Month: December 2009

.

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.

.

Suppliers and Expansions

This forum post is dead wrong. For those who cannot click through, it is someone complaining about the auction house prices of consumable items and the components needed to craft them. Down-thread, he goes on to rant about price-gouging and arresting merchants who raise prices when items are in short supply. I left after he took the surreal turn of equating (not just comparing) the expansion to Hurricane Katrina and calling for tools to report and perma-ban sellers the same way that gold-spammers are banned.

We have covered this before, but let’s refresh for the economically illiterate. When supply is low, you want prices to go up. This is especially true in a MMO market for crafting materials, where the cost of entry is almost nil. If prices do not rise, supply will not rise, because people have better things to do with their time than farm materials for a few silver pieces (while getting mail and /tells about what horrible gougers they are). Higher prices induce more people to sell, which brings back lower prices with more supply.

Consider the original poster, who we will refer to as the whining, greedy destroyer (WGD). WGD sees the new expansion pack and wants to experience the new content. Does he want to log on an alt, grow tea leaves, make buff food, and transfer it over? Does he want to grab a different alt, run around the previous expansion’s zones to gather materials, craft consumables, and transfer them over? No, nor did he plan ahead on any of those. WGD wants to go do the new content now. He wants to raid and run skirmishes, which produce few to no consumable components. With a worldview that even Karl Marx condemned, he wants to consume without producing.

WGD instead wants someone else to do the farming and producing so he can consume. And he wants them to do it cheap, with a smile, instead of playing with the new content. And they should be banned if they will not. I mean, with all the extra gold being pumped into the economy by having higher level enemies, why should crafters get any of it? WGD has also missed the point that banning producers leads to even less supply. Because nothing helps the situation like actively making the problem worse.

If you think prices are too high, cash in. Leveling a gathering skill is quick, so you can even start from scratch. Farm, sell, and profit until prices are too low for it to be worth your time to farm and sell. If prices are too high for you to buy, but too low for it to be worth your time to farm and sell, why do you think it is worth anyone else’s time to farm and sell to you?

: Zubon

If you want to argue that there should be no crafted consumables, and everything should be available cheap on an NPC vendor, that’s a different design argument. This is just the stupidity of making a outraged claim to others’ time.

Legendary Items and Soldiers

This forum post is dead-on. For those who cannot click through:

  1. Legendary items and skirmish soldiers are similar systems, providing post-cap advancement, customization, and grind.
  2. Soldiers win on customization. They provide full control, unlike the mostly random LIs, letting you customize to your playstyle. Many said that everyone would build the same LI, but on soldiers we see every possible class/soldier combination with many differences in traits. (Unmentioned: there is some chance of a trend away from customization, towards optimization in the future, especially if there is one clear best or worst.)
  3. Soldiers win on permanence. While you mulch hundreds of “legendary” items looking for a good one (or to get relics for that good one), you get one soldier. You do not trade out your soldier every five levels for a higher DPS one. You just pay for him to be a higher level.
  4. Skirmishes are just better than the item xp quests. They are more interesting. (I will say that the Dolven-view instances remain interesting, but then you have quests like mirror and bounty runs that have long-distance travel for one click or fight, respectively.)

Basically, take that soldier trait screen and give us the same sort of thing for LIs. Others add:

  • I really wanted a legendary weapon, but I hate the system added. I never wanted a soldier, but I love the system added.
  • Cosmetic options! You can make the soldiers look like what you want. Let me customize my weapon’s appearance!

“Basically you get a weapon, or a piece of armour or a shield and it has it’s own advancement path. It has XP. It has Deeds. You grow it, almost like a pet alongside you. Your Glamdring that has it’s own history.” – Jeffery Steefel, March 14th, 2008

I still wonder if people will get tired of skirmishes, only having about a dozen, they way they do with the hundreds of City of Heroes missions.

: Zubon

Interview with Undead Labs’ Jeff Strain

Jeff Strain over at the brand, new Undead Labs game studio took time out of his busy plane-hopping, zombie-stomping schedule to answer a few questions on the studio’s newly announced zombie console MMO.  (My real name is Zach so don’t be confused, but also don’t go spreading it around in case nasty lawyerssess finds me.)  Read on after the break to hear everything from velociraptors, the “MMO” term, and a debatably good place to hole up against a horde of zombies.

Continue reading Interview with Undead Labs’ Jeff Strain

4 Months, 5 Dungeons, 13 Bosses

I have leveled to 65 in no particular hurry, and I am almost done with the new quests in Mirkwood. Lots of solo content, lots of little stories, and I have toured the zone. “Now what?” as the players always ask.

The current end-game for The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ is three three-person dungeons, one six-person dungeon, and one twelve-person raid. The three-person dungeons have one, two, and three bosses, and the three-boss dungeon lets you summon them all at once for a big fight. The six-person dungeon has three boss fights plus a bonus boss if you complete hard mode. The raid again has three boss fights.

Not to seem ungrateful for the new content, but that is 13 fights to learn in the four-ish months until the next content patch. Continue reading 4 Months, 5 Dungeons, 13 Bosses

Pre-Buff Nerf

Your game is balanced at the cap. Your new expansion pack raises the cap. How can you let players rise further without completely disrupting things? Nerf everything, then let the players work to get back to where they were. Then launch the next expansion pack.

Do I need a developer quote for something we have seen on so many major expansions? The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ is the one nearest to my vision. At the end of Shadows of Angmarâ„¢, players had quite respectable Block/Parry/Evasion percentages, some avoiding the majority of attacks. Percentages are dangerous things: they automatically scale, and once you’ve reached a certain point, you cannot give more without giving the enemies an ability like “evasion penetration” that feels like a Burglar nerf. When Mines of Moriaâ„¢ launched, those percentages were all changed to BPE ratings, which were much larger numbers that translated to much smaller BPE percentages. It was an across-the-board nerf to defenses. This, in player relations speak, was done to create the opportunity for future character increases (i.e., work your way back to where you were).

For Siege of Mirkwoodâ„¢, several other percentages and numbers were changed to ratings. Who would like to guess whether the rating translates to a smaller percentage than it used to be? Continue reading Pre-Buff Nerf

Clearings in the Lonely Woods

There is a stark contrast between playstyles of many an MMO waiting on an expansion and just receiving the expansion.  The new expansion brings a new journey through many zones and quest chains, and as unfortunate as it is, many people experience the journey at a hugely varied pace.  Real life, and other games, have limited my game time Lord of the Rings Online with experiencing the new expanded content in Siege of Mirkwood.  As it is, almost everybody in my kinship is well ahead of me.  The woods can be much gloomier when only strange creatures and strangers abound.

Yet, Turbine has done a great job (as far as I’ve experienced) with the content concentration.  In the Mirk-Eaves, the quests send players at about three quests per chunk to specific geographical locations.  At the locations, I’ve found there is about 10-20 minutes of gameplay from doing everything from destroying orc weapon stashes, staking out bosses, and everyone’s favorite: killing boars for boar meat.  If a player does it right by picking up all three or so quests at once, then everybody at the geographical location will be doing approximately the same thing. 

Continue reading Clearings in the Lonely Woods

Re-Envisioning Book Instances

One bit of Siege of Mirkwoodâ„¢ that I have not seen discussed anywhere is how Volume II, Book 9 uses skirmishes where other books in the epic chain use instances. That they are using the new book to show off the new toy is obvious; that it has skirmishes has been discussed. No, the bit that struck me is that it does not have the group instances that all the other books have. There are solo instances to tell story bits, but it uses skirmishes instead of the old system for instanced group content.

Why does this matter? A recurring problem is how to deal with the older content for new people as the mass of the playerbase has moved past it. Most games go back a few years later and nerf content so that it solo-able, or add different grouping options, or otherwise experiment. The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ has weakened some content; before that it added rewards for repeating the 6-person instances so that veterans would have an incentive to help new players; and the latest talk has been of adding a “solo mode,” a mega-buff so that one player could solo what was built as a group instance.

Skirmishes get past that by building in scalability. Playing in off-hours or three years down the line? No problem: the attack on the castle has a solo difficulty built in. Small guild, or want to make it a guild event? Set it for 3, 6, or 12, or make it a higher tier. Never got into skirmishes, so your soldier is weak? You can turn down the level on many.

What impresses me is that the content has been built now so that it will be playable years from now. There will not be a need to fix it three years from now, and the grognards will have no fuel for, “Kids these days all need easy mode, while in my day we ground out ten thousand rats and liked it!” Maybe it is easier to add a super buff, but if I were the one retrofitting old instances to be solo-able, I would strongly consider turning some into skirmishes that you unlock during the epic books. This would also vastly increase the use of the content. Most people play the epic book instances once and then never look back, while people are repeating skirmishes everyday. (Making the boss fights interesting for different group sizes would be a design challenge.)

: Zubon

Token Economy

A typical looting session of the Watcher for my kin will look like this:
“OK we have a Platinum Coin of Spirit.”
“Is that shoulders or helm?”
“One sec… googling it”
“I think it can be bartered for either one can’t it?”
“No that’s the American servers. We have to wait until Mirkwood comes out in the UK for it to barter for either.”
“Spirit sounds more like it’s in your head than your shoulders. I think spirit is shoulders”
“Back. I just checked google and it’s helm.”
“So, if I need shoulders I could use my DKP on it now, and then get the shoulders for it later right?”
“Uhhhh…. need to check google. BRB”

Sometimes when it comes to exchanging tokens for things in games, its just a headache.

Continue reading Token Economy

Gender Differences at Terra Nova

Dmitri Williams at Terra Nova links to their latest paper exploring the EQ2 data. The highlights are not terribly surprising. One notable is that men play more on average, but the hardcore women are more hardcore. This will not surprise anyone with a female guild leader.

Dmitri’s highlights note the higher percentage of females reporting bisexuality, although not the higher percentage of men reporting homosexuality; the total not-straight percentages are about the same. That is consistent with the demographics I recall, although he notes the female reporting rate as higher than the general population. I wonder the extent to which these are factors of reporting or of the underlying population. In every online community I know, women discussing bisexuality receive quite a bit of positive attention; men, not so much. There could also be an age factor there.

: Zubon