Month: June 2009

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Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

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Enjoy the Maze

A behavioral scientist is a type of psychologist who spends a lot of time putting rats through mazes. Sometimes it’s a big maze, sometimes it’s a very small and simple maze. The one thing they all have in common is the cheese at the end.

The rats behave consistently. They move through the maze as fast as they can to get to the cheese. That’s just natural reward seeking behavior. Every rat we test is always going to get to the cheese as fast as they can. At no point do the rats ever slow down and just enjoy the maze.

Yet, our MMOs keep asking us to enjoy our maze. In the case of Lotro’s summer-festival maze, they mean it literally. But I wouldn’t be going through that maze were it not for the reward. I could get a new wall-paper for my house or a new fish-slap emote!

Our video game masters don’t want us reaching the end of the maze and getting full too quickly… so they ask us to slow down. We don’t. So they make the maze longer. They tilt the maze so that we’re struggling to go uphill to get to our cheese. Bastards! Why couldn’t they just make our maze more complicated and puzzle-driven? Then at least I’d feel smart when I beat the other rats there. Feeling smart is an especially nice little piece of cheese.

Really, if they wanted me to slow down, all they have to do is drop little bits of cheese all throughout the maze. Then I’d actually have something to stop and enjoy.

W101 Brew

An MMO for what ails me.

I have been quiet lately, partly because MMOs were on the downside of the cycle and partly because I am holding a baby during my “free time.”  Games like Peggle and Nitrome’s Ice Breaker held reign.  Until, I decided to re-try Wizard 101.

My initial foray in to Wizard 101 was as a tourist.  I was already having a blast in Lord of the Rings Online and Guild Wars, and Wizard 101 was, at the time, just a weekend getaway.  I liked what I saw, and I really wanted to support their “crowns” business model, which lets players buy zones of content for $1-3/each forever.  However, it was not up to par with gameplay with the more complex MMOs I was already playing.

Now, it is the MMO I play.  All the little things that Kings Isle has done to make it casual are all things that I need for MMOs right now.  Continue reading W101 Brew

Player Respawn Timers

Most death penalties come down to lost time, in its various incarnations of lost experience points, item repairs, corpse runs, and debuffs. As death penalties become increasingly light, one type almost invariably remains: you wasted the time you spent failing, and now you need to run back to continue. (If you die in a group, you may just sit out a while until rezzed, hoping your group does not wipe at -1 member, or a shorter time with -2 members during the rez.)

This time-to-return can be very important. If it is very short, and the death penalty is otherwise small, you zerg things: just keep dying and coming back until you get through it. It is a measure of how far we have gotten past meatspace that we can now intuitively see solutions that include “die and come back” as part of viable plans. To take the first few examples that come to mind: our LotRO static group wiped on an overpull with adds last week, but ran back to clear it easily since we had taken out 75% of the enemies on the first try; LotRO three-man instances are short enough for people to die and come back while someone keeps the boss from resetting, and some turtle-raiding strategies involve planned deaths to reset the stacking DoTs; fights against CoX archvillains and giant monsters often involve multiple resurrections and hospital runs/teleports, and the Hamidon raid usually involves planned near-wipes.

This is usually not a good thing for the game. Continue reading Player Respawn Timers

Good Change: Event Introduction

Book 8 is live. When you log in, the Summer Festival will have started. But how do you know what and where everything is, especially if you are not a forum-reader? When you log in, you will have mail waiting. You get “Invitation to the Summer Festival.” It starts the quest “Invitation to the Summer Festival.” This tells you what city to visit to start, and the quest guide will take you straight to the spot. The quest awards the Summer Festival Guide, the fishing intro letter (in case you forgot how to fish), and a free festival token.

This is a good way to introduce people to the event. *clap*

: Zubon

(Known Issues with the new patch.)

The Rough Road Back To WoW

My wife has been talking about starting a new character in World of Warcraft and I decided it would be fun to join her. Our past duo was fun, until she left me in the dust around level 40. She kept on going to 80, and I switched over to LotRO. The first question in my mind was, should we take advantage of the Refer-A-Friend deal which would give us triple XP or should we do the Scroll of Resurrection deal which would give her a free month? Or, should I just reactivate and go? Well let’s think about that some.

I have 2 accounts available to me, one has Burning Crusade expansion and one has Wrath of the Lich King on it. The BC account is pretty old, and would meet the “90 day inactive” Scroll of Resurrection requirement. The Wrath account has not been inactive long enough. Looking at the Refer-A-Friend deal, we decided that paying $80 for the game and both expansions was too much so we ruled it out.

Continue reading The Rough Road Back To WoW

The Old Republic: Space and Voice

In a recent interview, the developers over at Bioware mentioned that any good star wars mmo would have a “space experience”.

Threads on the SWTOR boards declared, “Spare confirmed!” and people there are discussing possible ship-types and asking each other whether characters should have abilities that affect their ship or whether space-combat should be fully twitch-based. Of course… those questions assume that space combat will be mainly twitch-based and that there will be combat in space to begin with.

In their single player KOTOR games, the “space experience” amounted to having all your companions stored on a space and the occasional turret-based minigame. The closest you came to piloting your ship was when you selected a destination from a menu. Is there any reason to believe this isn’t the kind of space experience the developers are talking about?

The same interview promises that every line of NPC dialog will be voice acted. This is great news, but there’s no reason to believe they will implement it differently than they did in KOTOR. In Kotor, much the dialog was spoken by species other than humans. Most of the time, this amounted to a Wookie npc speaking in the same recycled track of “rarr, Rarr, rarr” over and over with subtitles. The gibberish sounds were so familiar that when you saw a Twi’lek speak something other than Twi’lek, you sat up and said, “This quest must be important!”

Is there any reason to believe we’ll meet a Hutt in SWTOR who speaks something other than Huttese? I imagine the important NPCs are likley to speak in common, and all the rest will speak the same gibberish lines. It’s just too much of a financial investment for them to make all voice dialog unique.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited for SWTOR. Like everyone else on the SWTOR boards, I can be caught day-dreaming about the possibilities of what the perfect MMO might be. But at a certain point, we have to stop asking whether it will just be “be Everquest in space”, and start asking “Will it be KOTOR with friends?”

Exar Kun vs 16th Hall

I’ve been jumping into every group for the 16th Hall that I could get. I still need the token from there. This is the instance I talked about screwing up earlier. The one where my pet killed a small bug and I wasted hours of people’s lives. Well, since that time I’ve become much better as a player. I’ve spent so many hours trying to clear this damn instance that I know it like the back of my hand.

I felt so overwhelmed the first time. Now I know not just my own role, but what everyone else should be doing as well. Tonight was the second night in the row of attempting the 16th hall. We got to the end, and this time, our guardian was lack-luster. He was anonymous, which I immediately take to mean, “Don’t look at me, my equipment sucks”. Sure enough, his equipment and traits sucked. Every time we went into the boss fight, he was dead within 30 seconds and I ended up tanking the boss every time we went in. In my head a voice was nagging, “I wear light armor, I’m a lore-master, I shouldn’t be tanking this boss every time.”

It reminds me of Exar Kun in Star Wars Galaxies. Yes, the Exar Kun instance. It’s the toughest instance in the game. I knew every strategy in every room in that place. But I needed tanks who could do their job, and commandos who could run the elements successfully. One day, in the last room of Exar Kun, there was this commando guy and I needed him to tank something

When the fight started, the commando was nowhere near his assigned position. So where did the boss he was supposed to be tanking go? To me, the medic. This left me doing several people’s jobs at once. With each of the four bosses, I was involved in some way. I was attacking the Promised with everything I had, while ping-pong tanking both the Lingering and the Embraced. And while all of this was going on, I was hovering my mouse over the Unquenchable every 3 seconds to see which element that boss was vulnerable to and calling it out over voice chat. All of this I was doing while spamming my group-heals.

Again, a voice in my head was saying, “I’m the medic… I shouldn’t be tanking anything. I shouldn’t have to call the elements for the person who’s job it is to run them.”

I can learn an instance well, given enough times in it. But you know what? I’m only going to see an instance that many times if it’s incredibly difficult to get together a team capable of doing it successfully. It’s the same in 16th hall. Our hunter was fantastic. Our minstrel was great. And I like to think that I performed admirably. But that’s only half a team. So we were destined to fail. Three hours down the drain.

The funny thing is… the more I compare this to Exar Kun, the better I feel about it. I have fond memories of the journey from being one of the people who sucked at instances to one of the most popular group leaders on our server. When I think of it like that, the idea of dying in this instance over and over doesn’t feel so bad. Eventually, we found the people we needed to do a competent job, befriended them, and got them into the instances.

When our failed run had ended and the group broke up, our minstrel sent me a tell. He wanted to know if he could add me and my alts to his friend’s list so that he could call on me for future runs….

Ahh…. good times.

Zubon, Behind the Curve

I have been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2 this week. This leaves me with little to talk about, unless we want to delve into specifics of maps or what classes appeal to our playstyles. Also, welcome to 2007. That’s not as bad as I thought, since I did not realize it was new when I got it as a part of the Orange Box. I have been thinking of going through the classic games that I missed, then talking about them a decade later. That might feel a bit like saying, “Have you heard about this ‘Pac-Man’? It’s a really neat, maze-based game in the classic arcade style!” But I should play through KOTOR and Planescape: Torment sometime. Yeah, I know. I’ve never played any of the Ultima games either, and only two Final Fantasies (and not even VII). So, while I am on MMO hiatus, I may be talking about some truly random stuff.

: Zubon

Facebook ArenaNet

ArenaNet’s Community Managers have been very busy as of late (well always, but this is business we can see).  Their two big pushes this late Spring have been with the alternative gaming communities: Twitter and Facebook.  ArenaNet has had accounts there for quite some time, but the push has been trying to make them very active.  The Community Managers are hoping for 1000 fans on Facebook (as of writing this it is at 894). Continue reading Facebook ArenaNet

Drift 1: Loss of Context

The game will introduce a mechanic to you early on, something perhaps unusual but reasonable in context. Over time, the game will expand from its simpler beginnings. By then, you will be so used to the mechanic that you will rarely pause to notice that it makes absolutely no sense in its new or expanded context.

Example: The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ uses “morale” instead of health. You don’t die, you just get too disheartened to continue, and you must rally. Sure, goblin spears to the ribs hurt, but you can keep fighting so long as your morale does not flag. A Minstrel’s songs raise your spirits, and you carry on. Then you start meeting trolls, the sort that would crush your skull and limbs with their giant clubs and rocks. You could conceivably rally through a few broken ribs. Then you get to poisoned water that instantly drains all your “morale.” Insta-death from morale drain? Then you get to lava flows, where you burn to death and your armor melts. Life is just a song away!

Example: pills in Left 4 Dead. Reasonable for ignoring scattered cuts and bruises, and then someone starts carving a hole in your chest.

I wanted to use Katamari Damacy as an example, when you start rolling up clouds as if they were huge sheets of plywood and fire that still burns, but Katamari Damacy is sufficiently insane to defy logic anyway. Instead, tell us your favorite example from your current game. Telling riddles to wolves? Backstabbing buildings? Tripping gelatinous cubes?

: Zubon