Warlords of Draenor - The Project Manager's Addiction

Every WoW expansion pack that has been released over the past few years was shipped with its own personality.  Over the classic “vanilla” build of the game, Burning Crusade was markedly more difficult but had a lot of good content on your way to level 70 (not to mention replacing your epics on the first quest reward).  Wrath of the Lich Kingcame about and it was a far less challenging than its predecessor, but had what I consider to be some of the best endgame content raids in Ulduar and Icecrown Citadel.  It also brought the story full circle for those of us that nerded out on Warcraft III before Blizzard’s MMO days.  Cataclysm brought back the pure grind-it-out progression and the fall of Deathwing.  Mists of Pandaria?  Well, they had pandas and an eastern flair but I never got into it too deeply.

Now we’re a few weeks into Warlords of Draenor, the most recent expansion pack to the wildly popular World of Warcraft MMO.  And I’ll say it briefly before I get into the meat of this – I like it.  And it’s not wholly because of the content or of the throwbacks that will let you nerd out on character origins (like seeing Akama as a full on badass Exarch instead of an ubroken roaming Outland). This expansion answered the call for player housing from a lot of the fanbase, and they did it with style by implementing the garrison system.  I probably spend more time tending to my garrison and doing garrison-related quests than I do much else.  My main toon has been a level 100 for a week or so and I think I’ve only run 2 dungeons.  And there’s a reason…

My garrison is a giant project.  And one of my real life off-specs is project management.

The whole campaign starts with bringing people in from the Capital and creating a central outpost under your command to run operations in Draenor for whichever faction you represent – be it the Alliance or the Horde – when you have to sign off on the plans from the first buildings.  And from that point of initial construction, 100% of the mechanics involve running things (albeit in a much more toned down way but you know) in any sort of project.  As you level up more things open up to you in terms of crafting, garrison resource generation, heroes from around the land that follow your lead and run missions for you, and how much time and money it’s going to take to get it all done and customize it to exactly what you want.

(In other words, I just listed timelines, stakeholders, project resources, personnel, production/manufacturing, and change controls).

The player picks what buildings they want to be constructed to produce items or unlock certain rewards.  And other buildings are there to provide resources to get there.  My tannery lets my leatherworking department make stuff for me as well as higher grade materials for crafting and selling high end moneymakers.  My inn is a recruiting place where I can interview potential followers.  Hell there’s even a shack for fishing.  Everything can be laid out (almost) exactly like you want it.  And there’s a panel to track all of it.

And then… there’s the garrison missions.

Every mission that’s run has a reward, but they all have a set resource cost and personnel cost.  When you see a slate of available missions it’s up to you to figure out which skillset goes where, how long it will take and whether the cost and time is worth the reward.  Because nobody wants to wait 8 hours for just a tiny handful of coin.  I mean it’s insulting really.

Take the mission “The Infernals’ Fury,” for instance.  To guarantee a win in 4 hours I need level 100 followers with skills to counter the following: Wild Aggression, Massive Strike and Deadly Minions.  As you can see my girl Qiana Moonshadow has wild aggression covered handily, but I’m short on the other two.  My Dwarven associates Delvar and Bruma are my go-to aces to deal with massive strike and deadly minions.  But here’s the problem – they’re on another mission that is taking forever.  And even while they’re spreading the word of badassery in my name, that doesn’t give me something as good as that armor enhancement token.  So I can’t do this one right now – and that’s called opportunity cost, kids.  When they get back they’ll be assigned here because it’s a more important reward.

I can always put in my junior team in though.  They have the same skills, but since they’re not maxed out, my chance of getting that token would drop.  I mean you don’t take Peyton Manning out of the game unless he physically can’t play, know what I’m sayin?

So if Burning Crusade brought the gear, Lich King brought the break, Cataclysm brought the grind, and Pandaria brought the… well, the furries – Warlords brings the project.  And I am loving every second of it.

PAX East 2014: In-Depth with Blizzard

PAX East had a lot of great things to see all over the huge show floor at the Boston Convention Center – enough to confuse a person about which booths to hit first and which games to demo.  Luckily for me, we’re spoiled with shiny media badges, which gave us an extra hour before general admission to roam peacefully and make that decision.  As a dude that has played Warcraft and Diablo games for over a decade, I decided to hit up Blizzard first. Last year’s PAX East being their launch platform for Hearthstone, I was excited to see what they had in store for us this year - and as far as I’m concerned, they didn’t disappoint.  While Blizzard crew was still setting up the last of the demo stations, I settled in to try out World of Warcraft’s upcoming expansion, Warlords of Draenor, and their upcoming free-to-play mashup barn burner of a title, Heroes of the Storm. 

Warlords of Draenor @ PAX East 2014

World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor

Let me be straight here – what I played was definitely not a complete representation of the game.  The demo was limited, but I’m not going to hold that against them – they had an alpha build, and for those of you that have never worked in software or game testing, an alpha build is early earrrlllyy goins on.  So naturally I wasn’t expecting everything to be in final form.  That’s just how alphas go.  At least they were giving us what they got. The demo allowed players to see all the skins for all of the genders and races (including the updated Alliance models), but restricted player selection to Horde characters only.  It made sense to me really, since the first quest is literally speaking with Durotan in this tweaked timeline, and it wouldn’t exactly be a Gnome carrying that out now would it?  So I made a Blood Elf hunter (deviating from my Night Elven lineage), cranked him as brown as a Blood Elf can get and away I run.  The problem was that whenever I summoned a pet, debug windows came up instead of said pet, and I got good and killed in a sea of mobs despite my best efforts trying to close windows.  That’s ok though. The gameplay (at least as far as I can tell for hunters) is not drastically different at level 90 when you just start out.  BUT if big numbers jumping all over your screen is the life you're about then prepare to make an adjustment. We were equipped in character level 90 greens comparable to Mists of Pandaria endgame gear, but the numbers and damage I was doing was tremendously downsized.  With this expansion they've gotten away from the crazy exponential increase in stat values and damage, meaning I wasn't throwing out six-figure damage with my critical strikes like I'm used to seeing.  It doesn't mean that it takes that much longer to down enemies though - their HP is scaled to match your decreased stats.

Alliance Garrison

Thank the lords of Azeroth for that too.  Right now my hunter is walking around with half a million HP unbuffed, and I get 1000+ agility from just my bow.  My endgame bow in Wrath of the Lich King didn't even break 200.  The numbers now are just getting out of control and more or less have lost all meaning when my 140k DPS is the low number on Recount charts. The big change with Warlords  that everyone’s excited about (and with good reason) is the concept of the garrison – it’s like having your own little Warcraft III style homebase with peasants running back and forth gathering materials for you.  I wasn't allowed to take game footage pictures, but I got some screenshots from the press kit, and as more data is available I'll make sure to get that out to you kids.  I got in on the closed beta, so when I kick that off I'll have some real goods for you.

Heroes of the Storm Alpha Character Select

Heroes of the Storm 

Is there anyone that doesn’t love a good crossover?  How much fun did we have with Super Smash Brothers?  Kingdom Hearts saw Disney and Square-Enix collide.  The Marvel universe squared off against Capcom a number of times behind the controller, and even went head to head with DC Comics on the page before that.  And we love it.  There’s something about different universes coming together that is just pure meta appeal for the geek inside all of us. So what happens then when one company has enough isolated universes to do it within itself?  The answer is Heroes of the Storm – a crossover that pits the heroes (and villains) of the Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo universes against each other in a good old-fashioned melee. Now you see the thing is this - upon first glance this looks like the MOBA style (multiplayer online battle arena) we’re used to seeing in League of Legends and DOTA.  Do not be fooled though, it’s not.  Well not completely.  I mean it does have the concept of lanes, and you have to take said lanes to crush your foes.  But you don’t have to do a million things to be successful or have fun.  It’s like they stripped out all the annoying parts of the MOBA genre (sorry MOBA fans) and… the only way I can put it really is that it combines that with some old Warcraft III charm, down to unit jokes.

Hero - Baby Murloc Murky

The heroes are split into different types - Warrior, Assassin, Support and Specialist, each bringing a different type of play style into the game.  One of the interesting new heroes they revealed under the Support style was Brightwing the Faerie Dragon.  She has the ability to not only heal but to blink from ally to ally throwing heals anywhere on the map.  With her other skills she can be a pretty complex hero to play.  Tyrael on the other hand is a Warrior class, primarily dealing damage with high defense, having a less complex play style.

... and then there's Murky.  Yes Murky the Murloc is a hero because as the developers put it, "we decided to make a hero that was awful" and one to consider the "Wile E Coyote" of the game.  Murky has almost no health and no attack, but lays an egg before charging in.  When he dies, in a few seconds he will just respawn from the egg - over and over again.  It was absolutely hilarious to see Murky use this method against Diablo and ultimately run him off with a Murloc army.  So how's that for varied play style?  Each hero has his or her own signature attacks to customize it that much further.

Arthas calling in an air strike from Sapphiron

As far as skins and upgrades are concerned, yes there are some for purchase, but there are also some that can be unlocked just by playing a particular hero a lot without a fee, including what they call "ultimate skins."  There's some humor in these too, like having the abomination Stitches in a bikini. I'll let that one sink in for a bit. I'll be looking forward to when I can get my hands on HotS for real.

Gear and the Value of Time in World of Warcraft [tf charts]

I've got part III of my Windows 8 series pretty much buttoned up, but figured I'd get this in before I get to my final thoughts on the OS.

Today I logged into World of Warcraft after a long while, and had to download all of the updated tools and the pre-patch for the upcoming Mists of Pandaria expansion set to drop in just a couple weeks.  Having played since WoW original recipe, I've spent a sick number of hours in the realms of Azeroth - enough that I'm a little frightened to see the "/played" stat that the game provides for all of its players.  Through that time there was one very real statistic that all players would agree to - and that's the gear grind.  It takes countless hours to level up a character to max and at that point go through the motions to get the gear to allow seeing end-game content.  Cataclysm made that a little easier in one of its later patches with the Raid Finder feature, but the main idea stays the same:

With all the time it takes to equip those delicious epic items, which may add up to days, at least a couple of them can be replaced after 5-10 quests in the next expansion's starting zone.  And the trend looks like it's going to hold - straight through level 100 when the time comes.

Welcome to Pandaria, kids.

83. World of Warcraft and Add-ons: the Fall of a Purist

[Article first published as World of Warcraft Add-Ons - the Fall of a Purist on Blogcritics.]

Now if any of you read this with any sort of regularity, you’ll know that I play World of Warcraft. Until recently, I may have been one of the few that played it without add-ons or UI modifiers. I’m counting Recount as an exception here, because that just shows how much damage we’re doing and who I can blame for breaking my traps.

I was, in short, almost a purist, and classified add-ons as sanctioned cheating since they take a lot of the challenge out of the game. In fact I said I wouldn’t allow myself to use any add-ons (again, except Recount) until I had leveled a character to 80 “clean,” which was the cap at the time. I’m the same way with most games I play on the PC and consoles. Game Genie style devices or mechanics haven’t touched my consoles via my hands since I was 10, when I doubled my party’s initial health in the first Final Fantasy for the NES. After I beat the game, the victory seemed so tainted end empty that--at 10 mind you--I felt I had to start over and beat it clean before claiming victory. It’s just how I roll. I can probably credit my father with this – he wouldn’t let me use a calculator in elementary school until I could do my multiplication tables up to 15 in my head.

I started playing WoW right before the Burning Crusade expansion came out so I didn’t play much of the game “vanilla,” but I still got through heroics and Karazhan’s ghostly denizens, and even plowed through Arthas’ frosty minions in Icecrown Citadel in Wrath of the Lich King without too much issue. Evading boss attacks and knowing when to do what was relatively easy: for example an enrage is obvious as a boss turns bright red, and most of the other attacks coming my way were clearly telegraphed with an animation (like something showing up on the ground or some sort of charge-up). On my end, I would have to just pay attention to when my abilities were active so I knew when to use them. I knew for example that when it said “Lock and Load” above my head, I had two free explosive shots at my disposal. I didn’t need fancy glowing screen filling notifications.

In every WoW iteration though, Blizzard incorporated the functions of the most popular add-ons into its stock user interface, making the need for additional add-ons even less necessary in my mind, and giving me even less of a reason to download them. My “Lock and Load” example from above now makes explosive shot glow with a gold border so I know it’s active. I’ve got no problem using that now, as it’s in a player’s stock toolkit. Eventually however, after years of countless reactions to my playing with an unedited stock interface that went from the bewildered to the surprised to the downright strange, I stepped into the Blackwing Descent raid encounter a couple months ago and it finally happened: after the slew of wipes we experienced I downloaded Deadly Boss Mods. DBM and other certain other add-ons have almost become a requirement for even being invited to raid groups, since it flat out increases the chances of success by giving you warnings and timers for absolutely everything that’s going on. Don’t have DBM installed? You might find yourself back in Stormwind or Orgrimmar spamming the Looking for Group channel, because you just got kicked from your (former) raid group.

I tried to tell myself that I wasn’t downloading it for me, but for the guild, and that my having this installed would contribute to less wipes and save us a lot of time and repair bills. After running raids in the Cataclysm expansion a few times, I found with the add-on I was required to think less and able to act more, with the jury still out on whether or not that really was a good thing. I mean I perform much better, but did DBM make me a better player or bring me down to a new lower standard of gameplay?

All of us became worse players in Wrath of the Lich King, which was incredibly easy compared to Burning Crusade and Cataclysm. A lot of people blame that lack of difficulty in Wrath for the frustration-fueled departure of players after level 80, but I think they’re only half right. It was Wrath combined with DBM and other third party add-ons that created a class of players characterized by (a) an ability to collect epic gear damn near blindfolded, (b) an expectation that all things be that easy for them, (c) an inability to cut it when things became a little bit difficult, and finally (d) a level of being spoiled that precludes them from even trying.

My self-assessment that I am a half-decent player comes from what I’m able to do with the tools I have been given – which I’ve handily been able to do through level 85. And the way some of these Cataclysm boss fights go, add-ons are pretty much needed to get through them. So I shouldn’t feel so dirty using DBM right? I guess it’s for the team. Either that or I've just gotten good at rationalizing.

Now playing a rogue on the other hand… that’s a feeling of dirtiness that’s unforgivable.

70. FBI raids students for gold farming and bank fraud, stormwind's SI-7 nowhere on the scene

[Article first published as Federal Agents Raid College for Suspected Gold Farming on Blogcritics.]

When I think of “raiding” and the World of Warcraft, I’m generally thinking about the Blackwing Descent raid encounter that my guild is trying to power through or disposing of the Lich King in Icecrown Citadel with extreme prejudice.  Never do any of those thoughts feature United States law enforcement kicking in a door or any sort of real life crime.  Recent events may have two students at the University of Michigan seeing things a little bit differently than I do after this week though.   A sophomore and a junior in Ann Arbor had their Towers apartment raided by the FBI for the purposes of "potentially fraudulent sales or purchases of virtual currency that people use to advance in the popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft."  For those that don’t keep up with MMO vernacular, that’s “gold farming” – acquiring virtual currency then selling it for real world cash.  The two students maintain that agents have the wrong people, as neither of them even play WoW.

But why should anyone really care?  A common response when I was telling others about this story was some variation on “Come on man, it’s just WoW gold.”  Well for starters, not all gold farming is legit (as far as “legit” can properly apply to this practice anyway).  Some of the virtual gold that’s meant to fetch real dollars comes from account theft.  I’ve seen firsthand what happens through guildmates getting their accounts hacked in WoW.  They log in one day, only to find that anything and everything saleable on their person or in their inventory was cleaned out.  To some gold farmers, that’s most definitely a quicker and easier resource than grinding out quest chains or working the auction house to make some digital dough.  This is one of the 4 primary reasons I haven’t or won’t ever buy gold for real money:  (1) I’d rather not give some shady person my credit card number.  (2) It violates my end-user license agreement and that may open me up to the Blizzard ban hammer.  (3)  It promotes the practice, which promotes, to some extent, account hacking.  (4) I already pay almost $200 a year to play.  I don’t want to shell out more.

Reading up on this topic has given me a fifth reason.  Computerworld has found some information linking this kind of activity to botnets through a Canadian study, which details to some extent the seedy underbelly of the digital world, or as the study calls it, the “dark universe.”  It’s an adequate name, as what I read in the report involved some pretty scary information about all sorts of digital places i want no part of.  Here’s a little snippet about MMO’s and persistent virtual worlds to illustrate my point:  “These environments have not escaped the notice of terrorists, spies, and criminals. Virtual world terrorism facilitates real world terrorism: recruitment, training, communication, radicalization, propagation of toxic content, fund raising and money laundering, and influence operations.”  It goes on to talk about how some gold farming and power-leveling operations could be arms of criminal organizations that use them a whole host of shady enterprises.  There could be a possible link here, as the FBI agents involved with this raid believe that there was a “scheme to set up fraudulent bank accounts to buy and/or sell 'virtual currency' or 'gold' to be used in the game.”  Bank fraud does indeed sound like something within the realm of the aforementioned dark universe.

The information above made me glad to see details on something called Project Reynard from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA).   Project Reynard works on the premise that real world characteristics are reflected in virtual world behavior, and looks to identify criminal behaviors and trends online that may translate into any real world threat involving the users behind them.  With the increasing presence of virtual worlds and MMO environments, it would appear that intelligence gathering in the real world isn’t enough to catch everything.

Perhaps World of Warcraft is the new Matrix.  Maybe it's time to learn some digital kung fu?

sources:

gamepolitics

computerworld

IARPA official website

45. world of warcraft and fantasy football

there have been two notable time sinks in the past few weeks for me outside of work and actual living - the first is world of warcraft, trying to level a paladin because the guild needs another tank (and cataclysm drops today), and the second is the two fantasy football leagues i play in.  to the outside onlooker the two things have nothing in common - the classic "nerd" and "jock" social archetypes that you all experienced during your childhood still kind of stick with people through the years.  back in high school and college, most people's social choices were clearly made between nerdery (and associated gaming/science/tech) and popularity (and associated drinking/sports/people).  that is, until senior year, when no one really cared anymore and everyone just partied because school was coming to an end.  you know, the whole "no more teachers no more books" thing.  but with beer.  while my cohorts and i did try to somehow pull of both paths of society in college, we all sharply leaned towards the former.  friday and saturday nights for me in sophomore year, for example, either consisted of going to $5 to $10 shows put on by small local bands or playing diablo II with the other guys in my wing on the 4th floor of good ol' forbes hall (sometimes command and conquer: red alert 2 was used as a change of pace).  we didn't even know our own 4-digit on-campus extensions for our phone numbers, but we could sure as hell rattle off our IP addresses for you.

just the network, 3 engineers, a programmer and sometimes some chinese food.  and we owned, if that's at all relevant to anyone.

but there's way more similarity between these two things than one casual observer might think.  look at every major MMO or RPG that has been released in the past two decades.  the basic elements of hit points, mana, damage, defense, evasion, etc., etc., etc. are all modifications to different degrees to old school dungeons and dragons and tabletop RPG's.  these are the same base principles that flowed into other forms of nerd entertainment, like collectible card game magic: the gathering.  everything is driven by numbers.  in warcraft my hunter gains 1 attack power per agility i have, so my choices in weapons and armor will naturally be high in agility, to maximize the amount of damage i can deal.  characters whose role involves tanking, or damage mitigation, would optimize their gear for stamina, dodge or parry to enhance their defenses instead, because more defensive stats mean less damage will be inflicted on them by opponents.  every role has it's own numerical values, and a player will benefit from learning those patterns and trying to optimize those statistics with stat bonuses and augmentation.

so that's my quick nerd speech on basic stats in world of warcraft.  so how on earth is fantasy football, a game played traditionally by people into sports, and NOT gaming, related?  it goes back to the numbers-driven play that is present in a lot of gaming.  fantasy football has similar rules.  suppose i wanted to run a successful 10-man raid, let's say icecrown citadel.  i would want my team to be made up of 2 tanks, 2 healers, and 6 dps (damage dealer) players.  on the other hand, i also want a successful team in my fantasy league - so i would need (in our league setup anyway) a quarterback, 2 running backs, 3 wide receivers, a tight end, a kicker, and defense/special teams.  in both situations, a win is only obtained through good performance from a majority of your players, or if a few perform exceptionally well and carry the rest.  bad performance hurts your chances. your raid will be sunk if your tanks can't survive long enough.  and your fantasy head-to-head matchup and playoff dreams could be done for if your quarterback is throwing interceptions.  just as anyone who had mark sanchez this week.  poor jets.  poooooor jets.  that game was a massacre.  but anyway, again, everything is based on points.

so like i said, my warcraft hunter may get a point of attack power per agility, but my running backs get 1 fantasy point per 10 yards rushing (plus bonuses) and 6 for a touchdown.  quarterbacks get a point per 25 yards passing.  defense gets points for sacks and interceptions.  meaning while my hunter was delivering 10k damage points per second in azeroth this past weekend, maurice jones-drew was delivering 24 points for me in tennessee. and those points, even though they came from a great run game and not by stacking agility and level 264 gear,  could easily be considered damage - against my opponent for week 13.

see everyone?  fantasy football.  the nerd shall inherit the earth.  on schedule.  and at least make it to the playoffs.