Lens on Scratching That Glitch

There were a lot of puns I could go with for a title for this blog.  "Seven Year Glitch".  "SonuvaGlitch".  "Glitch Perfect".  "You can never be too thin or too Glitch".  And so on.

In my last blog I talked about how the future was small, and this time I'll talk about how well small can work.  I'm going to talk about the beta of Glitch.

BUST OUT YOUR BROWSERS!

So what is Glitch?  Well it's a browser based MMO, where you kill no orcs, blow up no spaceships, and face no world-threatening evil that needs to be defeated.

Well, that's more what it's not than what it is...

So what is Glitch?  Well, it's a 2-D game with a little bit of a platformer in it.  It's got deep crafting systems.  It's got player housing.  It's got exploration.  It's got a whole lot of achievements.  It's got a design esthetic best described as "Saturday morning cartoon meets magic mushroom".

It's really difficult to describe is what it is.

I'll touch on a few of the mechanics then (excuse me if it's a bit hand-wavey at times)...

Your glitch (character) has two stats and two currencies.  The stats are mood and energy.  These go up and down during the day (each game day is 4 hours long) as you perform activites.  Usually doing something productive will reduce energy.  Eating or drinking will usually  increase energy.  If you run out of energy, you die and go to Hell (don't worry, it's temporary).  Mood controls how well you perform activities.  I'm not sure what happens if you zero out mood, but I'd assume it involves putting on an album by the Cure.

The two currencies are imagination and, appropriately, currents.  Currents are more of a standard in-game money, used to purchase items from vendors or the auction house.  Imagination is used to purchase upgrades to your glitch and your house.  Most activities provide some small amount of imagination gain, but both currencies are rewards for accomplishing quests and achievements.

So what sort of "activities" does one expend energy on and gain imagination for?

Now we're back to the "magic mushroom" thing I mentioned earlier.  If you happen across a pig in your travels, you can expend a couple energy to pet it, and gain a little mood and imagination.  Then you expend a little more energy to nibble the pig, gaining mood, imagination, and some meat.  The meat can be sold or eaten...gaining 10 energy back!  You can water, pet, and harvest a bubble tree for bubbles, and then transmogrify the bubbles into other kinds of bubbles.  You can squeeze chickens for grain!  You can chop the grain into flour.  Add a little salt and you can fry it into a bun.  Add some meat and you can chop up a sandwich, which will add mood and energy!  You can meditate, scoop up jellisacs, use guano to fertilize those seeds you planted, you can brush foxes...I could go on and on!

Now we're back to the "it's really difficult to describe what it is" thing I mentioned earlier.

So yes, it's weird.

WHERE'S THE MMO?

"That's an MMO?  It sounds like a kid's game on goofballs!"  On the surface, yeah it kinda does.  But there's actually a lot of good and interesting game design going on behind the hydrocephalic and hallucinogenic glitches.

The game's skills are learned in real time, similarly to EVE Online.  You pick a skill and anywhere from 15 minutes to 12 hours later, you learn it and can pick a new one.  Unless you upgrade your mind though, you'll start learning 'em slower and slower.  Upgrades are purchased with imagination.

The skills are broken out as follows...  Animal: increases the benefits from interacting with animals and allows keeping a herd of your own.  Growing:  increases the benfits from interacting with plants, allows growing your own crops.  Gathering: increases harvests of some goodies, allows conversions into specific types (convert allspice into one of a dozen spices, or cherries into any other fruit).  Cooking: allow the preparation of all kinds of foods and drinks to replenish mood/energy and provide buffs.  Alchemy: breaking down things into elemental parts, also distilling of hooch (used in making cocktails via cooking)!  Intellectual: meditation (regeneration of mood/energy), teleportation, writing.  Industrial:  mining, furniture making, tool repair.

They all link together to provide a very deep array of skills used to play and to make things used in play.

I haven't gotten very deeply into character housing, but you have a customizable space, ready for you to kit out with whatever cosmetic and functional gear you want.  You can expand your yard to put down crop gardens.  You can keep a herd.  You can have your own industrial equipment to further your quest to take over the market for furniture creation.

The systems themselves are simple, but the connections are deep.  That helps create a degree of compelling game play.

But one of the big keys is this:  the game isn't limited by the maps and streets you have.  The players can get together and create more game space.  There are a series of quests for the Street Spirit, and once they are all completed, the players will decide on the attributes of the new street, and all those who partook in the creation will receive the rewards.

The players have played together, the community has grown, and the game itself has literally grown.  A fascinating new dynamic.

Talk about player created content!

EVER HAVE A GLITCH YOU JUST CAN'T SCRATCH?

So is it fun?

Yeah, it kinda is.  It's sure as hell not the hardcore, unforgiving, shotgun-to-the-head PvE of The Secret World or the lore-based quest grinding of LotRO, or PvP FPS of PlanetSide 2 (although Glitch does have some PvP racing mini-games!), but it's an entertaining, low-stress gaming experience.

It's free.  It runs on a browser (in Flash though, so no joy for us iPad owners!).  It's different.  It's certainly clever as hell in its writing.

I suggest you might want to give it a look...MMOs don't always have to be a megabuck enterprise.  They can be small and smart and different.

Of course, when the 25th rolls around and Guild Wars 2 launches I'll be off like a shot, but that's hardly the fault of Glitch!

Lens on "I have seen the future! (and it's smaller than you think)

(Sorry this is a day late...my Internet connection was down for most of yesterday, hence I spent the day curled up in a fetal ball while undergoing withdrawal.)

There's purportedly an old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times".  Well these are definitely interesting times, for computers, for games, and for MMOs.

HARDWARE REVOLUTION

Perhaps the biggest single change in these "interesting times" on the hardware side is the move to mobile.  The growth in the utility and utilization of phones and tablets for historically PC-centric functions is changing the way people use and view computing in fundamental ways.

The PC is still hands down the best tool for almost any kind of content creation, but the mobile phone, and especially the pad, are often as good or better for "consuming" content.  Now the word "consuming" often carries a connotation of a passive, slack-jawed, glassy-eyed person sitting motionless in front of a TV set.  But consuming in this context is simply doing everything you do on a PC that doesn't actually require a PC to do it.

Web-browsing, gaming, e-mail, maps, books, and so on.  And as the usage of mobile devices has exploded, the growth of usage of the standard, desktop PC has slowed if not stopped.  The desktop isn't dead, but the days of its total primacy are done for sure.

And the best evidence of this comes from the company that defined themselves through the PC, Microsoft.  And as usual with Microsoft, they understand the grand change and utterly miss out on the nuance.

For the better part of a generation, Microsoft lived by a single idea..."Windows everywhere!"  By which they meant they wanted Windows to run on everything, no matter how much Windows was unsuited for the task.  Windows on phones, Windows on tablets, Windows on kitchen appliances (I wish I was making that last one up, here's a link that shows their "Windows-enabled" coffee-maker http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/2009/jan09/01-09cesfugoo.aspx ).

Every internal attempt at making a device-appropriate environment for something other than a PC got killed because it didn't fit the "Windows everywhere" mantra.  Google "Microsoft courier" to see how the history of pads might be different if a Microsoft pad didn't have to run Windows.

So with release of the iPhone, the cell-phone market changed in an instant and Windows on phones became instantly irrelevant.  Their market share dwindled away because those inside Microsoft who tried to make a phone-centric interface got defenestrated.

Then the iPad came out, instantly creating a huge market for devices that everyone else seemed to think were niche.  And the people at Microsoft who worked on the courier project said "See?  We told you!"

And finally, the signal reached the dinosaur's brain and Microsoft reacted.  They brought out a completely re-done phone OS with a new tile-based UI.  While I find it ugly and clunky-looking, I am definitely in the minority as it has gotten pretty-much universal praise as a solid, functional, competitive offering.  Competitive everywhere but in the marketplace where it has pretty much sputtered.  It's good, but not compelling in today's market.

But in classic Microsoft style, they are making the same ol' mistake, but this time in reverse.

Having spent countless man-years and dollars following the "Windows everywhere" mantra by hammering the (very) square peg of Windows into every round hole they could find, they have now changed their mind and are starting to hammer the round peg of their mobile-based UI in Windows 8 into every square whole they can find, like the desktop PC.

How wrong-headed is this?  Gabe Newell of Valve described it as a "catastrophe".  Rob Pardo of Blizzard agreed.  They think this development is bad, particularly for game companies like theirs.

Oh but it's not just "interesting times" for the PC on your desktop...the console hooked up to your TV is at it too!

There has been, historically, a certain reliable timeline for releasing new console hardware.  And two of the biggest heavy hitters are two years late.  In fact, the theoretical PS4 and Xbox 720 are so late that game companies are blaming the lack of new hardware for the sluggishness in the industry as a whole.

So where are the new consoles?  Well the manufacturers there are facing many questions with the same origin as those I detailed above...the mobile space, especially the iPad, has them deeply concerned.

Why concerned about the iPad?  Well John Carmack, game legend, noted that "The iPad 2 has about half the performance power".  He's speaking of the current generation of consoles, the PS3 and the Xbox 360.  Half the power on some thing that looks like a prop from Star Trek: The Next Generation.  And once Sony and Microsoft get around to announcing their Consoles: The Next Generation it'll be another generation or two of iPads.

Now if your iPad can do almost as much as a console, can screen mirror to a TV set, is portable, can do almost everything a full PC can do, has an available library of thousands of games and applications, most at very low prices...how do you market your console and its $60 games against that?

And with EA's announcement of $70 as a standard price point for PC games going forward (at launch), how can the desktop PC compete in the future?

As people get used to the convenience and price advantage they get with a platform like an iPad, as a gamer...how can consoles and the desktop PC compete?

"GAMES ARE BIG, IT'S THE PICTURES THAT GOT SMALL"

And what impact will this have on games in general and our beloved MMOs in particular?  Going forward, a lot I expect.

This has been a terrible year for big MMOs.  First SW:TOR launched well and then plopped.  While it's probably too harsh to call it a failure, it's probably too kind to call it a disappointment.  And after burning through $100M-plus, 38 Studios spectacularly explodes in an unmatched display of hubris.

While I have no doubt that Guild Wars 2 and PlanetSide 2 cost a pretty penny, there is a huge difference between those games (which are looking quite promising) and the previous two...

ArenaNet and SOE both have successful MMOs in their repetoire already (yes, GW wasn't a true MMO [although exactly what is an MMO is getting less clear all the time], but most of the differences were, in design terms, minimal).  What this means is that it's very unlikely that any AAA, big-money MMOs will be coming out of any Western game company that doesn't already have success in the genre.  Nobody is going to chance $100-200M on a maybe.

So if we're going to see a vanishingly small number of big-money MMOs, what are we going to see?

Think mobile.

It's easy to poo-poo things like browser-based games and phone games, but when an iPad can disply something like Epic Games "Infinity Blade" driven by the Unreal 3 engine...poo-poo no longer my friend!

Check out the browser-based Unity engine and the kind of 3d you can get out of Firefox or Chrome.

Here's a question...if you can get 90% of the graphical performance out of a web-base client that you can out of a .exe file, why would you limit yourself?  OK...what about 80%?  50%?

The only argument here is where you draw that line.  But as the engines get more powerful, even if you don't like it until it's 90%, it's getting closer all the time.

Now don't get me wrong...I LOVE the big-money, AAA MMOs.  I want Guild Wars 2 yesterday and PlanetSide 2 tomorrow!  I want someone to swoop in to the bankruptcy proceedings for 38 Studios, gobble up all the assets and finish the goddamned game!  I want to know wtf Blizzard is up to with "Titan".  I want all these and more...

But as much as I like the big, I understand the importance, the allure, the future of the small.  The lines between game types are blurring.  Many MMOs are gravitating toward the casual gamer.  MMOs are going micro-transaction based for their revenue.

So if you were designing an MMO, and it didn't require the huge investment of a AAA development team...why wouldn't you make a great game that could be played on a PC and a tablet.  Or a phone.  Or even a browser.  What parts of your game design couldn't be redesigned so they don't need to run in a .exe?

If you could get essentially the same game play experience on a pad as a PC, what would you do?

You'd go small.

Lens on It Takes A Server To Build A Community

Sorry about the missing blog for Monday...but the Guild Wars 2 beta weekend was over and I was in no condition for prolixity.  Also, blogger's editing tool is acting like a COMPLETE POS today.

For the record, asura teeth are sharp so watch the lawn-gnome jokes around them, and be careful using the phrase "sporting a woody" around sylvari women.  I've got one word for you..."splinters".

Today I'll be talking about community and MMOs, the different kinds, how they evolve, and how they can be changed by changing game architectures.

THE TWO 'M's

That would be "massively" and "multiplayer" for those not paying attention.

MMOs have changed a great deal over the years in the way players interact.  It used to be that to get a great deal accomplished in a game, you needed a group.  This almost mandatory grouping forced people to be (to some degree) social, to make contacts, join guilds, to know people.

More recently, MMOs have become much, much more "solo friendly", allowing players to reach the endgame with little interaction with other players.  Sometimes with none.

Obviously, these two styles will lead to vastly divergent in-game communities.

The first, more old-school type of MMO, in essence required a web of friends and acquaintances, and almost always membership in a guild, to achieve many of the in-game accomplishments.  Vast amounts of content were difficult or impossible to explore solo.

Some of the most notable content would require multiple raids camping content for hours or even days.

That sort of insanity is inevitably going to create close bonds of community amongst the similarly deranged.

The more modern, solo-friendly MMO certainly allows for building a close-knit community, but the content doesn't require it for player survival and advancement.  And that sort of "sleep next to the computer waiting for the growling sound made by 'BargleGnash, the Hellborn Warbeast of Karthlax' when it spawns once every 72 hours" content has gone the way of the dodo and MMO permadeath.

So the games have changed...they are still massive and multiplayer, but very little of the content in the games still is.

E PLURIBUS UNUM

Another big change we've seen in MMOs is in their overall logical server architecture.

In the earliest of the old days, when someone said what server they played on they were actually talking about a single piece of hardware.

A logical server had a physical existance.  It was an actual machine (or a blade).

There were hard limits as to how many people could reasonably play on a single machine, and hence on a server...

Hmmm...server...I'm going to refer to it as a "shard" from now on in this article, because "server" kind of melds into some weird middle ground between physical machine and logical game-world.

So a single shard would live on a single server, and only so many people would "fit".  This limited number was very conducive to a community.  With only so many people playing on a shard, people would get to know each other, to recognize players and guilds.  Community would grow strong organically.

EVE Online started the big shake-up in server architecture.  They run a single shard, with various star systems living spread out across a large number of servers.  Now they've had performance issues when huge battles have gummed up star systems, but their single-shard architecture works successfully.

Having 10 or 20 more people in a single shard leads to a lot of different dynamics than in a WoW or EQ server.  Of course, so does EVE itself with its far more hardcore player base.  In fact, I'd say it's impossible to extract what community elements in EVE are based on the large, single-shard architecture and what parts are due to the back-stabbing, free-for-all, laissez-faire design philosophy.

And now we're seeing a new architecture design, with semi-solid sharding.  Both The Secret World and Guild Wars 2 have "home servers" which defines the residents PvP play, but allows players to act as guests on other servers for PvE play.

The physical and logical differences can lead to enormous differences in the nature of the communities created.

Let me address some of the community differences from different games...

EVERQUEST--My WoW guild is a former EQ guild, so I've heard some stories (especially during our Las Vegas get-togethers after a liberal application of adult beverages, although not all of those were game-related).  Their server (E'ci, I believe) was close-knit and they were a very close group.  The game and the environment were conducive to growing a community.

STAR WARS GALAXIES--My server...uh, shard...was Eclipse, and it definitely had a community.  There were a lot of people and guilds that were instantly recognizeable.  I remember trekking halfway across Tatooine to reach the shop of the top weaponsmith on the server (Smith'n'Wesson was his name, if memory serves) to get a vibro-knuckler to help my smuggler slog through skilling up hand-to-hand.  And I wasn't the only one there, because he was known.  Our guild started a mall with a whole bunch of vendors of top-end goodies, and we got so well-known that we broke the database with too many requests.  Dozens of people would show up for the PvP events organized by one of the guildies.  Strong community formed over time through many of the same mechanisms as EQ, plus the added element of the player-run economy.

WORLD OF WARCRAFT--WoW has gone through three phases of community.  First was at launch, where the servers were booming and everybody was getting the hang of the game.  Guilds were forming, people were playing, the community was coalescing.  The second phase was the real community.  Players and guilds knew each other (not everybody obviously) and there was a great deal of (mostly) good-natured banter on the game forums.  The third phase was marked by the introduction of the cross-shard group finder.  I was surprised to learn from my guildies that the cross-shard group finder in many ways destroyed the existant community on the shard.  Sure, a lot of the top-end guilds knew each other, and some of the old-timers were still around, but none of the ad-hoc community founded through the old-fashioned method of a shard-wide LFG channel existed.  I figured that "we want to foster a sense of community" line was developer BS, but I guess not.

LORD OF THE RINGS ONLINE--LotRO had a similar arc to WoW as far as community goes, but the "big change" that irrevocably altered the community there was going free-to-play.  A huge influx of new blood could have strengthened the existing community, but unfortunately it mostly just overloaded zone chat with noob-noise.  And Turbine's continued pursuit of commerce-driven design has alienated so many of the old-timers that the once thriving community is withering away.  You can occasionally see a familiar name, but that's getting more infrequent.

STAR WARS: THE OLD REPUBLIC--We briefly had an active community on our shard, but that got nuked.  Perhaps we can have another one later!  Seriously, at launch there were SO many shards that no community could evolve on most.  We had something of one on Shadow Hand, where we knew at least some of the other prominent guilds.  But with the  shard merges (yeah, I know, not technically merges, not yet) and going from 120-ish shards to about a dozen super-shards, the community will take a while to evolve.  But so many people have gone, the opportunity for true success has gone with it.  And whaddya know, the dev who keeps citing "building community" by not having cross-shard LFG tool might be right (see my WoW entry above).

THE SECRET WORLD--This is a bit of an odd bird (in oh-so-many ways).  A shard is mostly a PvP construct here, and your guild can be spread out among any number of shards (note that you can only PvP for your home shard).  But I don't see PvP being a big driver in this game, so I don't see that building community.  I expect certain guilds will become well known, and perhaps a few personalities, but I can't see how the sort of interwoven community you see in other games.  The architecture makes it less likely if not impossible to form organically.

GUILD WARS 2--Again we have the sort of semi-sharded architecture where anyone can be on any shard at any time, playing with friends, and where the home shard only really matters for PvP.  As an additional complicating factor (which may improve or reduce community-building) is that each person's account can be in any number of guilds, although each character can only "represent" one guild at a given time.  I think this will help individuals be part of communities, but I'm not sure it will help overall community.  On the positive side, the shard identification through competitive World vs. World vs. World PvP will certainly be a factor in building shard community, especially amongst those who will partake in PvP.

SOMETIMES, SIZE DOES MATTER

In summary, looking through all the factors that in my experience have lead to community building, there are a few that stand out.

GROUP PLAY--I've never been a fan of forced group play to deal with standard content.  But I won't deny that it is a positive community builder.  If you make people play together, some of them will end up friends.  I'm still not a fan, but I understand that it does work.  Too bad ain't nobody gonna put it back into MMOs anymore.

PLAYER INTERDEPENDANCE--This one's not obvious, but for example, in SWG and EVE online, you could only have one character (yes I know, per account per shard in SWG, and per account gaining skill points in EVE) and so to get many things done, you had to track down assistance.  Whether it's nullsec ratting in EVE or finding a weaponsmith to make the part you need for making slicing tools in SWG, you couldn't just make an alt to handle it for you.  Sometimes annoying, but it does drive people to interact with each other.

NUMBER OF PLAYERS--To me, this is unfortunately the single best driver of community building, why the communities build by many of the early games were so strong and are remembered so fondly.  Combined with the previous two factors, having a limited number of people around (due to the technical limitations of hardware and software years ago) concentrated both the need and pool of available options.  In those ancient days, if you wanted to play and progress, you didn't neccessarily have to make friends, but you had to make contacts.  And in an MMO this web of contacts is what makes up a community.  Just as in real life, community is easier to find in a small town than the Big City.  And most MMOs these days are definitely, the Big City.

I think the vast majority of players would agree, that a thriving community increases the enjoyment of the players and the longevity of the game.  It's not something that the devs can make happen.  It has to happen organically.

And whether we like it or not, as the games have grown and changed it has become less frequent and less compelling.  Also organically.

There is no simple answer to recreating the sort of shard communities we used to see in the days of EQ and SWG.  All we can try to do is find a smaller, more intimate community of a guild or group of friendly guilds and hope that, over time, something good grows out of it.  And hope our games give us reasons to celebrate when it does.

Lens on GW2 BWE3 Liveblog

Here we go again!

12:27 am--Off to bed!

9:02--Coffee is a-percolatin'!

9:03--I think it'll be a sylvari warrior to start.  I hope the name "Elmer" isn't taken.  Botanical puns for the...win?

9:20--I have coffee.  Is it noon yet?

9:40--According to my most recent estimates, it's still not noon.  I'll double-check and get back to you.

9:58--A small patch, no event ongoing to log into  :-(   Also, I miss the password chroma hash.  Dear ArenaNet, please bring back the chroma hash.  Thank you.

10:14--I have consumed my coffee.  It is still not noon.  I have dashed off a quick letter of complaint to my congressperson in an attempt to have this remedied ASAP.

10:24--Guildie just said "One hour and twenty-six minutes to go!"  Tease.

10:41--We're up!  And I'm stuck waiting for it to process my TOS acceptance :-(

10:52--And the sylvari warrior "Elmer" has awoken!  And for starting the beta early, ArenaNet I love you more than anything!  (Note:  I do not actually love ArenaNet more than bacon or vodka.  Other than that, we're good.)

11:06--I'm out of the dream.  The real world is scary!

11:47--I'm level 4!  I must now level up my sandwich making and consuming skills!

12:01--My last "quest" I was tranformed into a plantdog.  Insert your "dogwood" or "dogweed" joke here.

12:10--My first "vista", a sort of panoramic swooping view of the area.  A nice addition to the "point of interest" type of map accomplishments.  A little bit of a platformer, but not too bad.

12:17--The sylvari home city is beatiful and a classic example of "fantasty town syndrome".  It's pretty, it looks and feels cool, and it's ridiculously difficult to navigate because of the time and effort spent to make it look and feel cool.  So...a mixed bag.

12:23--Lots of botanical pun-names.  "Asparaguy" and "Joan of Bark"...I'd complain, but I went with "Elmer".

12:31--OK, very, very well done ArenaNet.  One of the initial sylvari stories has you help a guy whose lover is in danger.  And the lover is also a guy.  They don't make a big deal of it, it's not paraded around with a flashing neon sign...it's just there.  The Big Deal is that it's not a big deal.

12:55--Still trying to get to all the discoverable points in the sylvari home city.  Really a pain.  City discovery can be annoying, but this is above and beyond.

1:27--I'm up to level 6, doing some events and such and skilling up aaaaallllll my weapons.  That's one good/bad thing for the warrior, all the different weapon skills.

1:35--It's all feeling smooth and polished so far.  Only bit that felt a bit unresponsive was an escort event with about 30 of us running around in an area the size of a phone booth.

1:51--If I had any doubt, ArenaNet are evil geniuses.  I was working on my storyline quest and I had to help a woman defend her lover's grave from an attack by the undead.  She had seeds I could drop down into fertile ground, and they would grow into flowers that would slow or damage the rampaging undead.  Yes...Plants vs. Zombies.  I was slackjawed with amazement.  Well-played, sirs.  Well-played.

2:19--The first bug!  One skill point quest not activating.

2:42--So many skills to train.  Almost L8.

3:03--Because the sylvari starting area is so...green, so high-saturation green...it can be hard to pick out details and make out the landscape for the trees (and bushes, and etc.), so to speak.

3:13--Yeah, finding the appropriate path to certain landmarks is mostly impossible in the wall of greenosityness.

3:50--Wooo, lots of events, lots of loots (some of it even useful), level 9, and all of my basic weapon skills (except the underwater ones) learned!

4:43--And I've hit L10!  Skilled up one of the underwater weapons a bit on an event boss and got like 6 or 8 items out of the loot chest.  Wooo for loot chests!  And chests in general.

4:50--Back in the sylvari main city...and it's really a pain in the ass.  The map options to "show level" in the four level city are as useless as tits on a bowling ball because basically everything in the city shows up, just some are transparent, so you can only kind of tell what is on which level.  Basically, it stinks.  Perhaps the most frustrating thing in 3 weekends and 2 stress tests.

5:16--I finally found all of the points of interest and vistas and such in The Grove (hate it!) and they have a new build requiring a server reboot...so time for dinner!

5:51--I have dined and now resume my botanical existance.

6:12--I've been in this chair so long I feel like I'm putting down roots.  Harhar...plant-based humor!  Har?

6:53--Got to 11, spent half my silver for my book to open up my traits, did a little bit of crafting...  Progress!  So...since I totally hate the syvari main city, I'd better take a look at the asura and see what I think of those little turds...

7:00--Yay, the color hash is back on the password!

7:14--And a new asura engineer is born!  I give you...Loos Wingnut!

7:29--The sylvari tutorial boss was excellent, but the asura one is a-MAY-zing!

7:48--The asura area is a lot more whimsical and funny than the others.  Sort of halfway between WoW goblins and gnomes.

8:27--Really nice animations on the asura.  Comical without being over the top.  It's making the sylvari look totally vanilla by comparison.  And, you see, vanilla is a plant pod, so it's like funny!

9:00--It's a lot easier getting around and finding things in the first asura area.  Still haven't checked out the town yet though!

9:16--Some of the dialog is just asphyxiatingly funny in the asura zone.

9:55--And into Rata Sum, the asura home city, for the first time.  And it looks very nice.  I hope it's arranged in a more user-friendly fashion than The Grove.

10:06--Rata Sum is pretty much another "Fantasy Town Syndrome", looks extremely cool, hard as hell to get around in.  It's certainly better than The Grove, but still not good.  We really need the map levels to be separate, not overlayed.

10:10--I am reminded by Rata Sum of WoW's Undercity.  But way cooler looking.  Really, GW2 is sometimes strikingly beautiful.

10:13--That first step is a doozy...7024 falling damage.  It probably would have been more, but I started off so close to the ground!

10:43--OK...enough!  I've been at the game for about 12 hours...perhaps I should stand up and let feeling return to my legs.

SUMMARY:  After two previous beta weekends and a couple of short stress tests, I'm still enjoying the game a great deal.  But I think I'm also glad that this will be the last beta (purportedly), as all the time I spent in TOR didn't work out so great at launch and beyond.  On the other hand, I do expect GW2 to have better legs than TOR did, as I saw problems looming for TOR almost immediately after getting into the beta.  I expressed the opinion that they'd need to keep the content pipe full for TOR to succeed long term (something they certainly didn't do).  There's just a lot more to do in GW2 even just while levelling up.  It's a deeper game experience where TOR was very linear.

So I'll get some sleep...y'know, 2 or 3 hours...then back at it tomorrow!

Lens on Some Quick Notes

So today, I'm going to talk a little bit about things in the news the last few days.

--Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend--It starts up Friday with freshly wiped servers.  I think I'll do another live blog so that I don't have to write when I'd rather be gaming.  Because if it's "writing vs. playing GW2" I'm afraid there'd be no blog on Friday.  And, knowing how that would hurt my loyal reader, I wouldn't want to have that on my conscience.

I'm planning on skipping the zones I'm more acquainted with to try to keep them somewhat fresh for launch and going either Sylvari or Asura warrior come Friday, but I'll play it by ear.

--Layoffs at TOR--When the executive producer gets the boot (or walks) out the door, it can't be a good sign.  The official response to requests for information basically re-iterated the company lines of "with the launch of any MMO, the size and skillset of the teams needed to maintain the game is different than the ones that built it" and they're "currently staffed to ensure the continued delivery of new, high quality game content...and at a more frequent cadence".

More frequent cadence?  Seriously?

And to think, these clowns were boasting just a few months ago how they hadn't downsized after launch (like most MMOs) because they were so successful and were going to be cranking out the new content.  For those keeping track that would be fail and fail.

--Diablo 3 Item Duplication--It's clear that at some point Tuesday there were 8 identical legendary bows on the Auction House.  Where by "identical" I mean every single stat...including the randomly generated ones.  All were posted by the same guy at the same time for the same price.  Three of them were bought by one guy, who reposted them at a price where nobody would buy them from him just so he could prove that the original 8 were really identical and really existed.  I believe they are still up on the AH right now.

I have heard exactly one person report, with details, about where an NPC will rarely offer that exact item for sale, the only NPC in the game that has ever sold a legendary item at any time.  I have not seen a single confirmation of this.

If this guy isn't telling the truth, there's an item-duping bug in Diablo 3 and the game is done.  And with the Real Money Auction House, I think there may even be some legal exposure for Blizzard.  The amount of suck displayed by Blizz in D3 is quite extraordinary.

There used to be two companies that were the absolute Gold Standard In Gaming, Blizzard and BioWare.  Now the only thing they produce is disappointment.

At least let's hope that puts the stake through the heart of the RMAH for all games forever.

--The Secret World July Update--I thought that TSW would likely be a niche success and it looks like I was right, and the game has a shot at being slightly larger than that.  Especially if they can keep the content pipeline full.

Come the end of the month they'll be adding at least a half-dozen quests (including player faves "investigation quests"), a couple more dungeons getting nightmare modes, an auction house equivalent, construction in the starting zones (whatever that means!), and more stuff already announced for the August update.

With monthly updates and a solid (and sometimes fanatical) fanbase, I'd cautiously describe TSW as a success for Funcom.

P.S. Funcom haters...their launch went really well!

--Steam Summer Sale--The lads at Valve with their annual torpedo barrage to the wallets of gamers everywhere.  I've managed to keep the damage minimal so far ($5 for "Dungeon Siege III"), but we'll have to see if it lasts!  Most of my friends are checking a couple times a day to see if any of the flash sales catch their eyes.

We are addicts, I tell you.  ADDICTS!

I'd love a few hours with their bean counters sorting through all their sales metrics.

And Origin, EA's answer to Steam?  Here's what the rocket surgeon David DeMartini (their SVP of Global E-Commerce) has to say about the big sales, "I just think it cheapens your intellectual property."

Given what EA has done with Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 3, and SWTOR, they clearly prefer to cheapen their intellectual property with shitty games at FULL PRICE!

He also said, "It certainly works for Valve; I don't know if it works as well for the publishing partners who take on the majority of that haircut."  If it didn't work, dumbshit, they wouldn't keep coming back, now would they?  Of course you know more about their business than they do!

He also likened Valve to Target, whereas EA, "We're trying to be Nordstrom."  Anyone who goes to Nordy for something they can get at Target at half price is an idiot...and exactly the kind of customer DeMartini and EA are looking for.

--The DayZ Phenomenon--A mod with 500k users?  Impressive.  I haven't played, only watched some video, but I can understand the allure.  A hard-core zombie survival sandbox, who would'a thunkit?

This sort of thing always excites me...  Not the game, yet, which I expect I would find too unpolished for my overly-refined (OK, overly-wussified) tastes in its current state, but its success.

If a team of two (I think) can crank out something unconventional that becomes a huge hit, it gives me hope that unconventional games can get some traction in the market.  So that they have a chance to get, you know, MADE.

We need more Minecrafts and "Sword and Sworcery"s and DayZs.

--A Day's Worth Of Crap--I have a group of friends that I will describe as eclectic.  What do I mean by "eclectic"?  I could call them weird and they'd probably just nod.  But we have an irc channel we talk in, mostly about games.  But here's a list of game and game-related topics we hit on, in order, over about 10 hours on Tuesday:

SWTOR, Gamasutra, Darth Scabrous (that one's actually canon, btw), Star Trek Online, Farscape, Tron, Battletech, Shadowrun, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Skyrim, MUDs, Cryptic, Champions Online, Neverwinter, World of Warcraft, Blizzard, Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria, The Secret World, Guild Wars 2, Lord of the Rings Online, ZA bear runs, Ulduar, Tabula Rasa, Anarchy Online, Firefly, EverQuest, Star Wars, Star Trek, Dungeons and Dragons, Borderlands, PlanetSide 2, Defiance, Syfy, Trion (those three came in the same sentence), Dust 514, Modern Warfare 2, lensonmmos.blogspot.com (self-reference ftw!), Magic the Gathering, Auto Assault, EVE Online, Battlestar Galactica Online, Perpetuum, Mechwarrior Online, Car Wars, Steve Jackson Games, World of Tanks, Ogre, Harlan Ellison's "Along the Scenic Route", Mad Max, He-Man cosplay (truly creepy), "Player of Games", The X-Files, Fringe, Dark City, Ender's Game, The Last Starfighter, J.G. Ballard, Clive Barker, M.A.R. Barker, Meridian 59, Ultima Online, Diablo III, Electronic Arts, BioWare

Holy crap we are geeks.  And because you recognized most of that, so are you!

Lens on Questing Can Be Trying (And Two Requests)

Many years ago, in the primitive days of computing when a 5 gigabyte hard drive was the size of a washing machine and a terabyte meant a room-sized robot with 6000 tapes inside, there were people who spent much of their professional lives fetching, mounting, accessing, unmounting, and storing magnetic tapes.

In the data-rich environment in which we live today it can be hard to imagine backing up a computer on dozens of magnetic tape reels over many hours (or even a weekend).  I have no clue how many 9-track tapes I've mounted (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9_track_tape).  At least the tape robot would handle all 6000 3480 tapes (http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/memory-storage/8/258/1038) itself...after we labelled the bastards.

Once upon a time...I was what was not-so-lovingly referred to as a "tape ape".  I bowed before the Great God Of Backups and spent years slapping tapes on drives at the beck and call of The Computers.

And now?  Now I'm a "quest monkey".  I bow before the Mighty Quest Givers (and their holy symbol of  !  ) and spend countless hours stabbing critters with swords at the beck and call of The Designers.

PRE-HISTORY

In those same old days as the computers above, MMOs existed too!  And many of their game mechanisms were as obsolete as the tapes I described.

Questing as we now see it in MMOs barely existed.  And conveniently marked quest NPCs?  Hah...we wished!  If we'd known, we'd have dreamed of being quest monkeys.

Some games had dynamically generated grinding quests to help the player out with fresh "content".  In Star Wars Galaxies there were quest terminals where a player could get a critter nest or pirate camp or something to destroy for a few credits.  Ride (or run) out, kill, ride (or run) back, repeat.  Anarchy Online had dynamically generated instanced spaces, usually a series of rooms populated with predictable batches of mobs conveniently standing around to be massacred.

Honestly, it was just mob grinding for all intents and purposes, with a small cash or item reward for completing the "quest".

Any really cool content tended to be hidden, not usually as a matter of intent.  Either by conversation in the server chat or, for those fortunate enough to have access to this thing called USENET (look it up, punks!), through newsgroups devoted to a particular game one could hear about more involved quest that even to our jaded tastes today we would recognize as genuine content.

These were often quite involved and sometimes would be utterly impossible to figure out without those who had gone before sharing information.

Actually...some of the quests in The Secret World remind me of those old days, and in a good way.  A little bit of work can be quite rewarding (in real, not game, terms).

There sure as hell wasn't anything like Wowhead.

Now, if you want a quest spoiled...well, Google has spoiled us all I suppose.  It used to be hard to find.  And often didn't exist at all.

HISTORY BEGINS

And then came WoW (and to a lesser degree, EQ2) and questing in MMOs changed enormously.  WoW did to questing what it did to almost every system in the game, it took what existed before and streamlined it.  Then it polished it until it gleamed.  And made quest monkeys of us all.

Suddenly quest givers were obvious.  And usually clustered together.  The phrase "quest hub" came into the MMO player's vernacular.  It was convenient to quest.  And the experience gains were faster than any other method.

And so, for most purposes, mob grinding died with the appearance WoW's quest-focused levelling.  Oh sure, some times you might still grind mobs for a specific purpose (crafting components or deed completion, say) or a group of people might find a location where the xp or loot made it worthwhile, but for the most part, old school mob grinding was dead.

And good riddance.  For as much as "quest grinding" can be a, well, grind, it's nothing like standing in one place just killing one mob after another for hours on end.  If you've never done it, you don't know what you're missing and you should be glad.

As questing became the dominant method games used for levelling, the basic mechanics of questing themselves became more streamlined and more player friendly.  Over time they became perhaps too player friendly.

Now most games clearly label on their in-game maps where to complete a quest.  Quest items show up as clickable icons on the quest tracker.  Quest completions pop up to provide the rewards without having to return to the quest giver.  Oh...and quest flow...it has almost become too good.

If vanilla WoW made questing into the levelling mechanic, the Cataclysm expansion polished quest flow to the point where, in some ways, it became less of a themepark MMO and more of a single themepark ride.  You'd go neatly from hub to hub doing two or three batches of two or three quests and then, upon completion, be handed a deliver quest to take you to the next hub.

The quest flow in Cataclysm was so smooth and so fast you could fly through all 5 levels of new content in just a few days.  Very little extraneous time was spent doing anything that wasn't part of a quest.  The design was beautiful...and strangely uninvolving.

An odd circumstance...something so good it wasn't good anymore.  And the quest monkeys scratched their collective heads.

WILL THE PAGE TURN?

For the last almost 8 years, questing in the WoW vein has become the norm.  Almost every game released since has incorporated parts of their system.  The single-line of quest hubs that was so prominent in Cataclysm is almost indistinguishable from the system that TOR implemented (albeit in a less polished fashion because they are, after all, only BioWare not Blizzard).

It's all gotten so predictable and stale.  And in a few games, we are seeing designers looking at options other than the monorail.

Let me mention a few specifically.

Rift fired the first shots in the Boring Quests War with the dynamic content provided by rifts, invasions, and the like.  While it still has the standard questing mechanics, it also incorporated entirely new mechanics for generating the feel of a more living, changing world.

Small raiding parties running around, rifts spewing invasions and fighting off players...sometimes entire zones overrun, with quest NPCs slaughtered and their respawn points occupied by hordes of mobs.  That sort of thing doesn't happen in Goldshire in WoW.

The Secret World does incorporate a lot of the (now) standard questing boilerplate.  There are some "kill 10 zombie" type quests.  Most quest targets are clearly marked on the map.  Ah, but a great many of their quests are implemented quite differently indeed.

Most of the quests have a narrative thread where the actions you take actually make sense in a real-world way (if you can describe a cross between "Fringe" and "The X-Files" as "real-world).  You can see my earlier blogs for more info on TSW questing.

And the investigation quests are an AWESOME addition to the questing milieu.  More puzzle/scavenger hunt than "kill 10 zombies", if you want to fly through them for xp you can Google up the spoilers, but if you want to do a little thinking, a little trial and error, a little frustration...they can be enormously fun and rewarding.

They probably aren't a good option for every game, but Funcom deserves enormous credit for doing something VERY different, very appropriate for their game, and doing it very, very well.

Guild Wars 2 has re-jiggered almost the entirety of the questing mechanic, with the exception of the storyline quest which is fairly standard in terms of mechanics, at least through about level 15 or so.

GW2 has "hub" locations where a small number of different dynamic events will regularly go off, and that's about as close as they get to a quest hub.  Throughout the game world are dynamic...I'll call them "chains"...where an event occurs, which leads onto another event, and so on.  And these dynamic chains can have multiple branches, leading on until, in some cases, a Big Badass Mofo Mob (BBMM) is spawned, with the Phat Lewtz(tm) he drops as the reward.

So the best way to level in GW2 is to explore, to find nifty things happening and hang around to see what happens next.

This is the exact opposite of the perfectly streamlined hub-to-hub-to-hub quest architecture of WoW:Cataclysm or the less streamlined but otherwise identical TOR.

In GW2, for a great part of the levelling experience, the most economical way to level seems to be "wander around".  I doubt it will work out exactly that organically, but a guy can hope!

TWO REQUESTS

Questing is never going to vanish from MMOs, because it is a good mechanism for propelling a player from place to place and levelling them up.  But the standard, accepted mechanics have turned into an exercise in rote and repetition.

On the positive side, we're seeing some new games coming out with a philosophy of "standard questing has a place, but if we tweak it this way and add in this entirely different way of motivating players, we get a deeper and richer game experience for everyone."

And frankly, the quest designers have got to be sick to death of writing the same old crap.

But regarding old-fashioned questing...I do have two requests...

1)  Please get rid of quest log limits.  If you're going to throw a billion quests at us, don't make us micro-manage which ones we're going to keep and which ones we're going to throw away.  Really, how much goddamned database space is it going to take up to let us have those old group quests and "I'll get to that in a couple levels" quests cluttering up our quest log?

Just design the quest log to present the quests in a smarter way and cache the goddamned thing locally...I don't care how, but dammit give me a quest log with no limits!  Fricking SWTOR had one in beta (something met with Hallelujah-praise by me at the time) until they changed it to a ludicrously small 25 for one of the later betas and release.  Bastards!

2)  Please get rid of fucking escort quests.  Seriously guys, you are NOT a smart enough designer to make 'em work.  Nobody else has managed it, and neither will you.  Oh sure, occasionally someone by pure luck manages to balance an escort quest such that all classes can finish it, but that usually requires that you are escorting Darth Overkill on a roach-squishing mission.

Most escort quests end up with whatever shit-fer-brains NPC you're escorting aggroing too many mobs and getting you killed or aggroing too many mobs and getting himself killed.  Or he provides no assistance in a quest balanced for two.

Regardless...game designers and developers...your players HATE escort quests because they have no control over the NPC they are escorting, and that just leads to frustration.

We HATE them.  And we HATE you for putting them in.  So just stop making us HATE you.

Because we really, really want to love you!

Lens on There's More To Items Than Stats And Skins

Sometimes we MMO players can resemble a rat in a Skinner Box, pushing a button for a pellet of food, a pellet we call "loot".

Now certainly not all players are loot-driven, many have other primary reasons to play, from socialization and role-play to sociopathy and PvP ganking.  But I expect that all players get a bit of a jolt of energy from landing some awesome new loot.

Some games have launched with little or no real loot system in place, but often will change that to some degree to appeal to the loot-driven pleasure center in the brains of most gamers.

City of Heroes launched with no loot or crafting systems.  The only things the villains you beat up would drop were "Inspirations", little buffs you could save up a small number of for later use.

Fast forward a few years and CoH has a full-fledged crafting system supported by a wide variety of goodies the villains are kind enough to serve up upon defeat.

While it made sense for a super-hero MMO to not have the bad guys dropping loot (I mean Batman never frisked the unconscious Joker looking for gold and maybe a nice blue-drop magic sword), it also made sense for the devs to design a system that didn't feel too un-super-hero-ish while it stroked the loot-fueled pleasure center.

Star Wars Galaxies launched with mobs only dropping junk, if memory serves.  Some of it made for decent-looking housing items, but unless you were hunting krayt dragons for the rare-drop tissues used to make the highest of high-end weapons, loot was low-end vendor trash.

And in SWG this totally made sense, because any loot in the traditional MMO sense would have negated the entire point of a real player-driven/implemented economy.  That economy was at the very heart of what worked best in SWG and it kept people playing (often with multiple accounts).

But this game called "World of Warcraft" came out and the rocket surgeons at SOE/Lucas saw WoW's mind-boggling success and said to themselves, "How can they beat us?  We're StarfuckinWars!  What do they have that we don't?"

And, predictably, they completely misunderstood and implemented the "New Game Enhancement", universally hailed as The Worst Decision In MMO History.  Google up "swg nge" if you want the details, but I can sum up in this one quote from the game's senior director at LucasArts:

"We wanted more instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat."

In that one line, they display their complete lack of comprehension of two things:  1) What made WoW a compelling gaming experience, and 2) What the existing SWG community found compelling about their game.

So they completely overhauled almost every game system in SWG in an attempt to make it "like WoW" and ended up with "Like wow, look at that pile of dogshit."

Chasing loot can have mixed results, as we have clearly demonstrated.

So why all this talk about loot?  Because my recent playing of TOR has reminded me that sometimes improving a system...doesn't.

Items can just be stats and a skin, or they can be much more.

Let me begin by telling you the tale of a legendary sword...a sword named:

ZIN'ROKH, DESTROYER OF WORLDS

Once upon a time (patch 1.7), on the world of Azeroth, there was great troll city (dungeon) named Zul'Gurub.  A group of adventurers (20 man raid) of great power (level 60) entered the city, seeking treasure (phat lewtz) and fame (faction rating).

Here they defeated many trolls (trash mobs) and their leaders (8 bosses with an optional boss summoned by fishing!), before facing the troll god, Hakkar the Soulflayer!

Upon the defeat of Hakkar, amidst the rejoicing, there would be a great rolling of dice to determine who received the sweet rewards of victory and who would curse the Fates.

One of the goodies Hakkar might drop (remember, this was in the days where an end boss would drop 2 or 3 items from small pool of possibilities) was a mighty sword named..."Zin'rokh, Destroyer of Worlds".  As a side note, it does not seem to have had the ability to destroy worlds.

It was a two-handed sword with 64.8 dps, +28 stamina and +72 to attack power and was, at that time, pretty goddamned good for dps classes.  If it wasn't the best available, it was in the ballpark.

Fast forward many years (and patches), to the release of the Cataclysm expansion.  After talking for quite some time about a new game system called "the Path of Titans", shortly before the launch they shitcanned the whole thing for reasons mostly unknown.  In an attempt to recoup some of the dev time spent in designing this failed system, they created a new profession called "Archaeology", purportedly to put some of those assets to good use.

Archaeology was a slapdash piece of crap.  It promised nifty mechanics with cool rewards and delivered a grindfest with the player locked in mortal combat with a remorseless random number generator.  Guess who won that fight most of the time.

But because random number generators are random (or at least pseudo-random), sometimes people get lucky.  Relatively early on in my own personal archaeohell, I got lucky and ended up with perhaps the most sought-after piece of archaeoloot available...

"Zin'rokh, Destroyer of Worlds".  You see...ancient loot...archaeology...get it?

Now the boys at WoW were kind enough to upgrade the stats and such to be top-of-the-heap quality L85 gear.  The new, improved, old, dug-up "Zin'rokh, Destroyer of Worlds" now was 623.3 dps, +341 strength, +512 stamina, +216 to hit rating, +238 to crit rating.

Yes, that's 10 times the base damage increase from L60 to L85.  WoW has had just a tiny amount of stat inflation over the years.

I shipped this newfound item of supah-powah over to my deathknight and noticed a funny thing.  While questing and especially while running around town in Stormwind, my DK got a LOT of tells.

I got "Congratulations on Zin'rokh!", I got "Where did you get that sword?", I got "Is that a L85 Zin'rokh!?", I got "How long did you have grind archaeo to get that?", I got "I've been grinding archaeo for days on end, fuck you and your Zin'rokh."

You get the idea.  I got lots of tells.  Over a couple weeks I probably got 40 or 50 random tells about the Zin'rokh (Annihilator of Planets?) on my back.

Am I telling you all this because I had Zin'rokh (Obliterator of Orbiting Orbs?) and therefore I was cool?  Nope.  Believe it or not, this isn't about me, it's about Zin'rokh (Shatterer of Spheres?).

Zin'rokh (Extirpater of...screw it, I'll call it "ZDoW" from now on) was cool.  Millions of WoW players, past and present, know that ZDoW is a THING.  It has presence in the minds of players.  It wasn't just stats and a skin, it had lore, both in the game and, entirely separately, in the minds of the people playing the game.

Arthur had Excalibur.  Aragorn had Anduril.  Elric had Stormbringer.  Anomander Rake had Dragnipur.  And I, for a while, had Zin'rokh.

STATS AND A SKIN

During the beta of Star Wars: The Old Republic, the itemization in the game underwent a lot of overhauls.  Note, generally, this is a good thing in a beta.  In this case though, it was pretty worrisome because the changes were occasionally pretty drastic and it seemed to me to be awful late in the beta process to have not finished design-level work on a game system as important as itemization.  The last couple months of beta should be used to test balance and polish, not to re-jigger entire game systems.

Let me be clear, at launch the system wasn't bad at all.  It showed some really rough parts and clearly wasn't finished and needed polish, but it worked and was certainly an adequate system.

And it had a few items that were clearly THINGS, cool specific items like ZDoW, with an in-game lore that could in time develop a presence in the minds of the player base.

But players whined (as we will because we are a bunch of whiners) about the rough parts, the things that only kinda worked, the items that were inherently weak or strong, and all the missing polish.

And of all the mistakes the developers could possibly make, they listened to the players.  All sarcasm aside, the devs put their noses to the grindstone and after 5 or 6 months had taken the initial itemization system of TOR and polished and balanced it to death.

In doing so, no items were THINGS any more.  All items were reduced to a skin and stats.

They did it by creating a system that was so homogenous that all items were functionally identical.  (By "all items" I mean "all items that any character above level 20 is likely to use")  There were no legendary blasters any more, because all blasters consisted of a skin and slots for more generic bits, collectively called "mods".  A couple of these mods are for weapons, but some are so generic that they are for almost any other kind of item too.  Most only provide stats, but at least the "gem" mod provides a specific color to your lightsaber or blaster bolts in addition to more stats.

For a short time, certain crafted items could be "critical'ed" while being made and have an extra "augment" mod slot, making them (briefly) more sought after than the regular item of the same type, but that was soon remedied by allowing augment slots to be added to existant items.

So now, every item is exactly whatever the player wants it to be.  It has whatever skin he likes best, and it's loaded with the best mods the player can acquire.

And if a player gets some awesome new piece of gear, let's say "The Tri-Nuclear Atomizing Blaster of Hans Duo" you know what he does most of the time?  He pries out the mods and slaps them into the skin of whatever blaster he likes the looks of.  And that TTNABoHD?  It's sure not a THING.  It's (literally) an empty skin.

There are a lot of players who will prefer being able to completely control every little bit of their equipment in the way that TOR allows.  But for some, making everything so generic takes away enormously from the thrill of excitement provided by acquiring a cool new piece of gear.

MORE THAN STATS

First, let me get one thing out of the way...yes I know that in WoW now you can transmogrify an item, in essence copying a skin from one item onto another.  And I know that you can reforge an item, swapping around some of the stats to make it easier to reach things like hit cap or to min/max for your spec and build.

But even with that, even if it looks like ZDoW but has the stats of a Wiffle Bat (or vice-versa)...the THING, Zin'rokh, Destroyer of Worlds, still exists in the minds of players.

WoW has been waging a war against complexity by both balancing and dumbing down the game for years.  And yes, between transmogrification and reforging, WoW itemization is taking a step toward the sort of end result we see in TOR, and that's not necessarily a good thing.

The game designers and developers can provide the completely customizeable and balanced game systems that players are always saying they want, but I expect they'll discover that most players will find that what they thought they wanted wasn't what they got .

Because perfectly customizeable, perfectly balanced game systems are generic, and generic is boring.

Stats and a skin is boring.

Zin'rokh, Destroyer of Worlds is cool.

I prefer cool.

Lens on Legacy

So with a free week of game-time, I've gone back to "Star Wars: The Old Republic" for, oh, probably seven days.  Or less.

Our servers got merged, so I transferred my toons to their new homes.  Other than losing a few names, including "Lens" on both servers (i haz a sad), the process was quick and relatively painless.  It took them WAY too long to get it so that it was user controlled, rather than requiring BioWare to move them manually.  Seriously, how does that take 6 years of development and then 6 months of release?

Regardless, I'm back at it, for a while at least.  They've said there will be an HK companion that'll require a character on both sides on the same server, so I decided to start up a noob Sith on our Republic server.  Just in case I decide to hang around or come back at some point.

I also like, when returning to a game I've previously played, to start a new character to re-acquaint myself with the keys and game mechanics "from the beginning" as it were.  It also can help build up enthusiasm for hopping back to one of my higher level alts who are breathlessly awaiting my return.

Upon creating my new Sith character, one of the first things I did after rearranging my hotbars was to apply the self-buff...and had all 4 Imperial class buffs instantly applied.  Because I have each class past Act II of their storyline on the Republic side, my individual buff skills apply all of them due to...Legacy!

For those unaware, the SWTOR Legacy system is similar to what many games have for guilds, a "guild experience point/level system" where as the members of the guild accomplish various things, the guild itself levels up and gains abilities, buffs, and goodies that accrue to the whole guild.  But instead of "guild xp/level" it's more like "account xp/level" where it's the activity of alts that generate points/levels, and the rewards are account-wide (OK, on a per-server basis as well).

Today I'll be talking about SWTOR's Legacy system, the parts that work well, the parts that don't, why it is part-and-parcel of the games underwhelming success, and what other designers should learn (and steal) from it.

THE GAME DEFINING FEATURE...that wasn't.

TOR is obviously an extension of the "Knights of the Old Republic" (KOTOR) single-player RPGs, both of which were enormously successful.  Many of the game systems are pulled straight out of the single-player games with little change.  Some are just extensions of mechanics from the KOTOR games.  The designers obviously were guided by the KOTOR games in many ways.

One of the things they saw in the KOTOR games was, surprisingly for a single-player RPG, how many people replayed the damned things.  I played each game through to completion at least twice, and I almost never do that with any game, let alone an RPG.

"A-Ha!" they said, because that's what designers and developers say when they think they see something, "When we make the MMO version of this, people will roll alts and replay the game!  This can make for an awesome subscriber retention motivator!"

They continued, "We'll have this deep, involved system allowing those who have finished the content once to leverage that into their alts, allowing for enriched, extended gameplay and other supah-kool leetness!"

The intent was clear, a reciprocal reinforcement:  Legacy drives alt replay, alt replay increases the value of Legacy.

And then they shipped "Star Wars: The Old Republic" to trumpets, harps, and choirs of angels...but no Legacy system.

So people played for 3 months, capped a character or maybe two, got bored and left.

To paraphrase Gene Wilder in "Young Frankenstein", "Nice...leveraging."

NEXT TIME AT LEAST KISS ME BEFORE YOU **** ME

Because they hadn't finished the design at the time of launch, BioWare didn't really talk in any great detail about the Legacy system for quite a while.  They talked glowingly about the "coming soon" pile of awesome, but didn't really say much.

There was a lot of speculation in my guild about what might be involved.  I assumed, since there was a placeholder for the Legacy system on the skill tree display, that it would work similarly.  That you would level your legacy and get points to spend in the account-wide goodies.

BioWare had made it pretty clear that new races for characters would be involved, although whether that meant entirely new races or simply access to races not available by default for the appropriate faction/class wasn't known.  I'd guessed there'd be a "Racial Tree" where you could apply "Legacy Points" to open up different races for new character creation.

I had also said that as an example of the kind of thing you might be able to apply "Legacy points" to would be something like "increasing crit rates for companion crafting".  Yay me for being all prescient because that's in the second batch of Legacy goodies they came out with.

When the details of the Legacy system finally came out, my immediate reaction was one of venomous fury.

The "new racial options" required you to have finished Act III on a character (in essence, reached L50 level cap) to open up the race on that toon to all other characters to be created, regardless of faction or class.

And my L50 was a human...a race already available to all factions and classes.  And my next highest character, a L49 was also human.

Had they given us the details, I might very well have made a lot of MAJOR changes in the way I'd played the game.  I might have created my characters with different races, I might have created some of my Imperial characters on the same server with my Republic characters to leverage the features available.

Yes, I know that these various racial unlocks can be paid for with in-game credits, but that's really not the point.

One of the big rewards for playing a character to cap was negated because I made a choice in an information vacuum and felt screwed (sans lube) because of it.

I heard of LOT of "well if I'd known before..." from my guildies when the Legacy finally came out.

To paraphrase Gene Wilder in "Young Frankenstein", "My Grandfather's Legacy was doo doo!"  Class...dismissed.

THE RIGHT STUFFS

There's a lot of good ideas and good implementations in the Legacy system, and that needs to be applauded.

First, since I am an inveterate alt-whore (i.e. I always like to have characters of every class and craft to make sure I don't miss out on anything nifty, and no I'm totally not OCD why would you say such a thingdoIhavesomethingonmyshirt?  Now I have to go wash my hands.  Five times.) it's nice to see a major game system entirely designed to gently stroke that particular pleasure center of my brain.

Second, I really like the breakdown into both account-wide unlocks (again, per-server) and character specific unlocks.  I like that they have a required Legacy level to access them.

I think that the Legacy system as it exists right now, if it had been in the game at launch, would be considered a landmark addition to the MMO systems design pantheon, up there with things like Rift's dynamic events or WoW's instance finder.  Whether it's a system an individual player uses or not, it's one that deserves to be looked at for every new game being designed.  It might not fit, but the devs should give something like it full consideration.

I also have some issues with the implementation though.  Almost all of the unlocks come at a price in credits.  I understand to some degree, but it is quite frustrating having had to grind up my Legacy level to reach the point where I can get a goodie only to have to grind credits to pay for it.

I would very much like to see a system where some amount of the goodies can be acquired with, let's call them "Legacy points" because I called them that a few paragraphs back, and then the others can be purchased.  These Legacy points would be generated simply by getting Legacy levels.

This is especially true on the per-character perks where it would be nice to get some Legacy value without having to buy it.

But SWTOR's Legacy is a solid system, an extremely good first take on something I would like to see adopted and adapted for many MMOs.

To quote Gene Wilder in "Young Frankenstein", "It..Could...WORK!"

YOU CAN'T LEVERAGE WITHOUT A FULCRUM

So what went wrong with this whole SWTOR Legacy thing?  Why hasn't it helped turn TOR into a (pardon the pun) game-changer?

Pretty simple, really.  Strangely, the replayability of the KOTOR single-player games didn't translate to the MMO, historically a much more replay-friendly environment.

The reasons for it are pretty straightforward.  Freedom and choice.

In the KOTOR games, your choices really do matter.  You can have storylines fork, some quests may or may not be available, companions can die, and (at least in the first game) the ending can be entirely different...all depending on your choices.

And, excepting the beginning and ending locations, you'll have a lot of freedom to choose what planet to go to, what quests to do in what order, and so on.

These two things combined provide for a much richer, fuller feeling game, one where you get to define your own path and forge your own fate, to be hyperbolic.  When you finish your first game of KOTOR you can pretty much depend on two reactions, "That was pretty goddamned cool!" and "I wonder what would have happened if I had..."  And then you'd probably restart the game.

And that's the reaction they were counting on providing the fulcrum for the Legacy system to build subscriber loyalty, if not subscriber fanaticism.

But because of the necessities of a functioning MMO, those sort of defining choices and freedom are exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to engineer.

Often in BioWare's games, the choices are pretty stark.  I've joked for years that it's "You meet an old woman who needs your help.  Do you A) give her all your money, or B) slay her and feast upon her flesh?"

Well, in an MMO if you choose A and as a result she gives your newly broke-ass character an awesome ability, at some point the people who chose B need to get that ability too or you've inherently broken your MMO as there is now a "right" answer to the Old Lady Question.

And there's the contradiction...in an MMO with lasting choice, there's either a right answer that gives an advantage (which is untenable in an MMO) or there's no right answer and whichever way the player chooses they get the same advantage...in which case, obviously, choice doesn't matter.

In TOR, choice is a complete non-factor outside of story conversations.  With the exception of Advanced Class, no choice you make in the game make any notable difference.

And there's no freedom to go with the no choice.  You have a single path from L1 to L50.  You'll go from one planet to the next in the pre-designated order.  Once on a planet you'll go from quest hub to quest hub in the pre-designated order.  Sure, you can go back and...uh...re-do daily missions in zones you've outlevelled.  That spells "fun", right?  Well it gets the "eff you" right anyway.

No freedom, no choice, no fulcrum.  No fulcrum, no leverage.  No leverage and the Legacy system is trying to push Jell-O up a hill with a rope.

To quote Gene Wilder in "Young Frankenstein", "You know, I'm a rather brilliant surgeon. Perhaps I can help you with that hump."

And to quote Marty Feldman in response, "What hump?"

Lens on (un)Real Estate

It's impossible to predict what is going to "grab" any given MMO player.  We don't all like the same things and I don't know if I could come up with a single thing that appeals to every single MMO player.  I'd say "All MMO players like MMOs!" but given the amount of whining we do, that may not be the case.

Some people are only really interested in PvP.  Some people are all about progression and facing end-game raid content.  Some people are deeply involved in role-playing in-game.  Some people like to hang out and chat with friends.  Some people like to dance on mail-boxes with their near-naked elves (hello WoW players) or see how little clothing they can get on their seemingly-twelve-year-old slut bunny character (hello TERA players, seriously, creepy).

Often there's not a lot of overlap on those types of players described above (except the last two who obviously have a number of issues in common).

So I'm going to go on and on about one thing that's always had enormous value to me...I call it "stickiness", a game feature that helps keep a person playing long after they might have otherwise stopped...but it's also one I hear a lot of people say they have zero interest in.

Housing.  In-game housing.  I freaking love it when it's done well.  I even like it when it's deeply underdeveloped.  I'll first talk a bit about the best I've ever seen (Star Wars Galaxies) and how a game with an underwhelming system (LotRO) could greatly enhance the in-house experience.  And then I'll discuss why, for those of us who love it, well-executed in-game housing is an enormously "sticky" feature.

A HOME IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY

I'll start with the one negative thing I can think of about housing in SWG...people could load up their houses with so much crap that it could take quite a while to load it all in.

That's about it.

One of the great things about in-game housing items is that a lot of them are already existant art assets.  And art assets are things that MMOs have in great abundance.  Increasing their utility is obviously a significant gain...additional use for a wide array of assets for a (mostly) set investment of development time.

So if a chair, or a wall hanging, or a computer console, or a weapon is already in-game as an art asset, adding that to the potential housing items allows you to leverage all of those assets to greater effect.

Here's something that most MMO devs would agree with:  players enjoy personalization, the perception that they control how their character seems to others.  Everyone wants to seem cool and unique (the Special Snowflake Syndrome).  And housing lets them express themselves, to project some facet of their personality (real or role-played) into the game in a way that's accessible to other players.

My main character in SWG was a smuggler.  One thing smugglers could do that no one else could, was make "spice", in essence, illegal drugs.  (They later "censored" the drug-referencing spice out of the game).  So in the basement of my house, I set up what looked like an opium den for spice users.  Lots of rugs and pillows thrown around on the floor, items which were either hookahs or looked like 'em, some nice-looking storage for "the goods", a few artistic paintings on the walls, and so on.

While I sold a lot of spice in SWG, I don't think any of it was ever consumed in the spice den I had created.  I don't think I even put my vendor in there, but rather upstairs in a more convenient location.  But I got a number of compliments on the decor of my den.  And while I did it for my own entertainment, it was certainly nice to get a compliment on it.

How did housing work in SWG?  Well you were limited to the number of items you could have in a house by the size and type of the house.  Generally it was 100 items per "lot" that the house took up (each player could have up to 10 lots taken up by housing, automated resource harvesters, and factories), usually 200 to 500 items.  Later in the game there were also goodies that could be collected to expand any given house's limit.  For large houses with maximum expansion you could be talking up to about 1500 items.

1500 items...which is why some houses could take quite a while for the graphics to load in.

Each of these items could be individually dropped to the floor, then moved incrementally in all three axes.  And it could be _rotated_ in all three axes.  So for each of those (up to) 1500 items, as it loaded in it would have an associated (x,y,z) and (pitch, yaw, roll).  Yeah, lots o' info in a game with slow database access to start.

But because it was so flexible, the things you could do (and people did) with it were mind-boggling.  People used objects in startling ways just by rotating them and grouping them together in ways you'd never have seen coming.  I suggest you Google up some SWG screenies.  The amount of time some people spent (like anything Internet related) defied description.

Player-run housing shows and contests were very popular.  People liked showing off their creations.

And of course, this created demand for certain more difficult to obtain items for display in houses, which always to the benefit of the in-game economy.

During my time as a bio-engineer I made and displayed lots of the in-game pets which would function, if nothing else, as a fine stuffed animal stand-in.  I sold a bunch of those for just that purpose as well.

In-game housing, when done well, is a great driver of a lot of other in-game activities, and the players "into" in-game housing are enthusiastic, involved, and very loyal to the games.  I've seen it in SWG and in EQ2, which has a similar system to SWG.  Vanguard seems to have a nice system as well, so the direct descendants of EverQuest are well represented here.

Get a housing devotee started talking about their in-game property and they'll never shut the hell up.

That's the kind of loyalty that keeps subscribers around.

THE LAST SMIAL ON THE LEFT

Lord of the Rings Online has housing too.  It's very pretty looking.

And it stinks on ice.

When it was first brought out, my initial opinion was "This looks really nice and is the start of a really good housing system."

And since then, they've added LOTS of stuff you can put into your house, but done absolutely nothing to improve the basic housing functions.  Really, it's appalling.  And appallingly short-sighted.

Each house has a certain number of "hooks", and you can only put certain types of items on certain types of hooks.  Thin, small, and large furniture hooks, wall hooks, floor hooks, all in specific places in small numbers.  Basically, your options are dreadfully limited.  You'll also have a small number of  yard hooks.

The total number of available hooks will depend on the size of the house and no matter what that total is, it will feel dreadfully small.  A "full" house will have items scattered around through many mostly-empty rooms and will in no way feel like somebody lives there.  It'll look like they store their spare furniture there for their real house.

And every festival or new instance adds nice new furnishing items that can fight for space in the dreadfully limited housing they've given us.

Player's opinions on in-game housing differ, but those who don't care about it don't care, and those who do want so much more than this half-assed half-finished thing they've given us.

That's what's so frustrating about it...if they hadn't included it...well, most MMOs don't have housing, so while disappointing, it wouldn't be a big deal.  But to include a major game system like that and then leave it unchanged for five years is baffling to me.

Especially since the game has gone free-to-play.  Housing freaks will spend enormous time and effort...and money...to make their house into a showpiece.  So add in more options for placing/rotating objects and then charge for more "hooks" the way they do for additional slots in the bank or shared storage or wardrobe.  And charge for super-cool housing items, the way they do for horses.

Due to either ineptitude or foolishness they are missing a market opportunity...plus it's one that adds to their bottom line by reusing in-game art assets.

LotRO's housing could have been something special.  Instead it's unfinished and unsatisfying.

OH GIVE ME A HOME...

I actually don't care if it's where the buffalo roam or not.  And forget about "seldom is heard a discouraging word".  Clearly, around me, often is heard both discouraging and profane words.

I want housing in more games.  I want it in almost all games.  In TOR you should be able to decorate your ship.  The Secret World needs apartments in Seoul, London, and New York.  Guild Wars 2 could use a place to hang up your weapons...and maybe some nice trophies too!  Oooo, I know, a house in Divinity's Reach and a house-boat in Lion's Arch!  What a dreamer...

If you're a game designer, here's what a good implementation takes...  Freedom of placement and rotation.  A (very) large number of potential in-house objects.  A wide variety of types of objects to allow for things like "a weapon collection on the wall", "a trophy room", as well as the usual bedroom and kitchen.  Items obtainable from crafting, questing, and random drops.  Different floorplans, different sizes, different appearances.  I'd like a yard with appropriate items for it, but I understand that can be a lot more problematic.

I know...that's a pretty long feature list.  But you get a lot out of it if you do it right.  First and foremost, a good implementation of in-game housing has _enormous_ "stickiness" with a lot of players.  The prospect of keeping and improving their showpiece home can help keep paying customers around longer.

It provides an additional method of revenue generation through the almost ubiquitous "in-game store", both through expansion of housing limits and through store-only special items.  And by providing a second use for a great many art assets (everything from the open world furnishings and animal head trophies) it increases the value of those assets going forward.

Players are almost universally seeking for ways to customize their experience.  Most MMOs provide them with ways of controlling their appearance, but giving them an _environment_ to play with as they see fit can be a powerful motivator.

All we want is a house to make into a home!

Lens on The Little Things

We MMO players are a whiny lot.  We complain about everything...but then there's always a lot to complain about.  MMOs are extraordinarily complex systems, systems that we try to navigate in a smooth, progressive fashion to maintain a certain amount of "fun".

Now the big things we do include such accomplishments as "reaching level cap", "acquiring legendary gear", "putting a raid on 'farm' status", and "color-coordinating our outfit".

That last one can be really, really hard to do.

Because we can't just have everything handed to us on a silver platter, the game has to "creatively get in the way", forcing us to spend time, effort, or money (which usually takes time and effort to acquire) in our quest for...whatever it is we want.

Games have a lot of different methods for "getting in the way"...making us be heroes for our heroic goals.  And they also have a lot of simple, small things we have to do frequently, which have the mostly unintended consequence of slowing us down simply as a side-effect of not being well-designed.

These are often referred as "quality of life features".  Little things that smooth out the sharp edges of the game that we seem to always stub our toe on.  A lot of these occur in the UI because, well, we are the Users and we need to Interface so that's probably a good place to start!

Let me talk about a few...

HOTBAR LOCKS

Most MMOs have hotbars.  Icons go into these hotbars.  We sometimes click on these icons and accidentally drag them into the Terrible Oblivion Of Mis-Dragged Icons where sadly they are lost forever.

I can't tell you the abject terror generated in, say, LotRO when I realize there's an empty slot in one of my hotbars where something USED to be, but I can't remember what it was.  Time to go through my skill list one-by-one, comparing the incredibly generic icon art (really, LotRO's icon art is pretty awful) with what's left on my hotbar, searching for the one, itinerant skill.

Historically, there has been a checkbox in most games' UI control panel for lock/unlock hotbars...but seriously, it's a complete pain and it seems that it's a 50/50 bet each time that anyone will remember to relock their bars.

And then someone thought up putting the lock/unlock ON THE HOTBAR.  Just a simple button with icon next to the hotkeys.  Simple, obvious, fast...cue Hallelujah Chorus.

Winner:  First time I saw it was Rift I think.

SHARED STORAGE

If there is one constant among all MMOs, it's "I don't have enough room to put all of my crap!"  OK, not all MMOs...in EVE you'll just end up with crap spread out amongst half the planets in space, and in Anarchy Online you can put bags inside bags, but good luck finding anything.

Pretty much all MMOs offer you a bank to put your excess crap.  In fact, that's one of the big money makers for the Free-To-Play games, more bank space.

MMO players are, in general, a cross between someone with severe OCD and the scariest episode of "Hoarders" ever broadcast.  Really, if we have a motto it's "But I might need that!"

Many people have alts just to give themselves more bank space.  But some of us play our alts, so they need bank space of their own!

At some point we were gifted with...shared storage.  Shared bank space available to all characters on an account.  It's not only MORE...it's better because you don't have to mail junk back and forth between alts any more...just stick it in the shared storage.  And it means I won't have piles of the same junk in every separate character's bank because I can have a single pile in the shared storage.

It's not just more...it's easier.

Winner:  Lord of the Rings Online has an excellent implementation.

THE GUILD WARS 2 DOUBLE-WIN

This is related to shared storage, but it's much more than that.  When I saw it in the first beta weekend I sat there, mouth agape in sheer stupefied incomprehension of the awesome I was witnessing.  It's pretty fuckin' good.

First, in GW2 all storage is shared.  Individual characters don't have their own bank space, it's all shared across the account.  And there isn't a lot of space there either, especially since I plan on buying 3 more character slots to give me 8, one for each profession.  I will undoubtedly then have to purchase more bank tabs for more space...

No, this isn't the part that's awesome.  In fact, I'm unenthused about this part.

Ah, but the next part is so wonderous as to make a blind man see rainbows.

The characters also share a second "bank".  This bank holds crafting materials.  And it has one slot already designated for each material..."leather scraps", "copper ore", "copper bar", and so on.  So no crafting material will take up any of our precious "real" bank space.

And now, for the one-more-thing to coup de gras you right in the pleasure center of your brain...you can send that stuff directly to it's pre-designated slot in the not-really-your-bank bank from your bags.

You're out in the middle of nowhere and you find an ore node...you whack it three time and have 3 shiny copper ore in your bag.  Right-click it, select "Deposit collectible" and it vanishes from your bag and goes to your bank.

That easy.  That slick.  That awesome.  Excuse me as I dab away tears.

Winner:  Guild Wars 2 can I have your babies?

ONE MORE FOR GW2

Picture this:  you're running about the countryside doing, y'know, adventurey stuffs, when you spot a nice rich patch of gold ore!  Ooooo, shiny!

There's a little "Fluffy Weresquirrel" next to it that needs to be cleared out first, so you engage.  Said fluffball is about half dead when, out of nowhere, some prick-with-legs goes flying by and steals your shiny.  He may even watch you finish off the squirrel.  He may even /dance at his leet skillz in stealing your ore.

Pretty much there's nothing you can do about it.  Any response other than ignoring the asstard will just encourage him.  And the appropriate response of discovering his actual identity, flying to his town, walking up to him and kneecapping him with a crowbar while screaming "Ninjaloot my gold again!  I dare you!" is both expensive and time-consuming, believe you me.

This doesn't happen in GW2.  Not because there are no asstards in GW2 (a quick look around at people's names will assure you that there are tards of all creeds and colors aplenty), but because it can't happen.

Because every resource node can be mined/harvested by each player once.

Problem solved.  Is it realistic?  Of course not.  In this case...who cares?

Winner:  Guild Wars 2 can I have your babies more?

APPEARANCES ARE DECEIVING

WoW has always had a lot going for it.  It has been undeniably the most successful at pushing the MMO buttons we (mostly) love to have pushed.

But it's always had things it was slow to pick up on...and sometimes they became obvious.  Really, really obvious.

As a new expansion or content patch approached, more and more of the populace had completed the content already there...and everybody of the same class looked identical.

OK, the gnomes were shorter, but other than that...identical.  Wearing the same gear with their goddamned shoulder pads so huge and glowing so brightly you couldn't make out their faces to tell 'em apart.

In a genre of games where people are supposed to feel heroic, trying to look like everyone else sounds more like high school.

So...I don't know...how about you let people wear the stuff they want to, for cosmetic purposes?

Maybe it won't effect how easy it is to play the game, but it will make it easier to enjoy the game.

And some games have given us appearance tabs.  An entirely different "paper doll" to wear gear for cosmetic purposes only...so you can look however you want to look without keeping a raft of gear in your bags and manually swapping.  This also allows for purely cosmetic clothing to allow people more individualization.

Given how much people like to appear "different" in MMOs, and how much we generally like (at least the illusion of) individualization, it's amazing it took WoW so long to deliver even the half-assed version they have now.

Nobody, but NOBODY, does this as well as Lord of the Rings Online.  You can have multiple tabs (and buy more for Real Money!).  You can have huge numbers of cosmetic items, they have a wardrobe for storing them (and you can throw in differently-colored versions of the same item and it will offer you all the different colors you've tossed in [or dyed] from a single slot), and you don't even have to keep the items on your appearance tabs if you don't want them taking up space.

Basically, their implementation is just freaking awesome.  A lot of other games either do similar things, or have functions to provide some of the same result, but they are inelegant at best and more often simply slapdash.

Winner:  LotRO wins in a walk, having lapped the field.

IT'S A BIG, BIG, BIG WORLD

And we need to get around in it.  I don't just mean on foot, or horse, or goat, or speeder, or cyberspider (srsly, Rift!)...I mean covering vast expanses in less-than-vast amounts of time.

EQ had...well, not much.  Speed boosts.  Boats on a 30 minute schedule.

SWG had...shuttles on 5 minute schedules on-planet and starships on a 15 minute schedule between planets (if memory serves).  Watching that ship leave just as you run up...I swore more at SOE about that than everything else in the game combined.

WoW had 30 minute hearthstone and then (sometimes excruciatingly) long flights between places.  Oh...and you'd better have remembered to talk to the flight master everywhere you went or you might be walking there a second time!  You could also bug every mage that went by for a portal to Pick-Your-Major-City.

LotRO was like WoW except it did have fast travel between many locations or you could burn through some travel rations if you had a captain to summon you or a hunter to "teleport" you.

These all worked in their own way, but I'm going to give the nod to GW2...the first game in a while with _no_ mounts at all!

Mostly because it's not strictly needed.  Lion's Arch (a neutral city) has portals between the 5 capitals.  Inside each capital, and liberally scattered all over the maps are Waypoints.  You can click on your map and be instantly ported to any Waypoint you've activated (oh, and you only have to get close to 'em to "learn" them, no clicky required!) for a small fee.  Really fast, really flexible.

But dammit, I would like some cool mounts!

Winner:  No mounts, but GW2 makes it easy.

SUMMARY

I've only hit a few of the nicer improvements in quality of life features we've seen over the last few years.  Some are small things, but they are all things you miss a LOT when they're not there.

The lesson for MMO devs here is that often, small features (often easily implemented ones like the hotbar lock button) can have very large impacts on player perception.

So...make a big impression on your players...get the small stuff right.