Month: December 2006

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Non-Transitive Dice

These are interesting to consider. Rock beats scissors beats paper beats rock, but two rocks beat two papers beat two scissors beat two rocks. That can take a moment to get your head around.

Is this a common or desirable PvP structure? PvP is frequently balanced as some form of rock-paper-scissors, and we often discuss whether it is balanced for group or solo play, but I have never heard discussion of interaction between the two. I have certainly seen it in PvE. A City of Heroes Scrapper solos much better than a Defender, but two Defenders can take out Archvillains handily.

Let’s phrase that differently: two support characters support each other but are very weak alone, while two strong solo builds do not gain much from playing alongside one another. Okay, we knew that one already. And then there’s my friend Adam, who makes dominating solo characters that excel in groups. Bastard.

: Zubon

PvP Bait n Switch

I guess you could say it was a balance issue, but it depends on your viewpoint. To me, it was basic math gone wrong.

As announced on the WoW forums here, players are getting their honor downgraded by 30%. Apparently the massive surge of people with HWL/GM PvP gear got a bit of attention. I know there’s a good amount players in my guild with 4 or so pieces already, and one completely done, I believe.

I may be jaded, but I can’t help but think of the many times this has happened with insert_random_mmorpg_here. A bit more testing, or a bit quicker action would have prevented the fun the forums will have with this.

On the good side, maybe this means the queue to get in will be reduced? Muhahaha.

Ouroboros, WoW style

Way back when I was but a lad, there was this movie with fairly tacky special effects (for the time even) but a decent story called The Neverending Story. I reallywasn’t a fan of the movie, but what I remember most about the movie was the amulet the main character had, an ouroboros. For those not up on ancient greek, it’s a snake eating it’s own tail. I always thought it was a cool image. It’s also a fairly popular image/metaphor in your average ancient fable. Not sure why…perhaps the local Fable Outlet didn’t stock many plot elements.

Where was I? Oh ya, WoW eating it’s own tail… Full circle. Good grief have you tried to log on recently?

Continue reading Ouroboros, WoW style

Supply, Demand, Expectations, and Raiding

Raids are dropping in World of Warcraft, right? I started to post about the economics of the expansion pack, but then I realized that I don’t actually know anything about it. The bits I do know are level 70, Blood Elves and Dranei, and Horde Paladins/Alliance Shamans. From this, I divine that raids should have become far less common over the past month and will continue to fall over the next month.

Am I completely wrong about that? I could easily be, since if I reversed one assumption, I would expect the number of raids to be skyrocketing.

Continue reading Supply, Demand, Expectations, and Raiding

Tanks and Healers

cov[City of Villains] I have mentioned several times my fondness for the City of Villains archetypes, all hybrid damage dealers structured so that you can do fine without a tank and/or healer. It is funny that the end-game content, Lord Recluse’s Strike Force, is exactly a tanker and healer party. Well, tanker and buffer.

The hard part is the last mission, where you fight the entire Freedom Phalanx at once. For that fight, the ideal team is one */Stone Armor Brute and seven Corruptors of various kinds, with Kinetics and Radiation Emission being in the most demand. As many people as possible should have Vengeance. The other archetypes offer burst damage (not useful against 8 Heroes), control (not very useful against Heroes), and pets (which die in a hit or two against Heroes).

Conveniently and sadly, your temporary powers are more important than your character in that fight. Everyone must have a Shivan Shard from Bloody Bay. Several people should have missiles from Warburg. The Shivan Shard pets do far more damage than anyone on your team. The Warburg buffs and debuffs are far more powerful than your own. Your exploiting stacked Vengeance lets you survive while your cracked-out Shivans take out the entire Freedom Phalanx in under a minute.

In a sense, that feels right for villainy. We are using freakish alien/corpse monsters, backed with a missile assault, to take out the heroes of the city while we skulk about and try to stay safe.

: Zubon

Blizzard Explains

Why unusable raid items were added:

I’m sure it’s easier to pass that judgement from your well-informed, armchair designing position. Because of the way in the whole expansion is being pushed out, the gap that we are currently in was expected to cause a number of issues. With so much content that is being pre-released, we are going to see a number of inconsistencies that will be resolved on release of the expansion. Plain fact is that this is about production schedules and not about you. This is needed for smooth production of the game, because when expansion hits and people are actually patching the rest of the content, we will have more pressing issues than going back to check some loot tables. This is about putting in order as much as we can as soon as we can, so when serious matters come down the road, we have as many resources available to address them quickly. Issues that, I assure you, will be more important than this. This isn’t about you. It’s about the game. Find something more worthwhile to complain about. This issue will not change until the expansion is released, so railing against me or anyone else on the boards is a categorical waste of your time.

Emphasis added. The thread linked with this has been deleted. If anyone can add some ameliorating context or demonstrate this was a fabricated quote, I will feel better and update.

: Zubon

Hat tip: This is Not A Community via n3rfed

Firefly!?

Wired brings great news, Firefly is being made into an MMO. Could Kwip get what he wants? I hear the heavens rejoicing with good tidings.

But wait, what is that deep booming thunder? Is it a sign of impending doom? Alas poor me, my hopes of a good game are once again likely to be dashed against the rocks of despair.

I think the setting of Firefly is tremendous, but I really don’t see anything that impressive at Multiverse. Now if someone told me Joss Whedon was going to be involved, I would have hope.

– Ethic

Thank You Blizzard

[WoW] I have been reading a bit about the latest WoW patch. It makes CoH’s recent patches sting less. This is not schadenfreude, just a reminder that even the market leader is not doing any better. Introducing new bugs while rushing to implement nerfs and ignoring test server feedback is one thing (two things). Intentionally switching raid drops to items that no one could even theoretically use? Priceless.

: Zubon

Goldfarming By Trojan

I’ve been reading a couple of articles about a student named Wang Yue Si. It seems he was busted after earning 1.3 million dollars by selling World of Warcraft items.

The suggestion in these articles is that he could have used a virus (W32/HLLP.Philis.bq) that installs a trojan which would allow him to grab MMORPG passwords in order to steal characters, money and items. Even if it is not true in this case, it will happen sooner or later – mark my words. We had one machine here at work get this virus, so it is making it’s way around.

Be careful out there…

– Ethic

Apparently that was a good change

coh[City of Heroes] That nerf I was not sure about? It must be a good thing, because it is now live. The developers have commented recently (and repeatedly) about how they use data-mining to determine where problems are and whether changes will have good effects. That process must take exactly one week with the population active on the test server, since that is how long the changes were on test. If there are problems with it, I imagine the developers will know in less than a day’s worth of normal play, given live server populations.

Meanwhile the winter event is still on test, salvage racks still crash your client if you try to move the same piece of salvage twice, and the Known Issues page still thinks the test server and live servers are running exactly the same thing. But, you know, priorities.

: Zubon

PS: As is usually the case around new Issues, the old content remains fun! So long as you work around the various bugs and crashes that were introduced, the quality of life improvements are always nice. Except for making all the mission decorations invisible, that’s annoying.