December 2015 – Page 12

Reconstructing Garrisons

December 5, 2015 by Belghast

Largely Academic

With my recent return to World of Warcraft, I’ve been readjusting to the rhythm of Warlords and one of the big parts of that is the Garrison. As is always the case when I start to think about parts of the game, I begin fabricating ways that I would improve it. I am not sure if this is the armchair designer in me, or the programmer… but whatever case the instinct is always there. You can hand me the best possible implementation of something, and I will find ways I would tweak and improve it. Before even starting to write this, I realize that Garrisons like so many new and interesting ideas in Warcraft… are being utterly abandoned when it comes to Legion. So I am largely going through this as an academic exercise, because it has been on my mind. This line of inquiry all started as I once again began trying to dig into the Shipyard for my Garrison. Everything about that minigame feels like an worse in every way version of the Garrisons. With Garrisons there was at least a clear path to success… and with Shipyards the answer seems to be throw oil at the problem until you get something interesting. This of course lead me to start sifting through the design of Garrisons as a whole… and this mornings post is the loose collection of those ideas.

A Mobile App

I have said this point numerous times, but I am going to highlight it here again… for the purpose of hoping that if we ever get another garrison like feature… Blizzard will rethink the implementation. Everything surrounding the Garrison should have been available through a mobile app. I took the time to crudely mock up an ipad version, and I think for the most part it works. Of course this a mocked up version of the Master Planner addon… but whatever… I feel like anyone who is actually using their garrisons is using that addon. The fact that we can stroll around our garrisons is awesome… but the aspect that I dislike about it is how much it takes us out of the game. The garrisons I think were meant to be this place for the player in the world that is just theirs, and it does a great job of doing that. The problem being… people just live in their garrisons now. Before and after a raid… you can look at the guild list and see every single player sitting in the garrison fiddling with whatever they need to fiddle with to get ready. For both factions, Ashran was supposed to be this Dalaran like experience to bring us all together in the same place… but it was generally so poorly laid out that people have just adapted to doing everything they need to do in a combination of the Pandaria Shrine and their chosen set of Garrison buildings.

The negative side effect is there has been this daily maintenance ritual that takes us out of the game… instead of causing us to dig further into it. I know personally I have ten characters with garrisons, and four of those with level three fairly maxed out ones. I feel this obligation that if I do ANY of them… I should just go ahead and sift through all of them making sure every machine is optimally humming. This style of interaction is what we tend to expect from Tiny Tower/Fallout Shelter style mobile games… where we check in every so often and make sure all of the parameters are working like we intended them to. If I could have fiddled with my Garrisons from my phone, when I was stuck waiting in line at the pharmacy, or any other time I am forced to sit idle… it would have felt like a much better experience. As cludgy as the web based integration with Destiny is, it has given me ideas of how well it COULD work if someone did so properly. In Destiny I can fiddle with my inventory, or check the status of quest all from the web… or as a result of that api third party mobile app. That means I can do things like… if I forgot a consumable in the bank… I can drop it straight into the active characters inventory. Mobile integration of the garrisons would turn what feels like a lot of busywork, into a resource that is valuable and helps the players get more out of their game time.

One Garrison Per Account

I think pretty much everyone agrees that Garrisons are essentially a mobile app already… but now we are going to get into the more controversial tweaks. I think there should have been a single Garrison that is being built by ALL of your characters on your account. Now this would get a little weird when it comes to someone who plays both Horde and Alliance… so in theory I would also be fine with having one Alliance Garrison per account and one Horde Garrison per account. This means that all of the resources you are gathering would be shared in one big pool… and similarly all of your followers would be shared. Now in order to make this work, you would need to keep adding new followers as you add characters that gain the ability to access the garrison. The idea is here that you start with a base of like ten followers, and then each additional “garrison eligible” character would add 5 more followers to the pool. There would need to be a cap to the maximum number of followers, but we could safely place that cap somewhere in the range of 40. That would allow you to have upgraded your follower count with six more characters before capping out. This gives you a real reason why you would want to be playing more than just the one character, because alting becomes a path to access more perks.

Similarly I would make it so that the Garrison footprint itself expands as you get more characters to the level cap of 100. Much like the garrison expands when you shift from TownHall 1 to 2 or 3… or add the Shipyard. There would be additional annexes of your Garrison that would add building slots when you get any of your alts to level 100, allowing you to eventually build all of the buildings to support your characters. This also serves the purpose that I originally hoped Garrisons would do of allowing you access to tradeskills that your current character doesn’t have. When you are a multi-crafter like myself, you spend a silly amount of time not playing the game.. and swapping resource between characters. To facilitate this better I would have added a new kind of bank that came with the Garrison that was shared by all characters on your account. Once again the bank would start small but each additional character you get to the level cap would increase the bank by a number of slots, essentially giving you something in the end that is around the same size as void storage. While you could never store EVERYTHING you would want to store in this… it would serve as a place for shared crafting resources or raid materials among your stable of characters.

Characters in Your Garrison

One of the things I love about the Garrison is seeing the NPCs that I have picked up as followers, running around and at least “acting” like they are interacting with each other. In my perfect version of the Garrison, each of these followers would be more fleshed out… and through a sequence of talking to them and doing tasks for them… it would eventually open up a side mission. What I am thinking is the same sort of interaction that you have with the NPCs that you gather up in say a Mass Effect game or Dragon Age. The side missions might unlock new cosmetic items, or simply have a decent gold or whatever the raid currency happens to be pay out. This would make them feel more like actual characters, and less collectibles to decorate your sorta kinda home…. that just happens to look like everyone else. Currently there are a handful of followers that offer quests, or sell merchandise… and that is awesome. I just wish they were all so well thought out as those, because right now it feels like an awesome mechanic that only goes about half of the way to really being great. Especially with a shared Garrison, it would allow players to feel a greater connection across multiple characters to the same batch of NPCs.

As cool as the NPCs are however… I think the best possible thing for Garrisons would be to see your OTHER character wandering around in them. Ultimately where I am getting at with a lot of my changes is to give the players a reason to roll multiple characters. I realize there are folks out there that only have the one character that they care about… and that is fine… but for most of us multiple characters is the way we stay engaged with the game for long periods of time. There would be this huge sense of accomplishment in seeing your other characters wandering around in the same setting, highlighting the fact that your entire stable of characters is a “team” of sorts and that you are all together working towards some common goal. So for all of those people who take painstaking care in transmogrifying to just the right look… you would get to see your characters strutting their stuff together decked out in any fashion you would like. Additionally I think a nice feature would be for you to have the ability to interact with one of your characters that is wandering the garrison, and do some pretty simple things. Like hand off an item to them, or ask them to craft something for you. Essentially I am looking for ways to allow you to keep from having to do a constant sequence of swapping characters instead of actually going out into the world to play the game.

The Problem with Garrisons

There is a lot that I love about the concept of Garrisons, but my large problem has always been and continues to be today… that it keeps me from playing the game. Sure you are thinking… “but Bel, Garrisons are part of the game!”. To that I say… “Sorta”, they are this package of busy work designed to keep players coming back to the game… but in truth they also end up keeping the player from really going out into the world to play it. It is so easy to get stuck in this rut of logging in every night, and doing nothing but collecting garrison loot and sending more followers out on missions. If you add harvesting the ore or herbs, you can easily end up with a two hour or longer ritual that means… that is a couple of hours that you weren’t going out engaging in the world. You weren’t raiding, or running dungeons… or even completing the content in areas like Ashran or Tanaan jungle. You were essentially sitting at “home” doing paperwork, while there was a bigger and more interesting world out there… simply because we as players end up feeling an obligation to do it… or in some way we will “fall behind”.

When I left the game last time… I had run into a rut where I was simply doing nothing but garrisons and two nights of raiding a week. There was nothing pulling me outside of the tiny walled garden and thrusting me out into the more interesting world as a whole. The idea with these tweaks falls along the lines of making Garrisons feel more important to all of your characters at a whole, while speeding up the interactions so that you can get done whatever you need to do and get right back out into the world. World of Warcraft as a whole needs to do more to support the alting lifestyle, and I feel like most everything that is soul bound should really be account bound. I’ve also long felt that currency like Valor should be accumulated at an account level, allowing players to play whatever class happens to be needed by their guild or their friends… but at the same time support the development of the characters they really want to be gearing. Basically there are a ton of tweaks I would do to the game, but this morning… I simply focused on Garrisons and some quality of life improvements. I am sure I will catch hell for some of the things I have said… but at the end of the day its my blog and my opinions.

On Continued Evolution

December 4, 2015 by Ashgar

One more of these, then I think we’ll do something else.

Pretend there’s a plot

On Continued Evolution — Get the Amulet, defeat the bad guy. The first half is in the time travel area…

I didn’t feel like coming up with another synonym for Final Fantasy

The Final Battle

That’s it for Evoland. I wasn’t terribly completionist, and there are a both stars and cards to collect, but I can do without. Maybe I’ll try this for something else later.

MMO Ecosystems

December 4, 2015 by Belghast

What is a Game

Yesterday I got involved in a long winded discussion about the effects a major guild dying, has on a game… the game in question of course was World of Warcraft. There were a couple of different points of view floating around, and they largely centered around what the definition of the game meant to each person. Some folks chose to take the literal view and focus on the mechanics of the game itself, and argue that the loss of a big guild does nothing to change the way the game functionally plays. I however choose to view the game like an ecosystem, where quite honestly the actual game mechanics become one of the least important parts of shaping daily interaction. When a game launches, it ceases to be all about the pushing of buttons and the getting of loot. Much like a workplace has little to do with the rules and regulations that you set up ahead of time… but instead the interactions between the employees and the general sense of morale. If you have a great cohesive environment created by the players, you can overcome a lot of the technical shortcomings a game may have.

When a game is server based, like World of Warcraft, the game for most players is narrowed to a very specific niche… namely the things that occur on that individual server. Sure you can re-roll anywhere, but once someone has set down roots in my experience they are highly unlikely to move. I have 11 characters on Argent Dawn for example, and the vast majority of those characters are over level 90. So when I contemplate changing servers… the will to do this is pretty non-existent. My experiences with the game have largely been shaped by those individuals I have had interactions with on that server. With the switch of focus from group based activities to largely solo interaction… this might have changed, but I find it hard to believe that any given player is not in at least some way influenced by the forces at play on their home server. A large chunk of that environment is the large guilds that populate its ecosystem. So when one of those guilds leaves… it is felt not only in the social channels, but also in the economy and the general activity of the server. Crafters need time pressed raiders to buy their potions and “raid mats”, and casual players benefit from having those raiders regularly participating in group activities.

The Ecosystem

I’m going to break out and talk about a non-Warcraft example of the importance of a guild. In Wildstar on the Entity server, there is a guild I am part of called the Black Dagger Society. While I happen to be a member and might be a little bit biased, I think they represent one of those guilds that is for lack of a better term “too big to fail” when it comes to the health of that server. I would be willing to bet that there is not a single Exile player that does not benefit from them being on the server, and to some extent I would be willing to bet that even the Dominion players feel their presence as well. The big event that they organize is ThaydFest which is a weekend player run festival that serves as a focus point of getting players interacting with each other. The scope of this thing is massive, and you simply cannot exist on the server that week without feeling its pull. Similarly the BDS are the sort of guild that is constantly interacting with the world and the players that are not in there guild. I’ve rode along as they rolled into a zone… and started asking anyone there to join them in the taking down of this world boss or that. I’ve also watched their members be the first to respond when someone publicly asks for help. They embody the spirit of what an amazing community focused guild is like.

So if something were to happen to the Black Dagger Society, the effects would ripple to the core of the Entity server. There are a lot of things that would simply stop happening because I’ve not seen a similarly community focused force stepping up to offer the same level of interaction. Carbine as a company would do well to do whatever they can to nurture the fact that a guild like this exists, and they have done some community spotlight pieces on ThaydFest in an attempt to help them out. But when it comes to World of Warcraft, I have lived through the effect of guilds just like the BDS dying on a server, and watched the community as a whole contract. Cataclysm was the great changing of the guard on Argent Dawn, and when I came back at the end of it… all of the rich social network that I had when I left… had shriveled up and died. When one big guild leaves… it has a trickle down effect touching the satellite guilds that also interact with them. So to the players… that played on Argent Dawn, and stayed there during this transition… the game was absolutely traumatically changed for them. I know this… because I’ve talked to many of my friends that probably at least a little bit feel betrayed because I left them.

The Important Parts

Essentially this discussion is one about definitions, and how narrow your focus is. The trap that we can all too easily fall into is assuming that every player plays the game the same way as we do… and even more so… gets the same enjoyment and stimuli out of the game as we do. For a socially motivated player… the “game” is all about the interactions they have with other players. For a challenge focused player… the “game” is all about taking on new experiences and defeating them one by one. For an exploration motivated player… the “game” is all about seeing and experiencing new things. So while functionally the “Game” with a big G didn’t change… because the mechanics didn’t actually change when a group of players left the game… the environment and the atmosphere absolutely does. The problem is for me at least that a server is a snap shot in time. I will never be able to get back the Late Night Raiders from Vanilla Warcraft, even though I still keep in contact with dozens of them on a regular basis. I might be able to play a game with two or three of those people at a time… but I will never be able to set up another situation where the hundred plus people that circled that raid will still exist in the same setting.

The “Game” for me is this sequence of vignettes in time, of certain players and certain situations… that either positively or negatively influenced my experience. When they are gone… there is a void that is irreplaceable. So while you can still find Pixi peddling her “extra special pixipacks”, there will never be a Duranub Raiding Company, or a No Such Raid… or any of the countless other groups that I have interacted with and loved over the years. There was a time when on my server every single raid leader communicated with every other raid leader, and that infrastructure is just gone now. What is left is a sequence of walled gardens that no longer try and reach out to the other walled gardens and set up communication lines. As a result the server seems so much smaller than it used to, and while I love hanging out with the people there still… the experience is tarnished by the former grandeur that I remember. Did any one one of those players make the difference? Probably not, but it was the cumulative effect of losing a large group of players at the same time. There will always be a wistful nostalgia for the way those days felt, even though there was also a bunch of bullshit that went along with it.

Care and Feeding

Some companies do a great job of nurturing the community environment. Wildstar and Carbine for example seem to really be trying to focus on the players and their communities in trying to make that game a great place to inhabit. The challenge with Warcraft is that the game is just so insanely huge at this point, that it is really difficult to highlight every part of the community that is working. I do think that Blizzard does a bunch of things that actively harm communities, without really thinking about it. When you look at the “Game” with a large G… they have been regularly applying the sledge hammer to it every couple of years as they roll out a grand new scheme that is going to “improve the game”. The first of these fall-outs for me at least was when they shifted the focus from 40 player raiding to 25 player raiding. This created the “guildpocalypse” as I refer to it… and my own raid… the Late Night Raiders was one of the casualties that never successfully transitioned to a smaller raid size. Similarly the events that caused me to leave Warcraft the first time, were brought on by the shift in Cataclysm to greatly incentivizing guild based raiding. Prior to that our raid was a thriving ecosystem made up of House Stalwart and a bunch of smaller and more personal satellite guilds that together created one vibrant non-guild raiding landscape.

The focus on guild based raiding however meant that if we continued to raid in this fashion… that ultimately some of the guilds would see zero benefit from defeating this boss and unlocking this achievement. Instead we attempted to squeeze all of these guilds into House Stalwart and we went from being a guild of 600 characters to a guild of around 1000 characters over night… and this change was just too much for me personally to adjust to. There is a huge difference in raiding with someone two nights a week, to having to interact with them constantly in your guild. Blizzard is constantly fiddling with the dials… introducing Valor, taking it away… and introducing it again in a different way. I cannot count the number of times classes have changed so much that they end up causing players to abandon what was previously their main. I’ve done this myself numerous times because of a change in the game making the experience no longer enjoyable. Each of these decisions also has a social cost associated with it, that it often feels like is not being taken into account. Essentially the point of this post, and the eight paragraphs that it is ending up being… is that a game is more than just its mechanics, especially when you are dealing with a hugely social game like an MMO. For me the most important parts of this game, or any other for that matter… are the ones that have no direct relationship to the game itself, but instead are a side effect of the ecosystem that builds up around it. My game is always largely influenced by the people I happen to be playing it with.

The Burden of Convenience

December 3, 2015 by Tamrielo

I had an extended discussion yesterday about data analytics for websites and retailers. The subject was the idea that companies are collecting data about their customers, then selling/trading it and using it for things like targeted advertisements and shopping experiences tailored to a customer’s personal profile.

This is something that’s a hot button for quite a few people. The word “creepy” is thrown around a lot, as is “invasion of privacy”, which I think is understandable but I also feel can be a somewhat hypocritical concern. My immediate thought was that people have restaurants and shops where they’re a regular– where the staff knows them by name, knows their favorite meal/size/tastes, and gives them an extremely personal, tailored experience. This is considered GOOD CUSTOMER SERVICE, and it’s the kind of thing that gets a place repeat business and good reviews. The process by which this happens isn’t far removed from, say, Target collecting user data from customers who use credit cards to pay. Frequently, those establishments have a profile at a terminal in the back that they’re pulling up so they can ask you how you like your new shoes from last time, or if you want “the usual”.

It’s interesting to me, because it begs the question of what’s different about the restaurant where you’re a regular and Target, that you shop at a bunch. Why is it good customer service when your server knows your name but creepy and privacy-invading when it’s Target? When your favorite bartender moves to a new bar and you start frequenting that one, your information is shared with that new bar; how is that different from your profile being shared? There’s no opt-in there, you didn’t choose to have your information shared, but you’d (likely) be happy to get the same kind of personalized treatment at the new bar as you enjoyed at the old one, but many people are much less cheerful about seeing Facebook advertise their recent Amazon browsing.

My take is that the difference is tact. If your favorite restaurant were to loudly announce you as you walked in (“our FAVORED CUSTOMER!”), and make indelicate personal comments like “we see you’ve ordered the double-fried monte cristo with extra bacon and jelly the last nine times you’ve been here, would you like the number of a cardiologist?”, you’d probably stop going. Not because you object to the data being collected necessarily, but because it’s being used ineffectually and unsubtly. It’s too transparent that if you browse something on Amazon and don’t buy it, you see the exact same thing on Facebook later, heedless of whatever reason you may have had for not purchasing it.

I think the real problem is that the use of data analytics isn’t good enough. It’s a blunt instrument, lacking both the finesse and the tact of what we consider the more “personal touch”. It doesn’t help us to see the same Amazon listing that we already browsed, but it might to show us similar, cheaper products, or ones with higher ratings, or ones with more features. It’s not helpful for Target to hit you with advertisements for size XXXXL briefs, but it would be helpful for it to send you ads for laundry detergent or toilet at about the time you usually run out.

Data-driven marketing frustrates us because it doesn’t feel like an effective use of our data– it’s just that this is a few steps removed from an individually bothersome incident. It’s not that data analytics are necessarily creepy, it’s that when they’re used badly creepy situations can occur. Like your favorite diner recommending you a cardiologist, whether or not they’re accurate in their assessment it’s them using the information they have about you poorly.

A comment I’ve heard is about “control” and “opting in”. Putting aside that we already cheerfully hand massive amounts of data to social media platforms, it’s not terribly difficult to keep a big retailer from collecting data on you– simply don’t give out your e-mail address and pay for your purchases in cash. I suspect, however, that the convenience of a card is too overwhelming for a majority of people. Here’s the thing with a card– paying for something with a card is trading on your reputation to make purchases. It’s essentially a voucher that says “such and such financial institution thinks that I am a reliable enough person that I will pay my debt to you for these things I am taking from your store”. You can’t trade on your reputation, though, without some tie to yourself, without giving up some amount of personal data. Companies have used that personal data — data provided through lines of credit — for their own ends for centuries, this is nothing new. There’s a cost to the convenience of using a card to pay for things, and it’s not generally in the price you pay for goods.

A lot of this is also that I feel like Pandora’s Box is already open– even if we overwhelmingly decide that data analytics-driven marketing is creepy and unacceptable, it’s not like corporations worldwide are going to suddenly go “oh, yeah, I guess we shouldn’t do that”; they’ll just get better at being subtle. This is already happening. For one company, analyzing customer clickthrough data revealed that customers were less likely to look at one of a series of advertisements if all of them were accurate to their customer profile than if one or two of them were blatantly miscategorized. Having three or four home decor and sleepwear items and then something wildly incongruous like a motorcycle repair kit got more hits than if the repair kit were absent. It makes the marketing feel less personal, like it just HAPPENED to stumble on some things you liked.

I’d much rather see this sort of advertising become more subtle and tactful rather than simply try to fool people into thinking it’s not as good as it actually is.