Play PvE

JoBildo pointed this out first, I can't take credit for the insight, but most of the yummy goodness and polish in Age of Conan so far is within the PvE content. It's not perfect, but when I reflect on the PvE I find myself gushing:

• Immersion is king. The quest dialog is beautifully written, the best I've seen in any MMORPG.
• The zones are gorgeous, large and well designed to hide little secrets that you'll find over time.
• PvE combat is simply amazing, every class has big goodies that can make you cackle with glee.
• Line of sight aggro, sneak up behind mobs ala Thief.
• Gear, while sparse in variety at low levels, is deeply detailed and looks amazing. Funcom is intentionally keeping stats low so that while collecting gear is fun, it's not overpowered.
• Animation and the overall appearance of characters is spectacular. Subtle gestures in the emotes, visceral weapon swings in melee, pyrotechnic flames and lightning with the casting. And of course the much talked about death animation finishing moves.
• The instancing, while at first odd to get used to, supports player choices: Questing area swarmed and overcrowded? Change instance. Run into an annoying griefer or piggybacker? Change instance. Boss spawn too long? You get the idea. It's a convenient solution to a variety of problems.
• Best roleplay community I've seen in years, it's significant, mature and involved.

There are downsides too: The crafting is incomplete, many quests are still bugged, etc.. but I think there's so much raw fun in the PvE experience that it's easy to be patient for the fixes which Funcom is pumping out.

I'm not going anywhere else anytime soon, I'm loving this game on the PvE side.

PvP = meh

Meanwhile, if you're a PvP fan I would guess that eking out entertainment from Age of Conan right now comes coupled with frustration:

• Border Kingdoms are a ghost town, they're too far separated from the rest of the action, with no good reason to go there.
• Sieges are still buggy and involve large guilds, large grind.
• Mercenary system was never implemented.
• PvP free-for-all servers are a circus. PvP is available in good volume, but much of it's baseless and lacks depth. Asshat ganking abounds.
• Mini-games are very basic and poorly designed.
• Mounted combat is lacking, aside from the amusing rear kicks.

Age of Conan's PvP does beat WoW's, but that's a pretty low expectation since WoW's PvP is barely worth noting, of course it was easily sliced and diced with AoC's incomparable combat system.

While I hate to accolade an unreleased game, Warhammer clearly has the leg up in the PvP department. WAR's key element will be in the ease of jumping in and out of PvE-to-PvP interaction from most any zone while including tangible questing throughout.

AoC's PvP content is such a mess that it's going to take Funcom months to redo a bunch of this stuff. They need to pull their PvP out of the fire before it gets cooked.

Funcom should have marketed this game more as a PvE experience.

PvP is cheap by design. Without the campers in Quake and the snipers in Counterstrike these games wouldn't have been as much fun as they were. That damned sniper might pick me off six times in a row, but nothing was quite as satisfying as finally lobbing a grenade into his position. It felt like complete payback.

I find Tactical PvP so much more satisfying than systematic. Tactical implies opportunity. Opportunity implies advantage. Advantage is inherently unbalanced / cheap.

Can we handle costly PvP? Perma-death is a sad reminder of real life and you can only remove a player from the field for so long, if it's Last Man Standing then it better be a short round. Looting items from players isn't popular either, especially if it stops the player from jumping right back into the fray.

PvP is about action, non-stop. That's what we want right? To feel like we're in the middle of a rollercoaster blockbuster action flic where it never stops. Go ahead and die, take a loss, but pop back up and keep going. You can kick a man, but you can't keep him down.

But when you take the cost completely out of PvP, if you remove any progression and bring it down to the basic elements of skill and pride, players start to demand balance. Is a fair fight what we really want? Here's the central argument in a recent post crying for class nerfs:

Isn't that what you're asking for? Perfectly balanced classes / characters would average out to everyone dying exactly 50% of the time. If you're concerning yourself with your rate of wins/losses, half the time is horrible, isn't it? You want to win, to come out on top.

PvP has terrible odds, period. Statistically, the only way someone can get ahead is while more players fall behind. So winning can't be about the odds, otherwise a whole lot of players are left unsatisfied. Accomplishments need to be given out either in small doses, or larger tasks that progress and accumulate more than the losses. It can't be zero sum.

In my mind, I feel the trick isn't to balance everyone as equals, but instead allow suitable means of challenge and revenge. Lob that grenade right back!

You hear this term a lot, I use it myself plenty, but what is Endgame exactly?

It comes from standard RPG gameplay, where the player "levels up" to progress. But an online world needs persistence, you can't trap players into leveling up forever. It has to plateau, it needs an End. At which point players begin a sort of new game, where some of the rules change and new activities are repeated or take a much longer length of time to complete.

Anyone who doesn't play these games could look at that description and shake their heads. We don't repeat the leveling grind into infinity, because the repetition without end would frustrate players-- So we give them an End, but then redirect them into other activities that repeat anyway. Or make them progress very slowly.

That about sum it up?

I think it's perfectly possible to have activities that aren't a grind, the plain and simple of it is: gameplay and content.

It's easier to repeat gameplay and stretch content than to provide more of it.

Clearly it's impossible to create infinite quality content, but I also think there's this situation in MMORPG development when they stop making a game for the players and start cashing in. Further development slows, they accept the monthly fees but the content trickles out, reducing cost and turning the whole thing into one big cash cow.

I'm generally not this sort of cynic when it comes to game developers, the ones I know are passionate about their games, but I can't explain the trend for MMORPGs any other way.

I think this market is wide open for the first game that keeps up a better pace with quality content and a greater variety of gameplay.

Funcom is showing the full game for the first time to players at the Leipzig Games Convention, without an NDA so videos are already showing up on Youtube and elsewhere. Here's a developer demonstration of siege weapons in use, simulating how players might lay waste to another guild's fortress. Towards the end of the video there's some additional good combat footage amongst the ruined chaos. I believe the class played is a Dark Templar if I'm not mistaken, at least I'm seeing some dark-looking magic debuff as others attack him.

Although there are stunning moments, it looks a bit strange with the accelerated building, super fast trebuchet launches and dozens of support NPCs standing around, the developers really should be more careful with their god-mode cheats which could give a wrong impression of the game. Still, you can watch this and see what they're trying to demonstrate and imagine a bit of what a largescale guild vs guild PvP siege battle might look like.

The same demonstration is repeated in another video at Stage6 (annoying browser plugin required unfortunately), where you can see how Funcom scripted the temporary siege event for the trade show.

Found this post via AFK Gamer: "Tortheldrin is a dying server".

My first thought was that this sounded like an opportunity to me. If raiding isn't your thing, Tortheldrin could be the place to transfer to.

Imagine a server that doesn't have every outdoor area overcrowded, where you and your buddies can wander the landscape and actually immerse yourself in the story with YOU as the heroes, not just another joe in the crowd. You could farm for Scryer's rep without Paladin-Mage combos AoEing across your path. You could get as many motes as you wish from the Elemental Plateau and even leave it to go elsewhere without fear of giving up your hard-fought spot.

Perfect for a small to medium sized guild that wants to take their time with heroics and venture into Karazhan without feeling dwarfed by the swarms of players covered in nether vortex or PvP epics. Be the champions of the world but able to take your time about it and actually enjoy the content thoroughly instead of rush, rush, rush to keep up with the rest.

There are downsides of course. There isn't likely much on Tortheldrin's auction house and good luck finding people to craft gear for you, or cut any rare gems. Raiding of course, would be the most difficult, unless you brought your own raiding guild. Of course, that could happen: A few large-ish guilds might take notice of the attention Tortheldrin is getting for 'dying' and jump aboard.

... but... Wait ...

PvP?

Oh, it's a PvP server. If you look at the in-game server list, Tortheldrin is 'recommended' (Blizzard's codeword for 'please play here, please') along with a few other PvP servers. PvE and RP servers don't stay vacant very long, players will migrate to them for the very reasons I posted above.

Low-population PvP servers should just get merged.

The ever eloquent Tobold posted something quote worthy yesterday:

"But while we could discuss class balance in PvP endlessly, in the end it all sounds like the rock complaining that he always loses against paper in a game of rock-paper-scissors."

Class-based combat, whether it's WoW, Team Fortress or Tribes, is always best balanced in rock-paper-scissors style. That's the basis of the design. PvE requires more complexity in the design, whereas PvP is lent plenty of diversity by the human vs. human element.

As a PvE player, I'm selfishly irked over Blizzard's constant PvP-related rebalancing of the classes and how it alters the rest of the game. My impression is they appease a population that doesn't get it: some classes should be your bane.

Accept it. Play the class you enjoy most, to the best of your abilities. If you have problems with class balance in PvP, it's probably PEBKAC.

The WoW Battlegroups Catacylsm and Frenzy are getting merged this week.

A full post is available on the Blizzard forums, a quote of the announcement is here:

We've previously announced our intent to merge the Cataclysm and Frenzy battlegroups in order to lower their arena and battleground queue times, and increase the amount of players available for the cross-realm PvP features. Due to the extensive maintenance this merge will require, we're currently anticipating a maximum of 24 hours of downtime for the realms in these battlegroups, which are listed below. We're currently scheduling this downtime to begin on June 19 at 3:00 AM PDT, and conclude at approximately 3:00 AM PDT on June 20.

This does lend tangible credence to the speculation that WoW's population is shrinking, or at least has plateaued.