Go away, or I shall taunt you a second time!

Aggro, hate, threat, whatever term you prefer to use for the unpleasant attention of monsters, is a fundamental part of MMOs. Let's assume for a minute we're stuck with the class system (as in character classes, not the struggle of the proletariat and bourgeoisie). At a basic level, you probably have a tank, healer and damage dealer. The tank holds the aggro, the healer heals the tank, the damage dealer... anyone want to take a guess? Award yourself ten points if you said "deals damage", five points for "flounces around for a bit then turns up after the hard work is done to shout 'MY KILL'", and if you said "pulls the aggro off the tank, uses up all the healer's manna in a futile attempt to keep him alive, causes a wipe, then insults the rest of the group for not doing their job and quits in a huff" then award yourself a stiff drink and a bit of a lie-down.

(Disclaimer: I invariably *play* damage dealing classes, I'm allowed to say stuff like that.)

Obviously there's a lot of variation: other roles such as crowd control and buffing/debuffing might be performed by dedicated classes or combined in others; damage dealing often comes in ranged and melee flavours; hybrid classes perform multiple roles with varying degrees of efficiency; some classes may have pets to perform other roles, etc. etc., but at the end of the day, some classes are designed to be better at surviving the attention of monsters, and part of the game is to make sure they're the ones being attacked, rather than the squishy types standing behind them.

This is where things get a bit tricky. Due to class balance, the better a class is at soaking up damage (or avoiding it), the worse they have to be at other things (typically dealing damage). This makes the typical MMO tank a peculiar beast without many parallels; the tank from whence they got their name, the armoured fighting vehicle, is heavily armoured, true, but it also has a socking great gun for shooting stuff (momentary diversion for tank grognards: granted, you can find some better examples if you really try, like the early WWII British Matilda II, with very heavy armour and comparatively poor firepower, but never mind).

Lack of damage means tanks need another way of getting and keeping the attention of mobs, often some form of "taunt" or "provoke" ability to gain extra aggro. Other classes may have specific abilities to reduce aggro caused by their own attacks/healing, or may just need to consider their own actions slightly more carefully (like waiting until the tank has stormed into combat before drawing too much attention to yourself). This works as a game mechanic, especially for giving the damage dealer a bit more to think about than how many buttons he can press to inflict indiscriminate havoc and devastation upon the surrounding area, but it can seem very artificial; how does aggro reduction work, are you pointing behind the mob shouting "Look! Behind you! A badger, with a gun!"? Is the tank's taunt something like "Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!" while tapping his helmet in a strange fashion? One of the best analogies I remember is someone from the City of Heroes boards, likening being a Tanker to sitting in an armoured dustbin getting beaten by mobs, occasionally popping your head up to shout "YO MAMA'S SO FAT!" at them to keep their attention. It's even more of a problem trying to adapt this system to Player versus Player combat, where you can't force players on one team to attack a certain player on the other without some fairly extreme intervention (like the tank's taunt rendering the opposition unable to target anyone else).

As per usual, I've no real solution to the situation, though in writing this I have realised if any MMO includes a "French Taunting Knight" tank class who gets to shout "You don't frighten us with your silly knees-bent running around advancing behavior!", I'm playing it in a shot...

Gotta try and shake off this creeping malaise

I had one of those "meh" weekends in World of Warcraft. Nothing terrible, just a vague sense of dissatisfaction, really. Getting lured back to the auction house was a bad move to start with; while in Stormwind to visit a class trainer, might as well pop in and sell a few bits from the Outlands... and while there, well, it can't do any harm to have a little look, can it? Of course it can, I've gone from smugly admiring my shiny collection of quest rewards to coveting my neighbour's ox (well, not "ox" so much as "Blade Dancer's Wristguards", but it's the same principle), and my pile of gold was somewhat depleted ("A mere 20 gold for that piece of armour? I make that much in ten minutes now, I'll take it... and that sword... and the dagger, the throwing axe, a couple of pairs of trousers and that recipe for sauteed marsh wombat spleen (mmm, sounds delicious, just right for that dinner party I'm hosting)")

Then, there was the questing. Four of us had a little wander around Hellfire Ramparts; I really didn't think we'd be able to get very far at all, but maybe there was an outside chance of getting the first boss at least. As it was, we cleared through to the final boss with very little trouble, and had a fair crack at the dragon before he got a bit miffed and one-shotted the healer. For the rest of the weekend, though, we were on in dribs and drabs, precluding another instance run. That meant questing in the Outlands, which is a fine activity, but generally rather unsociable; you need to all travel to the same area (though thankfully this isn't really a problem in the Outlands any more, unlike previously where you might find yourself in the Eastern Plaguelands, and your friend in Silithus, and a half hour journey from one to the other), find common quests you all have available, or run quests that some of you have done before, or run other quests that some of you don't have yet (so they'll have to do them again later). As the mobs don't scale to group size or level, and the vast majority of quests are solo-able, having a group of three or four players tends to be overkill, rendering encounters largely trivial (until you get bored and play "see how many mobs the least armoured members of the party can pull", and other fun party games), and while you blast through "kill (x)" quests where each kill counts for the whole group, it's not much quicker than soloing for "collect (x) body parts of creature (y)" quests (indeed possibly slower, depending on spawn rates). All in all, things rather conspire to make playing with your friends (surely the point of an MMOG?) *less* rewarding in many ways than playing solo, other than for the occasional world elite/boss mob.

Forced grouping certainly isn't the answer; although it solves the problem of solo encounters being trivial for a group, it makes it even more difficult for a group of friends to get together and run new and worthwhile quests for all of them when they happen to be on together, especially when quests are designed for fixed group sizes. It all makes me pine for City of Heroes again; in that, every mission you did was an instance, and the number and level of opponents scaled to take account of the size of your group. You even have a difficulty setting, and the "sidekick" system to allow players of disparate levels to team together. None of your friends around? No problem, off you go and fight crime. Someone else arrives, they can join mid-mission, and the spawn sizes increase to take account of that. You're blasting through the missions? Turn up the difficulty setting a notch. A third person arrives, but they only started playing recently and are ten levels below the rest of you? Get them into the team, sidekick them to someone else, and off you go again.

Oh, and to cap everything off, London Irish put in a rather lacklustre performance against Saracens on Sunday. Ah well. Roll on next weekend...

No time for Vanguard

With Vanguard: Saga of Heroes about to launch, I've been taking a bit more interest in it. The timing is pretty bad from my perspective, though: a couple of months ago there was the pre-Burning Crusade lull in World of Warcraft, in three to six months time I might well be ready to move on again (or I might be a dedicated raider, you never know... well, you probably do actually, but still). Right now, though, I'm quite happy wandering around Hellfire Peninsula. There was a cheap Vanguard pre-order pack available with access to the final beta, which at any other time I would have jumped at, but during Burning Crusade launch week?

Maybe that's for the best; while I've been keen in the past to get into open/final betas (or "free trials by any other name with a bit of server stress thrown into the deal") as a way of getting a look at games without paying, this might not be the best idea. Open betas don't usually last too long (one exception being Auto Assault, which I think managed about a year and a half... I still have a soft spot for that game, but sadly almost nobody else did). Being a comparatively casual player to start with, and then knowing that any progress will get wiped away for launch anyway, I usually don't get too much further than the starting areas with a few different races/classes; unless the game is disastrously underdeveloped, these areas should be fairly well polished, and the combination of shiny new game smell, and rapid progression through levels/skills/items (shouts: "LOOK! I have upgraded my rusty blunt spoon to a rusty *sharpened* spoon!") tend to give a positive experience. If the game's called Captain Grind's Grindcrusher: The Ultimate Earache (Extreme Grind Edition), and you start up the beta and the first NPC is Geoff the Assigner of Extremely Grindy Quests who gives you a quest to kill 100 identical Grindbeasts, followed by a second quest to kill 200 identical-except-very-slighly-differently-coloured Grindbeasts... you might just about figure out it's not for you if you don't like grinding. The more cunning designers might adopt the Melmoth's First Circle approach to questing, showering you with plaudits (and indeed "phat lewt") for accomplishing such arduous tasks as "walking to that person just over there, the one with the huge flashing arrow pointing to them, in case you get lost on the way", so by the time beta finishes, you decide this is a really most splendid game and well worth buying.

Having actually gone and bought the game, and raced back through the initial content you got to know in the beta, you suddenly find yourself in a wilderness with not much to do, and a conspicuous lack of showers of rose petals from delighted NPCs. Some heavy crunch time got the starting areas finished, but unfortunately the development team were turned into shambling zombies in the process, and are now trying to eat the brains of the marketing department who *promised* users all sorts of features which would take another six months of unpaid overtime to actually put in. As Van Hemlock most appositely put it: "MMOs are a lot like fine wines - they're best if they've been left to mature a bit, and then should be allowed to 'breathe' before drinking!"

So actually, maybe the "bad" timing is the best possible timing. Once I'm done with the Burning Crusade, if people are generally positive about Vanguard I'll probably check it out. They'll have worked the initial kinks out, be adding new content, the box will be £10 cheaper to buy, and there might be a few old guildmates playing from launch who can spare a couple of copper pieces! (And there'll be world peace, and a solution to global warming, and I'll have won the lottery and be free to play all day... hey, I can dream...)

A Pack Rat's Tail

I'm a terrible pack rat, I just can't throw anything away. Maybe it stems from Zork and similar adventure games, where you'd habitually pick up anything that wasn't nailed down in case it was useful later (and if it was nailed down, you could use that crowbar you picked up earlier to fix that...) This carried over to computer RPGs, where my characters would stagger under the weight of their sword, a spare sword (in case the first one was lost or broken), a backup spare sword, an ornamental sword which wasn't very good for actually fighting with but looked nice, a two handed sword for extra damage, a shield in case defence was the better option, a mace in case of opponents more susceptible to bludgeoning, a glaive, a guisarme, a glaive-guisarme, a glaive-glaive-glaive-guisarme-glaive etc. I'd amass enough of a collection of scrolls, potions, rings and amulets to set up a library with a particularly well stocked bar and jewellery shop in the foyer, but would be loathe to actually use them just in case they were needed more later.

The apogee of this has to be the Elder Scrolls series, particularly Morrowind and Oblivion, and their magnificent "sandbox" worlds, where you weren't limited to the traditional weapons, armour and the like, but could also pick up cutlery, crockery, ornaments, housewares, furniture, small animals, shrubs, villages... Being limited in the amount you could carry (I'd always work on developing my Strength, if for nothing else than being able to carry a few extra plates and a nice vase) this necessitated a new place to store things: your own house, either within the regular game, or through a user-written add-on. Many's the hour I could spend in Oblivion, just wandering around town purloining assorted items to furnish my house. A bit like Old Man Murray's take on Deus Ex, in fact.

Anyway, for reasons I can't quite fathom myself, I had a fun evening chucking items around between various characters in World of Warcraft last night, as the Burning Crusade opens up new crafting possibilities for some of the stacks of cloth, leather, metals and gems kicking around on various alts. Also, with all the new item drops, I had a fairly ruthless (by my standards) clearout of stuff; some old armour, now outclassed by Burning Crusade drops, a bunch of useless items like the Faded Photograph from some Un'goru Crater quests (you never know, they might add an NPC in a new patch who gives you a bundle of epic loot for this stuff!), so I wound up with nice, neat banks, with everything lined up in the correct order. Maybe it's just obsessive-compulsive personality disorder...

I am the god of Hellfire (Ramparts)

Disclaimer: the post title is a Crazy World of Arthur Brown reference, not a suggestion that I defeated the Hellfire Ramparts single handed.

This weekend I got my first look at a Burning Crusade instance when a group of us decided to take a nice bracing stroll around the Hellfire Ramparts. According to the guidebook they offer a delightful view over the peninsula, and present several fascinating examples of Outlands architecture. The only drawback is a slight infestation of demonic Fel Orcs, but apparently a firm tap on the nose with a stout walking stick should see them off.

Our Sunday afternoon jaunt didn't start too well, as a patrol rather unsportingly joined in an already furious encounter, but after a chance to see the area from a more ghostly perspective we were nicely warmed up, and didn't have too many other problems, at least to the final boss. With myself as a Rogue, a Paladin, a Priest, a Mage and a non-feral-specced Druid, we were a bit too squishy, and the dragon baked us lightly at Gas Mark Death. Later that evening we had another try with a Warrior, and that worked rather better, so it was home and dragon-toasted crumpets all round.

For the first expansion instance, the Ramparts are a nice and compact, only taking a couple of hours for our modestly equipped group of level 60s (most of us seeing it for the first time). That's probably the ideal instance size for me; having a more or less free Sunday, I could even fit two runs in either side of dinner, where a single five hour session wouldn't have been possible without drawing heavy wife aggro. It got me thinking that the Deadmines (the first Alliance instance in the original game) would work *far* better as multiple wings rather than a single instance; maybe one for the mines themselves, another for the foundry, and then the final area. You still get the story (and I really like the story and layout of the Deadmines, revealing their purpose as you get further in), but without having to do the whole lot in one gruelling slog (the problem being compounded by the fact that, unless you have a really good group, being powerful enough to deal with the final boss makes the first half of the instance rather pointless). I gather most Outlands instances follow the multiple wing approach, so that gets the thumbs up from me.

The only thing I didn't like was the loot. Or rather, the lack of it, as the curse of random loot struck again. It wasn't the worst case ever, as most of the blue bind-on-pickup drops were useful to someone (lacking a Hunter or Shaman, I was expecting a load of Mail to turn up), but there wasn't a single thing useful for me. I probably shouldn't have done it, but curiousity made me look up the possible drops, which is like the bit on the gameshow where the host says "Come and have a look at what you could have won", revealing a shiny new car to the crestfallen contestant who's going away with a plastic figurine. Oh well. I never wanted that speedboat anyway...

Isn't it nice when things just... work?

So goes the tagline in Honda's excellent Cog advert (well worth a look, if you've never seen it). It's a shame so few things just... work.

World of Warcraft interface addons, for one. They're a bit of a delicate ecosystem of their own; from using one compilation pack for patch 1.12, patch 2.00 required many addons to be re-written, so as a temporary measure I grabbed another compilation pack someone had produced for the beta client (and which Melmoth had the foresight to save the day before, as all the interface websites collapsed under the strain of a good chunk of the playerbase all trying to find updates of their favourite addons). And there were some new and shiny things in there, but some things missing I'd liked from the previous compilation, so I started adding a few bits here, taking off a few bits there... I've now got a bit of a sprawling assortment of addons, which mostly function, more or less, but a couple of things seem to have decided to just stop working entirely, and others pop up error messages here and there. This isn't to take anything away from the addon authors, who in most cases produce really useful stuff, for free, spending much of their own time debugging and improving; it's hardly their fault I've gone and installed their addon on top of 23 others all trying to interact with the same bits of the game. Just another little annoyance...

Then there's monitors. You might recall, a little over a month ago, I got a nice new widescreen monitor. And after a few days, it started making a high pitched whining sound, almost painful to listen to. The nice people at Viewsonic said it sounded like a failing coil in the power supply, and said they'd arrange a replacement. Simple, right?

Or not. My wife and I work full time, which usually makes arranging deliveries a bit of a hassle, but over Christmas we had plenty of holiday, so it would have been a good time to sort out return and delivery of a replacement. Except Viewsonic didn't have any replacement units in stock. And still didn't have any replacement units in stock in early January when we were both back to work.

Last week, they did have a replacement unit in stock! I've got limited flexibility in my working hours, but I can get away early on a Friday if needs be, so delivery was arranged for Friday afternoon. Needless to say, no monitor turned up Friday afternoon... Turns out there may have been a mixup between "dispatch" and "delivery" (quite why we'd want to arrange when they dispatched the monitor, I don't know, but hey). And the actual delivery work is subcontracted, but the person on the phone couldn't tell us who would actually be delivering the parcel or supply a reference number, so we couldn't get in touch with the delivery people direct.

Wednesday, a card turns up from the delivery service. "We tried to deliver a package, but nobody was in..." So we phone the delivery company; nice helpful people, they asked if there was somewhere they could leave the package if nobody was around? Strangely enough, we weren't too keen on them dumping an expensive monitor in a garage or somewhere, so no. Anyway, weren't they picking up the old monitor? They couldn't see anything about a pickup... still. Arranged delivery for this Friday afternoon.

Yesterday, a card turns up from another courier service. "We tried to collect a package, but nobody was in..." OK, so that explains it, one company delivers, an entirely different company collects. Only this company are subcontracted to a repair service, themselves presumably subcontracted to Viewsonic, and the card says the courier service will rearrange collection with the repair service, and none of them have phone numbers or reference numbers. In the middle of trying to phone one of Viewsonic, the collecting courier service, the repair company, or anyone else vaguely connected with any of this (and failing, as everywhere was closed for the day), our neighbor pops around with a little gift. It's a Viewsonic VX2235wm, which the delivery service had dropped off earlier today. Fortunately, our neighbors are lovely people (though we may now be in the wife's bad books, as, prompted by the delivery, the husband was last seen investigating the possibility of buying a nice large widescreen monitor).

As is often the case, any time we've managed to get in touch with a human being, usually at Viewsonic, they've been nothing but polite and helpful, but there's not usually much they can do in the face of byzantine multinational bureaucracy. Oh well. At least this new monitor (so far) hasn't started making any strange noises (fingers crossed), and I'm back to larger, vibrantly coloured gaming. Sorry for the not particularly entertaining post, sometimes you just need to vent...

Melmoth's Inferno

M'colleague Melmoth has just started his blog, Melmoth's Inferno, with his rather splendid take on The nine circles of questing. Go read!