Cocky twat?

One of my guildies was in Caledor with his Witch Elf yesterday when he got jumped by 2 Witch Hunters. While the fight was going on, a Swordmaster strolled up and watched. The guy from my guild is well known on our server as a good player, and managed to kill both Witch Hunters, but as you can imagine he had barely any hitpoints left. So the Swordmaster walks up and kills him. Fair enough, this is WAR after all, but then the guy feels the need to spam /laugh and /point emotes at the corpse.

Of course we’re all on ventrilo and hear about it, and as I’m in Caledor anyway, as soon as I see the Swordmaster I chase him down and start hitting. Turns out that I kill him with very little difficulty… The guy was doing stupid crap like running in circles around me (the mighty strafe turn! Reminds me of Mechwarrior 4 ;) ), despite the fact I put Touch of Palsy on him 3 times...

I’m not complaining about it, it was funny as hell for us and made him look like a proper tool, but why is it the cocky twats that spam emotes on people almost invariably turn out to be... well, a bit rubbish :P School bully syndrome?

The WoW gamer and the WAR launch

I’ve been on beta and launch for most of the major MMOs since Ultima Online, I have to say other than GOA’s open beta cock up, this has been the smoothest MMO launch I’ve ever been on. The servers are very stable (with the exception of fortress raids, more on that later), the classes & factions are much better balanced than you would expect at launch and the CTDs (Crash to Desktop) were nothing compared with the likes of Age of Conan… Following on from the launch day Mythics patching has been excellent. Content of the regular hot fixes and larger patches have been well communicated, and noticeably have rarely introduced other problems. So certainly in my mind, the best launch I’ve ever been on. However in this post WoW age, is this probably best ever MMO launch good enough?

The veterans of other MMO launches were playing games with subscription figures of up to around 430,000 subs (EQ for example), but with WoW you’re talking over 11 million subs! Today’s MMO publishers want a piece of that 11 million pie, so when launching a new MMO a developer is now dealing with WoW’s monstrous subscription numbers. But the vast majority of those WoW players haven’t been on an MMO launch before; WoW was their first MMO... They don’t give 2 shits that this is a great launch, even when compared with WoWs, they weren’t on the WoW launch anyway. They are comparing WoW NOW with WAR at launch. They expect WAR to instantly be on par with a game that’s had 4 years of patching and live testing, so that’s barely any bugs and 4 years of patched content included please! Clearly that’s just not possible, but is the new breed of players from the WoW age wrong to expect this?

Yes and no. WoW’s horde of new MMO gamers are here, they expect their MMO to be faultless (anything else would be EPIC FAIL!!111), they’re very loud about it and they are paying your subs fee. If you want to compete then as a developer you must accept that and deal with it. It is what it is. Which means you need a damn well polished game and a shit load of content. But those gamers that write off WAR because it’s not as “polished” as WoW (yet) are also missing out. If they chill out with the rage about the odd bug or things working differently, read up about MMO launches, listen to what Mythic are saying (and importantly are doing) and look at the game objectively, they’d see this game has massive potential. Potential that on active servers is starting to be to kick in. Of course people just argue, they’re paying for this game, so why should they care about MMO history.

It’s impossible to launch a flawless MMO, but it seems to me that these days only a flawless MMO will be an instant hit, if what qualifies as a hit is judged against WoW’s subscription numbers. A new MMO needs time to develop in a live setting, but it’s now imperative that development is of a high quality. It needs to be tempting people away from WoW, not just an alternative, it needs to be a temptation.


However, I think WAR will end up having millions of subscribers and establish itself as the clear second place MMO. EA are not stupid, they know that Mythic are on the ball, they know that they’ve got the best licence in gaming and they sure as hell will understand the MMO world today (EA owns Ultima Online for example). If you are on an active server the game right now is awesome fun, I’ve had more memorably epic moments in the last few months than I did in all 4 years of WoW. Then if you look at the content additions we know about for this year… we have 4 major cities to be added, which judging by the current cities should mean another 4 end game and 6 mid range dungeons for each faction. And then we’ve got the last 2 missing classes apparently coming in the next few months. That’s sure as hell going to draw some attention.