Month: May 2009

.

Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

.

/afk

I won’t be posting much at all in the next following days for a very powerful reason: We’re moving to a new house. That includes of course packing all the stuff, transporting it, unpacking it, arranging it nicely and falling over from exhaustion.

This also includes having to deal with changing our internet provider. Unfortunately I could only choose between Comcast or AT&T for my cable/dsl needs, which is the same as saying “Would you rather be stabbed in the back or in the chest?”. Marginally, I decided to go with AT&T, but I have no idea when I’ll have internet at the new place.

The good news is I’ll finally be able to rejoin the ranks of those having decent internet. 6 meg pipe and better latency, hopefully. There’s just that matter of… yeah… when, you know, it will be installed and all.

At any rate, we’re very, very happy with our new home (it will be our first time as homeowners). I’m just dreading the actual “move your stuff” phase.

See you all soon. Fair winds, good pings, nice drops, great times.

Needless Buttons, or On Skill Wrongdoings

We become attached to skills, especially the ones that are used less.  We become masters of knowing when to pull at that situational godsend.  Then the developers take it away, or muddle it to the point where our mastery becomes nothing.  Skill balances like this happen all the time, but there are things far worse… and they just happened, again.

ArenaNet made the genius move of splitting skills in PvE and PvP.  Before they did that it was a complete mess.  They would balance the skill, and it would get abused in Guild vs. Guild.  Then they would nerf it to stop the spamming in PvP only to find that they ruined a few PvE builds.  Consequently, boss X became impossible.  It was a balance-puzzle they could never win, especially when nearly each year players got a massive glut of more skills from the new campaigns and expansions.  So great, skills are split.  Now something closer to balance is achieved in both PvE and PvP more easily.  A greater problem occurs when balance cannot be achieved, even with the split, with how the skill can maintain functionality.

Continue reading Needless Buttons, or On Skill Wrongdoings

Matrix Goes Offline

Word has dropped on The Matrix Online forums that the end is near: July 31, 2009.

In May 2004, I embarked upon a journey. I decided to take the red pill in a big way—I became the online community lead for The Matrix Online. Later that year, many of you joined me as you jacked in for the first time. It was a brand new world—a vision of online games that didn’t involve elves, spaceships, or dragons. We became part of the Matrix storyline; living our own adventures in the world painted by the movies.

It seems not so long ago I was jumping into Mara Central and going toe-to-toe with other devs at E3 2004. I had no idea this journey would take me to a whole different company, managing a major revision of the game, and my first producing gig. “Long, strange trip” doesn’t describe the half of it.

Now we’ve seen how far the rabbit hole goes and it’s time to wake up from that dream (or go back to sleep, depending how you look at it). On July 31, 2009, we will be jacking out for the last time. It’s a bittersweet moment for everyone involved with the game; as a player or as a developer.

It has been a good run. Where many games have fizzled out before or shortly after launch, by August we will have lived on in our home at SOE for more than 4 years. To this day, I have never worked with a community as dedicated as The Matrix Online community.

I’ll be at Fan Faire this year showing The Agency and hanging out with any redpills making the trip. The past couple years have been a blast, so I hope to see some of you there again..

The team will also be whipping up an end-of-the-world event. It won’t be quite the same as having over 100 developers in the game as Agents like when we ended beta, but we have 4 years of tricks up our sleeve. It’ll be a chance to revisit all the things that make MxO the memorable experience it is. And how could we pull the plug without crushing everyone’s RSI just one more time?

I have a lot of fond memories from my years working on MxO. We’ve had a good time in the Machines’ little playground and will be sad to see it end. I hope everyone enjoys the last few months of playing The Matrix Online.

See you on the other side.

Daniel “Walrus” Myers

– Ethic

Passive-Aggressive Help

Thanks to Jong for the link: Let me Google that for you. This is a more polite and useful version of Just F’ing Google It, which spells out F’ing if your workplace or parents are very sensitive about that kind of thing.

Lifehacker provides my title, along with some relevant commentary about being a jerk when answering questions this way. It also provides the critically useful Let me Rickroll that for you. As commenters there point out, good keyword and searching skills really are skills, which is why librarians will rock you. But it takes less time to Google something than to type the question.

: Zubon

2,000 Posts

We just hit another milestone here at KTR: 2,000 posts (with 12,000+ comments). Let’s take a quick look at some of the numbers behind that number.

Busiest months:
1. October 2008 – 82 posts
2. April 2009 – 69 posts
3. May 2009 – 61 posts (so far)

Most popular topic:
1. World of Warcraft – 282 posts
2. City of Heroes/Villains – 224 posts
3. Lord of the Rings Online – 214 posts

Busiest authors:
1. Zubon – 910 posts
2. Ethic – 577 posts
3. Ravious – 88 posts

Zubon is a machine. Oops, I wasn’t supposed to let that secret out!

– Ethic

Arena.Net: Set my people free

I’ve been revisiting Guild Wars lately (btw, the Zaishen quests seemed to reactivate things somewhat, so kudos there). If you’ve been reading these pages for a while, you know GW has a special place in my heart. No, I’m not married to it, it’s not even my girlfriend or a crush or anything like that. But it’s been a good friend, and we had a lot of fun together over the years.

Nobody’s perfect, though. However, just as in real life, you glance over other people’s imperfections just to maintain your sanity and play well with others. The problem with GW-as-a-friend is, to put it quite simply, it’s a very bossy friend. It’s a good friend, no doubt about it, fun to be with, special and entertaining. But there’s no escaping its rails; most of the time you do things the way GW wants you to do them, and may God help you.

With GW2 around the corner (ha!) maybe there’s still time for Arena.Net to take a look at the new friend they’re building up, and maybe make it a little bit more accomodating. The dynamics, I think, definitely need to change and players need to be given more freedoms.

Continue reading Arena.Net: Set my people free

Light Themes

You know, MMO’s aren’t particulary good at theming.

Take the medic class in Star Wars Galaxies.  Sure, when the game launched you could be a doctor and sit at the hospital doing doctor things, but today’s medic is more combat oriented.  The purpose of having a medic to take into groups is clearly driven by the tried-and-tested gameplay mechanic of having a healer in a group along with a tank and someone to deal out the damage.  The medic as it stands today, doesn’t really resemble any kind of medical professional, either in reality or in Star Wars.

This medic class can instantly heal a person who’s running and shooting with a “bacta bomb” or heal an entire group of people in mid-combat with a “bacta spray”.  Playing a medic doesn’t feel like playing a medic.  It feels like playing an MMO healer with skills like “group heal” and “single-target heal”.

To be fair, playing a healer in fantasy MMOs doesn’t fair much better.  You know if you pick a priest in a game that you won’t be doing much praying.  You won’t have to attend church or give any sermons.  You’re going to run around clicking buttons that make your friend’s health-meter go up.

Continue reading Light Themes

Redefining Value

I have changed my mind completely. For most people, MMOs are horrible entertainment value for their cost. This is by design: the mechanics stretch the content across the maximum time possible, rather than deliver the fun in the most efficient and effective way. The money cost is cents per hour, but the time cost per entertainment unit is far larger than in other forms of entertainment.

Continue reading Redefining Value

Chipotle MMO, Redux

Paul Barnett, Mythic’s Creative Director, is front-lining a round of some very interesting interviews.  MMOGamer has a brutally honest interview where the interviewer explains exactly why he stopped playing Warhammer Online.  The piece seems very real and far away from any marketing agenda.  There is also a video interview at Able Gamers, which is quite good.  I love how Barnett explains things.  He should have been in What the #$*! Do We Know!? or Life After People to also give his thoughts on quantum spirituality and mass extinction.

Anyway, in a follow up to the post on a highly-focused Chipotle MMO, I wanted to present an idea that Barnett gears toward in both interviews: asset-light games.  Two snips from the interviews:

We’re getting more casual players, and wider audiences who are less obsessed with the old-school. You’ve got people who want to have their gaming time defined. “I’ve got half an hour before I’m going out. I know playing this game will only take half an hour,” or “I’ve got to put the kids to bed. I know that if I let them play this game, I can say ‘you’ve got one more level’,” knowing that one more level means 30 minutes and you can get them to bed. (from MMOGamer, emphasis mine)

So I think in the modern era you’re going to see more and more asset-light online games.  You’re not going to see as many asset-heavy online games, purely because they cost too much money and I think that that’s how the market is going to diverge.  So you’re going to have people who do things like . . they want to play Fishing online, asset-light.  They throw the rod with their iphone.  They really knock in buy using their little finger and they catch fish and they feel very happy, and it’s a sort of very shallow, very quick game and it doesn’t really take much effort.  You play it maybe for a total of maybe 5-hours in your life but you play it in 2-minute chunks.  There are going to be more games like that . . . fun, interesting. (from Able Gamers, emphasis mine)

 I completely agree with Barnett.  More and more online games are going to be designed for specific activities for a specific amount of time.  I can only imagine what would happen if Popcap (you know, the other game company that prints their own currency) decided to make an MMO, but I would bet my bank account it would be a Chipotle MMO.

–Ravious
I’ll just ask the first sand creature I run into

Hat Tip: Sanya Weathers at MMORPG Examiner