Put out your cooking fires before leaving the Charred Vale, below we have a classic example of what happens when a careless Orc wandered off from his campfire, the local wildlife got startled and.. disaster.
So, remember, everyone be careful out there. Safety is the concern of us all.
Straight from the catwalks of Darnassus we have…
Beetle Druid!
A very short update, we are open. Tje opening was as good as ever.
Thought for the day
Why does it feel like I still have the headset on, I handed it back 4 hours ago.
Well someone has been busy with the earth moving machinery and where did they get all that cut and dressed stone on such short notice?
This is where it starts, we have ops, boxes are coming in from cars. Hotel walk throughs have happened, build is ongoing, tech is being tested. Tge “notpart of the con, why the hell ae there so many people here” (I reckon over 150) pub quiz is happening. Tomorrow we kick off properly.
A change of pace / topic, the Nth discworld convention is now officially almost go. We are at the hotel, as are around 10 other people. Weirdest comment so far
“you’d be amazed at the number of times the cats bottom was in shot”
So, does this lead to other worlds or just to a reclaimed gnome homeland?
Triggered by a rant from Dara O Briain where he merrily goes off on one about GTA4, Call of Duty and other similar games. He has a problem getting through various choke points in the game. The end of level ‘boss’ type encounter where working out the boss and getting through is mandatory to see the rest of the game. In his example he’s managed to get through 11% or so of one of the titles, that’s it.
Never been able to clear that end of level monster.
I suspect that’s nailed why I prefer Warcrack over that form of linear game, there is no “win” as such. Ok we can get bosses down in Dungeons or Raids, we clear quests but there is no crippling penalty to not doing them. So, I can’t get quest $foo done, no problem I’ll have to clear a few other quests elsewhere to build the XP, or mangle a few extra monsters. I can’t get through Yog-Saron or the bloody Faction Champs? This doesn’t block me from having a look inside Icecrown and handing Arthas his arse on a plate.
The penalty is not getting the swooshbing of an achievement or a pretty piece of gear and taking longer to get somewhere, not “you can never see anything in the game beyond this point!”
I’ve previously discussed my general thoughts around Real ID, the problems with it and some of the motivations which were driving Blizzard. I do not actually ascribe malicious intent to Blizzard or Activision. I know this goes against the received wisdom that Kotick is satan reincarnate but to be honest I think this is so much garbage. It’s more likely that the system was put together without serious input from outside the company, much like Google’s Buzz, remember how much grief that caused when that launched, it’s largely the same principle at work. Large corporations are used to sharing information internally, pushing contact details all over the place, there is also a tendency within large corporations for people to ‘share’ information about themselves as part of introductions in meetings, particularly for kick-off meetings without remembering that there are people who like to only share details of their lives on their terms. I count myself in the latter group.
Anyway onto the meat of this post, thoughts on what we’re doing already out on the web for ourselves and where I believe Blizzard are going to try to use Real ID to provide ‘new’ services and make more cash off us.
Let’s have a look at what millions of people are already doing, without an apparent care in the world
Facebook is a fact of life, I read somewhere recently that they’ve gone through the 500 million subscriber window. Even if only half of those are regularly users that still a huge number of people sharing their data with just about anyone. For some users it’s a race to see who can have the most “friends” and be as open as possible about the most intimate details of their lives.
It would be complete nonsense to assume that at least some of Blizzards millions of subscribers use Facebook. Indeed a significant number are using it to keep track of when raids are meant to be and build a social shell around a raiding core, to build interest and bonds which keep the group going through the slow periods.
Blizzard wants to keep building on the guild model, it’s part of the social aspect to the game which keeps players within Warcraft rather than drifting off to another MMO or RTS game. I’m as guilty as other people, one of the ties which keeps me playing WoW rather than exploring EVE or LotRO is that the ‘home’ guild is full of people I know, I think there’s only one I’ve not physically met and of the rest one who I’ve not shared a beer (or other alcoholic beverage) at some point in the last decade and a half, and that’s only because he’s underage. So vent is part of how we play the game, running dungeons for run and relaxation is what we do, the social aspect is important. The raiding guild (until it suffered from pre-cata collapse) had a different feel to it, friendly but not ‘social’ in the same sense, in my use of the game the raiding guild was there to provide the solid progression challenge and the home guild to provide the social base.
Social guilds tend to provide their own glue, with the interaction of the players keeping things ticking over, possibly with larger guilds having a forum or using such as Facebook for out of game communication and co-ordination.
For larger guilds and those focused on specific progression (raiding, levelling, RP, PvP and so on) there is a whole service industry
It’s huge, and the returns are paying for these services either through direct subscription or through advertising.
The community is incredibly powerful, but…
At times in the game cycle where the game is lacking in draw, and the strength of the ties within the various guild types is not sufficient to hold players in the game. It’s happening in WoW at the moment, progression has slowed massively, the noise on /trade on maintenance day for the weekly is a fraction of what it was 2-3 months ago. RP levels are up in the home cities and the levelling zones are crawling with freshly hatched alts, Auction House traffic levels are down.
If there wasn’t an expansion due I’d be expecting realm closures and a winding down of the game.
However we all know what is happening and come November (or somewhere close) the numbers will ramp up again with a huge spike as Cataclysm hits the live servers, however the fallout at the moment is pretty terrible, raid groups are collapsing in on themselves, some people are leaving the game for good (too easy, vanilla was better) the group and social cohesion is breaking down as is seen in LFD with the increase in morons in groups.
Players want to know they can find good players they want to group with and push through the new content.
Also players are moving off onto Starcraft II and more worryingly from Blizzards point of view, they’ll be heading off out into the uncharted realms of Dragon Age and other MMOs. If the social glue isn’t strong enough, why not go and explore something completely different?
All of this adds up to a problem, Blizzard needs players, with products such as WoW and SCII it needs players to keep shoving coins in the slot every month, forget the sales of the boxes they’re nothing in comparison to the monthly subscription. The model Blizzard rely on is to keep content going through social interaction & ‘progression’, let’s be honest without the driver of the badge grind and helping friends through the content who in their right mind would kill approximately 1800 5-man bosses in roughly a 2 year period on a single toon.
So the players need to be glued together or the subscription money dries up and more importantly it doesn’t come back to the same (or greater) level when the new content drops. Prior to realID all the control on how the players grouped together and interacted outside of WoW was in their own hands, Blizzard had to do nothing, they could simply be there and ride on the back of it. However this means they cannot direct it, add their own focus on where the playerbase should be looking for their next fix or indeed make some of the folding stuff. I can imagine that relying on external forces for the ongoing growth and maintenance of your games is something which disturbed Blizzard/Activision.
Like a twisted entity from the nether itself, intent on sucking the very life from everything it touches social networking tries to enter every aspect of our life. We’ve already looked at how hundreds of millions of people globally hooked on social networking. So the underlying fabric is there, Blizzard simply need to use the ideas and technology to start formalising that structure.
Stage one, the fabric is needed to link all the players together both within games and across Acti/Blizz games, that’s where Battlenet and realID enter the frame. At the billing level this allows simplification of databases, authentication and the like, it’s also brought together the Real Name -> ${games}/${all_characters} mappings. Now the fabric is in place let’s make it easy for anyone to talk to anyone else with the realID friending capability.
Problem 1 Solved: Players are glued back together within the Battlenet universe.
Stage two, while the above helps it risks leaving a large segment of the player base who have left for other MMOs, completely different games or even completely stopped gaming for the moment. Let’s make it simple to hook Facebook contact lists to in-game account information.
Problem 2 Solved: Players are glued together with the current leader in the social networking sphere.
Both the previous phases of this are about preserving revenue, they do nothing to increase it. The relationship with Facebook brings some viral advertising possibilities which might draw in new gamers but I cannot see this is anything more than a percentage point here or there. Gamers will already be looking at the big launches, non-gamers may be pulled in but they’re more likely to be recovering gamers who’ve managed to shake off the habit for a while.
There is another group of gamers out there, let’s call them timelapse gamers. Farmville is the classic example, unlike SCII, WoW or the other online properties there is no need for these gamers to all be online at the same time, everything is done in a manner which is more akin to “chess by mail” where actions are taken and shoved onto the stack and the other players react to what’s happening on the stack. With a major focus on social progression, in that “I must keep my farm growing and well-tended to keep ahead of $other_fb_user”. However I’m not convinced that Activision is seeing this as a particular growth area for the company.
So features which they could be bringing out (all as additional services, naturally), much of what follows is a stream of consciousness approach to the issue… so.. sketchy on details.
I certainly see nothing unlikely about Blizzard taking ideas and services which are already in wide use in the community and creating their own versions, they’ve never been shy about taking the best and most popular ideas from the Addon community and integrating them into the core game. So extending that reach further is well within their mode of operation.
It’s been denied many times, but there have been announcements in the past and I think it’s safe to say that any company will do what it thinks will bring in the most profit for the minimum of acceptable risk to its bottom line and where the organisation wants it’s reputation to be. This will not necessarily align with the views of all its current or potential customers. Opening up to Facebook brings solid gold information on the hobbies and interests of millions of users and how those users are linked. Advertisers want solid information, with the way the media is evolving getting relevant adverts to the eyeballs of internet users is where the money lies.
Will they bring adverts into the games? This depends on the game, WoW, not yet. It would smash the immersion which does exist into many tiny pieces, this doesn’t mean we won’t see it on the launcher or on the official sites. The FC channel can work both ways, once you’ve confirmed the BNet to FC link you’ve also let Blizzard see your interests as logged on FC, targeted advertising again, focused high value eyeballs.
As far as the paying customers are willing to let it, Blizzard will continue to develop along these lines for as long as the profit / risk balance is acceptable. We’ve seen already how pressure from the community, and I suspect the realisation of just how much at risk their staff were has caused them to back off. However my belief is that we are seeing only a tactical withdrawal and futher attempts to drive this forward will be coming our way. If the users accept the changes then more will be around the corner, given how the concepts of ‘friend’ and ‘privacy’ have been changing over the last decade I am not holding out much hope for the medium term.
So, there’s been an interview with Tom Chilton over on a German site where he states that Cataclysm needs “a couple more months” before it’s ready. While it’s nice to have an official voice here I don’t think it’s actually news, anyone who’s been on the beta can easily relate (and it’s probably hard to stop them) the problems, bugs, balancing and the general “this is massively unfinished” feel to the game.
Within our group there has been some discussion on whether it’s actually ready for beta or not, I don’t have a firm benchmark to work on here as this is the first Blizzard beta I’ve been able to get into. However from experience with IT, support and development I can state that it really does feel like they’ve leapt early because of the deadline given by the suits at the top of the chain.
The graphics are still very broken in places where to be frank I would have expected things to be sorted by now,professions aren’t live in the game, the bug reporting tool has remained broken for the last two patches and so on.
Where does this leave us. Assuming that the timeline given is accurate and we have no reason to believe he’s lying, he also does have an internal view on the task lists and what development is being done which hasn’t yet been rolled into the public beta version then I reckon we’re looking at mid-late Oct for it going gold and November for release.