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The War Z forums and databases hacked, taken offline for investigation
The War Z has been taken offline due to the compromise of its databases and official forums, publisher OP Productions has announced. "We have discovered that hackers gained access to our forum and game databases and the player data in those databases," the statement reads. "We have launched a thorough investigation covering our entire system to determine the scope of the intrusion. This investigation is ongoing and is our top priority."The user information obtained during the break in includes log-in e-mail addresses for the official forums and the game itself, along with the encrypted passwords associated with those addresses. No user payment information was compromised, however, as payments are handled by a third party company that operates outside of OP Production's ecosystem.Despite the fact that "there was absolutely no exposure of your payment or billing information of any kind," according to the statement, the possibility still exists for the stolen encrypted passwords to be decrypted, which could obviously be an issue for anyone that used the same email address and password for The War Z as they did for other, more vital internet accounts. As such, OP Productions recommends that its users change up their passwords.Beyond the promise of future updates, no further timeline was given with respect to when the game may come back online.
Captain's Log: A Star Trek Online player uses math
On the heels of last week's revelation that Star Trek Online will be releasing its first ever expansion, Legacy of Romulus, many people were apparently waiting for the proverbial shoe to drop so they could rage when their expectations weren't met. That happened within seconds after the release of a special Ask Cryptic blog written by Executive Producer Daniel Stahl last Friday. Massively received a tip or two informing us that there was a Thread of Rage on the Star Trek Online forums, one that arose after the Ask Cryptic revealed that characters in the upcoming Romulan faction will be forced to choose to ally with either the Federation or the Klingon Defense Force and share in their fleet capabilities instead of developing fleets of their own. With the help of my accountant husband, I took on the challenge of dissecting this alleged Thread of Rage to determine how many people really did express feelings of rage, anger, or even disappointment with the news. You might be interested in the results of our analysis. If you are, take the jump!
SOE introducing brand new forums later this month
If you're a regular on the SOE forums, you may have noticed some changes as the individual game boards have been transitioning over to the new system. But on Tuesday, March 26th, the entirety of the SOE forums will be switched over to let you enjoy the new look, shiny new tools, and improved stability. The most important thing to note about this upgrade is that it's an entirely different forum, so you'll need to re-register your handle. SOE assures us that users can reclaim their longstanding forum names during the first two weeks in the event that someone else grabs it first.
The Mog Log: Final Fantasy XIV declares open season on lore
Every so often, Final Fantasy XIV throws me a curveball. Case in point: the Lore forum. This was one of those things that was mentioned an eternity ago that I (and quite possibly everyone else) assumed would happen around the fifth of never. But it's a real thing, it exists now, and you can go over and get a lovely rundown of all that racial naming conventions, a primer on Roegadyn language, and assorted other threads detailing important lore tidbits. If you need more proof that things are different at Square-Enix these days, this would serve as exhibit A. This is the sort of thing that I love. But at the same time, it's something I'm not completely happy about. I should clarify; I'm entirely happy that it exists. But I'm a little perturbed regarding the timing, and I think there are ways in which its release now is kind of awkward. So rather than unmitigated gushing over the new forum, this week saw a lot of gushing and a lot of frustrated squinting.
The Daily Grind: What game has your favorite community team?
Let's be honest with ourselves for a moment: We MMO players are not the easiest bunch to manage in terms of community. We're moody, we're cantankerous, and we often want the game to be developed in seven different exclusive directions at once. So a member of a game's community team already has a hard road to walk. It's understandable that every so often a member of the team might just decide to snap and go out in a blaze of glory. But that's not to diminish the fine people who elevate community management to an art form. Final Fantasy XIV has built a well-loved community team where none existed before, World of Warcraft's community managers are viewed with a genial fondness by players, and both Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 have always banked partly on the strength of their community involvement. So what game's community team is your personal favorite? 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!
What if all raids were end game raids?
Sometimes the forums come up with some interesting discussions. Poster Locomonkey over on the EU forums posted this doozy of an idea, which Taepsilum then responded to in detail. They both have me thinking about the idea as well -- what if every raid, from the original 60 raids to the Cataclysm level 85 raids, was updated to level 90? What if, when the next expansion came out, all the Mists of Pandaria raids as well as all those previous raids were in some fashion made current with level 95, or 100, or whatever current endgame happens to be? What are the pros and cons of this idea? I'm not going to dredge over every point already made, you can go read Locomonkey's original post, and Taepsilum's well reasoned list of what the pitfalls to avoid in such a system would be. Instead, I'm going to speculate on how you could address those pitfalls. How do you make a system with so many potential raids tuned and balanced, deal with all the updated loot from those instances, and keep from drowning raid groups in choices? My suggestions are as follows:
Valor points and player choice
I get very frustrated with the valor point system. One of my characters is at the point where the only thing to do with valor points is upgrade gear, while the other struggles to accumulate enough valor to buy anything. Worse, they're on different servers, so I don't even get the buff when I cap valor on my main. Plus, in order to even spend valor, I had to grind a whole bunch of reputations so for a while I had valor and couldn't even spend it. So it was with interest that I saw this forum thread detailing one player's issues with valor, which were interesting to me precisely because they weren't a problem I was having - instead, the argument seemed to be that the player was wasting effort and doing enough in a week to generate over 2000 valor, but the cap meant that more than half of that weekly play was meaningless. That kind of surprised me, because I only cap valor when I clear all the raid content, but I could see it after thinking about the issue. What was even more interesting to me was the idea presented that the valor cap served as a punitive measure punishing players who were running enough dailies, doing the daily scenario and heroic, and hitting each LFR in a week. Vaneras responded, and those responses are worth discussing I think.
The balance between new and old content
In some ways, the development team on World of Warcraft has to constantly pay for their own successes. Nostalgia is a potent force, and players often look back fondly on their favorite experiences and want to experience them again. The recent patch 5.1 changes allowing max level players to enter and solo older raid content is a testament to how much goodwill there is towards these older experiences. In both Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria, older dungeons were revamped and raised to the then-level cap as heroics, and two older raids (Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman) were brought into Cataclysm as five man dungeons to tie into a further storyline. Today, while reading the forums I came across a post by Nethaera that really sums up the difficulty in this kind of balance between player nostalgia and new experiences. One of the things I think Cataclysm showed us was that there are limits to how much time players will accept spent on revamping old content and that Blizzard really has to focus on what's new in order to keep the game moving forward. As much as we all love a good soak in nostalgia, it's never as good to actually eat the leftovers as we convinced ourselves it was.
WoW Archivist: How forum trolls broke a CM
WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? Last week, I included some passionate but mostly reasonable discussion of debuffs on the official forums from the earliest days of WoW and beyond. The official forums have always been a rough and tumble part of the game -- an area that Blizzard has always wanted to improve. Trolls invade One can speculate about a dozen different reasons for why WoW's official forums have been so full of jerks. Is it because there are just so many players and thus so many people with forum access, raising the statistical jerk demographic? Does the game's immense popularity encourage people to demand more of the company that makes it than any other in gaming? Does the ongoing passion for WoW simply make the forums the best place to troll on the Internet? The forums have become gradually better over time, but the vanilla and Burning Crusade eras were completely out of control. Caught off-guard by the game's explosive early popularity, Blizzard's first team of community managers found themselves overwhelmingly outnumbered in their own forums. They couldn't possibly hope to keep up with the sheer volume of threads being generated. The CMs did what they could, but it was a losing battle from the start. The trolls took the forums by storm, and Blizzard never fully ousted them. Then, in May 2007, one community manager simply couldn't take it any more.
How feedback works and why it matters
Lately I've seen some forum posts that confuse me. Perhaps it's because these posts themselves seem confused. Posts like this one, where Librily the worgen mage accuses Blizzard and World of Warcraft's development team of soliciting feedback that they don't actually look at. I find this especially odd on a forum where community managers regularly engage with posters, and I wanted to address what feedback is, how it works, and why it matters now and going forward. Frankly, it is impossible to look at the design of Mists of Pandaria and not see how much player feedback has influenced the design of the expansion. The 85 to 90 game is everything Cataclysm was not -- it all takes place in a seamless new land, it removed flying in order to provide player immersion, it works the Horde/Alliance conflict into the storyline. It is in every way the result of player feedback being constructively weighted and utilized responsibly. By that, I mean that the game's developers clearly looked at what players were saying they liked and disliked and worked to find ways to address player concerns. What they didn't do -- what they have never done and cannot ever do -- is simply go to the forums, see who yelled loudest, and give them everything they wanted. That would be absurd design by mob, it would produce an unplayable game full of broken classes and most importantly of all, it would not be fun to play. Games require a ton of work to produce, especially a game like World of Warcraft, and the amount of effort behind the scenes to bring what we get to see and experience does not allow for that kind of design even if it were desirable, which it is not. Game design is not about giving the players everything they say they want, nor is it about doing everything they say as soon as they say it. Let's talk about how good feedback works, the difference between opinion and fact, and why taking the time to make a well constructed argument is worthwhile even if you don't see any signs of it changing anything.
The Daily Grind: Do you hold developers accountable for what they say?
Yesterday, Gamespot broke a story about an executive producer for zombie MMO The War Z who took to his game's forums to rant about gankers in the beta test. The developer, Sergey Titov, used a homophobic slur to describe those beta testers, which caused some commenters to erupt in a fury. He later altered his comments and issued an "apology" for the rant, expressing astonishment that anyone would take his homophobic slur as a homophobic slur. "I don't know where they [are] coming from," he wrote, "but I used it as a curse." The sad thing is Titov's probably right: Far too many gamers think nothing of careless insults based on gender, race, and sexual orientation. But to see it from a developer and then see it dismissed by the game's supporters as something trivial and all good in fun between bros is embarrassing for the community. I'm glad he (or more likely, the game's PR) rescinded the slur, but I also know that subconscious and conscious bias seeps into gaming at the design, culture, and corporate levels, and I'm far less likely to pony up for a game whose developers just don't seem to get that the MMO demographic stretches beyond the privileged straight white male 20-something stereotype. So today I'm wondering how you hold devs accountable when they say something that exposes their prejudices or blind-spots or just poor business sense. Do you expect heads to roll? Do you vote with your wallet and pick games where customers aren't subjected to unprofessional tirades by devs, or are you resigned to the suspicion that most studios are saddled with this mentality? 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!
Ask Massively: Forums, edit buttons, and staff change-ups
Last week, we announced that we are closing down Massively's forums. What forums, you ask? Yeah, unfortunately, that was exactly the point. The forums were always a bit too adjacent to the site, and in the wake of the success of our newfangled comment system, we'd prefer to focus on publishing articles and engaging readers right here in the comments on the site, rather than on a neglected off-site portal. I'm genuinely sorry, but I hope the few remaining, stalwart forumgoers will migrate over and help make our comments an even more interesting place to be. In return, we'll try to crack down harder on the comment trolls who are hell-bent on killing the buzz. Believe me, they annoy us as much as they annoy you, especially when we're babysitting them on a Friday night. But this is Ask Massively, the meta column where you ask us weird questions and we give you weird answers. So what else did you wonder about this week?
Guild Wars 2 boots up support and help forums
Those seeking help from the Guild Wars 2 pantheon of gods (and developers) now have an official source of help and information. ArenaNet brought online a portion of its forums for the game to deliver news and support from a centralized location. The new Guild Wars 2 forums include a place for official announcements, the dev tracker, account issues, technical support, and reporting game bugs. For those looking to talk about the game, ask questions, and share tips, ArenaNet's also opened a Players Helping Players forum to facilitate that discussion. [Thanks to Cecil for the tip!]
How is World of Warcraft not a cheeseburger?
I love analogies, but sometimes they get used to the point where they cease to be useful. And I find the idea of comparing World of Warcraft to a cheeseburger you ordered to be one of those times. But this forum thread, started by forum poster Otsego (who is surprisingly not undead) comparing the changes in the hunter class to ordering a cheeseburger and getting mayo on it (I hate mayo, by the way) and not being able to get the burger without the mayo. The thread ended up getting a lot of posts from players and Ghostcrawler alike, so I thought it worth some analysis. Seriously, I freaking hate mayonnaise. If this wasn't a family site I would be filling this post with profanity and vulgarity right now about how bad mayo is. Ghostcrawler's first response to the thread interests me for a variety of reasons. The first reason is this quote: I've actually used the restaurant analogy myself, because few restaurant patrons have the impression that they're going to be able to go back into the kitchen, give the chefs pointers, rearrange the menu and so on just because they think highly of their own opinions on food. Clearly he's never gone out to dinner with me. (I kid, I kid, I'm actually a very quiet and shy person in public.) But his later point about the desire to try and satisfy a very diverse playerbase with the game's design resonated with me, and it got me thinking about how World of Warcraft is, to a degree, a victim of its own success. Not only do you have to design each class to fill specific roles in a way dictated by its thematic roots (hunters and mages are both ranged DPS, but how they ranged DPS is wildly different for instance) but you also have to design for a very wide variety of players. That's much harder than simply slapping a variety of options up on a big menu board and being done with it.
Mists of Pandaria: Ghostcrawler on valor point acquisition
One of the topics we see and hear a lot of questions about is how we'll gain valor points in Mists of Pandaria. Some posters on the forums are estimating over 30 hours for two pieces of valor gear. Poster Ghatok found this a bit troubling and asked for clarification, and Ghostcrawler gave him exactly that. The short answer is no, it's not accurate. The long answer goes into more detail, and so here it is in full. Ghostcrawler - 30hrs for 1 piece of valor? accurate? To answer the original question, no those numbers are not accurate. Without getting into all of the details, we have features like a bonus for the first activity of the day to encourage players to experiment with lots of different types of content rather than just solving which is the most efficient and running that until you're very sick of it (we call this the Mechanar Syndrome). We can try to put together a blog or some other way to convey all of the different ways to earn valor and how it all fits together. Now, we are asking you to participate some in daily quests, scenarios, raid finder, challenge modes and the other new systems we're introducing in Mists of Pandaria. One of the pieces of feedback we heard loud and clear from Cataclysm is "I'm done raiding for the week and want to play WoW, but there is nothing to do." I know it's easy to dismiss everything that we're trying to give you to do as grinding, and I don't think we'll be able to change your mind on that until you get in the game and actually try out the content. We're pretty excited about it. Also note that players who raid the most will likely need to earn the least valor, because they'll have so many opportunities to get actual item drops. For those of you only interested in raiding full stop, we were able to deliver a bunch of bosses for 5.0. So I think it's cynical to say that we're just adding grinding mechanics to stretch out the lifespan of the content. It's more that we're trying to give you something to do in between raids that feels like you're still making progress on your character. source I'll admit that I personally intend to work out the fastest way to get the most valor possible and do that. That is how I play the game. And I'm perfectly happy to play it that way. But for people who complain there's nothing to do, it sounds like Mists of Pandaria is aimed squarely at squelching those complaints. I will admit, I want that blog post explaining how this is all going to work, and I really want to know if justice points are still going to be part of the picture or not. I still have them on my beta characters, but I don't know if that means anything. It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!
The danger of assuming personal experiences to be universal
Whether or not you can believe it, there are players right now who have not finished regular Dragon Soul. Some of them raid less often, some of them started later, some of them lost players, and some of them just raid more slowly than you. And yes, you may be a better raider or have a better raid group than they do, a more skilled collection of people. You also might have a better class comp or have gotten lucky on a few occasions when they didn't. Some groups lost key players at the worst possible time, had real-life issues to contend with, or simply started later than everyone else. Why do I bring this up? This forum thread on the EU forums, where Draztal ( who is rapidly becoming one of my favorite CMs) is constantly forced to deal with a mindset that does not seem to understand that each raiding group's experience is personal to that group and cannot always be extended to the game or all its players as a whole. Now, not every poster in that thread has that issue; there are some good ones in there, and you should read it. But it's a mindset I see over and over again. The game is large, and no two raid groups have the same experience playing it. Some raid groups loved tier 11; others were bored or hated the fights. Some raids had fun in Firelands; others found it repetitive or disliked the zone's tendency to be all one color. (I still say Bastion of Twilight had exactly the same problem, but that was alleviated by its being one of three raids at launch.) Some folks have enjoyed Dragon Soul; others dislike the mechanics or the use of Wyrmrest art assets. Having these differences of opinion is a fine thing and can be good for the game and its community -- when you acknowledge that they exist, and when you realize that your own strongly held opinion about the raid finder, heroic modes in raiding, or the superiority of this fight or that fight is rooted in personal experience to some extent and that experience will never be shared with everyone. That goes for things you love and things you hate equally.
Would we want content that hasn't been tested?
Lately, the EU forums have been on my must-read list due to posts like this one. Poster Ask (no sign of Embla) posed the question, as it is right and appropriate that Ask should do, of whether or not Blizzard could or should release new content without there being a PTR or beta for it. I wasn't even done sputtering yet when CM Takralus pretty much said what I would have, were I not busy sputtering. Takralus - "New" content and an idea New content must be tested. Many, many players enjoy being able to test and give their feedback on upcoming new content, and we put that feedback to good use. But, many more people do not test it, and first experience it when the content is actually released. The simple truth is that if you do not want to see maps and tactics for upcoming content, it's not too hard to avoid. Neither of those are things that will burn into your mind, never to be forgotten. The day WoW launched, even that had first been through an alpha and then beta test, where people could play and give feedback for months :P source Even with beta tests, bugs get through. Anyone remember Sinestra? At the time Paragon killed her, they talked about the fight and its issues. One of those issues was that Paragon was one of the first guilds to really see Sinestra, and as a result, the fight had bugs that were not discovered until after Paragon began seriously pushing for the kill. In other words, not testing Sinestra on the PTR had consequences that may be acceptable with a single fight that only a few players will even see while it is current and that will be fixed by the time other guilds go back while outgearing it. These consequences would absolutely be ruinous if they were felt by everyone attempting to do normal-mode raiding content. To a degree, not running a PTR or beta test is irresponsible on Blizzard's part, especially with content meant for the majority of players. I really think the responsibility for walking into a raid fresh, unspoiled by tips or beta testers, is on the players. Better we have some spoilers than untested content. And yes, we had both an alpha and a beta for World of Warcraft. They didn't translate to having everyone know everything when it went live. Heck, half the time, it just confused you because stuff changed so much. I really fall on the side of those who appreciate beta testing. It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!
No-brainer talent and cookie-cutter builds
I was reading the forums the way I do recently, when I came across this thread. In it, the original poster Strawberry asked for examples of talents in the new talent system that players would always take. In the current talent system, as an example, no fury warrior would avoid Flurry. You'd be an idiot to do so. Ghostcrawler chimed in, indicating that he wanted to increase people's awareness of the thread and get them participating, because the thread was useful. The reason it is useful is because no-brainer talents are something Blizzard's trying to do away with in the new talent scheme, and the only way to really know what talents are must haves is to have people tell them. The entire purpose of the new talent system is to promote choice and do away with the cookie-cutter builds of the previous and current talent paradigm. Cataclysm actually ended up with a lot more choice than previous iterations -- you usually have a few talent points left over when you're done getting the basics down -- but Mists of Pandaria is poised to remove the concept of going elsewhere for a spec or copying someone else's build entirely. This got me wondering. Assuming the thread does its job and helps identify talents that are too good to pass up right now and make adjustments to bring them in line, will that make the game harder or easier for new and inexperienced players?
Why we don't need an end boss in Mists of Pandaria
In answering a forum post about the point of going to Pandaria (and let me just say, it's kind of a sad thing for me when adventurers need a reason to go to a new land and kill stuff for loot), Nethaera has gotten me thinking about Mists and what it says about us. Frankly, it's not just the big bad syndrome at work, either. That's certainly a part of it: We're conditioned by The Burning Crusade, Wrath and Cata to think of expansions like series or seasons of a television program, with an overarching threat at the end that ties the experience up with a nice little bow and unifies what we did. While The Burning Crusade effectively subverted this itself with the Sunwell Plateau raid (dethroning Illidan as the end boss of his own expansion), both Wrath and Cataclysm held true to the paradigm. Really, they almost had to. Even though there was a raid after ICC, no one mistook Halion for anything but a teaser, and there's nothing going on raid-wise in Cataclysm after Dragon Soul. With Mists of Pandaria, we're returning to the feeling, if not the execution, of classic World of Warcraft, with the world itself and our exploration of it being the focus. This doesn't mean that the previous expansions didn't have plenty of world to explore. But Mists of Pandaria sets up the theme of players and their actions and what they do to the world as well as what the world does to them. The world is full of wonders and terrors, and rather than picking one and building the expansion around it, we get to see what trouble we can get into. I find this a fascinating return to form for a few reasons.
Zarhym clarifies the Mists Black Market Auction House
If, like many people, you're looking forward to the Black Market Auction House in Mists of Pandaria, Zarhym has a post for you. Zarhym points out that the BMAH is not intended to be a reliable means to gear up a character. Zarhym - Black Market is starting to go too far No one should count on this even being close to a viable option for gearing up a character. If you can raise that kind of gold in the game, you're going to have much better success paying your way into raids for gear than hoping the right items appear for you in the black market AH (which doesn't include set pieces), hoping you can afford to outbid everyone else on your realm, and hoping you're the last one to bid before the auction ends. Sure, it'll have some of the best rewards for sale. But that doesn't mean it'll be remotely reliable for one person to gear up quickly. It's the black market, after all. :) Ultimately the system is going to benefit the extremely wealthy and the extremely lucky. But in all likelihood the benefits won't at all be consistent, even for those who can pony up the gold. source This is a gold sink, plain and simple. It's a way to bleed off the vast amount of gold some people are acquiring, because when you buy an item from the BMAH, your gold doesn't go to anyone. It's a fancier, more random vendor, and if you're trying to use it to gear up your character, you'd probably get better results with the actual AH. Blizzard seems fine with this not being something designed to benefit most players, and I think that's the best way to approach it. It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!
