I’m always interested in finding people who play MMOs in a very different way from the way I do, so I was intrigued to read comments on the official forums by pet collectors who felt that the Blizzard Store was ruining their game by selling minipets. There is a fantastic site for WoW pet collectors at warcraftpets.com — and even on the front page, they mention that they are catering to hardcore pet collectors as well as ‘people who just want a new pet.’

I’m impressed because that specific site has pretty much created the entire pet collecting minigame. You can register your collection, compare it with other people, see who else is collecting on your realm. Why it doesn’t have a proper forum I have no idea.

(I also wonder why these guys don’t play EQ2 because it’s the most collector-friendly MMO I’ve ever seen.)

Just as background, there are lots of novelty non-combat minipets available in WoW. Some can be bought cheaply from an in game vendor, some are given as rewards for quests, achievements, or for being logged in on an anniversary week. Others are rare drops which can later be sold for high prices on the auction house. And you can also buy them with real cash — not just in the pet shop, but buying rare CCGs with minipets attached, buying collectors editions of the various expansion packs, and so on.

I’m quite surprised that so little of this pet collecting minigame has ever been incorporated into WoW formally. Sure, the pets are there, but the tools to locate, compare, and brag about them really are not. There are a few achievements involved but otherwise, the pets are just thrown in willy-nilly. I’m sure that for the collectors that is part of the appeal. Because there’s no real rhyme or reason to it, collecting a lot of pets shows that you know how to research the game.

Also, there are no mini pets which drop in raid instances. Pet collecting absolutely can be done solo — there’s one pet in a 5 man instance but all the rest are not. This is a type of gaming which lends itself to soloing or even casual play.

So why would adding buyable pets change that? It doesn’t. There has been a notion that cool or interesting pets should be more difficult to collect but that’s rather down to personal taste. There’s also a notion that it’s cooler to be seen with rarer pets, but with such a wide range to choose from, it should be easy to pick one that no one else likes. What the cash shop changes is that now it’s likely that cute pets might be very easy to get in game. You don’t even need to visit the local pet vendor.  And I think that is what is messing with people’s heads.

To non pet collectors, it’s a non issue. Pay cash for cute pet, job done. But for pet collectors, it’s more of an adjustment. Should they even include the buyable pets in their pet count, because there is no difficulty involved?

And for the rest of us, we can ponder whether or not Collector is a different style of play from Achiever (I think it is), and the happy coincidence that led “ok, lets throw in some more minipets’” to becoming a fun game for the minipet collectors.

One of my major issues with the game is the lack of some kind of vault in which to store items that you might need later on in the game. I end up carrying around way too many gifts for companion characters I haven’t even met yet, for example.

If you have the same problem, you’ll be pleased to know that there is now an (free) unofficial  addon which adds a storage chest to your camp. You can get hold of it here. Read and follow the installation instructions carefully so that everything ends up in the right directories. It won’t conflict with the storage provided as part of the Warden’s Keep DLC if you already have that.

It’s a generous addition by one of the Bioware coders, on his personal time. He’s also provided the source code, so addon writers looking to add things to the campsite could use that as a starting point.

I cannot remember a time when I have been as glutted on awesome computer games as I am right now at this moment. My gaming hours are still very occupied with Dragon Age, which is offering some of the most compelling, immersive gaming I’ve ever had on PC right now.  It is not only a great game, but it also plays right into my storytelling/ RP AND gameplay preferences so it’s absolutely the whole package.

If I want a break from that and some mindless hack/ slay action, Torchlight is still brilliantly entertaining. I find I enjoy it more when I don’t sit down for long sessions — that can get repetitive. But in short bursts it’s very fun and refreshing, and I still have more character classes, more builds, more endless dungeon to try. As if that wasn’t enough, we finally decided to pick up a PS3 so have a couple more great games there (Little Big Planet and Uncharted 2) when we want to sit down on the sofa together and play. I will have more to say about both of those games sometime but they’re both fantastic.

The nice thing about the single player games is that even if I build up a backlog now, it just means I won’t buy any more for awhile until I’m done with them. There’s no special hurry.

But where is WoW in all this? It’s on the back burner for me. I’m keeping up my relaxed raid schedule of one 25 man raid a week, and that’s about it. But why is that? This current patch is simply not compelling and I’ve run out of goals. Until the next patch drops, I’m finding other things to do with my spare time.

Larisa comments that she worries that people think she’s burning out because she’s been critical of WoW recently. I don’t think that. I think they put out an unexciting patch, and I remember noting that it sounded like filler when I first read about the Coliseum. I also don’t see any reason why even a fan has to ooze positivity over a lacklustre patch. By all means find something positive to talk about, but what if the positive thing is, ‘Well, at least we’ll all be geared for the next patch which should be better’?

Compared to the single player games, patch 3.2 offers very very little gameplay. There was one new raid instance that didn’t put up much of a challenge – I enjoyed the new mechanics but they didn’t keep us occupied for very long. Being offered the chance to keep rerunning old instances to be rewarded by a slightly different set of badges which could be turned in for better loot got old before the patch even went live.

One thing this has crystallised in my mind is that WoW at the moment is only as good as its last patch. Oh, there’s plenty of other content in there but I’m done with the rest of the expansion myself, as are a lot of other endgame players. We’ve run the instances, gotten the rep, experienced the quests/ storyline, and capped the tradeskills, so we are very focussed on the new patch content to keep us engaged. Or in other words, many people who played since the beginning of Wrath are now out of in-game goals and bored of the year old gameplay. As soon as a new patch hits, everyone who is endgame-ready will be motivated to switch to the new content — partly because it is new and partly because they will be enticed there with ever increasing rewards. But what happens when they’re done?

Any subscription game needs to keep offering players a mixture of short, medium, and longterm goals to keep their interest in maintaining a relationship with that game. Those are the things which make it worthwhile to pick up a longterm sub, knowing that there are things you want to accomplish that will take months. Goals aren’t enough on their own, but if they’re not there, then you’d better hope that your community is very sticky indeed.

The reason this has become more of an issue now in Warcraft  is that Wrath heralded a new era of accessibility for the game. And that meant fewer long term goals, and a shift in perspective for raid goals. For example, if your goal is to kill the last boss of a raid instance, you can now decide whether killing it on normal mode (possibly in a PUG) will satisfy the sightseeing instinct. Is it worth the extra hassle of finding a raid group just to get the boss on hard mode? A lot of people don’t find that as compelling a prospect as when it was the only way to see that boss die at all. Not only that, but because of the way players are now corralled through the game, many more of them will run out of patch content before the next patch hits.

So these things are in many ways a result of deliberate design decisions. I don’t think the decisions were bad, and I rather enjoy that I’m able to see all the bosses and finish a patch and move on without having to dedicate vast amounts of time and effort. But it does mean that if one patch is less exciting, it’s far easier to either skip it or take a break and do something else until Blizzard provide something more interesting for players to do.

I’ve seen a lot more raid groups recruiting at the moment, so I’m guessing a lot of people are bored with the Coliseum. Will they come back to see Arthas fall in patch 3.3, or will other games — maybe even single player games — have stolen their gaming souls?

This week, two main news stories made their way out of EA. The first one is that they bought Playfish, the social/ facebook gaming developer, for a eye-bleeding $300 million plus change.

And the second is that EA laid off a lot of staff, including 40% of Mythic, developers of Warhammer Online. I think it’s fair to say that WAR’s days are numbered, and there’s not going to be any magical expansion on the way to introduce a third realm and save the game.

This is not a post of doom though, the MMO genre isn’t dead. And no big game publisher can really ignore the massive success that social games have seen for the low cost to make. But MMOs have been going through a process of experimentation and refinement over the last few years. A lot of big budget games haven’t been as successful as they might have been expected to be on paper.

2010 may see the last gasp of the AAA big budget MMOs. It’s going to be a fantastic year for MMO gamers. It will see Star Trek Online, Final Fantasy whatever (14?), Guild Wars 2, Jumpgate Evolution, Cataclysm (I don’t really count this as a new game but it’ll be big) and SWTOR.

CCP still have to announce what they’re doing with Vampire even though it’s an open secret that they are working on a Vampire MMO. Blizzard haven’t yet announced their next MMO although they’re known to be working on it. But I doubt anyone else will start working on any new MMOs with that sort of budget and scope any time soon. It’s time now to wait, and see, and find out what players actually want.

As to where social gaming is going, Mashable makes 5 predictions here — of all of those, the one I have most confidence in is that EA will find new ways to monetize.

2010 is going to be an amazing year for MMO gaming, but will it just be the beginning of the end?

If you want to get out of the city map and back to the world map, then get to the city map page and select the icon at the bottom of the map, in the middle.

Trust me, I’m a dwarf

Dragon Age is the game I’ve been waiting for ever since I started to play CRPGs, and I hadn’t even realised. In fact, I’d all but given up on ever having a computer based RPG that came anywhere near the nuances of a tabletop game. But I was wrong.

Bioware have learned a lot since the days of Baldurs Gate and Knights of the Old Republic – BG had a large game world and lots to do but never really grabbed me as a story. KOTOR leapt for the jugular with a character based storyline but made the player so much front and centre that it was almost embarrassing to play. I felt awkward knowing that the game was so blatently all about me.

In Dragon Age, you are the hero. You will do great and terrifying things, but there’s a whole world in this game and a lot of other people too. You will affect them, they will affect you.

The game is a solid blend of CRPG sections where you can explore the scenery, talk to other characters, do quests, and take everything that isn’t nailed down; and party based combat. Both sides of the game seem exceptional to me from what I have played so far. But the story and the immersion is where the game really shines.

The origins of the title are long intro sections for each combination of race/social background which ease you into your character and flesh it out a bit before the main storyline kicks off and you are taken away from everything and everyone you once knew. I’ve played through a few origins and thought they were all effective – although I can see how some might appeal more to different players. The mage background, for example, offers an insight into a life lived entirely inside the mage tower, with some moral and ethical dilemmas thrown in. But because of the moral choices, it doesn’t feel as streamlined as the city elf background where you’re given a fairly arse kicking revenge fantasy (no moral dilemma there!). The dwarf commoner is my favourite so far but none of the ones I tried were clunkers. They all worked at getting me to like my character and connect with it, and offering some long term character  based goals as well as purely quest based ones.

Voice work is great, although there do seem to be a lot of people who talk with posh English accents around the place. I’m a convert to voice work in CRPGs now, although I can’t imagine what sort of resources Bioware must have at their disposal. As others have commented, it is a little jarring that everyone except your character is chatting away – it makes them come across a bit grim, like the man with no name. But appealing voice work brings even the least convincing character models to life. The animation is also pretty good. I especially loved watching my city elf warrior heft a two handed sword around. I’ve seen people do real life swordplay with those and the moves looked right to me (none of this swinging it around your head like a rhythmic gymnast).

The heart and soul of the CRPG is in the companion characters who will join you along the way, and how your main character develops a relationship with them. There is always a danger in CRPGs that because the player is in the driving seat, all the other characters feel weak – they are always deferring to your opinions and letting you make the decisions. That does exist here, but they will also step up and challenge you when they think you are making a mistake. It’s not like having a full AI on board, but they do feel convincing to me as 3 dimensional characters.

For example,  as my dwarf rogue, I was commenting to my husband that I liked Alistair but thought he was naive and a bit of a tit. He said that as his mage, he liked him because he felt that they had a lot in common – they’d both been taken from their parents at a young age and sent off to an institution to be raised. So the character and conversation options were there to support both of those experiences.

The fighting sequences are fast paced, although you can pause the action as often as you need to, and can be as tactically deep as you care to go. Easy mode is a lot easier – you won’t need to pause the game too much and area effects won’t harm your party through friendly fire. Normal mode (which is quite hard in places, even after the last patch) requires more thought and hands on interaction. Although you can set programmable tactics for each character, mages need a bit more babysitting to get the best out of them. If one particular fight is kicking your butt and you get frustrated, you can change the difficulty to easy for that, and then back again afterwards.

Or just play it through in easy mode if you’re more about the story and the character than the tactical combat. That’s just as valid a way to play and I enjoy that the game gives me those options.

And really the one flaw with the character classes is that mages feel as though they have many more options. As a mage, you can have crowd control, you can nuke, you can have AE, you can heal, you can buff. Fighters and rogues are a little more one sided, although my rogue has some stuns and can set traps and throw bombs so I don’t feel restricted with her at all. The game is not set up to assume you always have a healer along, but if you don’t, take a lot of healing poultices and have one of the party train in herbalism (to make more cheaply).

And about the maturity? They’re not joking. Even if you ignore the blood and the entertainment on offer at the brothel (it’s all fade to black) or the options to romance your party (I can’t report on that since I’m having enough trouble getting them to stay with me at all, let alone anything more), the issues and moral dilemmas raised in the game are a step beyond most fantasy fare. How do you feel about casual in game racism? Would you kill a child if you knew for a fact that doing so would also destroy a demon? Free the condemned prisoner, even if you know he might kill again? This is a game where you will be facing those types of choices, and you’ll have to take responsibility for where they lead.

As if all that wasn’t enough, there are also achievements to unlock and lore to discover – Bioware have used something similar to WAR’s tome of knowledge where new pages open up to inform you of what you have learned about characters, items, gameplay, lore, and so on. Lore entries may also be expanded later as you find out more. I found that worked very well, although indexing it by number doesn’t make it easy to search.

My dwarf just hit level 10 with *cough* a fair amount of hours played and I feel as though I’ve barely touched the surface of the game. I’m thoroughly enjoying it, as you can probably tell. In fact,  I absolutely love it and will plan to spring for the warden’s keep DLC at some point, if only because I’m happy to have the chance to throw more money at Bioware for content of this quality.

Tell me about your character

Let me tell you about my character in Dragon Age. She’s a feisty dwarf rogue who began her life as a casteless commoner. She doesn’t take nonsense from anyone, she hates rules, and wants to do the right thing but doesn’t see why she should do it for free because that made you a sucker where she came from. Her story is of someone who came from nowhere and is struggling to learn what ‘doing the right thing’ really means.

When I compare notes with my husband, he keeps saying, “You’re horrid,” or “You’re evil” when I tell him about my dwarf girl’s exploits. But I’m not playing as evil, just as someone who doesn’t know any better and really really wants to try anyway.

Her companions aren’t very happy with her (except for Morrigan who she gets on with very well), and I think being motivated to try to stay friendly with them is probably having a good effect on her. I feel like I actually have a character that could change and grow through the game – it may not be Oscar winning material but it could be a solid fantasy pot boiler! To me, that lifts the whole game up another dimension because I actually feel as though I’m role playing.

So, tell me about your character?

The holidays are almost upon us again and this year the MMO Blogging Alliance wants to help ensure a good season for all! We’ve decide to pull together and encourage our readers to donate to those less fortunate. It has been a tough year for many families across the world and a little boost can go a long way. Please consider donating to one of the many charities that we recommend or one you select on your own. If you’re a blogger and would like to participate in our drive it is as easy as writing a post, including this at the top, linking to the other posts, and picking a charity to donate to. Let’s show everyone that in 2009 the MMO community can make a positive difference in the world!

Kids studying in bad housing

Many gamers in 2009 followed the poignant tale of Alice and Kev, the Sims 3 homeless father and daughter, which showed all too clearly the issues that homeless people face, and the barriers that prevent them from getting back on their feet.

The charity I’ve picked to support this year is Shelter,  a UK based charity  that works to alleviate the distress caused by homelessness and poor housing.

The charity’s mission is to help anyone in need of housing to access and keep a home, by offering free advice on anything from trouble with the landlord to handling mortgage arrears or finding a place to sleep. This year, hundreds of thousands more families are struggling to keep up with the rent or mortgage payments due to the credit crunch. Many more people currently keeping their heads above water are only one or two missed paycheques away from the specture of repossession.

Charities like Shelter operate throughout the world, trying to help people to help themselves: Robin Burkinshaw at Alice and Kev has listed a lot of them here, perhaps one operates near you.

Click here to donate to Shelter.

If you’re interested in volunteering over the Christmas period in the UK, Crisis is another homeless charity which offers Christmas Centres for the homeless, where they can find company, a hot meal, and a wide range of other essential services — they need a lot of volunteers and it’s fun and rewarding work, which was my first experience of volunteering. Again, wherever you are, there are likely to be similar organisations, charities and hospitals which have use for volunteers over Christmas if you prefer to give time rather than money. (If you’re alone at Christmas and feeling down, it’s better than sitting at home feeling sorry for yourself.)

If you’d like to donate to multiple charities or a different one, why not check out these posts by the other MBA Charity Drive members (links might not be active until later on today):

Epic Slant

Stylish Corpse

Psychochild

Multiplaying

Nerf the Cat

Stabbed Up

Bio Break

Echoes of Nonsense

It took a bit of searching to find the most recent 1.01 patch for Dragon Age Origins yesterday, but Bioware have swiftly updated their social site to make the patch much easier to locate.

And because a picture says a thousand words, the screenshot below shows how to find and download it.

1. Log into the bioware dragonage social site at: social.bioware.com

2. Select My Games –> Game Patches as shown above

3. If you don’t want to log in or don’t have an account, you can go directly to the patch page using the URL  http://social.bioware.com/game_patches.php

3. The patch page (pictured above)  has a big blue download button that you can click to get the patch.

Happy Patching!

1. Tarsus explains why we should always blame the tanks and gives a reason for just about every situation.
2. Blizzard’s new petshop has inspired KIASA to sing. Katy Perry had nothing on this.
3. We’ve seen a lot of other blog reactions to the petstore. The majority accept that the pets aren’t a big deal, but there’s a pervasive sense of sadness – as if we’d seen the future and people aren’t sure if they like it (ultimately if it’s more profitable for devs to make social games and sell pretty pets than make big expansive virtual worlds with complex teamplay, then well …). Green Armadillo sums this up, asking if RMT is the third Trammel. Copra also expresses sadness at how the game is changing, philosophically.
4. The Rampant Coyote wonders if too much choice is a good thing in games. Or is it too easy to get lost or distracted and actually miss the game’s goal. I’ve recently started playing both Uncharted 2 and Dragon Age Origins and sometimes being on tracks is awesome fun as long as the view (and, more importantly, the gameplay) is that good.
5. Naissa (welcome back, by the way) has extensive lists of things she misses about WoW from times gone by, but also things she loves about the new content.
6. Speaking of Uncharted 2, Kotaku posts an interview with one of the designers, discussing how achievements (trophies) can actually add to the gameplay of a game and how they deliberately structure them. It’s so much more directed than the random ‘lets make an achievement out of everything’ scattergun approach we see in MMOs.
7. It’s not just zillions of people in the western world who are hooked on farmville. Farming Games are extraordinarily popular in China too (probably where Zynga nicked the idea from).
8. Game By Night analyses some of the problems with guilds as a concept, especially in games which have levels. And suggests some possible solutions.
9. It’s much easier for people interested in WoW raiding these days to just run a PUG for the Coliseum. Altadin discusses the problems this raises for raid guilds – if you ask someone to be on reserve for your raid, you’re actually asking them to save their locks and not to even go grab some badges in a PUG. Matticus takes another angle and notes that it’s much easier to recruit and gear up a newbie now, so why not widen the recruitment net?
10. So your guild is breaking up, everyone is all out of enthusiasm, and even the officers are wishing they could just quit. Ferrel discusses how to neatly put the guild to sleep – not a situation anyone likes but these things happen.

And my wtf of the week is wow.com’s post this morning about paladins which notes:

paladins are forced to pay the hybrid tax three times over — because they can do it all without limiting themselves, they can’t do anything as well as other classes

Does anyone seriously think that paladins can’t heal or tank as well as other classes (hint: they’re probably ahead on both right now).? Or that their dps is way behind … e.g. warriors? It’s not. Everyone whines, but that was a silly thing to say with any editorial weight behind it.

Also, I’ve seen a lot of rather tedious tank and healer questionnaires going around? Who the hell cares what your favourite spell is? *facepalm* It’s the whole package you should be looking at and how they fit together.

But for the record, my favourite tank type to team up with are bears. Warrior/druid is just a nice combo with a lot of finesse, I find. Or maybe I just know good bear tanks.

I’m much more likely to want to buy a single player game when it comes out when I know that a lot of my friends will be chatting about it online. The pressure to be part of that ‘first wave’ is higher than it used to be. Even being three days late on Dragon Age due to later European release dates felt like an absolute age to me. And I’m sure I used to be much more relaxed about waiting 6 months until the game was in the reduced pile.

This is the same reason that a lot of people here download TV shows or films illegally. Not because they can’t afford to buy it, but because they don’t have the option.

When will distributors realise that we want to read, watch, listen, or play these things at the same time as the rest of the world because we TALK to them about it?