Item (Item Level) – Prediction – Real

2h DPS (264) – 295 – 294.7
2h DPS (251) – 267.3 – 267.3

1h DPS (277) – 250.9 – 250.7
1h DPS (271) – 239.5 – 239
1h DPS (264) – 227 – 226.7
1h DPS (251) – 205.7 – 205.6

The error margin falls within the theory that the DPS is changed by hand to give items a bit of “flavor”, although it might just be that the numbers aren’t tuned 100% correctly, they’re still an improvement over the old values known.

Naturally, there are games that have a higher skill ceiling than others. But even before the advent of e-sports as we know, you could see that every game had the casual players who didn’t care much, the dedicated few, and the extremely talented ones within the dedicated few. Few games actually opened the possibility for really good players to shine. I’d say this was initially a trait from FPSes, and started to broaden with Starcraft, but that’s just my two cents.

A topic I find to be extremely interesting is how there’s a recent trend in MMOs where elitism is becoming the norm, not the exception. I believe this is natural at this point, as it should be a natural evolution of a MMO community and, since the burst the market had some good years ago, most MMOs are maturing to reach this point. Think about it – as time goes by, people tend to know more and more about the game they play, even if slow-paced. With time, information that was restricted slowly opens up to the rest of the population. With all the information and common sense available, the casual player’s skill goes up, but the game’s ceiling is still the same, slightly higher at best. Few games experience a solid increase in players for many years, at least not enough to compete with this natural ocurrence. There are very few of the older games that still have a lot of secrets to most of the playerbase, like EVE-Online or -gasp- Tibia. And in the former, the Pareto principle is stronger than ever.

As a matter of fact, let’s analyze EVE-Online for a second. If you don’t know, EVE-Online is a space-themed MMORPG developed by an Icelandic company called CCP. It’s arguably the most popular space-themed MMO in the market and, as far as I know, the most popular sandbox MMO too.

In EVE you can be a lot of different things. You can realistically (as in, it’s perfectly viable) be a bounty hunter, a miner, a smuggler, a pirate, a businessman, a producer. There’s only one server, with about 300,000 players in it.You can also be part of huge territorial wars, where strategy and infiltration matters more than individual player skill. But still one of the most popular methods of measuring player skill in it is by checking the player’s “kill/death” ratio, which is pretty straightforward. Some elitist guilds would not recruit players with a low k/d ratio, so if you have killed 10 players and died to 200, you’d be screwed.

The irony in this situation is that the once most powerful (and incredibly elitist) entity in the game, Band of Brothers, was defeated by Goonswarm, one of the groups with the worst k/d ratios in the entire game, if not the single worst. This was because, amongst other things, Goonswarm leaders realized that in such game there are a lot of skillsets that simply could not be quantified. They invested in strategists that were good enough to turn the tide of battles, in diplomats, in spies to infiltrate the enemy guilds, in propaganda to lower the morale of the enemy and attract more players, and in extensive programs to teach the incredibly harsh game to new players.

Because these things could simply not be measured, they could also not be displayed – at least not in the conventional sense. And let’s be honest here, we all know people have pride in displaying their badges, their trophies, their medals, their achievements. It’s not bad. But I believe this entire affair shows how players usually fail to realize how complex it is to measure something that is already subjective in nature.

In neural networks these things are called shortcuts. We humans take shortcuts to simplify our lives and how much of our brain we dedicate to simpler tasks. It’s important to conserve energy, so spending a lot of time and effort overanalyzing things all the time is not realistic. This usually works well as it should, because we’re taking shortcuts all the time, but when it fails, the consequences can be bad as in the EVE example.

Recently there’s been a lot more websites datamining information from game APIs to rank and rate players and guilds in different MMOs. They work good, but there are still some flaws in the current mechanisms, namely they take only one or two variables in consideration.  “Skill” is something highly subjective, but if there’s something I learned in EVE is that it simply cannot be simplified.

Besides suffering from the same problem of other MMORPGs (being compared to WoW), Aion seems to have a surprising amount of subscribers already. Although the game has only been released last month in US, it’s been running since November’08 in South Korea.

Personally, I believe Aion is a bit… way too much like WoW, and has some flaws (as perceived by me) that seems to be inherent to other South Koreans games. Being developed by NCSoft, it’s natural that there are heavy influences from Lineage. The game also reminds me somewhat of Ragnarok Online, at times.

Granted, copying highly successful games of the past can never be something one is to judge, and the game IS gorgeous, but some of the things that really annoyed me are:

1) It is too grindy. This may not be a problem for someone with way too much free time in their hands, and every MMO is somewhat grindy in their nature, but it’s simply not fun to have to kill the same creature for hours to level up. The game also features a Quest system that seemed very polished in the beginning, but it shows its flaws around Level 20, becoming nigh useless around Level 30. While the amount of experience you need to level up increases abruptly (by hundreds of thousands), some quests will still give you irrelevant amounts (such as 10,000) for your efforts. This is going to be somewhat averted in their newest patch, where they’re greatly increasing the quest experience.

2) Flying is a nice gimmick. However I don’t really see anything different from other MMORPGs except for the aerial combat.

3) Everything is too slow. Nothing screams “we’re making everything as slow as possible so you can spend a lot of time playing” more than running errands that require you to take a flying boat slower than your gliding speed that forces you to spend minutes in it to reach your destination. And the time required to talk to the NPCs in said destination is just enough for you to see the boat going away. I understand that MMO companies need to employ methods to hook players and force them to keep paying, but that method should be a bit more interesting.

4) Game is too punishing. This is something few companies have noticed by now. A game can be unforgiving about players’ mistakes, without having to reduce their “quality of life”. I’m talking about completely unnecessary traits that make the game look “hardcore”, while at the same time not providing anything fun or useful to players at all. An example in Aion (and it’s not new) is that you have a chance to lose your item enchantment every time you decide to upgrade it. It’s, at best, a way to artificially control the economy, and a hassle at worst. Another example of unnecessary punishment is how attributes work – You have ratings, but no indication of how they affect your character at all.

Something Blizzard did in World of Warcraft was to progressively increase the quality of life of the players,  by reducing the amount of unnecessary hassles they have to undergo. Examples include 30-minutes Hearthstones, faster flying mounts, reducing the level at which the player can mount, reducing the gold spent in traveling, allowing Meeting Stones to summon players, eliminating reagents from core skills, eliminating redundant skills, and others.

While one may argue that WoW right now is not a hard game, it’s definitely not because of these changes. Ultimately some players forget that you play a game to have fun and these traits do not add to the fun of anyone, or to the challenge of the game. Blizzard proved they’re also not necessary to have a large player base paying monthly. They’re methods almost exclusive to MMOs – think about your favorite hardest single-player games, and you’ll see they’re not hard because you move slow, or because you have to grind (maybe for some J-RPGs), or because your equipment breaks whenever you try to upgrade it. They’re hard because they were designed this way.
On the bright side, the game runs really smoothly and the CryEngine worked great. I’m sure the game will please a lot of the customers, and NCSoft seems to be paying more attention to the playerbase. It was an interesting experiment, but not something I’d stick to.

I have re-posted all of my previous posts in order, so they’re all here.

Sorry for the delay, my computer broke so I had to cease activity for the last week.

As such I could not implement all of the features I wanted (I’m still without a working video card so I can’t play WoW), so I’m releasing what I had developed prior to my PC breaking.

I intended to take longer to release a new version as I’m working in the Lunarblood update right now but I found some horrible bug yesterday that I just had to fix. So since I had included some new features, I’m releasing it as 0.1.2:

Download Item Calculator v.0.1.2

Here’s the changelog:

Bugs:
– Fixed a bug in the Comparison Tool that prevented some items from being calculated correctly.
– Fixed a bug that prevented the “current” item having all attributes calculated correctly.
– Fixed a Load/Save bug.
– Fixed some other minor bugs overall.

Added:
– DPS Template now includes Weapon DPS and Feral Attack Power.
– Added option to save if the item is Main-Hand or Off-Hand.

I still have an enormous TODO list regarding this spreadsheet but for now I’ll focus on updating the Rogue addon. Here’s a screenshot of the item comparison tool:

Currently it features the following:

> The Main Calculator: It attempts to predict the itemLevel and, if a weapon, the DPS/Spell Power based on the attributes of the item. It’s quite accurate right now, and I’m pretty sure the differences in DPS are either by rounding (for example, 231-428/2.10 counts as 156.9 dps on Excel, but the same value is rounded to 156.8 in WoW) or flavor (the WoW item designers manually changing some values to diversify the items). It also allows you to save/load the items.

> The Comparison Tool. Allows you to compare between two items using the same different stat weights. It also allows you to compare between two different upgrades. So for example, if you’re in doubt about which item costing 58 emblems would be better, you can input the 4 different values in it and it will compare.

Most of these features were done by me for personal study, but I believe they may be useful for you, specially the tool to compare between upgrades. Of course nowadays every class has their own simulators and spreadsheets that will give you (probably) more accurate results. My spreadsheet is more general. Anyway, here’s how it looks like:

Download Link to Item Calculator v.0.1.1

http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info14509-Lunarblood.html

Lunarblood is an addon designed for Mutilate Rogues. It’s mainly a PVE addon. It calculates the best possible move to do at any time to optimize DPS based on your timers, cooldowns and buffs, then show it on the screen. It’s my first addon for WoW so it’s still an early work in progress. I’m still learning Lua so I’m sure with time I’ll be able to optimize it better, but I’m glad with what I’ve got so far