Mythic GM Talks Warhammer Launch, Banning Gold Sellers 251
Gamasutra has an interview with Mark Jacobs, GM and co-founder of Mythic, about the recent launch of Warhammer Online. He talks about handling the heavy demands on the servers, and how the launch is going better than the opening of Dark Age of Camelot (during which "somebody parked a truck on our internet"). Jacobs also blogged about the glee with which he and his team have been banning gold spammers: "We don't wait and let them stay in the game and ban them en-masse, my guys ban their useless, time-consuming butts right away. We have a strike team whose sole job it is to get these guys off our servers as quickly as possible. This weekend, we unveiled a new wrinkle in the fight against them, the public ban message. Players on our Phoenix Throne server have been treated to special messages when a gold seller/spammer is banned. I've given them a wide leash to come up with creative messages to tell the entire community who has been banned and we keep it within the Warhammer universe."
Re:thinking about it (Score:5, Informative)
I throw out the phrase "Better than WoW" after a long period of due consideration. It's not just hype - it's really that good.
The only problem I have with it is that there are a few glitches they haven't quite ironed out yet (animations getting stuck, occasionally a HUD window will vanish for no reason), so I would give it a month.
Re:thinking about it (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Inside job? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:thinking about it (Score:4, Informative)
It's fun. A lot like WoW, but does a lot of things better/more fun, like how mana regenerates and how Public Quests work.
The GM is right though. Gold spam is starting already.
Re:What is the problem? (Score:2, Informative)
WAR: Taint Of The Half Arse (Score:4, Informative)
Well, I've played it for a couple of days, since I'm bored to tears with WoW by now. It's certainly not a horrible game, and there isn's even much "bad" about it, but it's certainly not half as polished as WoW. There's probably some gem in there, but unfortunately nobody tried much to separate it from the rock, much less give it a shine. In other words, it's yet another half-arsed, me-too attempt at milking the MMO market.
In fact, probably the best thing that can be said about it, is that it copied WoW shamelessly. It's a good thing, really. WoW did figure out the righ gameplay by now. And yes, I really mean clone. E.g., Witch Elves and Witch Hunters work _exactly_ like WoW Rogues. They build up combo points, then spend them on finisher moves. In fact, they may even be renamed "bloodlust points" and "accusation points" respectively, but at least one tooltip still calls them "combo points." E.g., Ironbreakers (dwarf tanks) work almost exactly like WoW warriors, with 0 to 100 "grudge points" that build up as you hit or are hit. Are you thinking "rage points" too, Pinky? Only dumbly enough, they didn't understand the role of that mechanic on WoW, like the difference between burst damage and sustained damage, so as a warrior you're _also_ stuck with a mana bar. Etc.
The downside isn't that it's a clone, that it's yet another half-arsed, shove-me-out-the-door-patch-me-later clone.
To understand what I'm talking about, just look at the web site. Two days after release, it was still talking about preordering, and it was telling me things like that I don't need to register my preorder code again. When in fact, I was registering the game key for the first time. They didn't even bother updating the web site. Now I'm certainly not playing the web site, so it's not a vital issue, but it serves to illustrate the half-arsed attitude I was talking about. Rest assured that it's reflected in the actual game too.
Ok, to the game itself. The first thing that happens, is that promptly at the list of servers the game informs me that server X needs more players. Do I accept? Well, ok. Good thing I decide to double-check that choice, because it turns out to be an open PvP server. (Ok, ok, RvR.) Normally the game seems to ask, basically, "do you really want that?" when you choose such a server. But IIRC if I'm goaded via such a dialog, it didn't. Though maybe that was still one step too early, because when I see "Open RvR", I'm out of there. Way to make friends with your potential customers by trying to shaft them out of choosing a type of server they like.
I pick a new server and start by creating a character. As it happens, on the Destruction side. I play with it for a bit, and, being the altaholic that I am, figure out I'll see if there's an equivalent on the Order side. I need to go to another server for that, though, and honestly I have no problem with that. I like to keep my characters sorted like that anyway.
Again comes a dialog asking me to join realm Y, 'cause it needs more players. I'm weary, but say "OK." Immediately comes a prompt saying that the realm is full and I'd face queues if I play there. What. The. Fuck? It just told me they need more players on a full server?
Ok, I pick another one, toy with character creation for a bit, want to go back to my first one on the other server. But, as it happens, the server names say nothing to me (I'm not a tabletop buff or anything), so I forgot its name. But that's ok, because it has a column in the server list which says how many characters you have on a server. And an option to sort by it. So finding the server should be a two second affair, right? Wrong, because it's non-functional and says 0 for all servers.
After a brief scare that it lost my character, I resolve to do it by brute force and perseverence, by joining and leaving each bloody server in the list, until one has my character in the list. Yep, that's some time lost just because they can't even finish the very first list you'll see, before they release the game. The impressio
Re:How is it hard to prevent. (Score:4, Informative)
To pick an only slightly contrived example, an account playing from out-of-region for 36 solid hours starting at its activation is damn well a gold farmer. Oh, and there are other excessively long playtimes coming out of that same building, and the accounts travel the same paths and trade with each other? That's even MORE out of the range of legitimate normal players.
Apparently you've never been inside a university residence? ;)
Also, the ability to reliably ip trace to a building is really a feature of North America, there are places where nearly the entire country is NATed. Pro farmers set up operations there; they get a different IP address every couple days, and even that address is some 10.x thing behind their ISPs NAT. Blizzard can't block the ip or subnets; they'd block everyone in an entire city or even province.
There are a bunch of other damning statistics that would jump right out of the data too, I'm just naming a few for ease of conversation.
Yes, for what its worth I agree that logging usage patterns and profiling them for certain 'farming' patterns and login patterns could yield useful results. However, nothing jumps from the data all by itself, they would have to make a concerted effort to write tools to analyze logs and summarize the data.
A guild can look much like a farmer. Hell, they even power level, farm, dump piles of cash on 'bankers' and 'treasurers' and then from those treasures relay funds to members to make equipment purchases, fund their alts and 2nd box accounts, etc, etc, etc.
And a professional farming op, knowing that they were being profiled could relatively easily slip beneath the radar, by rotating accounts, mixing up farming areas, playing games with proxies, laundering the funds through the in game economy, etc. Running it like a 'terrorist' or spy network, using isolated cells, so if one cell is compromised it can't be traced to others, etc, etc, etc.
Consider this scenario: golf-farmers inc, operating in some place with dynamic dns where their ip changes every few days if not faster... they buy a few accounts, join random levelling guilds of which there are dozens in the game, power level like mad, then break away and farm with it. They rotate between multiple accounts doing the same thing. And transfer no gold), then one day they transfer all the accumulated gold directly to a bunch of other accounts, and then now that its transferred massive amounts of gold to people its never interacted with before, the farmer abandons it and gold-farmers inc uses it to spam ads into the chat-channels until Blizz shuts it down. The recipient accounts were all buyers. The farm account went from being beneath the radar to being practically discarded in 5 minutes flat. How do you profile that?
It would take more effort than you are willing to give credit for to develop tools to hunt them them down and filter them out without hassling a lot innocent players, many of whom power level, farm instances solo, and so on.
Re:thinking about it (Score:4, Informative)
Cut my teeth on UO. Played a bunch of others. The ones I spent significant time in were AC, SWG, and EVE.
The game is good. He's not kidding with the RvR. You can literally create a character and click the enter scenario (battelground) button as your first action. Oh you're level one? So what? RvR is broken into tiers. T1 is levels 1-11. If you're below 8 you get buffed up to level 8. T2 buffs you to level 18 if you are below, etc. You don't have to be at the top of the bracket to compete.
You can join queues from anywhere. No running to town. Each area also has an open world RvR area with objectives to capture.
When you join a scenario you are auto added to a party.
One of my favorite mechanics is the open party system. It's like lfg/meeting stones except it works. You can set your party as open and anyone in the area can see you on the list and join. Also anyone in a party can "refer" someone to the party leader. You click them and select invite and the party leader gets a pop up saying Bob wants Alice invited y/n. Find a group is basically effortless.
The public quests are scripted outdoor events. For example the newb orc/gobbo one is as follows. Giant/Ogre thing is being chased by little annoying mobs. 30 of them must be killed. Then the giant sits down and complains about being thirsty so the group has to run around and grab 20 beer barrels. Then the giant gets up and knocks down the doors of a dwarf keep that this is happening outside. A dwarf leader comes out. He sends a couple waves at the group then he attacks with some henchmen. As you complete tasks you get influence which allow you to pick rewards in the town that quest is near. Also at the end of the quest a loot roll is made based on participation and persistance and you may get a loot bag. 2.5 minutes after the loot roll the quest resets and starts over. Also some stages are times and if not completed in time the whole quest will reset. This is mainly a mechanic to prevent them from advancing due to one person grinding for an extended period.
The scenarios are good. I've played capture and hold the CPs and a "flag runner" mechanic one. That one you have to grab the flag then interact with 3 land marks scattered around the instance. That one is a bit wonky because people never seem to know the rules. There's also a standard CTF but I've never made it into an instance on that.
The general pace of combat is a bit slower. Tanks are more tanky and healers heal more. I play a black orc (greenskin tank class) and I can soak sick amounts of damage. Put a healer on me and you have to take the healer out or put 6 or more people on me. I find myself switching targets a lot looking for the guy the healers aren't watching. Snares and roots are very effective killing tools because they allow you to cull someone from the pack. Bascially in RvR you have to work together. Two people just going toe to toe is often a sustained battle. Except for overwhelming forces 8-1 there are few quick kills.
This is getting long. I can talk more if you have questions. In summary: If you like RvR then give the game a try. If you don't like RvR but are a fan of the warhammer world I'd still say pick it up. They're very true to the world. My black orc has a skill called "Right in Da Jibblies."
Re:How is it hard to prevent. (Score:3, Informative)
I'm an MMO developer, so I can speak with a bit of authority here.
We're talking about something that takes a GM seconds to judge here.
First, nothing takes seconds. A GM gets a report, then s/he has to look at the logs. What are the conditions under which the mail was sent? Was this a paying customer playing a stupid joke that a friend didn't get? Is this a gold farmer creating a noise to gum up the system? Is this the same idiot who keeps using the "report spam" button instead of the "delete" button, but might actually be a legitimate complaint this time? There are plenty of mundane reasons why this would take longer than "seconds".
Second, you have no idea of the scale in the larger games. Let's say it takes 1 minute to review a complaint. All it takes is 1440 complaints to take up one GM's 8-hour workday (without breaks). That's less than 1/10th of one percent of WoW's North American playerbase, and ignores other CS issues like tech support, billing problems, etc. Realistically, each incident probably takes at least 10 minutes, so you're looking at needing 10 times the number of GMs to handle the problem. And, given the problems with gold farming in WoW, I wouldn't be surprised if they got 1500 complaints per hour about gold farming under this type of system.
Some perspective from someone who has some experience in this area.
Re:How is it hard to prevent. (Score:3, Informative)
I'm an MMO developer, and believe me, people have been working on this problem much longer than the 10 minutes it took you to think of that comment on Slashdot. If there were a solution that easy to reach, it would have been done and shared across all possible games a long time ago. Contrary to popular belief, MMO developers aren't drooling morons. Well, most aren't, anyway.
[S]ince when has "it's hard" been a valid excuse in engineering?
Since code sucks at determining human intent. Hell, humans have trouble telling intent, so what chance does code have?
Examples:
My high level character giving your low level character money because we're friends is good, because it builds a social bond in the game.
A gold farmer's high level character giving your low level character because you bought the money is bad, because that disrupts the game.
Exact same action, very different effect on the game world. Code has a very hard time telling the difference between these two actions.
So, uh, yeah, it is hard.