Blizzard Expert at Prolonging Game Time

Wrath

Wrath

So you have been plodding along playing WoW. You’re over the group that you have been playing with or your guild disintegrates. One of your friends (or a blog writer) convinces you to restart on another server and on the opposite faction. You level that character up, all the way to max or near-max level. You fall in love with the new class you are playing. Then that deal falls apart too.

You get talked into going back to your original faction, but you miss your high-level (insert class here.) Oh, that character also has a few thousand gold. What do you do?

Fret not my friends. Blizzard has sensed your malaise and has offered a solution. According to an article on WoW.com Blizzard will soon be offering a new Faction Switching Service, for a reasonable fee I’m sure, that will allow you to turn your gnome into an Orc or your Tauren into a Space Goat.  This wow.com article was derived from this post on the WoW forums, which now has over a hundred pages of responses.  People definitely have an opinion on this service.

I opined earlier that a lot of the catering to the user base is bad for the game.  I’ve reconsidered.  Exploiting a title for all it’s worth is management’s job.  So in spite of all the altruistic qualities we gamers would like to see our fearless leaders espouse, at the end of the day they report to their stakeholders.  How well they deliver what we want is what is going to drive the revenue to satisfy those stakeholders, so it’s a blade’s edge they walk.  This is something at which Blizzard has become expert.

As soon as I brought this up in guild chat, people started thinking and every one of our core players mentioned not one but two high or max-level characters that they would bring over to the guild from the other faction.  Myself, I have a Lock and a DK over on Rexxar that I wouldn’t mind playing more.  I loved my DK but I haven’t had time to start leveling a new one over on Jaedenar where I play now.

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WoW H8 and Shaman Love

So WoW it coming up on another major sub-version upgrade to 3.2 soon.  At the same time that there are critics about what the patch will or won’t contain there is a growing sentiment in the blog community that the thing is just getting old and tired. Some of this is fueled, I believe, by one of the most influential bloggers out there (Tobold) giving WoW a rest.  Cries of ONOES! were heard.

I say that the news of WoW’s demise has been greatly exaggerated.

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I was wrong. I was SO wrong.

Turns out that the site listed in the previous post is indeed Brad’s.

There was too much about it that made it seem “off” that I didn’t believe it.  But I got from a trusted source today that it is his site.  Too bad, a spoof would have been funny.

As it is, it’s kind of creepy seeing some of the posts there.  There are sycophants and there are vitriolics, and not much in between.

Judging from Brad’s post today, there isn’t going to be an interview, which is too bad.  I guess we’re going to pretend that everything never happened and there is no culpability.  I wish when I didn’t make my sales figures for a month, I could go to my boss and say; “I’m really looking forward, not looking back.”  Like that would work.

I hear from my sources that Brad is in a better place, and that he’s healthier and doing better than he has in years.  I’m glad for that.  I never wanted the guy to be sick or unhappy.  I just don’t want him around any game that I’m playing.  From all accounts, he’s a good guy.  Just not a good manager.

Good luck, Brad.  I don’t know what you are trying to accomplish.  I think the road is going to be a little rockier than you may expect.

And I’d still like to do an interview.  Shoot me an email when you are ready.

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That’s NOT Brad McQuaid

I think someone fooled my friend Darren over at The Common Sense Gamer.

As most of you know, I started off my online “career” doing a fan site for Vanguard.  During that time, I got to read a LOT of Brad McQuaid’s essays, posts, and manifestos.  After a while, I got to where I could easily recognize his style.  So I was surprised today to see that Darren posted about how Brad was popping back up with a couple of posts on his blog at bradmcquaid.com.

Here’s what Darren and most of you probably didn’t know.  bradmcquaid.com’s domain registration expired in February.  What you also don’t know is that on a flyer, I took a shot at picking it up when it expired.  I didn’t get it.  It was scooped up by;

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Finally, 80

I don’t usually post my personal achievements here on the blog because I don’t want to bore you guys any more than I usually do.  But after being retired from WoW for almost 2 years I’ve finally gotten my original day-one WoW character to 80.

Ding!

Ding!

I had leveled this Shaman to 60 LONG ago, and had run most of the Pre-BC dungeons.  He was all dressed in Purple.  I quickly found that was irrelevent upon my return to him a little over a month ago.  Now, all in Blues, he’s got 4x the hit points and I can’t comprehend how much more powerful he is.  Having dual spec available has made him SO much more fun to play.  He’s Elemental when he’s soloing or running dailies.  Dungeon run?  Quick flip to Resto and I’m ready to heal the raid.  Done with that and I’m back.
Anyway, don’t want to make this a long post, the guild is waiting for me to run the Heroic Daily.

Talk to you soon!

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The Issue of Trust in MMO’s

Trust

Trust

Last night something came up in my WoW guild that got me to thinking.  Yeah I know, it should happen more often, this “thinking” thing.

I’m almost level 79 so I’m running some stuff with friends, trying to level.  As such I’m not in Naxx with the rest of my guild on the nights they run that.  Tarkheena is 80 and she has started running Naxx with the guild and as such was in the Vent channel with them during the run.  Before I get into the details, let me set the stage.

The guild I am in has been together for years and years.  They play other games and WoW just happens to be the game that they are playing as a group now.  We got invited to the guild because we know some of these guys in real life.  Most of the people in the core of the guild live here in Austin and we’ve been to lunch and we’re probably going to do a LAN party event here soon.  They are adults, most of them have kids or long-term relationships, and have pretty good jobs in the high tech industry.  As such, there is a very high level of trust among the core.  I’m not likely to ninja something if I have to be on a conference call with that person in a few weeks trying to sell something to a customer.  It’s just not gonna happen.  Plus, no one wants to jeapordize that kind of relationship.

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Shut Up We’re Talking #47

SUWTDarren over at Common Sense Gamer has hosted and posted the 47th edition of his podcast, Shut Up, We’re Talking (SUWT.)  I’m happy to have been on for the third time with Darren and Karen from Journeys with Jaye.  Here are the particulars;

  • Introductions
  • What we’re playing
  • Darkfall and Eurogamer
  • Avatars. Players, Characters - The Gap
  • Blog of the Week
  • Hosts:

  • Darren - Commonsensegamer.com
  • Karen - Journey’s with Jaye
  • Openedge - Dichotomy of the Gamers Blogosphere
  • Genda - The Grouchy Gamer - Yay me!
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    What Constitutes an MMO Success or Failure?

    FAILAs discussion on some of the blogs in the MMO blogosphere seem to be discussing the slowdown of activity in some of the WAR-dedicated blogs recently it occurs to me that there are all kinds of different definitions of what makes an MMO commercially “successful.”  While some companies look at anything less than Blizzard-Level numbers as too small, many companies are looking at smaller niches or alternate styles and saying “yes” to new game development.

    So what DOES make an MMO a success in your eyes?  I think that is a complex question.  There are certainly different levels of success.  There are definitely different levels of failure.  When you see a game like Tabula Rasa close down so soon after launch, you have to probably agree that it’s a business and critical failure.  Same for games like Auto Assault.  But what of those games in between?  Certainly I’ve written enough about how big a DISAPPOINTMENT Vanguard turned out to be, but with a dedicated team still working on it and a small but loyal customer base you may be able to successfully argue that it’s not a total failure.  Certainly the economy of scale that SOE has working allows for some marginal games by today’s standards to stay open and running.  Whether the publisher thinks a game is successful or not is certainly dependent on the investment they have in it and how profitable it remains.

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    The Guild Makes the Game

    Something has really driven this seemingly-obvious point home for me over the last few months.  There’s a little back story, so please bear with me.

    As most of my readers probably know I got into the Casualties guild and was GM for the Destruction guild over there for a while.  We had a great group over there, and if the game had held my imagination even a little bit I would have kept playing.  Unfortunately it didn’t.  Then the same thing started happening with a lot of the core gamers in the guild and the game in general and a couple of server merges later I was stepping down and looking for something else to play.

    I had started dabbling in WoW again and decided to see if anyone in Casualties wanted to start a WoW guild.  Several did and we were off and running.  I had some real life complications which kept me from playing for a month or so, and stuff happened, and well, the guild had a big exodus.  When that was over there were several characters left in the guild but mostly people that had odd play times or sporadic ability to log in and play.

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    WoW Patch 3.1 is a Win

    In spite of some transitory technical problems they had with the switchover to 3.1, Blizzard has done some great things to WoW in the new patch.

    I know that not all of you are WoW fans.  I know that I’ve been a critic myself (see blog title, so yeah) from time to time. But you have to give them credit when they get it right.  For me, they definitely did.  Some of the things that I think are really cool;

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    An Interesting Thing Happened Yesterday in WoW

    For the last few years people have been complaining that WoW is a dumbed-down version of an MMO.  “It’s the Easy Button.” they would say.  And they were, for the most part, right about that.  As the game evolved, it tended to get even a little easier.  They kicked up the experience curve to shorten the time it takes to get you to max level.  Mods made the game even simpler.

    Yesterday, something interesting happened.  Blizzard made the game a little HARDER.  They did so while making the game a little less annoying.  Here’s how they did that;

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    It’s going to be a long Patch 3.1

    As you probably know if you read MMO blogs, today is a BIG patch day for WoW.  Mounts that can swim, dual talent specs, and the long-dreaded DK nerf all seem to be in.  I say “seem to be” because it’s, um, down.

    Blizzard originally scheduled 8 hours (3 am - 11 am Pacific) for “server maintenance” and to install and get the patch up and running.

    At 1 pm, they posted that it would be another hour.

    At 2 pm, they posted that it would be another hour.

    At 3 pm, (when the east coast is getting home from work/school) they posted that it would be another hour.

    At 4 pm, they posted that they didn’t know how long it was going to be, and started to bring servers on line.

    At 4:15 pm, all those servers started coming off line.  Character lists were not coming up and new character creation was causing the error “Error Creating Character.”

    These are usually the signs that things have gotten away from Blizzard.  Honestly, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often.  This is a pretty complex and (needless to say) large server farm.  It does a ton of I/O every day, and it has to work flawlessly with a (widely) distributed client.

    I’m hoping that this is temporary, because I really want to play tonight and figure out what my new free talent respec is going to be.

    Stay tuned.

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