Month: July 2009

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Need before Greed

Today I joined a pickup group for the Forges with my Runekeeper. It was a pretty good group. We all kept re-doing the instance so that each person in the group could get the desired item at the end. Most of the time, the person who just won the roll says “thanks for the group” and leaves. So I felt pretty good about the group.

One of our members was a Lore-master who would always switch to their level 48 Captain for the last chest. They had asked if this was OK before starting, and our leader had told him it was fine. It was on our fourth run that a second age Captain’s weapon dropped. The leader of the group gave it to the level 60 Captain in the group without putting it up for a roll.

He said, “I think you’ll agree that this should go to the other Captain, because you can’t use it yet.”

I could hardly believe my eyes. The whole point of our Lore-master attending was so that he could bring his level 48 into the group and roll for the equipment. He was getting his equipment ahead of time so that he’d already have good gear when he reached a higher level. The level 48 Captain just said that he couldn’t argue with a group leader, and left the group. Then he logged off.

Continue reading Need before Greed

No More MMO Heroes

Yesterday, the gods of Team Fortress 2 felt the need to bestow upon me a glorious moment for my birthday.  The payload was in a trench, and just then someone threw a jarate at the bomb cart.  This lowly pyro did jump into the fray pushing the cart thereupon critting down two heavies, a medic, an enemy pyro, and some other hapless being before succumbing to enemy fire.  The moment was epic.  I just had to share.  Allow me this one small indulgence.

I, as well as Zubon, have been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2.  I really enjoy the chaotic style of play that public servers are ripe with.  One can usually find me amidst the Lotus servers.  Now back to regularly scheduled Kill Ten Rats thoughts:

Continue reading No More MMO Heroes

Chicago Trip

Reading is Power Unlike my Minneapolis trip, there is no overlapping gaming conference, but I will be in Chicago this weekend, if anyone else will be about. Sadly, my librarian guildmate will not be attending. There should still be time to get a free exhibits pass, if anyone needs the link. Neil Gaiman is on the list of authors signing, along with Judy Blume on Saturday and M. T. Anderson on Monday.

: Zubon

Simple Graphics for Simple Minds

Setting things on fire in-game is satisfying to a degree that is psychologically worrisome. The implementation, however, is important.

One thing I really enjoy in Team Fortress 2 is playing a Pyro. When you light someone up, they really are on fire, and it covers the entire character model. They yell for help, announcing that they are on fire. If there is water on the map, they may go diving off the edge. If you get a kill, the body will smolder on the ground. Nothing messes up an enemy charge like lighting up a few people, who instinctively go looking for health in a way that simple bullets cannot cause.

Contrast this with your MMO. What happens when you hit an enemy with an elemental effect? Most of the time, it seems, you can have an animation during the casting time and for a second or so later. You can have someone on fire from a half-dozen sources, and they just have a string of debuff/DoT icons. Stacking DoTs is still a good thing, but is a far cry from the panicked shouts of ogres.

Some do this a bit better, or do for certain effects. Some of the City of Heroes control graphics are great. Lock your enemy in a block of ice, boulder, or sphere of electricity. Have little ice cubes fall off a slowed target. Great. The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢’s Red Maid gets a great graphic on her immobilize, with red specters rising from the bloodied waters to hold you in place. Does your game do anything like this well, where an ongoing effect has a highly satisfying ongoing visual? Let us know.

It would be nice to see them scale, from a low-level singe to a high-level pyre. I am not sure how well that works for all energy attacks. I can see frost scaling from a blue tint from a low-level slow to a giant ice cube. I would need to think about some of the others.

: Zubon

Lithe Festival

Summer is here and that can mean only one thing, the Lithe Festival has come to the Shire.

One of my favorite parts of the festival, besides getting away from the trolls for a while, is the fishing contests.

If only there were prizes given for the most goldfish caught or maybe listening to a dockworker make astute observations, I would have won big.

But really, catching goldfish in a river has got to be a pretty special talent.

– Ethic

Issue 15

You can start the new Strike Force with a team of 4. It may even be possible to complete it with that, if you have the right characters and no PUG members. It is not much fun, it is bugged, and it is not the kind of thing you can do with whatever random people who happen to recruit. This puts it with a small amount of the level 50 content, like the Statesman TF, Lord Recluse SF, and Hami.

I’d say more, and there is more to the Issue, but I don’t care at this point. I’ll wait a little longer before uninstalling City of Heroes.

The thread discussing it is interesting, if only for the way that games’ urban legends get made. You can see people discussing how to get something to work and what worked for them, even after the developer has posted and said it doesn’t work. And heck, the developer could even be wrong. It has happened before.

: Zubon

Lori Drew Dismissal

While it will not become final until filed next week, Lori Drew’s conviction has been dismissed. This is important to gamers and other online folk, because the government’s theory in the case was that any violation of Terms of Service should be viewed as the same offense as hacking (“unauthorized access”), and therefore a federal crime. This would be a fun way to get rid of certain people we don’t like, but is probably one of the less intelligent legal theories to come out of California recently.

: Zubon

On the W101 Update

I played a large amount Wizard 101, which was recently updated with the Grizzleheim update.  Not only is there a new region, which branches the usual leveling path, but there are a whole slew of core mechanics that were just added.

The first, and in my opinion biggest, core improvement is the Bazaar.  The Bazaar acts as a trader depot where the NPC will buy just about every item (some have the “No Auction” tag) for gold, and if it has an item in stock it will sell it back.  Guild Wars uses this type of NPC-controlled market for materials, for an example of another MMO that uses this mechanic.  It is a great system, and much needed in a game where items could not be traded in any way between players on separate accounts.

There are two issues.  The issue that I am still on the fence with is in regards to the economic model used to determine buy price and sell price.  The system is built so that the NPC gets a huge turnaround profit so as to get rid of gold stockpiles, but that is not the thing that concerns me.  The Bazaar window has a numerical counter that shows how many of a particular item are in stock.  This counter caps at 100, and I am not sure what that means.  Will price be more severely affected as things are sold when the Bazaar already has 100 of them in stock?  Or, is it merely a faux consumer gauge?  The counter ending at 100 items in stock seems awfully low in a game where there are over 1,000,000 registered users.

Continue reading On the W101 Update

Gated communities

People complain a lot about the “gear gating” in Lotro. If you want to fight the new boss, you have to get the gear from the previous raids. We just want to experience the content, even if we can’t beat it with a PUG group.

When I think of it, isn’t almost everything in an MMO gated in one way or another? You can’t do everything in the game right from the get-go. If you want to fight that boss at all, you’re going to need to level up. If you want to get access to the zone he’s in, you’re going to have to do the last quest in a chain of quests that grant access to Moria. If you want to do that quest, you have to do all the pre-quests.

MMOs are all about gated content. You can’t meet Boba Fett until you do all the pre-quests. You can’t try the Battle of Lothlorien until you’ve earned enough reputation points. You can’t wear the cool armor until you get the drop. You can’t fly the cool ship until you save up the cash. You can’t summon the cool monsters until you do the quests to get them, and that’s only after you do the quests to become a summoner and all the leveling needed to start the quests. You can’t ride a chocobo, a horse, or a boat unless you’ve done the quests and have the needed level.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t completely hate gating. It’s necessary in a way. If I play Mega Man, I expect that I’m going to have to beat cut-man if I want to gear-up to kill made-entirely-of-paper man. And I know I need to beat every level and every mini-boss before I kill the last boss. But those are solo challenges.

I’m not expected to wait for a group of other mega men and women so that we can take down cutman. When the boss dies in Mega-man, I’m not typing /roll hoping that I get to be the one who wins the gun I need to fight the next boss. And the length of the levels doesn’t exceed an hour.

Gating of some kind is good. I like that story quest 1 leads to story quest 2. But gear gating with rare-drops, long instances, stupidly difficult bosses, or horrible grinds isn’t fun. It’s frustrating.