Author Archive for Zubon

Page 3 of 165

Time Consumption

Posted by Zubon on April 18, 2012 in General and Guild Wars 2. 8 Comments

I have been looking at my /played, and I am not convinced that a MMO has hundreds or thousands of times the enjoyment of Portal or Portal 2. There is a lot more to do, but there is also a lot more of “something to do.”

I am increasingly looking to entertainment that does not have a quota of content to fill. The need to have another episode, another hour of play, another month of subscription fees can be productive, but it also leads to filler. When I read George Martin, I really believe that he needs another 500,000 words to tell his next story arc. He is not fulfilling a contract requirement. When I see a TV show that was written to last 1 or 2 or 3 seasons, I am thrilled, because the creators had a story to tell. When the initial story is over and they are stretching for 100 episodes, maybe they found a great take on “the continuing adventures of…” or maybe they just wanted to get enough for syndication.

Despite this, I know I will continue to spend more time on things that are designed to take up time rather than continuously finding new sources of great, dense content. The world seems basically structured for that, and trying “just one” will consume as much time as twenty entertainment sources that chose to refine rather than bloat. Star Wars: TOR seems to have fallen on both sides of this problem: it is story-based, so it has a finite end point at which players quite; it is an MMO and yet another Star Wars tie-in, so it will “supplement” whatever story it has with bloat like mixing sawdust into sausage. Some cash cows attract quality talent because of their high-profile, high-paying nature, but in terms of getting the best entertainment per hour, we should probably be avoiding established IPs, avoid MMOs, and avoiding sequels.

Unrelatedly, I pre-purchased Guild Wars 2 and got my cousin’s kid the collector’s edition.

: Zubon

[GW] Documentation Update

Posted by Zubon on April 13, 2012 in Guild Wars. 14 Comments

It had previously been documented that when the player sets a flag, NPC heroes will run to it and make it their “home base.” The documentation has been updated to reflect the actual behavior: when the player sets a flag, NPC heroes will run directly into AE DoTs then do laps until they die.

We hope this documentation update will improve your understanding and play experience.

: Zubon

Exactly What It Says on the Tin

Posted by Zubon on April 12, 2012 in Asides and General. 1 Comment

“Pre-purchase and receive free DLC pack “Kill Hitler.” I can’t speak to its quality, but they have the right idea here.

: Zubon

Balanced For

Posted by Zubon on April 11, 2012 in General, Guild Wars, Lord of the Rings Online and World of Warcraft. 8 Comments

A level of difficulty entails certain assumptions. Problems arise when those assumptions do not obtain. Most difficulty settings assume some level of experience, either in player skill or numerical balance.

Numerically, a new raid tier assumes a certain gearscore, probably that almost everyone on your team has a partial set from the last raid tier. You could shoot lower or have a DPS check that assumes full tier 12 before you have a reasonable chance at tier 13, but that will lead to easy/difficult raids. The new raid will also assume that you already know all your class abilities and how to use them to counter common situations. Hard mode for the new raid will assume that you have beaten normal mode and know all the mechanics.

Pixel click bosses assume that you already know everything the bosses can do. Well, no, they don’t assume that, but beating them is balanced around that. You are expected to research or fail the first few times until you know what that icon means. If you have the time and resources to spend on first-hand research, you can be a trailblazer. If not, the wiki and Youtube are there for you. If difficulty were tuned to give you a reasonable chance walking in blind, you would probably find the fights trivial when you did not need to spend two minutes reading abilities and thinking about how they interact. (LotRO’s “In Their Absence” update did many things very well, including hitting this balance of fair bosses.)

When I say that Guild wars expects you to have the wiki open, I mean that the difficulty of encounters is tuned around players’ already knowing what those encounters are. You can beat many/most of them going in blind, and the mastery reward almost certainly involves knowing the encounters once you are past the tutorial missions. Later missions are balanced around the assumption that you have capped your equipment and that you have taken time to farm elite skills. With the right skill setup, missions can go from a 5% chance of success to a 95% chance of mastery. Even the hardest missions are not balanced around the assumption of the perfect build, so the perfect build can make it trivial, but an all purpose build may not work for all purposes, and it certainly might not get you to the mission bonus needed for the titles.

Most of us come from a single-player game background, and the “gotcha” moments there are so common that it is actually shocking to have a one-phase final boss. Oh look, I needed to bring two entirely different weapons to the final fight, and I lost half my health for not leaping away from the boss the instant he died. Yawn. Okay, learn how phase two works, then re-load and re-do phase one. Let’s hope we didn’t waste too much time on phase one. Do I sound bored? I’m bored with it. It’s both obvious and nigh impossible to plan for, so the game is effectively taxing you X minutes by not having a save point between boss phases. You know it’s going to try to screw you over, just like you knew a big fight was coming when you found the stack of health and ammo.

That moment is far worse in multi-player games because it needs to be balanced around everyone knowing, so being the one guy who does not know means ruining it for everyone. That’s not fun design. You face lots of situations where there is a briefing before the fight and half the players are just following orders while trying to get some sense of what is going on here. That’s not a lot of fun as either the leader or the follower, and there is a narrow window for groups that already know each other to explore collectively without anyone feeling dragged along or held back … but you’ve already heard my rants about games that need you to bring all your own friends and fun to work (short version: so you might as well play anything because the game is not carrying its weight).

The numeric balancing is clearer. You can demonstrate that X DPS or Y gearscore is needed to reasonably beat a fight. The developers could even post that on the entry screen. Skill and knowledge balancing is much harder.

: Zubon

[GW] Tooth Enamel and the Aging Adventurer

Posted by Zubon on April 10, 2012 in Asides, General and Guild Wars. 7 Comments

This weekend, as I was taking a chocolate bunny from the remains of a land-going fish assassin, a man carrying 1250 ingots of iron in a belt pouch remarked to me that it was unrealistic that he could salvage wood from charcoal. I had trouble hearing him speak from a different continent, partly because of the way 13,507 gold coins were clinking in my pockets, but he strangely evoked another worry in me.

My character has not consumed anything but candy and alcohol for the past three months. “Not even skale fin soup?” No, allergies. To some, this just sounded like college, but he is getting on in ranger years, and I became seriously worried about the state of his teeth. Perhaps the alcohol will kill the bacteria?

: Zubon

[DD] Financial Models

Posted by Zubon on April 9, 2012 in Dungeon Defenders. 9 Comments

As I write this, Dungeon Defenders costs $14.99 on Steam and has $39.84 worth of DLC. This soundly trumps last year’s post on Civ V, and it is something I did not see coming for this game. Only a few dollars of that is purely cosmetic; it includes new classes, missions, holiday events, and conventional expansions. At the end of last year, you could get the whole game with all expansions for $6.20 on sale. If this works for them, Trendy Entertainment has found a highly profitable variation on the cash shop model.

Of course, this comes nowhere close to Railworks 3: Train Simulator 2012. As I write this, it costs $34.99 and has $1,869.03 (not a typo) worth of DLC. It seems to be priced to be competitive with buying actual miniature train sets.

: Zubon

Update: as commenter Galaji mentions, the Dungeon Defenders holiday event DLCs are free if you get them at the time. I was rather surprised by the Presidents Day event.

Platform Independence

Posted by Zubon on April 8, 2012 in Asides. 2 Comments

Say what you will about their product, Taco Bell is serious about getting people to take customer satisfaction surveys. The back of the receipt asks you to visit this website, or call this number, or scan this barcode to connect on your mobile phone, or text them “TACO” to have the link sent to your phone. The survey is asking you to do something for them for the minute chance of a reward, and they are making it convenient to do so. Most companies make it more difficult to give them money.

: Zubon

#takeyourmodelswhereyoucangetthem

[GW] HoM Check: 25/50

Posted by Zubon on April 7, 2012 in Guild Wars. 24 Comments

The Hall of Monuments provides a convenient way of summarizing how much “stuff” you’ve done in Guild Wars, at least to completion. I am at 25 points. I have done almost everything there is to do in-game at least once. I still have two Eye of the North dungeons I have not visited, a few Factions challenge missions I have never run, and I have only tried the solo-queue PvP options. I also have not run every quest, but the only one left that seems strongly recommended is the titan-clearing chain at the end of Prophecies. I have repeated some but not all on hard mode.

Touring Hall of Monuments categories: Continue reading ‘[GW] HoM Check: 25/50′

[GW] Dialogues on Efficiency

Posted by Zubon on April 2, 2012 in Guild Wars. 9 Comments

From guild chat:

“I’ll just use Discordway.”
“Discord isn’t the solution to everything.”
“Discord is the solution to everything.”
“She kinda has a point.”

: Zubon

The Community You Create

Posted by Zubon on April 1, 2012 in General. 12 Comments

Moderating is hard. Community managers have the difficult task of taking anonymous internet mobs and channeling them into groups that are socially worthwhile (and financially remunerative). The great failure of this would be EVE Online, a game with a surprisingly strong community given that structures of both the game and the community have fostered sociopathy to the degree of suggesting or plotting the rapes and deaths of players and their families. Not characters, players. As I recall, online game-related murder has actually happened in South Korea, but I had always presumed that was an isolated incident rather than a reasonable expectation of where the game was headed.

(The outcome of that particular EVE situation? A 30-day in-game ban on the leader of the largest group of organized sociopaths, who can still lead them just fine without logging in. This will be about as effective in curbing the community’s excesses as telling Al Capone that he is not allowed to personally brew beer.)

At root, the glory of consequence-free internet anonymity is also its downfall. One of the most important points in internet law is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

(See the link for similar laws outside the US.) This has become a building block for the internet: with very few limits, you are not responsible for anything anyone posts on your website, forum, whatever. Even the limits are limited, so if you could reasonably claim not to know about X, you’re clear. This has led to the tendency not to moderate anything: if you take responsibility, you are liable, but if you let it all run wild, you retain plausible deniability. Hence the number of internet cesspools.

Upcoming legislation would make a simple change, and you know the programming power of flipping the sign on a variable. Just cross out that “No” and suddenly anyone setting up an internet forum is responsible for what happens there. That will need some amending, because you need a reasonable chance to respond when someone goes off on a rant while you’re asleep, but ultimately you are responsible for the community you create. If you are running the digital equivalent of a crackhouse or vermin pit, you will no longer get to say that you have no control over your customers. Barring hackers, you have complete control over who can post on your website, so take the legal responsibility along with the moral responsibility.

I want to mourn the death of online anonymity, but I don’t really expect it to happen. There will be international hosts to which something like 4chan or Something Awful can move, and there will be few cases in which it is worth the effort for the US government to impose itself upon another country. But if you can impede the lazy and the stupid, you have solved 90% of the problem.

: Zubon

Hat tip: Popehat. It’s a big hat to tip.

The non-Americans are presumably chuckling about that “US government not imposing itself upon other countries” thing. You cannot imagine how much it frustrates American politicians that they do not control the entire world.

Update: This was a bracing April Fool’s post. Wilhelm in the comments has the appropriate reaction to calling for the death of the anonymous speech under a reasonable-sounding cover. The annual debriefing is live. I think I’ll need to skip next year’s prank, since you have at least basic pattern recognition skills. (Also, sorry Maladorn: I put your comment to pending because I didn’t want the very first one to mention the date. It’s back!)