[GW] Your Thanks Are Enough

Posted by Zubon on January 27, 2012 in Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2. 0 Comments

Today I found the quest Too High a Price. There is a loan shark involved, and “I tried to return the money, but he is demanding that I pay him a fee of 250 gold! We do not have that kind of money.” The quest reward is 175 gold. Maybe it takes NPCs a long time to make 75 gold. The player, of course, takes the money from someone who needed a loan shark to afford life-saving medicine, in a setting where a plague is transforming people into monsters and potentially devouring their souls.

One notion I like about GW2 karma is that the rewards make more sense and you should feel less like a jerk for taking things from the poor people you are supposed to be helping. The farmer has some spare vegetables, or will give you a good deal on buying sheep.

: Zubon

Nerdview

Posted by Zubon on January 26, 2012 in A Tale in the Desert, General and Guild Wars. 1 Comment

I drove to Chicago yesterday. I-90 splits to local and express lanes once you are in the city. Ideally, you stay in the express lanes until the next opening back to the local lanes is the one before your exit. For that to work, you need to know when the lanes re-merge. The signs helpfully explain that the next exit from the express lanes is at Pershing Road. Great. Is Pershing before or after my exit? What number is the Pershing exit? This sign is a helpful reminder for people who already know where they are going, but not if you are just coming into Chicago and do not know what order the roads are in.

Our friends at Language Log define “nerdview” as “writing in technical terms from the perspective of the technician or engineer rather than from a standpoint that would seem useful to the customer or reader.” This is probably their best example, while our friends at Popehat present this gem that looks incomprehensible, becomes clearer through the comments, and then becomes fully comprehensible but completely useless after an informed commenter explains that the somewhat-reasonable explanation is not the true one (assuming he did not make that up).

In gaming, we might call this newbie-(un)friendliness. This has been a theme in the recent Guild Wars posts, both about the game and the community: the explanations of what to do assume that you know what you are doing. The developer or experienced player may have great difficulty dialing his knowledge back to the newbie, and then there are tiers of newbie because some people are completely new to the genre and some have experience with similar games, and then the experienced players need to unlearn what they have learned elsewhere.

Some games and communities do this intentionally. Developers usually would prefer more customers, but some like to keep their community small. Some players just don’t like to bother with newbies and want to keep casuals, trolls, etc. out. It is a form of initiation or hazing: if you are not willing to put up with X, we do not want you here. The original A Tale in the Desert was an accidental example (great community, strongly self-selecting), and I don’t know if Dwarf Fortress is intentionally that hard to get started on. Rogue-likes tend to like to have a painful introduction. Or, as was said about D&D as it left 2nd Edition, “THAC0 kept the riff-raff out.”

: Zubon

Sometimes I Need That Carrot

Posted by Ethic on January 26, 2012 in Lord of the Rings Online. 4 Comments

I’ve been in a gaming funk for about a year now. I may find something fun for a while, but within a few weeks I’ve tired of it. I don’t have any active MMO subscriptions either. All I have left is MMOs that are subscription free, or ones I’ve signed up for a lifetime account.

I’ve been almost forcing myself to keep playing Lord of the Rings Online because it is still the one game I feel “connected” to. Regardless, as I play less and less, I get more and more lost. I will often log in, pay for my house upkeep, see if anyone I know is playing, and log out. Continue reading ‘Sometimes I Need That Carrot’

[GW2] The Jotun, That Which Was Lost

Posted by Ravious on January 25, 2012 in Guild Wars 2. 1 Comment

There’s a nice new lore article detailing one of the non-player character (NPC) races that appeared in the Guild Wars expansion, The Eye of the North. The jotun are a giant-race, cousins to the ogres. It appears that the giant-races prefer mountains, the ogres getting the Blazeridge Mountains east of Ascalon, while the jotun once held court all throughout the Shiverpeaks. While the story of the ogres is still unknown, the jotun fell in power because of interracial conflict.

Behind the scenes, ArenaNet’s loresmith Ree Soesbee writes that the jotun lore was expanded to show something great that was taken because the jotun race cannibalized itself. They were legendary and possessed the magic and the ability to create huge monuments, possibly before the time of the gods and Bloodstones that brought magic to the races. This leads one to wonder whether the jotun had a hand in the Eye of the North superstructure. Regardless, all that’s left is a mongrel scrap of a race among massive stone monuments without meaning. Continue reading ‘[GW2] The Jotun, That Which Was Lost’

[GW] 100%

Posted by Zubon on January 24, 2012 in Guild Wars. 14 Comments

The first few titles I saw had just a couple of tiers: survivor, drunkard, party animal (I started during a festival, so I had booze and candy before I had a secondary profession). Then I met “Cartographer.” That is normal, an achievement for exploring the whole map. It starts at 60% and tiers up, makes sense.

I did not notice until this weekend that it goes all the way to 100%. This explains much that I have seen in the wiki. Zone descriptions talk about how the docks count as 0.1% of the map, or you can get an extra pixel by “scraping” the walls of a zone, or that 101% is possible. When I was thinking that you were done at 80% or 90%, that seemed super-Completist. Now I’m worried that I need to step foot on almost every square centimeter of the world if I want to add that to the Hall of Monuments.

I am saving that one for once I start trying hard mode vanquishing anyway. I just feel for folks who were stuck at 99.8% and spent weeks scouring maps for the dozen pixels that needed to be stepped on because they had an invisibly brief lag spike one day while pushing against a rock.

: Zubon

[LoL] A Bad Sign for the Community

Posted by Zubon on January 23, 2012 in League of Legends. 13 Comments

I just finished a game of Dominion and was complimenting the opposing Jax in the chat room afterwards. They lost, but he was top scorer with the best KDA (13-7-8). Given that at least three of us reported one of my teammates for verbal abuse, I can see how he was suspicious about whether I was trying to be sarcastic.

: Zubon

[GW2] Year of the Dragon

Posted by Ravious on January 23, 2012 in Guild Wars 2. 14 Comments

To rock in the Chinese New Year, ArenaNet has announced that Guild Wars 2 will be released this year. There was much dancing and celebration in the streets. Even though most revelers were celebrating the announcement, they didn’t mind the company of the other Chinese New Year party-goers.

In the blog post, Mike O’Brien then goes on to discuss ArenaNet’s plans for the ongoing beta:

We recently finished our first closed beta test, and we’re now ready to hold progressively larger events. In February we’ll invite select press to participate in beta testing, and in March and April we’ll aggressively ramp up the size of our beta test events so that many of you will have a chance to participate. And of course, this all leads to the release of Guild Wars 2 later this year.

Don’t worry, faithful readers. My firstborn is already shipped well on her way to the ArenaNet studios.

There are a couple of interesting points, though. Press are usually involved in MMO betas at some point, but usually this is one of the last phases of beta. What does ArenaNet intend with having awesome, dedicated bloggers and some real journalists in the beta? Normally, I would assume they would be under a non-disclosure agreement, but it would be really cool if ArenaNet kind of said “we’re so amazing, just come play and tell the world.” It could also be that ArenaNet wants possible “reviewers” to have more time to play so the Metacritic crushing reviews happen all the fast upon release.

Which of course leads to the question, when is release? Certainly nothing would be more epic than it launching on the Guild Wars 7th Anniversary. Yet, many times in the past it seems a good idea for MMOs to shut down beta and give the company a couple weeks to add that last bit of polish. This would lead the launch on the edge of summer, during exam time for students, near vacations, etc. Most MMOs will not launch during summer. Then there is this bit of Nostradamus-ish evidence of ArenaNet soccer jerseys possibly signifying June 28, 2012. My personal best guess is September with a wild card bet of April.

–Ravious

[GW] Crafting Storage

Posted by Zubon on January 23, 2012 in Guild Wars. 6 Comments

One Guild Wars design decision that beats the competition is the crafting storage tab. Crafting materials stack up to 250, and one tab of your storage holds one stack of each. All storage in Guild Wars is shared, so all your (post-Searing) characters have access. You could duplicate the effect by giving players two more storage tabs, since this is effectively 36 slots, but this comes pre-organized and of course for the specific purpose of crafting. (NCSoft could also remove the cap of 250, which seems arbitrary, low for common materials and very high for rare.) Aligning with other design decisions, Guild Wars does not have tiers of crafting materials as you level up, although having a crafting tab would be even more useful there (potentially messier in the UI).

Splitting “crafting storage,” Guild Wars crafting is not exactly rigorous. The crafters are basically collector NPCs with shared materials. Storage in Guild Wars is simple, shared, and rather inadequate if you want to keep all those collector drops. The vault is expandable at $10/pane, which feels a bit pricey, although it’s tempting with all these frog and bug bits about. I need to do some muling.

: Zubon

[GW,SW:ToR] Inversion

Posted by Zubon on January 22, 2012 in A Tale in the Desert, Guild Wars and Star Wars: The Old Republic. 4 Comments

Many of the design oddities I am citing in Guild Wars arise from its development path. It was not built as an MMO, but it has accumulated MMO elements over time, grafted interestingly but sometimes awkwardly onto its frame.

Everything I read about The Old Republic suggests that oddities arise from its developers. Without having played, my sense of the internet consensus is that this is a wonderful, brilliant, elegantly crafted single player game with excellent polish, story, and voice work. And that it completely lacks anything that attracts and retains MMO players except for having WoW-like gameplay.

Personally, I am quite happy with the notion of a game that has an intended finish rather than an eternal grind, but that has gotten about as far as possible from the old notion of an MMO as a virtual world, and it does not mesh well with a subscription model. But what do I know? I am not the target audience for “WoW with lightsabers,” and those are not my hundreds of millions of dollars invested.

: Zubon

[GW] Start the Mission

Posted by Zubon on January 21, 2012 in Guild Wars. 15 Comments

Here is a bad design decision that seems easy to band-aid. Guild Wars starts missions in Prophecies and Nightfall with a button under the character list, while in Nightfall and Eye of the North with an NPC dialogue. This is poor, having something be a UI element in one place and part of the world in another. I started in Nightfall, as most seemed to recommend, then played some Eye of the North and just this week visited Factions. Nothing tells you about the “enter mission” button. There is absolutely nothing in-game that tells you how to start the mission unless you notice that a button appeared in the UI.

I have commented on how Guild Wars players and wikipedians assume that you have a sizable resource base. It reaches a new tier when the developers forget that they designed the game as three expand-alones rather than a base Guild Wars with expansion packs (and then one actual expansion pack shared across the three). There is a handy mission to introduce you to the other campaigns, but whoever wrote it must never have thought that you might be starting with Nightfall and not already know how things work in Prophecies and Factions.

The in-game help is already a link to the wiki. Your players should not need to then Google to try to figure out what they need to ask the wiki.

: Zubon

Psychonauts did the same thing by giving you inventory items without telling you that you have an inventory or how to access it.