Taugrim's MMO Blog

Today’s video contains my solution for re-designing Rogue classes in MMORPGs so that they are viable in sustained PVP combat.

Rogues across games tend to do well in 1v1 and small-scale combat, but where Rogues fall down from a mechanics perspective is in sustained or large-scale combat.

Why?

Rogues typically have many of their key damage and CC mechanics coupled with being in stealth, but their ability to sustainably re-enter stealth in combat is limited.

Watch the video for my simple solution for addressing these issues and creating a dynamic playstyle that scales from 1v1 combat up to raid-vs-raid.

It is amusing that I concepted the same solution that ArenaNet came up with for their Rogue “Thief” implementation in GW2. They grasp the issues common to the Rogue archetype in PVP and are addressing them with elegant game design.

To see me PVP’ing live, check out my TwitchTV channel. My stream features real-time commentary – and to the extent possible interaction with the Chat Room.

Follow Me

Twitter: @taugrim
Stream: http://twitch.tv/taugrim
YouTube: http://youtube.com/taugrimtaugrim
Facebook: http://facebook.com/taugrim
GAMEBREAKER Host for “The Republic” SWTOR show: http://www.gamebreaker.tv/category/the-republic/

Today I launched the first “show” on my TwitchTV channel.

Here is the link to the recorded broadcast:

In this episode, we cover:

1. The most frequently asked questions for me from Beta
2. Schwag & Giveaway announcement
3. Live Q&A and discussion

Please let me know what you think – positive and constructive feedback is welcome and appreciated.

I will be streaming SWTOR game footage (PVP and PVE) once I get into Early Access and my guild Irony gets sorted out as far as where we’re playing. You can expect a lot of ad-hoc streams this week, and hopefully by next week I’ll have a regular schedule.

Information about our guild is in the broadcast, so I won’t say more – watch the recording.

As discussed in the episode, my CafePress store is now up at cafepress.com/taugrim. Let me know what products I’m missing that you would purchase.

I’m going to order a t-shirt and hoodie tomorrow, just need to pick the designs / colors I want to wear.

Follow Me

Twitter: @taugrim
Stream: http://twitch.tv/taugrim
YouTube: http://youtube.com/taugrimtaugrim
Facebook: http://facebook.com/taugrim
GAMEBREAKER Host for “The Republic” SWTOR show: http://www.gamebreaker.tv/category/the-republic/

Back in January 2010, I predicted that Social Gaming may kill the traditional MMORPG industry. This was after the spectacular failures of two huge IPs that launched in late 2008:

• Warhammer Online (WAR)
• Age of Conan (AoC)

The developers for those games make the mistake of over-promising and under-delivering, a cardinal sin for any business.

EA Mythic set the expectation that WAR would launch with 24 classes and 6 capital cities, but shortly before launch they cut 4 classes and 4 cities. The game client was unstable (multiple CTDs a night for me even a year after launch) and the servers simply couldn’t handle mass RVR without crashing or lagging severely. The “lakes” RVR while leveling was one of the most enjoyable PVP experience I’ve ever had, but the game fell down at endgame in T4. A game that hyped RVR couldn’t handle it.

I didn’t play AoC, but I kept tabs on the community. Funcom set the expectation that AoC would ship with DirectX 10 support – it was written on the box – but DX 10 wasn’t there until 6 months post launch. The game in Beta had serious performance issues and bugs, and Funcom unwisely drew attention to a “miracle” patch right before launch. It’s like saying “we’ve done a crappy job but finally got our act together, really!” Gamers loved the leveling experience from 1-20, but unfortunately the content team did not maintain that standard of quality from 21 to endgame. Rumor was that the writers across leveling zones had little or no interaction.

After WAR, in 2009 and 2010 I played several other “new” games to the Western market: Aion and Allods Online (AO). Aion’s grindfest killed my interest before I even reached level cap. AO had a terrific Beta experience go into the toilet when the game developer implemented a Death Penalty mechanic that basically made the F2P game a P2P game. I stuck with AO as paying to play wasn’t an issue for me, but I eventually quit due to the lack of appealing endgame content.

The failures of these MMORPGs unfortunately coincided with the incredible surge in growth and popularity of Facebook and Social Gaming. Money was being funneled into Social Games for obvious reasons, as I wrote in that Jan 2010 article. I grew increasingly concerned that developers would lose the financial backing to publish new MMORPGs, which typically cost tens of millions of dollars to launch. All any executive or VC had to do was point at the high cost and high failure rate to say it wasn’t be worth the risk. The MMORPG market was facing a vicious cycle, whereas Social Gaming was in a virtuous cycle of wildfire growth.

I went back to the safe haven of WoW in May 2010 after hearing that much of the tedious grinding in WoW had been removed. I enjoyed the latter parts of WotLK and then Cataclysm, which finally brought back meaningful challenge in PVE. Although as Josh “Lore” Allen recently pointed out to me, I am in the 1% who wanted things to not be faceroll, and the other 99% of the population had gotten used to the faceroll joke that was WotLK Heroic content.

While Cataclysm was my favorite WoW expansion, by mid February I was restless / bored with it. A fellow gamer, Castorcato, sent me a link to the talent calculator for a game I hadn’t heard of. RIFT. Looking at the talent calculator for an hour sold me on trying the game. Castorcato said that RIFT in Beta felt like the good things from WAR again, and I got very excited.

RIFT’s launch was the smoothest that I’d ever seen for an MMORPG. It blew me away. The game had bugs of course, but the level of polish was phenomenal, so it was able to meet the “is this as polished as WoW” standard question from the gamer community.

At WonderCon 2011, I asked a panel with Scott Hartsman (Exec Producer, RIFT), Dirk Metzger (VP Publishing, Zentia), and Nick Huggett (Customer Experience Manager, Runes of Magic) about the viability of the MMORPG market given the past couple years and their responses were highly encouraging. I also spoke with Scott after the panel about how Trion was able to launch a AAA-quality MMORPG.

As you may know, I’ve been critical of RIFT’s 1.5 and 1.6 patches – IMO they’ve derailed the great progress being made for PVP from 1.0 -> 1.4. But there is no denying that Trion has shown that AAA-quality launches of new games are doable, with the right mindset and execution. Trion has also brought a healthy amount of innovation to the MMORPG market – in particular with RIFT’s superb spec system and the game’s integration with social media.

So we started 2011 with a bang with RIFT, but that isn’t the end of the story.

EA BioWare is launching SWTOR later this month. I started researching SWTOR once I saw what was coming in RIFT 1.5 to determine whether it was a viable option for me. Long story short, SWTOR has greatly exceeded my expectations in Beta and I am pumped to play it at launch.

My guess is that RIFT has been a significant financial success for Trion Worlds, and I expect that SWTOR will be the same for EA BioWare.

This is great news for fans of the MMORPG, regardless what game(s) you play. The more success stories in the industry, the greater the degree of financial investment into game developers, which means more new games for us.

Thank you Trion Worlds and BioWare for delivering!

Follow Me

Twitter: @taugrim
Stream: http://twitch.tv/taugrim
YouTube: http://youtube.com/taugrimtaugrim
Facebook: http://facebook.com/taugrim
GAMEBREAKER Host for “The Sanctum” RIFT show: http://www.gamebreaker.tv/category/the-sanctum/
GAMEBREAKER Host for “The Republic” SWTOR show: http://www.gamebreaker.tv/category/the-republic/

While skimming through SWTOR PVP links on Google, I noticed that:

• One writer described SWTOR’s approach for making tanks relevant in PVP as novel
• Another writer recognized that SWTOR’s PVP design for tanks is a copy of what Warhammer Online implemented

The second guy got it right base on what I read.

I am glad that SWTOR is borrowing the tanking mechanics from WAR – these mechanics made tanks in WAR valuable in PVP and mad fun to play.

I often read complaints from players, bloggers, and media folks that games don’t innovate enough, but in my opinion, what game developers don’t do enough is copy the great features from other games while delivering true innovation.

RIFT is a good example of blending innovation with parity. In my opinion, RIFT clearly innovated in several areas…

1. Flexible class spec customization: each of RIFT’s 4 classes has 9 talent trees, and for a given spec you can mix-and-match 3 trees however you like. By comparison, WoW’s 10-class system with 3 fixed trees per class feels incredibly rigid and limiting. In RIFT, you can spec your Mage, Cleric, or Rogue to be a MDPS, RDPS, or healer. And Clerics, Rogues, and Warriors can all tank in PVE
2. Rich, elegant warfront map design: RIFT’s maps have similar mechanics to maps from other games. E.g. Codex = WoW’s Arathi Basin, Whitefall Steppes = WoW’s Warsong Gulch, etc. However, the maps in RIFT have terrain features that encourage and create opportunities for tactical play, as exhibited in my most recent RIFT Cleric PVP video
3. Integration with social media: you can record game footage in RIFT with the press of a button and then upload to YouTube, and RIFT integrates with Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr

…while copying other practical, sensible features from other games, such as:

1. Distinct PVE gear vs PVP gear systems (e.g. Valor is WoW’s Resilience, etc)
2. Achievements, which originated in WAR and were copied by WoW

It will be interesting to see how/where SWTOR and GW2 innovate and where they choose to copy from other games.

I have been a huge advocate and supporter for RIFT – it was the first AAA-quality launch of an MMORPG in the past several years, which in itself was a big deal. I am concerned with some of the proposed changes in Patch 1.5, such as how key talents work (for Clerics) and how the stats work. I also believe that now is not the right time to be introducing disruptive changes to the playerbase, given the impending launch of SWTOR and GW2. By changing stat mechanics, RIFT players may have to re-gear, which usually means re-grinding, and some players may simply write a game off and jump ship for perceived greener pastures.

RIFT can’t create meaningful differentiation in terms of lore-based IP – the buzz around known properties such as Warhammer Online (3 years ago) and Star Wars (now) has already proven that – but RIFT can differentiate itself from much of the MMORPG market by iterating thoughtfully and carefully with each Patch.

If any of you have tried SWTOR, let us know what you think of the game. I have heard that it feels more like a single-player game than most MMORPGs and that the PVP was not so good. But I have not tried it myself.

Trion made a huge announcement today about changes coming to PVP gear. In particular, Valor will no longer scale as it currently does with Rank:

With this Hot Fix you will find that all 4 PvP sets will share the same amount of total valor. This means that the set earned in Ranks 1 & 2 has the same amount of valor as provided by the set earned over Ranks 7 & 8. How much? It works out to 751 Valor, or a 30.04% Damage Reduction.  Instead of being differentiated by survivability, they will be differentiated by their main stats.

This is an awesome and much-needed change in my opinion.

I’m a firm believer that player skill and coordination/communication should be the most significant factors in determining PVP outcomes, but with RIFT’s current PVP gear system, players of higher ranks enjoy two significant advantages:

1. significantly higher PVP mitigation via Valor
2. significantly better stats on their gear and weapons

As an example for point #1, an R6 player can reach ~1100 Valor for 45% mitigation whereas an R2 can reach ~580 Valor for ~23% mitigation. So an R6-R8 literally mitigates twice as much damage as an R2.

These two factors synergized to create strong imbalance issues in PVP – and frequent request by players for PVP brackets based on Rank – and it made fresh 50 PVP a frustrating experience for most players (not including me). I believe the 2nd bullet point alone is sufficient reward for ranking up and will provide a meaningful but not imbalancing competitive advantage – and Trion is moving in that direction.

As a point of reference, Blizzard finally figured this all out after 3.5 years of Arena with the launch of Cataclysm for World of Warcraft. In Cataclysm, epic PVP gear could be purchased by anyone who participates in Battlegrounds and Arena, with the sole exception of the 2200-ranked weapons. Thus, gear has been greatly reduced as a differentiating factor. This was a very positive change for WoW PVP in my experience in battlegrounds and in 2k 2v2 and 3v3 Arena, because combat was much more balanced and challenging. Gear still matters in Cataclysm, but PVP no longer felt like the old oft-quoted formula:

gear > spec > skill

Some RIFT players who grinded up to R7-R8 will be disappointed by the change to Valor, but I think it’s for the better of the game. And frankly, if I hit R7-R8 in the current system, I believe the degree of PVP challenge would be too low for me – I would simply faceroll lower-ranked players, and that would be boring.

I want to lose to better players not simply better-geared players, or the side which has the better class/spec mix. And it sounds like I’ll be getting my wish

Rock on Trion!