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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TF2 Item Shop

Team Fortress 2 has decided to sell the random drops you can find, along with some new cosmetics (dye) and miscellany. They also added 17 new items, composing sets (with set bonuses) for 5 classes, conveniently available as one bulk package. And some new rare items (you may need to buy a key to get them; I have only seen the boxes drop) and item trading. There is some question about whether everything can really be found or crafted, but that will mostly be speculation given the few days the new toys have been around. I have found one of them so far.

So far, I have heard “Korean MMO” only twice, plus one guy shouting about kids who waste money on useless crap. Personally, I sympathize with their accountants in the blog post “who — after watching with tooth-grinding irritation as we shipped over 120 free updates to a three-year-old game — gently suggested that we ‘make some f$*&ing money already.'”

I am torn at times with respect to encouraging potentially negative revenue models with wanting to reward publishers whose content I enjoy at great length and low cost. I know people who have maintained (sometimes multiple) accounts to niche games mostly as developer charity. TF2 has been worth more to me than most purchases that did not include the rest of the Orange Box. So I do not mind the idea of passing them extra money, ostensibly for the new toys but really for several years of ongoing development and nigh-free fun. I just want the store to have a box where I can say, “I am not encouraging you to make this a cash cow, but I thought the game was worth far more than it cost, so I wanted you to get a share of that consumer surplus.”

The game can now have a de facto subscription fee, in that crates (with potentially rare items) drop but keys cost $2.49. Open one a week and you are paying $10/month.

: Zubon

Player Skill in WoW

Player skill is mostly irrelevant in a gear-centric game. SynCaine makes this point with respect to why players obsess about eking out the last percent of benefit from builds. I think we are mostly familiar with this argument, and it is 90+% true, but this comment from Sean Boocock is a well formulated statement of the counter-argument: some people are so ridiculously good that they break the curve, we dismiss them as aberrations, and forget that they are examples that demonstrate how sufficient skill can overcome most anything short of a hard gear check. (Most of the other comments are “WoW sucks,” “Darkfall sucks,” and “you suck,” so skip them; poor signal-noise ratio.)

: Zubon

Of Sticks, Carrots, and Wallets (Guild Wars 2)

Last night the ArenaNet blog updated with a post by John Hargrove, Guild Wars 2 game designer, presenting an overview of some of the reward and upgrade schemes in Guild Wars 2. There are five main design points followed by a look into how they incorporated that point. These are some pretty cool concepts incorporated in to the game. For example, a player’s loot roll is personalized. If there is a dungeon boss chest, the player gets her own roll on the loot table to find out what that she earned.

This one concept is resounding, and can be a dual-edged sword. The loot distribution at the end of a dungeon was almost a kind of bittersweet celebration. It was exciting to see what we as a group had won, but then often times others would get some of the loot I wanted. Instead they use a system similar to Dungeons and Dragons Online where the group after-event is gone in place of a personal moment with the chest. Hopefully they can find some way of taking back a little of that group reward by perhaps allowing a person to donate an item in-chest (before it gets bound) to another player.

The blog post then leans heavily in to the most iconic rewards in the MMO genre, gear. With gear players become walking trophy cases of accomplishment, and coming off of the excellent dye post, we know ArenaNet wants players to look exactly how they want to. However, this luxury is not without cost anymore.

Continue reading Of Sticks, Carrots, and Wallets (Guild Wars 2)

New Rig Bleg

It has been a couple of years, and this computer has seen more abuse than most of my PCs, including physical damage to the motherboard. It still runs mostly fine, but the loading times are getting to me, so I am moving to 64-bit and gorging myself on RAM this time.

I would like to get a new system sometime in the next five months. Sadly, I know jack about current hardware and price points, since I need that information once every few years. Conveniently, some of you know a lot about hardware and good deals on it. So I turn to you. Any recommendations? (“Let’s see what’s available on Black Friday” is a fair recommendation.)

My goal is a system that will be able to play the next holiday season’s games on high (not necessarily ultra-high) without issues, although the most demanding games on my list right now are StarCraft 2 and Guild wars 2. I suppose that is mostly a graphics card question, an area where I know even less than usual, since meeting their recommended specs is not too hard. I do not take my PC on the road enough to justify the higher costs of moving to a laptop, although maybe I would start doing so if I could (plus a docking station for full monitor and keyboard at home).

My previous rig came from CyberPowerPC, which was a good mid-high end PC at a sane price. The only downsides were the huge Coolermaster case and problems resulting from the failure of the liquid cooling system; I am pretty sure that I caused most of the damage troubleshooting it and poking around afterwards. That is a separate story.

: Zubon