Month: January 2010

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Bet or Change Your Mind

One thing I’ve picked up from everyone’s favorite stable of bloggers at the George Mason economics department is that you should be willing to bet on your beliefs. If you really believe in what you are saying, it is taking easy money; if not, shut up. I think this would be useful in our world of interminable online arguments. It improves the accuracy and precision of your beliefs, and it forces others to face up to theirs.

The heart of it is nailing down just what it is that you (or others) believe. Many of your ideas exist as fuzzy generalities that have no application to the world because they are insufficiently well defined for there to be any counter-evidence. If mutually exclusive options are both consistent with what “you know,” you don’t really know anything. Continue reading Bet or Change Your Mind

Ode on a Server

Today’s Wikipedia article of the day is “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and Keats is a relevant figure for MMOs. He was a candle that burned brightly and quickly. His odes constituted a new form of poem, although those not immersed in poesy are unlikely to see them as much different from other forms. His works are known more for an effusion of passion and imagery than technical perfection; some say his best works are marred by unbecoming lines, and others debate whether controversial lines “work.”

If you’re not getting the connection, your link on that last one is “bug or feature?” “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is an old favorite that exhibits this well. There are several points when you might pause and ask whether a line really works, either in its content or its form. To my mind, some of them work just because of that — “More happy love! more happy, happy love!” succeeds only to the extent that you accept a narrator effusively overcome by the moment. On content, do we really want to celebrate eternally unfulfilled desire? If Epicurus had a hell, that would be it, but there is a Romantic ideal in teetering on the verge of satisfaction. There many ways to take (or not) the last two lines.

As an MMO player, if you have not read “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” you really ought. Someone pick a tune, and it could be our national anthem. That eternally unfulfilled desire? That’s what you are paying for. Those frozen lovers are your treadmill, always on the verge of ecstacy, never quite reaching it, where joy is found in the endless almost-attaining. The world is static, unchanging, with events clearly happening but never actually resolving. There is an eternal spring, and the silent pipes play on.

: Zubon

For anyone who does not believe in poetry-based “controversy,” (1) this was bleeding-edge stuff in 1819, and (2) like you have never seen a forum explode about whether changing Rogue positional damage by 2% will completely ruin the game.

LOTRO Volume 3 – First Motes

The first official tidbits on the upcoming Volume 3 for Lord of the Rings Online was released yesterday.  Volume 3 is named Allies of the King, with Book I: Oath of the Rangers, and it hints at the martial mobilization of zones we know and love.  There are going to be some crafting updates.  Complete solo-ization of Volume 1, and some updates to a few current skirmishes we have, making them raidable.

The best part is a new skirmish, which will be part of Vol. 3, Bk. 1 called the Depths of Nurz Ghashu, which takes place in the Rift that many loved during pre-Mines of Moria times.  Unfortunately I picked up Lord of the Rings Online only a few months before Mines of Moria was launched, and I never made it to the Rift.  (Though I did make it to Helegrod – the 24-man raid - amazingly enough.)

It does not seem like we will be getting a new zone, like Dunland, this time around.  The start of Volume 3 uses a lot of old content, which is not a bad thing.  Recycling old content just requires a balance between the old and new.  Developers will want to polish the great memories, discard the yucky ones, and then add a touch of new.  A new drop would suffice, or new mechanics as the case is for the new skirmish in an old dungeon instance.

The best part is that Turbine can escape the timeless existence of their old content.  We already see this in a snowy Bree ransacked by villainous curs in the two Bree skirmishes, but this is a future story.  I want to see my effects have consequences.  Let’s pretend I did kill Thaurlach the Balrog in the Rift.  The best I could hope for was some quest text thanking me and suggesting that the threat is now lessened and the Rift is in disarray.  Now, Turbine has a chance to show me what happened after that brave group of 12 assaulted the Rift. (Also maybe give another way to give Eldgang rep. Hint. Hint.)

–Ravious
we have to go back, kate

Virtual Worlds and Action Movies

MMOs are supposed to be virtual worlds. But just because it’s virtual, doesn’t mean it’s a simulation. In the real world, we have ugly people. Sure, we try to make ourselves look better via nice clothing, diet, or by using make-up and photoshop, but none of that is necessary in an MMO. You can make yourself look however you want, and everyone wants to look good.

For all the multitude of options you have in the Star Trek Online character creator, you can’t make a big fat “Scotty” character. Few MMOs actually let you be ugly or unattractive. People want their MMO to have a simulated economy, or simulate the process of building a star-ship, or simulate the weather. But MMOs are not simulations, they’re more like action movies.

In an action movie, everyone is beautiful. Something interesting is always on the verge of happening. There are no bathrooms or tax-collectors. The entire world in an action movie exists for the sole purpose of being an interesting setting for the main characters. The boring, ugly, and annoying aspects of life are minimized or ignored. The real question is, do players actually want a virtual world or do they really want the action movie they’ve been getting?

Five Bars to Mordor

Sammath Gul is the new 6-man dungeon in Lord of the Rings Online Siege of Mirkwood.  Overall, its a well designed dungeon.  The main mechanic deals with the dreaded bone piles.  If a player steps in a bone pile placed all around the dungeon, a couple mobs pop out.  They are easy enough to deal with even if a couple piles are disturbed, but when players are already embattled with the trash mobs things can start to get tough.  The third (final) boss is Gorothul, the sorcerer of Mordor that shook things up in Moria.  The fight takes place in front of enormous glass windows where two Nazgul on felbeasts watch the fight.  And, there are bone piles.

The fight begins with one of my now favorite boss cinematics.  Gorothul basically phones home to big-daddy Sauron, and has a brief discussion about the players’ fates.  The Lidless Eye appears, giving players immense dread, and Gorothul, you know, casually mentions that some Free Peoples are standing in front of him.  I have to say that I was very impressed with the voice acting and dialogue in what could have been a very cheesy setup.  Of course, Sauron commands Gorothul to end the players, and Gorothul responds with a resolved ‘as you wish.’  The fight begins but for the first 30 seconds or so the dread from having Sauron’s eye on the players has to wear off.

I have to say that I have been thoroughly impressed with all the cinematics in Siege of Mirkwood.  The flow of each scene and the emotions presented are usually spot on.  The one mechanic I am getting sick of, though, is the use of the cut-scene stun(especially in the prisoner trade scene).  It’s very anti-heroic when the Enemy has a win-button.  It’s even worse when a silly dwarf breaks the fourth wall and asks what “trickery” the cut-scene stun is.  I’d prefer that either they take camera control away (like Turbine did in the last book of Volume 1) or just freeze my character.  I understand that important things are happening, and I can deal with the loss of character control for that scene.  It’d be much better than my heroic character swaying in the wind like a drunk hobbit that just ate three fermented cherry pies.

–Ravious
the feeling’s irresistible and that’s how we movin’

A Lesser Evil

Answer this question right now, which is worse – gold farmers or cheaters?  They might belong to the same coin of the disease that hurts our favorite MMOs, but they attack it from wholly different sides.  The answer, for me, is not self-evident.  Sure, if I were the Ultra Decision Maker with infinite resources I would press my magic button and both problems would be dealt with by my happy MIT graduate programmers.  But, developers don’t live in that world.  They live in a world where the target is always moving, always trying to outsmart, and there is never enough time to line up the scope for a perfect kill.  So which is worse when you have the development time for one bullet?

Continue reading A Lesser Evil

STO: Beta Events

Today was the last day of beta for Star Trek Online. For the last day of beta, the developers gave the fanboys a chance to play what they were asking for.

A lot of PVP fanboys were asking for open-world PVP. That was part of the event. Klingons could fly all the way to the starting location for humans and attack enemy players as they loaded in. Unfortunately for the Klingons, there are far less of them than there are of Federation players, so once they loaded into the zone, they found themselves to be the ones being spawn-camped. I heard Klingons complaining that they were dead before they could move. I heard federation players complaining that killing the same Klingon player over and over at the spawn-point was boring. For all the requests I read on message boards about wanting open-world PVP in STO, I only heard complaints from both sides in zone chat today.

A few Star Trek fanboys were complaining that the Borg in the game were too weak. In the tv-show, one Borg cube destroyed an entire fleet of ships. In Star Trek Online, you easily kill dozens of Borg on your own during the tutorial. During today’s last-day event, the Borg were everywhere. They spawned in the earth spacedock by the dozen. Individual Borg-drones one-shotted Klingon and Federation players alike. In space encounters, no fleet of players could hope to take out a single Borg-cube. The reaction to the Borg invasion was less negative, but I doubt even Star Trek fanboys would enjoy being one-shotted in the starting area once the game launched.

So why is Cryptic giving players in open-beta a chance to test things that won’t be in the game? Partially, this kind of event is a chance to celebrate the end of beta. But also, this gives Cryptic a chance to show what things would be like if they actually did something like this during launch. In Champions Online, their last-day of beta event in Millennium city was a slide-show for most people. The Borg invasion and open world PVP showed that some ideas fans have are more fun as concepts than they are in-game.