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WildStar reboots forums and prepares for weekend beta test
WildStar's ongoing beta forums have been wiped, but weep not for their loss: Carbine Studios has brought a new forum online for all to visit and use. The new forums contain topics such as community support, PvP, and housing, and come in English, German, and French varieties. The forums have come online not a moment too soon, as WildStar is preparing for a weekend beta test that includes those who have pre-ordered the title. The beta begins tomorrow, Friday, March 21st, at 10:00 a.m. EST and concludes on Sunday at midnight EST. The beta weekends following that begin on April 4th, April 18th, and May 2nd.
Managing expectations and the evolution of discussion
In the run-up to Warlords of Draenor, we're seeing news of a lot of class and systems changes - discussion of what's being changed or removed has been one of the things we're very concerned with over here, for obvious reasons. It's also a subject of major interest on the forums. In fact, some people are accusing Blizzard of only posting the bad news in an attempt to create negative feedback, to get people talking. Bashiok addressed this idea recently, and it got me thinking about how we interact with game news in the first place. Bashiok - Simplifying currency? That's the grand plan? Well, actually, good news doesn't really create much interest, if you want to dissect it. But that's beside the point. We're obviously not intentionally releasing bad or angering information to try to get people riled up. That'd be silly. We do want to try to manage expectations. Letting people know far in advance that currencies are being streamlined gets that into people's brain meats early, and gives it time to sink in so that when they start seeing or playing that change it ideally isn't jarring and upsetting at that moment. My point was that people discussing a change they have partial information about, debating the specifics, and questioning what it means, are not necessarily negatives. In cases where those are becoming destructive we'll generally try to provide some guidance to at least direct it back to a constructive conversation. source It's this idea of managing expectations that interests me, because over the years, I've come to see quite a few examples of people not doing it. To this day I'm convinced that much of the negative reaction to Cataclysm wasn't to the expansion's flaws (and yet, I admit it had quite a few) and more to the expectations people had for the expansion - expectations it didn't meet, because it wasn't trying to meet them.
Bashiok on choice and complexity
It's not a secret that a lot of change is coming to Warlords of Draenor and WoW, and not all of us are sanguine about all of it. Enter Bashiok, the man, the demonic evil tree avatar, with a forum post about the nature of choice and how it informs complexity in our gaming. Bashiok's point about interesting choices vs. choices for the sake of having more choices is one that is worth discussing. There's complexity that comes from the interaction of options, and complexity that descends from an overwhelming variety of options. In the past, Blizzard has always tried to err on the side of lesser, more interesting choices as opposed to more choices that aren't necessarily choices at all. One need look no further than the change in Mists of Pandaria to our talent system. We lost talents that added things like 1/2/3% crit and gained decisions. Not everyone liked that change, but it's worthwhile to keep in mind when looking at future changes that happen. There's a lot of complexity in modern WoW that evolved over time as new systems were introduced, but not all of this complexity is based on meaningful options and gameplay. As we get closer to Warlords of Draenor, we're going to lose some of this evolved complexity, in order to clear out some room for more choices that matter. For the full text of Bashiok's post, click on through to the other side.
RIFT willing to ban players for toxic forum behavior
Official game forums have a reputation for being hopelessly toxic. It makes a certain amount of sense, too; being an utter jerk in the forums usually means that at worst you'll be banned from those forums. So RIFT is taking things up to the next level. If you choose to be persistently awful in the forums, you can eventually have your ability to play the game suspended. Readers with a long memory will note that Sony Online Entertainment has discussed similar possibilities in the past, hoping to encourage a more positive and engaging atmosphere all around. The Carnival of the Ascended is rolling back into the game and helping create a more positive atmosphere as well, giving players a plethora of minigames to enjoy. RIFT Junkies has a full guide to the event available now, walking players through the steps necessary to unlock mounts, pets, and fun cosmetic pieces. So enjoy the addition... assuming you haven't run afoul of the more aggressive behavior policies. [Thanks to Cederhill for the tip!]
The Helping Hand Effect
Sometimes crawling the blue trackers and forums leads you to posts like this one. I like this post for many reasons - first off, because it combats the strange mercantilism we see over fake money in WoW sometimes, where people demand gold for each and every thing imaginable, but also and mostly because it's a simple act of kindness. "I know how to do this, and I will share my experience with you, and all you have to do is participate." Nightfuzzy the DK is doing here something that my first raid leader did for me and a bunch of us back in Molten Core - he's sharing what he knows with others. This is something that is the bedrock for any mmo - the willingness to play together with others, to work together to the completion of common goals. And it's the primary thing people are talking about when they decry the loss of 'server communities' and while I've never bought into the idea that matchmaking services in World of Warcraft are bad - indeed, in many ways I find matchmaking ideal, because many times I found those server communities to be rife with elitism, snobbery, a refusal to take certain classes because they didn't have X or Y ability, outright crudity and boorishness, and hours upon hours of delays - I do recognize that the opportunities for these helping hand moments are rarer now. I can't just sit in trade in a major city and take all tanking requests that come for a couple of hours just to help people out anymore. But clearly these opportunities still exist, and Nightfuzzy stepping up to the bat shows us that. There are other ways to do this, ways we can in day to day life be the positive in a given situation.
The game as it was, the game as it is
People do not remember the game as it was. They remember it as they think it was. Want proof? See Daxxari responding to a forum poster who is wildly mistaken about a mechanic that never existed during The Burning Crusade. Daxxari - PvP gear penalty in pve content Quote: Posted by Mát in BC a penalty was introduced for wearing pvp gear in pve content. the simple version is the more pvp gear you had the more your damage and healing scaled down while in instanced pve content. I am not aware of any such mechanic ever having been implemented. Perhaps you're thinking of the equivalent loss of effectiveness due to Resilience having been budgeted into the item level of that gear, and thus it was less effective than an equivalent piece of PvE gear? source Now one of three things is happening here. Either Mát is misremembering (it happens to all of us), he or she is lying, or he or she has made the mistake Daxxari mentions, mistaking the fact that Resilience back then was part of the item budget and thus, PvP gear was less powerful in PvE because it spent itemization points on a stat that reduced your chance to be crit (back then, that's what Resilience did). But no matter how you look at it, the idea of this penalty introduced for wearing PvP gear in PvE did not exist - which is why so many of us wore PvP gear to PvE in. Sure, it had resil on it, but it was easy to get and often better than what we would have gotten from five mans to prepare for raiding Karazhan. With a game as old as World of Warcraft (we're entering its tenth year) this is understandable. Not all that many people playing today have played since launch, not even since the days of BC or Wrath - heck, there are a great many people who started playing in Cataclysm and even quite a few who started during this expansion. People will tell you that the talent system that we had up until Cataclysm allowed for great customization. They may even believe it.
Should WoW have a customer loyalty program?
Every time this pops up on the forums, I mull it over - should World of Warcraft have a customer loyalty program, and if it did, what should it entail? Part of my difficulty with the concept is, I would probably benefit from it - I've been playing WoW pretty much non-stop for its entire existence. Even when I stopped playing I didn't unsub (probably should have, but hindsight is gloriously incapable of altering the past) and so, if a customer loyalty reward of some kind was implemented myself and my wife would probably get something out of it. This has me wondering if it would in fact deter new players - the last thing you want is a system that makes people just picking up the game envious or feeling as if a reward is forever out of their reach. After all, you can't go back in time and start playing in 2004, If there was (say) a special mount or pet or transmog item that people who'd been playing five or more years got, then it would by definition exclude players who hadn't been playing that long. And a lot of people tell me they started playing in Cataclysm nowadays - that's a significant number of people who would have to wait at least another year or two before they could get that hypothetical reward. I'm not opposed to the idea, mind you - like I said, I have been playing forever, so if it got implemented, I'd probably get something cool, and I'm sure you could work it so that it didn't feel like something so far out of new player reach that they felt like it wasn't even worth trying to get. I'm frankly more curious about what you think, friends - is a customer loyalty feature a good idea, or more trouble than it is worth? How should it be implemented? What should it do?
Official forums receive minor facelift
The official WoW forums have gotten a minor update today, confirmed with a blue post by CM Nethaera. The new format has several tweaks and changes, but the largest by far is the font -- posts and headers are now showing with much larger text both in the posts themselves, and in quoted text. Quotes are now a lighter shade of gray, and character portraits have been re-sized as well. The updates appear to be slightly more in-depth than graphics, however. In addition to the font changes, it seems as though the option to view the forums in Simple or Advanced view has been removed, along with the ability to link items in posts. Along with this change, the My Realms option to switch between only those forums on which you have playable characters has vanished. For now, players will have to scroll through the entire list of realms to locate a particular realm. If you can't see any changes, or if the forums are displaying incorrectly on your browser, you may want to try clearing your cache or refreshing the page. At the moment, there doesn't appear to be an official thread for feedback or to report any technical issues with the new forums. Although the removal of some features may be a little disconcerting, it might be possible that some of these changes are unintended, or that we'll see some of the more popular options make a return. What do you think of the facelift? Is it easier to read, or did you like the original version better? Are there features you'd like to see working again?
Feedback and what it does and doesn't do
For as long as I've been playing World of Warcraft (which is as long as it's been around) one thing I've seen over and over again is the constant debate between players about the forums and what they're for. Blizzard has stated repeatedly that they listen to player concerns and take feedback very seriously, but they've also stated that they don't design by committee. Still, we've seen design choices made with the player base and its reactions in place - Mists of Pandaria had a far more engaging and active endgame than did Cataclysm, and it evolved over the course of the expansion in response to player reaction. Similarly, many credit (or blame) the steep increase in difficulty in heroic dungeons between the end of Wrath of the Lich King and the neginning of Cataclysm on fanbase complaints. One question that seems to get asked a lot is does anyone at Blizzard care about the forums, which to my mind is a strange question to ask given the evidence I just cited. Clearly, player feedback (and not just from the forums, either) is something that Blizzard pays a lot of attention to. CM Takralus gave a brief on what, exactly, the CM's do with player feedback on the forums and how it is brought to the devs' attention. Let's talk a bit about feedback. When is it useful and when isn't it useful?
Doodlegnome answers all of your Warlords of Draenor questions
Doodlegnome has done it again. Five months ago, the World of Warcraft community watched, spellbound, as a certain precocious gnome enthralled us with her scrawled tale of a crab, the floating skull who loved him, and the nerf bat-wielding child they weaned on the tears of irate forum posters. The Doodlegnome, Paululum, has been busy since that 251-page official forum thread finally came to an end -- she's continued to draw at a prolific rate, even starting up her own webcomic and crafting some amazing BlizzCon badges -- but she hadn't created a new epic forum thread since she took the Zarcrawler idea and ran with it as far as her little legs could carry her. Until this week, that is. On Wednesday, fresh from an invigorating weekend at BlizzCon, Paululum took to the official WoW forums once more to offer up scribbled answers to any and all questions about the upcoming expansion, Warlords of Draenor. Thirty-one pages, more than 600 posts and over 50 drawings later (and still counting!), we've got ourselves a Warlords encyclopedia the likes of which the world will likely never see again. In fact, so valued are Doodlegnome's posts that Community Manager Bashiok swooped in to make sure that each link within her posts in the thread could be clicked, even though WoW forum settings don't normally allow for non-blues to have clickable links. Here, for your education and neatly categorized viewing pleasure, are each of Paululum's "Ask Me Anything" responses about the expansion. (We'll keep this post updated as/if new doodles are added.)
Mechanist Games working to restore faith with City of Steam's community
Mechanist Games will be taking actions to "restore faith" by those affected from City of Steam's impending shutdown and rebirth as City of Steam: Arkadia. The studio announced three initiatives to draw back players. First, it will be recharging alpha and beta supporters' Electrum, although it doesn't look like refunds are in the cards. Second, it will be compensating returning players who will need to start fresh on a new server. And third, Mechanist is opening up a new English-speaking forums on the website for the community to use. The exact nature of the compensation for affected players was not revealed, as the studio said it has yet to finalize details in that regard. Mechanist paid to reclaim the English publishing rights for City of Steam and will be self-publishing the title going forward. Other language editions of the game will continue to be operated as is. [Source: Mechanist Games' press release]
ArenaNet takes its first step toward Guild Wars 2 collaborative development with a call for topics
Last week, Guild Wars 2 studio design director Chris Whiteside announced a new community initiative designed to better filter and address player feedback regarding the future and current state of the game. Today, Whiteside followed up by posting the first set of instructions for participating in the process ArenaNet is referring to as "collaborative development." The Guild Wars 2 team is asking players to begin by choosing three priorities from each area of gameplay and listing them in a response to the initial post. For example, a player's PvE priorities might be ascended items, world events, and roleplaying. ArenaNet will then take the top item in each section and start a separate thread in which players and the team will share opinions, brainstorm, and converse. Our own Anatoli Ingram tackled the initial announcement in this week's Flameseeker Chronicles. As for this first round of feedback, players have "a couple" of days to add their thoughts before ArenaNet compiles the list. [Thanks to Mikey Moo for the tip!]
The Daily Grind: Do you take part in forum rage?
It's a generally accepted fact that the official forums for any given game are a cesspool of invective, animosity, and rage. Whatever recent changes have been made to a game, you can be sure that there will be an outpouring of rage that detail how the changes were too big, not big enough, or didn't affect real issues. If World of Warcraft is unexpectedly down, there will be plenty of people ready to explain how this is the downfall of a hugely successful game that makes millions of dollars. The flip side to this is that it can be cathartic to just open up and complain on the forums. Even if you know full well that launch week results in server issues for every game, it helps let out frustrations to just explode about those server issues on the forums. The other side would be that this sort of behavior contributes to an atmosphere of negativity rather than discussion. So do you take part in forum rage? Does it depend on the conditions or the problem? Or do you just stay out altogether? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Final Fantasy XIV dev talks new servers and access restrictions
It's no secret that the long-awaited re-launch of Final Fantasy XIV hasn't gone very smoothly. In fact, the servers are taking such a beating that Square Enix has temporarily shut down online sales of the game. Despite the game's current woes, the FFIXV team wants fans to know that it is working overtime to get things running smoothly. In a lengthy forum post, producer and director Naoki Yoshida (aka Yoshi-P) outlined what steps have been taken to stabilize FFXIV's game world. Yoshida noted that all Final Fantasy XIV servers now have login restrictions to prevent a flood of logs and re-logs from causing them to crash. Login restrictions are most likely to be implemented during peak times, which Yoshida says are between 9:00 p.m. and midnight. Each server can support a theoretical maximum of 5,000 concurrent players.
The Daily Grind: Should MMO studios outsource their communities?
If you played MMOs at the dawn of the genre, you'll recall that player forums were not considered a mandatory feature of a studio's infrastructure. Many communities resorted to wild, offensive, private forums in an attempt to avoid heavily moderated official boards that looked more like advertisements than conversations by the time the mods were done with them. (Anyone else remember Crossroads of Britannia? Good times.) Since then, MMO studios have figured out that forums (and their annoying cousins, social media) are highly useful tools for getting information to and feedback from their playerbases. But sometimes it's gone too far; we've criticized studios for posting updates only to social media outlets at the expense of their own native forums. Well, move over, ArenaNet, because Hi-Rez has topped you: Earlier this week, Hi-Rez decided to shut down its games' official forums and move forum discussion and support to Reddit, which upset not only those people whose skin crawls at the idea of participating on Reddit but also Redditors themselves, who proposed (unsuccessfully) that Hi-Rez employees be banned, essentially, for mooching. So what do you think -- should MMO studios outsource or crowdsource their forums, communities, and support to unofficial and potentially toxic private social media venues? Does it signal an industry shift, an insensitive budgetary decision from Hi-Rez, or a genuine desire to go where the perceived population density is highest? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Disconnects and latency issues and Patch 5.3
No one likes high latency, least of all someone playing an MMO that can demand reaction time the way World of Warcraft can, especially in raids. But even out in the world, latency can be a killer. So when people started reporting issues with connections to World of Warcraft soon after patch 5.3 launched, it got a lot of players noticing. In a six page forum thread there's been a lot of lively discussion of what's going on - whether it's on Blizzard's end, or somewhere between the computers of the affected players and the Blizzard servers. If you remember the Lagpocalypse post, you know how complicated these issues can get. MVP forum poster Lissanna posted an interesting walkthrough of her own attempts to find the culprit today, and explained why despite some forum poster dissatisfaction that it is indeed helpful to run a traceroute and pathping and post the results to the tech support forums, since it gives Blizzard an idea of who to talk to about these issues. If they don't know who's being affected, where those people are, and more importantly where the issue is physically located there's not much they can do to help. So if you're having the same problem, giving Blizzard as much information as possible is definitely helpful in terms of getting this sorted out. I've seen people in my raids disconnect on every single boss so far while I haven't had the issue at all myself, suggesting the problem isn't on Blizzard's end but is out there somewhere in the path the data takes between Blizzard and the players. Hopefully it can be solved soon.
Lionhead launches new Fable forums with suspicious timing [update]
Lionhead Studios has launched a brand new set of Fable-related forums, now available on the developer's website for users to discuss and dissect the popular series of role-playing games. Lionhead's also giving away virtual founders' medals to anyone who signs up in the forums' first two weeks of existence, and you can log right in using your Xbox Live ID. The last game in the series, Fable: The Journey, arrived back in October of 2012, which raises the question of why the Microsoft-owned developer would announce brand new forums for an IP that's all but fallen off of the radar. Don't forget, though, that E3 is next week, and Microsoft has $1 billion worth of games coming to the Xbox One. The fates may dictate a return to Albion very soon. Update: That didn't take long. Lionhead is teasing a Fable HD remake.
My favorite imaginary class mounts
Well, even more imaginary, I guess. Technically all of World of Warcraft is imaginary. But this post on the EU forums got me thinking: what kind of cool class mounts do I wish existed in the game? What with the Armored Bloodwing up for grabs in the Blizzard Store, I guess I have mounts on the brain. For warriors, I want a mix of the fanciful and the gritty. I want an armored rhino mount. Something like the Wooly White Rhino, but with armor plates all over it, so heavily armored that it looks like a mound of metal coming to gore you. Like a rhino wearing Onslaught. A rhino wearing Onslaught with Christopher Lee's album playing in the background. Some classes also come to mind - hunters should get to tame a mount, shaman should get a huge elemental ascendant version of a racial mount (so orc shamans would get a stone worg, while draenei would get a fire elekk and so on) and priests should get angel wings (or in the case of shadow priests, dark angel wings) like Imperius from Diablo III. So what are your suggestions? What class mounts would you like to see?
Should WoW add a Deathmatch Battleground?
I was reading twitter as I often do... no, really, it's for work, I'm not just wasting time posting jokes about wearing a crown roast as a helmet... when I saw Nethaera post this tweet, which led me to this forum thread. While perusing the thread I eventually found Neth's response to it, and that got me thinking about the concept. Nethaera - Could we get a PvP battleground? Battle grounds have always been missing an important part of world pvp.... PvP. Make it like a big arena but not so big that people can't hide. 10 to 15 players forced into all out pvp. First to so many kills or 10 minutes, whichever comes first, wins the round. No need to even create an area for it. Just make a copy of Blackrock mountain in an instance. That is PvP I would actually like... its the reason I liked AV so much back before it was turned into race where pvp sometimes breaks out. What you're asking for is a straight Death Match type of Battleground. I'm not sure it would be compelling as you think. I'm a big fan of DM as well, at least in FPS', but for an MMO like World of Warcraft, I question how enjoyable it would be in the long run for people. I think for players who feel very comfortable with their abilities, straight head on PvP like that would be fun for them, but for others, I'm not sure it would have the same appeal. That said, I'm not killing the discussion. I'm just interested in how you feel this would work or appeal to a wide enough audience for it to be worth creating. source I have in the past advocated a deathmatch style BG because I do understand the original poster's point. But let's really take a look at what a deathmatch BG would have to entail.
How would you design a raid boss?
Nois, a dwarf warlock, posted this neat thread to the forums asking that very question: how would you design a raid boss? It interests me for a variety of reasons. One, I like seeing what players would do if called upon to design aspects of the game. For another, it gets me thinking about raid design, boss fights, and how they've evolved and changed over the years. It's hard to believe that once upon a time Razorgore or Vaelestraz were considered enormously difficult mechanically complex fights when pretty much every boss fight in Throne of Thunder has so many moving parts and elements to consider (the Iron Qon fight, for example, is a four phase fight with different mechanics for each phase). I'm also interested because this finally gives me a chance to share my Cakearon the Frosting God raid boss strat I wrote back in Firelands of all places. People here at WoW Insider have been regaled with tales of the epic battle with Cakearon for two years now, and finally, I get to share the master of Icingdeath with you all.
