Month: November 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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Art Treat Intermission: Dalí + Disney

If you can spare a moment from killing each other virtually, take a look at this rare little gem from way back in the day.

It’s the only collaboration between Salvador Dalí and Walt Disney, and it’s interesting (to me at least) because of the way in which two seemingly opposite styles are fused and flow so well together. You can clearly see and feel the classic Dalí surrealism and the old school Disney animation as separate elements all through the piece, but in complete harmony. Almost complementing each other. It’s called “Destino” (Destiny) and tells the story of a dancer who falls in love with a baseball player, but destiny – in the shape of time itself – makes it not meant to be.

(some fragments have been recently restored and done in 3D to complete the piece, but it’s not very intrusive)

Update: Check the comments for Dblade’s corrections to all this. Thanks for pointing it out ;)

Triceratops Summer: Beyond the Illusion of Permanence

What do you do when there is no tomorrow? Blizzard invited me back for a free pre-Cataclysm week, and this might inadvertently be the best possible gift to my MMO mental health.

What would you do in your MMO if progress were not saved? Would you even play? The immediate effect I see is the removal of Achievement. Yes, the servers will save whatever I do, but it is not as though I will be re-subscribing. The characters effectively go away after that week. How would you play differently if your characters were deleted at the end of the week?

This should be Explorer heaven: see as much as you like in a limited time frame. There is not much for the Achiever, as character advancement is meaningless, which raises the further question of how meaningful it ever was. And how far can you advance in a week? Okay, that could be an amusing Achiever expedition. There might be more for the Socializer, but I never much loved my server, there are few I would want to see that I do not have access to out-of-game, and I am not one to form new bonds only to sever them a week later. It could be Killer heaven, except that my characters would be several thousand gearscore behind the competition (and/or a large level grind).

I do not know if a week in WoW would be worth the download and install time, but the offer has given me much food for thought about what I do in-game and why.

: Zubon

Portion Size

There is little silliness quite like using a souped-up, thousand-dollar PC to play flash games, but I tend to enjoy them when MMOs run stale. As I have heard many say about no cover charge DDO, it is a low commitment, short duration, high yield gaming experience. They are intended as self-contained blocks.

Most flash games do not feel the need for padding. If you are selling a game, you add in grind, repetition, fake difficulty, and other playtime extenders, because your players expect 40 hours of play for their money. If your business model is “none” or “ad revenue plus tips,” adding in an unfun hour benefits no one. So you get not only smaller portion size but higher content density within it.

The downside is that independent trials lead to quite a few failures. If you log on WoW and run your dailies, you know what you are getting. If you play the latest featured flash game, it could be really horrible. But there again, they are self-contained, so lousy parts are not defiling a larger game/world.

: Zubon

Improving TF2 Servers

Many Team Fortress 2 servers run hlxstats, and you do not win/lose normal points for kills until you have 20/50/whatever kills. This is a good practice. It would be even better if players could not be Snipers until that point. Beyond grumbling about newbs and one-shots, I see two factors in favor of this new policy. First, many new players seem to like to hide in the back, and teams self-destruct with 6 Snipers or, on servers where class numbers are wisely capped, the potentially useful Sniper slots are filled by the worst players. Second, no one aim-bots a Heavy. When someone new appears on the server and gets five headshots with no other kills, I am immediately suspicious. I see cheaters as more likely to find another server than wait 50 kills before getting their advantage back.

I am wondering how the new Sniper suit has affected the latter. The set bonus takes away your headshots but lets you survive any headshot. Newb snipers kill aim-botters in traded shots, while the new suit is useless for aim-botters. When I get repeatedly, uselessly head-shot as a Sniper, I wonder if the opposing Sniper is really good but has not adjusted to the new items, or if Valve added something specifically to watch aim-botters lose.

: Zubon

[GW2] A State of Consumption

Things feel rather slow at the moment for Guild Wars 2 info with a few crumbs.  ArenaNet did a triple-A job building excitement and fervor during the convention season. That, my friends, amounted to months of prep and long hours by ArenaNet staff during the two main conventions, gamescom and PAX. Then, Guild Wars 2 was also shown at the New York Comic Con and most recently at Paris Games Week. Yet, for the community it feels like nothing has been revealed since the Hall of Monuments, and the mob is getting a little restless.

Continue reading [GW2] A State of Consumption

Borrowed Judgment

I have a recurring theme that the human brain is an unreliable piece of hardware. Seriously, meat-based information processing with no expansion slots? Another weakness of the organ is that we have trouble predicting how enjoyable, satisfying, etc. we will find something. How We Decide discusses how removing information can improve our decisions because we get distracted by details instead of focusing on what really matters to us.

Another potential way to improve your decision-making is to outsource where relevant and convenient. While you may have trouble predicting your outcomes, you can look at those similar to you and see how they rated it. If someone with similar movie tastes to you does not like a film, you probably will not like it either, no matter how excited you are about that latest sequel. Hence a use for our gamer blogger peeps: if you usually enjoy the same games that X does, and X says the beta is going horribly, cancel the pre-order.

It seems that most people read and comment on reviews primarily to engage in religious strife about whether some upcoming game they have never played is the messiah or the devil, but if you are planning to spend more than 100 dollars and hours on something, it might be worth availing yourself of useful heuristics.

: Zubon

No, the study is not a slam-dunk. The sample is WEIRD and the size is not huge. But it does agree with a body of research on failures in self-prediction. You would think you would be able to predict yourself better than anyone else, but no.

Growing Up in Vindictus

I feel I have finally transcended past obvious noob in Vindictus to now being just a slow poke. The tutorial battles are in the Perilous Ruins, but some can be quite challenging. After that the Hoarfrost Hollow opens up. It is a zone filled with goblins of some intelligence, and it is ruled by a gigantic polar bear, the White Tyrant. I’ve experienced a few changes in leaving the early area. For the most part though, the quick, fun format is holding course.

Continue reading Growing Up in Vindictus

New Content Is Shared Content

Fantasy MMOs tend to start with race-based newbie zones and meet up some number of levels in, thinning to a smaller number of high-level areas before expanding again at the cap (discussed previously). Games with strictly divided PvP factions get a more strongly separated version of this, as you can send your night elf to play with your dwarf friend but not your orc friend. Some games will bring everyone together sooner, others will create several paths to the level cap. Please, make an alt while we work on the expansion.

You spend years making this base content. It takes a lot of work to recreate that leveling path several times, even if you recycle content across the paths (a roc is a red vulture, sure, why not). Unless you are Cryptic, this is something like a four-year development cycle. Now that the game is live, you are expected to patch in new content every one to three months while working on bugs and balance. At least you have some half-developed content that was meant for live, maybe even an advertised feature that was not completed on time; City of Heroes/Villains gets a special prize for patching in the last 10 levels after release twice. Oh, and you likely have an expansion every year or two, and that needs to be big enough to justify selling a new box.

Making new content for each faction is time-consuming, creates balance issues, and has limited value given the number of players at the level cap in multiple factions. Or you can make the new content once and send everyone through it. You will need faction-specific details, but the more overlap you have, the less content you need to develop. Add neutral factions that deal with everyone. Add common enemies. This conveniently encourages PvP and/or cross-faction teams, depending on how you set it up.

So you have one Outland and one Northrend. Albion, Midgard, and Hibernia fought over the one big dungeon, and now their descendants in WAR do the same. Superheroes and supervillains both fight the Hamidon, the Honoree, and Romulus (CoX is odd for having the Statesman Task Force and Lord Recluse Strike Force, very different parallel content). Holiday and event content is often mirrored, with the same content slightly redecorated for the factions’ cities or low-level areas.

I don’t know that I would prefer it any other way. It sometimes feels like corner-cutting, but I do not want to need level-capped characters across multiple factions to see all the new toys, and making two sets of them means more time or more cost. I would rather have two sets of content that I can experience on my main. Although it strikes me that Blizzard has the billions of dollars and the staffing and is still producing shared content at a Blizzard pace.

: Zubon

Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Assn. Oral Arguments

For those interested in the (to be decided) Supreme Court case in which California claims that content-based restrictions on expression (video games) are constitutional, you can download the oral arguments. Popular bits include whether the State’s legal logic would also let it restrict Grimm‘s fairy tales, how censors panic about every new media type, whether there are established community norms for violence, and if it matters whether video game violence is against humans or if Vulcans are close enough. SCOTUSblog has assorted briefs from the case.

Personally, I am expecting a crushing defeat for California, and it is embarrassing that content-based restrictions on expression can still make it as far as the Supreme Court. I understand the political reasons why several state attorneys general jumped on the case with amicus briefs, and I am further embarrassed for my culture that seemed like a winning political issue for them. I know that some of them are not returning to office after last week’s election, but I cannot believe that many of them lost on free speech grounds.

: Zubon

H/T: Volokh