Insider Trader is your weekly inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.
Are you a tradesman -- or are you simply a player who crafts? The determining factor is yet another question: Do you care? For the vast majority of WoW players, crafting is a means to an end: better gear, more money, consumables and resources. For others, though, crafting is a game in and of itself. The WoW tradesman relishes the entire process of crafting: training up, obtaining rare recipes, scrounging mats, actually crafting items, researching new possibilities, interacting with customers ... an enjoyable pursuit in its own right.
WoW's crafting system is by no means complex or even especially compelling – and perhaps even anachronistic. This week, Insider Trader brings you musings on professions inspired by well-known MMORPG blogger Tobold's predictions on the shape of MMORPGs in the year 2020. We have a lot for you to ponder and pontificate about – so please come join the conversation, after the break.
Now of course, the story's not really about Tobold-- with apologies to him for the unwanted attention we sent, it never was (so leave the guy alone, already-- if you've got comments about his decisions, leave them over here). But he is a big, influential MMO blogger, and his leaving WoW was part of a trend back then. In the dark days before 2.2, progress on the realms was stagnant, and there was nothing new to keep folks interested. Even with patch 2.2, voice chat wasn't a big draw for players (and in fact, now that I think about it, I haven't used it at all since it debuted-- my guild is still on Ventrilo, and no one has invited me to use the voice chat system).
But now we're at patch 2.3, and the times, they are a-changin'. There's new midlevel content (!), Engineers have a purpose in life, Hunters have no dead zone, and there's a brand new 10-man instance in the game (almost guaranteed to quickly become the most popular endgame instance out there). Tobold's back, and, just as before, we've got to wonder if he's part of an early trend. Are all the players who took a break this summer coming back to Azeroth?
Prolific MMO commentator Tobold writes about a possible problem with Blizzard's plan to speed up the level grind in 2.3: it could make getting a dungeon group together even harder. His solution would be to institute cross-realm dungeons that would resemble the current cross-realm battleground system. He also mentions some improvements to the LFG system (setting aside slots for dedicated roles, so that if you need a tank you don't end up in a group with three mages and two priests, for example) and the commenters come up with some good points, including worrying about how to deal with cross-realm ninjaloots.
Generally, the cross realm BG's worked out and I'm a fan of the much reduced waiting times for an AV run. Even with the anti-AFK measures it still only takes a few minutes as opposed to the upwards of an hour it could take before. But I do see some logistical problems in setting up a similar system for instance runs: no more summoning stones since everyone is on a different server, for example. Everyone would have to make their way to the dungeon themselves like they used to in the dim, barbaric past when cavemen first played WoW.
What do you think? Would we need 'Instance Groups' similar to Battlegroups, or would you just extend the Battlegroup to also be the pool your cross-realm LFG pulled from? Is this even an issue or are folks overestimating how much faster level will effect instancing?
Tobold's got a good post up today about players 8,999,999 to 10 million-- folks who've come late to the party that is World of Warcraft. Lots of people like to brag that they started playing on the beta, day one (Tobold's one of those), but I didn't-- while I watched WoW news with close attention, and remember watching a livecast of someone playing a gnome Mage on Winamp, I didn't actually pick up the game until the May after it came out. Still, I was early enough that there were still some newbies to level up with-- I remember grouping at level 5 in Teldrassil with four other people who were discovering the game just like I was.
Nowadays, says Tobold, things just aren't the same-- if you're just coming on board, you might wonder where all the nine million players in this game are (answer: Outland). And with every expansion, the real action will get farther and farther away from the starting zones-- would you come to this game when WotLK releases if you knew that you had 80 levels and two expansions to get through before you joined the rest of the world?
There are probably benefits to coming late to the party as well-- nowadays, we have guides aplenty, and you don't have to suffer through any of the old bugs or balance problems that have already been fixed. And if you're looking for single-player content, there's plenty to go through. But joining up with the other 10 million players now isn't nearly the same experience that everyone had a few years ago.
I can't stop thinking about new classes these days for some reason. Perhaps it's Blizzcon and the hope that Blizzard will announce a new expansion with new classes in it. In any case, I'm thrilled by the challenge of how to design a new class (or even new class abilities).
And I'm not the only one. Lots of intelligent writers out there have been thinking about this for a long time. One of them, Tobold, recently changed his mind, and I was struck by something in this change. At first he said that Blizzard should not add new classes because there couldn't possibly be anything fundamentally new in this new class, but later he said that maybe it isn't such a bad idea to have new classes that are pretty similar to what we have already. "People who liked one character class and are starting an alt because they don't enjoy the end-game often are looking for something not so different from what they already played.... Adding more content to a game is never wrong."
So I got to wondering, how new would a new class have to be in order for players to accept it? Is it true that people would just cry "Bah! Another kind of rogue!" or "Humbug! another kind of warlock?" Or would these sorts of initial criticisms just die down gradually as people got used to the new rogue and warlock and whatever else that did basically the same thing in just a different way. After all, if you can reduce all class abilities down to a simple few (damage, crowd control, and healing) then maybe you can expand all these abilities out in a myriad of interesting hybridizations too. Perhaps, with this perspective, the potential for class differentiation is limitless.
Tobold has an interesting post up on getting scammed by businesses claiming to sell in-game gold or items. While, yes, it's easy enough for them to take your money and hand you some in-game cash, it's easier still for them to take your money and then not bother doing anything else. (And try to explain that to your credit card company when you dispute the charges...) And once you've lost real money to such a scammer, what's your next recourse? Well, a lot of people will call customer service and complain -- Sony cited frequent customer service calls as one of the reasons they legitimized the trading business with their Station Exchange. But Blizzard's not going to be able to do anything but snicker when you call and complain that a gold-seller took your money and ran, so, really, buying gold could just leave you with a hole in your real and virtual pocket. The only way to be 100% sure you get what you pay for is obvious: don't buy gold in the first place.
The lack of information about the next expansion continues, and so does the fabrication by fans hungry for info about new content. This time Tobold lays out what he'd like to see in the next expansion, which he is calling, as a parody of the Burning Crusade, the Freezing Jihad.
He's got some of the usual suspects in there, including the long awaited hero classes. But his biggest suggestion is probably that the expansion focuses on adding oomph (technical term) to the midlevels of the game. In his imagination, there is no new level cap, but rather a complete reworking of everything between 1 and 70, including an all new neutral faction with four new races, and a new continent of quests for players from beginning to end. I doubt we'll get anything near that comprehensive, but it's true that players want more midlevel content. While this is probably beyond their wildest dreams, hopefully Blizzard will at least hear their pleas.
In other places, Tobold is just plain wrong-- we're going to see guild housing before we ever see player housing, and Blizzard has consistently said they want their armor to look like what they say, not what players say. But he's dead right on the new professions-- woodworking and the ability of players to make arrows and bows would both fit perfectly with the lore, and fill a nice hole in crafting that's been there for a long time.
Tobold linked to a new blog about MMO gaming called Hardcore Casual, and the first entry is a nice one-- it's all about the differences between a "carebear" game like WoW, and the much more hardcore games of the past. His big example is Ultima Online, where players could gank each other and actually loot the corpses. Playing a game where others could steal your armor is very different from playing a game where BoE means it's yours forever.
But you don't have to go back that far to find a really hardcore game-- in Blizzard's own Diablo 2, you could play "hardcore mode," which meant that when your character died, that was it. Game over, no respawns, nothing. Either you lived and beat the game, or you died and lost the ability to play your character and everything with it.
To tell the truth, I'd love to see a server like that in WoW. Not because I'd love to play it (what are you, crazy?), but because the stories coming off of that server would be terrific-- we could all just stand in awe of the character who made it to 70 on the Hardcore server. Or would that even be possible? Especially if the server was PvP (and it would be, wouldn't it?), it seems like an impossible challenge to keep a character alive that long, especially since the other side would be gunning for anyone who got too high. Would you play on a hardcore server, where you could lose your life (and/or your gear)?
Before you yell at us for saying the sky is falling (again), that's not what we're saying at all. WoW has lasted for a long time for a lot of people-- more than almost any other videogame out there (in some cases, ever). For some people, including this first round of bloggers, it's run its course. Just because they're quitting doesn't mean the end of the world (of Warcraft) is upon us. In fact, it doesn't even mean the blogging is over-- Tobold quit a week and a half ago, and he's still blogging about WoW. My guess is that both bloggers will be back when the next expansion hits.
But then again, it's kind of sad that these WoW veterans are stepping out of the game. At least it's productive-- Tobold quit partly because of attunements, and they were lifted the next day. Maybe now that Pally Sucks is RIP, that ret Paladin review will come sooner than we think.
The Auction House system in WoW is one of the more popular mechanics in the game.Having a way to trade goods is one of the ways that Blizzard puts the Massively Multiplayer in MMO.But I know that when I use the AH, 90% of the time I buy something using the buyout price.I don't have the patience to participate in a bidding war.And evidently this is a trend within the game.
Tobold explains that the system is actually designed so that players will be more than likely to choose the buyout rather than play the bidding game.Part of this comes from the fact that to not have an item sell is to lose the down payment we place on it when a bid is first posted.With the Auction House as it is currently designed the bidder gets no sense of the bid prices, of the history of bids, of really any of the information that someone might see on an auction site like eBay.It's actually too transparent for the purpose as an auction system.
There have been suggestions as to how this might be improved.Perhaps, like Tobold says, tweaking the interface so that the auctions have more information provided might work.Reader Joe Szilagyi wrote in with a different suggestion.He mentioned the possibility of making the AH like the PvP system, system-wide rather than server-specific.He explains that this would be a way to bolster the economies of lower population servers while at the same time allowing loot to be available to both the Horde and the Alliance.The daunting task of such a reconfiguration makes this an unlikely solution, but it poses an interesting hypothesis.Either way you look at it, the Auction House system is a good game mechanic with some room for improvement.What would you suggest as a way to fine tune the AH?
Tobold, MMO blogger-at-large, has posted that he has cancelled his World of Warcraft account.
Sign of the times or outraged for the wrong reason? That's for you to decide-- Tobold says his guild has moved on to Serpentshrine, and since he's not attuned yet, he probably never will be, which means there's no point to moving on. Apparently no one has told him about Vashj's attunement scrolls, which will let a guild that beats Vashj attune whoever they want to SSC. Of course, he'd have to wait until his guild actually beats Vashj, but hope is not lost yet.
Then again, maybe Tobold's just going with the flow. If you ask me, leaving because your guild has moved on is a terrible reason to leave-- not only is there lots to do out there, either on your own or with the people in your guild who don't happen to be running SSC, but I do believe there is more than one guild in the game. Surely someone else would be willing to take Tobold to Karazhan, right?
Either way, it's his choice. As he says, cancelling the account sends a clear message to Blizzard that he wants things to change. And if enough people send that message (for whatever reason), then you can't but agree that they will.
Recent reports that the general population of WoW players may be going down for the first time cause some concern, enough to even have our post on the subject listed on the BBC for a while. Our readers gave lots of reasons why something was missing from The Burning Crusade, from problems with the new raids, new items, or even lack of anything actually "new" at all. Granted, it is too soon to say whether people are leaving WoW en masse or not, but the concerns raised here are still valid.
One of the main problems our readers cited was leveling boredom. The game before Outland is a bottleneck for casual players who want to explore other classes and playstyles but find that getting where they want to be with their new favorite alt would take more tedium and repetition than they're willing to tolerate. Some have the patience and dedication for it, but for others it feels like an impassible jungle.
Stranglethorn Vale, sometimes called the "Stranglethorn Hole" (coined by Tobold in reference to black holes, I think), has been the prime example of 1-60 leveling boredom, because at some point between levels 30 and 45, quests in most other areas just dry up, and you're left with little choice other than to help out the goblins in Booty Bay. The Gaming Fascist complains that he couldn't get any characters through the Vale without it feeling like "an affliction or a chore, something I don't really enjoy and fall back to when times get too boring." This was especially infuriating for him since he apparently chose a PvP server and he got ganked a lot there. Anyone tends to feel frustrated and hopeless when your goal is so far away that you have no reasonable means to achieve it.
We took a light-hearted look into the future a couple weeks ago, to see what solutions might present themselves in a few years as this problem gets increasingly severe. The fact is that has to be done for casuals who can't or don't want to go raiding, and if trying out new classes and isn't really a feasible option, then what's to prevent them from feeling stuck with nothing to do? More reputations to grind?
How much, asks Tobold, do you owe a pickup group? He uses the example of Seaforium charges on locked chests-- they can "cost" up to 5g in mats, so is that too much for the engineer to contribute to a group of people he basically doesn't know? Potions are the other big question, but I'd expand it to include everything you bring to a pickup group: just how many times do you need to wipe in a pickup group before you're free to ditch them and move on?
I happen to be pretty much like Tobold. I'm not rich in the game or anything, but the money doesn't mean much to me (this is, after all, a videogame), so I'm more than willing to pass out potions at bosses, or stick with a PUG until my gear is red. I guess there are some things I wouldn't spend on a pickup group-- repair bots are just too expensive to use among people you don't know, and while I'm often willing to give lower level enchants away, the higher level enchants I usually save until there's a guildie around that I know can and will use it.
Tobold says, rightly, that groups are "worth" much less in WoW than earlier MMOs-- because you literally can solo all the way to 70, a lot of bad groups can be avoided, whereas in older games, you had to suffer through a lot of bad groups just to level, because there was no other way. But of course it is still just a game-- a good social experience is worth way more than a potion or two, and you never know if the Warrior you give an Onslaught Elixir to today might end up being your main tank tomorrow.
Here's a real interesting commentary about the recent lawsuit Blizzard brought again a fairly heinous gold seller (we haven't mentioned their name yet, and I don't plan to, but it's easy enough to find out who it is). Blizzard hasn't shared much about the case at all, except for the fact that it's filed in federal court, and that they want this one to serve as a precedent, not just for them, but for any MMO dealing with gold spammers.
Cmdrslack (who's a gamer and a lawyer) says there's three ways Blizzard could be handling the case. First, they could be filing under CAN-SPAM law, claiming that even though the in-game mail is never actually leaving Blizzard's servers, it's still illegal spam email (first of all because it doesn't identify itself as advertisement). The second possibility is an much older tort called "trespass to chattels," which means that Blizzard could be saying the gold seller is unduly using their servers, bandwidth, and game properties to advertise their own business. That, says cmdrslack, seems most likely, because there's precedent for it, and Blizzard can easily prove that the spammer has been working on their servers for a while.
Finally, Blizzard could also simply say the spammer is violating the EULA, which they definitely are. More likely, as cmdrslack says, they're using a mix of all three cases to show the spammer is wrongly interfering with their business. (Strangely enough, says Tobold, the one thing Blizzard isn't suing the gold sellers for... is gold selling.) But cmdrslack closes with the same question I will: Seeing as the spammer is based in China, and Blizzard is an American company filing in US Federal Court, just how are they going to enforce the ruling when they win?
The year is 2012. WoW fans are excitedly awaiting the game's 5th expansion, Revenge of the Gnomes, which brings two new races to the game (Sporeggar and Goblins, at last!), as well as a new class (the Tinker), and a slew of other features. As everyone knows, this is the expansion where the gnomes finally take back Gnomeregan from the troggs, pushing them back all the way into the "Undergloom," a vast and ancient network of caverns beneath Azeroth. Of course, the gnomes also accidentally stumble upon the long-buried prison of the Old Gods and unleash unbridled havoc on the World of Warcraft, but that's where the fun is, right?
I could go on and on about the new features included in Revenge of the Gnomes, but I'm sure you've heard about most of them already (like the subterranean hovercraft group-mounts and blue-pill, red-pill potions for alchemy). Suffice it to say that the feature everyone is most excited about is that the level cap is once again being raised another 10 levels, to a grand total of 110.
Like everyone else, you're probably wondering how in the world (of Warcraft) are you going to level your new Goblin Tinker character all the way through those tedious levels of 1 to 100? Everyone wants to try out the new content, but no one wants to slave away through Stranglethorn Vale for the 48th time. To complicate things further, Blizzard still doesn't want to add any more 1-60 quests in the lower-level zones (not to mention any of the Outland, Northrend, Emerald Dream, or Great Sea Expansion zones)!
Fortunately, though, Blizzard's got what you need! Are you prepared for the "/level" command?
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The lack of information about the next expansion continues, and so does 
Tobold linked to a new blog about MMO gaming called 
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Tobold, MMO blogger-at-large, has posted that 
How much, asks Tobold
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