An open suggestion to Blizzard: WoW needs pullers

There was something about the feel of EverQuest that's different from the feel in World of Warcraft. What was it? I'm beginning to think that it wasn't just playing a bard and having about 20 polygons per character. I think it was the fact that EverQuest actually had three consistent roles: healer, dps (damage-dealer), tank and puller.

Yep, monks and to a lesser extent, necromancers were excellent pullers in EQ. The role of a puller was to scout forward, identify the next mobs to pull to the group and get them to come back just far enough for the tank(s) to pick them up. Pulling was hard, and interestingly enough, it was often seen as a leadership role. It wasn't always strictly necessary, especially since gear and level balance wasn't nearly as razor-strict as it is in WoW, but now it makes me wonder: how could WoW be improved if pulling were a role?

First off, you'd have to identify who would pull. I'm thinking it should be one rogue spec, one hunter spec, enhancement shaman and either frost or unholy death knights. Why? Well, rogues and hunters have traditionally had no other options but to dps and vanish and feign death both seem like obvious hooks for a pulling capability. Shaman and death knights, through this change, would become on-par with paladins in being able to serve 3 out of 4 of the possible party roles, and no class would be able to to it all any longer (though druids would still be the only class to be able to serve as melee and ranged dps, tank and healer).

Now, what does pulling mean in WoW? I think it's probably a combination of an advanced set of marking tools; agro drop; threat transfer and ranged CC. For example, in the next expansion, trash packs in dungeons and raids could be twice as large as the average group could handle. However, using multi-target snares, CCs or saps the puller breaks the group in two, agroing half of the group on himself while the other half stays in place or moves more slowly. The tank picks up the near group and the puller drops agro (vanish, FD, etc.) At this point, the other half of the group resets and the first half gets burned down by the party.

So. why is this a role and not just an extra duty like CC? Well, the easy answer is: gear. Make these new abilities require gearing that's rich in non-dps stats, perhaps even a completely new rating-based stat that only pullers will want. This means your puller will do less dps (not a lot less, hopefully, but enough that you don't expect them to top the meters or even come in second). On the other hand, you need a puller for raids (perhaps 2 or 3 depending on raid size) and you need one for every dungeon group.

For the LFD (Looking For Dungeon) tool, this will mean that there are four ways to queue and the tank is no longer the obvious "leader," as it's the puller that sets the pace and decides what's up next. I think this will set the tank aside as the class that needs to know the bosses while the puller needs to know the dungeon and the trash.

The only remaining problem that I see is this: does the puller have a special role during the fights? Tanks are blowing cooldowns to stay alive. Healers are blowing cooldowns for mana and to save anyone at low health. dps are blowing cooldowns to squeeze out more damage. What do pullers blow cooldowns on? Perhaps the deal with distracting pathers? But that seems to take them too far out of the action. Maybe the puller can back up healers by debuffing mobs with long-cooldown abilities that briefly reduce damage?

These are all just ideas, but the core problem they try to address is this: there are three primary roles in WoW, and the balance of the community with respect to how many people want to fill each role is just not in line with the balance of how many are needed. the solution is simple supply and demand. You can try to create more supply of tanks and healers (so far, no luck) or you can try to reduce their relative demand by making pure dps scarcer. Something clearly has to be done.

On the origins of Harmil

SPAM is a Hormel trademark.
No confusion is intended.

It gets asked sometimes: where do my character names come from? Some are simple like Miskaton or Himalountain which are references to works of fiction (Lovecraft and Lucy: Daughter of the Devil, respectively). Some are just names based on role like Smitina the Paladin or Zot the Mage. However, across a wide variety of games and online services, I've often used the name "Harmil." This one isn't quite so obvious, and I figure it's worth having a blog post I can point people to for the story.

Back in the late 80s, I was gaming (tabletop) at MIT with the Strategic Games Society. Good bunch of folks, and some of my most formative gaming experiences were had, there. In one D&D game I was going to play a cleric, but I wanted to be a bit of a rough-and-tumble sort. Something like Friar Tuck from the Robin Hood stories. He was going to be the party's cook, confidant and healer. I needed a name that fit. For some reason, I imagined him constantly preparing unidentifiable meat for the party while they traveled, and this brought Spam to mind. Going from there, I thought of calling him Hormel, but that was a bit too on-the-nose, so I went for Harmil instead.

And thus was born my most widely over-used character / avatar / user name of all time.

Protoss + Human = Titan?

Protoss as they appear in Starcraft II

Many have pointed out that the Zerg of Starcraft and the Old Gods of Warcraft have much in common, though obviously, the Old Gods are far more powerful than the Zerg. However, I've never seen it pointed out that the architecture and technology of the Titans in Warcraft closely resembles a hybrid of Protoss and Human from Starcraft. If we read really far into that, we could make the connection with Blizzard's upcoming MMO, code-named "Titan." Could it be that that MMO is the story of the bridge between the world of Starcraft and that of Warcraft?

For the Protoss and the Humans to have combined forces and perhaps even hybridized their races would require some rather radical changes in the all-out war between them circa Starcraft II, but if the Zerg were to discover a way to infect and destroy entire planets from the inside-out, perhaps such an alliance would be born out of need?

But what of Humans in Warcraft? The lore within the game suggests that they were descended from Vrykul, a human-like race of giants, but that humans were the weak offspring of Vrykul who refused to cull their young as their leaders commanded. What if this was no mutation, but a reversion to type? What if the Vrykul are actually descendants of ancient (very, very ancient) humans from the Starcraft time period? That could explain why these mutated offspring breed true. It might be that Vrykul have to kill off their human progeny in order to maintain their relatively recessive, non-human traits (most of which appear to simply be their size and cold tolerance).

Ah, I hear you say, but what about magic? Well, there are several kinds of magic in both Starcraft and Warcraft. The Protoss have psionics, the basis of which was never clearly explained. There's also a lot of Clarke-esque "advanced technology indistinguishable from magic" going on in Starcraft, especially in the Protoss camp.

Another interesting angle is the Xel'Naga, a race from Starcraft which is reported to have manipulated the development of both the Zerg and the Protoss, and which will play an important role in future developments for the game... If those two races gained access to different aspects of the Xel'Naga race's capabilities, it's possible that they each found a way (of untold thousands or millions of years) to use that advanced technology to create "magic" in the time of Warcraft.

We know that Demons are, in part, the creation of one of the Titans, gathered from various races starting with the Nathrezim from many different worlds. We know that "The Light" appears to be code for manipulating some sort of power source, be it of religious, natural or engineered origin... that much is never made clear. The Naaru are attuned to it, and were able to connect the Draenei to it in a way that Humans appear to have had a natural affinity for. But there's also quite a bit to support the idea that while Humans see The Light as a quasi-religious phenomenon, it's not quite that simple.

So, now that this new MMO is coming and Blizzard is coyly describing it as "new IP," rather than "original," I think it's clear that there's something going on, here. Will the new MMO take place a few thousand or million years after Starcraft and focus on the origin of the Titans? I think so. We'll see...

No mods? No MMO!

I'm getting tired of people announcing MMOs. Can we please come up with a name for, "a game where many thousands of people can play in the same world, but where the UI is created solely by the publisher, and user interface mods cannot be written? How about Online Large Dynamic game or "OLD game"?

I've heard a lot of feedback around this point, so let me summarize all of the discussion that usually takes place, below, but if you want the TL;DR version: User interface modding is hard to do right, hard to support, and absolutely required of anyone who is seriously trying to unseat the primary MMO (World of Warcraft) in the market. I'll get to why, later. As Warhammer proved, it's not sufficient, but it is a requirement for long-term re-playability and community-building.

As a general note, I'll use "addon" and "mod" somewhat interchangeably, here. I see a "mod" as being anything that modifies the actual in-game experience (e.g. Auctioneer, HUDs, etc.) where "addons" are a much broader category that include simple user-interface changes and other tweaks as well as mods.

But my MMO of choice let's me change colors/fonts too!

Well, that's very nice, but changing layout and look-and-feel isn't what UI modding is about. Here are a few things that user interface modders have done in World of Warcraft:

• Added an auction house interface with long-term trend tracking, pricing assistance, scanning, tooltip enhancements, etc.
• I have a tiny addon installed that just alerts me every time I get agro on my healer or dpser characters, by playing a voice saying "agro!"
• One mod allows damage numbers to be filtered so that many damage numbers can be compressed down into single numbers to avoid spamming my screen.
• A mapping mod puts known locations of mining and herbalism resources on my map and then draws an efficient route between them so that I can run around grabbing stuff for my other professions.
• A chat mod transformed the standard chat windows into an IM-like interface that tracks who I'm having conversations with and warns them when I'm in combat and unable to reply.
• A raid-running mod lets raid leaders perform all kinds of basic administrative tasks more easily and improves on the basic "ready check" mechanic that the game provides.
• I have a mod installed that tracks how much gold I have on all of my characters and how much gold I've made/lost this session. Similarly, other mods track what goods I have on my characters and put notes in tooltips so that I know if an item is already in my bank or in the mail, etc.

So to sum up, changing colors, fonts and layout is an important part of modding, but so is adding usability to the game that the developers haven't thought of or are not prioritizing.

Addons are cheating / WoW is easy because addons tell you what to do.

I have to agree to a point. There are things that Blizzard has been tolerant of from the addon community that I think they should have stamped out (in some cases they did, but took quite some time to do so). Then there's the question of DBM and other "how to raid" mods. In part, I have to agree that these mods are not a good thing, but most of my reasoning has nothing to do with "cheating." Quite the opposite; mods like DBM are so much an expected part of the raiding experience that Blizzard designs encounters so that they expect you to play with addons that tell you what's going to happen. I'd rather they focus on making these things visually distinct (e.g. giant pillars of lava are probably things you should not stand in). As it is, bosses now "emote" subtle queues that these mods pick up on and tell you "turn around to avoid being blinded," or the like.

IMHO, this is just bad raid design, but the fact that WoW has bad raid design has absolutely nothing to do with the value of mods. Just like WoW bans the use of mods that facilitate cross-faction chat, they could just as easily ban mods which act as "howtos" in raids. That's a matter for game designers to decide, and has nothing to do with allowing addons in the first place.

If the default UI is fine, you don't need addons.

This is said fairly often, but the fact of the matter is that no gaming company has ever produced a perfect (or perfectly customizable) UI. Addons will always improve the game because there will always be someone out there with a good idea that no one in the gaming company thought of. It's just a matter of numbers.

But addons allow viruses!

This, I had to throw in, just because it's sometimes said, and easy to correct: while allowing data from untrusted sources to be interpreted by your computer is always risky, WoW has addressed this problem by giving addons no access to the system or external networks other than by writing saved variables files for state information in a known directory. Addon security must be taken extremely seriously, but with a good, trusted distribution mechanism (something WoW lacks and third-parties have had to back-fill), game designers should be able to do this job reasonably. Your Web browser has a much riskier job to do in running JavaScript which is required by nearly every Web site in the world, now, so if you're OK with the Web, allowing addons in video games is a no-brainer. If you're like me, and you restrict JavaScript on the Web and are very careful about who you allow to run code in your browser, then you should do the same in video games.

I'm a game developer, and I can spend my time on content or UI mods, why would I choose the latter?

This is probably the one question that I have serious respect for. Game developers are pushing the limits of productivity and trying to release a game on time. How can they spend hundreds of man-hours on developing a tool that very few of their players will ever interact with directly? The right answer is to ask how they can spend so much time on the internal content tools they develop? Sure, your players will never use them, but without them, you'll end up producing a game that's unplayable. The sad fact is that you have to budget for this up-front.

On the flip-side, game developers don't seem to push this as a major selling feature. Why is that? If you produce the bigger, badder UI addon framework and it's designed to build a community, why wouldn't you be pushing that to everyone who will listen?! Make it drive the buzz about your product in technical circles where a video game wouldn't normally be news. Get Slashdot talking about it. Have industry publications talking about how this is the new face of community development. Create a new kind of grassroots hype channel for your game!

Quotes

Here are some interesting quotes on the matter:

• "People want loads of content right off the bat, and third-party add-ons are a given now," he said. "It’s a tough situation for new games." -MMO FFXIV needs 'FFVII's impact', Strategy Informer
• MMO fans may be wondering if there will be any interface customisation but at this point TRION are holding off on add-ons. However, they are open to the idea but it’s unlikely they will go as far as the customisation we saw in World of Warcraft. (which I read as "we don't want to be a real MMO") -RIFT Hands-on Preview, IncGamers

Conclusions

My personal feeling is that WoW is a great first try when it comes to allowing user-authored UI mods in an MMO, but it's horribly out-dated. I really don't understand why someone hasn't produced an MMO with an app store, for example. I mean, isn't that painfully obvious? The other problem is updates. There really should be a company-hosted development site through which addon authors can be tracked and their addons monitored so that the authors of the most popular addons can be notified of upcoming releases and betas, be involved in the process, and more importantly, the community can be made aware early on when a major addon hasn't been made to work with an upcoming change. WoW is always broken for a month after any big change because addon development is poorly coordinated, and that's just not something that should be expected.

After all, World of Warcraft is getting on in years, and it seems to me that the world of downloadable addons has taken over several industries. Isn't it about time that MMOs get some love in this respect, and actually start leading the way again?

If you're working for a gaming company and you find yourself wondering: should we have addons? Stop immediately and ask, instead, "what's the next big thing," in addons, and can we do that?

Thinking ahead in WoW: Post-Cataclysm instances

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm ("Cata" is how I'll abbreviate this from here on, and could Blizzard please think about how people are going to abbreviate their expansion names from here on in?) is a great expansion. People are fired up about the new content, the new trade skill, the art... basically everything. The only problem I see is that instances aren't all that fun. There are some great moments, but most of the effort seems to have gone into two things: gimmicks and fire.

By "gimmicks," I mean the use of non-traditional instance tools. The best example is the first instance I ran: Throne of Tides. This instance has so many gimmicks that it's hard to imagine before you walk in. There are cut scenes, teleporters, a jellyfish elevator, a raid boss you get buffed to kill, mobs that jump out of the walls, etc.

By fire, I'm of course referring to the ground effects that harm players during a fight. Sadly, it's become such a pervasive element of encounters (boss and trash alike) in Cata that your strafing keys will be worn out before the next expansion. This makes a mechanic which was previously a nice way to force players to stay alert into something of a tedious way to make ranged casters less effective. You see, melee attackers like my enhancement shaman just strafe around behind a mob, avoiding fire while they fire off their normal barrage of instant-cast effects. My mage, on the other hand is forever interrupting his fireball casts and having to dump an lower-damage, instant-cast spell instead. My mage just cannot keep up with my shamman for dps throughput, even though they're nominally fairly evenly matched.

So, what should encounter design have brought to the table in Cata? Well, some variety without gimmicks might have been nice, but there have to be enough vanilla fights to establish the norm as well. Let's look at one of the most creative instances in Cata: The Vortex Pinnacle. This instance is entirely built in the clouds, and has some interesting mechanics which aren't just gimmicks. For example, there are trash pulls where the mobs start off in fields that prevent substantial amounts of damage, and you have to pull them out to fight. A nice way to break up the otherwise routine fights without changing the in-combat mechanics if the pull is executed correctly. No one loses dps or has to do anything unusual. There are also some nice fights where the "fire" is much more equitable because it requires that everyone move to a particular side of the boss or that everyone move to a specific location while the boss does some large AoE effect. However, the majority of the trash pulls are of the sort one would expect and the boss abilities don't get too gimmicky.

The only other thing that really feels wrong in Cata is the speed-bump at the start when WotLK and Cata dungeons are viewed as a continuum from level 70 to 85. That is, there is such a radical rise in gear ilevel between the ilevel 187 normal-mode drops in level 80 WotLK dungeons to the ilevel 308 normal-mode drops in the first normal-mode dungeons in Cata that there's no way to avoid some very disappointed players who try to level exclusively in instances from the 70s to 85. To counter this, it would have been nice to see Blizzard change the ilevel of some of the WotLK normal-mode gear (perhaps scaling it all up to the ilevel of the ICC 5-man instances -- at ilevel 219, this would still present a big step between dungeons, but might have softened the blow). Granted, a little questing quickly resolves the issue, but that won't prevent many players from going in cold and feeling like they're of no use in early Cata dungeons.

In general, I think the instance design in Cata shows that Blizzard isn't just trying to pump out the same old thing over and over and that's good, but they may have become slightly carried away in Cata with making instances "special".