I have written previously about storyline paths differing between development and live teams in MMOs. I find myself looking at recent Guild Wars 2 updates and wondering whether there was a change in development teams or the same team deciding to shift directions. One could easily look at the first year of GW2 and say, … Continue reading Shifting Priorities
A friend in college had an unusual day in dance class: “run slowly,” his instructor said. He realized that, while he could run, he knew it as a single activity and had great trouble analyzing it to a series of individual steps and motions. He did it unthinkingly. Programmers and industrial/organizational psychologists will be familiar … Continue reading Awareness of Individual Actions
I’m not much one for cinematics, but this is a nice close-up view of some League of Legends champions. On the gripping hand, it does not really show off what League of Legends is about. It is mostly one-on-one fights, which shows off the champions well, but it involves neither laning nor team fights. If … Continue reading [LoL] A Twist of Fate
We have several commenters on the last post citing the problem as “overthinking”: optimization is sort of prisoners’ dilemma, in which optimization (defection) takes the fun out of the game, but if you don’t optimize (cooperate), you’ll be excluded from some significant portion of the game/community. By this logic, everyone would be happier playing with … Continue reading Overthinking
On one hand, this is a really great post about PvP from the perspective of someone with that K orientation who wants a PvP-based game. Syncaine makes all the points you would want about why someone wants PvP with consequences and who the niche is, with the awareness that it is a much smaller market … Continue reading Meaningful PvP
Yesterday’s comments prompted a weird proposal: remove enemy levels entirely. For those of you who do not know City of Heroes’ giant monster code, they treat all characters as even-level. You should have the same chance to hit (and debuff effect, armor, etc.) as everyone else, and you receive level-appropriate damage; I think damage does … Continue reading Make Them All Giant Monsters