Bad/Unforgiving games tend to have very tight communities in a Stockholm Syndrome sort of way. You join a guild in WoW to raid some dungeons and get some loot. In old EQ or UO a guild was more like AA or a cancer survivor’s group or something, and naturally tight bonds formed.
…
So I guess the question I have about UO, and FFXI, and EQ, and all those great old “social” games is this : did those games have great communities because they created social interaction, or did they have great communities because they eliminated non-social players?
— Boatorious

Boatorious on Bonding is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

For example, consider Marks of Triumph in The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™. The epic quest chain is a big feature for LotRO, but it was punctuated with instances that demanded full groups. If most of the population had completed them all, how did newer players and alts get through the epics? You asked someone to repeat one. Repeating one was a way to help friends, but you got jack for it. Your friends had to give something up, and you would not meet new people unless someone was a very charitable stranger (or, lucky day, you find a few people who need it, a couple of whom have charitable friends). Game update: repeating one of those instances began to award (once per five days) a Mark of Triumph; accumulate several Marks to barter for various rewards. The rewards were rather nice for when they were released. Pro-social behavior increased.

Because of how Marks were awarded, you did not need someone new to repeat the quest. This has the further benefit of letting you repeat older content without completely sacrificing character advancement, and developers want players to pay for recycled content. The downside is that it is more efficient to get a level-capped group and cycle through all the Mark instances rather than actually helping near-cap players on their first run-through. On balance, however, Marks increased pro-social behavior more than they inhibited it.

Looting is a major source of drama and anti-social behavior. Did you know that you cannot ninja-loot in City of Heroes? Not that there is much that you could ninja-loot, but there are not even corpses to loot. Rewards just instantly appear in each character’s inventory. So one person randomly gets the reward from the raid boss? No, everyone gets one. There are drawbacks to every system, particularly given the adjustments necessary to adapt it to another game, but there are ways around all the problems you assume.

Consider the related problem that there is nothing for you in that instance. Alice wants to run the caverns for her tanking trinket (best in slot!), Bob needs the mountain for his shoulders, and Carl is grinding crabs by the lake in case one drops the resource he needs. They could help each other, but that involves giving up their individual progress: pro-social behavior requires an individual cost. Or we could set up a different system for how you get “best in slot” that will not give people competing demands, such as a token/badge system that lets you adventure anywhere and then exchange for your rewards. Of course, that will encourage grinding in the most time-efficient area (drawback).

LotRO has an interesting mix on those loot systems. The top-tier armor involves tokens that you can earn in sets of dungeons, so you are not bound to any one. Freedom! When Mines of Moria™ was younger, you saw people who would never go to instance X again because they had their radiance pieces from there. So the armor rewards are mostly solved, and the weapon rewards are on a similar system, but all the other slots are on the same system in which the best tank ring drops here and the best DPS bracelet drops there. Is that a compromise between pro-socialization and encouraging people not to focus on the most time-efficient dungeon?

Consider the DPS meter. On one hand, it can be useful in assessing your performance and seeing where the group could improve. It frequently becomes its own mini-game at the expense of good tactics, with DPS encouraged to deal as much damage as possible to as many targets as possible as quickly as possible. Sometimes that works well, sometimes that causes wipes, and the tanks and healers frequently want to choke people. Also consider the gap between what is easy to measure and what helps the group.

Consider achievements for doing various absurd things. Someone on your Team Fortress 2 server is probably trying for one at any given moment. That Medic is not healing anyone because he is hunting for Scouts. That Heavy is just standing in a corridor spamming G in the hopes that someone will walk into a taunt kill. You see similar things where there are rewards for suffering; I left characters intentionally getting chain-stunned overnight for City of Heroes badges, and people also farm damage there. You get perverse results if the tank equivalent of the DPS meter measures damage taken and effectively punishes having high defenses (damage prevention is not measured).

Consider achievements for working together. The best of them will be for normal cooperation as opposed to situations you would perversely work to create. The TF2 Engineer achievements have lots of good examples. Identify how you want people to work together and place a bounty on it.

We could also consider pro-social design from the group perspective, rather than the individual. Consider how FFXI approaches (approached?) level ranges in groups. Everyone needed to be in a very narrow band, or else there were severe penalties. “Ding!” “Grats! /kick” Consider how CoX approaches level ranges in groups. Everyone is automatically the same level, which is exactly the right level for the instance. Group with anyone anytime: perfect. (We have discussed the drawbacks of the CoX instancing/scaling at length, and we will surely do so again.)

Really, pick any mechanic that sets the interests of the individual against the interests of the group, rather than aligning the two. People respond to incentives. If people are rewarded for leeching, stealing, or griefing, it will happen. Yes, some people will always be schmucks, but it will happen a lot less if you do not pay them for it.

: Zubon

Pro-Social Design is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

A lot of the classes that swing their weapons in Lotro make a “swish” sound no matter if they hit a target or not.  It’s not something you notice the first time you fight, or even the millionth, but at some point you play a character in Lotro or another mmo and you whack something and go, “Ouch, I think I heard some bone breaking!!”

As an example of the swish effect, I’d like to direct your attention to some bloody penguins.

First, the swishy one:

http://www.logan.ws/games/penguin.asp

Then the more satisfying smashy one:

http://www.logan.ws/games/bloody-penguin.asp

Notice how when you smash the penguins in the second link, it just feels more gratifying.  You get to hear a “splat” sound when you actually hit the penguin to begin with, plus the penguin makes “ouch” sounds whenever it bounces, and finally there are sweet “boom” sounds whenever the penguin hits a mine.

FFXI is great at having very satisfying sound effects.  Other games like SWG really drop the ball in this department.  With Lotro, it depends on which class you play and which skills you use.  One of the reasons I like playing my new Warden alt in Lotro is how satisfying the stabbing sounds are.  I really feel like I’m inflicting some virtual pain.

Swish Effect is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

The inflation doesn’t affect me much yet because I’m starting fresh with a new character. Mary’s Horn, an instrument for my Bard that I bought back in the day for 90k, resold for 600k on my server. My Hume RSE (race specific equipment) pants (or was it gloves?), which I got for free, sold for 300k. Needless to say, I had more gil starting fresh than I ever had when I used to play. I now had over one million gil, my old gil record being only 230k. But enough about the economy. I gave 100k to my little brother and life was good as we started our Tarutaru characters.

I started as a BLM (Black Mage) and he started as a WHM (White Mage) and we eventually made our way through the extremely boring level 1-10 phase of FFXI. This is the phase where you solo because grouping is useless, and soloing is not FFXI’s strong point. It went by painless on my end but a WHM soloing 1-10, especially with no subjob, is extremely painful, but my brother made it. We finally arrived at Valkurm Dunes, the first grouping area. Our first day, unfortunately, reminded us of the pains FFXI can cause. It took us literally all day to find a good group. Party after party we could not find a good tank. It was either a tank that didn’t want to Provoke because he was scared of dying to a tank that didn’t even look like he knew how to control the character. To top it off, I got chewed out by a couple of power-levelers that were in one of my groups for being a crappy BLM. I might admit that I wasn’t casting and managing hate efficiently, after all, it’s hard to come from playing WoW’s mage, which casts constantly, to playing BLM in FFXI, which only casts a handful of spells a battle, but when your BLM can’t even cast one spell without pulling hate, there’s something wrong other than just the BLM. We finally found a good group with a PLD (Paladin) tank and took our jobs to level 13.

The rest is mostly boring. We got our jobs to 18 and did the subjob quest and now we’re stuck trying to swell up enough will to stop playing WoW and grind levels 1-10 out again for our subjobs and then go through Valkurm Dunes.

In other news, I got my new computer and I’m happy. Peace.

.:lufia22:.

FFXI: There and back again is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I’ve been kind of mellow lately, not feeling like even logging into WoW, even though I got home five days ago and have been able to. I’ve mostly been playing offline games between my new Nintendo DS and Dragon Quest VIII. I don’t know exactly why I haven’t felt compelled to play WoW. There’s many reasons I can think of, with feeling bored of the game actually being close to last on the list. Playing FFXI again would be like breathing fresh air again. I’ve never played two MMORPGs at once, so I don’t know if this could eventually be a good or bad thing for me.

All I know is that I can’t wait to log into the world of Vana’diel. I play WoW because it’s fun, but most everything else about WoW that is sensually appealing I just hate. I love FFXI’s world. I love the music. I love the graphics. The fact that I’ll get to experience this at the same time with my brother rather than having to take turns like we did before is even more appealing. FFXI brings out the RPer in me. It makes me get all googly eyed when I think about it.

FFXI has this certain essence about it that is completely missing from WoW. I used to run around towns and explore them inside and out and just sit in a cool place I found and hang out. I used to run between Korroloka Tunnel and Altepa Desert just for the hell of it, plus my love for the town Rabao. I never do this in WoW. When WoW is cool, it’s awesome. Example? The entrance to the Blackrock Depths (BRD) is freaking awesome. The Blasted Lands is by far the coolest area I’ve visited in WoW. Unfortunately, cool things like this in WoW just aren’t everywhere. Realize this is coming from someone who pretty much hates the Warcraft world’s style.

Anyways, I will be logging into FFXI come Christmas morning. I’m hoping it will run on this computer. I scored 2000 on the high-res benchmark, over 3000 on low-res, which means it should run, but the characters in the benchmark were flickering the whole time it was running. I’m hoping it doesn’t do that in the actual game. If it doesn’t run, I’ll either just limit myself to playing on the other computer in this house, the one that’s actually above average, and my brother and I will have to wait to play with each other once I get my new computer. I’m thinking of being a Tarutaru BLM and my brother will be a Tarutaru WHM. We’ll be starting in Sand’Oria because Sand’Oria is my favorite town in the whole game and I haven’t explored its surrounding areas as much as I have the other two main towns. It’ll be like starting out completely fresh, especially since I’ve explored the Bastok newbie areas inside and out and have given the Windurst areas a pretty good exploring as well.

Be looking for another person to be talking about FFXI.

.:lufia22:.

Loving Change is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

/em clutches chest.

/em dies from joy overload.

In the next version update, major changes are scheduled for the dragoon two-hour ability.

The development team does not consider the dragoon to be particularly weak when compared to other jobs, but we are aware that a large part of a dragoon’s strength depends on the presence of his or her wyvern. After taking into account the wyvern’s tendency to be quickly defeated in heated battles, and the dragoon’s lack of a powerful special ability for use in missions and other critical situations, it was decided that improvements were necessary.

Simply raising the wyvern’s HP and defense to increase its survivability would cause balance issues in other parts of the game. However, it was judged that improving the dragoon’s two-hour ability would have less of an impact on overall balance, and so the following changes have been planned for the upcoming version update:

-New two-hour ability
The dragoon will be imbued with the strength of his or her wyvern for a fixed length of time, increasing the dragoon’s power and adding special effects to “Jump” abilities.

-Call Wyvern
The recast time for this ability will be reduced to twenty minutes. This ability will only be available when the main job is set to dragoon.

-Wyvern
Wyverns will now have the equivalent of the job trait “Subtle Blow,” reducing the amount of TP gained by opponents from the wyvern’s attacks.

More details will be announced at the time of the version update.

FINAL FANTASY XI Development Team (11/22/2005)

Just when the stigma was disappearing on dragoons, SE steps and destroys it.

This is freaking awesome.

I only have speculation on what the new 2 hour ability might be but this will make dragoons at least a little more acceptable in end-game activities if not much more acceptable.

- ringthree

O… M… F… G… is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Did Dynamis leave you thirsty for another challenge? We bring you “Limbus,” coming in the October version update! Upon the completion of certain requirements, players will be able to enter one of the two mysterious new areas that comprise Limbus: “Temenos” and “Apollyon.” Check the version update details in October for more information!

Also, a one-way door in the Grand Palace of Hu’Xzoi will become accessible from both sides for players who have advanced far enough through the “Chains of Promathia” story.

Oh yeah, that last part, it sounds like they are openning a gate in the Grand Palace for those that have gotten far enough through CoP missions that they shouldn’t have to spend the 1+ hours it takes to go the long way.

ringthree

WTF is Limbus? is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Anyway, I have now completed the hard parts of both of the quests and just need to talk to the NPC’s to finish the quest. Which is nice. Except the fact that I have to do it again for the rest of my CoP static.

ringthree

The Road Forks. is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Experience Point Bonus Items

These items are designed to help those who wish to earn a little extra experience from defeating easy opponents, rather than for use in extended party play.

The bonus points provided by these new additions may not be noticeable at first, but taking advantage of the bonus every day will eventually make a substantial difference.

The new items will be available through the exchange of conquest points, making them accessible to a wide range of players. Talk to your nearest conquest guard after the version update and see how this adventuring accessory can help you!

Stolen from the Development Team page.

ringthree

More FFXI October update info. is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

O

M

G

Pics from the Treasures of Aht Urhgan expansion:

From top to bottom: Blue Mage Artifact Gear, Blue Mage using a spider slow attack, Blue Mage using raptor breath attack, Boat to a new city, Beautiful new scenery, More beautiful new scenery, Even more beautiful new scenery, You get the picture, Ghost ship

Square Enix also made this statement:

Blue Mage

Employing the legendary arts of Aht Urhgan, these formidable fighter-mages employ elegantly curved blades for close combat, while decimating their enemies from afar with fell magic mastered from their opponents.

This was all completely ganked from DigitalBackSpin.

ringthree

::Drool:: is a post from: Kill Ten Rats