Month: August 2010

Cultural Difference

In World of Warcraft, the shared world is where you complete the leveling game. It is organized by and dominated by quests. The goal of the leveling game is to earn experience points and to complete it as time-efficiently as possible. The end game is the real game, and it takes place in instances. The goal is to improve your gearscore. Completing achievements and collecting pets and mounts are shared mini-games between the two levels of play.

Or at least that is how I see the majority of hardcore players. If you disagree, the question is not whether it is true for you but whether you think I have mis-assessed the majority. You could also make the case that the real majority is casually making its way through the leveling game. Those people are less likely to be engaged in MMO blogs or the meta-game, so I don’t know if they are part of the conversation.

In City of Heroes and The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢, the leveling game is the game. There is a veneer of end game, but people who think that the game begins at the level cap are severely disappointed. There is some harder content at the cap, along with the chance to farm for best-in-slot gear, but the games are designed for the journey. If you power-level to get past the leveling game, you are just missing the game. The end game is pretty much more of the leveling game, without experience points. (Completing badges/deeds and collecting costumes/mounts are shared mini-games between the two levels of play.)

Going from the latter two to the former, I was constantly annoyed by “the game begins at 80.” Meanwhile, the population in the former is much larger and therefore is a constant source of complaints as visitors in the latter two. “I left WoW because I was bored, but this game sucks because it isn’t more like WoW. I need you to change it for me now, because I’m going back to WoW when the next expansion drops.”

: Zubon

Group Puzzle Content

Puzzles have a long and proud tradition in single-player computer games. Quality has varied dramatically, but then Sturgeon’s Law applies. (Feel free to commiserate in the comments about your favorite horrible guesswork “puzzles.”) Puzzle bosses are a classic implementation, although these are often a thin candy coating over the BIG RED GLOWING EYE that you shoot.

We seem to want to replicate this in MMOs, and I do not think it has gone well. Problems are both because you expect to fight the bosses multiple times and because you will not be bringing the same people.

Continue reading Group Puzzle Content

Varieties of Gold Spam

I recently received the usual e-mail asking me to help some African official move millions of dollars through my bank account. I was obviously selected carefully, because he had 30kb of names in the “to” field. The interesting twist on this scam was that it was supposed to be gold, not US currency, and the e-mail had links to several stories about commodities markets and the gold standard.

The gold-sellers who are trying to steal your account information through phishing e-mails are often insufficiently sophisticated. Some are very good, with copies of real companies’ sites and artful URL deceptions. Most seem to rely on bulk, making a token effort and sending it to as many people as possible. If you get a 0.01% hit rate when sending a million e-mails, that’s not bad money for the effort.

The 419 scammers are intentionally being unsophisticated. Many of them really do speak better English than that, or at least have access to someone who does. The ruse has two purposes in the scam. First, the kind of person they want to take advantage of is more likely to respond to an unsophisticated request. Either you are charitable, and therefore feel sorry for them, or you are predatory, and therefore think you can put one over on them. Either way, you are drawn in. Second, assuming you are drawn in, if they manage to get money from you once, they can plausibly claim a misunderstanding and try again on the same victim. He does not look bright, and his English certainly is poor, so he has a convenient excuse for whatever goes wrong; come on, give him another chance.

As ever, don’t click the links, don’t give out your info, yaddah yah.

: Zubon