Killed in a smiling accident.

Melmoth:   Hello.

Zoso:   Certainly. Welcome to our new feature, ‘Post Bag’, where we share some of the letters that have been sent in by our beloved readers.

Melmoth:   Beloved.

Zoso:   You know, we’ve had the most marvellous response to our first reader topic, namely (meh!) Name Quest.

Melmoth:   Perspicuous persiflage.

Zoso:   Bless you.

Melmoth:   That’s right. We know that a lot of you out there have witnessed players on MMO role-playing servers who have ridiculous non-canon names, and yet nobody seems to discuss this vital issue on any of the MMO forums that we’ve visited.

Zoso:   How ever-so-slightly beige. So we asked you to write in and tell us about them.

Melmoth:   And what crackers you’ve told us about!

Zoso:   ”There is a character on our server whose name is Milton Sloluck. It is an abomination of a name and I’ve petitioned it on several occasions to no avail!” That was sent in from a Gerald Suckmaster Burstingfoam of the Karag-Foon server.

Melmoth:   I’m rather fond of this one: “Dear Killed in a Smiling Accident, I was recently in a group with a Paladin called Polydore Smith and our guild master is named Munwele. I really think some people should not join an RP server if they aren’t going to take it seriously, Yours etc. Jamrammer Felchfreely.”

Zoso:   Five pounds on its way to you for that one Mr Felchfreely. Or how about this one “Dear Killed in a Smiling Accident, My first MMO cybersex partner was called Geoff Hart. I still split my sides whenever I hear that name, but it wasn’t terribly appropriate in a dedicated role-playing community such as ours. Yours faithfully Pippinhole Spakfarter-Knobwrench.”

Melmoth:   Could it get any more outrageous than ‘Geoff Hart’? “Can you please warn your readers about the fool on the Funtweedle server who goes by the distressing name of Marley Wottel. It destroys my immersion every time I see this person run past, and I am forced to log out and listen to my Evanescence records for several hours to regain my composure. Yours gropingly, Flangibald von Smegsock.” Scandalous!

Zoso:   Creamery. Here’s another one. “I really hate it when people use real-world references in their character names. Just the other day I saw a Barrak Orbaum, which sounds very much like Barack Obama. Yours insincerely, OptimusPrimeSkywalkerRedsox249.”

Melmoth:   Tremendous response all around. Many thanks to all of you who wrote in.

Zoso:   We’ll be sure to delve into the post bag again soon!

Melmoth:   Delve.

This post is brought to you by the letters F & L.

Is end-game MMO raiding just line dancing for the Internet generation?

“Master, moving stones around is one thing. This is totally different.”

Star Wars: The Old Republic will be similar to other MMOs but with several key innovations. Traditionally MMOs are built on three pillars; Exploration, Combat, and Progression. We at BioWare and LucasArts believe there is a fourth pillar: Story. Our mission is to create the best story-driven games in the world. We believe that the compelling, interactive storylines in Star Wars: The Old Republic are a significant innovation to MMOs and will offer an entertainment experience unlike any other.

“No! No different! Only different in your mind. You must unlearn what you have learned.”

I’ve decided not to continue my subscription to Warhammer Online. Or, to put it more accurately, I’ve decided not to subscribe at all, since GOA were not resourceful enough to demand my credit card details from the outset, and thus I never actually had any semblance of a subscription plan in the first place.

Now, all those fanlings out there who take joy at frothing and foaming at any slight to their game, no matter how small and no matter how irrelevant the instigator, can feel free to fire-up their email clients and compose stern letters in poorly spelled words of no more than two syllables telling me just how wrong I am. Rest assured I will print out every email and give each one the intimate attention it deserves; even if it means I have to wipe my bottom raw, I will make sure I cover each and every point you make.

So why am I not subscribing? I’m not having fun; this much is as irrefutable as the gravity on this beloved planet of ours. Why am I not having fun? If I could only tell you the reason, I would, but then I would also be able to tell Mr Jacobs, preferably on a contract salary with many, many zeros at the end of it, and to be brutally honest I’d much rather do that because, regardless of the monetary recompense, I wouldn’t have to wipe my bum sore on all the ranty opinionated drivel that was sent my way.

I simply don’t know why.

To put things in to context a little, then: I’ve tried numerous classes, on Order and Destruction, and have found nothing really wanting with them, they are all excellent takes on the classical classes, with unique twists and attempts to involve the player more; some work better than others, but they all work. I’ve played alongside some fabulous people in a guild that is both populous and active, and therefore have not simply tired of soloing a game that was never meant to be played solo other than by the hardcore grinder. I’ve probably had as many victories as I have had defeats in PvP, such that I have not been put off by the game’s heavy PvP bias; in fact, I’ve found that upon cracking open my sugar-coated carebear shell there was a soft, delicious chocolaty PVP centre within me. Warhamer Online has, if nothing else, opened my eyes to how good PvP can be. Guild Wars showed us that an MMO with a PvP focus could endure and remain fresh in the public consciousness, much like Everquest showed us that MMORPGs could work in an online world of FPSs and RTSs; and much as World of Warcraft brought MMORPGs to the masses, I believe Warhammer Online brings large scale PvP to the same. Make no mistake, World of Warcraft had the mass-market PvP first, but Warhammer made it compelling beyond a mere treadmill-like league of grinding phat loots, instead making it integral to the whole game experience, tying it inexorably to your character’s fundamental reason for being.

Still the question stands: why am I not having fun? There must be something tangible to grab on to, some tiny annoying loose thread that mars an otherwise immaculate dinner jacket of a game. Perhaps it’s not that I cannot find the thread, but that I fear to pull on it lest my entire view of MMOs unravels before my eyes, and I’m left wearing the rather tatty and dishevelled waistcoat of MMO disillusionment. Can we just accept that for some reason the game does not work for me on a basic primal level, and leave it at that? Look, I like Shakespeare’s works; I love to visit the Globe and be a groundling for an evening, or in times passed watch the RSC at the Barbican before they decided to turn into some sort of travelling troupe. Yet I know many, many people who don’t get it. They don’t enjoy it in any way shape or form, even if it’s cast in a Baz Luhrmann too-hip-to-be-cool mould. I never ask them as to why, though, for what sort of answer could one expect? It’s boring. It’s inaccessible. It’s outdated, maybe? To me these seem like crazy reasons, but that’s not because these people aren’t right, it’s just that they can’t really put their finger on why they don’t like it. They. Just. Don’t. I can’t argue with them for not liking it, you can’t say to someone “Well, if you just read all around the topic and studied it for a few years. Perhaps take to quoting sonnets until your brain can only form sentences structured in iambic pentameter. Then you’d probably enjoy it”, that’s not an argument for the joy to be found in Shakespeare, it’s an argument that says “You’re at fault and you should work hard to correct that”. No, no and thrice no. Enjoyment of pastimes is not a chore, it is a pleasure from the start or it is nothing at all. Yes you often have to work at an interest to experience all the enjoyment that it has to offer, but there has to be that base interest in the first place, that foundation of pleasure and enthusiasm to build upon, else you’re building something that will not stand even the lightest of pushes against it.

If pressed, if truly harangued by the torch-bearing, pitch-fork wielding horde of fanatical fans of the game, smashing at the doors of the KiaSA windmill while I stand above them on a balcony, cursing them for their lack of understanding and their heathen ways, I would perhaps offer a few vagaries in the hope that they would pause for a moment in contemplation and then leave me in peace. These would be thus:

The so good:

• The character and world design is fantastic. Grittier than World of Warcraft and eschewing shoulder pads that rival the wingspan of 747 airliners and weapons that could be used to span the English channel and support multi-lane highway access to the continent, Warhammer’s characters are closer to the tabletop miniatures, they still have their comedy moments, but it is the refined surreal comedy of the Mighty Boosh as opposed to the gaudy over-the-top comedy of South Park.
• The war. War is indeed good. We’re still not sure what it’s good for (huh), but we can agree that Mythic has certainly delivered on its promise to develop realm pride and to allow that pride to be represented (yo) on the field of battle.
• The game is at least trying to do some things differently. Many of these things work and work well, others are great in concept but have lacked a little in their realisation.

The not so good:

• The XP curve. Fixes have already begun to filter through for this, and if there’s anything most MMO players can cope with it’s a tedious repetitive grind, so I don’t imagine that this will be a problem for long.
• There is still too often a tangible disconnect between what I do with the interface and what my character appears to do on the display. The effects work - the healing is delivered, the enemy is smote with damage - but my character appears to be doing something entirely different a lot of the time, playing the banjo or crafting origami badgers, it doesn’t matter, the fact is that I cannot easily tell if what I did had the desired effect without parsing the combat log or upgrading the floating combat numbers with an AddOn and then spending my entire time staring at text on the screen. Which I could do playing MUD1.
• Huge parts of the game already feel like WoW’s 1-60 content: empty, abandoned and unused. I have visited so many public quests and out of the way areas and found nobody else around. On odd occasions I’ve found another lone soul and we’ve teamed-up in order to try to accomplish something, but mainly we just end-up standing and quietly holding one another, a forlorn attempt to affirm our connection to a world where one steps into a void as soon as one leaves the grind-filled ruts of the common levelling path.
• Scenarios break public quests. Simply put, public quests should have been available on a queue system like scenarios are, or scenarios should not have been on a queue system but accessed from specific locations around the world map, with those locations preferably being close to public quests (which would have been rubbish, because instant fix PvP is one of the excellent design decisions Mythic made). Mythic came up with two excellent game systems that unfortunately aren’t terribly compatible in their current state. With scenarios having the greatest XP-per-effort/time ratio, they won out, as has been discussed by m’colleague and numerous others already.

There’s nothing game-breaking or truly awful in the above, they are just a few areas that help contribute to my lack of desire to play the game. They are not the reason for my lack of desire, however, this I wish to make abundantly clear; the game doesn’t work for me at a fundamental level, but it works for a vast number of others and I’m deeply happy for, and somewhat envious of, them. And if none of that helps to pacify the lynch mob, or at least confuse them long enough that I can make my escape by the back door, then I shall just have to play the Boris Karloff part to Zoso’s Frankenstein, lift him up before the crowds and present him as the sensible one, the brains of the operation, the one who is still playing WAR and enjoying it, and to entreat them not to destroy us with their flames just because they perceive me as a monster.

Dwarves are a curious race my lad,
Bad tempered and bearded and stout.
They move with the grace of a two legged mule,
Or a grizzled old badger with gout.

Make way for unsteady dwarves my boy,
It’s often a symptom of drink.
You can tell ’cause they act like a mad addled bear,
But give every stray mongrel a wink.

What is this, inviting me to tea?
My retort is simply: go fish.
For how does one say in a quite polite way,
That you clearly are taking the pish.

I would not patronise you fair friend,
But ever I’d chastise my self,
If I didn’t alert you to the old dwarven joke:
To leap skyward and head-butt an elf.

So dwarfs are awful, crude and mad?
You question what Dvergar are for.
But to see a dwarf fight is a fair awesome sight,
And to witness the beauty of war.

Ask no more concerning this old dwarf;
I’ve spoken much wisdom this day.
Bring ale! And some whores who can bear bearded folk,
I’ve this reward to squander away.

World of Warcraft has added a version of Bejeweled into the game, presumably to help players while away those unavoidable tedious moments of game-play such as flights between zones; waiting for a boat or zeppelin to arrive; raiding. Everquest has long had its card game Legends of Norrath, presumably to give players something to do while they watch their Evercraft macro increase their character’s craft skill for them.

However, all MMOs have the elements required for a simple yet fun sub-game built in to them by default. Ladies and gentlemen and nondescript transgender individuals, I present to you MMO Top Trumps!

Consider it for a moment. Your character has all the stats required to play the game: strength, intellect, armour, defence, dps, health, mana; enough stats to make a hardcore Top Trumper squeal with joy and become moist at the choice. Players could build decks using members of their guild, say, and then battle against other people they meet out in the world, with the winner adding the defeated player’s Top Trump card (which I imagine could be easily calculated based on a combination of all the stats, with various sensible weightings applied to each) to their deck. That’s not all though, because your deck would not only change as you won other players’ cards, but when the characters which the cards represent level-up or gain new items of gear; the cards stats would change to match the new and improved character stats!

Just watch out if you’re playing on a role-play server though, because it’ll be an embarrassing defeat when you draw your Top Trump card only to find out that the character it represents has switched to their statless casual role-play evening wear of tiara, ball gown and crystal slippers.

Especially when the player character the card represents is Mad Gorgonoth, Barbarian Lord of the Seven Hells.

The only problem with Tobold’s idea to have MMOs play like the Fighting Fantasy choose your own adventure books, is that some poor developer has got to invent a way for the players to be able to simulate using their fingers to mark five or six different pages, such that that they can go back to previous decisions when they don’t like where the story is taking them; such as into a deep pit of spiky death.

And how would this affect PvP?

Player1: “Ha, haaaa! Critical hit!”

Player2: “Yeah? Well, I’m going back to page 71, and instead of choosing ‘If you dodge to the right, go to page 127′, I’ll pick ‘If you dodge to the left, go to page 1145′. So now I’ve dodged your blow. Ha!”

Player1: “Oh YEAH? Well, instead of picking ‘If you swing your sword in a broad arc to the left, go to page 276′, I’m going back to page 389 and choosing ‘If you kick your opponent squarely in the nuts, go to page 413′. So take that!”

Player2: “Ooooof. Awww <pant> now you’ve made me <gasp> drop my book and lose my place.”

Player1: “Woo! Winnah! And now I’m choosing ‘If you decide to teabag your opponent while stealing their equipment, go to page 1337.’ Let’s see now… 1334… 1335… 1336…”

Player2: “…”

Player1: “1337″

Player2: “Nooooooooooooo!”

It was on listening to episode 21 of the VanHemlock and Jon podcast that a thought struck me, like a stretched rubber band back-firing into one’s face. In the podcast they discuss spoilers, and it was the section where they compared PnP RP modules and MMOs (with respect to repeated content being, in essence, a self-perpetuated spoiler) that caused the Overly Elongated Rubber Band of Insight to strike me painfully in the idea bucket.

In PnP RPGs, dungeon masters will often create their own adventures, and player created content is nothing new to the MMO space, if a little under utilised. However, DMs can also buy ready prepared modules for them to take their adventurers through, and I wondered whether a model such as this could be applied to MMOs.

Could a game world be designed around the idea of pre-packaged adventures that the players could purchase and then undertake? I’m thinking of a scale much smaller than full blown expansions, for example: a set of quests and a final dungeon along the lines of the Deadmines story in World of Warcraft. With players purchasing these adventure packs, the developer could perhaps invest more time in the creation of the story, scripting it and maybe even being able to provide voice-overs for the chief protagonists. Players would chose which adventures to go on by purchasing the ones that interest them, and it would provide a natural selection process for the content produced by the developer, with substandard adventures failing to generate significant sales, perhaps providing a driving force to not take the easy, grindy route with an adventure. Adventure packs could involve a locale and all the adventures within; you could have Age of Conan’s Tortage everywhere you go, but all for a price, of course. The developer would provide a basic game framework with characters, basic equipment, a means to travel from adventure pack to adventure pack, and perhaps provide an introductory adventure area or two. Where the players went from there would be up to them. Imagine a World of Warcraft where you didn’t have to purchase the Stranglethorn Vale pack if you didn’t want to, it would enable players to vote with their wallets whilst still remaining subscribed and loyal to their game of choice, a trend that many seem unable to break even when certain MMO developers appear to be taking their players’ custom for granted of late.

The Ancient One bemoans various features of the Warhammer Online quest log that he finds frustrating. To be honest I barely use the quest log or quest tracker, mainly due to the excellent integration of quest tracking with the world map, and thus PvE questing these days seems to be mainly a case of:

a) Open the map.

b) Look for arrow representing oneself on said map.

c) Find a big red highlighted area on the map that is near to said self.

d) Orientate arrow towards the Red Blob Zone.

e) Move towards the Red Blob Zone, occasionally closing the map to avoid crap animals in the world that are only there to bite on your arse as you run to a destination, then reopening the map to check that your heading hasn’t deviated too much as you ran around trees going “AHHHHHHH!” whilst trying to run away from said crap animals, or because you had to run around a small bump in the landscape that a low-slung supercar could negotiate, but apparently your character can’t.

f) Upon arriving at the Red Blob Zone, hover your mouse cursor over the Red Blob Zone to find out which motile bags of XP to slaughter/ask for autographs/steal underpants from, and make a mental note of how many of these are required.

g) Ignore the quest entirely and kill everything in the area (even if you’re meant to be collecting autographs) until the quest log goes ‘bing’, signifying that you have completed your task.

h) If your bags are not full then goto a. Otherwise, take yourself back to town, empty your bags of rubbish on the nearest merchant and take your blood stained autograph album back to the relevant quest NPC, then goto a.

However, one thing which does indeed make the quest log cumbersome and annoying is that you can only have a set number of quests at any one time. This is a seemingly archaic and arbitrary design, and all that it does is force people to go into the quest log and micro-manage, at which point many of the Ancient One’s concerns become obvious. Why do MMOs have this forced limitation on the number of quests? Is it purely a storage issue? If it is, then there’s no real arguing with that, but if it’s some deliberate design element of these games then it needs to stop. If I want to have a hundred quests in my log, some of which are out of date and too low a level, and it is within your power to allow me to do so, then let me. All I need from you, as a game, is to provide a few very simple search criteria; they could even be a permanent set of tabs on the quest log, which would allow me to sort by level and by area. That’s it. I can then decide that I want to quest in the Forest of Death and Blood, open my quest log, click on the tab for that area, click on the tab for quests at my level, and see what there is to do. If in the meantime a friend has asked me to help them with quests in the Dungeon of Twisty Passages All Alike, then I can grab any quests from the NPCs in the area there, open my quest log, find that I already had another bunch of quests for the area, and crack on with them. My friend doesn’t have to try to share quests with me, with me telling them to hang on because I haven’t got room in my quest log; then umming and arring for half an hour over which quests I want to drop because I’m in the middle of all of them; my friend getting ever more twitchy about getting on and doing something other than play Shopping List Simulator 2000; and me then randomly clicking quests and dropping them, only to realise at a later date that I dropped the quest to kill one thousand NPCs for their autograph when I was nine hundred and fifty six autographs into it.

With such excellent integration of quest information with the world map, the function of the quest tracker UI element should also have been reconsidered in WAR, because all it does at the moment is repeat what is now available in a more intuitive manner on the world map. What they needed to have done was change the tracker’s behaviour to be more dynamic, a spur of the moment informational device that displays only the objectives of quests that you’re currently in the process of completing. For example, when you enter the Red Blob Zone the tracker would load-up the quest objectives associated with it, and when you leave the Red Blob Zone it removes the objectives. At the moment it’s just a static display of whatever objectives happened to get loaded into it first, which you then have to go into the quest log to micro-manage in a rather awkward fashion if the objective you want to track isn’t there and the tracker is full. When you didn’t have the integration of quest information with the world map (say, in a vanilla install of World of Warcraft), the quest tracker was an important informational device, relaying not only how many more people you had to slaughter for their autographs, but also which area the quest was in and the fact that you had the quest in the first place. I don’t believe that that functionality is required any more, and essentially the new quest tracker would be an intermediate stage between the text alert window - the thing that briefly pops up “3/10 Autographs” in the middle of your screen after you just killed a famous NPC - and the quest text on the world map. It would allow you to see at a glance what objectives you had left to complete in the current quest area, making life easier if you happened to be on several quests in said area and keeping track of all the things you had to kill was becoming difficult.

All-in-all none of the issues with the quest log are annoying enough to cause prolonged consternation, but as with many things in WAR, several excellent new features have been added without any seeming consideration of their impact on existing game elements, and whether these elements could be redesigned to work more harmoniously with the new features, or removed altogether because they have now been made redundant. One wonders whether the Next Great MMO might benefit from a little of its beta time being used for focus groups on the usability of the UI and various game play elements; perhaps it is ultimately cheaper and easier to leave these things to be fixed by the AddOn community post launch, and subsequently copy and incorporate the best ideas in later patches of your game and pretend they were yours in the first place, Blizzard.

Sorry about the straight-laced post, I do these sometimes.

I’d say “sue me”, but knowing the Internet, someone probably would.

The default dwarf mount is the gyrocopter, a bizarre half helicopter, half microlight steampunk affair which is nevertheless only able to move along at ground level, with the ensconced dwarf’s feet dangling a few inches above the world as they burble and clank along.

In terms of the game world, gyrocopters are actually capable of full flight, as evidenced by the travel system between zones, where characters are strapped into one of these unconventional contraptions and the player is then subjected to a short cut scene of said character launching off into the distance, an undignified affair for any robe wearers (which is a good three quarters of all Order classes) it must be said, as they gyrate overhead, legs akimbo, underpants on show for all the world below to see.

However, it would be slightly biased towards the diminutive race of hearty eccentro-engineers if their mounts could launch them across maps in all three dimensions of space, so they are restricted in the game to only being allowed to hover a few inches off the ground, and one has to wonder why the designers didn’t just remove the main rotor and stick some wheels on the thing instead. Still, that’s the least of anyone’s concerns, because as you ‘fly’ around Altdorf you very quickly come to realise that, as such a short race, hovering a few inches off the ground for a dwarf means that the main rotor of the gyrocopter is perfectly placed at throat height for the somewhat taller races of elf and man…

I can only imagine the bloody carnage that I leave in my wake as I barrel around the city streets at break-neck speeds; peasants, nobles and merchants alike all have to leap out of the way of my thrumming and grinding decapitating mechanical monstrosity as it hurtles past in a cloud of smoke and churned-up leaf litter. All those poor children forced to live on the streets because their parents were mown down by a dwarf trying to get to the ale house before it closed, while they themselves were spared due to their short stature. Not to mention the number of cats that have been sucked-up into the rotor and flung out into the harbour or diced into skaven feed, or had their tails caught up in the gearing mechanism and then been flung out of the exhaust pipe like some sort of feline cannon shot. Many a dog has been seen scampering down the street, tongue lolling out, barking after a gyrocopter, only to be found later missing an eye and a leg and howling from the roof of a town house where it has been stuck for several hours.

There’s a whole section in the slums of Altdorf that is a crumbled ruin which burns day and night, it used to be one of the more affluent areas of the city. Until the gyrocopters came.

Ever wondered why you never see children with skipping ropes in the streets of Altdorf? After the Great Gyrocopter Garrotting of 2508, skipping ropes were banned in all major public areas.

It’s fun to be a dwarf.