ARAM

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I have been enjoying the new mode in League of Legends. “All random all middle” is even more frantic fun than Dominion, although almost all strategy is gone in favor of tactics.

  • You can reroll your champion every few games, so it is not fully random. This is especially a good thing for people who bought packs like the one when League of Legends launched. Have seven champions you’ve never played because they were not really your style? Rerolls minimize that punishment.
  • But then you get the chance to try new things. Ryze? More fun than I remembered from the time or two I played him, although see below for why his spells aren’t the best for ARAM.
  • The most important thing about ARAM is that team fights start NOW, often before minions spawn. When the whole game is team fights, the values of various abilities and champions change.
  • AE is obviously far more valuable.
  • Skill shots are also far more valuable. You do not need much skill to toss a skillshot into a crowd and hope for the best. Even given that, skill shots are even more valuable than you think because the enemies are boxed in one lane. You don’t need to spray and pray to appreciate having a shooting alley.
  • Juking is less valuable, with far fewer options, although the people who can pull it off are impressive.
  • Support wins games, above and beyond what you are used to. Healers are fabulous with no healing fountain. Soraka and Sona are great support combined with offensive powerhouses in ARAM.
  • Alistar is similarly amazing, enough to merit his own bullet point. Tank with AE heal and CC, plus the R of “soak all the damage”? I have only seen a team with Alistar lose once.
  • Team composition is very important. Four melees? You’re probably dead already. Opposing team is the MMO contingent of tank, healer, and three DPS? Yep, that’s bad. Because team composition is mostly random, the game can be randomly unwinnable before you even start. This is an intrinsic hazard of randomness, but still generally unfun.
  • It is still hard to find 10 people who can stay connected and play a video game for 10-20 minutes. While I have had a good streak today, I have had days where half my games were 4 vs. 5. This is not a satisfying way to win or to lose, and if there is any punishment for quitting once you see the previous bullet point, it is not visible to the people who must suffer through it.
  • Remember, the most important thing in the game is to make sure everyone knows it is not your fault that your team lost. Everyone else was bad, you had lag, the opposing champs are OP, and team comp sucked gg lol noobs

: Zubon

The F2P In-Game Economy

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If you are spending $0 on a game, and the economy is working great for the company and the players who are paying money, but your favored currency is not retaining value well, that means the economy is working. “Working” applies both in the sense of in-game supply and demand (there is WAY more supply of the free currency than of the paid currency, and people with low time value are more prevalent than people with low money value) and the game’s business model. A business model that rewards “not paying” as much as or more than “paying” will not be a business model for long.

Just because you do not like something does not mean it is not working.

: Zubon

[NW] Development at Cryptic

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We asked Cryptic Studios to walk us through their development process, from inception to implementation. Also, any examples on something cut rather than making it live? Lindsay Haven, System Designer, please take it away:

Because we have so many creative people that work here in the studio, and each idea is different, not every feature has the exact same development cycle. In general we follow the cycle I’m about to outline. Sometimes we make exceptions for creativity, scope, and feature timeline; however, we do find this process works well for us in most cases.

Rough outline of Neverwinter development process:

  1. Idea!
  2. Outline
  3. Kickoff with leads and implementers
  4. Implementation
  5. Revision of the plan
  6. Implementation
  7. Testing, iteration, testing, iteration…
  8. Final sign off!

Any feature first starts as an idea, here at Cryptic this is usually brought on by some clever person playing in one of our playtests and thinking “this could be more fun if…” or from brainstorming ideas to fix a known issue. Once the idea is born a developer, or sometimes a producer, will outline the new feature, zone, race, or other addition to the game. The outline is then reviewed and updated by relevant department leads and people who will be directly implementing the feature. When a consensus is reached implementation begins!

Sometimes, especially with big features, not everything we envisioned is possible, worth the time investment, or as fun as we thought it would be. If this happens we will revise our original plan and continue implementing. Usually these kinds of changes are small, such as specific quest drops not matching the lore of the adventure zone; rarely they are really big, like changing what technologies we use to create the tens of thousands of equipable items we have in Neverwinter. In the event that we end up cutting a feature instead of implementing, it usually happens here. We have a lot of eyes on features at any given time, because of the early input we get it’s rare that a feature would be cut beyond this point.

Once implementation is nearly complete, we begin testing the feature in playtest meetings in the room we call “The War Room.” This is particularly true with adventure zones, dungeons, PvP zones, and player classes. The war room is where most of us first see a feature come to life and, if you’ll pardon the cliché, where the magic happens. It’s where the mood is measurable, first impressions are made, and bugs are shouted out (usually by more than one person at a time) for the nearest producer to put on a punchlist. Eventually we get to some number of playtests where everyone is happy with the outcome and we give the final development sign off. From there it moves to QA testing where they test it for exploits, typos, and other things the developers missed. Once it passes QA, the feature is done!

The great thing about working at Cryptic Studios is that everyone is an integral part of the development cycle. We frequently have all team playtests and sometimes all company playtests. Everyone is encouraged to send feedback and contribute to all aspects of the game. Because of this, Neverwinter is the culmination of the love, determination, and passion of everyone in the studio. We forward to Neverwinter going live and hearing what you think!

Thank you, Ms. Haven
: Zubon

[GW2] The Crab Grab Hustle

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Temporarily, the crazy refugees of Southsun Cove have come up with possibly the most masochistic game in Tyria. Surrounded by hostile wildlife that is attacking each and every settlement (at least the omelet-free ones), the free peoples have decided to design a game around a small Succulent Crab, which seems like one of the favorite foods of the karka. A mad game of solo keepaway ensues with planks, fishing poles, mad karka hatchlings, and giant rolling karka. Life imitates art, and the insanity of this game bleeds through to the Guild Wars 2 player.  Welcome to Crab Toss. Continue reading →

[GW2] Secret of Southsun Impressions

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There are many ways to view the Secret of Southsun update. The most objective is ArenaNet has added an hour or so of content, and then you are done. This is the worst way to experience Guild Wars 2. In another view, it’s easy to see that Southsun has become the de facto hotspot for some time. Ignoring the checklist-type content, this zone is alive with players now. Finally, Southsun has received a much needed injection of life, love, and polish.

Guild Wars 2 continues to use achievements to replace quests. For Secret of Southsun players are tasked to explore the updated areas, talk to a few key individuals, and find a bunch of samples around the island. I find it to be a poor guide especially given the dozens of achievements in the Secret of Southsun achievement category. The mail sent to all players tells them to get to Southsun to talk to the Inspector, but the real guide to the content is the achievements. I feel that if ArenaNet is going to continue to focus on achievements as the quest-like director for new content serious iteration needs to be done to make it a better means of communication.

Anyway, savvy players seemed to burn through the quest-like content pretty quickly. I would not suggest focusing on the achievements to such a narrowed degree. Might as well enjoy the passion fruit flowers on the way. Continue reading →

[GW2] Scope of Flame & Frost

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Before the mob’s attention is diverted to Southsun, the vocal players on the Guild Wars 2 forums appear to be unhappy with the ending of Flame & Frost. It distills down to “4 months and we just get a few bonfires”. That’s a lot of distillation, and even in the final hours of Flame & Frost, it is not very accurate. Still I think a big issue is the handling of the scope of Flame & Frost.

Flame & Frost revolved around the Molten Alliances assaults in two zones. In the norn starting zone, Wayfarer Foothills, the Molten Alliance took roughly the northeast corner quadrant, and in the second charr zone, Diessa Plateau they took a large chunk of the west-central side. This is where the action was. This was where the yellow sunbursts were yelling at me to go. It became such a focus to players, yet it really wasn’t a focus to the world. Continue reading →

[WS] Dat Double Jump

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WildStar has a column going on called “DevSpeak”. The latest clip is about movement. “Movement?” the hardened MMO veteran in you says, “what a silly thing to advertise for your game.” In a way it is silly, but like Mr. DevSpeak says “it plays a major role in every part of the game.” (I will say whoever wrote and voiced this first episode did a fantastic job of keeping it informative and snappy. Definitely looking forward to more.)

Poor movement can harm a game. Take Guild Wars for example. It doesn’t matter how great it was in some parts when gamers couldn’t get past the fact that they couldn’t jump. I admit every time I play Guild Wars it feels like there is a ceiling pressing down. I also do not care for how movement feels in The Secret World, especially when they add don’t-stand-in-the-evil-circle-of-forthcoming-evil effects that I have to dodge out of. In both of these MMOs I can look past it, but some gamers can’t. Continue reading →

[GW2] The Molten Function

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Jeromai and I must be on similar wavelengths, even though I know I do not have anywhere the gumption required to solo a dungeon. He writes this morning on how in six days that was all it took for the community situated around the Molten Facility to distill down to “mostly tired, lazy or focused on getting as speedily to the end as possible”. I was thinking the exact same thing over the weekend where I ran it one more time and decided I was likely done with the dungeon (especially since our guild is unlocking guild challenges this week).

Six days, indeed. Continue reading →

[GW2] Speed of the Chook Run

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My guild has started doing guild missions every day. Guild bounties are still the basis for things, but we have guild treks and guild rushes unlocked too. Yesterday we did a few bounties, wiping on the first bounty thanks to bear vs. 2-MULT, but I felt the main event was the Chicken Run guild rush in Fields of Ruin.

I had an absolute blast with my first ever guild rush. This, this is where I think guild missions should have started. Guild bounties are work. It seems I am cursed to randomly get Prisoner 1141 on almost every guild bounty, and that is a frustrating 15 minutes trying to tag down the speed demon, and communicate it. There is confusion in communication, especially since I did not have a mic ready for Raidcall. Don’t get me wrong. Guild bounties are a good challenge, but guild rushes are more about fun. Continue reading →

Alas, Camelot

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Mid-week, I watched as Camelot Unchained’s kickstarter neared its goal of $2 million. Seeing as how the man Jacobs had already brought in $3 million contingent, I had a feeling that somehow the kickstarter would not fail. Was Camelot Unchained a sure thing? Heck no, and by appearances it got through by the skin of its teeth.

I am pretty relieved that it got through the finish line, but this was not best game to lay across as the poster boy to anti-publisher’d MMOs. It’s niche, and unlike say the next Jim Jarmusch film, significant effort has to go in to the game to get back enjoyment. (Okay, so significant effort sometimes has to be put in to understanding a Jarmusch film too, but at least you only lose an hour or two.) I do not think Camelot Unchained is going to be a very casual-friendly popcorn MMO, which in my conjecturish opinion many Dark Age of Camelot players have grown to love.

One article at onrpg.com had fellow blogger Spinks up in arms. I tend to agree that the article was filled with too much hyperbole while ignoring plenty of non-AAA MMOs that have thrived (e.g., all of onrpg.com’s site). The developers of Storybricks replied that onrpg.com had the right idea (perhaps wrong words?). Camelot Unchained’s kickstart will make it a smidge easier for any MMO developer to get funding. However, it is really hard to back an indulgent cause while not being interested in the luxury product.

I am glad that it was a success, but whether it was or not, now it is back to silence. It’s going to be 2 years until Camelot Unchained is going to make those kinds of waves again, and it might be 4-5 before there is any noticeable ripple effect in the world of MMO development. Congrats to the City State team. I’ll be looking forward to their future developments.

–Ravious