Archive for July, 2008

Virtue Caps

Published by Zubon on 31 Jul 2008 in Lord of the Rings Online. 5 Comments

Virtues are a category of trait. You can have any five virtues active at once (at higher levels). Each virtue has up to ten ranks, providing three bonuses that scale based on how many ranks you have in that virtue. You gain ranks by completing deeds, such as exploring the farms of the The Shire, finding the lost lore of the Cardolan princes, or slaying wargs in Angmar or the Lone Lands.

Only one deed currently goes all the way to ten, and only since Book 14 went live. More may hit it when the new zone opens up. It is unclear whether they will still stop at 10 with the expansion pack or whether they will scale higher with the higher level cap; otherwise, they become worth relatively less, as 30 Agility is more meaningful at 50 than 60; or not, if the stat cap stays at 500.

If the cap does not rise, we will very soon have more ranks available than necessary. There will be options. This is a neat notion to me. Currently, you have quite a bit ahead of you if you want to cap anything. There is a more or less continuous group going in Sarnur for people farming trolls. You will likely hit the experience cap long long before you run out of quests, and there are always several ways to go about seeking experience. It might be nice to provide similar trait options.

I cannot see anyone killing 360 worms in Ram Duath if there are other options. It might be meaningful to developers to see which deeds fall in the category of “only if I need it, only if there is no other way.” That data is probably spoiled by incorrigible completists like me. Like me and half the other gamers in the world.

: Zubon

Translations and Mistranslations

Published by Julian on 30 Jul 2008 in World of Warcraft. 17 Comments

So, WoW finally opened up its Latin American servers this past 25th, and made available a localization and language pack to go with it (optional, though. you can play just fine on Latin American servers with the good ol’ vanilla English client and launcher). Being the native Spanish speaker that I am, I decided to give it a whirl. See if I could get in touch with a few friends from really down south and get together in-game.

But nothing could prepare me for the translation to Spanish. How do I want to put it? Okay, let’s try this: It’s repugnant. How about that? Need more qualifiers? Happy to oblige: Obscure, Nonsensical, halfway between machine translation and surrealism.

I won’t make a laundry list of all its sins. But having done a lot of translation work in the past myself, I had to switch back to English before my liver gave up the ghost. I can mention a few things, though:

Continue reading ‘Translations and Mistranslations’

Improving Auction Houses

Published by Zubon on 30 Jul 2008 in City of Heroes/Villains, EVE Online and General. 5 Comments

There are few improvements to be made on EVE Online’s economic tools. The more your system resembles that, the better.

Buy orders are a key feature. Most systems lack this, but it is the “Buy It Now” equivalent for the seller. It would improve economic efficiency enormously. Creating a market is hard, and letting either buyers or sellers make the first offer will encourage more use.

Continue reading ‘Improving Auction Houses’

Appearance: Achievement or Individualism?

Published by Zubon on 29 Jul 2008 in City of Heroes/Villains, Everquest 2, General and Lord of the Rings Online. 6 Comments

Can you identify the hardest-to-get weapons in your game? How about the tiers of armor for your class? Can you tell how far someone is into the endgame based on what s/he is wearing? This is the standard item-based model of character (appearance) customization. There may be options to make your orc 5% bulkier or give your elf fourteen shades of blue or green eyes, but it will be covered by equipment anyway. Making yourself look interesting is almost always a result of making yourself powerful, and your appearance suggests your capabilities. The guys in those robes heal, and the guys in those robes blow things up, and the guy in that hat is obviously very experienced. Looking good is a reward worth working for, and it immediately commands the appropriate respect from the knowledgeable (and often wonder from the ignorant).

Or is form radically separate from function? City of Heroes gives you almost all the costume items up front. Norrath and Middle Earth have cosmetic tabs for equipment to cover your mismatched raid gear (a half-measure to let you lock in your favorite achievement-based appearance). In a world where the same gesture might be a sword-slash or a fireball-toss, there is no need to connect how something looks to what it does. This allows the maximum of customization and individualization, and it can come as early as you like. I have seen swordfights somewhere between a feline hominid and a lightsaber-wielding lesbian mermaid slave; spectators included several librarians, someone in an oversized cowboy hat, and a robot-thing with a cow levitating over it. None of these had special abilities.

You can cross the two a bit. Item-based systems have dyes for customization, although the colors can still signify wealth levels. Function-free systems can have unlockable pieces or categories, like City of Heroes auras that are available after level 30, costume sets reserved for long-time subscribers, or weapons that require certain badges (and you can bet I show off my Rikti Axe).

Is one better, or is it a matter of taste? I often enjoy a connection between form and function, such as making the meaner monsters bigger. You can even reverse the two standards: have item-based play that does not affect appearance (like Diablo II sockets or City of Heroes enhancements) or non-item play that ties appearance options to accomplishments.

: Zubon

Yeah, I keep citing City of Heroes here. I have played a few years of it, and its costume designer is still the industry benchmark.

Server Issues

Published by Zubon on 26 Jul 2008 in Lord of the Rings Online. 5 Comments

Book 14 went live this week. Players have wondered a bit about the “players must do this 1/day quest 70,000 times before the new zone will open.” Depending on how many high-level characters your server has, that is up to a month to unlock. There is more or less continual speculation that the zone is not done, or at least has not been tested.

Something about Book 14 was not tested, because the game has not run properly all week. The mail or auction house might stop working for hours. You might rubberband or hit invisible walls. The invisible walls are the most interesting to me, because they show how the game divides up the zones. Many of the walls align with existing terrain features like shrubs, hills, and fences.

I was in The Shire when the latest wave of server wonkiness hit. I was trying to run the mail quests on a new character, but I could not cross an open field. I ended up mapping the range of those invisible walls, since I ran other miscellaneous quests that took me to the wall on the far west, and I found the corner where it met the south wall. Unfortunately, that was on a slope. Hop down the hill, bounce back, fall, bounce, fall, bounce, motion sickness. /stuck still worked, so it looked like I was tap-dancing in place for the minute it took to engage. And then I was at a loading screen until I alt-tabbed.

Servers went down at least twice on Friday. Depending on your time zone, the current downtime might have come on Friday, too. Servers are down as I type this, a 7 hour downtime on Friday night. Someone is having a late night in Westwood, after the previous fixes failed to take. Either time.

: Zubon

I haven’t seen much that is new, just lots of new rewards for the old. Lots of rebalancing and bug fixes, some new bugs added. I’m not to Book 14 yet. I did the Moria prelude: underwhelming, but it must appeal to some folks’ RP sensibilities. Except that I can still see all the fellowship members, even though I watched them leave. Which is probably necessary since they are the contacts for your legendary trait books.

ESL in /gu

Published by Zubon on 25 Jul 2008 in General. 4 Comments

I want to ask if some people in my guild are non-native speakers. I was thinking of going with “where are you from?” and hoping the answer is Germany (or such). Maybe ask about a time zone.

I think it would cause unnecessary unhappiness in guild chat if I were to ask directly. If the person is a native speaker, his natural follow-up question is, “Why do you ask?” My other guesses were “small child,” “illiterate,” “stupid,” “lazy,” or “family pet”; “foreign” seemed like the most charitable assumption.

: Zubon

(”Foreign” is not a bad thing. It is an explanation for why they cannot speak English very well. My Spanish isn’t so good. They have worthwhile thoughts that they have trouble expressing. If he is just stupid, that is really the best I can hope for.)

Too Soon?

Published by Zubon on 24 Jul 2008 in General. 10 Comments

We are approaching the end of the first presidency since the invention of lolcats. The idea struck us: why don’t we write a visual history of the administration in lolcat? Maybe start with a cat dangling from something “hai im chad”; segue into a picture of Justice Scalia with “u can has presidency.” “Invisible WMD” on a map of Iraq seems obvious. Then the problem arose: is there any tasteful way to make a 9/11 lolcat? “Oh noes” just doesn’t seem to cover it.

: Zubon

Online Surveying Bleg

Published by Zubon on 23 Jul 2008 in Asides. 2 Comments

My workplace would like to do an online survey, but we do not have the capacity to recruit survey participants. We can write the survey, but putting it on Survey Monkey and asking around will not do it for us. I have taken surveys through Greenfield Online, but I have no idea what online survey companies there are, who is good, etc. Can anyone recommend an online surveying firm that supplies its own respondents? We are going to be looking for a limited age range and geographic area (of the United States).

Thanks!

: Zubon

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