I am interested in seeing more factors tied to the account rather than the character and in the form of unlocks rather than items.
Most MMO elements are tied to the character. Your level, skills, reputation, achievements: all of these are character-specific. You may be able to trade money and equipment between characters. Some games are progressive enough to let you share a few items like a friends list, chat channel, guild affiliation, or key bindings across characters.
Some of my interest comes from being an altoholic. If I have a dozen characters, a bonus that applies to all of them is more interesting than a single-character upgrade. It is secondarily of use to the hardcore with multiple level-capped characters, less so to players who devote themselves to a single character. It makes it a lower-investment decision to try new character options, and it retains the illusion of progress and permanency rather than making each character feel like something entirely new. Continue reading ‘Account-Level Rewards’
Team Fortress 2 has been an interesting mess since the Engineer update. You can trade your sentry gun’s ability to upgrade for ridiculous building speed or its self-targeting for a remote control, but the greater change is letting all Engineers pack up their buildings and move them. Fully upgraded sentries are popping up all over the place, fast, while they are also being shot down faster than they can be reassembled. Two weeks ago, you might plead for a second Engineer, and now you’re considering moving to a server that caps them. You can be annoyed at the insanity or embrace it, being your team’s seventh Engineer or picking a class to counter them.
The attached achievements are actually healthy. I am used to seeing achievements for aberrant gameplay or freakish occurrences, like getting mid-air melee kills while rocket-jumping or encouraging medics to attack instead of using an uber-charge. The Engineer achievements are largely for things you should be doing anyway, and most of them encourage teamwork, particularly between Engineers. There are achievements for helping someone else build, for upgrading their buildings, for healing their buildings, for saving them from Spies, and from getting Engi-Engi kill assists. There are achievements demanding dispensers and teleporters. The Wrangler (remote control) gives an Engineer the Sniper’s narrowed focus, but the rest rewards a utility class for being team-focused. Excellent!
: Zubon
Just sayin.’ The servers are under heavy load at the moment.
: Zubon
This week, I had one of my proudest moments in Team Fortress 2: I was accused of hacking. As a Pyro. Normally we reserve that for the Snipers, who can one-shot people at extreme range, rather than someone using area-effect attacks up close.
Granted, this was from a Spy, and a relative newcomer to a server where I usually play. He was outraged and found something suspicious in the way that I would run up to a niche or corner, where he was standing invisibly, and set him on fire. We regulars know that Spies are constantly hiding in those spots, and he could not watch me Spy-checking continuously for several minutes once the other team got up to 4 Spies. And we know there is a Spy nearby once he backstabs a Sniper. And not all of them were perfect on the issues of being fully cloaked before moving or changing disguises in plain sight.
Let’s see what this weekend brings. Fear my w+m1 skills!
: Zubon
Donate blood. If you can, you ought. Fewer people die, and the survivors share your blood type, so you will have more people around who are potential donors for you. It’s win-win. You also get a cookie.
As part of their social media, the American Red Cross site has avatars for download. Most of them are variations on “I gave” and “please give,” but note the avatar to the left. I don’t know about your favorite FPS, but in Team Fortress 2, everyone I kill gets an image of the kill along with my name and avatar. Now with every headshot I can show off my civic spirit, encourage others to donate blood, and taunt my enemies. I am also thinking of changing my spray to one of the “give blood” avatars, to decorate the enemy base.
: Zubon
What I think of as my “home server” in Team Fortress 2 runs just one map (2fort) with increased teams (16 per side) and a long running time (up to 3 hours). I found this very helpful for learning the game, as I did not need to simultaneously learn a couple dozen maps (including stages), nine classes, alternate weapons, etc. One map, enough people for my beginning incompetence not to doom us, and time enough to settle in and explore without frantic NOW rounds.
I moved to that server after starting to learn on a 2fort server with instant respawn. Instant respawn is nice for a beginner who dies a lot but utterly unsuitable for a real game on many maps, especially 2fort. If it takes longer to reload than to respawn and get back to the fight, the game is an extended stalemate. Maybe one side will eventually get a lucky grab or a really good spawn-camp going.
I am coming to see increased team size as a similar problem. Rounds still end, because many shy from playing defense even as the intel is running out the door, but large teams mean that there is always more defense available. Killing one per second is barely keeping up with the respawn. Furthermore, that defense is always there, even while mounting a big attack. You can have 3 Engineers, 3 Snipers, a Demoman with stickies, and a Pyro spy-checking at all times, and half your team is still available to assault your similarly staffed enemy. If your assault is going well, the (entire) other team respawns behind you, while any replacement attackers are 10-20 seconds away across prime Sniper territory.
Hence the 3-hour running time. Unbalanced teams can sometimes end it early with a string of wins, but it is not uncommon to see time reach 00:00:00 with one win and a cap or two into a second round.
: Zubon
I have been enjoying an Arena server on the side. “No respawn” solves many problems.
I keep forgetting to mention: I am Zubon on Steam. Feel free to add me, and we can shoot at/with each other. Borderlands is almost here. I’m a Team Fortress 2 regular, but I never got much use out of Left 4 Dead.
: Zubon
Team Fortress 2′s Pyro brings the perfect elements for the psychotic killer. 1 to use a flamethrower; 2 for shotgun; 3 to be an axe-murderer. The three alternate weapons are another axe, another flamethrower, and a different way to set people on fire. What are we missing here besides a chainsaw?
The Soldier is competitive in this respect. He still has a shotgun, but he gets a rocket launcher and a shovel. Something seems classic about beating people to death with a shovel, but maybe that is just my family. If only it looked more like a garden tool and less like a Glock field spade.
: Zubon
Is the Team Fortress 2 hat drop rate really this bad? The recent update added many new hats. I have received at least 4 of every piece of equipment in the game, probably more, but no hats. I was hoping my luck had just been poor.
: Zubon
I commented last year about the multiple LOTRO PvMP battlefronts:
One interesting outcome is that most people win most of the time. The side with more bodies usually wins, or the winning side quickly becomes more numerous as fair weather friends join and leave their respective teams. There can be multiple fronts, so 75% of the freeps might be at the lumber camp beating 25% of the creeps, with the reverse happening at the mine: both sides had a win, and most of the players on each side were part of that win.
This weekend, I had the opposite experience playing Team Fortress 2. Two times in a row, playing Gold Rush, I was auto-balanced to the losing team within the last minute. With players joining and quitting the teams, you have the opposite effect of PvMP, where the majority of the players are losing most of the time. There is a cap on how many people can join the winning team, and if you are winning, you are less likely to quit. There is never a cap on how many people can quit, so a lot of the losing team leaves, which cycles in new people who also get crushed 5 seconds out of the spawn. Why did no one mention on chat that there are two Heavy-Medic pairs at the spawn? They all quit, and a quarter of your team just joined the map. A quarter of your team is loading in or out while the winning team makes more progress. If people are not joining for the losing team fast enough, they will be taken from the newer players on the winning team. Hit tab, and you will see one or two high-scoring players on the losing team (who have toughed it out), and no one else there above 50; on the winning team, if there is anyone below 50, he has scrolled off the scoreboard. There is no way to overcome this, because half your team will be dead or loading in as you join the losing team, and continuously from there on, so you cannot make any progress. A previous night on this server, I saw the blue team fail to ever move the cart. After a few minutes, no one survived as long as five seconds outside the base, and most never made it to the doors.
My new plan is always to check the scoreboard before joining a team. If one team is way ahead on points, there is no point in joining. Even if you can join the winning team, you will be auto-balanced away. You could try to stay long enough to reduce your chances of auto-balance, but you’ll probably get kicked for a reserved slot.
: Zubon