behind-the-curtain
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Behind the Curtain: This too shall pass
And so we mark the passing of another MMO. I was going to add an adjective to that sentence, maybe 'great', 'fine' or even just 'good'. I couldn't decide, as I didn't play Tabula Rasa beyond the Open Beta. That's clearly not my fault though, obviously it's something to do with the developers not making exactly the game I wanted, needed or deserved at the time. Cry, whine, QQ, etc.Don't worry, this won't be an obituary for TR. That would be silly; I'm not lying when I say I didn't play it beyond Open Beta. I liked it well enough, but it lacked the spark that drives me to log on, night after night. The news of TR's demise however, has got me thinking. Like it or not, nothing lasts forever. MMOs are subject to the same financial rules as any other business, and sometimes those rules mean you lose. Regardless of how long we've been playing any particular game, how many alts you've raised up or how much of a home you've made for yourself in the community there, there's a chance your MMO will die eventually. Some games last longer than others; gaining enough momentum to garner a fair-sized and dedicated fanbase before they're shut down. Others barely get out of Beta testing before things go South, and the doors are closed before momentum really gets going.
Behind the Curtain: More apocalypse please
So let's be clear here – I loves me some zombies. A childhood brush with Ray Harryhausen means that I still get chills when I think abut armoured skeletons eviscerating hapless Argonauts. Later encounters, first with ridiculously over-wrought Victorian Gothic Horror literature, and later with the genius of one Mr. Romero sealed my fate. Regardless of the source, my love affair with the Undead has been long-standing. And no, I don't mean that kind of love affair. Freak. After I finished reading The Zombie Survival Guide for the first time, I carried it in my bag for a month afterwards. Not because I thought Zombie might be real, but because the book was awesome. And don't get me started on World War Z – Massively is not the place for a 3000-word Max Brooks love-fest.
Behind the Curtain: More apocalypse please pt. 2
This was the point where things got interesting for me. One lasting memory of the event I have is a one-line message I saw in the Trade channel while in Ironforge. It read simply, "Stay out of Stormwind, it's infected." I did the only thing a sane person would do in that situation and hopped on the first Gryphon to Stormwind. It was like a dream come true. Zombies were thronging the streets, attacking anyone they could get their hands on, vomiting on those they couldn't, and blowing themselves up when all else failed. Nowhere was safe. I could barely see the floor of the Auction House for all the skeletons there; the Bank was similarly decorated and my FPS dropped sharply from the shimmery green glow the infection gave off.
Behind the Curtain: OH NOES POLITICS
Before we get started, a few caveats. I'm no more politically aware than the average person, probably a little less. I've never studied politics in any seat of learning past High School, nor have I studied it on my time for fun. I may have made mistakes below, or came to false conclusions regarding the nature of the political systems I've outlined, so any mistakes are the result of that. That, or the fact that I'm loaded with the cold, and I've taken so much over-the-counter medicine today, that huffing paint is probably the next logical step in my intoxication. What with Election Day fast approaching for my estranged colonial cousins across the pond, my thoughts have turned to politics of late. I got to thinking about the conjunction of politics and MMOs, and indeed if there even was such a thing. Do any modern MMOs have a recognisable political system? Is there even a place for politics to play a role in MMOs? What I thought I'd do is have a look at a handful of forms of government and imagine how they might be applied to MMOs, and see if that can't get a discussion going. In short, I want you to do my work for me.
Behind the Curtain: Religion as a game mechanic
Should we have more religion in MMOs?I'm not talking about the Priests and Paladins we see in World of Warcraft, Everquest 2 and probably lots of other games I haven't played. Religion for character classes like these is more often than not a game mechanic, something which is used to explain the source of their powers. Divine Magic is a term which is frequently used to explain a player or character's ability to cast spells. It's a catch-all term, attributing magical and mystical abilities to ill-defined deities and otherwordly beings watching over the game-world. Usually benevolent, these beings empower their followers, enabling them to carry out miraculous feats. Probably deliberately, religion has remained generally fuzzy and ill-defined in MMOs. That shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Religious debate in the real world is a sure-fire way to incite some flames, and it's no wonder that games developers have been keen to shy away from it thus far.
Behind the Curtain: Religion as a game mechanic pt. 2
If developers chose to extend similar mechanics to affect players, you might find yourself being penalised for being in possession of 'forbidden' materials, whatever they may be. Mechanics might be in place to reflect how devout your character was, meaning you were actively prevented from taking certain actions at a certain time, reflecting any holidays or religious observations your character made. Imagine a Paladin who was actually prevented from ganking lowbies because it was contrary to his faith? Shocker. More blue-sky thinking, I know. Putting aside for now the idea of fake religions, what about allowing real-life religions into games?
Behind the Curtain: Guilds are serious business pt. 2
What I'm wondering is just how seriously you or your guild takes the membership process? My guild have gone with a few simple questions about a player's intentions and why they want to join our guild. That won't be the case for all guilds, and I'm sure 'hardcore', serious raiders will raise the bar higher than most, and that's perfectly understandable. If you're aiming to burn through content at a rate of knots, you want to make sure you're taking on people who can hack the pace, who are geared enough to keep up, and knowledgeable enough to not have to be baby-sat through boss fights. Making friends can be serious business, and running a good guild can be akin to running a real-life company. A fractious, barely-solvent, badly-insured company staffed by borderline-schizoid personalities, but a company nevertheless.
Behind the Curtain: Guilds are serious business
First off – don't worry, it is indeed Saturday, not Thursday. We've just decided to move Behind the Curtain to a weekend slot; you didn't just hallucinate the last couple of days.How serious are you when you're either creating a guild, when you're inviting people to join, or when you're looking to join one yourself?Guild drama is always just one forum post away for many guilds today, and if you're not careful you could end up one of the many, many casualties to appear on the pages of Guild Watch on our sister site, WoW Insider. Drama doesn't happen all by itself – it's created by the people in your guild. More specifically, it's created by the personalities in your guild; it's not uncommon for guilds to have more personalities than they have people in them.
Behind the Curtain:Slow it down
So – Altdorf is burning. That didn't take long, did it? Fifteen days to hit the end-game of one of the most hotly-anticipated MMOs in recent memory? I know I shouldn't lol, but I did, and heartily. The more I thought about it though, the more I worried that it's simply symptomatic of the way we approach and play MMOs just now. Is this what we've come to? I started World of Warcraft a little late in its lifetime, but I'm pretty sure that the end-game target/ideal/objective hadn't been reached and breached two weeks after the first players logged on. Such does not seem to be the case with Warhammer Online. There's more than one reason behind the speed with which this happened. From what I'm seeing, it's partly due to the Destruction players in question making use of (exploiting?) a bug wherein they gained access to the central part of Altdorf via the 'back door'. Said door is supposed to only be accessible by Order players. Not only that, but the raid took place late at night, when most players are logged off, taking full advantage of the fact that Destruction players seem to outnumber Order players as a rule. Apparently, it was little more than a gank-fest as the Destruction players rolled over what little PC defence there was.
Behind the Curtain: Blurring the lines
I find it strange that sometimes the world created for our MMOs isn't always well served by the game itself. World building is obviously a vitally important part of designing an MMO, but what if the world created for a particular game becomes so enthralling, so exciting, that the structures of the game leave some players feeling constrained? What happens when players have ideas and stories they want their characters to play out, but the game provides no tools or options to do so?How many times have you wanted to take the story behind your MMO just a little further, to push the envelope and really get into the world you're spending your free time in. Have you ever finished a quest chain and thought, "What happens next?" Have you ever wondered what Stormwind would look like if Onyxia's disguise stayed uncovered? Have you enjoyed an MMO enough, or more specifically, enjoyed the world enough, to actually step away from it and create your own adventures in it, outside of the game?
Behind the Curtain: MMOre Morality
See what I did there? MMOre? See? No? Fine, get lost. So, it seems like Knights of the Old Republic Online is a definite thing now. I've actually been trying not to think to hard about that – I normally end up having to change my pants afterwards – it hasn't worked though, so my washing machine's been taking a serious beating recently. But enough about my bodily functions and laundry habits. We know that Bioware can make awesome singleplayer RPGs which provide you plenty of opportunities to choose the kind of person you want to be in-game. That's all well and good in a singleplayer environment, where character growth, progress and even gear can be controlled and directed with much more precision than in an MMO.
Behind the Curtain: Gone for good?
I've been thinking recently about loss. Having been incredibly lucky with my own brush with the possibility of losing my World of Warcraft characters, I got to thinking. Not only about what I would have done if things hadn't worked out for me, but about how loss works in MMOs today.Last week, Gabriel wrote a fantastic column about item decay in games past, present and future. I've been playing Diablo 2 again lately, for obvious reasons, and I had found myself thinking on the similarities and differences between the durability system in Diablo and WoW. I've said before that my MMO career started with Star Wars Galaxies, so I don't have the long-term experience many of the other writers here at Massively do. I've never had to worry about making corpse runs in Everquest, or had to concern myself with losing my items in Ultima Online. While Galaxies did have item decay, it wasn't set to a punishing degree – items did wear out eventually, but at a reasonable rate. When an item eventually gave out, you crafted yourself a replacement, or you picked one up from another player. By doing so, you knew you were contributing to the economy, so if you tried hard you could convince yourself that you were actually helping the game.
Behind the Curtain: Hacked account - opportunity or deathknell?
Well, it seems I may have been too hasty in jumping on the 'omgblizzardgmsaretehsuckzorz" bandwagon last week. Merely a handful of hours after logging back on to my World of Warcraft account and submitting a GM ticket after reformatting my PC, not only had my deleted characters been restored, but all of their gold and items had been recovered. Colour me chuffed. I was correct in my suspicions, and whoever had managed to compromise my account had indeed stripped and deleted two of my level 70 characters. The last time I had logged on, I had three characters at level 70; a Horde Druid and Priest and an Alliance Warrior. On checking the Armoury, both the Priest and Warrior were missing, and the Druid was naked – which, as I'm sure any other Tauren player can attest, is rarely a good look. Now, as much as I deplore it, I can understand the concept of hacking a person's account in order to sell their gear, then pass that money along via a Goldseller – that's simply business, but I don't understand why you would delete a character completely – while the first is an undeniably rotten thing to do to a person, it's generally something that can be recovered from, or (in the worst-case scenario) rebuilt. New gear can be acquired, gold can be earned once again, and if your guild happens to be chock-full of good folk like mine, you'll maybe get some help along the way.
Behind the Curtain: My turn to get hacked
It's official – my guildies are 'teh awesomez'. The reason? My World of Warcraft account was hacked yesterday afternoon, and I've already been inundated by offers of assistance and gold from my friends, should things go South once I log back into my account. To clarify – I came home from work yesterday evening to find a nausea-inducing email from Blizzard informing me that my account had been suspended due to activities which made them suspect it has been compromised. They advised that they had reset my account password, and suspended the account for three hours as a precautionary measure. Unable to actually access my account in-game, I check the Armoury to see what state my characters were in, only to find that of my three level 70 characters, only one is now showing up, and he's completely naked. So it seems that not only have all my items been sold off, but at least two of my characters have been deleted. It's that last part that really annoys me.
Behind the Curtain: Why bother?
What is it that keeps us playing, months and years after our first trip through the character generation screen?The obvious answer is that we're still having fun. Maybe you've been playing World of Warcraft since release or earlier, you've got an alt of every class, epics to make a GM weep with envy, but you still get that little tingle of excitement every time you log on, that keeps you coming back for more.What kind of enjoyment do you get from your MMO? Hopefully you are actually having fun with it. If not, I suggest you seek help, or go play Vanguard. Just kidding, maybe.That being said, how do you quantify 'fun'? Exactly what is it about WoW or EVE Online or any other MMO that keeps you coming back for more? The steep climb to yet another epic flying mount in WoW has pushed me perilously close to burn out over the past few weeks (the impending release of the new 40K rulebook may also be a factor) so I've been thinking, more than usual, about what keeps us going in situations like this.
Behind the Curtain: Hell is other people
How often do you your social experiences in MMOs actually satisfy you? How many times have you been part of a PUG that lasted longer than the bare minimum of time it took to finish the instance and left you with the feeling that you'd met some decent people, instead of with a headache from grinding your teeth in frustration for the past hour and a half?Despite the fact that I'm in a guild full of great people whose sole concern is not being top of the damage meters or who has the most DKP stored up, I still spend a fair amount of time playing solo. Sometime I feel like I'm cheating myself a little bit by intentionally missing out on the social side of World of Warcraft a lot of the time. I guess time is a factor more often than not; being a slave to the evil, capitalist ways of the decadent West, I work a full-time job which involves a fair amount of commuting each day, so on most weeknights I have to juggle what time I have at home, and sometimes I simply can't squeeze in a run through any instance, and I refuse to be the player who skips out of the instance half way through.
Behind the Curtain: How far is too far?
What would it take for you to cancel your subscription and jump ship to another MMO? If Blizzard announced World of Starcraft as their next-gen MMO at Blizzcon this year, would you stop playing World of Warcraft in favour of it?Let me share a little story with you. A few year ago, I was a fairly 'hardcore' Star Wars Galaxies player. My main character had a Master Doctor/Master Teras Kasi Artist spec, I was powering up through the Rebel ranks, and I was working my way through the quest chain to unlock my Jedi character. Then, in April of 2005, the Combat Upgrade came along. The Combat Upgrade completely changed how combat worked in Galaxies, and despite what the prevailing mood may have been at the time, it wasn't all bad. The Upgrade changed the HUD in the game, changed the way special attacks and actions were queued up and paid for (previously, you could kill or incapacitate your character through using certain moves too often) and also changed how mob and player level balanced out against one another; a side effect of which was that soloing suddenly became much harder than it had been before. Essentially, it completely changed the way combat on the ground worked.
Behind the Curtain: Don't be ashamed
Picture the scene – you're at a family gathering, or maybe you're meeting your significant other's friends and family for the first time, and the conversation turns interrogative. Questions are asked about your hobbies; what you do to relax and how you spend your spare time. What do you do? When put on the spot like that, it's natural for gamers to feel trapped, to feel like admitting to playing MMOs would be tantamount to admitting to a rather kinky fetish or confessing that you've got a rather embarrassing disease – it might not be catching, but there's a chance that you'll get some funny looks, and you may just lose some credibility points. What about job interviews and applications? These invariably have a point where questions are asked about you hobbies and leisure time. While there are good arguments that putting down strong examples of guild leadership might work in your favour – owning up to the fact that you play an MMO upwards of 15 hours a week might not be the smartest thing career-wise. Don't get me wrong – I am proud and happy to be a geek and a gamer, and I've never wanted to be anything else; the wall above my desk sports a rare Akira poster I picked up on holiday France a while back; I own the complete boxed set of the original Transformers series; and much of my wardrobe consists of t-shirts from ThinkGeek and the Penny Arcade store. People ask me what I do in my spare time, and I look them straight in the eye and tell them that I'm a gamer, and while I'm not ashamed of it, I can't help but wince a little when I see most people's reaction to it.
Behind the Curtain: Hard at Work?
Having been trapped in the Hell that we call flood recovery SLASH redecorating over here in noble Caledonia, I have had precious little time to play anything this past week other than 'World of Pry the cat free from the slowly drying gloss paint Craft', so forgive me is this week's column is a little unfocused. Still, as I was slopping on the third coat of paint on one particularly irritating wall, something MMO-related managed to penetrate the paint fume-induced fog in my brain, and I began to wonder about how the ease and difficulty of accomplishing certain tasks in MMOS – how hard are they really, and should they be easier of harder than they are?
Behind the Curtain: Are you frightened?
We all know that MMOs can provide you with plenty of emotional experiences. The MMO genre – generally – is one in which the slow burn is the norm. We'll spend weeks, months, maybe years working on our level 70 characters, our fleet of ships, and our guild. We know this and we expect it. We are rewarded with a warm sense of wellbeing, of a comfortable achievement. We're happy when we beat an instance, down a boss or win an Arena or Battleground match, but what about the other side of emotions? Has an MMO ever made you afraid? Have you ever been truly scared of what might happen next, of what might be round the next corner? I love the Stratholme and Scholomance instances in World of Warcraft. The former is a ravaged, ruined city, home to hordes of the Undead Scourge, and a small but fanatical cult of insane ex-Paladins. The buildings which line the street are smashed and burned; they lean at precarious angles, with fire still licking hungrily at their walls – what few remaining signs there are outside the houses remind you that people once lived here, before Prince Arthas Menthil slaughtered them. The Scholomance instance is a sprawling journey through the catacombs of a dark castle in the middle of a dead, poisoned lake – a place given over to the instruction and Necromancy and the Dark Arts. It's based on an old Transylvanian folk tale, and features the spirits of dead servants of the previous masters of the castle, tortured to death by the sadistic scholars within. As you run through its corridors and vaults, you come across the remains of people, perhaps innocents used as fodder for lessons, perhaps students executed as examples. Both instances are two of my favourite in the entire game. Given the opportunity, I'll still run through them now. Not only are they technically well designed, but the lore behind them is excellent, hinting at the fate that befalls the innocents in WoW, the peons, farmers and sundry other NPCs we barely glance at.
