Month: June 2014

.

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.

.

Interitus

I attended the fifth Interitus anomaly this weekend. On the overall score, it was a dominating win for the Enlightened, largely on the basis of the special rule added for this one: every link from several cities to one particular portal in Texas was worth 20 points in the overall score. Before the event, teammates described that alternately as “Calvinball” and “a fair chance for the Enlightened to come back,” the latter of which made less sense to me since either side could go for it. There were 102 documented links (and more submitted late) for the Enlightened and 0 for the Resistance, making it a second golden snitch worth even more than the first one. I have no evidence if this was again running up the score on an empty field except “102-0”?

The nature of that extreme swing was somewhat cloaked because the points were awarded to the two primary sites, so it looked more like two big wins for the Enlightened. Removing both those points and the Resistance points for the global score, the Enlightened carried Santiago and squeaked a victory in Cincinnati, with the Resistance carrying every secondary site by at least 2:1 except for the one the Enlightened won 27:1.

I was on the ground in Cincinnati. Continue reading Interitus

Servers

League of Legends is a game I tend to play when I am not interested in any current MMOs. I appreciate the self-contained nature of each round, versus the ridiculous accumulation over time. I usually quit for several months after the toxicity of the playerbase gets to me, but I find that less of an issue in ARAM. Instead, I find myself quitting because the servers are lousy. I must have had three games in a row where it was a 5v5 game, but I cannot recall that off-hand. I just had two 4v5s in a row, one of which was a 4v4 for the start of the game until a 9th player connected. I know I have several “leaver” marks on my record because the game crashes, I was disconnected, or whatever error causes the game to think that you installed a new firewall between games because that is a reasonable assumption rather than the game’s having connection issues yet again.

I used to make jokes about how many people blamed deaths on lag, but I’ve certainly had those times when I lost half my health while the server decided what I was doing. I used to get annoyed at players who quit or never showed up and wasted everyone’s time, but given the number of times I have been unable to connect to a game, I cannot honestly blame the player. I cannot blame their computer or connection either, because mine will work perfectly for two games then be unable to connect to a third.

This is no easy network engineering problem. You want servers that are reasonably reliable and close enough to your players to reduce latency, while also needed to be close to players who may be anywhere on the globe, a problem only worsened when you form a team with your friend from another continent. A good algorithm for which server to use for a game must be about as hard as for matching up players. But still, it is one of those problems your players reasonably expect you to have addressed when your business is online gaming. And having a 95% solution is not good enough because losing 1 of 10 players every other game is the whole problem.

: Zubon

Circularity

xkcd explains how a fake entry in Wikipedia gets repeated elsewhere then cited as support for the fake entry. There is, you might guess, a Wikipedia page on this phenomenon, although it does not cite xkcd. It does, however, cite an article just published on the subject. This article links and cites the Wikipedia page on the phenomenon.

I really want that to be a prank at a higher level of recursion.

I would also like to note that “circular reference” references circular reporting, which references circular reference. Disappointingly, self-reference does not reference itself.

: Zubon

[RR] Player Character Antagonism and Interaction

Your mileage may vary, but as a GM I find a unified front of players pretty boring. “Why, yes” they all seem to say although only one player is talking, “we all agree and do this.” In real life even something simple like choosing where to go to eat on a group dinner can become a balancing act. Bob’s on a diet, and Fi wants a steak, or at least something from a cow. Throw a vegan in to the mix and the difficulty increases exponentially. No one presses “X” to move along.

The more I play role-playing games, the more I get the feeling that the story isn’t that big of a deal. Sure, a cohesive metaplot would be nice. However, it’s the situations that really seem to stick. Those situations are especially good if players become invested in the outcome. Go for a full boat, when the players want different paths or outcomes.

I just started playing two play-by-post games at RPG.net, and already we’re hitting some great player vs. player or PC vs. PC situations. Continue reading [RR] Player Character Antagonism and Interaction

Windborne Interview with Michael Austin

I snagged some of Michael Austin’s time in the middle of a crazy, crazy week to discuss Windborne. He is the Chief Technology Officer of Hidden Path Entertainment as well as the lead designer / project owner for Windborne. On the Hidden Path forums he is known as Echo. Hidden Path’s site heralds Austin as one of the few experts in the world on Xbox 360 CPU architecture, and his resume includes Call of Duty 2, CS:GO, racing games, and many others. Hidden Path is pretty well known in the PC indie gaming world for their amazing tower defense game Defense Grid, which Austin also lead in design. None of these are social sandbox games.

WindborneLogoe7f864

Origin of Windborne

Austin said that originally he was messing around with voxel engines, and he found a cool way to do smooth voxels with hard edges. Hidden Path was already looking for another game they could self-finance instead of more work-for-hire jobs. Everybody became really excited about the potential of this simple idea of moving around the voxels in Austin’s prototype engine. That is how Windborne began.

I pushed Austin on Windborne being a completely new genre for Hidden Path. He said with Hidden Path’s history they are more interested in creating “fun, compelling experiences” than sticking to any one or two defined genres. The creative genre has been in Hidden Path’s dream pile for some time, and Minecraft proved that there was an incredible market for the genre. The path they wanted to take in their creative game was to have a very immersive world on top of the creative elements.

They wanted the creations and mechanics of Windborne to provide meaning. There should be a sense of wonder. That was Windborne’s elevator pitch. Continue reading Windborne Interview with Michael Austin

Golden Snitch Caught

I am planning on attending an Ingress Interitus anomaly (gathering/event) this weekend, but I am no longer sure why. It is kind of like playing out the games of a “best of seven” series when one team has already won four. You can still play for the battle, but the war has already been won.

I don’t know if it was true in previous event series, but the event details include the note, “Research suggests the the [sic] outcome of the Interitus Anomalies will be dependent on total Values accrued by the Factions across the entire Interitus series of Anomalies.” One of the cities in the previous anomaly, Kansas City, was so lopsided that the blue team won by 1500 points. Outside Kansas City, the score for the entire anomaly was about 1500 for each side. That metaphor about running up points on an empty field? At least in “best of seven” that would count as just one game.

Funny thing is, Kansas City was an outlier but only as a matter of degree. Most of the anomaly events seem to be blowouts for one team or the other, with 5:1 scores not uncommon. If the game is not intentionally designed for this to happen, balance went astray a long time ago and has not been seen often since.

: Zubon