Monthly Archive for October, 2009

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Hunting With Nesingwary

Posted by Zubon on October 28, 2009 in World of Warcraft. 3 Comments

Glad ye could make it to Northrend, lad! I knew ye cut yer teeth on raptors and wee elephants in the last hunts, but now yer in the real game. We’re settin’ ye against the fiercest cats in these lands, but only to prepare ye for the greatest of them, a beast so fierce we only know it exists because of the people who ne’er came back! And how about a rhinoceros so singular that ye’ll need to invoke the spirits of the dead to find it? Of course, we could not let ye go without a bit of crocodile wrestling, although the crocodiles’ kneecaps will be higher than yer head. Does pulling the teeth from live, 30-foot long cobras sound exciting? And ye’ll get to kill some zebra-striped giraffes.

“Excuse me, what was that last one?”

Longneck grazers. Four-legged things with brown bodies, long necks, gazelle horns, and zebra-striped legs. Kill some.

“…”

Look, we’re hungry out here. Unless you brought some tacos from Dalaran, giraffe steak it is.

: Zubon

First 30 minutes with Torchlight

Posted by Julian on October 27, 2009 in Torchlight. 6 Comments

If Torchlight doesn’t become wildly successful then I don’t know anything anymore. What a wonderful game.

Borderlands Bulletpoints

Posted by Ravious on October 27, 2009 in Borderlands. 8 Comments

Actually just for Bonedead, it will be a numbered list.  Heretoforth:

  1. It is very much in some large venn-diagram with MMOs, but the face of its father is squarely in an FPS.  It has kill ten rats quests, pick ten flowers quests, and quest chains.
  2. It would be an MMO if persistence was irrelevant.  Up to 4 players can play at any time, but one player owns the persistent world.  All players will still advance their own quests, achievements, etc.
  3. The gun-porn loot pinata is crucial.  The more people playing the better the loot.  Solo players might get bored pretty quickly.  If opening up an MMO loot pinata does not give you some twinge of serotonin, this game might not be for you.
  4. PC users have to deal with opening ports. GAH!
  5. The graphics are great even at low settings.  I’ll take cell-shaded stylized graphics over hyper-realism anyday.
  6. The level disparity is ridiculous.  The game punishes players for going much above their level, but anything below the level gets popped pretty easily.  I’ve also heard that grouping up with a higher leveled friend equals advancement city.
  7. Did I tell you about the magical gun-porn loot pinata that can give you a shotgun that shoots rockets!?
  8. The story is good, in that, there is just more reason to use the brand new guns that dropped out of the vending machines and puke piles to put more bullets in to enemies.  It doesn’t pretend to be any heavier/complex than the actual game is.
  9. The classes are generally good, but some seem a lot slower due to the cooldown on each class’s one skill.  I am sure it is balanced on some level, but it doesn’t feel that way when I have to wait nearly two minutes to use mine every time while my Siren friend pops hers every half-minute.
  10. For Bonedead especially, Nine Toes has three balls.

–Ravious
and that’s why we call it a “zoo”

Do You Click on Mystery Threads?

Posted by Zubon on October 27, 2009 in General. 13 Comments

My post titles are usually subject headings or literary references. You usually know what you are getting from the title and category, and if you do not care about Champions Online or crafting, you can skip those posts easily enough. I am fond of meta-data that helps us improve the noise:signal ratio.

I frequently see forum posts with titles like:

  • Just one question…
  • Devs, what are you thinking?!
  • ridle me this
  • A humble request

These are just bottles with “drink me” on the tag. There is no indication of what might be inside, and there is a very good chance that it is poison. But there are also some great gems and good discussions. (I just leapt off that metaphor.)

I guess this is a question of how you deal with sources with a middling signal:noise ratio. I like sources near 1:0 or 0:1, because I can track the former and ignore the latter. I am not sure where my cutoff is for willingness to dig through trash in search of gems.

: Zubon

Wow, that last sentence applies pretty broadly, doesn’t it?

Ignoring the Approaching Diku Gate

Posted by Ravious on October 26, 2009 in Lord of the Rings Online. 16 Comments

The foreboding Gygaxian DIKU gate is imminently approaching in Lord of the Rings Online.  We are given until December 1, 2009 for the Mines of Moria iteration.  Then, the Siege of Mirkwood power levels are deployed.  Following the usual formula, your hard earned gear is washed away as more powerful boars and spiders resist laugh at your feeble Morian might.  At least on my server, it seems, no one cares.

I just bought a new ring at the sizeable price of 4 gold.  I didn’t need the ring per se, but at a 33% discount from the usual market price it felt like I was making a good decision.  My stats were buffed the usual 2%, and I had another teal to adorn my indigo-hued Captain.  People are still buying my black dye, and my top tier morale potions seem to sell within the hour.  Shouldn’t we all know that within a month all of this will be for naught?

People are still working on radiance gear in the Moria instance cluster, the Watcher and Turtle are weekly runs for many, and generally the heroes fighting the denizens of the deep are unaware of the war-hippies’ plans to attack Southern Mirkwood.  Maybe all at once the cultural focus will shift from advancement to preparation.  Open beta perhaps?  Until then, ignorance is bliss.

–Ravious
a child said, what is grass

Steam ID

Posted by Zubon on October 26, 2009 in Borderlands and Team Fortress 2. 3 Comments

I keep forgetting to mention: I am Zubon on Steam. Feel free to add me, and we can shoot at/with each other. Borderlands is almost here. I’m a Team Fortress 2 regular, but I never got much use out of Left 4 Dead.

: Zubon

Power of 10 Achievements

Posted by Zubon on October 26, 2009 in General. 5 Comments

One way to run achievements is to encourage breadth. Have achievements for doing everything once or a few times. Complete this dungeon, kill ten rats, cook every type of pie. I advocate this for Explorers, of which I am one. It encourages players to see all of your content, therefore extending the time until they get to the end and complain that there is nothing to do, while rewarding long-duration playthroughs. It can increase retention that way while serving as a checklist for players looking for something to do. It can also be expensive, because you need an entirely new thing every time you add achievements.

One way to run achievements is to encourage grinding. Have achievements for doing things repeatedly. Complete this dungeon 10 times, kill ten thousand rats, cook one hundred pies. I advocate this for Achievers, which I am secondarily. If you are going to track and display how many rats Bob has killed, as I think you should, you can then tack awards onto it. This is easy to develop, because you just add a name for each power of 10 for each enemy type. You get that Explorer award for the first kill of each enemy type, then add another tier for 10, 100, 1000, …, 100,000,000. You do not even need names for all of them at the start, because you will have lots of time between the time he becomes Bob the Super-Epic Ratslayer for 100,000,000 rats and Bob the [prefix] Ratslayer for 1,000,000,000 rats. Then add meta-achievements, for having killed 100 of everything. This means that there is always something more to do, more to Achieve, and it can increase retention with a never-ending checklist. Not everyone will pursue it, but if people will pay you to run on an achievement treadmill, set it up and take their credit card information.

The latter idea came to me first, and I find myself turning away from it. First, I would not want to do it myself. If I played a game for 10 years, it might be nice to know that I had killed 2,405,353 goblins, but then again I might see that (or my /played) and think of what else I could be doing with my life, and I certainly do not need the logarythmically extending bars ever before me. Also, I think it would encourage aberrant gameplay. If there is some reward, any reward, for killing ten million rats, someone will do it. You may not like what they do to optimize rat-killing time. Without the impetus to exploit them, certain holes and bugs could just sit there until you get that far down your priority list, instead of having the forums burning up with the implications. You can also burn out players that way, ones who start to see through the grind and wonder why they are killing that next million rats.

I suppose that is a financial decision. Which is the larger pool of subscriber dollars: retention of obsessives or loss of burnouts? Since I personally would not want to be racing that treadmill, I would fall on the “loss” side. But you will always make more money on the mass market betting against my preferences, so let the eternal achievements go forth for greater profits.

: Zubon

Subtlety in Blogging

Posted by Zubon on October 25, 2009 in General. 2 Comments

The brilliance of this post is only somewhat marred by several commenters’ explaining what is going on. This post does something similar in the opposite way, and it takes a bit longer for the spoiler comment to point it out.

: Zubon

So, what am I missing?

Posted by Julian on October 24, 2009 in General. 20 Comments

I have to conclude I’m either missing things, or doing them terribly wrong. Just to give it a fairer shake (and to keep Psychochild from hitting me below the belt) I went ahead and grabbed a trial key for Fallen Earth. I didn’t think it twice when I saw them available because, one, that was one of my original semi-complaints -the lack of a trial- and two, it wouldn’t be the first time I had to eat crow about a game I originally disliked for whatever reason and ended up winning me over big time. I don’t mind being proven wrong if I end up with a good game.

Problem is, it’s not really clicking. In fact, something funny happened; my original complaints about the visuals, while not entirely invalidated after judging the game “the way it’s meant to be judged”(tm), have been lessened. While the rest of the stuff in the game, which I had no way of experiencing from mere screenshots and which I had assumed to be good because of comments from a lot people whose opinion I value, ended up being quite the disappointment.

Let’s go piece by piece, like Jack the Ripper:

Continue reading ‘So, what am I missing?’

Expectation of Balance

Posted by Suzina on October 24, 2009 in Lord of the Rings Online. 10 Comments

What follows is, a nitty gritty nerdy look at certain legacies on legendary items and class balance, so be warned.

Some time ago, I was trying to determine the value of different fire legacies on runekeeper items by determining their exact relation to the dps of runekeeper skills. There were two legacies which were causing me confusion. One of those legacies was called “Wrath of Flame Damage Over Time” and the other was called “Fire Skill Damage”. Because every single runekeeper fire skill does damage-over-time and every single runekeeper fire skill is considered a “Wrath of Flame” skill, I found this to be confusing. I thought that there must be a reason behind their separation. I thought that if one effected “Damage over time” specifically, the other must somehow… not do that.
Continue reading ‘Expectation of Balance’