Today I’m miffed!

It is “guest post Wednesday” but I don’t have a guest poster today (yes I know that is a frequent occurrence)! Instead I’ve decided to fill this space with “Today I’m miffed!” Let me tell you why.

First I want to note that I have had quite the flu since about Sunday. It even featured fever hallucinations. I’m still feeling pretty poor so please forgive the extra crabbiness. I have two things that have miffed me royal.

Thing one:

I am tired of hearing about how Warhammer (or any MMO) is a failure and “won’t last if they don’t do x.” Are all the people who post on forums economists? The numbers come out, Warhammer has 300,000+ subscribers and people cry epic fail. Do people not realize that in the American market a 300K MMO is actually a… gasp… success! That isn’t an opinion folks. That is fact. If it wasn’t a lot of MMOs would have closed by now. World of Warcraft is an anomaly. It isn’t the measuring stick. EverQuest, at its height, when there was an extreme limit on choices, never grew past 600,000 (to the best of my knowledge) and is still in operation and releasing new content. I guess in poor economic times we consider a property that pulls it $4.5 million a month or $54 million a year in subscriptions alone a failure. If that is the case then I pretty much have to declare here and now that all MMOs but WoW are a failure. Folks, MMOs don’t need a lot of subscribers to make money. Age of Conan has merged down to four or less servers and is still running. A niche MMO is 100,000 subscribers. Over 250,000 and it’s a hit. Accept it and move on. Not everyone gets to be WoW. Only WoW gets to be WoW unless you’re in Asia. I know I shouldn’t let forum people annoy me but I just think that new players (generation WoW) need some basic education in MMOnomics ™.

Thing two:

To completely change gears from “defend Warhammer” to “attack gnoll” I’m miffed at Mythic. Here is the situation. We’re clearing Lost Vale again last night. On a previous night we cleared the Left and Right wing and called it early so we could watch the Super Bowl.  Picking up where we left off we get to the first mini-boss in the center and literally just as he is about to die a group member goes link dead. Considering we were too far along to stop at that point (and honestly the thought we’d be punished for this never crossed our minds) the boss dies immediately afterwards. Our tank logs back in and, of course, can’t join the instance because his progress doesn’t match ours. The guy started the dungeon with us, cleared two wings, and because he missed one mini-boss, both he and the rest of the group are now cheated out of the lock out? Who made that design decision? Honestly, who would think that is a good idea or fun? I get it, Mythic doesn’t want us bringing in people who need certain pieces and let us pick and choose. Even though that means it can take roughly 90 days or more to gear out a set group of six in Darkpromise (that is an actual valid estimate by the way folks, I wish it was a fever induced exaggeration). One person goes link dead and we’re just shafted though? What if he had gone link dead on the second mini-boss in the left wing? Oops sorry, that is five days wasted.
If the dungeon had the one or even three day lock out my hackles wouldn’t be so high. Lost Vale is on a five day timer and the bosses drop a single piece of Darkpomise. They drop a piece for a class that is not in attendance more frequently than for ones that are (which defeats probability) and if someone misses one insignificant mini-boss we’re done? This defies MMO rule number one: “If it isn’t fun and doesn’t actually serve a purpose it shouldn’t be in game.” So now we get to sit and wait for a CSR to respond to our ticket and tell us he isn’t able to add progress to a character (we won’t hold it against the poor CSR). Then we’ll do what we always do, suck it up, five-man what we can and then go sulk until our lock out is up again.

To the Mythic developers I implore you to get rid of progress trackers or at least articulate to us why you think they’re necessary. Give us some leeway at least. Don’t punish six people because of a belligerent ISP (or in this case a curious two year old).

Lost Vale is one of the best designed and most exciting dungeons in the game. Someone took a lot of time creating a beautiful zone and crafting interesting encounters for it. Everything clicks here and it is a wonderful high end adventure for PvE players. Where we really lose that fun element is in issues like this. Why does every member have to attend every mini-boss? Why is it only one Darkpromise item per boss? By logic if a one day lock out means one item (BS) and three days means two (city dungeons) than five days should mean three. How we went back to one I’ll never know. I have my suspicions though. Why even a five day lock out? Why are there multiple versions of the same loot (not exaggerating I believe there are four different DoK swords) in the zone?

What I’d like to see if the five day lock out remains isn’t too outrageous. Have each wing boss drop two of their items and have a chance to drop a third one that can only be gloves or a belt. Have only the wing bosses set your progress tracker. Reduce the loot table in the zone to only items that average PvE players would consider usable. Some of the gear needs to be reevaluated. Marauders aren’t going to use a weapon with 40 strength and 40 willpower no matter how much the combat and careers team says defensive stats are awesome. There is a real disconnect here.

Remember, June is a long time to just do Lost Vale for PvE players. This is especially true at one item per wing boss. We don’t ask for much, we love the zone but the details just drive us nuts. I’ve watched for weeks now as post after post shows up in forums about an alternative loot system. I’ve seen a post on almost every blog about it. Why has the issue not even been addressed? Why haven’t we even had a “we’re looking into it” comment? This seems to be the untouchable topic. Is Mythic really that afraid that if we get all our gear we’ll just cancel? I have to gear out an entire guild, not just myself. We’re used to it. We’re not used to it taking longer to gear six people than it did for us to gear out 50. All we ask is a little acknowledgement of the issue. I can assure you, the average player in my guild is far more likely to quit because they’ve done the city dungeons 20 times and are still missing two pieces than they are from gearing out. If we gear out we can just roll an alt and gear out again. Why roll an alt if you can’t even gear your main though? We still want to do the Kings, after all. We’d never stop playing before we defeated the ultimate encounter! I imagine most PvE plays who like to raid feel the same.

So that is why I’m miffed today. Your regularly scheduled non-hyper, non-heated posts will resume on Friday.

My math for your evaluation:

Six players need Six pieces of DP (36 total pieces). You will see one set of boots, a shoulder piece, a helm and a chest guard each run for sure. On average we see two pairs of gloves/belt. If you got every piece you needed every time it would require 30 days to gear your party. Our experience is that we get one usable piece per run and that is with everyone needing every piece. That equates to 36 clearings or 180 days.

Why do I continue to say probability is defeated? If you have six people of different classes who all need an item you have a 6/11 chance of getting an item.  That means that roughly 55% of the time you should get something you need. Warhammer, at least in my experience, consistently defeats that probability. In Bilerot in the right wing it took roughly four clearings to get one set of gloves to drop. So that was eight changes of 6/11. Our number came up once. It defies basic probability. The same is holding true in LV.

Disclaimer: This post does not represent a tantrum or threat to quit. It merely seeks to express the frustration of players who love a game but find little parts do a lot to detract from the fun.