Month: August 2008

Reminder: You Are Not the Hero

The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ takes an unusual path with its epic storyline. You start out as the epic side-quest, running parallel to Bilbo and the gang around the time of the Prancing Pony. Villains appear there, and you chase them down for several books, like one of The Nine or the Witch-King’s servants who lead the attackers in that side-quest. That takes you about one-third of the way through, when the real story picks up. Now you are defending the homelands against the armies of Angmar (hence the name of Volume 1).

Through it all, you are reminded frequently that your PC is not the point of this story. This is not just the prologue for Volume 2, where you are sent to buy supplies for the company, or the frequent other errand and courier quests. More than that, the big end scene for many of the epic books involves stopping the action and having NPCs take over. A few times, you really do get to defeat the big enemy. Good for you! Often, not. Either there is no big end fight, or the NPC gets to finish it. Books I, II, VIII, XIII, and XIV all do this, and there may be more that I do not remember. The enemy gets to 5-10% hp, the fight stops, and the NPCs do their little play.

In one sense, the ending to Book XIV was fantastic. It gives a piece of lore that has been speculated upon, it theoretically changes the dynamic of the game world (despite the game world being utterly static), and it has a really great scene with the mount you all want. In another sense, it even takes camera control away from you. You are not just standing there watching a brief machinima, reading text, or seeing a cut scene. You lose camera control for several minutes as you stand there and watch the NPCs carry out their business.

Without you. Because you’re not important.

: Zubon

Patch the Patch

Why are our options “broken or not at all”? I’m thinking of various specific examples, but you don’t need them, because you have seen it in almost every game. I have seen explicit developer statements that if the new stuff has no game-crashing bugs, it will go live, even though there are large known bugs. Because you can just eat the parts of your dinner that have no cockroaches.

We can fix balance once it’s live and we see how the players are using it. There are some exploits, but we’ll just suspend accounts if people use them (also, don’t tell people what not to do, because then everyone will know about the exploits). Let’s release the content even though it is literally impossible to complete it, because we can probably fix that before too many people get to the completely broken parts. Nah, don’t bother to update “Known Issues” on the website, I’m sure we’ll get to it quickly.

Fast, cheap, good: I wish we could get two. I read Scott’s comment as saying we demand all three and sometimes get zero. Quite often, we are getting one, and it is usually cheap. Hey, for $15/month, you would have trouble finding any better outside a public library. But updates come late and are still buggy after the patch to fix the bugs caused by the patch to the update. You’re paying for crap and you’re getting it. You’re paying $50 for crap when a new box of it comes out, and you knew from the beta that it was still buggy crap.

I suppose we can compare the industry to baseball. There, you are a great hitter if you only fail two-thirds of the time.

: Zubon

How is the Kingdom These Days?

Wednesday’s post reminded me that I have not poked my head into Kingdom of Loathing for months. I took a break before NS13, and I never really got back into it afterwards. I just found the level 11 and 12 quests to be a drag, a grindishly long haul. Your character even comments on that during the level 11 quest. After NS13, there was a pause in the Tuesday updates, well deserved, but I wandered off.

We can look at the updates, but is there anything you’d really like to say to sell the game? Something with awesomeness that needs expounding? Is doing a set of Bad Moon runs super-fun? How about those new zones? If you are a current player, consider this an open thread to hype, brag, and recruit. If you are a former player, consider this an open thread for reminiscing about what fun you had. Or rant about how it has all gone down the tubes since they introduced the Astral Badger, whatever.

: Zubon

Crowded Comic Books

City of Heroes has had the superhero MMO market to itself for the past four years. (I don’t think Twilight Heroes counts, although Kingdom of Loathing compares favorably with Everquest in many ways.) Now the next couple of years are promising a sudden flurry, with DC, Marvel, and Champions MMOs forthcoming. Is there really that much pent-up demand for superhero-based MMOs? Maybe this summer’s batch of excellent superhero movies will help build an audience, but I do not see it. One game might have hoped to cannibalize City’s playerbase, but four?

Marvel and DC have their obvious stables of characters to use in advertising their games, although how you use those characters in-game could succeed or fail dramatically. Cryptic can market its game as “City of Heroes II,” with all the things that, in retrospect, they should have had the first time. City of Heroes can market itself as having four years’ worth of content additions and as Cryptic Without Jack Emmert, which appeals to a certain vocal part of the playerbase.

I know we have more than a dozen significant fantasy MMOs, but do we have even a half-dozen successful sci fi MMOs? Four superhero MMOs seems like a crowded marketplace. Unless the audience for them expands, that is bad for developers, and, due to network effects, bad for their players.

: Zubon

Pack Space

Storage is broken in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢. It works, as in I have rarely heard of its losing folks’ stuff, but as a game mechanic it is broken. This is not true for everyone: if you are not a crafter, collector, or social player with several outfits, and you are past level 30, you are fine. Turbine has done some good things to alleviate problems, such as simplifying the crafting items and increasing stack sizes. Once you save a cosmetic outfit, you can get rid of the items. Still, forum discussion directed me to what WoW is planning. Even before that, it would be nice if a game took advantage of the gameplay innovations from previous games. Keyrings, for example, should be required if you have keys. The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ lacks keyrings.

Note in the WoW plans “Pet and mount tabs” and “currency user interface.” That is, don’t store mounts in the vault, and track all those barter/reputation items the way you track money.

Continue reading Pack Space

Feedback Sought: Scheduling

Blogs get far less traffic on weekends. I presume that many of you are reading from work. Lucky. The blog-reading I do from work needs to be at least plausibly work-related. This leads to a feedback loop where blogs post less on weekends. So you are less likely to read on weekends. So we post less. Does this fit your reading pattern? I tend to worry less about missing a weekend, which often leads to missing a Monday because I write now and schedule it to go live at 12:02am Central. (And I only post once a day, or else my wife makes fun of me.)

I notice that many blogs have less content on Friday. This is a letdown for readers, who want to do something other than work on Friday afternoon, but then it also demands that bloggers work Fridays. Would it be better for me to plan longer pieces for Friday? Or pieces seeking lots of feedback/discussion/comments? Might as well fill that gap. I have hit Monday and Friday harder without great planning in the past.

Anything else in how you like things or what you want to see? I stopped the CoX Character Contemplations series because they seemed to get few views, which I interpreted as “tl;dr” (though I have a couple more written). I should do another “Recent Searches” post; I fell out of the habit after skipping a month of WoW porn searches. I have not looked at the site stats at all in the past three months or more.

And this is a Monday morning post seeking discussion, so it’s all meta. Please, your thoughts.

: Zubon

Feign Death as PvP Crowd Control

Each race in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ has a panic button, of varying quality. Humans get the best, with a full heal. Dwarves get massive resistance, elves get “parry everything,” and hobbits get feign death. Minstrels also get a feign death ability, which is helpful when the group is wiping.

In PvE, feign death is sometimes useful. As long as you are not in the enemies’ aggro range, you will be safe when you stand up. It works nicely when you run through a crowd while trying to get somewhere difficult. As a Hunter, it can help when I pull too much aggro and need to let the tank get it back.

In PvMP, feign death is a fabulous distraction. People will stand there and wait for you to get back up. We got this Minstrel down to 200 hit points, now we just need to wait the 30 seconds for him to become available as a target. If we leave, we know that he will stand up and run around a corner. So three or four creeps will target the feigned corpse and wait. (Freeps do the same thing to spiders in Trap Door Sanctuary. He has 60 seconds. If the creep raid leaves, we may skip pursuing just to camp and trap that one spot.) We are getting that kill.

I want to take a Hobbit Minstrel into PvMP sometime just to mess with this. Start going down: Hobbit Silence. Tab through the enemies to make sure they are still on you. Stand up and immediately feign death. Tab tab, wait. Stand up and use one of the feign death scrolls from Forochel. Ha! Yes, I will be out of the fight for more than a minute, but so will four or more enemies, and they can be shot during that time. It’s like a channeled AE mez.

: Zubon