The Man Who Would Solo a 40 Man Raid

This is NOT the story of those who made this video; it's the story of a mad-genius who watched this video and his plan.

Xzin, a World of Warcraft player, is contemplating graduating from "epic" to "ledendary." He already regularly pvp's by controlling 5 characters at once: one priest and four mages. I've seen one of his videos and I'm impressed. Note that he leveled them all up by controlling all five in instanced dungeons. Note that he has no tank, just mages and a priest. Xzin his his priest and his mages are Azin, Bzin, Czin, and Dzin. His guild: Army of Zin.

Zin is now planning to scale up his efforts to take down Ragnaros, the boss of Molten Core, all by himself. He'll need to buy 40 copies of World of Warcraft, by 40 monthly subscription fees (about $600/month), have enough computers to run 40 instances of the game, and use 40 monitors (most of them will be 8.4" monitors). He'll need a physical space that can accomodate all the equipment, and by his estimates, he'll need at least the equivalent of two T1 internet connections for bandwith, which you can't really get from residential dsl or cable. I'm guessing that the hardware and software costs will be more than $20,000.

This is also quite an interface challenge and micromanagement challenge. I think he plans to use one keyboard to controll all this and an assortment of (legal) macros. Just planning and executing a UI setup to accomodate this task is probably a full time job, in my opinion. Of course, he's already proven himself in controlling 5 characters at once in pvp and in instances, so perhaps it's just a matter of scaling up what he's already been doing for a year.

His gameplan premise is to have 35 of his 40 characters be mages, lol. He hopes that with high enough dps (that's damage per second for the jargon-impaired), he will be able to end the fight against Rag before the 120 second mark, when it gets a lot more hairy.

Xzin, to me, sounds like some kind of Batman character. I'm sure right now he's building his super computer setup deep in the batcave, illuminated by the glow of 40 monitors. He's wealthy enough that he can spend time and money on hobbies without being bound by the drudergy of the common man. His entrepreneurial spirit gives him the will to believe that "it can be done" and to actually stick with it until it happens. I don't know why such a totally ridiculous and silly thing should be so inspiring, but somehow, I think it is.

Incidentally, since it's proven extremely difficult to find anyone much of a clue who wants to pvp with me on ysera (horde), maybe I'll try the Xzin route myself on a smaller scale, lol.

Ok, for reference, here's the link to Xzin's post (those posts aren't saved very long though)

The text of his first post on the subject is below.

--Sirlin

Xzin said:

I posted this a little while ago and I wanted to get the take of the WoW community at large.For those of you who don’t like to take the time to read anything - I want to solo 40 characters at once. Meaning - I want to play an entire raid - by myself. This is not a statement about WoW - this is a challenge and I like challenges.On to the background:

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Q u o t e:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9024435764919244981

Rag has about 1.1 mil hit points, give or take a few hundred thousand. 35 mages, with buffs and decent gear and a 76 second kill = 14,473.68 dps. That means each mage is doing 413.53 dps, including resists, crits, etc. Not out of the realm of possibility with every major buff (Oxy head, ZG, etc).I wonder if I could solo rag with enough mages……..

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A bit of background. I solo 5 characters right now. At the same time. 4 level 60 Mages and 1 60 Priest on a PvP server. I have been doing this since release and I have been pretty successful with my setup over the last year or so. I pretty much destroy Alterac Valley fights but the whole time invested factor being the primary reason people advance in PvP is a very poor game mechanic but that is aside the point right now. Anyway -

I had a thought. I looked around and seeing that I already have much of the hardware, I thought to myself - what if I took it a step further and bought 35 more accounts and connected the computers needed to run 35 more accounts and I leveled up 35 more accounts to 60? A bit of a tall order but nothing outlandish. I leveled up at the same time, soloing instances all the way to 60. I can solo DM North (full tribute) as well as UBRS, most of LBRS, etc….. without any tanks - just mages and a priest. So I know this can be done, atleast leveling up 5 at a time, seven more times to get 40 level 60s.

This begs the question -

Could I actually “solo” 40 players at once? Would I want to? When I get some time off, I will most likely do so. Aside from details like the $600 per month fee and the hardware and networking requirements needed to perform said feat - I wanted to hear from the community about what you thought about this.

Note: I do not bot, I will of course NOT be using any third party programs, I have no intentions of selling or farming (nor would I make any money doing that anyway - and trust me, my time is worth far more than that). I doubt I would even PvP with this setup - it would be basically me soloing raid instances…. mostly just because it is a pretty unique challenge that I believe I can accomplish. Very few people multibox on a level that I do already, let alone take things to this level. So what about it?

What do you as a community think? Do you think I will meet great success or fail miserably? Any particular problems that I am not thinking about? Vael, Domo might be a tough fight, etc. Brainstorm with me - positive or negative I am interested in hearing what you have to say.

Xzin, Azin, Bzin, Czin, Dzin

New Super Mario Brothers

Unfortunately, I have to give the New Super Mario Brothers (DS) a 7.9 rating out of 10. My first impression, like pretty much everyone else, was somewhere around 9.5. The game has *great* presentation and plays as well as ever.

 Mario has a million game mechanics now. Really huge mario, really tiny mario, wall slide, wall jump, butt stomp, floating after jumping on springboards, diving from the float, ability to carry springboards, sidling on ledges, tightrope walking and jumping, one way floors, one way doors, turtle shell Mario, and so on and so on. All sounds great so far.

I have three main criticisms. First, I do not like the philosophy behind the secrets in this game. Every level has 3 large secret coins to find (sounds good), but the methods used to hide these coins are just not up to par. They are similar to the methods used in Donkey Kong Country 1, rather than the much better DKC2. NSMB has far too many cases where you really have no way of knowing if you should have done this or that thing to get to the coin, then you see you guessed wrong and now you must do the level over to get it. Even DKC2 had some of this with the forced-advancing levels, but NSMB has tons of it. I got really tired of seeing that I rode the wrong platform or whatever, and realizing I'd have to restart the level to get the secret coin I just passed. Secrets should encourage exploration, not constant restarting. DKC2 remains the best platform game at hiding secrets.

Not liking the methods used to hide secrets might not seem like a big deal, but it is in fact the central goal of the player. I take the entire goal of the game to find these secrets, so if they are about a 7.9/10 fun to find, then that's unfortunate.

Second, the emphasis on pits that kill you. Yes, the original Super Mario Brothers has lots of pits that kill you, but we're not in the 1980s anymore. Dying and doing the level over and over is a dated mechanic, and I expected NSMB above all other games to show us that. Unfortuantely it doesn't and is full of those familiar instant death pits, the concept of lives, and restarting levels. Just like God of War shows that a game is fun when dying makes you repeat as little of the level as possible, NSMB *should* have showed us that platform games are about exploring to find secrets, rather than lots of instant-death pits.

I can imagine some people disagreeing with my second point, but there is really no excuse for the third: you can't save anywhere! The only times you can save the game are when you beat a castle for the first time (end of world), beat a tower for the first time (middle of world), or pay secret coins to open a mushroom house. This is really, really bad.

For example, let's say that i just finished a level and got 1 of thd 3 secret coins because I jumped down the wrong shaft to get this coin or killed the only turtle that could be used to get the other one, or whatever. Then I play the level again and accidentally fall into a pit of instant death and die. Then I play it again and fall into some other instant death pit. Then I play it again and die again and again, because that's what happens in this game. Ok, I finally get the other two secret coins, yay! Now I repeat that entire process on the next level. Now I feel like playing some sudoku on Brain Age or my girlfriend wants to play Nintendogs. But NSMB won't let me save the game! I have to beat a tower or a caslte or spend coins on a mushroom house (which I probably wanted to save for some specific use).

One year, Shigeru Miyamoto was kind enough to appear at the Game Developers Conference and give a keynote lecture about game design. I still think about that lecture. In it, he said the #1 rule of game design is "When you press the jump button, the character should jump." He isn't kidding. In the original Tomb Raider, you don't jump when you press the jump button. Instead, you jump the next time that your running animation reaches the point in your stride where jumping would "look good." You should jump when you PRESS the jump button. He's really talking about having responsive controls in general, and doing stuff like having a basic attack come out when the button is released or something, as opposed to pressed.

Anyway, it's a great rule that reminds about responsive controls. Here's my proposal for rule #2 of game design: the player should be able to save the game anywhere! There is nothing so important in a game that it should decide it gets to supercede the player's real life needs to go do something else or play another game, or whatever. In NSMB, an example way to handle this would be to allow the player to save the game in the pause menu at any time. It wouldn't have to save your position in a level or the state of enemies in the level or anything so fancy. The only thing that really matters is if you finished the level or not, and which secret coins you found on the level.

In fact, they even have a mechanic in place already that would prevent you from getting the coins in a way the designers didn't intend. There are some coins you can get by jumping into a pit or something and getting the coin on the way down just before you die. Interesting to note that you don't actually get the coin until a couple seconds after you touch it, because it has to fall down to the coin holder on the bottom screen. So even if you got a coin, paused the game and saved right before you died in the pit, you wouldn't really have the coin. That's fine because you weren't SUPPOSED to jump into the pit to get the coin. The real puzzle was to do some certain jump or throw a turtle shell at it or whatever, and adding this save feature wouldn't diminish that.

Anyway, the game is fun and great looking and all that. Secrets should have been hidden much better, the game should have graduated from the 1980 idea of instant-death pits everywhere, and there is really no excuse at all for the save system. Believe me, I wanted to give this thing a 9.5 as much as anyone else.

--Sirlin

Nintendo's Line at E3 2006

I said before that Nintendo's booth this year was the most popular booth ever at any E3. I don't think people realized that I meant that literally. This video should drive the point home.

E3 2006 Report

Last year's E3 was probably the worst I've ever seen, so I was reduced to giving out backhanded put-down awards. This year, I only have genuine good things to say.

Best Game of the Show: Spore.
Spore is really on another level from everything else. The high concept looks like it's starting to gel into a cohesive experience. There are 6 different phases of the game, each one of increasing scale. Each phase has it's own editor. If I remember right, the 6 phases are cellular, creature, tribal, city, civilization, and space. The transitions between these modes are looking seamless and great, especially the transition of zooming out from the surface of a planet to seeing the whole planet and rotating it around, and the transition of flying around in space and landing on a planet and going to the surface view.

Spore showed off an even better looking creature editor than ever this year, and a new twist on the "sporepedia" that's basically a pokemon-style catalog of which creatures/buildings/whatever you've seen so far. You can click on any item in there (such as a creature) to see a trading card of that thing. They said you can print out the card and maybe play a trading card game based on the creatures (wow, I'd love to design that for them, hehe). Also, every item is labeled with the name of the person who made it. When you make a creature, it gets uploaded to Maxis's master database and other players can see that same creature (or building or whatever) in their world. You can also see how other creations by a creator you like, and you can see how many other players have seen or used your creations.

Spore is an amazing thing both technically and conceptually. It's a game that can only exist when the following 3 things collide: 1) the extremely unusual intelligence of a game designer who looks mostly outside the game industry for inspiration (go Will Wright!), 2) a team of great, solid people to support him and and believe in him because of past success (Sim City, The Sims), and 3) the infinite resources of EA, both in terms of money and in the power to contact any expert in any field that Will needs to talk to. A Magnum Opus game like Spore might a one-time event in our lifetimes.

Best Action Games: God of War 2 and Heavenly Sword.
Two wins for Sony, here. God of War 2 has great graphics for a PS2 game, and the same deep understanding of visceral gameplay and well-timed combat as ever. If it weren't for Spore, this might be this year's Game of the Year.

Heavenly Sword has amazing graphics. It's one of the best looking games at the show for sure. It also seems to have a handle on good combat, partly because it's a blatant copy of God of War (it should be called Goddess of War) and partly because the game's combat designer admitted that his he has a good background in playing Virtua Fighter and an even better grounding in Street Fighter. Considering God of Wars combat designers are also veterain Street Fighter players, it seems foolish for any game company to invest millions of dollars in a melee combat game without hiring expert Street Fighter players to guide it. Yes, I'm serious.

Best Peripheral Game: Eye of Judgment
Yeah Guitar Heroes 2 is nice. No one cares about PSP peripherals. But Sony did get on my radar again with this "enhanced reality" card game. Contrary to popular belief, it does NOT use the EyeToy. It will use a proprietary camera that will ship with the game, and that camera doesn't even have an actual product name yet.

In Eye of Judgment, the camera points downward at a game board with 9 squares. The squares start unowned by any player, and the first player to own 5 of the 9 squares wins the game. You place physical cards on the board (kinda like Pokemon cards). They represent monsters that will fight for you. The novelty is that when you look at the TV screen, you you can see that the cards are summoning 3D monsters that sit on top of the cards. The 3D monsters fight each other, adding a lot of flashiness to the card game genre.

The technology was a bit buggy, but that's understandable for an early prototype. Also, all those flashy monsters interactions took waaaaaay too long. The game itself looks like it's shaping up not to be fun. I would love to design a game for that system if I were in any position to do so, but I'm not. "Enhanced Reality" games like this could be a big new category someday, though.

Best Presenter: The Girl Who Gave The Spore Demo I Saw
I don't know who she was, but she was one of the best presenters of anything I've seen in a long time. She was a blonde woman with a ponytail and a chisled, pretty face. She had a thorough understanding of what she was presenting, was clear and articulate, and had to roll with the punches in a very unpredictable demo that involves interacting with AI that has emergent behavior. She was able to deliver a whole lot of information in a very short time without it seeming rushed. Whoever she is, I hope her boss sees this.

Best Proof of Concept for Why the Nintendo Wii Will Reach a New Market: Nintendo Sorts: Tennis
The tennis game used no buttons. You flick the controller up to toss the ball up so you can serve. You swing the controller to hit the ball. That's it. If you swing in a wimpy way, you'll get a very weak stroke. You have to really put some effort into it and move around. Everyone I saw play this game understood it immediately and had fun.

Interlude about the Wii
Note that I played the following Wii games: Tennis, Wario Ware, Pointing Demo: Shooting (aka Duck Hunt), Dragon Ball Z, Metroid Prime, Zelda.

Wario Ware is great (as is every version of that game) and I'd definitely buy it. The duck hunt demo illustrated using the device as a precise pointer. Pointing and shooting large baloons is easy, and aiming at tiny targets is pretty hard, for human reasons more than software reasons. Dragon Ball Z seemed overly designed with confusing controls, just like always. Metroid Prime illustrates that a solid first person shooter is possible. After having actually played it, I can say that it has a pretty good interface that could perhaps rival mouse and keyboard. I was personally clumsy at it though, and people who aren't "core gamers" are going to have just as difficult a time coordinating one thumbstick and one freehand controller as they would with a dual analog. Metroid is very good, but it's a gamers game. Moving the Zelda character through the world is just as easy as any other game that uses a fixed camera angles and a single analog stick (aka: easy). The various free-hand actions and weapons/combat were all implemented well. It will of course sell 10 zillion units.

Most Crowded Booth of Anything Ever at Any E3: Nintendo
I have never seen anything like the mob scene at Nintendo. Lines for DS games like the New Super Mario Brothers and Starfox were pretty damn long. The line to get INTO the area with the Wii was absurd, with something like a 2 hour wait. On thursday, Nintendo closed the line at about 1:30pm becaus they already reached capacity. I was there on Friday, and inside the Wii area (after the crazy line), every station had massive lines. Nearly an hour wait each for Metroid and Zelda, and at least 10 minutes for most other games, probably more. The sheer number of people in and around Nintendo's booth and in the many and various lines was just staggering. It was pretty clear who owned the show.

Also of note: the total number of PSPs I saw in use by actual real people (not paid workers) was ONE. That's right, in 3 days of being on the show floor almost all day, I saw one. One of my friends saw 3 PSPs in that time and another saw zero. Meanwhile, the number of Nintendo DS's was too large to even count, certainly in excess of 100. Every line at E3 seemed to feature multiple people with DS's. Some joined in impromptu games of Mario Kart, several were playing Brain Age, a few were playing Tetris, and some used the Picto-chat to communicate with each other on the very noisy show floor where cell phone reception is spotty at best. I guess a 100:1 ratio of DS's to PSPs is a pretty interesting indicator of the state of the industry.

Oh, that reminds me:
Award for the Games I Will Actually Spend the Most Time Playing: Brain Age 2 DS and Clubhouse Games DS.
These are two unassuming little titles. The new Brain Age is even better than the last, and I'm sure I'll mess around with it quite a bit. Clubhouse games has 38(!!) games on one cart, that I counted at least. Half are card games such as poker, hearts, and rummy. The others are various board games such as chess and backgammon, and there's also random stuff like darts and bowling on there too. I'd probably buy it for chess alone, so I consider the other 37 games to be a bonus. There's a difference between flashy games that look good at E3 and the games I'll actually spend time playing. I'm sure I'll end up pouring hours into both of these games.

MMOs: There were a lot of MMOs. They all seem to involve aiming a reticule, which means I have zero interest in them. Guild Wars builds on it's very strong base of good ideas with even more new good ideas, more classes, more pve missions and story, and more pvp game modes. It reamains in my mind a "theoretically wonderful game." It has the exact same interface problems as it had ever since the alpha test: interface. It's still too interested in making me click-to-move even when I supposedly turn that off. It's still too awkward to pivot the camera without affecting my character's movement. When you click on an NPC or PC, you still get that totally ugly rectangle with only a name in it, instead of something reasonable like a nice border and a portrait. Guild Wars **NEEDS** to drop whatever it's doing and give me UI that functions like World of Warcraft. That is it's number 1 problem, and I wish that would be solved and announced so I can get on with actually buying it and playing it.

And finally: Game that Will Make the Most Money: World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade
Although it has a great art style (much better art direction than Guild Wars), World of Warcraft looks technically dated compared to every other MMO at E3. The expansion will have two new races (who cares?), level cap increased from 60 - 70, flying mounts (at 70), jewelcrafting and socketed items. It also will probably have tons of new raid content and more half-hearted attempts at small group and solo content that will ultimately keep the game focused on it's current elitist group-only time-ocracy mentality. I *want* to be this game's biggest spokesperson, if it would only stop mimicing EQ, embrace the concept of inclusiveness for all (skilled players and time-sinkers alike, solo and small group players and raids alike), and stop treating the player base overly aggressive Terms of Service.

Anyway, I just wanted to remind everyone that it doesn't matter that World of Warcrft is looking graphically worse than its competitors. It doesnt' matter that it can't show much of anything flashy gameplay-wise at E3. It's well crafted, it's addictive, and it's has fun locked up in it, and it will sell. The power of Warcraft will go toe-to-toe with Halo 3 and GTA. Blizzard please come back to us and stick with the original promises the game made during beta.

Final Summary:

• Nintendo owned the show.
• Sony had a few very strong titles, but the PSP is looking shaky. The $600 price tag is mostly irrelevant anyway because they'll only have 2 million units available (if that) by the holidays, so only that hardest hardcores will get one then, and after that the price will drop.
• Microsoft didn't have much of anything inspiring to show, but Gears of Wars looks great of course. Halo 3 and GTA will make tons of money, and Xbox Live is still the best online experience in town. Also, Xbox 360 will probably reach 8 or 10 million units before PS3 even *launches* so Microsoft is doing just fine...but we didn't need to go to E3 to figure that out.

Long report, but I hope you find it useful.

--Sirlin

Various Games I Should Comment On

In no particular order...

I played Oblivion for about two hours and found nothing fun about it. I ran around a mostly empty field, chased a deer, found a random dungeon and killed everything in it for zero useable treasure. Finally I went to town and there seemed like a lot to do there, but at the 2 hour mark, I should have had a lot more fun already. The interface is not nearly as good as the World of Warcraft interface I used (mostly Discord Action Bars, but various other mods thrown in), and of course it couldn't possibly be as good. One game has a single, game designer-created UI while the other has an open system that lets anyone create almost anything.

All Oblivion did was make me want to play Warcraft again, since a few of my friends are on Ysera, the newest PvE server. They're looking to do at least 5-man content and to dominate the battlegrounds at 60. Anyone want to join? (horde)

Resident Evil 4 was the best game of last year. God of War was second best. Both were amazingly polished and well crafted. God of War had a good story, RE4 had good everything else.

Brain Age (DS) is awesome. I've had it for a month now because Nintendo's President Iwata gave it out to game developers at GDC. It's exactly what he was talking about last year when he said "games are only one planet of the software entertainment solar system." The entire game you just use the stylus (and occasionally the mic), with no buttons needed. It's not a "game" but it's entertaining and easy to get into.
Bleach (import DS) is incredibly good. It's a fighting game that's almost as good as Guilty Gear(!) and it's on the Nintendo DS! I'm totally blown away that such a good fighting game could be on the DS, but leave it to Treasure to pull that off.

Guilty Gear XX Slash (import PS2). This is the best designed fighting game, period, in my opinion. The GG series has always had soooo much variety in its characters that you can't even believe it. One character has inifine guard reversals, another can control two characters at once, another is the best version of Zangief ever, and so on. The two new characters in Slash are each weird and crazy each have 3 different modes: weak, good, too good. Each has totally different mechanics for going between those modes, and totally different trade-offs. No other game could have *that* much variety and still be a tournament-quality game. Arc Systems, you guys are on another level from everyone else.

Lost in Blue (DS). Seriously, screw that game. It is beatiful and peaceful looking. It has an interesting premise of being stuck on an island and trying to survive/escape. It has interesting use of the DS with digging up burried thing using the stylus to blowing on sparks with the mic to make a fire. It's as if someone wrote a game design for a calming, relaxing game, then gave that document to Itagaki at Tecmo to actually make the game. He must have said "I want the player to die over and over and over. Then die more. Die." Also, the screwy save system makes it so you are afraid to save because at any moment, you might be in an unwinnable situation already. I hope you like redoing the same parts of the game over and over. Being on a beatiful beach and having your character say "ugh...I'm dyyying" is eerie in a very bad way.

Guitar Hero is great and my girlfriend loves it.

Burnout on 360 is an A game trapped in a C wrapper, just like the previous Burnout. Also, it's way to similar to the previous Burnout (same tracks and most of the same features). But at least it's a racing game for people like me who don't even like driving. You can totally smash into everything and knock enemy cars off the road in order to get super-meter. Yay. Why can't I just pick a course, pick a mode, pick a car and go? Burnout 3 had this, and the last two have omitted this obvious, basic feature. Why does it autosave (and force me to wait and kick me out of the track selection menu) when I get a measly bronze medal on a new track? It wastes my time when I just want to restart the track to get a gold. There's a lot that's unpolished about the features, but underneath all that, I find it to be an excellent game.

Dead or Alive 4 (Xbox 360). This game is a lot better than people give it credit for. It's a reasonable fighting game with some interesting guessing games. Most of the time when you are in a combo, you have the ability to attemt to reverse out (meaning grab an incoming arm or leg). First there were Combo-Breakers in Killer Instinct (bad). Then there was the fixed version called Burst in Guilty Gear (great, you can only do it about once per round). DOA4 has an interesting new take in that you can "combo-breaker" during many, many combos, but if you guess wrong, you just let the enemy reset the combo and own you even more. Also, it has hands-down the best online play experiene of any fighting game. (And Gen Fu rocks.) I don't think it's nearly as good of a tournament game as GGXX, but it's still pretty good, and at least I can play anytime I want (online, there are plenty of opponents). Fighting game players should really buy this game to tell developers that good online play is vitally important.

Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition (PS2). DMC3 was another A game in a C wrapper. The Special Edition really addressed the issues of the last game by toning down the difficulty and implementing a non-retarded save system. You can play as Virgil as well as Dante now, too. If you like action games, it's worth playing.

Capcom Classics Collection Remix (PSP) just came out, by yours truly. It has good presentation and extras in the form of tips, art, music, and game histories. It also has the most configurable buttons ever: you can even turn the PSP sideways (for vertical-oriented games), set your buttons however you like, and even assign functions to various directions on the analog stick. Gamespot rightly called us out as the best networking on a PSP game collection, and best networking on a PSP game, period. Just like in an arcade, anyone can join in (from their PSP, ad-hoc) at anytime, and you don't have to reset your game or go to a staging room with them, or any of that bs that the other game collectiosn make you do. Oh, and this time around, all these games are perfect arcade emulations.

That's over 10 or 12 games I've mentioned. I'm tired even writing about them, much less playing them all!

--Sirlin