The Funeral of WoW Gold

Blizzard Entertainment has released the eighth BlizzCast, a series of podcasts created by Blizzard’s Community Team and focusing on the company’s current and future game offerings. Number eight features Q&As with Julian Love, Mike Nicholson, Tom Chilton, Jay Wilson, and Dustin Browder about Diablo III, Starcraft 2, and World of Warcraft.

Bornakk: Before Wrath of the Lich King came out there was talk of aerial combat in Wintergrasp and in the game in general with some goblin anti-air shredder being put in the game. Howling Fjord showed some footage of this as well. What happened with aerial combat and do we still plan to put it into the game?
Tom Chilton: Well the aerial combat that we had in Wintergrasp we just ended up feeling wasn’t really polished enough for the final experience. We gave it a shot with the vehicle technology that we had but ultimately it was a little goofy that you could crash your airplane into the ground and nothing bad would really happen. Then also the kinda of sense of flying really wasn’t there enough.
If you look at a lot of games that have done flight simulation, there is a lot of care that goes into giving you that sensation of flying by having the world tilt and stuff like that so it feels a little less mechanical, feels a little bit more alive or more natural. So one of the things that we have kind of tasked ourselves with doing is figuring out how to polish that, how to improve on our vehicle physics, there’s still a lot of vehicle physics tech that we want to get in that didn’t make it into the first pass of Lich King.
So we have to make some tough decisions sometimes about what we are going to go forward with and what just isn’t working out well enough to meet our quality standards and that was one of them. So it’s still definitely on our list of things that we want to do, we have a lot of people here who are passionate about vehicle combat, passionate about making it more interesting, more fun, by increasing the number of things we can do with it – that would definitely include the possibility of doing aerial combat.

Bornakk: Will there be a diverse selection of items that are viable for the end-game or will it follow the WoW-type style where there is more like one end-all-be-all set for each class?
Jay Wilson: It’s definitely diverse and it’s diverse on a lot of different fronts. When you think about Diablo 2, all the different ways you can build your character, we really expanded all the ways you can customize your character by adding in the rune system. Not only can you completely customize your skill set, much more so than you can in game like most MMOs like World of Warcraft, because of that, the items you want are based upon the skill set that you’ve chosen or the type of build that you are trying to create.
And items, one of the things we are trying to do is focus on this even greater element of defining your build. So really it’s up to the player on what kind of stats they want on their character, but we’re definitely not shooting for a, “oh here’s the barbarian armor”, there is a set and when you get the full set you’re done. That’s just not very Diablo and it’s not really the kind of gameplay we’re going for. If anything we’d like the item set to be a lot more diverse than it was in Diablo 2.

Bornakk: . Can you give us some insight into the current air model, like what are the roles of the air unites, and what do you see working really well in-game?
Dustin Browder: Well obviously each of the races behaves differently with how they use their air units. The Zerg, obviously the mutalisk is still a powerful part of the Zerg air force and still used for a lot of fast raiding, a lot of sudden attacks from different directions to keep the enemy off balance and of course in mass in the end game you can obviously use mutalisks for mass air assaults.
The other races behave a little bit differently. The Terrans with their banshee, is very very powerful anti-ground unit. It can even sometimes just power right through base defenses which really the wraith couldn’t have handled in the original game. So you see a lot of need for all the races to have some very powerful anti-air weapons to deal with these kinds of threats.
A similar threat on the Protoss side is the void ray. It is a very powerful bream that can really do a lot of damage to enemy buildings. So you’ll see there are some very heavy hitters in the air in Starcraft 2 that really require you to get out there and use some of these more dedicated anti-air units like the corrupter, like the phoenix, to really fend off these powerful sort of air threats. Obviously there are some similarities players will see with the original game, at the same time there are these really powerful hitters really do make a pretty big difference.
You’ll also seem some new authority for some of the bigger units in the game. Certainly the carriers have a much longer range than they’ve ever had before. It makes them a very powerful threat from the air in the end game. We should probably see more carriers used in higher level games but obviously will see how that goes in the beta. And of course the battlecruiser has three different options in terms of how he wants to sort of improve his battlecruiser, whether he wants to buy a yamato weapon for his battlecruiser, or the player wants to a buy a shield for his cruiser, sort of different choices for the player for the battlecruiser which again adds to the authority of these big end game units which makes them a little more practicle in different matchups. Where previously you would only see battlecruisers in certain matchups in Starcraft, now in Starcraft 2 you’ll probably see them in more matchups sort of across the board.

NEW YORK - When Jerald Spangenberg collapsed and died in the middle of a quest in an online game, his daughter embarked on a quest of her own: to let her father’s gaming friends know that he hadn’t just decided to desert them.

It wasn’t easy, because she didn’t have her father’s “World of Warcraft” password and the game’s publisher couldn’t help her. Eventually, Melissa Spang-enberg reached her father’s friends by asking around online for the “guild” he belonged to.

One of them, Chuck Pagoria, of Morgantown, Ky., heard about Spangenberg’s death three weeks later. Pagoria had put his absence down to an argument among the gamers that night.

“I figured he probably just needed some time to cool off,” Pagoria said. “I was kind of extremely shocked and blown away when I heard the reason that he hadn’t been back. Nobody had any way of finding this out.”

With online social networks becoming ever more important in our lives, they’re also becoming an important element in our deaths. Spangenberg, who died from an abdominal aneu-rysm at 57, was unprepared, but others are leaving detailed instructions. There’s even a tiny industry that has sprung up to help people wrap up their online contacts after their deaths.

When Robert Bryant’s father died last year, he left his son a little black USB flash drive in a drawer in his home office in Lawton, Okla. It was underneath a cup his son had once given him for his birthday. The drive contained a list of contacts for his son to notify, including the administrator of an online group he had been in.

“It was kind of creepy because I was telling all these people that my dad was dead,” Bryant said. “It did help me out quite a bit, though, because it allowed me to clear up a lot of that stuff and I had time to help my mom with whatever she needed.”

David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, has had plenty of time to think about the issue.

“I work in the world’s largest medical center, and what you see here every day is people showing up in ambulances who didn’t expect that just five minutes earlier,” he said. “If you suddenly die or go into a coma, there can be a lot of things that are only in your head in terms of where things are stored, where your passwords are.”

He set up a site called Deathswitch, where people can set up e-mails that will be sent out automatically if they don’t check in at intervals they specify, like once a week. For $20 per year, members can create up to 30 e-mails with attachments like video files.

It’s not really a profit-making venture, and Eagleman isn’t sure about how many members it has - “probably close to a thousand.” Nor does he know what’s in the e-mails that have been created. Until they’re sent out, they’re encrypted so that only their creators can read them.

If Deathswitch sounds morbid, there’s an alternative site: Slightly Morbid. It also sends e-mail when a member dies, but doesn’t rely on them logging in periodically while they’re alive. Instead, members have to give trusted friends or family the information needed to log in to the site and start the notification process if something should happen.

The site was created by Mike and Pamela Potter in Colorado Springs, Colo. They also run a business that makes software for online games. Pamela said they realized the need for a service like this when one of their online friends, who had volunteered a lot of time helping their customers on a Web message board, suddenly disappeared.

He wasn’t dead: Three months later, he came back from his summer vacation, which he’d spent without Internet access. By then, the Potters had already had Slightlymorbid.com up and running for two weeks.

A third site with a similar concept plans to launch in April. Legacy Locker will charge $30 per year. It will require a copy of a death certificate before releasing information.

Peter Vogel, in Tampa, Fla., was never able to reach all of his stepson Nathan’s online friends after the boy died last year at age 13 during an epileptic seizure.

A few years earlier, someone had hacked into one of the boy’s accounts, so Vogel, a computer administrator, taught Nathan to choose passwords that couldn’t be easily guessed. He also taught the boy not to write passwords down, so Nathan left no trail to follow.

Vogel himself has a trusted friend who knows all his important login information. As he points out, having access to a person’s e-mail account is the most important thing, because many Web site passwords can be retrieved through e-mail.

Vogel joked that he hoped the only reason his friend would be called on to use his access within “the next hundred years or so” would be if Vogel forgets his own passwords.

But, he said, “as Nathan has proven, anything can happen any time, even if you’re only 13.”

In the next few weeks, Blizzard will be releasing patch 3.1, which holds many new features and upgrades to the MMO juggernaut World of Warcraft.  The features include a reduction to the hearthstone cool down, dual specialization, class changes, and a helping hand to the disabled.

World of Warcraft’s scripting community is second to none.  Unpaid players spend untold periods of time developing custom UI add-ons to improve the basic Blizzard standard interface.  These add-ons are available to download for free from any number of websites dedicated to improving World of Warcraft’s user interface.

One such add-on was ColorBlind 4.0, which adjusted the player’s screen to improve the game for the colorblind.  Soon this add-on will no longer be necessary.

Patch 3.1 will introduce a new feature for the colorblind, which adds letters and/or symbols to objects that have traditionally been color-coded to convey information.  We wanted to find out more specifics about the new option for colorblind disabled gamers, so we reached out to Blizzard.   One of Blizzard’s lead developers, Tom Chilton aka
Kalgan, sat down with AbleGamers to talk about the colorblind option.

AbleGamers: Why have you made colorblind option available in game?  What are some examples of the feature in use?

Kalgan: In World of Warcraft, we sometimes convey the quality of items, the difficulty of quests, and other information about the game through text color or the color of an element in the user interface. The name of a challenging quest might be color-coded red instead of green, for example, while a particularly good item may be colored purple instead of blue. Over the years, there have been some great player-created user interfaces to help make this information clearer for color-blind players — but as the game keeps changing, it is sometimes difficult for UI authors and players to keep updating add-ons themselves. As a result, we wanted to design our own system to help address these issues and make it easier for players to access them.

The Color Blind option, accessed through the game’s Interface menu, offers an alternative way to display such color-coded information. Creatures and enemies, for example, will have tags that designate them as friendly, neutral, or hostile to accompany their green, yellow, or red nameplates. Gear quality, which is color-coded from grey to purple, will have new text descriptions from “common” to “epic.”  Gold, silver, and copper coins will show a “g,” “s,” or “c” next to the amount — for example, 1g23s45c. This feature will also be localized to show the appropriate symbol next to the corresponding number throughout the various regions World of Warcraft is played in.

In addition, the quest log will now display the recommended character level as a number, while recipes you’ve learned for your professions will have a +, ++, or +++ rating to correspond with the green, yellow, and orange skill-up chances. We are also adding text to denote the color of gem sockets.

AbleGamers: What is the best way for the Able Gamer community to submit feedback or provide ideas to the development team?

Kalgan: Our community and development teams actively read the World of Warcraft forums, and that is the best place for any player to give us feedback. In addition, we highly encourage players who want to offer feedback to take part in the public test realms (PTRs) prior to patches going live. This can help make the development team aware of any issues you may encounter. We also have a section of our forums dedicated to suggestions, and we highly encourage players to submit their ideas.

The accessibility of this feature is a welcome addition to an already impressively disabled friendly game because one in seven men and one in 12 people live with some form of colorblindness. Unfortunately, Blizzard painted colorblindness with a broad stroke.  Not everyone who is colorblind suffers from the same deficiency in the ability to see all colors.

The colorblind option for World of Warcraft is an all or nothing type of deal.  Whereas with the player base’s version of the same add-on, the script would only affect the parts of the game that the player chose to alter it in options menu.

For example, someone may be able to see the difference between gold and silver coins but they may not be able to see the difference between an easy or difficult monster.  Again, this is because there are different amounts of colors each individual can see.  In this situation, the person would be able to see the difference between the colors gold and silver but not green and red.

The third-party add-on would allow the user to check option such as “colorblindness for monster level.”  The add-on would place the letter G for a green or easy mob and R for a red or deadly mob.  Some say this is splitting hairs but the ability to choose which options the user would like to be turned on is something many hope for in the future.

Additionally, some things were overlooked in Blizzard’s version of this add-on.  Rogues accumulate combo points as they attack their victims.  These combo points are shown as red dots in an arc around the picture of the rogue’s target.  As the points are accumulated, the red dots are filled in.

Someone who was colorblind to the color red would not be able to tell the difference between a red dot filled in with red and a red dot lightly shaded with red.  One member of the player base identified this problem and created a specific add-on called Kast Combo Points that would change the way the points are displayed.  This modification changed the red dots so that they are completely hidden until a combo point is awarded.

Blizzard has since been made aware of the need for such an option and promises to add it as soon as possible.  This is a shining example of why it is important for our readers and Warcraft players to leave feedback for Blizzard on any accessibility related issue he or she might have.  The developers do read the forums and consider the feedback extremely valuable.

You can submit ideas on improving the colorblind options before the patch goes live by submitting feedback on the public test realm forums.  In addition, you can e-mail us at admin @ ablegamers dot com with your accessibility problems and we will contact blizzard directly.

Overall, the colorblind option to the world of Warcraft is a welcome addition.  Blizzard still has some fine-tuning to do when it comes to accessibility but with the help of the community; Warcraft is becoming more accessible to disabled gamers with every patch.

During his GDC panel last week, former ‘WoW‘ game director Jeff Kaplan ranted about “medium envy” and how games shouldn’t try to be more than what they are: entertainment.

At his GDC panel titled “The Cruise Director of Azeroth: Directed Gameplay Within World of Warcraft,” former game director Jeff Kaplan (who’s now working on Blizzard’s new MMO) talked about all the mistakes that games make, including his own title.

He explained that “WoW” quest designers are limited to 511 characters but he wished the number were smaller. “This is a phrase I learned from the forums: ‘Too long, didn’t read,’” Kaplan said, explaining that his own step-children never read the quest texts. “I think it’s great to limit people in how much pure text that they can force on the player. We need to show the story and not go crazy with the text.”

Kaplan also said that the reason text is long in some games is because they have “medium envy.” Then, in the spirit of GDC, he proceeded to do his own rant on the topic:

“We’re so fortunate and privileged to work in a medium that is not only an art but a revolutionary, interactive form of entertainment. That’s the key word there: entertainment. It’s unfortunate to see so many games try to be what they’re not, including our game at times. Of course we should embrace the concept of story. I’m not ranting ‘Don’t have story in your game’ — I’m ranting about how to tell it.

“Art, literature drama, film, song — they’ve all embraced story but they all tell it in their own unique way. I feel like we need to deliver our story in a way that is uniquely video game. We need to engage our audience by letting them be the hero, the villain or the victim. We need to stop being self-aware in our own games. We need to recognize that art, literature, drama, film, music, they’re tools at our disposal.

“We’re very fortunate that we work in a medium that we can use all those other art forms to tell our stories. But we need to engage our players in an inspiring experience and the sooner we accept that we are not Shakespeare, we are not Scorsese, Michelangelo, Tolstoy or The Beatles, the better off we are. If it makes us feel better, Shakespeare couldn’t 3D model his way out of a paper bag, Scorsese couldn’t program ragdoll physics and The Beatles are pretty lousy at balancing three unique races on an RTS battlefield. Basically — and I’ll direct this more at the Blizzard guys — we need to stop writing a f—ing book in our game because no one wants to read it. There are better books out there to read.”

Do you agree with Kaplan?