Month: November 2008

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Pay Someone Else to Play

Despite EVE’s horrendous learning curve, or lack thereof, I still think it is one of the MMO genre’s best success stories.  I am not alone in that time for my hobby is limited, and even playing two games can be a juggling feat.  Some games I wish had a business model that I feel is worthy of me being a customer, and some games I just like reading about.  EVE Online is the only game that I would like to pay someone else to play for me.

It would be simple, really.  I would pay for the subscription and some sort of stipend, and like some Dick Cheney, I would sit in the shadows and “guide” my employee on how to play the avatar.  In return they would give me a complete actual play multimedia gaming feed.

This month, I would say during our Sunday night meeting, I want you to be a drug smuggler.  For the first half of the month, I want you to get your ducks in a row.  You know, build up a clientele and find your smuggling routes.  The second half, I want you to live a little more dangerously.  Take some risks.

Maybe then for the next fiscal quarter, you will became an agent inside an enemy corporation.  Make your way up the corporate ladder playing the good little, helpful guild member.  Then strike with a fury of a billion isk.

After that, who knows?  The single-server universe is the limit.  Of course, my employee would get bonuses for a satisfactory job (both in-game and in the actual play feed content) and some degree of control.  I just need this MMO experience compressed from the hobby-style time-consuming Las Vegas buffet to a one-bite peanut butter-coated grape wrapped in brioche.

–Ravious
Maybe the last humanist.

The Power of xkcd

Today’s xkcd is about using rocks for cellular automata. The alt text is “I call Rule 34 on Wolfram’s Rule 34.” You can look up either term, but the great glory comes from Google trends, where “wolfram rule 34” has jumped to the #5 hot search trend, with a ridiculously massive spike within minutes of midnight EST. (It is still losing to “miley cyrus dead” (she’s not).) As I write this, the top search results for “Wolfram’s Rule 34” are from people who monitor search engines, wondering why everyone is Googling “Wolfram’s Rule 34.”

And now I am part of the feedback loop. It is a warm and cozy loop.

: Zubon

Frantic

I rarely recommend flash shooter games, but Frantic is rather good. It demonstrates several competencies in game development:

  1. It has auto-fire. How many games like this make you hold down a button to shoot? Or worse, click repeatedly? If the player is going to shoot constantly, with no reason not to, just turn on constant fire by default.
  2. Bullets everywhere. You are throwing out so much ammo that you can forget to dodge enemy attacks because you are distracted by how awesome you are. Use all the powers of this computer to make me feel mighty.
  3. Enemy attacks are entirely reasonable. For all the bright colors flying at you, at no point is being hit inevitable. You can beat the game on your first try without dying (I did). You can probably get through the whole thing without getting hit. This qualifies as the main negative: it is easy. But when a boss throws out hundreds of shots at once, you can still find a safe path through them. Excellent.
  4. You do not take damage for touching an enemy ship, just their shots. Not a terribly important thing, I just like any change on the standard “touch anything and die instantly.”
  5. You get enough money for the final set of upgrades just before the last level. The timing on that is perfect. You build over time, you get all your toys, you get one last run of being awesome with them, and then you are done. You do not farm gold to buy them, you do not keep doing the same thing after running out of shinies: cap, hit the final boss, go home the winner.

: Zubon

Tactical Lessons

I have to hand it to the Averheim Order guild HOSS.  For nearly a week in Tier 3 of Warhammer Online, they have pretty much been locking down all the Keeps.  It does suck that most of my guild is farther on in Tier 4, but it’s not like we don’t have Destruction players to make up a Keep-sieging warband.  HOSS (and alliance) doesn’t just ninja Keeps when Destro players sleep; they make very sound tactical choices when defending Keeps.

When defending a Keep, it seems very normal for defending players to filter in through the main and postern doors in order to build up a defensive warband inside the Keep.  The first time HOSS led order crushed my Alliance-pug warband, they all met at their warcamp and came all together like a hammer against the rock that was the first Keep door.  We were completely unprepared.  They ran over our soft backline like butter with their well communicated focus fire.

The second tactic that really gained my attention was during a pitched battle.  Our warband was a tad more organized, and we pushed the defense (including people in the HOSS alliance) pretty hard.  We rushed through the second broken door, regrouped at the bottom of the stairwell, and felt pretty good about how many defenders we had killed inside the keep.  Then just as we started to rush the Keep Lord, the Order defenders rushed from behind the Keep (it seems they all fled through the postern door just as the second door fell) came around to the front of the Keep, and again they swept us from behind while our tanks were agroing the Keep Lord and crew. Just for perspective, most the time the defenders will hole up behind the Keep Lord.

Tier 3 Order has definitely upped the skill and communication required (not to mention amount of live bodies) to RvR succesfully on the Averheim server.

–Ravious

Losing Sight of the Carrot

One of the problems I have with quest-driven leveling in modern games, is that I end up depending on the carrot to lead me around way too much. Eventually, I lose sight of the carrot altogether and then I stop playing. I know it’s kind of a silly metaphor, but it happened to me in both World of Warcraft at level 40 and in Lord of the Rings Online at level 32.

What seems to occur is that I will end up with a group of quests that are too hard to do solo, or else a bunch of quests designed specifically for groups. Since I seem to have some sort of mental block around finding groups, I usually log on a few times and log back off. Finally I cancel the game.

However, since I have a lifetime account for LotRO, I didn’t cancel and continued to pop in once and a while to see what’s new. One day a few weeks ago (with my hunter that was stuck at level 32) I decided to get on my horse and ride to Rivendell. I had not been there yet and I realized I did have one quest asking me to talk to someone there so off I went.

Continue reading Losing Sight of the Carrot

Mines of Moria

I may get it in a few months, after a price drop. Right now:

  1. I don’t like the level cap boost.
  2. The Runekeeper has been handled poorly. Not only is it out of place in Tolkien, the developers have mocked the players for caring. Because they are free to do so when the people who care about lore purity already have lifetime accounts: you cannot take your monthly fee and leave, and you either buy the expansion or stay stuck and alone at 50. (At least the graphics on the Runekeeper have been turned down from “Sith Lord” to “gunslinger with no guns.”)
  3. My gaming rig is in the shop.

: Zubon

Review Old Games: Contra

Taking my own challenge, let’s talk about one of the great classics: Contra from the NES. Nerds who know exactly what you mean if you talk about the spread gun, and many of us know the Konami code as the Contra code.

On the plus side, this was one of the great early mass slaughter games. If you wanted to pick up a machine gun and blow up some aliens, in the days before shotguns and zombies were all the rage, this was it. You had a variety of guns, cooperative multiplayer, and several variations on places in which to shoot them. When I was much younger, this was awesome.

On the down side, it was Nintendo hard. One-hit death with full item loss, three lives, and enemies with guns in multiple directions. Mix in flame jets, death pits, and spiked walls that spring from the ground. I blame development for arcades: “kill him frequently to take his quarters” does not port well to a non-quarter-based environment, to say nothing of the many games without saves, passwords, etc. (See also: online games that give you incentives to stay logged in AFK.)

Lessons to take away: (1) fake difficulty is bad. Elite monsters are not any more interesting than normal ones; they just have bigger numbers. Granted, the normal ones are not very interesting in group play, but it does not make something more interesting to give it 10x the hit points or damage. In Contra’s case, dodging a few shots is interesting, but dodging shots while on a moving cart beneath a splat-pillar maze, only to have a spiked wall pop up as you are almost to the last pillar, is bad. (2) Let’s make that a general case: it should be at least theoretically possible to beat the game on the first try, without random choices that sometimes lead to suicide, undisclosed boss fight mechanics, and all the other fun reasons why we follow online guides instead of just playing the game. (3) Understand your audience and platform. Do not design for the console as if it were a PC or an arcade stand-up. (4) Shooting things with your friends is fun. Preferably imaginary things rather than the neighbor children.

: Zubon

Bonus: speed run

Death Knight, Fun.

I installed WotLK for my wife and then watched the queue for her. 1600 people and 45 minutes later, I was staring at the character screen. What the heck, I thought I’d whip up a Death Knight to see what they put together before she came back downstairs.

Fun. Damn you Blizzard you know how to make this fun. I had a total and complete blast and finally logged out after a level and a half of pure joy. Even the quest to kill 100 guards was fun. And what is this fantastic new technology that you use to change the state of the landscape with the blink of an eye? I was dumbstruck. I just don’t know what to say other than way to go Blizzard! You really surprised me.

I had no intention of ever playing World of Warcraft again. Thanks a lot.

– Ethic

Vicariously Expanding

Some time ago I bought the pre-order expansion for LOTRO, filled with great excitement at seeing the first expansion for a game. This tends to really set the tone of the growth of the game in an MMORPG world. Look at EQ – Kunark was probably the most solid overall expansion ever for an MMORPG game. It had not only 10 new levels, it had a new playable race, great lore, and experience content for every level out at the time. I knew a lot of the beta testers and they well knew the sheer envy I had for them and a burning desire to know things they took to their virtual NDA-encased graves (those of us who did serious beta testing for Sony have everlasting NDA’s…there’s a great many things I can never every talk about, sadly). Later expansions were good and bad, but the first one…magic. Move up to WoW – an expansion that was very much like a fireworks display in that it was very flashy but unfortunately faded out quickly. Not that it hurt them, as they continued to slowly keep content dribbling in, but not all we’d hoped for. For my friends still in WoW, I hope WotLK is everything you wanted.

All that said, I await the launch of the first expansion for LoTRO in a mere 5 days. While I sit in my hotel room, a bit over 100 miles away from my gaming computer. For the next week and a half. Are we having fun yet?