So, you know those dungeon adventures with random pick-up groups on World of Warcraft that are almost entirely chaotic and run counter to the strict guidelines set down in every strategy guide found on the Internet?

Here’s the thing: I really enjoy those PUGs, ESPECIALLY when things go a little haywire or spiral completely off script. It’s probably sick of me to feel this way, but there’s only cold comfort in pursuing trip after trip through these same old dungeons, following the normal rote tactics, and doing it flawlessly. No doubt, this makes me a bad raider and a questionable dungeoneer – particularly now that the system on WoW is designed for farming emblems to earn better gear so that you can move on to the bigger and better dungeons. Nevertheless, I kind of get a kick out of unhinged situations when a tank fails to hold aggro or someone inadvertently pulls the boss too soon or someone forgets about that bad guy’s Whirlwind ability and forces me to get my butt into gear to pick up the slack after they go down like a sack of hammers.

It’s only when the adventure doesn’t go as planned that I feel challenged and excited about it. Otherwise, it’s just monotonous – lather, rinse, repeat. Give me some unpredictability!

How many people do you need to have online at the same time in a MMO? Up until now, this has been determined mostly through technical requirements (how many people can one server support?). But depending on design, some MMOs need more people online at the same time than others otherwise they just don’t work.

If you look at WoW with it’s plethora of solo content, popular 5 man instances, and battlegrounds that you can jump into without being in a pre-made group, it’s very clear that server population can get quite low and people will still be able to play. So although your chances of being able to run a 5 man instance of your choice in the middle of the night are lower than at primetime, you still only need 4 other people to do it. The only big sticking point is raiding, and battlegrounds themselves – and just as cross-server battlegrounds eased the need for one server alone to provide all participants, it will probably ease the need for single server raid PUGs too.

Warhammer, by comparison, seemed from the outset to be a game that was designed for a truly massive population. Open world PvP split across lots of different zones and different level bands needed quite a lot of players on the same server to all be interested at the same time if fights were to be consistently available (in practice, there were so many different zones that player warbands could comfortably avoid combat while taking forts). Public quests, while fun, needed to have enough people in the same zone interested in the same quest to get the group together. It was never the case (except maybe in the very early days) that you could just wander around and happen on a group in the public quest you wanted to do.

So I always wondered if at any point the devs had sat down and tried to figure out their critical mass. ie. how many players do we need per server for there to be a reasonable chance that a player can find a public quest/ scenario/ open world pvp/ instance to do at prime time/ off peak daytime/ night? I’m sure they didn’t.

Note: In game economies are a different issue. They do require a certain number of active players, but those players don’t all need to be online at the same time.

Raising the Critical Mass

So there are some design decisions that will raise the critical mass of a game and spread the existing player base:

1. Non scaling content that needs large numbers of people (ie. raids of fixed size, battlegrounds of fixed size)
2. Larger group size.
3. Lots of group content spread all across the level range
4. Lots of levels, and lots of content that is level specific (ie. difficult to group with people outside your current level range)
5. Wide choice of group content (eg. lots and lots of public quests)
6. Very large world with long travel times (ie. once you have found people, how difficult is it to get the group together)
7. Highly tuned content. (ie. people reluctant to run it with people they don’t know or in PUGs.)

So in general, the more choices people have about what group content to do, the more people you need to have online to raise the chances that other people will also want to do it.

Lowering the Critical Mass

Likewise, other design decisions will lower the critical mass of a game, and funnel existing players together:

1. Have people from all timezones on the same servers (means people who play offpeak from one timezone are more likely to find other players)
2. Good LFG channel and functionality
3. Robust PUG scene. (ie. an atmosphere where people feel encouraged to join random groups)
4. Announcements when public quests become active (ie. to funnel people towards them)
5. Reward systems that funnel people towards specific group content (ie. daily dungeon rewards)
6. Lots of solo or small group content
7. Scaled encounters. Lots to do for different group sizes.

Is cross-server PUGs the answer?

Just from looking at those lists it’s easy to see that WoW is specifically designed to work fine with a lower player population. This seems ironic given how much more popular it is than other MMOs, but I do think it is one reason for the game’s massive success. It really is much easier to log in and just play.

On the other hand, the high critical mass design statements lead to a wider, deeper, larger game. I would rather PLAY that game, but … as soon as the critical mass dips too far down, you lose many of the advantages. More and more I believe that just as Wolfshead suggested, better scaling is the answer.

Is it possible to have the best of both worlds? It might be that in WoW, the cross-server PvE PUGs that are coming next patch will be more game changing than anyone yet guesses. Surely it will be easier to find groups for those lower level instances when you have several servers contributing to the player pool. And if PUGs for raids are implemented across server also, who knows where it could end?

Not only that, but the game retains the current server size so people who like their current server communities won’t feel swamped as they move around the game world. They’ll just have access to a much larger group of players to instance with.

Link to / Enlace a: Vivox Voice Chat @ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=145526109656 & http://apps.facebook.com/vivoxwebchat.

From/De: Vivox

Vivox® Labs Debuts with Voice Mashups for Facebook & World of Warcraft®

Vivox test-drives new technologies to deepen the social web

Natick, MA – September 15, 2009

Vivox (www.vivox.com), the market leader in voice services for online games and virtual worlds, today announced the opening of Vivox Labs, an initiative designed to capture and incubate new ideas around using Web Voice to create voice and web mashups. The first two innovations to come out of Vivox Labs are Vivox Web Voice for Facebook, a way for friends and groups to seamlessly talk on Facebook; and Puggable.com, a website for World of Warcraft players creating pick-up groups (PUGs) with voice chat, character data and boss tactics.

Since the company’s inception in 2005, Vivox has been enabling massive conversations to take place in some of the world’s largest online games, virtual worlds and communities. Now the company is bringing its sophisticated and expertly designed voice capabilities to social web application developers and users with Web Voice.

“We created Vivox Labs because our team was bursting with new ideas to combine voice and web products. This new initiative enables the team to work on new ideas and share these opportunities with our partners,” said Monty Sharma, co-founder and VP Product Management and Marketing of Vivox. “Vivox Labs has now opened up opportunity for us to experiment with Web Voice and leverage what we learn for the benefit of our users and partners. These first two projects coming out of Vivox Labs are extraordinary examples of the passion and talent of our team and the adaptability of Web Voice. While we are excited about the potential of these early efforts we know our partners will take the tools we have developed and create further innovative solutions as gaming and the social web merge.”

Vivox Web Voice for Facebook combines the award winning Vivox Network with the social environment of Facebook, making connecting with friends easier than ever. Users can have virtual reunions, play games or conduct meetings. Vivox Web Voice for Facebook is designed to provide a simple way to get a group talking. In addition to the core app, Vivox is working with developers to integrate custom voice capabilities into their applications.

Also in development in Vivox Labs is Puggable, a website that supports pick up groups (PUGs) commonly formed in MMOs. Gamers often have to find similar geared players in certain roles to achieve game objectives. Presently focused on the World of Warcraft community, Puggable assembles both character and instance data from the game so that players can easily build a complementary team. Once the PUG is set, they can use Vivox voice right from their browser, making it easy and intuitive for players to communicate while playing together.

Vivox Web Voice for Facebook and Puggable are presently in closed beta with expected release dates in Q4 2009.

About Vivox, Inc.
Based in Natick, MA and founded in 2005, Vivox is the leading provider of community-building voice services for games and virtual worlds. Supporting over 15 million users in more than 180 countries, and over 2 billion minutes of voice chat per month, the Vivox Network is the world’s largest voice network for gamers. Vivox customers include game and virtual world developers and publishers such as CCP Games (EVE Online), EA, Icarus Studios, Linden Lab (Second Life), NCsoft, Sony Online Entertainment and Wizards of the Coast. For more information on Vivox and the power of voice, visit www.vivox.com.

Thanks to all the musicians who dropped by to play for our Clown Parade and our Fourth of July bonfire! The groups were nicely balanced and played well. I hope you’ll all consider putting us on the calendar again for next year.

1. First up, a mind-boggling colour based optical illusion. (I’m thinking this won’t work too well if you are colour blind)
2. And on that note, ablegamers.com have been posting up some great interviews recently. Check out this discussion they had with Timothy Cain (lead designer of Fallout) and Mitch Ferguson (lead systems designer who worked on The Sims Online) about the future of MMO gaming, it has some real gems.
3. One of my favourite newer blogs, standing at the back in my sissy robe compares his experience in PUGs to .. err.. his experience in pick up bars.
4. Ixobelle helps out with the best healing macro you’ll ever need for PUGs.
5. syncaine eyes up the problem of how to introduce new players into old games. Why do we force alts to regrind , and what about the new guy?
6. Copra is also puzzling over the problem of how new players can learn to group when old players won’t teach them, may mock them, and may just exclude them. As a social player, I want games to make it easy for players to group, not foster elitist barriers which prevent them!
7. Brenda Braithwaite thinks about what it is in games that makes us happy. Is it the purple loot? The other rewards? Or are they just steps on the path towards happiness?
8. John Walker@RPS asks why we can’t just teleport in MMOs. It works fine in Free Realms and Guild Wars, after all.
9. What does it mean to be unique? Why do we all want to be special? And how can you really sparkle in MMOs? Larisa has some deep thoughts and some smart answers.
10. Suzina discusses a recent experience in LOTRO. She joined a guild with a few friends, and because her clique is so tight-knit, she feels as though they’re slowly taking over. I’ve seen this phenomenon also, and as a guild officer, I’ve always been a bit reluctant to invite a large group of existing friends for that reason.

Also, a gratuitous Harold Ramis link where he discusses why it’s more difficult to make funny videogames than funny films. I had such a crush on Egon as a teenager …. (then I grew up and found a cute, funny, geeky guy of my own to marry )

lantanasham made a comment on one of my posts this weekend which really struck home.

“Call me naive, but it’s recently been sinking in that a tremendous number of people who play WoW do so while: a) watching TV; b) tipsy, drunk, or really drunk; c) high as a kite; d) reading/watching videos/posting online; or e) all of the above.

In my tiny, tiny experience (~.000043% of all WoW players is my calculation), those who do so are usually the ‘hardcore’ – and frequently behave like morons.”

And I was thinking, yes I’ve seen this type of behaviour. You invite someone to a PUG or raid, you see that they’re a member of a hardcore guild or maybe recognise their name, and you think it’s going to be a great help and a smooth run. But no. They screw around. They act like a total noob. They go pull extra patrols just for the hell of it. The run is actually ten times harder because of having them there. You think, “Wow, these hardcore players are total jerks, and they’re not even all that good. They’re used to being dragged through content by having overpowered dps.”

These things are actually all true. Except that they may well be good players. Just:

1. many of them care so little what anyone thinks outside their social group that they won’t even try
2. some are just used to running instances in a very different way and can’t or won’t adjust. if you’re used to overpowered tanks and dps, you’re going to approach an encounter differently. A good player will adjust to whoever is in the group, a hardcore one may or may not be able to adjust. It’s simply not a skill they need to use a lot in raids.

When I was a class officer in a hardcoreish raid guild, I used to avoid running 5 mans with our guys. I often had more luck and more fun in PUGs. Because the guys from my guild would just mess around and not take the instance seriously. They got bored, so they made things more interesting for themselves. They broke crowd control because they were careless – they just didn’t care. They knew we’d handle it. As a healer, sometimes I just wanted a nice easy run without me having to think too much and not bored tanks seeing how much they could pull so they could boast about it in guild chat.

I remember running ZA back in the day with a friend who is a priest in a hardcore raid guild. He singlehandedly screwed up our run. And I know he’s a good player. It was at the point where I wondered if someone else was playing his toon (hardcore players let others do this a lot, by the way, so be careful). But no, it was just his ‘evening off’ and he couldn’t be bothered to try, just for us.

It’s not everyone by any means. Some people are just fantastic players, they’ll adjust how they behave to the level of the group. And any group taking them WILL have a smoother run. You’ll end up with an incredible impression both of the player and of their guild.

So I’m not saying never group with anyone from a more hardcore guild. Just that … you’ll often find in PUGs that you end up with people who have different playing styles. Don’t assume that because someone wears a hardcore guild tag it means that they’ll be good at playing at your level.

You know that you’ve been there. You want to run the Scarlet Monastery (Graveyard, chapel, armory, all) and you simply cannot find enough people to put together a pick up group (pug). You know you can’t run the instance by yourself, but you want the loot, achievements, or practice that come with that instance. You could spend literally hours in the LFG (Looking for Group) channel and totally waste your time looking for a group of like minded players that your probably not going to find. So what do you do?

Well, what I’ve found effective is offering higher level toons gold for instance runs. I think of it as paying for a service that another player has to offer. To start I will go to a city during peak times (since I’m Horde and Undead I normally hit UC or Org) and state something like – offering 10 gold for single run through Razor Fen Kraul – 5 gold up front and 5 for completion – plus tip. Now for some this may seem to defeat the purpose of running instances. To some extent that is true. The lower level instances are really good practice for learning how to play your toon in higher level instances. Unfortuneatley if your level 35 and the rest of your server has toons who are all running end game then this is really one of your only practical choices.

There are several perks to running instances this way:

1. You can work it out so that you get to keep all the loot – so a successful run through might pay for itself depending on what loot drops.

2. You save a lot of time by offering gold to other players who already have experience running the instance – or – have a toon powerful enough that they can just grind their way through the instance without a lot of problems.

3. You normally don’t have to offer a ton of money to other players to get them to help you tear through a low level instance. I ran through Shadowfang Keep with a 76 Warlock and we made it through in less than 15 minutes, I kept all the loot, and I completed all of the Shadowfang Keep quests – which brings me to number 4.

4. You can let the toon who is guiding you know that you have x number of quests to do. He/She might even know where the quest items and mobs are if you let them know in advance. So you get loot, acheivements, quest xp, and the reputation points that go with completing instances.

Soooo…. what if you are a poor toon and you don’t have any gold to spend. That’s ok. If you find a guild that is fairly active you can normally find people in your guild who would be willing to run you – if they need some persuading offer to let them keep all the loot that you don’t need for toon, like all the cloth drops or green items that you can’t use. Sometimes you can also offer to do that in trade chat as well and someone who is bored or looking for reputation points with a certain faction will be enticed to run you.

The point is that if you can find a pug then that’s really the best way to go – but if you can’t, then you shouldn’t waste time standing around in a city waiting for toons to join your group. You have other options and while it might require you to part with some gold or loot I think its well worth it for a chance to run through an instance and complete the quests and see some of the best content in the game. K. Later.

So, I got my little paladin to 60 yesterday and about damn time! I can safely say that leveling the dorfadin has been the least fun thing I’ve done to date in Warcraft.

I don’t know much about the paladin class and they were one of my biggest headaches when I was raid leading. I didn’t know who had what buff and what they all did and why for the love of all that is holy it took my gaggle of raiding paladins 15 minutes to sort out their buffs. So I rolled one in the hopes of learning a bit more about paladannery.

I leveled my adorable chubby little dwarf from 1-45 as Holy, because my main raiding paladin said it would be easy. Well, it wasn’t exactly hard, mind you, but it was very, very, very slow. Slower than slow. So at 45 I re-geared her, and changed her to Retribution, to learn a bit more about that spec. That went a little faster, but I had almost no mana pool, poor survivability and spend a small fortune on repairs and mana drink. And close to a good hour per level just bubbling and running when I bit off more than I could chew. Which was often. So at 59 I re-geared her again and switched to Protection.

Hoo boy.

I’ve never tanked before. Never ever and I had only the vaguest idea of what our long-suffering meat shields did up there at the bosses toes while I watched their green bars bounce up and down. I did an absolutely excruciating 5 hour long pick-up-group regular Ramparts run and by then end of it I was ready to strangle someone. Anyone. Starting with the aggro monkey rogue and the “loltrap” hunter that were in my PuG. The run went spectacularly poorly and was an exercise in frustration for all concerned. I did, however learn quite a bit about tanking in general and paladin tanking in specific. And every now and then, these rare fleeting moments would occur, when the pull went right and the cc worked and I got enough aggro and the moon was in the seventh house and lo! I was enjoying tanking!

My guild has been so generous helping me with this little paladin. They have sent me gear, advice, taken me to instances to help me power out a few levels when I got so bored I wanted to cry. They have (as they always are) been so very supportive of me. What I would like to do is stand up and salute them and all our raiding paladins and all paladins everywhere. I would rather eat lightbulbs than ever, ever have to level another one, and I have nothing but respect for everyone who has mastered such a difficult class.

And now I’m going to go farm herbs to relieve the boredom!