Month: March 2011

[GW2] A Crafting Recipe, Revised

ArenaNet came back and clarified some of the mis-assumptions and issues people are having with the crafting system reveal in two forum posts, which Vulturion graciously copied in to the comment’s on yesterday’s post. First, given that so many ArenaNet employees were mid-flight to PAX East, or preparing for the journey, it was pretty awesome of ArenaNet to so quickly respond. In lieu of the response, I want to hedgingly retract my position from calling the discovery system to learn recipes “superfluous.” I am still going to grill whoever gives me a demo at the NCSoft Meet and Greet, but at least I see where ArenaNet is trying to come from.

Stupidly enough, I think they added the discovery system not so much for their initial reason, but for fun. I mean really, how often do you compare your recipe list with another crafter’s to reinforce your self-worth as a crafter? You know what’s scientifically proven to be fun? Surprising rewards. Mess around with a few materials, and surprise, you found a new recipe!

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[Rift] Event Ridden

Readers may or may not have noticed, but I have actually been avoiding comparing Rift’s dynamic event system with Guild Wars 2 dynamic event system. First, I have not yet played Guild Wars 2, which is an issue that will be rectified in two days, and two, it feels like Trion is just getting their feet wet.  I want to see what Trion Worlds does with their system, which they have said is going to be expanded greatly as they go along.

In a recent Rift post dealing with the risk of traveling time versus actual participation in an event, commentator Naum brought up a really good point on how in Guild Wars 2, the designers found that zone-wide announcements on events actually frustrated the players. They hated traveling to a place where an event was recently announced only to find the event wrapping up. So the developers made it so only nearby events were announced to players. I think this is fine for Guild Wars 2, where the whole world is events, but I would hate this change in Rift because then the game would go back to feeling like a meager quest-driven MMO.

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[GW2] A Crafting Recipe

Game Designer Andrew McLeod wrote up the crafting system preview for Guild Wars 2 on the ArenaNet blog. The system starts with the vanilla MMO crafting system premise, but ArenaNet has given it a few twists both good and bad.

First off, anybody can gather. There is no miner profession, herbalist profession, etc. If a player sees a mining node, the player can get at it. These nodes are “phased” for each player. So I might see a rare node spawn in the distance, but believably a nearby player won’t, or it might be his own version of that node. In other words, no more node racing and ganking. The node gathering is further supplemented by the Guild Wars gathering mechanics, such as normal loot drop, and my favorite salvaging. I love going through a bag of loot after a run in Guild Wars and deciding which items to salvage. I am glad that mechanic jumped the sequel gap.

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Approaching Mid-Game

My Warden is entering the mid-40s and exiting “one level per day” unless I take some vacation time. The real goal is level 58, when a daily Barrow Downs Survival skirmish becomes more plausible with Conviction (AE heal and threat: kite-tanking).

Just ahead lies what used to be the endgame, so there is a ridiculous lot of content available: Angmar, Goblin Town, Eregion, and Forochel, plus all the Shadows of Angmarâ„¢-era endgame instances and occupations, plus skirmishes and scaling content. The leveling path becomes far more constrained in Moria, but I could enter there in my mid-50s, or you can skip any level range in these days of scaling content.

I already have my completist character with a mostly complete deed log, so I have only a minimal urge to achievement-grind on this character. I have accepted advice on the five virtues she needs, so that will be ~50 deeds, and the rest is decoration that no one else can see. The “Warden” title is not available until level 65, so I may pick another target deed before then. I do feel compelled to complete the deeds for X quests in each zone plus the epic chain, but The Shire is my only place to backtrack and quest-grind. I may even overcome the compulsion to complete the mail and pie delivery chains.

: Zubon

[Rift] Travelin’ On

I am about to hit up the boss in Silverwood, the first Guardian zone in Rift. Since I am level 21, I am well enough ready for the next zone, Gloamwood, but I do want to finish the quest lines in Silverwood first. The Life tree-demon Kongeegon, who may or may not be filled with rice porridge, alone stands in my way before I head off. It’s a little sad because there is still so much I want to experience and achieve in the zone. I have only received a check mark for one of the four invasion bosses, even though I have fought three, and there are hundreds of platinum-worth of artifacts to still collect. Still, there is much to look forward to.

And I need that, because I am also getting a little frustrated with the mechanics of Silverwood, which all coalesce in to traveling times. I am hoping that as the population thins, the landscape changes, and the events rebalance for the long-term populations, most of this will go away. I won’t really know though until I move on from Silverwood.

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[GW2] Conditioning The Precious

As part of the pre-PAX week, ArenaNet has posted an article on their blog about Attributes and Iteration. It’s a great read for anybody interested in the nuts, bolts, and granular advancement of their future Guild Wars 2 characters. I definitely appreciate the newly updated attribute system because truth be told, I really did not care for the one I saw last year. The simpler the better, I say, but I do agree that there has to be enough attributes to cause a choice. This choice is compounded by itemization, where Izzy writes:

With our current implementation of the item system, items raise single attributes higher than when they raise a pair. However, the total number of points will be higher for a two-attribute item than for an item affecting a single attribute. For example, a Rare Ruby Ring gives +40 power; an equal level Gold Topaz Ring gives +33 power and +25 vitality; and a Pearl Ring gives +25 power, +25 vitality, and +25 toughness. This item system enhances another choice: do you max out one attribute or raise the total effectiveness of all your attributes? The character who deals the highest raw damage is someone who has maximized the offensive attributes, but the character who diversifies becomes a jack-of-all-trades while mastering none.

Except that rarity could already affecting the choice. I am making a decent assumption here that we have a gleaming Rare Ruby Ring, a notable Gold Topaz Ring, and a Pearl Ring likely caked with oyster byproduct gnarling the hands of wearers and passersby. I am not going to go so far as to say that this itemization example is definitive for the whole Guild Wars 2 system, but it is interesting to examine.

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[GW2] Art and Stealing

Over at GuildWars2Guru, Actionjack is still going strong with the Can I Play GW2? webcomic. He’s created about 80 strips, but that doesn’t include all the variants and asides as well. They are simply fantastic, and rightfully we’ve plugged them before. My favorite thing is the effect Actionjack is having on this one Guild Wars 2 community. Creative people are rallying around his comic, making their own versions to thank him, and Actionjack is running a weekly Art Challenge with a simple Guild Wars 2 subject as the concept. This week it’s a norn thief. So, if you are artistically inclined definitely check out those threads. Finally, I wanted to republish an Actionjack-inspired piece drawn by Husky detailing one of the newly revealed thief mechanics: stealing. It amuses me every time, and it really hits home exactly what the stealing mechanic does. The thief takes something from an enemy then uses it against them. Perhaps the two would want to band together and draw tutorial strips for all the profession mechanics? (wink, wink)

–Ravious

Different Directions

Tobold ponders the directions of WoW and Rift. WoW, he says, is pushing raiding towards high selectivity based on gear and/or skill (I find the former more annoying in a game). Rift, he says, merrily invites everyone by having easier content and not limiting numbers. Players, he suggests, seem to be preferring the latter; I might append that vocal players of Rift seem to be expressing that preference, while subscriber numbers make it premature to ponder anything as a WoW-killer.

The day before, a LotRO developer diary lovingly described the design philosophy behind the new raid: higher difficulty, perfect execution, learning via wiping repeatedly. It explicitly contrasts skirmish Tier II (higher numbers) with the new raid Tier II (different abilities), although I might again append that I would be surprised if higher numbers (i.e. gear dependency) were not a factor.

My long-running game was City of Heroes, so I enter with an expectation that you can bring a full group of almost anything and beat almost anything. A few fights all but demand something from a small set of options, but those are notable because they are rare rather than the norm. Add to this the City of Heroes assumption that you will be able to play with your friends now rather than waiting two months for them to hit the level cap, and you have a very different philosophy than gear-gated tiers of raids.

I refer back to Tobold’s excellent discussion: does this encounter test the worst, best, or average player? The most restrictive content will test the worst player. Raids demanding synchronized dance and perfect execution wipe if you add one new or slightly undergeared guy. (See Spinks on the different effects of this philosophy in single- and multi-player games, or try a LotRO PUG Durchest raid in which one of your three tanks is not geared above the boss’s potential one-shot damage range.) Not restricting encounters by player count gives you a fourth option: testing the sum, so you can beat the Rift by bringing more people. Combining unrestricted attendance with testing the worst player would be apocalyptically horrible.

I cannot tell you what the mass market wants, because I am obviously an outlier, but I will favor a design that makes it easier to join with my friends, all of them, whatever level they are. Lowering the minimum difficulty threshold tends to do that.

: Zubon

Apologists

The population distribution on forums has very long tails, but I still find myself curious about some of these people. There is a substrain of fanboyism that I call apologetics: some fans cheer their games or boo the others, but these folks are devoted to defending the game against complaints, right or wrong, and seemingly most loudly when least defensibly.

The stages of denial seem to be denying that something happens, denying that it is a problem, and denying its importance. This is the politest case, assuming it does not collapse into personal attacks during step one. To take last week’s example (now solved), this was an obvious and acknowledged problem including a customer effort to track it, and here we have players announcing that they play on four lag-free servers and maybe you should stop buying K-Mart blue light special computers. When Qaddafi says there are no problems in Libya, I get the motives and delusions in play, but is there some sort of e-peen value to defending the honor of a corporation’s servers?

A recent favorite is a highly rated comment on a flash game that paraphrased to: “Okay, this game isn’t very good, but you should not badmouth it because the guy makes a lot of flash games and many of them are better.”

Some people troll, but you get the sense that some really see themselves as the company’s defenders. They think they are helping. Maybe they believe their own propaganda and think their games are perfectly balanced, lag- and exploit-free utopias, undermined only by an impossible to please playerbase. They at least think you should believe it. They are rude and abusive to people with (potentially legitimate) issues. Do they really think the Alpha Nerd approach works? Maybe that the problems will go away if they can drive away dissenting players? I can almost hear Sanya saying, “Stop telling my customers to go back to WoW!”

: Zubon

[GW2] Front Loaded

The thief profession is starting to get pieced together as fans act like archaeologists piecing together what was once whole from fragments offered by GDC ’11 videos. The thief seems pretty well understood being a very mobile, very dangerous, and very squishy class in Guild Wars 2. It can steal skills from enemies, go into a Predator-mode stealth, shadow-step (warp), and so on. It’s a pretty cool profession that seems a little more complex than the other 5 released professions. It has one mechanic though that breaks the rules. It’s weapon skills have the costs front-loaded, which amplifies the risk for each weapon skill activation. But, that seems to be what the thief is all about, the Master of Risk.

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