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.