Month: March 2011

Prior Art and Three-Month Games

Most of you are probably reading gaming blogs for news and drama, but if you are interested in issues of game design and business, you should go read the archives of Biting the Hand, dating back to 1997. I read the entire thing, along with the Tweety and Lum archives, before starting blogging. I should probably re-read it.

One reason Jessica Mulligan stopped writing Biting the Hand is that she was repeating herself. She was tired of pointing out the same lessons repeatedly as developers made the same mistakes. You could run your own blog for a couple of years just updating her columns with recent examples. Skimming, it is interesting to see how much times have changed and how much they have stayed the same.

To take an example, the February 1998 column, “Online Gaming: Why Won’t They Come?” has a pair of tables that I always think of when a new game launches. For those of you not pursuing links, it explains the subscription pattens of online games. Well-managed games rise for three or four months, dip when the buzz of initial release dies down, then get a word-of-mouth bump before settling into a long-term, stable population. Poorly managed games never come back from that initial dip, losing at least half their peak within the first year. So I always think of games as about to meet their fate around the four-month point. This column was the first thing on my mind when, 13 years later, I saw Keen’s recent post on three-month games. Wait, failed online games have always been 3-monthers. The issue of the moment is “theme park vs. sandbox” instead of “customer service,” but as Keen expands his inquiry in the comments, he increasingly is getting back to 1998. (And, as far as I can tell, is calling for someone to develop EQ or pre-NGE SWG.)

Of course, you can wonder whether developers are repeating old mistakes or embracing them as a new model. My college buddies switched gaming obsessions every 3 or 4 months. If you are expecting most of your players to do that, why bother to build a game with a year of content? Embrace churn, invest in advertising instead, and plan to invite those players back in a year when you have another few months of content. Whiners will leave no matter what you do, fanboys will subscribe on almost pure hope, so triage suggests focusing on the squishy middle.

: Zubon

See also September 1998, at which time Blizzard was the small, innovative company used as a contrast to the sclerotic corporate behemoths.

The Essential Scatter

As fun as I had last time around in my guild’s massive Gloamwood event, I noticed a flaw. Or rather, I saw the flaw in another form. It’s a unique flaw that has been appearing more in the age of public grouping. Let us call it “the zerg.” The zerg is a group of overwhelming force of otherwise unimpressive individuals, and a zerg in an event usually emits a strong gravitational pull entrapping other players. It’s not a unique thing, as its been for as long as there has been open world PvP (if not longer). Yet, it comes across as something different, possibly fouler, when the zerg’s opponent is the system.

Near the end of the Gloamwood crusade, I was starting to get bored. I was thoroughly enjoying all the camaraderie, but the game was being distilled down to merely following the herd and firing off as many spam skills as I could before whatever was targeted inevitably popped. The system was stretching to the outer limits of its “balancing.” Yet, there were far too many players for it to respond in a useful way. This is when the system needs for players to scatter.

Continue reading The Essential Scatter

Sari-Surma: An Example of Reasonable Puzzle Bosses

This week’s update to The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ brings with it a new instance cluster: 2 small fellowship, 2 full fellowship, and 1 raid. My first partaking was one of the full fellowship dungeons, Sari-Surma, and let me compliment the developers on using new abilities and mechanics in a way that feels fresh, difficult, but not unfair.

We have previously cited problems with puzzle bosses in MMOs and the particular difficulty with that given LotRO’s icons. I must admit to paying a fair amount of attention to icons, but the fights in Sari-Surma had several elements that made their use of both new and old mechanics fair, challenging, and mostly entertaining. This is especially important when they are bragging about adding hundreds of new abilities to the enemies.

First, the trash preceding a boss uses the same/similar abilities, or the boss will summon those trash as minions. This makes the trash fights a learning opportunity, not a waste of time. Continue reading Sari-Surma: An Example of Reasonable Puzzle Bosses

[Rift] Events, Chapter 2

Last night, Chapter 2 of my guild’s epic Rift journey started in Gloamwood. Thankfully with my horse-plodding advancement pace, I had just hit the near-end of Gloamwood’s quest cycle by the start of the event. The guild event was a lot of fun, and we opened up Gloamwood’s “mega-event” The Purging of Gloamwood Pines. It seems that our glorious guild leader heard through the direct-source grape-vine that cleansing the zone of small events is one of the best ways to start a zone-wide event. The grape-vine hoped that my guild could “double-check” this functionality, and it appears to be working.

So far I have felt that the events I saw were not to full potential. There are nearby events that appear in the quest tracker when a player gets within some distance. These are the rifts themselves with their offshoots, footholds and invasion forces, which are all one-offs. Destroy the foothold, kill the invading force leader, or close the multi-stage rift, and the event is gone. Then there are zone-wide events, which many call invasions. Everybody in the zone is notified via flavor text and the quest tracker update. Those that I’ve seen so far are simply a mass spawn of rifts and invasion forces followed by a boss that appears after so many rifts and/or invasion forces are dealt with. Continue reading [Rift] Events, Chapter 2

Blogworthiness

Would anyone want to read the story of your life? On a gaming scale, would recounting your adventures of the day sound like an adventure? For we the bloggers, one way of measuring how interesting a play session was is whether there was anything worth blogging. If you did not do anything worth speaking of, why did you do it?

Contrast: Ravious is blogging daily about his adventures in Rift, while I mentally summarized my weekend play as “I did two quest hubs worth of Forochel on my new Warden.” New and exciting tends towards extremes of good and bad, with new insights to be had, while my third trip through Forochel yields nothing new. A strong argument against the twentieth day of running dailies plus an instance is that your only likely story is that someone you grouped with was brilliant/awful.

If your story is not growing, you are not growing.

: Zubon

[Rift] Social Work

My last post exploring a phenomenon I saw in Rift created a swath of great comments that cross a broad spectrum of ideals. The issue was how evidential of, well, anything is the post-event public group scatter. My favorite was from coppertopper who said that the phenomenon was like “a comedic aside on a system that works so well, the only thing to pick on is no one stays around for a group hug after the event is finished.”

There is an interesting prejudice with what is required to “be social” in an MMO. “Social” at its base is activity in a group. Driving a car on a crowded freeway is a social activity. I can’t selfishly do what I want. I have to respond to other people. It doesn’t seem social since all the other people are hidden behind a ton of metal and plastic, but we are all acting as a group. We know that if we all follow the rules and remain within set social boundaries, we will all get to work more efficiently.

Continue reading [Rift] Social Work

[GW2] PAX Chat With Jeff Grubb

I had just introduced myself to a legend. Jeff Grubb was one of the first ArenaNet devs I started talking to at the NCSoft Meet and Greet at PAX East. He recognized my name, and I apologized for being a thorn in his side ever-seeking answers to the deep lore of Guild Wars. It was just that this man had helped build a world so deep and mysterious that lore-delvers, like myself, were constantly trying to make sense of it all. This was not the first world he had touched, as Grubb had helped build many of the most famous Dungeons and Dragons worlds. Like all the ArenaNet developers I would meet that night he bled enthusiasm, his infectious laugh hinted at the fact he kept lore secrets that would drive Cthulhu mad, and it was apparent that, like the man said, Grubb contained multitudes.

Continue reading [GW2] PAX Chat With Jeff Grubb

[Rift] The Scatter of Shame

Melmoth over at KIASA analogizes the open-grouping system in Rift with some comedic situations. For as far as I have gone in Rift, I tend to disagree. I have yet to feel that my “personal” game space has been invaded. Yet, there is a personal downside. Let’s call it the scatter of shame. Going off Melmoth’s last situation involving his wife and many partners, there is another moment where everybody is finished with Melmoth’s wife and the party is over. People still have to run by Melmoth, scamper down the hallway, and jet out of Melmoth’s house. Everybody tries to do it without looking at each other (or Melmoth). No one seems to want to bond or mention that they just partied together and there may be other similar events going on elsewhere.

It’s like a race to see who can exit the raid the fastest. I still think this is another symptom of the solitary events. Perhaps if events fed into one another in a more elegant way, people would forge bonds more similarly to a dungeon crawl than a pity group to share a slow-spawning quest mob. It actually occurs in invasions as well because after a rift is closed half the raid might go one way, another quarter might decide to head to the main hub, and the rest decide to all go bio. They might forget to leave so when I finally hit the next event destination half of the raid has wasted space. It’s just easier to leave the public raid right away and rejoin close to the event.

Trion Worlds next grouping mechanic will be a way to form a group, but I really hope they start taking note of ways to keep a group together post-event. Then again this all might just belong in the personal preference bin. I’m not sure. System flaw or subjective flack?

–Ravious

 

To Create and Destroy

Games, even violent ones, frequently create situations where it is easier to create than destroy. Well, no, it is easier to delete a level-capped character than to build one, but in the normal course of MMO play, even your most destructive actions tend to build rather than destroy.

In the modern parlance, “RPG” means “character advancement.” This is what you are building. While your actions on-screen involve stabbing things and setting them on fire, everyone you kill gets better within 120 seconds while the experience you gain is permanent (outside old-school EQ). You earn money faster than you can reasonably burn it, and some games include character advancement while you sleep.

Are there any in-game actions that would actually harm Azeroth? You could hack the servers, you could reduce Blizzard’s revenue by being enough of a jerk to drive away players, but could you actually destroy Stormwind, defeat the Horde, or even permanently kill a single wolf? The worst you can do is throw away your own advancement or impede others’ in limited ways.

Everywhere else in your life, building is hard. Left alone, things fall apart. Reality is a treadmill, where your house and body need maintenance just to avoid getting worse. Bullets are cheaper and more effective than equipment for keeping them out of people. Kipple accumulates. It can be pleasant to pretend that things out of sight remain as they were instead of atrophying and decaying.

: Zubon

[Rift] A Lock of Genius

SynCaine spoke on this already, but the “coin lock” feature is seriously a “duh” moment. I definitely appreciate the fact that I can log on to my Rift account from any computer to play, but seriously. Basically, if the account logs in from, say for a completely random country chosen at random, China then the account will go in to locked mode, which does makes it so funds/materials cannot be liquidated and characters cannot be deleted. Tampering down the accessibility just a little for a significant trade off of having increased account safety is well worth it. It appears that players are getting the “coin lock” feature in the update for Rift today. I already did this with Steam’s version, Steam Guard, and I am really glad that the PC gaming industry giant is also helping to lead this change.

Blizzard’s authentication device was cool, but Trion Worlds is also working on another way to authenticate using text messaging or a mobile phone app. They really are working hard for subscription fees. I hope future games, especially ones already dedicated to having mobile phone apps, take note.

–Ravious