Month: October 2010

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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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Cash Shop Dreams and Nightmares (GW2)

Set off once again, the Guild Wars 2 communities are going manic over the PC Gamer article that misinterpreted ArenaNet. PC Gamer thought they heard that microtransaction dungeons were confirmed and ran that “exclusive” pigskin to the freakin’ endzone.  Except there was clearly a failure to communicate, and it turned out to be the wrong endzone. Still, all manner of speculation arose over how much allegedly game-destroying products would be for sale in the cash-shop. The biggest culprit? The terrible XP potion. (This is going to be a long one.)

Continue reading Cash Shop Dreams and Nightmares (GW2)

Casual Destruction (Vindictus)

For a “review,” this is as good as it gets. I’ll have my caveat first. I don’t really care about Vindictus. I am not vested in the game. If devcat became a sentient monster-machine and in a pyrrhic victory destroyed Nexon, Maple Story, and Vindictus, I’d pour a little off the top and move on. I mean, I named my character “Shingshing” for Eru’s sake. So take my ramblings for what they are worth.

Vindictus starts out as a fantastic game. I step in to this ridiculous dialogue starting out the tutorial with my nameless, faceless soldier, and then I find myself carrying a princess-girl-person while kicking gnolls in the face.  I end up fighting a bus-sized tarantula on top of a crumbling bell tower while ballista bolts rain down on the just and unjust a like. Then I feel bad for the dead tarantula in an empathetic Ol’ Yeller kind-of-way.

Continue reading Casual Destruction (Vindictus)

LotRO Harvest Festival

It is pretty cool, especially the new Haunted Burrow. A Casual Stroll to Mordor has a full guide. And, thanks to F2P, you don’t even need to be a subscriber to see it. The main events are all in lowbie-safe areas.

They keep adding more to the festivals each year. I like that. I also like when MMOs keep adding more little festivals. The long-run goal is for something special to be going on all the time.

: Zubon

Of Cabbages and Kings

Things have been a little up in the air right now. I still have a little time to game after the event, but right now I am finding I have less time to blog. Or rather, time is not the issue so much as the sheer force of will required to transcribe thoughts in to coherent blog posts. Anyway, right now I am actively playing Vindictus, Guild Wars, and Minecraft.

Vindictus, I’m finding, has supplanted Dungeons and Dragons Online action-y, quick bite of an MMO in my stable. Not only does it have that fresh feeling, but each dungeon takes 15 minutes or so. It is a little grindy, but it seems that some forward movement can be accomplished somewhere in any small play session. I have been mostly playing alone due to the horrendous lag I get whenever I try and join a pick-up group. Occasionally, I’ll work up the gall to start a party myself, and with my connection it works a little better. I am hoping some Vindictus blog posts make it through the will barrier in the coming months.

Guild Wars is actually slowing down. I am beginning to get that warm feeling of perfect satiation. My Hall of Monuments sits at 36 points, with a hard day’s work to get to 40, where I suppose I will stay. Flameseeker, they will call me. Still, there is plenty of “play” left in the game. The Guild Wars Live Team seems to have a full plate of updates ready to be served. The next course is Halloween with my always loved Costume Brawl and more Mad King goodness. I am really excited to see both the old and the new for my favorite Guild Wars festival.

Finally Minecraft. Many MMO gamers and bloggers have stared in to that abyss. I’ve been kind of taking a break, though, in anticipation for their Halloween update. In the meantime I will have to argue with my so-called real-life friends over whether we should reset our world and use monsters (if damage is fixed for multiplayer). Might be a dark Halloween.

–Ravious
it would be grand

More Unthinking Play

Anything you do in real time will benefit from repetition. If you need to consciously think about what you are doing, you may not have time to do it at all. If you can do it, you are performing suboptimally and probably focusing on your specific actions rather than incorporating them into a larger strategy.

When I started playing StarCraft II, I would refer to a friend who was jockeying to get into a diamond league, saying, “I don’t want to be that good.” Which is to say, I do not want to engage in the planning and repetition required to be that good. I am still thinking about my build order and looking around to see where ramps are on this map, rather than just building automatically and knowing the terrain.

You can think about only so many things at one time. If you think of your build order as a series of five steps, which you are working on while setting up your economy, you have about exhausted your mental resources. If you have played 1000 games and can subsume all of that under one mental unit of “Reaper rush,” you have lots of active attention available for strategizing and scouting. If you need to flip through three buildings and mouse-over some icons to find the research you want, you have lost time that your opponent has spent micromanaging his units. For him, it is practically Pavlovian to respond to the sound of an upgrade finishing and start the next level.

My early multi-player games were a series of constant re-discoveries of what things from the single-player campaign do not exist in multi-player play. I may not have played Zerg or Protoss as much, but at least I do not need to un-learn things to play those races. Except Scouts and Guardians from SC1, I miss those.

: Zubon

Torchlight Sets

Tesh reminds me of Torchlight’s set items. I was excited the first time a purple item dropped, which might just be conditioning from MMOs that make purple the color of awesome, but upon reflection I never found much use for sets. As Tesh says, you out-level items very quickly; in Torchlight, leveling every 15-20 minutes is taking your time.

Ah, but there is shared storage and inter-generational item transfer in Torchlight. You can gradually build up the set and make use of it every run. Well yes, maybe if I enjoyed inventory management more, but that seems like a lot of work for a small bonus. Meanwhile, there are awesome non-set items I would need to give up, and I can risk them at the enchanter all I like without threatening to gimp the set. (Given enough times, you will have items survive 10 enchants, and given enough times, you will have set items disenchanted on the first try. One of the former gives me a permanent “best in slot,” while one of the latter breaks my set.)

But this assumes that I play Torchlight enough for it to matter. How many runs would it take to get a full set of 4-6 items in the same level range? 6-10, if you are lucky? And then that set is the best for maybe an hour or two per run? If you beat Torchlight once a week, that is probably worthwhile, although after 10 runs you will also have some very nice non-set items. I would be surprised to find many people who play through Torchlight once a month.

It seems like an over-designed subsystem. It works very nicely if you play for hundreds of hours, but it is just noise if you beat the game once with each class.

: Zubon

This is the reverse of Magic: the Gathering. The original designers knew the system would have problems if players spent hundreds of dollars on cards, but if lots of players were spending hundreds of dollars on cards, great!

Oh, and read the comment from Darius at Tesh’s. Interesting notion!

Stricter Comment Policies

Geoffrey Pullum has become annoyed with a couple of common comments:

… Unable to bear any longer the tedious work of seeking out all the instances of these two comment types so I can delete them, I have decided that from now on I will hunt down the relevant commenters and kill them. …

From now on, if you are going to post either of the two sorts of comments I have just described, please supply your actual name and residential address so I or Language Log security staffpersons Luca and Enzo can track you down.

I appreciate that there may be some legal issues with this policy, and some believe that death is too harsh a punishment for Language Log writers to be handing out… But the “let-everyone-have-their-say” softies who criticize my policy have no idea just how many boring self-satisfied twits have posted almost exactly the same thing over and over again down the years. Yes, death is a severe sanction. But I think people should look at things from my point of view. It is really irritating.

Keep in mind also that both kinds of commenter think that they are being enormously clever and witty and original. This is frightening: remember, these morons are out there somewhere, ready to get seated next to you at a dinner party or on a plane and bore you senseless. …