Up until now, most MMORPGs with any sort of decent PvP system have taken the route of allowing factions to control buildings, castles, or points of interest. While the system works to some extent, it is at its core, broken.

One of the key measurements economists look at when ranking countries of the world for the best places to live, and do business in, is property ownership rights. Report after report, it remains true today, as it did 50 years ago; the countries that give the citizens the most property ownership rights, are the best countries to do business in. Below, I posted the chart from the International Property Rights Index of 2011. Even without any other statistics, you can easily see that the countries in the top 20% are most likely the places you want to live in, and the countries in the bottom 20% are the countries you probably would never even want to visit.

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So, the Icecrown Citadel raid buff has been raised to 5 to 10%. Old news at this point, I realize, but I want to know how this mechanic has affected your progress in the dungeon so far, and whether or not it’s a good idea in the long run.

Of course, the most straightforward argument that can, and vehemently has, been made against the buff is that it’s eventually going to make what is the toughest, and most grueling, dungeon in the game look like a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese. OK, that’s actually pretty chaotic, but you get the idea. “Kid’s stuff.”  But that’s assuming that all raids are created equal, and as we all know, that’s simply not the case.

Take my guild, Severance Pay, for instance. Before any dungeon-wide raid buffs became active, we were able to get through just about everything but Valithria Dreamwalker and the wing-end bosses with relatively few problems. Some wipes were inevitable, but we’d usually finish off everything we were comfortable with before the week was out.

What surprised me is that the 5% buff, when it became active almost a month ago, didn’t seem to have much effect at all. In fact, despite finally finishing Valithria, we started backsliding down the hill a little bit. Progression completely halted. Festergut’s a good measure of these things since he’s more or less a damage sponge, and we were tighter on the timer than we had been when we had no buff at all. In general, even our improvements proved too subtle to even matter.

I think the problem can be traced back to two issues. The first is fundamental raid dynamics and there’s not a whole lot we could do about it. People simply weren’t showing up for raids. Whether they were on Spring Break or otherwise, we always seemed to be down a few players. We progressed farther in the two weeks preceding the introduction of the Icecrown Citadel raid buff than we did in the three or so following it, and perhaps we had hoped that even with flagging attendance, that extra 5% would carry us through.

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All games have learnings curves, the time it takes you when you first start playing to the time where you actually know what your doing.  World of Warcraft for example is very easy to pick up, only takes about 30 mins to an hr to get settled in and going. Other games however have a slight steeper learning curve. I saw this pic on Digg.com today and thought it was hilarious, so take a look, I’ll wait.

Funny, right? Although in the graph the person who made it used Eve: Second Genesis which is a card game not MMORPG, but I’m not sure if that was intentional or a mistake. Anyway the point is that Eve Online is a hell of a hard game to learn. I gave it a shot a while back with the free trial. Got about 6-7 hrs worth of game play and quit as I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I went through the tutorials and asked about a thousand questions in the player chat, but I just couldn’t get a grasp on it. Which brings me to my question for this article. How much time do you put into a game before you give up? What’s a reasonable amount of time?

No offense to Eve players but for me if I can’t get the hand of a game within 5 hrs I out. To me at that point there is obviously some interface and possible gameplay flaws that are just not making the game intuitive. No game should take 5 hrs to get comfortable with, I’m not saying you have to be good in 5 hrs, I’m just saying you should have a pretty good concept of what your doing. However I don’t want this turning into a Eve Online bashing article so I will say that whenever I read something about Eve, I wish that I had stuck with it cause it seems like the games right up my ally, harsh PvP action, I just wish it didn’t need to spend 2 weeks learning how to play it.

In a genre of gaming where the first word is ‘roleplaying”, its a bit humorous that almost no one actually roleplays. Seriously when’s the last time you saw a character act like there supposed to. For instance in LOTR lore we know that elves and dwarfs are not very fond of each other in, however in the actual game dwarfs and elves regularly quest together and are even in the same guilds. Once in a while you can find a elf, dwarf or hobbit in character, but after a joke or two the player would go right back to normal breaking out of character.

The obvious answer here is that most people don’t actually want to roleplay. Sure being a elf hunter with a mean bow shot is one thing, but who wants to go around talking like a Legolas or not joining a quest group because theres a dwarf in it. Hell its hard enough finding full groups for raids and quest without discriminating dwafts. Also think about what you type when your chatting. If your seeking a group for a quest you probably type somethink like “LFG – quest name”. If I had to write a long winded sentence in the style of LOTR, I’d never get anywhere.

With that said, I do enjoy running into people that actively roleplay. It brings the game more to life and it’s actually fun to be around them. While I don’t actively roleplay myself, if I run into someone that is, I try to get into it also. It’s quite fun once in a while, you should try it.

(img: http://www.tehw00t.net)