March 2014 – Kill Ten Rats

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.

Smooth Launch

None of us here seem to be leaping into Elder Scrolls Online, but the one thing I’m not seeing on my RSS of MMO bloggers? The usual Day One issues with logins, authentication, servers, unrecognized keys, queues, and whatever your online game of choice suffered through in its first weeks.

As far as MMO launches go, yesterday might have been the smoothest Iâ€™ve ever experienced. Everything worked, there was no queue, I didnâ€™t have to jump through any hoops, and I was able to play the game as if it had been live for 6 months. Being able to patch-up the beta client was huge too. Hats off to Bethesda, they nailed day one.
— SynCaine

We have seen many games from companies with more MMO experience fail that Day One readiness check, so let’s give proper accolades for doing it right. The server team: if they’re doing their job right, you barely notice they’re there.

: Zubon

[RR] Scarlet Heroes

I apologize. This week has been a ruddy mess. I wanted to talk about print-on-demand publishing and digital books, but just couldn’t get it together. I kept going off on tangents. Combined with work, barometric headaches, and prepping to start my own campaign… well excuses.

Since I can’t share my grand thoughts, just yet, I will point you to a result of all the good things in tabletop roleplaying games this century: Scarlet Heroes.

Scarlet Heroes started as a Kickstarter where backers immediately received the draft for feedback and the necessary gratification. It then moved to digital / print-on-demand publishing, which is a smart move for any RPG book. And, it rounds out the how-to-do-it-this-century style with a free quickstart.

What is it? It’s a roleplaying game meant to be played with a single player, with or without a GM. It’s an overlay to old school Dungeons and Dragons so you can run that single player through old school modules meant for whole groups. It’s a way to create Dungeons and Dragons style adventures of legend for that single player. Plus it has a nifty setting. Can’t go wrong at least checking out the quickstart.

–Ravious

[GW2] The Wardrobe

In pre-launch days, the one system I disliked the most in Guild Wars 2-to-be was the transmutation system. Coming from Lord of the Rings Online, with its excellent wardrobe system, the design of the Guild Wars 2 transmutation stones felt like a step backwards in usability and a step forwards in the cash shop arena.

This system, I felt, directly went against the idea of Guild Wars 2 rewards. I felt I the cost of using cool skins, for say a week, was too high. At the base level, I had to overwrite a skin or make a new item. It cost inventory slots, or it cost gold. This is ignoring the transmutation stone to begin with.

Thankfully ArenaNet is finally creating a full wardrobe system. Continue reading [GW2] The Wardrobe

[TT] Gamer Games

We pause in the festival of Dominion for a general reflection on the audience for a game. Like most people in my generation, my wife plays games at times but would not characterize herself as a gamer. She knows who Mario is but not Master Chief. She plays Dominion with me and enjoys it.

We have also played Android: Netrunner, which she did not enjoy. She gave it a few chances, she tried several options, but no. This is a gamer game, not something for a general audience. She would play again if I asked her to, but she would not have fun. It is a particular sort of fun for a particular sort of person.

A gamer friend noticed that I had Android: Netrunner and was quite keen to learn the game. He enjoyed it. His fiancÃ©e watched a bit of the game and concurred with my wife: she would not refuse to play, but it did not look like fun. My gamer friend also has the Game of Thrones card game, which is from the same publisher and has some similarities. The two of them had played that one, and the fiancÃ©e had the same reaction, hence the recognition that she would not enjoy Android: Netrunner. I presume I would enjoy the Game of Thrones card game and my wife would not.

I will refer to some things as bad games or not meaningfully games at all. Candyland and Craps are non-games: no choices, just randomization. Monopoly is a bad game, intentionally designed to be a bad experience, and I may come back around to its major design flaws. Other games are for particular audiences or purposes. They can be good, but not for everyone. We should celebrate games like Settlers of Catan, Apples to Apples, and Plants vs. Zombies for being accessible to non-gamers and still of great interest and enjoyment to gamers.

: Zubon

Magicite: A Good Walk Ruined

Iâ€™ve been on a roll with Steam early access games, but I still stick to my rule of thumb: read the discussion before buying. Magicite seemed good and fun. It is a rogue-like sidescroller with crafting and leveling aspects similar to Starbound or Terraria. It also has a bit of between-death progression I loved in Rogue Legacy. As a hint to the future, one achievement to unlock a race demands you beat the game in an hour. So far I am liking all the design on paper. So I buy it.

The game is in Early Access, but it is apparent right away that more love needs to go to crafting. Itâ€™s a nice system where you shift+click two things to combine them. Two sticks become an axe handle. Add another stick to an axe handle and it becomes a pick handle. The problem comes in two parts. The first is that this all occurs in the inventory, and it requires separate stacks of items. If I wanted to combine two sticks, I had to separate one stick from my stack of sticks. It is possible I was just doing it wrong. Continue reading Magicite: A Good Walk Ruined

[GW2],[DAoC] WvW v#1 or v#3?

One mechanic that Dark Age of Camelot worked out for Realm vs. Realm combat that Guild Wars 2 has yet to meaningfully attempt in World vs. World combat is providing a reason for the two #2 and #3 servers to both attack the winning team, rather than having the #1 and #2 servers attack the weakest team. Rarely, out-of-game efforts will lead to two Davids’ conspiring against Goliath, but this is rare because the reward structure incentivizes picking on the weak rather than challenging the strong.
Continue reading [GW2],[DAoC] WvW v#1 or v#3?

“Chicken From Hell”

In Plants vs. Zombies 2, my wife’s bane is the zombie chicken. The Wild West’s Chicken Wrangler Zombie (!!) leaks chickens when he is damaged. The chickens are archetypal fragile speedsters: they move and attack much faster than zombies but instantly die from any damage. (Spikeweeds are particularly funny, as huge waves of chicken wranglers become massive clouds of feathers.)

What kinds of chickens are these that can sprint faster than zombies on rockets and kill you just as effectively as the Gargantuar? Recent news stories explain: that kind of chicken. Time travel is dangerous!

: Zubon

Find the Exploiter on the Graph

My alliance was winning the current war in Game of Thrones Ascent, but it turns out that an estimated quarter of our victory points came from exploits. It was possible for players to instantly craft an expensive item using no resources, which could then be sold for silver — an infinite money exploit limited only by how fast one can click. And here I thought our camps were getting repaired quickly because we had allies sending us repair actions. The alliance was docked those points and four players were permabanned.

Folks on our team talked about whether the whole alliance should be penalized for the actions of a few, how much could it really have affected things, and weren’t people in other alliances using the same exploit? And then the developers posted this graph. There is no scale on the left, but you can pretty easily pick out three of the four people using the exploit. One of them seemed to realize that keeping it on the down low was a good idea. The other three contributed about as much silver to the alliance war as the next 97 people combined. Once the developers knew what to look for, that kind of stuck out.

In a previous alliance war, our alliance was also severely docked points because some players were using a modded interface. It did not give anyone special abilities, it just let you perform actions quickly rather than clicking many times to launch 1 attack.

Because Hear Me Roar is one of the largest alliances in the game, we are still safely in second place, and the new first place alliance is allied with us (yes, the terminology there is unfortunate). I noted previously that my part in the team is sending help to our allies, who send us help in return. On the developers’ accounting of our victory points, it notes that our allies gave us enough aid to repair 234 camps from “destroyed” to “fully operational,” so the support squad feels pretty good despite the devastating setback.

: Zubon