Category Archives: World of Warcraft

Why I Wouldn’t Bet on a Warcraft Movie

08 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by in PR, Social, World of Warcraft

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[edit from 2024: this blog post is amazing and I’m never deleting it. Radical acceptance is my new mantra: we’re all dumb when we’re 20-something.]

So, reading WoWInsider’s daily queue, I came across this question:

dumbass said:
Ok, so, I’ve just watched Hobbit and, having read the book ,but not being a LOTR buff, the film still felt pretty darn amazing. The art, the effects, the way they went about things. WHY ISNT THERE A WOW MOVIE??? If they can do that with Hobbit, I mean come on ,the style felt so WoW-like. And the box office would be off the charts for it imo. Any idea’s why it’s still not out there?

I don’t know about the profitability of a movie. The fan base isn’t as relatively large as many think it is, for one. Assuming $8 a ticket, let’s be generous and say that everyone who has ever played WoW also manages to talk someone else into seeing the movie with them. That’s 24 million people! Actually…that’s actually not a huge number in movie ticket sales. The top 100 movies sold a much higher range: 50-200 million.

Let’s do some math, though, and guess how much money Blizzard would make. 24 million * $8 = $192 million. That sounds pretty good! But that’s just gross intake. You have to subtract production costs, advertising, etc. The Hobbit? Guesstimations put that at $300 million to make. Even if WoW went for a drastically lower budget, they’d still have to invest some decent funds to make the movie look professional. The anomaly of the incredible El Mariachi aside, most movies take a big chunk of change, with fantasy movies requiring even more. It appears that no top (or even modest) grossing fantasy movie has been made in recent years with a budget of less than $50-$100 million.

I'm ready for my close up, Mr. Ghostcrawler.

I’m ready for my close up, Mr. Ghostcrawler.

Blizzard already tagged Sam Raimi for producer – even though he’s backed out, we can approximate what style (and cost) of movie he’d make by looking back at his other recent projects. Spiderman 3 is probably an unfair example, since it’s one of the most expensive movies to be made. Ever. Legend of the Seeker, however, is more on-point: a toned-down and SFX’d up version of Raimi’s original Xena and Hercules series, the show makes do with a budget of $1.5 million an episode, which is leaning towards the higher end, especially for non-network television. The special effects, however, are clearly made-for-TV quality, and a much larger amount of money would need to be allocated for a movie. Raimi’s most recent work, Oz: The Great and Powerful, had a budget of around $200 million, a number that is becoming increasingly more average for big name fantasy flick. Extrapolating from these, it seems that Raimi’s average production budgets, as far as fantasy stuff goes, would range from solidly above average to Lord of the Rings territory…so we can conclude that Blizzard would be aiming at a fairly high bar (which is pretty well reinforced by the company itself, in my opinion. They don’t do substandard stuff).

So, basically – the movie would either have to be quite cheap to make (which doesn’t look likely) OR draw in a ton of general fans, to cover the production costs and net a large profit. Just how generic would the movie have to go to draw in non-WoW players? How much would that deviation detract from the movie? At the least, there would have to be heavy backstory exposition – or a lot of sweeping changes to lighten the plot and make it easier to follow – to catch the non-gamers up on the storyline. I’ll let you chew on that and consider how it would affect the overall movie.

This whole moment – the verge of confronting Varimathras in the Battle for Undercity – would be drastically scaled down to, “There’s a demon being demony so let’s demon slay!” And Sylvanas wouldn’t be undead. Hell, it’d probably just be all about Thrall to simplif- heeeeeey wait….

Conversely, Diablo 3 sold over 10 million copies, at (let’s round down) $50 a piece. That’s $500 million gross intake.Rounding up as much as we can (to match the insane budge of Gran Turismo 5), let’s say D3 cost $50 million to make. That’s a much larger investment to profit return.

However, it goes beyond even that – Blizzard is a video game company. Making a live action movie is entirely outside of their wheelhouse, so either a large chunk of the movie would have to be outsourced (perhaps with Blizzard just providing the story, rights and maybe some creative input), or a big investment would have to be made in regards to staffing and equipment (which, really, just is impractical unless Blizzard is planning on making other movies in the future).

In short, making a Warcraft movie would likely not be a financially wise decision for Blizzard. It might, however, be good for other reasons – such as a PR move to pull in more subscribers to the Warcraft/WoW franchise. In my opinion, it would have to pay out quite solidly in this other department to be worth the creation of an entire movie… which may have been the entire original point of the movie. Remember, the movie was first announced in 2006, at the height of vanilla and WoW’s seemingly-unstoppable rise in popularity.

WoW subs over time. From http://mmodata.blogspot.com/

WoW subs over time. From http://mmodata.blogspot.com/

At the time, creating a movie probably seemed to be an ambitious, but exciting, idea for a spin-off. Sure, the profits would only be modest at best, but it would draw even more players into this new world of MMOs. The sky probably seemed to be the limit – more and more people were discovering online gaming and the industry was growing at exponential rates. A movie would only draw even more in.

However, time passed and this growth slowed. WoW seems to have settled into the 9-12 million subscriber range, and has hovered around these numbers for several years. Furthermore, it seems the MMO market itself has saturated and reached somewhat of an equilibrium of players, staying steadily around 20 million:

All MMO subs over time. Image from http://mmodata.blogspot.com/

All MMO subs over time. Image from http://mmodata.blogspot.com/

A movie nowadays would lack that recruitment punch that it would have held in 2006; Blizzard would be pulling a relatively small amount of new MMO players in with it, and existing gamers probably wouldn’t try WoW out just because of the movie. A new game (Titan, cough, cough), new expansion, or revised content, on the other hand, is much cheaper to make and more likely to draw in gamers from other games, draw back straying WoW subs or draw money out of D3/Starcraft addicts in need of the new game fix.

All that being said, have you heard about Defiance? This game is intertwined with a TV show on SyFy – the game world is represented on the small screen, characters from the TV show appear in game, game events revolve around the TV plot – and promises to be a potential…err…game changer when it comes to video games. Even though it’s not really my thing (I like to test shooters, but I’m not as much a fan of playing them), I will probably keep a close eye on this just to see what develops. If it works out? Hey, maybe we will see a WoW movie someday.

I really hope so, if only to see the racial dances on the big screen. >_>

Low Res Gaming

02 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by in Game Design, Game Psychology, World of Warcraft

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I was reading the Queue, WoW Insider’s daily reader Q&A, and this question (and the TONS of debate in the comments) stood out to me:

Daniel asked:

is the increasing size of the game killing subscribers with inferior machines?

No. WoW is still very accessible from very aged computers. The size of the game has very little to do with any as well, as long as the graphic settings are low the game could be three times the size it is right now and it’d still function fine.

It’s a fairly relevant topic for me. You see, I don’t have a video card. In Guild Wars 2, I joke that I have a super deluxe in-built realistic physics engine. My friends all kinda raised their eyebrows, until they saw my computer at our New Years’ GW2 LAN party: every time I ran anywhere, my turns would translate momentum from the direction I had been travelling in and if I stopped running my character would jog a step or two before fully halting. It makes doing jump puzzles impossible, but it actually does add an (inadvertent) layer of realism to my toon’s movement. Still, it’s crappy graphics. The game looks pixelated and grainy, and WoW – while less demanding – is often hardly better.  I run at about 10 fps in raids. All of my settings are as low as low can be, except for view distance in battlegrounds (hey, I gotta be able to see Gold Mine from Lumbermill!).

I’m also my guild’s top healer. Granted, we’re not a hardcore progression team, but we did just down the first boss in Terrace, so we’re not a throwaway guild either. My game is not as pretty as…pretty much anyone else’s…but, to be honest, I find that helps half the time for avoiding crap on the ground. I used my live-in-arms-warrior’s computer while he was back east visiting family and I was dazzled and almost a bit overwhelmed by all the shiny, pretty, glaring spell effects. I may be part magpie. However, I can see the merit of toning all that down (except for certain encounters, like BoT’s Valiona which had to be hotfixed so low graphic settings could even SEE the black circles) to make it easier to see the really vital stuff, like void zones.

Plus, if you have really shitty graphics, it makes gathering quests (and sometimes PvP) cool in an almost-cheating-it’s-kinda-that-great way, since all the ground clutter phases out of view unless you are right on top of it. This means that you can essentially see through the world and view the actual quest elements and other players. Boxes, rocks, plants – bam, gone! Great for things like hunting for cloud serpent eggs; all the foliage vanishes, but the eggs are interactable objects, so they remain visible.

I mean, really, what stuff IS actually important to see? As a priest, I like being able to see who has bubble and aegis at a glance, but that’s really only vital in PvP (both for keeping them ON my team and for dispelling them FROM enemy teams!). In raids, I tend to be keeping my eyes more on health meters, however, and those display who’s got bubble AND  how long their weakened soul is. I don’t really NEED to see my spells themselves being cast. Now, don’t get me wrong, it’d feel weird if my character just sat there, but seeing sparkles shoot out of my hands is not necessary to gameplay – all I really need from that end is a cast bar to let me know that spells are actually being cast. Technically I don’t NEED the visuals of it.

However, there’s a reason gaming moved on from text-based into graphical, afterall (hint: it involves the graphics). A game where all of the visuals are pared down is not an aesthetically pleasing one. Think about it – when you picked up your first MMO, there was probably a moment of awe, simply based on what you were seeing. I know there was for me: I came to WoW from text-based MUDs and to suddenly SEE all of the game in dancing, vibrant colors and 3-d image was jaw-dropping.

mudscreen

General MUD gameplay. Talking to another player and viewing /g

mudscreen1

MUD combat and part of the in-game mapping system

mudscreen2

An ASCII firework!

Those above? That’s what a MUD looks like. You might get some ASCII image, like the “map” at the bottom of the second (yes, we use THAT to navigate) or even some more flashy things like ASCII fireworks of a nyancat. However, that’s as advanced as you get, graphically. It’s like being stuck in 1980, visually, in a MUD. So to suddenly load WoW and SEE my character (instead of just imagine her) and SEE her casting spells…that was incredible. It’s not much of a leap to assume that it was a similar experience for many people trying MMOs for the first time, and there is no doubt in my mind that part of what makes a game popular is its graphics – but very firmly only part.

Graphics alone don’t make (or break) a game. RIFT, for example, had stunning graphics, but a lack of distinctly unique gameplay prevented it from becoming the WoWKiller it was predicted to be. Many Asian MMOs have gorgeous graphics, but overly-grindy (to Western audiences) gameplay prevents them from getting a foothold in the US and EU market. On the other end of the spectrum, you have the runaway success of Minecraft and its 16-bit world.

In my opinion, it comes back to that first experience I had with WoW. Not only was I seeing the game world, I was seeing MY character. I had given her red hair, like me, and, to this day, I remember what it looked like to watch her run around and cast spells. I identified with my avatar and formed an attachment to her visual representation. Now, that kind of visual identity transcends whether the game even has graphics; it’s just easier in an MMO. In MUDs,  many players went out of their way to visualize their characters: avatars and signatures for forums, a paragraph describing how the character looks, even real life drawings to depict the character. One of the biggest ways to make money in the IRE games, for example, is drawing pictures IRL for other players. I know, personally, because I had DOZENS made of my little Imp.

The difference between a MMO and a MUD is that the ENTIRE world is there for you to see in a MMO. In a MUD, you have to imagine the game world, and immersion stems from other sources, such as reading the description of a room, or reading what an NPC says, or reading another character’s emotes (it involves a lot of reading, is what I’m getting at). In a MMO, it’s right there before you. You drink it in and are instantly immersed;  that type of game magic is what drew so many to try out MMOs and shot the popularity of multiplayer games from the thousands into the millions.

…but at the same time, that quick, in-your-face immersion dulls you to its very power.

In a MUD, you are drawn in to the story and the mental pictures you, yourself, are painting. That doesn’t mean that you read the text for every time you cast a fireball. It’s the same line of words, and you cast hundreds of fireballs every time you go out grinding. You tune it out, just as MMO players tune out basic cast animations to focus on what is DIFFERENT. It’s the same concept of our brain tuning out white noise or ignoring the sight of our own nose in front of us. Basically, stuff that is repetitive and the same gets relegated to the back of our notice, so we can pay attention to changes.

I’d argue, however, that after a point, the very gameworld becomes background noise. When you are raiding or capturing a flag, you aren’t focusing on the cool architecture of the room or the pretty trees surrounding the base. You are looking on the ground for void zones or watching an enemy cast bar for polymorph. MUDs are similar: when you first start playing you walk around reading every room description. Eventually, you just turn on BRIEF and get just the name of the room and the exits as you run around the game.

Verbose and then brief room descriptions in a MUD

Verbose and then brief room descriptions in a MUD (my spaceship in Lusternia)

In short, you focus on the game’s mechanics and gameplay, and the immersive aspects (like graphics or descriptions) only really factor in as an occasional “yeah, that’s nice” or when you consider how well they are letting you see stuff like enemy AoE. In both cases, there are definitely moments where you can be drawn back into the game world. It might be a particularly beautiful vista in WoW or an especially unique room name in a MUD prompting you to read the room’s description. And some players who are focused heavily on roleplay may not even leave the heavy immersion behind in the first place. But the majority of players tend to concentrate on the gameplay itself when involved in tasks like raiding or PvP. I guess I’m saying that graphics don’t really matter for core gameplay, as long as they are good (and fast) enough to let you see what you need to. Having graphics, period, has helped draw many new players to MMOs, but having insane graphics won’t make up for subpar mechanics or design, because players become essentially immune to the visuals when they are engrossed in high-attention gameplay.
All of the above being said, playing low graphics does make for some amusing anecdotes. For example, when xmog came out, I said I wanted a halo or a crown or something pretty, so a guildmate took me to BRD and I got the Circle of Flame. “Oooh!” I thought. “A red gem hanging above my head!” and proceeded to xmog every outfit ever with it for a year or so.

flame_kal

See? There’s a little red gem hanging over my head! (Squint your eyes and zoom in; it may help) Then, a few weeks ago, I came to bug my boyfriend’s toon by mimicking him as he ran around doing stuff (we’re mature adults like that)…and I completely froze, staring at his screen.

“What…what is that?!” I stammered.

“What is what?” he replied, turning to face me in real life.

I pointed at his screen. “That!” I exclaimed, circling my toon’s head on his screen. “My head is on FIRE!”

He stared blankly back at me. I mean, I’m a goof, but I think he was a bit concerned.

“It’s…your…armor…?” he suggested.

“Since WHEN?!”

Turns out, the actual visual for the circle of fire is – shockingly – a circle. Of fire. Go figure. After a few minutes of being weirded out by my (from my view) new wreath of flames, I decided I liked the look quite a bit, and began demanding that he show me myself just so I could admire my toon in high res. In a way, I feel like I’m back at square one, knocked out of my jaded function-over-form paradigm from the last few years to find myself enthralled simply by the image of my character, shining away like a pretty little pyrotechnic elf.

Pretty fire....

Pretty fire….

…Damn. Now I want a video card, and Christmas JUST passed.

Furtive Father Winter!!!

01 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by in Social, World of Warcraft

≈ 4 Comments

So I’m trying to make friends in the blogging community and I signed up for the Furtive Father Winter, a special little secret Santa of online creativity!

My secret target was a writer named Nightwill whose work tends to cover roleplay and the game experience. I made her a picture featuring her main character, the Tauren emblem, and quotes from her character, taken from her website. I hope she likes it! Looking over the other presents, though, it seems that I was confused about the assignment; everyone else wrote stories and guest blog posts, so I kinda messed up there. I hope my gift is still ok :/

nightwill

For what’s under my own virtual tree – I got an awesome email with a great guest post as my gift. So, without further ado, here is a lovely post from Jojo over at Admiring Azeroth, covering the 12 battlepets of Winter Veil 🙂

————————————————–

Hey Kaliy! (and your readers).

Hope you’ve had a good festive season so far.

I’m Jojo and I write the blog Admiring Azeroth (admiring-azeroth.blogspot.co.uk). I, like yourself, don’t cover anything too specific in my blog. Rather I try to cover a bit of everything. From looking at your blog I’ve noticed that the main differences between our respective blogs is that you cover PvP, BG’s and Raids (which I don’t do) and I cover more on scenery (i.e. screenshots) and Pet Battles.

My initial idea was to do a twist on the ’12 Days of Christmas’ or something related to Pet Battles. However, I do realise that some people don’t like Pet Battles and/or have no desire to experience them. So, I checked the armory and noticed that you have collected and levelled some pets. In the end I decided to produce a mini-guide to seasonal (i.e. winter) pets that are available in-game and I was able to fit them into 12 points. I’m sure there are other pets available in-game that are wintery but these are the ones I could think of.

1. Snow Cub (Dun Morogh, Pet levels 1-2)

Found throughout Dun Morogh and one of the first and easiest pets available to capture.

2. Snowshoe Hare (Hillsbrad Foothills, Pet levels 6-7)

Found throughout the snowy region of the Hillsbrad Foothills, these hares share a similar design to other hares / rabbits.

3. Alpine Chipmunk (Winterspring, Pet levels 17-18)

These are found in a few select locations within Winterspring as well as within the Stonetalon Mountains and Mount Hyjal. Unfortunately, they are the same/similar model as other chipmunks and squirrels – not white like I’d hoped.

4. Snowy Owl (Winterspring, Pet levels 17-18)

The Snowy Owl is a season dependent pet and only appears during in-game winter. Spawn locations are throughout Winterspring.

5. Crystal Spider (Winterspring, Pet levels 17-18)

These little spiders look so fragile and suit their name well. They spawn within two small regions of Winterspring; Lake Kel’Theril and Frostwhisper Gorge.

6. Everlook Mechanicals (Winterspring, Pet levels 17-18)

Around the Goblin settlement Everlook a number of mechanicals can be found. These
mechanical pets are the Robo-Chick, Rabid Nut Varmint 5000 and the Anodized Robo
cub. These pets have a relatively unique look, with only a few additional mechanical pets
available to capture.

7. Mountain Skunk (Storm Peaks, Pet levels 22-23)

The screenshot shots my mage with my level 25 Mountain Skunk Pongy. He’s a rare and one of the first pets I levelled to 25. I think the skunks look cool but they also have a rather amusing ability, ‘Stench’, which reduces the enemy teams accuracy by emitting a green gas cloud.

8. Arctic Fox Kit (Storm Peaks, Pet levels 22-23)

The Arctic Fox Kit only spawns when it’s snowing and is required for the ‘Northrend Safari’ achievement. The Alpine Foxling (found in Kun-Lai Summit) shares the same model so if you don’t want to hang around waiting for snow and aren’t bothered about the achievement head there.

9. Tundra Penguin (Dragonblight, Pet levels 22-23)

The Tundra Penguin is the only capturable penguin in-game and I think they’re really cute with their chubby bellies and feathered crests. Two other penguins exist in-game; Pengu (whom can be bought once exalted with the Kalu’ak) and Mr Chilly (whom can no longer be gained).

10. Summit Kid (Kun-Lai Summit, Pet levels 23-25)

I love goats and this pet was a must have for me. It’s not as wintery as the other pets but the kids are found at the edge of the mountains in Kun-Lai and I really wanted to include them in my list.

11. Kun-Lai Runt (Kun-Lai Summit, Pet levels 23-25)

These little yetis are found on the snow-capped mountains of north-western Kun-Lai. They look unique, are real beasts and are great for battling.

12. Winter Veil Pets

I couldn’t really talk about winter season pets without acknowledging those gained from taking part in the Winter Veil festival. There are a number of pets so I decided to bundle them into rather than cover them individually. The available pets are the Tiny Snowman, Clockwork Rocket Bot, Winter Reindeer, Father Winters Helper (green), Winters Little Helper (red) and Lumpy. In the screenshot below I am posing as Winters Little Helper (with a little help from a PX-238 Winter Wondervolt machine) and all the pets, except Lumpy, are shown. Unfortunately I don’t have Lumpy Yet but hopefully I’ll get him before the end of the world event!

And there it is, my list of wintery companion / battle pets that you can use to fully
accessorise this winter season! Hope you’ve enjoyed my little ‘gift’ to you and I wish you all
the best with your blog etc in the future!

With Win Trading, Nobody Wins :(

28 Friday Dec 2012

Posted by in Battlegrounds, Game Psychology, PR, PvP

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I recently tried to join a RBG via Battlemasters. No hate on the site – I love these new communities for PvP. However…sometimes…I am astounded by the kind of things I see.

Random Leader: “What’s your gear/MMR?”

Me: “http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/dragonmaw/Kaliy/simple – healer priest, veteran of the horde, 15 from vet #2, 7.8k resil – low MMR (1500) however because I’ve been playing with guildies. Great player!”

Random leader: “8k resil? That’s subpar.”

Me: “Wait…what?”

Random leader: “I only take 10k resil players.”

Ok, I suck at math. But I think I am fairly in the clear to say that 10k resil is a SHIT TON OF WINS. I have capped EVERY SINGLE WEEK except for 1 (I had the flu, sue me!). My cap IS ABOVE THE MINIMUM CAP. I GEM PARTIALLY FOR RESIL. If my resilience is “below the norm” there is a severely skewed impression of what the norm is going around.

But, then again, I don’t really blame people for being confused. Actual rating is somewhat of a lost cause right now – when there are 60 pages of people wanting to cheat the system, you HAVE TO admit that something is wrong. Or, ya know, at least ban those 60 pages worth of people. Sadly, neither of those has happened, so we have a system riddled with crazy ratings, permeated with far-too-powerful gear…and one that makes legitimate victories feel worthless.

I really am quite sad to learn about this rampant win culture. As you can see in my self advertisement, I am quite proud of my RBGing. I’ve been doing it as a PUG since the system debuted, and I want to earn “Warbringer of the Horde” this season. The issue is that the win trading has pervaded beyond just the top brackets – as you can see by the skewed view of “geared”, even midranged brackets are being ruined by these exploits. I used to be able to hop in for any team and many people on my server will snatch me up as a RBG healer – healers are rare this expansion. With a wider net, however, we start seeing the influence of cheats.

Let’s have a visual. Here are top top rankings:

wintrade

Here’s an easy way to discern a cheater- look at the number of games they have played. Most of us? We’ve played HUNDREDS of games. These cheating brats have played maybe 10 or 20 games. Can you spot the cheater in the above pic? The sad answer is that MOST OF THEM ARE CHEATERS.

I am gonna stop ranting about cheaters. Oh, I mean, it’s not because I *want* to give it a break. It’s just that there’s no point in being upset; there is no website functionality to report  cheaters at the top brackets, unless you use the in-game reporting system, which relies upon being in a group with them, encountering them in a BG or arena, or being on the same server as them. This is an irritating oversight, as PvP is based on battlegroups (ie, multiple servers linked together). I quite like the many new additions Blizz made to automate customer support, like the new item restoration service and easy, right-click reporting – but they need to extend it to armory profiles and ladder listing functionality for it to be truly useful.

Tons of PvPers have identified people who are clearly cheating or win trading…but have no way to flag them for the mods to investigate. For PvP, in most games you play (especially the smaller ones), a lot of the potential regulation and moderation can be outsourced to the community itself – you aren’t fighting NPCs in PvP, but other players directly, so the impacts of cheating are instantly felt and disliked. The majority of serious PvPers aren’t behind cheating, and the cheaters will quickly rise above the rest as they are ferreted out. Crowdsourcing the moderation for PvP is easy AND it also has a great, “calming” effect on the frustrated honest players. Being able to easily flag people who are obviously cheating feels a heck of a lot better than just having to sit and shrug, accepting it.

GW’s failed Auction House

14 Friday Dec 2012

Posted by in Game Design, Gold

≈ 4 Comments

I just read a great post over at game developer Psychochild’s blog. In it, he addresses various issues plaguing Guild Wars 2’s economy. Guildwar 2’s failed economy is part of why I didn’t stick around there – I love being able to be a crafter and merchant and make money. When I was playing, however, crafting was a straight gold sink and the trading post was a clusterfudge.

 

Here are my impressions on what went wrong with the GW2 trading post:

– Worldwide Trading Post: by not limiting this to smaller markets of individual servers, it becomes very hard for individuals or groups of people to change the market prices. This may seem good, but what it means is that the greater common denominator of clueless sellers wins out, as you can see in the Trading Post, to the point where they had to implement a feature so you couldn’t sell items below their freaking vendor price! Attempting to tweak market prices is simply not possible on a scale this large without the coordination of a LOT of players with a LOT of gold.

– Anywhere access to the Trading Post: This is a huge problem. While it seems great to a questing player to be able to toss up junk on the TP without having to go there in person, what it means is that people are using the TP as a mobile vendor to sell whatever is in their inventory. There is no thought or strategy to the postings, and people don’t care if the items are sold far below market value; they just want them out of their inventory. Items then bypass a basic auction house price floor – without the mobile trading post, people would have to decide if it is worth selling an item to a vendor or on the trading post. Convenience overrules this type of decision. ANet’s later addition of a “minimum price” on the TP didn’t really fix this. It just bumped the price floor up.

– Deceptive/Unwieldly UI: The trading post has a high chunk of hidden costs built into it, which seem designed to actually discourage people from using it to build up a healthy server economy. In addition to the cost you are told about, there is also another chunk of money taken out if you sell the item (I think it’s 15%; it’s been a while since I read ANet forums). These fees also scale really badly, especially at the low end of price ranges. The lack of expiry time on auctions and the hidden additional costs for using the TP combine with an awkward UI to make it a headache to really use beyond casually. It’s hard to make money by buying out and relisting (and thus bumping prices up) due to the heavy listing costs. Sure, you lose money by doing this normally – but when the listing fee costs nearly half as much as the item, it’s not worth it.

There might be further problems with the ease of gathering and drop rates for items, however I think limiting TP access would actually go a decent ways towards addressing that. When players actually have to make decisions about inventory, gathering becomes a more specialized job. As is, everyone can just gather as they go and post raw mats up when their inventory gets full. If that was disallowed and you had to plan how to unload your collected mats, many players would drop out of the gathering market, deeming the time:profit ratio not worth it. Supply would go down and prices would naturally rise.

In short, I get the feeling that the whole thing was designed by someone who hates auction house players and wanted to make a system to “prevent” them from playing the market. It’s expensive to use the market as a merchant, the market is far too easy to use to just unthinkingly slap up items and the lack of an expiry date means that the low priced auctions just keep building up – and it’s not worth it financially to buy them out, since you can’t hope to control a global market. The problem is…we need auction house players. These players keep the economy vibrant and help ensure items retain value.

Many people probably intensely dislike reading that, but auction house players can actually be an asset to a healthy economy. Yes, some of them are jerks and drive out others from the market – but without pressure to push prices upwards, we see situations where constant undercuts drive prices down. There needs to be a counterbalance pushing upwards as well and auction house players provide a stable one.

Winter is here…but is the roleplay?

13 Thursday Dec 2012

Posted by in Events, Game Design, Game Psychology, Social, World of Warcraft

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WINTER IS COMING HERE! Holiday season is upon us and pretty much every game out there is cashing in with special events. Aetolia and Achaea have Celesmas. WoW has Winter Veil. Even Team Fortress 2 has a (surprisingly) somewhat-roleplayed Christmas event. But what part do holidays play in the overall game world?

Many games TRY to give a semblance of backstory to the holiday celebrations. For example, WoW does a pretty cool job of translating Halloween into the game world: the Foresaken get a giant wicker man to burn (sadly devoid of bears and bees) and the classic fairy tale archetype of a headless horseman gets a lich-themed twist, as the horseman is a reanimated paladin confused over his own state of life (though I don’t really understand why we never just…show the guy a mirror or something).

Christmas is no exception. WoW slaps some drunken dwarves and dancing gnomes on it and makes it religion-neutral: bam! You got yourself a Winter Veil. It’s one of the least complex of the WoW holidays (check out the backstory for yourself – the Harvest Festival has more going on in the lore department)…but it’s definitely one of the most FUN. Free stuff! Free stuff! More free stuff! I honestly think the popularity of this holiday inspired the  Blingatron.

santa

“Have you been naughty or nice, little girl?” “…I’m a freaking Twilight Cultist, dude. What do you think?”

But how do these holidays fit into the game world itself? Let’s look at the obvious, first. While it’s not as noticeable in WoW, many games don’t use 1:1 calendar systems, and instead have accelerated time scales. An event that matches real-life holidays will have NO correlation to the in-game calendar, and will highlight the biggest “detraction” of holiday-based events: they aren’t based in the game world. Even with attempts to pretty them up, the events are based on real world holidays, and some players find this to kill immersion.

In MUDs I’ve played, this immersion-slaying was as ubiquitous as dragon slaughter (granted, we didn’t have that many dragons; they were rare spawns) and rather vehement arguments sprung up around the holidays (kinda defeating the point of a fun event). Both sides had very valid points, to be honest. For example, for Valentine’s Day, Aetolia holds an events where players pretend to be Cupid, shooting arcane bows at each other to collect “hearts” which they could turn in for prizes. The people playing the event basically ignored most of what their character’s motivation and actions would be, and tended to just run around doing what they needed to in order to win prizes (highway ambushes, kidnapping and breaking into houses all included). The roleplayers, on the other hand, often were stuck as targets (or at least in the crossfire) for the event traffic. Chatter and shouts would often be inane. People couldn’t emote more than a few lines without someone busting in on holiday event business – and the people trying to do the events kept getting frustrated by nonparticipants getting upset at being shot, as if their characters were the ones being hit. But weren’t their characters the targets? For the roleplayers they were – for the people participating in the event, they weren’t…which was the crux of the problem.

Another example from MUDs are holiday giveaways. Certain holidays in the Iron Realms games feature a NPC named Ironbeard who will randomly visit a player and toss a giftbag at them. Inside may be gold, a potion or two, or fabulous prizes. Players soon figured out that being online increased their chances of getting a random visit, and soon nearly every player was logged in 24/7…most of them afk. Guilds would have dozens of members online, but nobody actually around to help out a newbie’s cry for help. People started getting angry at the rampant afk and some people even started attacking others, merely for being idle.

As we can see, beyond just the badly transmogged holidays themselves, reskinned events can trump normal gameplay, on a fundamental level. Many players view holiday events as “OOC” (out of character) activities, because they are based on real life holidays. And, as mentioned, games which do not have a 1:1 time scale have an even more jarring inclusion of external holidays.  Even in WoW, this happens: think of battlegrounds and how drastically they change when Children’s Week rolls around. Players who don’t even PvP are in there trying to get the achievements – the big fans of PvP would be the roleplayers from my example above, irritated at the achievement hunters clogging up their gameplay. Rogues around Thanksgiving also make gripes about holidays and their constant turkeyfication.

However, holidays are a great inclusion to a game world – any developer should strive to include some types of events like these to punctuate normal gameplay. In Avalon, there were no holiday events, and their lack of presence was felt. Players would put on their own activities, and anything an admin/god did was considered a big deal. That burden for excitement should not fall on the players, however. A well planned persistent gameworld should include holidays and/or seasonal events, as these punctuated bursts of activity “outside of the norm” can really spice up play, giving players something to look forwards to and log in for.

So how to reconcile immersion with events? My thoughts:

– Base events off in-game lore. A game which values IC immersion will already have a lot of lore and backstory to find a way to base holidays off something within the game world.

– Base awards on participation. Simply logging in is fine for a “You were here!” recognition, but any sort of random giveaway should have a basis in actual player activity.

– Consider ramifications of event participation. Adding NEW things to do for the event is good. Reskinning existing content (like children’s week battlegrounds) will lead to normal gameplay being invaded by event traffic.

– Make em fun 😛

 

So. My thoughts for now. All that said, I love holiday events. As someone who’s travelled alot and moved to strange places and isn’t the best at making huge groups of new friends, it’s been nice to be able to log in to the games I play and have my own little version of Christmas if I can’t be at home with my family. So, in that regard, I absolutely love that games have special recognition of these special times of the year.

Let’s just make sure it doesn’t involve mobs of PvErs trying to cap all the flags in WSG, ok? Sheeeesh. >_>

Node spawn rates and ripple effects

04 Tuesday Dec 2012

Posted by in Game Design, Gold, World of Warcraft

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So big bear butt’s latest post about the recent node spawn rate has…err…spawned a lively discussion about how exactly changes to collection affect the game at large. From my experience in MUDs, changes like these are actually far more wide-reaching than a simple rise in ore costs; they can have (or be a result of) much larger ripple effects in the economy.

Let me share a few examples from MUDs, and then I’ll address these changes in WoW.

– In the very first mud I played, Avalon, the rogue-class equivalent (Thieves) and hunter-class (Rangers) each had the ability to harvest their own poisons for use in combat. Other classes, like warriors, could also use their poisons on their weapons, and other players could sell/distribute these poisons to others, but every single poison use was a direct 1:1 ratio of player harvested to use. I picked one resik, I got to disarm someone once, and then that poison was used up.

Each poison grew in its own environment type and grew at a modest rate. You could have 60 poisons max growing in each node at a time, and it took about 1.5 seconds to harvest a single poison. So, there was a time factor (several minutes for one fight’s worth of poisons) plus a rarity factor (some locations would only have a few poisons available to pick, and locations were limited by the game’s world size. The hardcap on possible growth also put a ceiling on the total amount of poisons possible in the game).

My solution to this was to begin building a vast network of cottages, squirrelled away behind the walls of my guildhall. These private gardens basically gave me infinite poisons for certain environment types. Now the first result was a good one: I was able to spread the wealth and give newbies tons of nice stuff to use in combat. However, as the idea became popular, other players began to do it as well, and we saw a permeation of poisons, to the point of ALL classes eventually using them.

Coupled with this player-based proliferation, the admin also decided to change the environment types of one of the very rare poisons. I was the class liaison at the time and, admittedly, naive. I pushed for this, not having the full view that I have in retrospect. The result was that we suddenly began to see a much larger influx of certain poisons being used, again by all classes.

These small changes reshaped combat, from the player level. The game wasn’t balanced to have heavy-hitters like warriors able to afflict like thieves. Affliction-based users began to get more sloppy, throwing expensive affliction after expensive affliction at their foes. Classes had to go through rebalancing. Thieves and rangers had to be given more buffs to balance out the fact that everyone had access to their affliction potential. In addition to this, the economy was completely tweaked. Poisons dropped in value, while the potion and herb market shot up, as people began to need to chew through TONS more curatives each fight.

In short, huge changes happened because of spawn rate changes. Some, like having more new players able to dive into combat, were great for the game. Some, such as the class unbalances, were severely problematic.

This is what happens when everyone can harvest herbs. :(

This is what happens when everyone can harvest herbs. 😦

– In another MUD I played, Aetolia, there was a similar herb harvesting system. Each room could potentially contain a specific number of herbs, and players had to visit each room, picking a few here and there. Only two classes in the game, Druids and Sentinels (similar to hunters) could pick plants.

As the factions split into various city alignments, it became clear that the “evil” side of the game was facing a much harder struggle to get herbs, as both Druids and Sentinels were members of the “good” faction. Herbalism/Alchemy was turned into a general skill that all players had access to. The only limit? You couldn’t be a blacksmith (had to pick one or the other). And blacksmithing really wasn’t that fun or profitable. Once you had a weapon, you kept it for real life MONTHS, so barely anyone had interest in that profession.

In conjunction with this change, harvesting turned to PERSONAL limits, with each player limited to a certain number of herbs picked per day, instead of the prior overall world limits on plant spawns. The result was expectedly catatrosphic: with no upper ceiling on the total number of plants in the WORLD, every player went out each day and harvested their max. There was no competition for specific plants, no rarity for plant spawns, and so EVERYONE had the same amount of plants available for sale each day.

Within a month, plants bottomed out at one gold each (the lowest possible price, about the equivalent of one copper in WoW), whereas before they had cost dozens of gold. They pretty much never recovered from plummet, and harvesting plants became basically a profession where you were paid for your time/you did it for the convenience.

Some of us keep it big pimpin' no matter what, though.

Some of us keep it big pimpin’ no matter what, though.

The moral of these examples is that what may seem like small changes can have potentially large ripple effects. WoW is obviously a bit different (we don’t consume multiple stacks of plants each fight!), but there are some similarities here. At its very core, the gathering side of an economy has a chunk of its value based in TIME. How much money are you getting for your efforts? Consider, also, that the rewards for all those freaking dailies had gone up in Mists, so there’s a fairly direct comparison for gatherers in the amount of money they could snag with a basic time investment.

At the start of MoP, the value side of the gathering economy became very low due to the high node spawn rates. On larger servers, this might not have been as noticable, as there are ALWAYS players who will gather, even if they are getting only pennies for their efforts. Players may have only seen a relatively low cost for crafted goods, since mats were cheap. However, on smaller population servers, this contingent of die-hard gatherers is smaller, so the result has actually been a weird one: prices got stupid. And not just stupid high or stupid low, but stupid all over the place. The initial influx from the high amount of nodes drove the prices down super low…and those low prices discouraged many people from gathering. Materials became harder to get, so prices would shoot back up…and then the market would get flooded again, and prices would plummet.

Imma get ALL THE ORES

Imma get ALL THE ORES

Crafters, however, would be purchasing mats at a fairly regular rate, and (the smart ones, at least) would base their prices off how much they were spending and/or the market value of the commodities. Crafted items also, on the whole, take longer to sell…or rather, they sell at a smoother rate – raw mats are purchased in bulk, crafters turn them into a bunch of items, and the items are bought as needed. The end result of this is that the cost for raw materials was fluctuating wildly from day to day, but the market for crafted items wanted to stay stable. Players themselves were a big factor in this, as crafters had prices they wanted to sell at, and buyers had ideas of how much things were worth (and neither of these may actually be the market value!). We ended up seeing tons of items selling at less than cost. For example, some alchemists were only profiting based on spec procs.

Was the nerf needed? Maybe. I view it as an attempt by Blizzard to rectify the too-high gathering rates from early in the expansion. They wanted to avoid the huge price inflations that we saw at the start of Cata, but they went too far in the other direction. This could potentially normalize it and make gathering attractive again…except there is the tricky aspect of us players ourselves. The market had already settled down (albeit into a slightly lower level than many would like). We have all picked up an internal “cost” calculation. This change was ABSOLUTELY needed several weeks ago. Now? It might very well throw a big wrench into things and require the market to readjust, again. Then again, it might be a very useful one that encourages more gatherers to get back out there grabbing items, which can ripple profit upwards along the crafting chain. Or it could just make things even less profitable to craft. I, personally, am going to be keeping my eye on things for a bit before I craft/post large amounts of items created from herbs/ore, unless I see a huge profit from it.

I want recruitment for my Winter Veil present!

04 Tuesday Dec 2012

Posted by in Game Leadership, Social, World of Warcraft

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I’ve just joined the Blog Azeroth (http://www.blogazeroth.com/) community, and have decided to jump on the shared topic train. Now, Winter Veil isn’t a big holiday for me, as I’m fairly well-off goldwise, with my far-too-many crafting alts pulling in several thousand each per day. I’ve actually spent silly amounts lately buying things like Brawler Guild invites and Vial of the Sands for pals.

However, there *IS* something I want Father Winter to bring me: fresh blood. As ruthless as that sounds, it’s not REALLY that violent. Well…it kinda is. See, I want more people to HELP ME KILL THINGS. My guild was formed at the end of Cata, and we’ve been slowly recruiting in new members, but we still have to struggle to build a full raid team some nights – and our eventual goal is 25 man raiding, so we have a ways to go to get there!

Now, while I’d love for a nice box o’ guildies to just appear in my mail, it seems that the more reasonable answer is for our recruiting to keep on keeping on. Thinking about this, I’ve pinpointed some tips from my MUDding days that carry over well to general game recruitment.

Now, from MUDs, one key thing I have noticed is that there are three main types of potential new members: 1) newbies, 2) hoppers and 3) atmospherists.

Newbies is pretty self-explanatory. These members are people who are generally new to the game itself. They are looking for their first guild and home. Some guilds don’t even want to bother with this sort of player, but if you have ANY sort of casual community, these members can turn out to be amazing diamonds in the rough. They may be new to WoW, but super experienced old hands from EverQuest, or they might be someone who’s always done solo-play and wants to give raiding a try. One of our highest DPS is technically a “newbie” in that he’s NEVER raided before…but he’s supremely competent and driven to gear himself up, and it’s clear that as a player, he’s very good. Back in MUDs, the userbase was far more limited, so us Guildmasters would actually actively hunt down people like these and poach them for our guilds, as they can end up being some of your strongest members down the line. In MMOs, obviously the playerbase is much larger and it’s harder to pinpoint who’s new or potentially looking, but you’d be surprised at the number of players you can recruit just from being social in random groups. I’ve snagged at least half a dozen awesome members (who became solid raiders/RBGers or just great pals) just by questing with random people, chatting about guilds during dungeon runs, or noticing people I keep ending up in battleground queues with. Now, with all that said, I’d advise AGAINST bringing in newer players if you are a hardcore guild with little casual/non-raid activity, as this type of environment won’t be fun for newer/non level-capped players and they will feel lonely.

Someday, this troll will be a Gladiator. You never know...

Someday, this troll will be a Gladiator. You never know…

Next we have hoppers. In MUDs, many times class skills are actually gated behind guild membership, so a large chunk of guild membership is based around who wants to play what class. You get a lot of new blood in your guild based around your class itself. I actually got a decent chunk of people interested in my guilds often just because I made the class LOOK AWESOME, either by going on a PvP rampage or pulling off a huge big steal (when I was a theif). In MMOs, this is obviously not the same, but there are similarities. Instead of class, think about what your guild is. Are you a social guild? PvP? If you raid, is there something that makes you stand out, like late night or weekend hours?

In my guild’s case, I realized last week that we offer a really unique opportunity for those who haven’t raided before: we DO NOT require past raid experience and we use a rotation system every hour/boss kill, to ensure that EVERYONE who shows up gets to participate. At the end of the night, the top performers stay in for final attempts against whichever boss we’re on, to ensure progression. We also run a SECOND raid with more strict requirements, over in Heart of Fear. The end result is that we are casual and newbie-friendly but also making decent progression, which is an awesome little niche! Thing is, we weren’t really playing that up until last week, when I went “Duh!” and started promoting that aspect…and we’ve gotten several new people already from that change in recruitment. Find out what type of “spin” you can put on your guild advertisement to highlight what makes you special – it will help you stand out AND ensure that new members know exactly what they are getting into…which means they will be a better fit when they join. Remember, there are a ton of generic “raiding” guilds – find what makes yours special and you’ll get people interested in trying out your flavor of it.

ALL BEARS ALL THE TIME is a perfectly legitimate guild niche.

ALL BEARS ALL THE TIME is a perfectly legitimate guild niche.

Now, atmospherists. This is a term I use to refer to people who like to focus on the social or roleplay aspects of the game. They aren’t too pick about what the guild’s focus is, but instead are looking for a good atmosphere. Lively activity is the big draw for them. A great way to get members like this – and make no mistake, these members are super important to have, as they bolster your ranks and make gametime more fun for everyone! – is to just DO STUFF. Not only do stuff, but be vocal about what you are doing. For a roleplay guild, share logs, be that on a guild website or realm forums. In MUDs, I’d post logs ALL THE TIME of guild events, and it made our numbers swell; people saw that we had active roleplay and community and they flocked to the guild. Yes, you might get some trolls or bitter people posting in reply out of jealousy or irritation (especially if you post a bunch), but you’ll get a ton of great members, which more than outweighs the negative remarks.

Another great (and easy) way to highlight what your guild is up to is to include a photo gallery and/or news feed on your guild’s site. Set permissions to allow any visitor to see this stuff, and people can browse through and check out old events (and silly hijinks!) with the click of a button.

All events are better with leper gnomes, amirite?

All events are better with leper gnomes, amirite?

You can also advertise your guild’s atmosphere just by bumping your own recruitment thread with descriptions of what you’ve been up to as a guild. “Bump” is a horridly boring reply (and technically against forum rules), but you are absolutely able to update your recruitment threads with information about what your guild’s been up to. You can also encourage other members to reply in the thread, either about their experiences or to engage in banter (all of which serve to help keep your thread updated and visible).

Holding realm events is another awesome way to meet new people for your guild. Host some old content runs, a world PvP event, or a fun contest like a transmog fashion show or a pet battle tournament. In MUDs, I’d hold quiz nights or roleplay talent shows, while in WoW you can consider something like a big Gurubashi arena brawl. All of these things get your name out there and invite others to experience what it’s like to hang out with your members!

So! Those are some ideas to boost recruitment, while also ensuring that you are getting the right TYPE of people for what your guild is. Writing this has actually helped me flesh out some ideas that were floating in the back of my mind, so I’m off to work on some more recruitment things…and here’s hoping Father Winter brings me a ton of great new members!

Edit: here is my guild’s link!

http://sosbrigade.bestmmosite.com/

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/guild/dragonmaw/S_O_S_Brigade/

When a team becomes a family…

04 Tuesday Dec 2012

Posted by in Raids, World of Warcraft

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Listen my readers and you shall hear: the story of a derptastic healer…

So, on Saturday, we ran Heart of Fear. I was sick with the flu for the first guild run through there, and the second week, we basically one-shot the Vizier, so my only real practice against this guy has been in LFR. And I knew I needed practice – I was dead on our Vizier kill, because of attenuation, so I went back to LFR to practice dodging the rings. If you haven’t fought this guy, basically he spews out rings that do around 100k damage each time they hit you. There’s a sweet spot you can run in to avoid being hit, and I made sure to focus just on finding that spot during my LFR runs.

Cut to our raid, where I immediately crashed into them. We wipe. We try again, and again I die to them. We end up wiping again because of lack of heals, so I’m feeling pretty much to blame for these wipes. We try another time and I fail again – for some reason, it’s just not working for me tonight, despite all the practice in LFR. At this point, I’m beyond tired (I was up before 3am to drive someone to the airport, and it’s 11pm now), I’m a little bit tipsy (I had two drinks with dinner), and I’ve got PMS making me a bit irrationally angry at myself. So I try to apologize in mumble, and offer to step out so we don’t lose progression time….and end up crying. It wasn’t intentional and it just happened, and that made me even MORE ashamed of myself – not only was I failing on the mechanic, now I was crying about it!

I'll just....drooooop...grouuuuup....

I’ll just….drooooop…grouuuuup….

And here is where I realized that my raid team is amazing. Instead of them getting weird, or angry at me, or letting me step out, my leader Haru did a quick mental rundown of what we had at our disposal, and decided that they’d be tossing hands of protection on me during attunement…and if I died, I’d just take a brez and wait until the next phase. I felt horrible, at first, hearing that decision – I didn’t want them to carry me! – but the entire raid was having nothing to do with it. “We are going to have you here, downing this boss with us, whether you agree or not!”

And, so we pulled. And I got that hand on attunement. And a brez when I still died…but, you know what? We hit phase 3 and got another attunement and I DODGED THE FUCKING RINGS. We all made it to the end and killed that damn Vizier…and I realized that I really love my guild. They wanted me to be there, even if I was being dumb that night, and forced me to stay and experience it with them.

That feeling? It’s better than downing any boss. It’s one of the best moments I’ve had in WoW – thanks, you guys, for being patient and flexible and helping me realize that it’s not just about the stats, but also about the experience. 🙂

UPDATE: A week later on the next down of the Vizier… I took the LEAST DAMAGE in the entire team from the rings. YAYYYYYY!

PvP Resources!

04 Tuesday Dec 2012

Posted by in Battlegrounds, PvP, World of Warcraft

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Here is a compilation of some useful sites and addons for those learning about PvP. While addons are not necessary to be the best (the tournaments for the very elite even prohibit addons!), they can be great training wheels for teaching yourself to pinpoint targets, deal with CC and learn awareness of objectives. As with anything, practice will help you improve, and reading up on the topic will also help you learn the more intricate details of PvP!

Where are all the enemies...

She bravely ran away away…

Websites:
The following websites offer useful information about PvP combat, gearing, strategies and so on.

http://www.arenajunkies.com/ – Great overall PvP resource. While this site does have a paid member option, you can still get a ton of info as a free user. Macro libraries, spec and gearing discussions, active forums with lots of combat strategies and discussion.

http://elitistjerks.com/forums.php – This site is more focused on PvE, but it is still a very high quality resource, especially for information about min/maxxing, spec/gemming, rotations, and theorycrafting.

http://wow.joystiq.com/category/blood-sport/ – WoWInsider’s PvP sections offer great information, especially for those new to PvP. This site has a more casual focus, although the older articles (http://wow.joystiq.com/bloggers/c-christian-moore/) have some good breakdowns of more advanced tactics.

Add-ons:
The following add-ons are super helpful for PvP!

http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/healers-have-to-die – “Healers have to die!” is an excellent BG addon, especially for DPS. The addon will identify who healers are and clearly mark them in your UI for easy burning/CC.

http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/battlegroundtargets – “Battleground Targets” helps you pick out enemies, find weaker targets, pinpoint healers and see how many teammates are focusing a target. Very vital for DPS to have!

http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/losecontrol – “Lose Control” is a great, lightweight addon for CC. Blizzard copied this addon in 5.1 with the CC splash text, but lose control is much smaller and has a clear graphical display over your character cycling down how long a CC on you will last. Far less obtrusive than the default UI and it’s easy to see, at a glance, how long you’ll be stuck.

http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/gladius – “Gladius” is the number one arena addon. It replaces the default arena UI and includes a lot of customizable display options to show things like trinket use, CC duration and alerts for drinking and rezzes being cast. You can also setup the frames to have actions cast with various mouse button clicks (eg bind right click to a spell).

http://www.deadlybossmods.com/ – “Deadly Boss Mods” is something people might think of right off the bat for PvE and raiding, but there is also a great module inbuilt for battleground PvP! With this addon, you can see who is holding each flag for maps like Warsong Gulch and Twin Peaks, and you will see countdown timers for how long a node will take to cap or how long until a match is won.

All was quiet on the Hordish front...

All was quiet on the Hordish front…

Community:
If you are fanatic about PvP and want more ways to group with people, check out these options:

http://www.openraid.us – This site uses the battletag system to let people group up cross-realm. There is a realtime chat (like IRC) for pugging groups, as well as scheduled events you can sign up for, as well as forums. There are also public mumble servers available for free use.

http://battlemasters.org/ – Similar to openraid, Battlemasters is run by a highly-ranked PvPer, Eldacar, and provides players with a chat tool/IRC to quickly form groups across realms using battletags. There are also blog posts discussing PvP, forums and a free vent/mumble servers available for use.

http://solidice.com/oqueue/ – oQueue is an innovative merging of community and addon. The addon links you up to a large network of other users and allows you to queue, in game, for cross-realm BG groups and RBG matchups. Be sure to watch the tutorials on the website or join the facebook group if you have any trouble figuring out how it works.

Please feel free to reply here with your own suggestions for addons and websites, and I will add them in to the original post!!!

Happy murdering!