Dungeon Defenders helpfully points out the items that would be upgrades. You can even see green dots on the map and highlighting through the walls. “Come check this out.” Of course, whether it really is an upgrade depends on many things, such as whether your character wants to trade +40 to towers for +20 to towers and +21 to hero stats. So maybe you should still be looking at everything, because that armor may say it’s a downgrade, but you are trading 8 points of something you don’t want for +25% base damage. And then you have prizes like this one. The value algorithm says this is an upgrade for me. For those of you who do not know the stats involved, those are pretty good hero stats, decent base damage (with no bonus), a very nice firing rate, and an excellent reload rate. It needs that reload rate because this is a gatling gun with a one round clip. It could fire seven times per second, except that you need to reload this muzzle-loader after every shot.

The loot drops so quickly in Dungeon Defenders that it is automatically deleted (not looted, deleted) as you play. There is an item cap that protects game performance and encourages you to run around collecting mana and items. This somewhat counters the pro-social mechanic of dividing up the cash from loot left on the ground at the end of each round, because if you try to leave the loot, a lot of it will go away before the end of the round (past the first few waves). The item cap feels like it was designed for 100-200 enemies, and Survival maps quickly get to thousands of enemies. This discourages AFKing but gives you the choice between adding DPS to beat the level or trying to claim your prizes before they *poof.* The latest patch changed it so that the lowest quality loot gets deleted first, not the oldest; the opposite was a very strange design decision that led to your potential upgrades disappearing as you ran over to pick them up.

Mana is both the currency of the game and what you use to build towers, upgrade them, and power your abilities in the level. It also has a cap for how much can be on the ground (I’m not clear if that’s shared with loot), without the “lowest quality disappears first” provision, so your shiny teal 500-mana gem might disappear when the next 1-mana gem drops.

With so much vendor trash that it throws itself away, Dungeon Defenders may be approaching the reductio ad absurdum of Diablo-style loot.

: Zubon

One Shot is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

It is really great to have everything as endgame content. There is always tension in development between working on the leveling game and the endgame, and scaling content lets you create one dungeon that is available at many level ranges. Success! Are you really going to buy DLC that adds level 20 action for a game where your character is level 50? This isn’t an MMO where you are likely to have a stable of alts.

It is really awful in that it highlights the problems inherent in the game. If you stopped playing Borderlands because it felt like you just kept fighting the same guys over and over again, making them level along with you so that everything is an at-level encounter really drives home that you have yet another edition of the same guys, this time with a new number by the name. You don’t even get the MMO scheme of making this goblin blue with a flaming sword; you are still fighting exactly the same bandits and psychos, sometimes with a different name but exactly the same model and abilities. When you get new enemies, the zone structure will make you repeat many fights unless you complete the whole thing in one setting, and the fight is exactly the same because the enemies leveled along with you (or it might have gotten harder if you did not find better equipment, so you are fighting the same fight only you are relatively weaker). It’s great that you can have a Playthrough 2 where everything is even-con to make it a potentially meaningful challenge, but it really drives home that you put levels in a FPS where they add so little that you built mechanics to get around having levels in your FPS.

: Zubon

At this point, I’m open to the argument that “do the same thing 10 times a day for as long as you’re willing to subscribe” is the point of the current MMO genre rather than a defect in it.

Scaling Content is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

See also ongoing discussion of joyfully spending money on F2P.

: Zubon

More DLC as Something-Something is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Edit: let’s see what happens if we add in enemies that do the same, some of which may mirror heroes.

Engineer class turret/sentry:

• Borderlands, Crimson Lance Engineer
• Brink
• City of Heroes, Malta Operations Engineer
• Guild Wars 2
• Hellgate: London
• Mass Effect 2
• Quake Team Fortress
• Star Trek Online
• Team Fortress Classic
• Team Fortress 2
• Warhammer Online
• World of Warcraft (trade skill)

Engineer class without turret/sentry:

• Anarchy Online (or are those robots turrets? haven’t played)
• Battlefield FPS series
• Bloodline Champions
• Eden Eternal
• Hellgate: Global (mobile robots)
• Mass Effect
• Torchlight 2

Non-Engineer class that builds a turret/sentry (“close-enough” names starred):

• **Asheron’s Call 2, Lugian Tactician
• Borderlands, Roland the Soldier, although he is canonically a former Crimson Lance Engineer
• **Champions Online, Inventor
• City of Heroes, Blasters and Corruptors with Devices (was Auto-Turret, now Gun Drone)
• DC Universe Online, Gadgets
• **Dungeon Fighter Online, Mechanic
• **Global Agenda, Robotics
• **League of Legends, Heimerdinger the Revered Inventor

Obvious turret analogue, but not “built”:

• Dark Age of Camelot, Hibernian Animist
• Guild Wars, Ritualist
• Warhammer Online, Chaos Magus
• World of Warcraft, Shaman

“Deploys” turrets s/he did not build:

• Diablo 2, Assassin
• StarCraft, Raven
• TitanQuest, Rogue
• Torchlight, Vanquisher (Arbiter tree)

Rejected, pending argument: engineer units from RTS/turn-based strategy games like Civilization.
Heard of but unknown to Zubon: Alpha Protocol, Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

Engi Census is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

: Zubon

Steam Summer Camp is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

City of Heroes took a different approach, and it seems to have worked against them from many players’ perspectives. Everything scales, and you can always drop back profitably, so every instance remains relevant as you level. Everything is endgame content and leveling content. Perhaps because of that, City of Heroes has never built much that is endgame content in name. A favorable interpretation is that very little is held back and hidden behind a grind; a less favorable interpretation is that there is little new to do at the cap, which quickly becomes “there is nothing to do at the cap.” Those who took the latter interpretation generally unsubscribed. The illusion of scarcity is an important marketing principle.

: Zubon

Nothing and Everything as Endgame Content is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Maybe it works better on a console. The very first time I used one of the in-game menus, it felt like a console game ported to a PC incompletely. Menus required some odd, perverse combination of mouse and keyboard, screens that should have accepted either and instead asked for one but only responded to the other. At no point did I memorize which buttons brought up the different menus, instead finding one or two and then clicking between menus once the window was open.

Coming back after a break, I have no idea which button is for melee. “Had?” No, I did not guess it, though I was insufficiently motivated for much trial and error. I normally check that via the screen to edit keyboard controls. Oh, I can’t do that? At least G for grenade is intuitive enough. I can look it up, and I presume that it was in the tutorial, but once I am in-game there is nothing to suggest it. Or maybe there is something, but finding that is unintuitive, which is the same problem one level up.

I am reading The Design of Everyday Things, and I taken by the view that user error is usually design error. If your design does not lead users to the right action, that is an interface problem not PEBKAC. Some things are radically complex, but punching imaginary people in the face should not take planning or research.

: Zubon

Unintuitive Controls is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Syp finds the same problem with Star Trek Online, I said the same thing about LotRO skirmishes, and many of us have said the same about Borderlands and Torchlight: it is great at first, but there is not all that much improvement or variation over time. (I do credit the two single-player games for having interesting boss fights mixed into the repetition, where MMOs tend to rely on even more repetition, even in tank-and-spank bosses.) I appreciate being able to get 95% of the benefit in 5% of the time. Portal did that brilliantly and then ended.

: Zubon

Non-MMO inspiration banished to the first comment.

Onion Headline Syndrome is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I don’t like that feeling.  I love playing with other people online, but I don’t feel at one with my gaming experience when that feeling happens.

Left 4 Dead results in an interesting developer bit of genius, if I may say.  Its most basic gameplay is not so much different from Borderlands, but every game mechanic is aimed at getting players on the same speed and pace.  Lone wolves, speed demons, and slowpokes all get punished along with the team.  Players subconsciously search for that balancing speed of not too fast to run into a Boomer, but not to slow to run out of ammo while horde music is playing.  Borderlands does not have the same guidance, and even if things start at the same pace with careful chatting, etc.  the collective tempo gets quickly washed away in psychic apparatus of self.

MMOs with group play, like Lord of the Rings Online and World of Warcraft, have the herding mechanics built in.  They are far more integrated, and therefore far more ignored.  In Left 4 Dead, someone can easily leave the group and single handedly kill the Witch.  Comments of “lucky idiot” should follow, but spikes in the tempo to give some feeling of individuality are allowed.  In group MMOs, we don’t have heroes like that.  The tempo belongs to the group, and I believe (with all my research*) that successful groups have gamers that subconsciously submit to the tempo of that MMO gameplay.  The dominant speed of gameplay simply metastasizes to overcome individual beats.

None of this is new, but what is interesting is possible changes in the MMO landscape that are coming.  I think AI-controlled lackeys might allow players to break away from the herd for short bits and not get immediately slaughtered by the elite wolves.  Both Lord of the Rings Online’s skirmish system and Guild Wars 2 companion system could do this.  In the skirmish system there can be up to 12 players each with his or her own Soldier.  A Minstrel can call a Protector Soldier to act as a wall between soft flesh and morale-crushing lyrics.  A Hunter can summon a Sage Soldier to crowd-control whatever is not getting pin-cushioned.  It gives an MMO player more power to break away from the collective tempo.  If I had the instance piercing powers of a Turbine developer, I would be very interested to see how the amoebic entity of players reacts and splits against foreign invaders, especially ones like a Witch waiting for a good crowning.

–Ravious
if i had the chance, i’d ask the world to dance

*Note to self: place sarcasm font here when released for the internet.

Breaking From the Collective Tempo is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Today, I encourage you to separate the reward from the activity, the pellet from the lever. If it really is the journey rather than the destination, you should still want to go on the journey without a prize at the end. Would you keep re-running that dungeon if there was no more loot to gain? Would you farm if you had unlimited gold? For some things, you would. Good. Do those, freed of any worries about winning a roll on a 2% drop.

There is an easy way to test this: cheat. Grant yourself the reward at the end. This will not work in an MMO, but if the game saves to your hard drive, you can edit the save file. Are you really farming for experience or gold in some flash game? Are you running Diablo II or Borderlands bosses to try for better equipment? Backup your game, download a save game editor, and just give yourself the gun you want. There, now that you are no longer pulling the arm on a virtual slot machine, do you actually want to fight that boss multiple times per night?

Because let me tell you, we may call them Achievements, but they just measure time spent, and if you do not enjoy what you are doing along the way, you could be spending your time elsewhere. If your game gates the fun content behind that kind of repetition, throw the game away and find something that will not make you crawl through barbed wire. If you find that it is the getting rather than the having, I hate to tell you this, but desire is the root of all suffering. There will always be more useless crap to want, and apparently it is useless crap to you if you no longer want it once you have it. If you are really willing to work long hours for a digital gold star, I need some wallpaper replaced in the guest room. I’ll e-mail you the imaginary star, gold piece, or sniper rifle.

: Zubon

Cheat is a post from: Kill Ten Rats