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Griefers wait until you initiate a conversation with a NPC then gank you while you’re stuck in a quest dialog. Tobold: Let's talk a bit more about PvP. Everquest had no PvP at all on most servers. The Warcraft lore would have fit well with a more PvP-centric game, but the various PvP systems like honor points, PvP rewards, battlegrounds and arenas have only been patched in later. You're on record as calling PvP rewards "welfare epics", is it fair to say that you aren't a big fan of PvP personally? Tobold: Last question on PvP: The PvP part of World of Warcraft is apparently perceived as a weak spot in an otherwise immensely successful giant of a game, and several competitors are coming out with more PvP-centric games this year. Do you perceive Age of Conan or Warhammer Online as a threat? Do you think that World of Warcraft's subscription numbers will take a visible hit when these games come out, that the population at least of WoW's PvP servers will drop noticeably?

One interesting thought about AoC graphics is the parallel of the AoC / WAR situation to the EQ2 / WoW situation. Of course that is a simplification, EQ2 has other problems than just bleeding-edge tech graphics. But the basic truth that more existing PCs will be able to run WAR than can run AoC, just as more PCs back then could run WoW than EQ2, remains. I haven't played WAR yet, but I'm already pretty certain that WAR will sell a lot better than AoC, just by comparing WAR videos with AoC beta gameplay. Keen also had a very good list on why I won't be playing on a PvP server in AoC: People would literally camp the rez points and gank people before they could load in. This NEEDS to be addressed. I spent 15 minutes trying to get away from the Stygian rez point.

Would you trust my opinion on a PvP MMORPG? I can only advise you to take anything I say about PvP-centric games with a large grain of salt, because it is no secret that I don't like PvP. Thus my dislike of PvP could possibly prevent me from recognizing good PvP over bad PvP, because I'd always tend to prefer carebear PvP à la WoW to any form of impact PvP. If you want an unbiased opinion about a PvP game, you're much better of reading the blog of somebody who really likes PvP. Keen and Graev for example. And Keen isn't happy about Age of Conan, and he doesn't like the graphics. Now that happens to be the same that I was thinking, but Keen is definitely the one to listen to here.

And now comes the kicker: Guilds can reserve for themselves special neighborhoods, with a guild hall in the middle, and the housing spot around it, with enough place for every guild member to build a house. Voila, instanced player-built guild cities! The guild hall would have the guild bank in it, and have a trophy room where for every raid boss kill the head of the boss could be mounted on the wall. Player houses would have some functionality too, for example for storing armor sets on mannequins, and like in LotRO with an added possibility to teleport back to your house from anywhere. So with players having some reasons to visit their house and their guild hall, guild members would constantly meet each other in the guild city. It is a lot nicer to meet guild mates in virtual person than just see them as a name in guild chat. Guild halls could also serve as portals into raid dungeons, so meeting up for raids would happen in the guild hall instead of in front of the dungeon. Guild cities would become a veritable hub of guild activity, and thus foster guild cohesion.

When Lord of the Rings Online introduced player housing last year, they tried to get the best of both worlds, by making housing both instanced and visible to your neighbors. The LotRO housing instances are not just one appartment, but a complete neighborhood with several housing spots, for everything from small houses to large guild halls. Up to 30 houses can be built in one neighborhood, and new neighborhoods open up when the old ones are full. But the system still has a couple of issues: Every neighborhood had exactly 4 kinship (guild) houses, 10 deluxe houses, and 16 standard houses. But the standard houses sold a lot faster than the others. It would have been better if there had been "slots" for sale, on which any sort of house could be build, not already pre-built houses of a fixed size. I also found the instances a bit too large, so you didn't meet your neighbors often enough. So for World of Warcraft I was thinking that a system similar to that of LotRO would be best.

So games like Anarchy Online or Final Fantasy XI or Everquest 2 went with instanced housing instead. You go through a door somewhere in a city, and you are directly inside your appartment. As appartments thus take no space at all, you can have one for every player, even in various sizes. But houses also lose a lot of their purpose that way: Nobody walks past your house and sees what a nice castle you got, or sees the NPC vendor you placed on your porch for selling your crafted goods like in UO. Open world housing did work for Star Wars Galaxies, for the simple reason that this game had far more square miles per player. And one of the really great features in SWG was that guilds could choose some empty spot somewhere, all build their houses there, and start a player-run city. They could vote for a major, and get utility buildings like star ports (flight point) for their city.

Player housing for World of Warcraft is one of those features where the developers said they would be interested in introducing it, but haven't gotten around to doing it. It is not a trivial problem to get player housing right. But by looking at how housing has been done in other games, I had an idea how housing could be great in World of Warcraft. So lets look at the history of MMORPG player housing. My first experience of player housing was a bad one, in Ultima Online, when I could afford a deed to place a house, but in two weeks of searching high and low couldn't find a spot where to put it, because UO didn't have enough housing spots for all players on a server. The other big disadvantage of the UO system was that houses could be placed anywhere where the ground was flat, so that areas which were meant to be adventuring wilderness suddenly turned into huge cities, with the monsters still running around between the houses. It is clear that World of Warcraft cannot go that way, just imagine the Barrens getting filled with houses as far as the eye can see! Wouldn't look good, wouldn't feel right.

Thanks to several independent observers for forwarding information about a money hemorrhage in EverQuest. Apparently a little bug appeared on an NPC that allowed the conversion of any amount of cash into 10 times its value, almost instantly. The first sign of a problem: plummeting prices of platinum pieces in terms of dollars, a development quite understandably lamented by a moneyseller. When your inventory is digital currency, money dupes are a major problem. SOE also treated it as a problem, and diverted major resources to plugging the hole. It now appears to be fixed (although I'll have to log in tonight to see.) So, in thinking about the Alphaville Herald Affair, I've come to the conclusion that developers need to take the lesson of politics to heart; not because they are running political systems, but because as political consumers we love to hear why political choices are made, even if we don't agree with them.

It seems that everyone has a view about the goings-on over at The Alphaville Herald. Oddly, the only view we haven't from is Maxis. Which is interesting. It would be easy--and probably helpful--for them to put their spin on the toading of Urezinus. Maybe he's a no-goodnik, maybe he's really using his account to sell simoleans. We only have his side of the story...Of course, from the perspective of the PR flak their silence is not odd at all. Better to keep your mouth shut and hope the storm all blows over than to open your mouth and create more damage. We've come to expect this from developers. Standard Operating Procedure is to make no public response to publicly-voiced user concerns. From other perspectives however this approach is a little odd. MMOGs are businesses where consumers have low switching costs, and where the quality of the community seems to be more important than the quality of the physics engine (else, why could EQ and UO still be making money?)