Killed in a smiling accident.

Just a quickie before I head off for a few days from tomorrow; popped up to London today for the Eurogamer Expo and to meet up with assorted members of the Virgin Worlds collective and others. A splendidly game-tastic Expo which I’d suggest you head along to if you like that sort of thing, only the tickets are all sold out, so don’t. Inevitable heavy interest around the Big Games made them a bit difficult to play, but they generally look most impressive. There was even an MMO there! And one I’m rather interested in, Jumpgate: Evolution. Unfortunately, taking over a spaceship randomly flying around in space wasn’t the best way of being introduced to things, and I never found something to shoot. Looks pretty, though. For all the fun of the games, though, better still was heading off to the pub en masse and pontificating on Life, The Universe and Everything Connected With Games. Look out for the end results on a podcast near you, if the Recording Wizard can extract any usable audio, at which point we’ll find out that what seemed like an erudite deconstruction of the gaming industry as a whole was really just a load of people going “y’know wassh realllly good… that game with the… y’know… the thingsh, thash brilliant that”.

After missing out on last year’s game (probably quite fortunately, as it turned into a pretty dismal low scoring rain-soaked affair), we picked up tickets for the Saints vs Chargers and headed in to Wembley. Great stadium, first time I’ve been there, and watching an NFL game live is fantastic. The games can go pretty slowly on television with all the ad breaks, the stoppages seem to go a bit quicker live. As predicted, the game was a shoot-out, both quarterbacks passing for over 300 yards, neither defence getting much of a pass rush going, so pretty spectacular to watch and plenty of touchdowns. San Diego didn’t do themselves any favours, being heavily penalised, but came back strongly at the end of the game before Rivers was intercepted to effectively finish things off. Great day out, and looking forward to seeing which two teams come over in 2009.

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.

If Companions in The Old Republic MMO may possibly be love interests, will Bioware need to update their traditional storylines a bit to account for massively multiplayer-ness?

“Over the course of our adventures, with all we have been through, I find I have grown much closer to you… and your friend… and your other friend… and that pick-up tank we found on the LFG channel…”

Tier 3 scenarios have been rather a mixed bag. For a while, when queuing for everything it seemed Tor Anroc popped 9 times out of 10, a Destruction Dude would always pick up The Thing, and you’d have to slog it all the way over to their base and fight your way up the hill under a withering barrage of fire in an oft-doomed bid to Kill The Dude With The Thing. Then different scenarios starting coming up more frequently, and Order were winning Tor Anroc more often than not, but losing most others. This was from a fair mix of the Temple of Isha, Doomfist Crater and High Pass Cemetery, an occasional Talabec Damn, and almost no Black Fire Basins. Conclusion: the best scenarios are those that involve Killing Dudes With Things, or Killing Dudes Standing Next To Things. Picking Up The Thing And Running To Another Place Without Being Killed, not so hot.

Last night, after a few days of general exploring, questing, dungeons and the like, I thought I’d go scenario crazy again, queued up five or six times in a row, and Order won everything, convincingly in most cases. It might’ve just been the luck of the queue, but glancing at the summaries at the end, Destruction’s levels seemed a bit lower on average than they had been. There are a couple of pretty dedicated Order guilds on our server, with several players who’ve been level 40 for a while now, probably more than Destruction (from anecdotal evidence), so I have a suspicion that Order players have tended to start on Tier 4 scenarios as soon as they can, whereas Destruction had been staying with Tier 3 as long as possible; I’d often see four or five level 30/31 Destruction players in a scenario, and very rarely see an Order player over level 28. Now it looks like a wave of Destruction players who were on that cusp have either outlevelled Tier 3 entirely or chosen to head for Tier 4, and coming up in their place are some lower level players, tilting the Tier 3 level advantage in Orders favour. Or I could be reading way too much into random scenario queue matches. Either way, it made for a nice haul of XP and renown, huzzah!

A few months back a Plastic Instrument Battle Royale was brewing, with Rock Band 2, Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Revolution all due out around the same time (in America, at least). Back then it looked like all-out war, with frostiness between Harmonix and Activision over instrument compatibility forcing a choice between one game or the other (after entirely discounting Rock Revolution) for all but the most die-hard of plastic instrument fans. For the Wii, the Rock Band prospects were particularly bleak; no instrument compatibility, no downloadable content, and no sign of even the first game in Europe let alone a release date for the sequel. I know the true battleground is the XBox 360, and with plummeting prices I could pick one up for even less than a Wii now (the 60Gb model, let alone the hard-drive-less Arcade), but, plastic instrument based games apart, there’s nothing I’d rather play on a 360 than a PC, so I’ll stick with the Wii.

By the time Wii Rock Band was actually released over here (September), Guitar Hero World Tour had a release date (November) and for a UK Wii owner, Guitar Hero World Tour vs Rock Band is a no-brainer, really, with World Tour on the Wii having comparable features to the 360 and PS3 versions including downloadable content (with the option to use SD cards). Order placed!

Good news, though, everyone! Harmonix and Activision have since been playing nicely, and the Instrument Compatibility Matrix now shows a refreshing amount of green, most importantly for me in the last week including Guitar Hero III guitars being compatible with Rock Band 2 on the Wii (no word on the World Tour peripherals, but as the guitar uses the Wiimote as well it would seem likely, and if not never mind, least I can use the GHIII guitar). Wii Rock Band 2 will also support downloadable content, again via SD cards if needed, so once that actually makes it over here I’ll grab that as well, as it has a rather excellent song list. Maybe it’s not quite the Final Rock Battle after all, but a new era in cross-compatible fake plastic rock for all.

Fret not, gentle reader, if m’colleague Melmoth’s casual, barely considered dismissal of WAR has struck you like a slap in the face from a game developer (I could never develop games, my arm would get far too tired from all the slapping that’s apparently mandatory). I haven’t changed my mind since last week, I’m still enjoying WAR, clocking up scenarios, popping into public quests, storming the odd Keep or two; still annoyed by the limitations of the quest log (an impromptu Gunbad group formed up last night, so I dropped all the general world quests, flew to Gunbad, picked up all the Gunbad quests, did a wing, completed a few, dropped the rest of the Gunbad quests, flew back to High Pass, picked up all the world quests again…)

If, however, you seek WAR, the whole WAR and nothing but the WAR, KiaSA possibly isn’t the blog for you; while Warhammer is currently my main source of blogging inspiration, muses are lithesome and ephemeral things (the mythological muses, this is, not the band. Though Matt Bellamy could possibly do with eating a few more pies.) Even if I keep playing WAR for a while, there will be times when I just can’t think of much to write about it, or even MMOGs in general; I previously blogged at “MMOG Musings”, and one of the driving factors for moving here instead was going through a particularly non-MMOG-y time. Rather than rust into posting-immobility, I thought it was better to at least keep momentum going by writing about other things, hence at KiaSA we cover the whole gamut of human experience. MMORPGs, MMOFPSs, other MMOGs, online (but not massively multiplayer) games, offline games, generally offline games with an online component, generally online games but with an offline mode, you name it, every facet of life on the planet. Books (game novelisations, or books about gaming), television programmes (that ideally feature games), films (so long as someone plays a game at some point), music (why, the very post after this one is going to be all about music… possibly in games, admittedly), comedy (why did the chicken cross the road? Because it was a tier 3 player in a tier 1 zone and wanted to get to the other side, *badum tish*), I could go on. Though don’t ask me to.

Having said all that… scenarios, eh? Is it me, or are Order a bit slow to get off the mark sometimes? The scenario starts and there’s only six people there, and the rest sort of dawdle in over the next couple of minutes apologising for the delay, only the bus was late and they overslept and stuff, and they have a bit of a look around then amble off towards the objectives taking in the view. Destruction on the other hand are all spiky bundles of growling hatred and really jolly cross about all sorts of things, so what we need to counterbalance that is a rousing fight anthem. With apologies to Tom Lehrer I’d like to propose:

Fight fiercely, Order, fight, fight, fight!
Demonstrate to them our skill.
Albeit they possess the might,
Nonetheless we have the will.

How we will celebrate our victory,
We shall invite the whole team up for tea. (How jolly!)
Hurl that Chosen into the sea (of lava),
And fight, fight, fight!

Fight fiercely, Order, fight, fight, fight!
Impress them with our prowess, do!
Oh, fellas, do not let Sigmar down,
Be of stout heart and true.

Come on, chaps, fight for Order’s glorious name!
Won’t it be peachy if we win the game? (Oh, goody!)
Let’s try not to injure them,
But fight, fight, fight!
Let’s not be rough, though!
Fight, fight, fight!
And do fight fiercely!
Fight, fight, fight!

Rewards are a hot topic in the WARniverse at the moment, as Mythic tweak XP and renown rewards for various activities and the MMOG-o-blog-o-sphere chip in with their suggestions.

Over in my all-action day job of (to use the technical description) “software-y stuff”, one of my favourite essayists is Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software, and he’s also been looking at rewards. And that’s Quite Interesting, because Spolsky’s point (or Robert Austin’s point, that Spolsky illustrates) is:

…incentive plans based on measuring performance always backfire. Not sometimes. Always. What you measure is inevitably a proxy for the outcome you want, and even though you may think that all you have to do is tweak the incentives to boost sales, you can’t. It’s not going to work. Because people have brains and are endlessly creative when it comes to improving their personal well-being at everyone else’s expense.

Now, to massively over-simplify and generalise for a moment, the desired outcome for the MMOG company is “people giving us money so we can buy speedboats”. After the ill-fated “give us money for no reason” campaigns, I believe the generally accepted model is “keep people subscribing to our game (and therefore giving us money so we can buy speedboats)”, and the main reason people subscribe to the game is because they have “fun” when playing (I would’ve said “only reason” rather than “main reason”, but amongst others there are probably a bunch of sociologists using MMOGs as valuable study tools for various personality disorders). So the desired outcome for the MMOG company is to “make the game fun (so people keep subscribing to it (and therefore giving us money so we can buy speedboats))”. And that’s a bit of a problem, as “fun” is much like “obscenity”, in that it’s highly subjective, everyone’s opinion differs, and about the only test is “I know it when I see it” (also, obscenity can be lots of fun, but let’s not go there). Worse still in MMOGs, everyone’s fun overlaps. A frequent complaint on MMOG forums is that a change to something is a “nerf”, and causes their character to “not be fun”. Obviously this is insanity on the part of the developer, right, because no fun equals no speedboats? Except for one player “fun” is making a little bar on the screen go up as fast as possible, and for another it doesn’t matter how fast it goes up *so long as it’s faster than everybody else*, and for Geoff fun is utterly dominating in PvP, destroying all that come near without being scratched, and for Jeff fun is a long, evenly matched PvP contest where the final outcome is secondary to the struggle.

Back to the problems of measuring performance, then, the desired goal is “fun”, you can’t measure that, so incentive plans won’t work. Except, in many MMOGs, the incentive plans *are* the game, the gaining of XP, renown points, gear, loot, badges, titles. Not universally; much less so as you move towards “worlds” rather than “games”, most obviously Second Life, and EVE neatly avoids pigeonholing as it so often does (possibly because getting the players to be “… endlessly creative when it comes to improving their personal well-being at everyone else’s expense” *is* the game, not an unfortunate by-product). Back in the comfort zone of WAR and WoW and their ilk, though, the balancing act is to pitch the rewards so that they work for as many people as possible, so if Eric really likes fighting other players and Derek really likes shiny things, you hand out shiny things for fighting other players, Eric and Derek are both happy. Though Neville, who likes adventuring in PvE dungeons with other players, is miserable because everyone else is PvPing… Tobold posted an interesting moving cheese suggestion that might keep Derek moving around, with P0tsh0t adding a neat game mechanic possibility for it in the comments, though I’m not sure of the overall long term effect on Eric and Neville.

More specifically, and a clearer “incentive plan”, there are the rewards for taking part in scenarios in WAR. Desired outcome: “fun”. Very broadly, I can think of three main types of “fun” in scenarios: winning (and only winning), putting up a good fight (even if you lose), getting rewards (mostly XP and renown points). Different people value each of those more or less (or not at all), the aim of the incentive scheme is to get all three pulling in the same general direction. One possibility would be to only reward scenario wins, that would surely encourage everyone to fight as hard as they can to win, right? First problem, 50% of scenarios are instantly “not fun” for some players (unavoidable if they care only for winning, but I suspect this is a smaller factor for many people than rewards). Second problem, if a team are losing a scenario 200 - 50, you only need a couple of people to think “not going to win this, might as well lose as fast as possible to get on to the next one”, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, with added bickering in scenario chat, spoiling the fun of those who want a good fight. If you really want to encourage that, you can also hand out a fixed reward for losing; “hurry up and lose I’m just here for WSG marks” anyone?

So to discourage leeching and reward people for pulling their weight, you want a system that rewards contribution, but how to measure contribution in a scenario? Worse still, a scenario in a class-based MMOG? Perhaps the best (or at least easiest to gather) metrics are healing and damage, but those are still flawed with no way to measure “good” DPS play (e.g. using your debuffs and crowd control abilities, sensibly targeting the most important enemy players) vs mindlessly spamming the nearest enemy target with whatever spell/ability comes to hand, or healers keeping an eye on the whole scenario group, carefully applying appropriate buffs and heals vs picking a tank and following them, spamming any available heal as soon as the green bar moves even slightly. Speaking of tanks, how do you quantify their performance? DPS is viable for some builds, but for others do you reward damage taken? Cue reward-driven tanks running around in their pants trying to get killed as soon as possible, as many times as possible… And of course all these measures focus solely on the other players, whereas most scenarios have goals like capturing flags, holding objectives or Killing Dudes (With The Thing). Can you reward sensible strategic scenario play? Defending a flag can be very important, maybe you should give renown points for being in the vicinity of your flag? Sure, if you want both teams to stand next to their own flag while watching telly…

I’m not sure precisely how WAR hands out XP and renown points; damage, kills and healing factor in there somewhere, but rewards are also shared with the rest of your scenario party (a sub-group of everyone in the scenario), presumably to smooth out intangibles like tanking, focusing on scenario objectives rather than just killing other players etc. This, in turn, has lead to rather a hot button issue, leaving the default party to solo in scenarios, a somewhat thorny problem. It’s not AFK-leeching or anything, you still have to heal/damage/kill to get renown, so why shouldn’t you be fully rewarded for your efforts? Well, you’re screwing over the poor tank who’s keeping your arse alive in order to do all that healing/damage in the first place. But you’re also more than justifiably not sharing rewards with some useless smeghead who’s just running around and shouting “LOL!” a lot behind you. It’s certainly galling to be stuck in a group of fluffmuppets who are getting XP and renown solely from your brilliance (though I suspect on numerous occasions, *all 12 people in a PUG scenario* think that’s the case), but in the absence of a perfectly fair reward system I prefer to err on the side of group friendliness.

Is WAR the Next Big Thing, or just a passing phase (one of my bad days)? I’m still rather enjoying it, and I think I’ll stick with it a while longer yet. It doesn’t do anything wildly revolutionary, claiming it’s created a new genre or something is frankly bonkers; WAR and WoW and LotRO and EQ2 and Age of Conan and their Diku-inspired chums are all ice cream, just some have chocolate swirls, some have raspberry ripple, some have sprinkles on top, some are made by otters in carpet factories. Maybe you don’t really like the sprinkles but you’ll put up with them ‘cos the other varieties don’t have those lovely chocolate chips, or maybe the sprinkles are a showstopper (for every sprinkle I find, I SHALL KILL YOU!) So far, for me, Warhammer’s butter almond ice cream of PvP scenarios with the roasted hazelnuts of public quests and almonds of keep taking in the white fudge shell of World RvR are enough to compensate for the fairly average praline pecans of PvE. I’d better step away from the ice cream a moment before I get too hungry…

It’s the mix of options that really make WAR. If there’s nothing else particularly on, I gravitate towards scenarios. Hop on, hit the “Join Scenario” button, roam around doing anything else you fancy while waiting, then it’s off to a fearsome life or death struggle with XP and renown rewards at the end of it. Oddly enough this is very similar to how I played WoW for a while, queue up for a battleground, fly off and quest for a bit, and into the battleground when it pops. The main difference is that on my old WoW server 10 minutes was usually the minimum queue time, more often 15 minutes for Warsong or Arathi and 30 minutes or more for Alterac, whereas now they’ve added the ability to queue for all scenarios in a tier with a single click, something usually pops within a couple of minutes in WAR. Unless joining with a guild group, though, the increased frequency of PUG scenarios isn’t necessarily a good thing, and can merely speed the screen-punching results of repeated losses in wildly unbalanced teams (10 ranged DPS, 1 melee DPS and a tank, let’s go!) full of bozos, but that’s PUGs for you. Tier 2 was going fairly well, I think I had a winning record overall, but Tier 3 is a bit painful so far, possibly due to being comparatively under-level for now, and not helped by Tor Anroc being the most frequently popping scenario, in which Destruction manage to be The Dude With The Thing every single time.

Outside scenarios, world RvR has been quite fun too. It’s a bit hit and miss, obviously depending on who happens to be around, but our guild have stormed around en masse a few times taking a bunch of keeps in the process, and a few spontaneous rucks have developed around battlefield objectives. More often, though, it seems that large warbands eschew direct confrontation; a substantial number of human defenders make taking a keep a very difficult proposition, far easier, if you can manage to point everyone in generally the same direction, is to fly off to another zone and quickly storm an undefended keep; the attackers just need to shout “everyone to (zone name)!” in warband chat, and unless the other side has a pretty organised intelligence and communication network, they’ll have taken the keep before any serious opposition can be massed.

Public quests do seem to be suffering slightly from the popularity of scenarios, but I don’t think it’s because scenarios give better rewards necessarily (though the combination of renown points, experience points, and even money and loot from other players is a nice package), just that they’re much easier to get into. If the situation was reversed (ignoring the fact that it wouldn’t really work), if public quests were off in their own instances that you could queue for with the click of a button, and there were a couple of locations on the map you physically had to travel to for specific scenarios, I think more people would be in public quests much of the time. Scenarios only need to be slightly more popular for a positive feedback loop to kick in, you go to a public quest location, nobody else is there, so you join a scenario queue while plinking away at a few of the Stage 1 mobs; you get into a scenario, somebody else turns up for the public quest, nobody is there, they join a scenario queue… On the plus side, once you do get a group together, they still work very well; a guild group ran through all nine Elf public quests in chapters 10 - 12 last night, and had a rather splendid time.

Also in PvE-world are dungeons. I’ve only seen Gunbad, heading there a couple of times, and… it’s a dungeon. It’s not awful by any stretch, but it didn’t exactly leap out and perform an “I’m an amazing dungeon” tap dance while handing out free tickets to the wedding of its son. Perfectly functional, mosey on through taking on groups-of-three-Champion-mobs, a bit like yer bog standard WoW-type instance (one of the less interesting ones). Having public quests as you go is quite a nice touch, and it’s something to do as a group, nice for a bit of a change but not something I’d be queuing up for on a daily basis.

Finally, there’s general questing. Quests are the glue that binds everything together, and unfortunately for WAR, it’s more Pritt Stick than superglue. It starts off so very promisingly in your first zone, you have plenty of lovely quests. Quests to use siege weaponry so you get the hang of that, quests that reward you for taking part in a scenario, quests that overlap with public quests to nudge you gently in that direction, quests to kill mobs, quests to kill players, quests to scout the objectives in World RvR zones that encourage people in there for a bit of a rumble, quests that introduce you to and reward you for just about every aspect of the game. By Tier 2, though, and especially Tier 3, things start to come a little unstuck. M’colleague points out the problems in no uncertain terms, most fundamentally that the quest log (the otherwise concentratedly awesome Tome of Knowledge) is limited to 20 quests. The quests keep coming, and indeed multiply; you get quests that send you to the other racial zones, wherein there are more quests. There are quests to go to the Gunbad dungeon, and quests within the Gunbad dungeon, quests to capture Keeps…

Let’s say I’m merrily wandering around Empire lands, quest log stuffed to the gunwales with lovely quests in that zone, and I join a group for Gunbad. Flying over to the Marshes of Madness, I wonder if there might be some quests in the offing, and sure enough bright green “quest available” icons abound, the local Dwarfs more than keen to offload their petty chores onto you, what with being nailed to the floor and unable to move and everything. I start to grab them, but wait, quest log full, so I drop anything back in Empire lands (hoping I wasn’t halfway through anything particularly difficult to complete). A couple of the quests involve going to Gunbad, huzzah, and off we ride to the caves, where, in the pre-dungeon bar and grill (”would sir care for apéritif before plunging into the hellishly troll-infested bowels of the cave?”) a couple of the quests are completed, and another bunch are available, necessitating further quest dropping to fit them all in.

After a light and refreshing jaunt around pestilent nurglings and gaseous squigs, we finish a few quests, never get around to some others, pick up a couple of follow-up quests and call it a night. Next day is Guild Keep Storming Day, so we form up, and go and look for a Destruction keep or two to reclaim for the Emperor. Now a couple of weeks back I’d remembered to pick up the three quests to reclaim keeps, only Destruction weren’t playing that day, and everything was already in Order hands, so I’d since dropped those quests to fit others in, only tonight of course *everything* is in Destruction hands, but by the time I remember there’s a potential quest available it’s a bit late, I think it might be bad form to shout “wait, wait, I forgot the quest! Everybody stand on the ground floor, don’t worry Mr Keep Lord Sir, we’ll be up in a moment, I just need to nip back to Altdorf first…” (tanks stand around whistling, Witch Hunters adjust their hats for maximum jauntiness, the Bright Wizards stand on their own in a corner having a chat about the best way to treat burns and occasionally exploding).

Day three and a bunch of us decide to blast through some public quests, most of the others are over in the Elf zone so I fly and join them, and of course there’s another stackload of available quests, some of which probably overlap with the public quests and would provide nice bonus XP, cash and/or items, but it’s just too much of a pain to try and juggle everything.

Now this isn’t a terrible problem, it’s not something that makes me furious to the point of unsubscribing, but as Melmoth suggests, why do you need to talk to someone to start a quest? Just stick everything in the Tome of Knowledge automatically, tweak the interface a smidge so quests are divided up by zone, default view being the zone you’re in, track ‘em all on the map with the nice red splodges, make the on-screen tracker a little more intelligent to only show relevant immediately local quests, and Bob is your proverbial uncle. Does it make sense? How would you know that Neville T. Arbitrary really needed a box of vital supplies that had been on a wagon that lost a wheel in a rogue hamster attack somewhere in the north east? You’ve already got “Wanted” posters in games that give kill-quests, is it such a stretch that villages extend the system with lost and found, domestic help wanted and assorted other small ads? One click on the notice board, you jot everything relevant down in the Tome of Knowledge (three good leads for quests, one opportunity to make easy £££ at home and a possible bargain if the L-reg Ford Fiesta really is in running condition), and from there it’s hardly a huge leap to just *assume* the click, and automagically populate the Tome as you wander around the world, it’s no more immersion-breaking than joining scenario queues and randomly teleporting off to fight them. Granted if you did that for *everything* it would rather take the mystery out of it, you wouldn’t want to totally eliminate fun for Explorers by labelling everything with a big red arrow, so leave a good sprinkling of conventional quests and items to find around the world (as WAR does, with various tome unlocks for mobs and items all around the place), but the basic nuts n’ bolts “do this scenario, scout this objective, go to this place” stuff, there’s just no need for it. The supreme irony in all this, of course, is that somebody has effectively pointed this out before. Some “Paul Barnett” bloke, something like that? He really ought to implement those ideas in a game, it’d be great[1]…

[1] This is irony, by the way. Kill Collectors are in the game, and they do work, but there’s one of them standing next to seventeen other people with glowing green “git yer lovely quests here” icons, which if anything makes it all the more annoying when one of *those* is to kill ten of something you’ve just been mowing through.

A month in to an MMO, the question is usually “do I want to start subscribing now?”; for Warhammer, though, I don’t really have to decide for the best part of another month (not that it’s stopped me, look out for a State of the WAR Nation soon). Thanks to the headstart, grace periods and bonus days, I seem to have a subscription until early November, and as the EU billing system has only just become available I haven’t needed to hand over any credit card details to be playing. I doubt we’ll get any detailed official figures, much less broken down by region, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this caused a higher than average drop in EU subscribers as the month-with-the-box draws to an end just from impetus, you have to go all the way to the account page and type stuff into boxes to keep playing, whereas usually you’d have to go all the way there and click a couple of boxes to unsubscribe. Even if it’s not outright laziness, it’s all too easy for it to be one of those “oh yeah, must remember to…” jobs that have a habit of slipping through the gaps, and if your timing’s slightly off you end up subscribed to Age of Conan for an extra month. I had a quick look at the account screen, just to check it was up and running and see how long I had left before having to hand over some cash, and something else that struck me was a little tick box labelled something like “Recurring subscription?” (or similar); without actually trying the process, I presume the default option is that you just pay for your 1/3/6 months, rather than the usual set-up (in every other MMO I can think of) of “we’ll keep taking money until you tell us to stop”. I’m not sure if this is a laudably ethical decision or some legal requirement, but again it seems like the path of least resistance might be to stop playing, rather than keep paying. Or perhaps I’m massively overestimating the number of people for whom going to a web page and clicking a couple of links is a bit too much effort.