MMO Gaming

This one will have to be a bit shorter and lacking a diagram since I was away from my home computer most of the day. The good news is, there is no great need for a diagram as it is more of an addition to last week’s topic than an entirely new one. As promised, this week will be a bit about buffs and debuffs. More specifically, how they are displayed, seeing as how that’s what we are talking about in this series of Repairing Gears.

If you head on back to last week’s Repairing Gears you’ll be able to get a good picture in your mind from the diagram for what I am about to add to it. Right on the player’s circle (or target’s circle, for that matter) would be attached smaller circles that have a color/graphic on them representing a certain debuff type. For instance, there may be a circle on a person when they have a poison on them. Mousing over that circle would display the information about the poison (damage/time remaining). If they also had a disease on them then they would have 2 circles sitting around their bars. If there were multiple debuffs of a certain type on the person the mouse-over effect would show each debuff. Fairly simple. For buffs there would really only be 2 circles that would ever be needed. They would be buffs you were able to cast on yourself (with mouse-over for time left and effect) and other buffs that players put on you. Simple.

Target buffs/debuffs would be displayed the same way so there is no real reason to break into that too much. Party buffs would be a little different though. Mousing over a player would display the buffs he has on him, targeting him would allow you to check how much time was left on your buffs, but the simple mouse-over without targeting would not display the time left on the buff. Debuffs would display next to the party health/special bars with a small icon and color around them to discern type. A good option to add here would be a special notation for debuffs that players have the ability to get rid of (perhaps a slightly oversized icon) so they are more easily seen.

Next week we will explore some different parts of the user interface that we haven’t done before.

repairing gears, information management, buff, debuff, poison, disease, mmorpg, mmo gaming, interface, user interface

I want to go over just a small portion of the information we want to display for this week’s topic. We’ll look only at the unit frames, the area that displays the health and “special” bars (mana, rage, endurance, energy, whatever) of you, party members, and your target. I promised diagrams, so I’ll go ahead and get right into them, and then wrap it up with a small tie-in of why they were designed this way.

Now, let’s take a moment and go over what’s there. The first large circle on the left side is the player information area. The outer ring is health, the second ring is whatever “special” bar should be showing and the innermost ring can be used for a couple different things. For instance, it could fill up as you gain experience in the game, or perhaps it could fill up as some sort of quest counter, for a specially designated quest in your log (as you kill “x” amount of people or collect “x” amount of item it goes up.) You could also just show what level the person is there, or their class icon, the uses would depend on the game in this case, but I’m just trying to keep it generic. Directly to the right of that is the health/special bar numbers and percentage, which are fairly self explanatory.

Below that is the party member bars. They are small and only show the information that is really useful. Health and “special” with a small spot for their name above (you’ll notice your character does not have a slot for name, if you don’t know the name of your own character, you have bigger problems, it shouldn’t need to be displayed on your screen.) To save even more room have the XXXX/XXXX health and special bars moved right on top of the unit frames and set the percentages just to the right.

Finally, to the right is the target bar, which is basically the same as the player bar, so it shouldn’t need to be explained any more. The question of why not make all the bars small and rectangular probably comes up, especially if we are trying to save room, but there is a reason for the display of target and player in this way, that will be discussed next week though.

That will wrap it up for this weeks Repairing Gears, next week we will look at how buffs/debuffs show up on these unit frames and a bit more as well.

unit frames, information management, repairing gears, player, target, party

I’m changing things up this week and talking about a subject that is far more abstract than previous topics. It’s been said in interviews I’ve read (and linked to) and by the players that MMO interfaces are lacking in quality as a whole, and even more so when compared to non MMO games.

The obvious problem is so much more information is available and needs to be displayed in an MMO than in any single-player game. In the average single-player game you can push your start/menu button and pause the game, allowing you ample time to cycle through what you are looking for and do whatever you want. In an MMO there are plenty of times where this isn’t the case. The game is going to continue to go on around you even if you are scouring your inventory for that potion you need to use so the mob attacking you doesn’t kill you. Another big problem is that people play on monitors of various sizes. Those with larger monitors will probably be able to put up more information without it looking cluttered, whereas those playing on smaller monitors may not be able to add helpful information to their interface without sacrificing space for other information.

In this Repairing Gears we will be looking at interfaces from multiple games and seeing what can be done to fix the way things are displayed and how to better set up the information that needs to be seen on screen at any given time. In the first part we will set up the principles which the following posts will use to design an effective game interface. We will also probably incorporate some interface modifications available that would work well as default elements to the interface.

Let’s get right down to it and find out what principles we will use.

First we need to figure out what our interface needs to accomplish, in the most general sense. In this case, and I think it is fair to say, the game interface should attempt to display as much (relevant) information as possible in as small an area as we can fit it so that the world around you is still the focus of the game. Some people like interfaces that are more “flashy” than others, but that doesn’t have to mean we are using up space to put in random junk.

Second we need to decide which information needs to be always available in the interface, which should “pop up” and which should be put into the “menu” (the menu, in this case, would be things like video/sound options, and not the character screen, which I would classify as a pop-up element.)

Those are going to be our two main points to design the interface, and from there we will set everything up. Next week I’ll continue along with some of the first interface elements we should look at (and I’ll even try to make some diagrams, because those are fun.)

information management, ui, user interface, interface, game interface, interface modifications

Time for the fourth installment of the Repairing Gears on World of Warcraft’s guild system. I said this one would cover guild halls, and it will, but first a quick note that I thought I put in an earlier installment but must have missed.

Officer MOTD.

The current MOTD (Message of the Day) for the guild is nice, but I’ve always wanted to be able to set aside a second one where only officers (or those with proper permissions) can see the message.

Let’s head back to guild halls again though and recap while doing so.

In the second part of the article I talked about guild banks and what they should be, what they should have in them, this would be one feature of the guild hall, and in my mind, the most important. Two weeks ago (I missed last week’s installment) I brought out some highlights from a topic on guild halls, and I’ll use that as the jumping point to expand on a variety of things mentioned there.

The idea of a trophy case of some sort is one that interests me and something that would be fun, if not necessary to include (of course, a guild hall isn’t entirely necessary in itself so it seems kind of a ridiculous distinction in the first place.) The exact way this would work is something of a lesson in the difficulty of implementing such a large scale feature (though, I don’t see it as hindering such an inclusion in the game.) Ideally other people, outside your guild, would be able to interact with this area of your guild hall (and others) because it is a lot more fun to show off to people that weren’t there what you did, rather than just those who already know about it.

With that being said it becomes necessary to take a moment and switch to decide who gets to enter a person’s guild hall. The simple way to fix this would be to take the “trophy case” idea out of the guild hall and put it in-game somewhere else in a major city (or all of them) with a list appearing of those guilds that have completed the encounter. For instance, you go into the building, click on the head of Onyxia and a listing (think similar to what happens when you right click to read a letter or book) pops up with the guilds that have taken down that boss. I know, that actually seems to reverse the need for a guild hall if this and other things were done with me, but that isn’t a horrible thing really.

Another idea brought up last week was a sort of inter-guild arena and I like that idea. I’d also like to take that idea and stick another one along side it. I’m all for a CoH/V style ability to “raid” other groups guild halls (an option to be flagged for this, at least on normal servers, would be best obviously) and along with the ability to fight other guilds, it would be nice to see the opposite implemented, the ability to ally with other guilds to accomplish goals. The specifics of the system could be debated back and forth for a while, but at its most basic level it allows two or more guilds to effectively “share” members without losing out on the individuality of each guild. I talked about how to implement the guild system inside the LFG system a while ago and this would work in a similar fashion, except it spans all allied guilds, not just your own.

Moving on, a “crafting station” (yes I said station, we’re reverting back to our third-grade days where we had separate designations for each area) would be nice. Some people in the topic from a couple of weeks ago talked about letting us see what individuals could make, but that seems unnecessarily cumbersome. What if I just wanted to know what the Jewelcrafters in the guild could make. A list of all jewels that could be made by people in the guild with the names of people who could make them would be much better, rather than one for each person. In this way it also requires much less space. Instead of John’s jewelcrafting list and Jim’s jewelcrafting list there is just the guild jewelcrafting list. Throwing in a fun feature here, let people put in “orders” for items that they want at these stations (and, if we are feeling especially brave, let this function with the guild bank to be able to use materials from there and flag alerts for people that can make the items desired.)

The other big thing mentioned in the other topic was all the decorations and accessories people may want to throw into their guild hall and I’m all for that idea. Though my guilds hall would probably be pretty Spartan (I imagine the decorations would cost money and I’m…thrifty) other guilds would probably do a lot with this.

There is so much more that could be done, and other ideas that I have, but I want to keep a few for myself, because I don’t want to give every idea I have away. Just these features would be a great start, and many of them are not even terribly difficult to implement, perhaps not simple but certainly not so tough as to completely stop the ideas from going any further.

Next week we’ll look at a new topic in our Repairing Gears, but you’ll just have to stop by next Thursday to see what it is.

repairing gears, world of warcarft, guilds, guild system, guild hall, guild bank

Time for the third part of this the third Repairing Gears post. What I’m going to do for this part is go through some of the post I mentioned earlier and pick out some ideas from it with a short comment, which will be expanded on in the following installment where I take what I like, add in all that I had already planned, and enhance what other people have thought of.

I’ll go ahead and quote the posts (or the parts of interest) so people don’t have to guess at which one I’m talking about.

Gigantic heads of the bosses that have been vanquished by your’e army of crusaders.

This idea isn’t exactly what I would do, but I like the spirit of the idea, some sort of “trophy case” to display accomplishments is a cool idea.

A bank NPC where officers of the guild can store pots and other items would be useful.

Having talked about this last week I don’t think I need to go over the practicality of having such a system in place, but I’m just pointing out that at least one other person notes a physical guild bank is a good thing.

Also there should be food/water/alcohol/reagent/repair vendors,

Maybe some minigames like tonks and a mailbox/ah mob.

No, a thousand times no. No vendors, should be in here because they simply aren’t necessary. If these halls are located in some instanced portion of a city (as I imagine they would be) you could step outside the instance to do all that sort of stuff (the same goes for putting an AH inside the hall, the idea is not to take things outside the hall and stick it all in one place, it is to create something new and fun, something original.) I also see no need to set up crafting stations, they are fairly easy to get to within the city anyway. Remember, the idea isn’t to consolidate it’s to add something fresh.

Switching for a moment though, several comments mention the ability to buy certain things (anvil or forge for instance) and this is something that I wouldn’t be against on the whole, this feels more like the “City of” idea where you buy things and I enjoyed messing around with that system, so in that sense I may not be against certain things being able to be purchased, relating to crafting anyway.

A mini inter-guild arena would be awesome

I like this idea in general, but I’d like to see it more CoH/V style, but that’s another thing altogether.

Perhaps even a special hearthstone could be purchased that could ‘port people to the Guild hall.

I wouldn’t mind this but I could also live without it, but worth mentioning at the very least.

This whole thing could also be added at the same time as player housing.

Just a quick side-step here, I am against player housing. Not necessarily in every game, but I am in World of Warcraft, again, that is a topic for another time.

ALSO it would be awesome if you could get a 30 min buff off one of the boss kill trophies. Just something like +15 stam or “character takes less damage from falls”

Something like this wouldn’t be too bad, depending on how it was set up of course. Giving it some cooldown timer of only once every X hours/days wouldn’t be a bad idea, and the buffs wouldn’t have to be great, but I could see this as a cool feature.

Ways of allowing players to create a list of craftable items from their own professions so other guild mates could essentially place an order for an item/enchant to be made for them

This idea I really like, it would be nice to be able to figure out what guildmates could make without having to hope the right person is on or wait until they are, I would love a centralized list, this one goes on the pile of good ideas.

and Guild-only-Looking-For-Group system.

I covered this way back in the second part of the first Repairing Gears piece, at least I’m not alone.

decoration and accesories.

Personally this matters little to me, but this extra “fun” stuff could certainly be thrown in (similar to the “City of” games again. It serves no real purpose other than to give it that friendly atmosphere.

* a way to create our own “quests” where we request something and offer a reward to brave souls willing to lend us aid.

I think Blizzard shot down player created quests before (I could be wrong) but I like this idea. Make it almost like an auction but in reverse, you put up the items you want and the gold you are going to give (another side note, I am against guild auction houses, but using the auction house idea is the easiest way i could think to describe it). Something like you want a bunch of iron ore and you are willing to pay 5 gold per stack of 20 to the first ten people to turn it in (essentially just like the current repeatable quests.) Certainly not the easiest thing to add by any means, but a great idea and something that could work out well.

I’m not shooting down any ideas, we’re all just speaking in a hypothetical anyway, but some ideas that would remove players from the world are some things that we would probably not want to include in a private area. Player interaction is of course a large part of the game and we probably wouldn’t want to remove players from the world for things such as crafting, buying reagents, the auction house, and mailboxes.

This is the comment by Drysc and it pretty much goes along with what I have been saying so I wanted to point it out, don’t take out the need for the rest of the world with these halls, make them separate and still useful, if players can’t think of things to add other than what is in the world they just aren’t trying hard enough.

Anyway, that covers a bit of what I wanted to highlight from the topic (a lot of the following pages are just more of the same, but I haven’t scoured through it all, so if you think I should add something, or want to point one out I missed, just leave a comment and I’ll check it out. Next week I’ll take these ideas and others of my own, and more fully explain what I had in mind for guild halls, but that’ll wrap it up for now.

Repairing gears, world of warcraft, blizzard, guilds, guild halls, wow guild system

Last week I made some changes to basic guild management. This week I wanted to dive right into the first part of my fixes for guild banks. I will still be going back to other changes in the guild management part of things, but I am trying to keep things in order of how they interact with one another and this seems the next logical step for me (though the way ideas fly in and out of my mind that may have changed by the next part.

There have been many, many posts over on the WoW official forums about this and guild halls/housing and the entire topic of just guild banks can taken so many ways that I want to focus it again into two primary components for the first part of this guild banking system.

• Items
• Money

Items first, because I like starting at the top of the list. This is probably the simplest part of the banking system because it works essentially just as the individual character banks do, there is a bank space, followed by rooms to put bags (though charging the space for these bags in my mind could be taken away). Here there is a choice that can be made by developers, do you want one massive bank (in which case increase space and make special, large bags) or do you want multiple banks for different things. Personally I’m a fan of multiple banks, it is cleaner to work with. Similar to the mining bags or enchanting bags that are already in the game make banks that each hold different items. I see a need for 7 going this way, but I’m sure something could be said for only having 3 as an option. I’ll stick with my 7 though, because it really gives a greater amount of control over things, and I like that. Mining, herbalism, skinning and enchanting each have their own bank for their products (ore/bars/gems, leather/scales/etc., flowers and dust/essences) those are all fairly easy. The other three that I added help to further spread out items. One of these others would be for potions/flasks of all kinds, another for reputation turn in items and the last for gear.

Depositing items would be a simple process, it would use the mailing system already in place. A new tab could be added when checking mail to “send to guild bank.” This option would take item/items that were placed there and send them directly into the bank into an appropriate bag (if you are thinking this would be difficult for the computer to determine think of how you currently get an error for trying to put leather in a mining bag, same idea, items are marked as a certain type.)

Obtaining items would be a bit different because there is a good chance that some pathetic players would take advantage of a good system and walk in taking everything out of the bank and then quit the guild. The easiest thing to do to avoid this is to only let certain individuals (see the individual permissions section of part 1 of the article) take items out of the bank.

That solves one problem but raises another, with only certain people able to actually get stuff out it means that other players have no way of obtaining something they could legitimately use. An option to be added here would be a “flag” option, to mark an item as desired by “X” player, when an officer (or someone with proper permissions) comes on they could load up the guild tab and optionally check out what items are currently flagged in the bank and to whom. Then they can accept or deny the person the item(s).

Doing all that covers the basics of the item portion of the bank, but what about money. Having a guild fund can be important for various reasons, maybe your guild will use it to help certain people obtain money for a mount or some item they desire, what exactly it would be used for is unimportant, how it works is important though.

A lot of guilds work on a sort of donation basis where players may send a few gold to the guild bank that helps the guild get whatever it needs, or the officers send money together to buy things. There is nothing particularly wrong with this, but it seems that a better solution is to have a guild fund separate entirely from personal funds. A simple way to do this is to set a percentage of money gained from mobs during certain places (say in a guild raid) to go directly to the guild bank and the rest would be split normally amongst the group. In this way players do not need to send the guild bank money (though there should also be a way for them to do that if they desired) for it to have some.

Now,another quick additions which I wanted to throw out there involving the bank, because there is the potential to do so much with it. A loaning system. Say a player wants to borrow 800 gold for the flying mount riding skill, but you as the guild leader don’t want to give this person money and then appear to play favorites, or something along those lines. What if there was a way for a player to automatically send a portion of all money earned from the point they take out the loan to pay it off? Obviously there are plenty of ways to exploit this, but I’m not going to cover all the ones I can think of, I’m just throwing out this idea to put it there on the back-burner for future improvements.

There is still plenty which could be done and still plenty to do to work with guilds, but that covers the basics of guild banking, from here on out I’ll probably work in extra features as they become necessary for explaining other parts.

Next week we’ll move on to another portion of the system and start talking a bit about the Guild Halls in general. Stay tuned.

World of warcraft, guilds, guild system, bank, guild bank, blizzard

It fascinates me that such a very social game (and one that seems to pride itself on this fact) seems to have such a poorly designed setup for creating and maintaining guilds. Much like the LFG system I don’t expect to see much action happening with a better guilds system until it becomes horribly apparent that things need to change. For the most part the facets of the system that don’t work out well are purely affecting those with power in a guild (Guild leaders/officers), simply being a member isn’t nearly as bad as trying to work around the awful design they have put into the system as it stand now.

As seems to always be the case, as I am writing I realize how long things will be, and this will again be a multi-part series on the system. I haven’t yet planned exactly how many parts I will end up having (here’s a hint, at least 2) but be warned, we’ll be covering this topic for at least one more week.

Let’s forgo talking about a Guild Hall and better guild banking system in this first part, because there is so much to do (and so much that has been said via the official forums already, that I don’t want to intimidate people by starting with that. Instead, let’s talk about basic guild management in this first article.

What is needed to properly manage a guild system? I’ve broken it down into two main things.

• Control over individuals
• Control over groups

Let’s start with control over individuals. I don’t mean evil, dictatorial control I mean the ability to assign privileges to an individual. For instance, say I want certain player’s alts (the alts of officers perhaps) to have the ability to invite, but I don’t want to add in another rank just for alts of officers and I don’t want it to look like the guild has 12 different officers, I want to assign this privilege to certain members only. Individually assigned privileges go a long way into making the system better. The same idea could be applied to officer/special chat rooms set up for certain members only, this way not everyone has to share a rank, but they can share a similar privilege. In this way, of course, individual privileges have to override group privileges (a special note here for the privilege that this is most important (to me) for, a way for people other than the guild master to have access to the guild control tab and the things it allows (enhanced of course in the system as I will explain it.))

Switching focus now to group control. If you’ve ever messed with the ranking structure in the WoW guild system you already know how poor it is, there’s no real way to add a rank without messing everything up you already have in place. This is just sloppy and, though I try hard, I can’t find a reason it was designed this way. Adding ranks shouldn’t be like pulling teeth, it should be a simple process. You input a rank name in a box, you then select where the rank should be placed (above or below) and then in the third option you select which rank to base it off of. So, when complete, it may look like the graphic below:

Now as shockingly simple as that is, it is vastly more effective than what is currently implemented.

Next, let’s do one final, little thing to the current “Guild Information” tab. Let’s make a header before all the other text that may be input. In this header, let’s stick some information that has been in every guild info I’ve ever seen. Website address and voice chat info. I’ll throw in another graphic of what this header would look like to the guild info tab.

All of this seems very simple, just small changes, but these changes would make the interface cleaner and more effective, to me it is a surprise something like this wasn’t already done.

There is a lot left to still be done in just the guild tab, including an enhanced “Guild Information” section and some other nifty features I thought of, but many of them rely on further detail of my ideas of guild halls and guild banks, all of which I will cover in the week (or weeks) to come. So for now, let’s leave it with the very basic changes I’ve recommended here.

World of warcraft, guild, repairing gears, guild system, blizzard

Does being part two of number two make this the Repairing Gears squared edition?

I do enjoy the square, lovely shape that one.

But wait, we were talking about death, a much more melancholy subject (though I suppose that description depends entirely on your state of mind).

What was I going on about again? Right, death penalties.

Last week I set up the two systems to compare against, and then said that my ideal death system would not feel like an interruption of game time but should rather be a natural extension of time spent playing. When I pay to play, I certainly don’t want to run around dead, especially when it is through no fault of my own (server instability for instance).

So what do you do to fix it? I think that an example of death penalty done right is best seen in Dungeon Runners. For those that haven’t played there is a system in place in Dungeon Runners that people can drop “waypoints” at any point in a dungeon (assuming they have the item) and instantly port themselves out to town, or back to that point. When you die in the game, you are resurrected outside of town and to continue your adventuring you simply head to a big stone in the center and warp back to your waypoint.

The frequency of the drop for the item to create a waypoint makes death in the game feel negligible though, which is not what I am going for, but I would certainly use this system as a basis for what I was doing. It needs some expansion though.

Let’s change topics for a moment and talk about realism of dying and coming back. It annoys me that when death occurs to major NPCs, in story changing ways, that death is permanent and really means something, yet I, just some guy, am allowed to have infinite chances at life? It feels a bit crazy. What we want to avoid here is the Aeri(s/th) effect. You know, from Final Fantasy 7, the one where she dies (spoiler!!) and they don’t just use a Phoenix Down to rez her. That’s annoying and inconsistent. I dislike inconsistencies, especially when they can be avoided.

Back to the system then. What do you do? I came up with a bunch of different options, all of which I liked to some degree, but none of which I loved. To be honest, none gave me that “eureka” moment. Onward though. First, that idea, as I mentioned, of Dungeon Runners and waypoints is a good one and a great point to start from. And graveyards, as seen in World of Warcraft, are another thing we combine into the system. Now, let’s throw some objectives in here. PvP seems reasonable, what if points could be captured where you could rez from in the world. Dungeons though, what do we do about that? Why break a system that works? What if dungeons were designed in such a way that they were taken back from whoever it is you were fighting against. Wouldn’t it feel like you were really working toward something (this could be especially true in the case of raids where a person is saved into a dungeon for a period of time and works to capture objective points by defeating the bosses that are there)? These points in dungeon then act as auto waypoints. There is no item that drops too much/too little to worry about, it is a system based on player accomplishment.

So that covers an idea of where players can rez from, but what about when they are in the world, how do they go about things there, other than just having a point to start from.

Here in the system we add in any number of things, depending on preference. An item could go here, a quest/mission (my personal choice) and an item or something along those lines, it would be completely up to a designer to figure out their perfect way. My personal choice is some sort of quest/mission and an item that is acquired from doing it.

The quest or mission here could again be designed a number of ways, but essentially you get an item that has a certain number of charges to it, that allow you to come back to life at a given checkpoint (whether that be inside a dungeon or outside). This item would have to be recharged, before it ran out, otherwise a steeper penalty would be enforced. If you die with no charges left you are rezzed at a location that can’t be captured near your closest city (similar to CoH/CoV) or zone, along with another penalty that relies more on specific game mechanics that I don’t want to get into at this point (it would open far too much up).

Of course, this isn’t my ideal system yet but I think it fixes some problems by allowing a degree of control and sway depending on circumstances of the death. Even if it was through the fault of the server/company and not your own this adds some leeway to allow a person to not necessarily be forced into spending extra money/time missing out on the game when they want to be playing.

Hopefully I will get that eureka moment yet, that one system that snaps everything together in just the right way so this topic is still open for some extra commentary, but next week, we’ll focus on something new.

Yeah, I’m calling this one number two. I know you may be thinking that it would be more appropriate to name it number four, but the other three articles were part of a series all covering the same thing so I’m sticking with my number.

This topic could cover any number of MMOs, so to mention a specific one would be unfair, but I will take the systems from two different MMOs and compare them, bringing out the good and bad points, and then talk about how a penalty for dying should be implemented.

Let’s start by taking our two games to compare, World of Warcraft and City of Heroes/Villains and describing what the penalty in those games is.

In World of Warcraft there is a multi-part penalty every time you die. The first part being you suffer a durability loss on your equipment, and when you repair the equipment it costs more money the more durability that has been lost. The death penalty drops the durability by 10% which is usually not bank-breaking, but still can increase repairs by a tidy sum. The other part of the penalty is you are forced to run back to where your body fell to resurrect yourself (there is also the option of resurrecting yourself at the graveyard, but this comes at an extra price, and we won’t touch on that as it is optional, and not the standard way in which the death penalty is applied). Running to get your body may not seem like a big deal to people that haven’t played the game, but anyone who has died at the northern or southern end of the Barrens knows what a long trip that can be.

In CoH/CoV the penalty comes in the form of experience debt. What this means is that you earn only a portion of the experience from killing mobs that you normally would until the debt you owe is paid back. This also stacks, so if you die several times quickly, without working off the debt, it can be an especially arduous task to grind it back. There is a further part to the penalty that could be added, in that characters are resurrected at the hospital, so they must run back to where they were playing before they died, which can also be an annoyance.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both systems. Some of those may even switch back and forth depending on the circumstances. It is a real hassle to run back to your corpse in WoW and have to resurrect when there are a lot of mobs around, and at times like those it might seem it would be better to be resurrected at some given point like in CoH/V. Of course, when there are no mobs directly in your way recovering your corpse at the point you died and continuing from there can be a much less troubling experience.

That covers the two different systems we will look at, and they relate fairly well to many other games, though each game seems to put its own spin on things.

How do you make death less of a hassle though? Or, should it rightfully be an annoying experience?

Those questions come down to the basic philosophy you have when you are making the game, and they are an important thing to ask. There are in fact several basic questions to consider when you want to design a death penalty.

Whose fault was the death? Was it brought about by the player or by the game? If it was through the fault of the game, should the player be punished for that?

Is in-game death an expected result of playing over a period of time, or is death a freak occurrence that can be avoided?

Should the in-game death be an annoyance, or should it be an extension of the character’s play time, instead of an interruption?

Answering those questions is important because it sets up just how masochistic you are as a developer. In my mind, the proper death penalty is built off the ideal that death should not occur if the player uses all the skills at their disposal, but, if it does happen, it should be at worst an inconvenience, and shouldn’t feel like an interruption of the time you get to play the game.

To satisfy the “too long, didn’t read” audience I’m going to cut the article off at this point, and we will finish the discussion of how to implement a death system in the second part of the article.

Repairing Gears, death penalty, experience debt, corpse run, World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, City of Villains, MMO death

Now that we’ve covered the new questing system and the social system of LFG let’s get to the biggest part, the true LFG system, the one that does the dungeons and battlegrounds, etc. I know I promised this last week but hey, things didn’t work out that way, so here it is.

The only real problem with what I am about to recommend is that it takes up almost all screen space, and this is only slightly a problem anyway. Essentially this LFG page is about the size of the Auction House screen on your monitor and it has multiple tabs to search through depending on what you are doing.

When you first open it up you are taken to the basic “Add Looking for Group” option menu, not the best name obviously but this is the place that lets you look for groups for things other than what is in your quest log, instances and that sort of thing. This menu has a dropdown of various things to choose from much like the current system where you choose to look for a group for Dungeon, Raid, Zone, etc. It of course excludes quest as this is done via your quest log in my system. Of course, this system also adds PvP options, 3 from what I imagine, PvP Arena, PvP Battleground and PvP World. Also, you may check whether this group is for your “main” (the character you are on) or an alt (any character you aren’t playing as now).

When you make your choice, let’s say dungeon, a list with boxes of the different dungeons in the game pop up (also, it is important to note that you could limit which dungeons show up by plugging in your desired level range or show all (the level range is not automatic so as to allow you to search for groups for alts)) When the dungeon listing pops up you may check off as many dungeons as you want to, whichever you are interested in. Also, at the bottom, there is room to write a brief comment about your looking, perhaps you could stick in what spec you are, or anything else you want to say, if this group is for an alt, you could mention class/level of alt in this spot (assuming this isn’t taken care of elsewhere, as I will explain in a moment). At the bottom of this page is the final button to save this setting as LFG and “post” it to the LFG system.

To backtrack just a moment to my comment mentioning class level of an alt in the comment section there is an improvement to the system that could be made at this point already, but I didn’t state it as something I would stick in immediately as it is more of a “nice” feature than a necessary one. But, what could be done here is to automatically let you select any other toons on the server that you are on (for your current faction of course, so if you are playing on an alliance character you couldn’t look for groups for your horde toon) and in this way the information of class/level could be put in automatically when you post the group to the system, but, as I mentioned, this is a very nice thing to have but really wouldn’t be necessary for the system (this would be automatic though if you are posting for your main).

Back to the main topic though, further tabs in the system. After you have saved your LFG settings you probably will want to still do some work with things, as the main page doesn’t have all the options you could want in it, to help this along you move to the Advanced Options section, or Looking for More section, perhaps. On the whole, in my system, LFM becomes something entirely unnecessary as it’s main idea can be done in the advanced options/group search tab, which I will touch on in the coming paragraphs.

First, advanced options. When you go to this tab you are greeted with your list of saved lfg’s all with the option to expand/minimize them (like the zones you can expand minimize in your quest log, same button/idea). Continuing with the dungeons example and picture that I have above let’s assume you want to set a priority list of desired classes. You can do this with a setup of the names of classes listed from 1 through 9 each with an up or down button next to them, one being highest priority and 9 being least. Clicking the up or down arrow moves that class down or up 1 position. So, in this way, you can set which classes you are most interested in getting (for instance, perhaps you are a hunter looking to do an instance, you will probably need a tank and healer, so perhaps your priority would be something like Warrior, Priest, Druid, etc.). This option would be especially beneficial assuming the “auto join” function is enabled, in this way you are allowing the system to do what you want. There are other options possibly available here, which, at the moment, I seem to have forgotten (oops, I should’ve written it down as it came to me). Anyway, that’s the gist of that tab though.

The next tab up is the real meat of the system the “Index of Groups” page. This is the directory of people searching for groups for the same thing you are, for instance, the dungeons you checked off. A variety of information is included in this section, Class, Level, searching for, comment, etc.

One of the best features of this system comes up when a group is just starting (i.e. it has just formed because someone joined). At this point the group leader is allowed to “flag” the instance they are doing (since multiples may have been checked as possibilities). When the instance is decided on the information for that particular group changes on the LFG page to display the instance that is being done, the group leader’s name, and, the important part, a countdown of how many spots are left to fill (ex. 2 people are in the party the countdown shows 3 spots left). With this there is of course a ton of stuff that can be done, expand this to show who is currently in the group is one such thing that would be a great feature.

That basically covers all I can remember, I know I had originally thought up a lot more stuff, and there is quite a few things that I still remember wanting to put in, but I don’t want to give away all my ideas.

When it comes right down to it I feel this system is a lot better for the game. I will admit that it may in fact be a bit daunting to the newcomer, but overall it is a system that is much more robust. To me the LFG system that was added feels like something I would just put in as some sort of mod, it doesn’t feel like it is truly integrated into the game in the way it should be given the importance of grouping for so many things.

So, any comments on any of the parts/all the parts? I’d love to hear them.

World of Warcraft, Looking for Group, Repairing Gears, Blizzard Entertainment, Patch 2.0, Burning Crusade

wow gold World of Warcraft Gold on GameGoods

Well, I was thinking that as this was a weekly piece I should put one part up this week and one part up next, but I didn’t feel right doing that, it just made it seem like I was stretching this topic out to long, so I’ll be posting parts two and three this week so we can move on to a new topic next week.

Okay, we’ve covered the new quest log, but next I’d like to conquer the social aspect of the looking for group system, the one covering friend and guild related looking for group, and it really does deserve it’s own special section.

Maybe some other people never really thought of this, but as for me, I’ve always felt that if a guild-mate or someone on my friends list had marked down looking for a group I would prefer a special place to look at it. My original thought was to put this in the main LFG index and just highlight in some way (a different color for instance) people who are friends or guildies. This seemed acceptable to me at first, but as I thought about it more, I realized as more guildies and friends used the system, and depending on how many you had this could take up a massive amount of space at the top of a list of all people searching, so giving it a section all its own seemed best (a quick note here, the groups would still show up in the main LFG index but they would appear just as any other one and would be sorted in whatever manner had been designated).

It is also important to realize that as this is more of an offshoot of the main system this Social LFG Index would have the same functionality as the normal index (i.e. a search feature, among others) but I don’t want to get to much into that as I’m saving all that kind of stuff for the last article (just know that you can look back to this post and really see what kind of power would be held in this social index).

Anyway, that about covers it, we can keep it short and sweet on this one, and the next one will cover quite a bit.

World of Warcraft, Looking for Group, Guilds

It’s safe to say that I’ve officially cried about the new Looking for Group System long enough. I’ve mocked, degraded and insulted the system and those who defended it, but I also haven’t really said anything about how to fix it. That’s about to change in the first installment of Repairing Gears, the weekly look at fixing problems that plague MMO games.

To start I’d like to point out a post over at WoW Insider that I think did a good job of highlighting some problems (though I may not agree with what they recommend for fixes).

Now taking that bulleted list of fixes and extracting the problems from it isn’t that difficult so I’ll not reiterate them, I’ll trust that your reading of the post and my covering of the points will be sufficient.

Let’s get right into it now. How to fix LFG in WoW. I should mention, this is a multi-part article, because as I began writing I realized just how long this would be, so I broke it up a bit. This first part will cover changes to the quest log.

For one thing, I find it amazing that Blizzard decided to go ahead and try to re-invent the wheel with this system, when using and extending the capabilities of a mod like Call to Arms would have worked wonders. It is quite clear that Blizzard has no problems with taking mod functionality and making it default behavior, they have done this with many updates, particularly in relation to raid interfaces and the like (I’m also not saying that doing so is a bad thing on Blizzard’s part).

So why did they decide the circle wasn’t the optimal shape? I can’t say but for some reason they wanted to go ahead and do something different.

But I fear that I digress so back to the topic at hand, fixing it.

One big problem is the Auto Join option, in itself it is not bad, but it is misguided on Blizzard’s part to believe that players want the game to play itself by default rather than let them play it. Fix #1 is simple, change this to default Off, not on and you have already made the system better. This allows players to have a greater control from the start, rather than be subject to being stuck in with the first people that come along.

The second thing I would recommend is a more ingenious delivery on the whole. This is a multi-step process and involves quite a variety of changes.

Step 1 would be to, in the quest log, allow a person to flag any number of quests as LFG/LFM. This would be done in much the same way as the current shift+click to add quests that you are currently working on. Change this to be a 2 box system next to the title of every quest. If you check the first box, it puts it on your screen as a quest you are working on (as shift+click does now) and if the second box is checked it flags that quest as LFG/M (there is no great desire to differentiate between the two at this stage because of what will be added later as I will detail in the post).

This does have the unfortunate effect of possibly needing extra screen space when you open up your quest log, but expanding the log a little seems like a small price to pay for a better system.

Of course, the question may be asked of, why do I need to look for a group for normal quests/non-elite quests? It appears Blizzard believes this and thus didn’t even add an option to look for non-elite quests at all. But I believe that thinking is flawed because it forces people to do only quests which are yellow/green for them (most orange or red are to hard to complete alone since the level difference is so great) and it denies the thought that a normal quest is still best done in a group setting simply because of difficulty (quests such as escorting Corporal Keeshan out of the cave in Redridge Mountains are a good example of this, it is much easier to complete in a group, and, depending on class, necessary to group for anyway). Now, normally I am all for players completing only those quests within their level range (yellow/green ones that is) but there is a time and place for a person needing/wanting to complete a quest that is orange or red to them, such as when it is the last quest in a particular zone they have to do. I know for myself I hate having that one left over quest from the zone I was at previously because it is still slightly to hard (this is especially annoying before level 40 when traveling between and within zones can be an arduous task). So, that is my reasoning for allowing any quest in the quest log to be flagged LFG/M.

Now then, further improvements are necessary to this system, and that takes place in the other tabs of the revised quest system. First up on this tab, is advanced options, this will cover a few things, and really replace the idea of LFM with the way it is designed, thereby getting rid of the need for that on the whole. First up is a class priority listing, classes 1-9 are listed and allowed to be moved up and down (a bit more about this will be discussed in a later part of this posting series). On the side/below this is a box for putting in how many players you are looking to quest with (any number from 1-4 more (a party in Wow is limited to 5 players)). If you are just looking for a buddy to help you out, put in 1 other person you are looking for, if you really want to blow through some stuff, say you are looking for the full 4.

Now, already I can put improvements on to how that works, but I’m trying to keep this fairly basic in it’s complexity, I have plenty of other options that I will keep stashed away in my own mind because I don’t want to make people feel this system is overwhelming, when, really, from a user’s standpoint it would be a lot easier than it may come off being written.

Now that the Advanced options tab is completed, let’s look at the final necessary tab, the “Index of Groups” tab. This is where it lists the players who are looking for groups for the same quests as you are, along with pertinent info (class, level, which quests, etc.). This is where you will be able to go through and find the people you want to group with and is the main driving force behind this system.

Now, I don’t want to ramble on for to long, so I’ll stop it there. I’d love to hear questions/comments on this part of the system, and I’ll answer them if I can, and if it’s something I haven’t thought of yet, I’ll try to come up with a way of working whatever you mention in as well.

For the next part, we will cover enhancements to the social tab as they relate to my Looking for Group system.

Burning Crusade, World of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertainment, Vivendi, Looking for Group, Patch 2.0