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Friday, February 13th, 2009
| Time |
Event |
| 10:12a |
SBR #1: World of Warcraft: Now Even Easier! In the first of GameSpy's new editor columns, Gerald explores how World of Warcraft has gotten way too easy. Welcome to The Serious Business Report, Editor Gerald Villoria's biweekly column. Exciting new changes are coming to GameSpy in the coming months, and your first taste of our new editorial direction has arrived in the launch of our editor columns. Insightful or funny, controversial or informative, you'll want to check out what we have to say about gaming. ]
You can attribute Blizzard Entertainment's astounding success with World of Warcraft to many different things. So what does it take to create what is arguably the most successful videogame of all time? What arcane elements did the alchemists at Blizzard Laboratories mix together to breed this magical goose that lays golden subscriptions every month? Let's run through some of the biggest factors. A Simple Recipe for Success Polish: It's a polished experience, with plenty of attention to the little details. Heritage: Diablo, Warcraft, and Starcraft fans all had good reasons to give it a shot. Timing: It launched at the perfect time, with great buzz behind it. Accessibility: Low system requirements, thanks to the focus on art over horsepower. Solo-friendly: An online game that can be played solo from start to finish. Easy: It's friendly to new players, who can jump right in on the fun. I contend that World of Warcraft's newbie experience is largely responsible for its industry-leading subscriber numbers. Within minutes of starting the game you're working on your first quests, beating your first enemies, and collecting rewards. Just three minutes into the game you can gain your first level.
The one constant is that it's all very easy to understand, and easy to play. Thanks to the game's focus on accessibility, you don't need a strategy guide to embark on a night filled with adventure. So if World of Warcraft was already an easy game to play, why is it that the game has continued getting easier and easier over time? There are multiple offenders here, ranging from the player community to the developers themselves. In the Beginning
It all started with Thottbot. This website was powered by an addon that submitted player data to the site, compiling a database of quest and item info. Players looking for help could look up troublesome quests, or research the best places to find the perfect weapon. Since then, Wowhead has become the database of choice, which, interestingly enough, is owned by the same parent company, Affinity Media. Affinity Media, owner of Thottbot, Allakhazam, and Wowhead, is in the business of making World of Warcraft and other MMOs easier. Yes, there's an entire thriving, multimillion-dollar business model based around simplifying your game experience.
Time is Money
You can't discuss making the game easier without mentioning gold-buying services, and Affinity Media owned one of the biggest ones, Internet Gaming Entertainment, or IGE. The business has been in decline since 2006, thanks to anti-money-trading countermeasures by Blizzard. Gamers who want to make their lives easier can still easily purchase in-game gold, primarily from gold-farming operations overseas, where workers grind 'round the clock in order to save you the time you'd otherwise have to invest in purchasing that epic mount. I Wanna Hold Your Hand
Currently, addons like Questhelper and TourGuide are used by players to make the leveling experience faster and easier than ever before. These addons provide you with waypoints and big flashing arrows that guide you from the questgiver to the mobs in need of killing. Used in conjunction with James' leveling guides, now with their own TourGuide addon, these addons are a popular choice for those looking to have their hand held during the leveling process.
Tell Your Friends and the Next Hit is Free
You can't blame the players for wanting to take advantage of these external sources to make the leveling experience more efficient. World of Warcraft is a cinch to level in when compared to soul-crushing grinds like EverQuest, but it's still a considerable time investment. But Blizzard has also done its share to get players to max level as soon as possible. Just look at the Recruit-a-Friend program.
Essentially turning their player base into an expansive marketing team, Blizzard's Recruit-a-Friend program allowed linked accounts to earn up to triple experience points. Many players took this as an opportunity to sign up for multiple accounts, and then multi-box those characters, playing them all at once with macros. While it was already easy to level one character, now it was conceivable to level three or more at once in the same amount of time, as long as you were willing to pony up the cash. An Inheritance Worthy of Paris Hilton
The latest and greatest innovation in easy leveling you can thank Blizzard for is the heirloom system. Your main character, presumably level 80 and with a nice stockpile of Badges of Heroism and Stone Keeper's Shards, can spend these tokens of currency on items that "Bind to Account." What this means is that these pieces of gear can be freely traded using the mail system to any character you have on the same server. These items scale with the level of the character using them, so presumably, you'll never need to upgrade those slots until after that alt hits level 80. And at that point, they can mail those items off to the next character you decide to level.
I've never played a Rogue past level 60, so I decided to deck one out with these heirloom items and see the results. My Orc Hunter already had a large stockpile of Heroism badges and Stone Keeper's Shards, so I went on a shopping spree. I picked up Venerable Dal'Rend's Sacred Charge, and slapped a Fiery enchant on it, since you're limited to enchants that existed in Vanilla WoW. I picked up a trinket, the Swift Hand of Justice, which would increase my Rogue's haste rating. You normally don't get trinkets until the mid 20s at the earliest (with Engineering), though most get them in the 40s. The most important piece came next. I headed to Lake Wintergrasp and bought the Exceptional Stormshroud Shoulders for the tidy sum of 200 Stone Keeper's Shards. These shoulders not only provided agility, stamina, resilience and attack power, but after putting the Greater Inscription of the Gladiator on it, my little level six Rogue had an extra 30 stamina and 15 resilience. An extra 30 stamina is a sizable boost at level 80; at level six it's just overpowered. The real reason to pick these up, though? The passive 10% boost to experience gained from killing monsters. That, my friends, is leveling made easy.
/faceroll
At level six my character had more than triple the health of a normal rogue of his level, and dealt more than four times the damage, not counting when the fiery enchant on his sword would go off. Just for fun, I dueled some level 11 and 12 characters who were going at it in Brill, and it wasn't even close. I was killing characters twice my level in seconds, while barely getting scratched. No need to stealth. Just walk up to them and Sinister Strike until they're dead.
Any challenge that I may have encountered while leveling this Rogue through the starting areas was completely taken out of the equation. I don't even bother with stealth anymore, instead focusing on the delicious ham sandwich I'm eating as I cruise through the levels. The effect is most assuredly more dramatic at the lower levels, since I have those higher-level enchants working in my favor, but from what I've seen, the gear all scales rather nicely until level 80. Who Cares About Epics Anymore? There are also the drawbacks to consider. While these heirloom pieces will always be good fits at any level, they also devalue any exciting items that you may find. While running my wife's warlock through Zul'Farrak, for instance, Gut Ripper (a level 40 epic dagger) and the Gloves of Holy Might (level 37 epic leather gloves) both dropped for us, ideal Rogue pieces. Normally, BoE epics for the character that I planned on leveling would be worth cheering about, but I just couldn't get myself psyched about them. It was a foregone conclusion that I'd be cruising past the 40s bracket, so I decided that dropping them in the Auction House would probably be for the best. One of the most exciting moments you could have in WoW, finding random epic loot, had suddenly become uninteresting.
I've put myself in this situation, and frankly I'm torn. I love the heirloom gear for its efficiency, but I still feel a slight twinge of regret at having dialed World of Warcraft down to super-easy mode. Questhelper, Wowhead, heirloom items and purchased gold may be depriving gamers of the experience as it was originally intended, even if it is a second or third playthrough. Leveling up a character, for many, is the most fun that WoW has to offer. After all, the content quickly runs dry at level 80, as I've previously explored. So when you consider picking up a full set of heirloom gear, think twice about it, as you may be doing yourself a disservice by racing to 80 at such breakneck speed. Doesn't Azeroth, the undisputed king of virtual worlds, deserve to be experienced at a slower, more challenging pace? | | 10:13a |
Blizzard Announces 2009 World of Warcraft Arena Tournament Blizzard has just announced that registrations would be opened for the 2009 edition of the World of Warcraft Arena Tournament on February 17. Players who are interested in taking part will need to complete a registration form, pay up a 20-dollar fee for entry in the tournament and then get to work planning strategies and tactics that they will use in the upcoming competition.
Why should anyone pay the price of admission for this tournament? First of all, those who enter can test their skills in Player versus Players combat. Players will also get the Vanquisher title for the characters that they use on regular game servers and there's a chance to win an exclusive pet, in the form of an armored murloc. Also, the top player will get to take home a big cash prize. Blizzard says that the overall prize money for the 2009 World of Warcraft Arena Tournament will total 200,000 dollars.
Those who enter the competition can create three characters on special Arena Tournament servers and they will be automatically leveled up to 80, in order to make sure that they are able to use all the skills of a particular character class. Players will be able to customize the abilities of characters and will get a basic set of gear and some money. Near the starting positions, players will find trainers, merchants and Arena battlemasters. Players will need to form teams of three, as the Tournament is played in the three versus three format.
The first two weeks of the competition will be devoted to practice matches and players can make all the tweaks in their characters they want. After that, ranked matches will begin and teams will be eliminated from the competition. The best team will take home a cash prize of no less than 75,000 dollars. | | 10:13a |
Ahead of the Bell: Activision Blizzard Activision Blizzard Inc. posted a better-than-expected fourth quarter, Lazard Capital Markets analyst Colin Sebastian said Thursday. Late Wednesday, Activision Blizzard (nasdaq: ATVI - news - people ) reported a quarterly loss of 5 cents per share, due in part to charges related to its combination in July with Vivendi Games. On an adjusted basis, earnings totaled 31 cents per share, beating the average analyst estimate by 2 cents per share according to a Thomson Reuters poll. Adjusted revenue of $2.3 billion beat analysts' forecast of $2.15 billion. The company's results were helped by holiday sales of the games "Guitar Hero World Tour," "World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King" and "Call of Duty: World at War." In a note to clients, Sebastian kept his "Buy" rating and $13 price target for the stock. He said he has some worries about growth expectations for music games like the "Guitar Hero," but thinks sales will be strong for "Call of Duty" in 2009, and subscriber growth will continue for the online multiplayer game "World of Warcraft." He also expects a strong launch for the game "StarCraft II," which is expected in the second half of the year. "In contrast to major competitors undertaking mid-cycle restructuring efforts, we believe Activision remains very well positioned and is our top pick among software publishers," Sebastian said. | | 10:15a |
Twitter’s secret: the law of unintended consequences When Stephen Fry was trapped in a broken elevator in London earlier this month, he pulled out his mobile phone and sent a short text to his more than 160,000 “followers” on Twitter.com: “OK. This is now mad. I am stuck in a lift on the 26th floor of Centre Point. Hell’s teeth. We could be here for hours.” He even sent a picture of himself to illustrate his predicament. Nearly immediately, many of his “followers” replied to the British actor, author, and comedian with return “tweets” – as the brief, 140-character or less texts are called. Charmed by the responses, Mr. Fry “tweeted” back, “Your brilliant comments are keeping us all (hysterically) cheerful.”
In a Twitter-fied world, no one ever need feel alone or unconnected. Fry is now the second-most popular individual on Twitter, trailing only President Obama, who has about 250,000 followers. (The Obama “tweets” have gone silent, however, with only one entry since last November. Conversely, Fry has “tweeted” some 1,400 times in the last 200-plus days.) Twitter has quickly become the preeminent way to go about “micro-blogging,” sending short real-time comments to the world (if it’s looking) and especially to anyone who signs up as a follower. When the service was introduced in 2006, it was ridiculed as the latest narcissistic way to waste time online. Last year, minds began to change. Twitterers tapped out tweets during the earthquake in China while the ground was still shaking and live during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India. One of the first pictures of the airliner downed in the Hudson River last month, picked up by major newspapers and magazines, was “tweeted” by a 23-year-old tourist with an iPhone who happened to be aboard a ferry sent to the rescue. Suddenly, Twitter has become a venue for “citizen journalism,” a way to learn what’s happening sometimes even before news organizations themselves could find out. “News no longer breaks, it tweets,” blogged Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley-based technology forecaster, last November during the Mumbai attacks. “If newspapers are the first draft of history, then blogs are the scratch pad. And in front of blogs are tweets,” he added in a phone interview last week. Twitter is a classic example of the “law of unintended consequences,” says Matthew Fraser, who tracks the world of online social networking. At first, he says, people shared the “micro-banalities of life” such as “I’m at McDonald’s having a Big Mac.” But Twitter now has “morphed” into something with real value and utility, says Mr. Fraser, coauthor of “Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom: How Online Social Networking Will Transform Your Life, Work, and World.” More and more Twitterers share useful information, in essence giving the “headline” and sometimes sharing a web link that points to more information, says Fraser, the former editor in chief of Canada’s national daily newspaper, the National Post. Growing chorus of tweeters
Twitter’s mushrooming growth has observers wondering if it could possibly be the next online phenomenon. The service is starting to grow beyond geeks and early adopters and beginning “to hit the mainstream,” says Louis Gray, a technology blogger in Silicon Valley. The service has attracted 4 million to 5 million users, 70 percent of whom joined in 2008, calculates a recent report from HubSpot.com, which analyzes business activity on the Web. An estimated 5,000 to 10,000 new Twitter accounts are opened each day, and traffic to the site grew by more than 600 percent in the most recent 12-month period HubSpot measured. Last month, Twitter passed Digg.com, a successful, established news aggregation website, in market share of visitors, says Heather Dougherty, research director for Hitwise, an Internet measurement and analysis firm. And Twitter is “probably much bigger” than the Hitwise statistics show, she says, because much of Twitter’s traffic flows through mobile devices or other third-party software that isn’t being captured in Hitwise’s data. But where’s the business plan?
Facebook, the popular social networking site, tried and failed to buy Twitter for a deal some valued at a half-billion dollars. Like Facebook, Twitter has yet to make a penny for its founders. It’s living on money from investors. According to the website Techcrunch, a recent infusion of more than $20 million in venture funds would mean that Twitter has, in theory, a value of $250 million. But that’s only if a way to make it pay for itself can be found. “We plan to build Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company,” the company website says. “Twitter has many appealing opportunities for generating revenue but we are holding off on implementation for now because we don’t want to distract ourselves from the more important work at hand, which is to create a compelling service and great user experience for millions of people around the world.” Even if Twitter fails, it’s already proven that micro-blogging is here to stay, Mr. Saffo says. Second Life and World of Warcraft weren’t the first to jump into the online role-playing arena, he notes, but they were the ones who figured out how to make it pay. “Someone will figure out the model” for profitable micro-
blogging, he says. Charging a fee to use Twitter isn’t likely. “Anytime you have a service that is free, customers are going to expect it to stay free,” Mr. Gray says. Advertising would seem to be a logical next step (Twitter has no ads now), but other social networks have found that users find them intrusive. “They see it as a social space,” not a commercial venue, Fraser says.
But businesses might be willing – and able – to pay for a Twitter presence. In an e-mail, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says the company plans to talk about revenue sources later this year and that paying for “commercial usage” is one possibility. Another is that a big player, such as Google, might buy Twitter and add it as a feature among the many that it offers. The new haiku
Meanwhile, the ways people use Twitter continue to proliferate. For consumers, it’s become “a big complaint box” where Twitters can voice their dissatisfaction, Ms. Dougherty says. That, in turn, “is making companies pay attention to Twitter” to see what is being said about them – or even start their own Twitter accounts, she says. Celebrities beyond Fry are beginning to use Twitter to talk to their fans too. Britney Spears, Lance Armstrong, Stephen Colbert, Shaquille O’Neal, and Tina Fey are among those sending tweets, each attracting thousands of followers.
Some might charge that Twitter is still largely a vast wasteland of self-indulgence and irrelevancy. But Twitter’s best days may still be ahead, Saffo says. “It’s already become a new news form, and I think it’s in the process of becoming a new literary form,” he says. He notes how Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, so brief yet so profound, was influenced by his use of the telegraph, which disciplined Lincoln to get to his point quickly. Twitter, Saffo says, may become “Haiku in the age of attention deficit disorder.” The 140-character limit “really forces the writers to compress their thoughts into a very short space,” he says. Twitter is a “disruptive” technology because it is in “real time,” Gray says. With blogging, “there’s still a lag between when they post and [when] you get it…. If you want to find out something that is happening immediately, the place to go is Twitter and not Google anymore. And that’s revolutionary. And that’s why Google, in my opinion, should be watching this closely.” | | 10:16a |
While you sleep, autopilot plays your Warcraft character Should people have the right to cheat? More than 100,000 folks seem to think so. That is how many copies have been sold of a computer program called Glider, which essentially plays the game World of Warcraft for you. While you sleep, eat, go to work, attend class or do whatever else, Glider controls your WOW character -- killing monsters, casting spells, collecting treasure and accumulating the experience points required to advance and become more powerful. Of the more than 11 million people who play World of Warcraft, most do so legitimately; they actually play the game themselves. The whole point of a massively multiplayer online game like WOW or EverQuest is that players can take pride that their virtual accomplishments and wealth reflect real human effort, determination, ingenuity and skill. Even though I haven't played WOW regularly in more than a year, I've still racked up thousands of hours in that world since 2004. To have the few unscrupulous players use a "bot" program like Glider makes a mockery of that effort and contributes to ruining the entertainment experience for me and everyone else. But should creating and selling a program like Glider be illegal? That is the question winding its way through a federal court in Arizona since 2006, when Blizzard Entertainment, WOW's creator, first locked legal horns with Glider's author, a programmer named Michael Donnelly, and Donnelly's company, MDY Industries. Last summer the court ruled that MDY (which has made at least $3.5 million in sales from Glider since 2005) illegally interfered with Blizzard's customer relationships and engaged in copyright violations. This month, Judge David G. Campbell additionally ruled that MDY had violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by circumventing an anti-bot technology developed by Blizzard. Blizzard, he said, was entitled to an injunction essentially shutting Donnelly down and halting sales of Glider, which costs $25. (WOW itself generally costs around $15 a month to play.) Let me be blunt: I, like the vast majority of gamers, feel strongly that bot programs like Glider are abhorrent and people who use them should be banned from the games they bot in. I agree wholeheartedly with Campbell's assertion that "the public interest may favour full and honest competition, but MDY ultimately is an exploiter, not a competitor." But I also recognize a powerful argument on the other side, which contends that it is dangerous and improper to allow a software company to dictate what other programs may be used in conjunction with its products. Glider does not hack into Blizzard's systems or alter World of Warcraft's programming code. And it does not actually copy the game's programming or visual assets. It "merely" interacts with the game, like a player, only with inhuman stamina and precision. Lance C. Venable, Donnelly's lawyer in Arizona, recognizes that his client is "a pretty unsympathetic character," as he said in a phone interview. But as the case nears the appeal process, he knows it's his job to make the most dire slippery-slope argument possible. "What if Microsoft made a deal with Electronic Arts and said you are only allowed to play EA games on machines running Windows Vista?" he asked. "What if Ford said that if you put third-party Napa auto parts in your vehicle, you are no longer allowed to load the software that runs your car's ignition system?" For now Glider is still for sale; the judge has not yet decided whether to impose the injunction pending appeal. It would surprise few people if that appeals process continues for at least a year. All I know for sure is that as a gamer, I think bots are as bad as out-and-out hacks or people hiring a "goldfarmer" in China to play the game for them. I have seen bots and hacks destroy other online games, in particular a previous Blizzard product called Diablo II. Diablo II was one of the world's best games until it was swamped about five years ago by hackers, who illegally duplicated and distributed copies of rare and expensive items in the game, just like counterfeiters. Paul Sams, Blizzard's chief operating officer, has every right to get on his high horse, as he did in a telephone interview this week. "The Diablo II experience is why we are so adamant about this," he said. "We are not going to stand by and let our games be destroyed by people who are taking away from the fun that we have created and that others are experiencing, and we are not going to let that happen to our customers again. Ever." |
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