Author: Ravious

They were standing there on the kitchenette counter where a co-worker with an overflow of Easter candy had left them.  The marshmallow Peeps were lined up, execution style.  I gleefully grabbed the nearest one and popped it into my mouth.  There was a satisfying soft cry as the air inside the marshmallow tried to break free from the sweet inside of the bird-shaped candy.  I took a moment to reflect on all the cruelties the Peeps endure.  I imagined people’s deepest desires blossoming from the days of cave and fire to inflict carnal delights on small animal shaped treats.  And, then I thought of MMOs…

MMO developers can be a clever bunch.  They put that 2 HP spotted faun or clover-eating rabbit walking along while players are on a zone-wide crossing.  The obvious thing to do?  Drop a run-by DoT or damaging yell on your way by the poor beast and watch it flop over dead.  It’s like a minigame without consequence or reward.  Sometimes the devs allow the poor creatures to fight back.  Regardless, it is nearly an MMO pastime.  So much, I believe, that if it weren’t for the graveyard daemons, peaceful fields would be strewn with dead, lootless fauna.

It goes deeper, though, when players return as completely overpowered demi-gods to places of relative peace.  Whole hapless murloc villages are torn asunder by a sole dimension-walking hero.  The guy wasn’t even helping anybody else.  The imagination makes up for what the game engine lacks.  Over on the Darkfall side, the practice targets the plump, weak freshly-minted players in the noob zone.  The hardened veterans fall upon the sheep like avenging razor-fanged wolflords.  The world is theirs.

And, maybe that’s it.  In worlds where players have no perceptible stake amidst the infinitely respawning mobs and hallowed raid locks, for that one moment we can be kings.

–Ravious
what is best in life?

Tobold plugged a Newcastle University Business School research project based on the potential beneficial or detrimental effects of playing MMORPGs during off-job hours on employee well-being.  The survey reads like some undergraduate amateur hour where they did not really take time to contemplate the responses (e.g., they don’t even have my degree, grammatical errors), but I can deal with rough surveys on topics I am interested in.  What I cannot deal with and what caused me to immediately dead stop on my progress for their “research” was their opening list of how strongly do you agree/disagree with the following:

1. PLAYING MMORPGs: The following statements concern how important massively-multiplayer online role playing games (MMROPGs) are for you.

• MMORPGs have created real problems for me, but I keep playing.
• Sometimes I only plan to play a MMORPG for a few minutes and wind up spending hours in front of it.
• Playing MMORPGs takes up almost all of my leisure time.
• I would be a lot more productive if I didn’t play MMORPGs so much.
• My family and friends get angry and tell me that I play too much, but I can’t stop.
• I often play for a longer time than I intended.
• I spend much more time playing than just about anything else.
• I would spend more time with hobbies if I didn’t play so much.
• Sometimes I feel like my whole life revolves around MMORPGs.
• I often think that I should cut down on the amount of MMORPGs that I play.
• When I can’t play I get restless or irritable.

To be fair later on in separate sections they ask whether you get enjoyment from playing, if you are cheerful when you are playing, when you play you play for yourself, etc. BUT, the damage is done. The tone was set. I believe I have a very healthy amount of computer gaming time that allows me to amuse my wife and play with my toddler and be fully successful at my job; yet, this Monday morning I felt like MMOs were the worst and most unhealthy thing in my life after reading that list. I refuse to complete the survey because it is clearly apparent what result Dr. Savvas Papagiannidis from Newcastle University (U.K.) and Dr. Despoina Xanthopoulou from Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands) wish to have. Look for them later this year on a depressing report coinciding with a gamer suicide or divorce.

–Ravious
it’s all about the small stuff

Some times, devs just know things:

The only place where I find a very broad approach useful is in convenience of play. What is a player’s overall tolerance for inconvenience and delay of any sort? In that one regard I do tend to think in terms of casual and hardcore I suppose. A hardcore player will put up with less refined UI, buggier content, long travel times, and other things that basically delay or degrade the play experience. A casual player will quit after fairly little irritation of that sort.

Vastin knows a lot of things.

–Ravious
how deep the rabbit hole goes

Zubon many times has reminded MMO players that in “their” epic story to become a hero, well… you aren’t.  This position is debatable (and has been debated).  Regardless, we can assume for the sake of this post that making the player feel like a unique hero in a game-spanning story is quite difficult.  What if the player was not actually supposed to be the hero in the first place?  Could the writers create a story, where the player was merely a cog in the grand workings of the world AND also make the story meaningful?  My position is that “yes, with skilled writers this is possible.”

Continue reading Persignifficult (A Reminder Revisited)

Funneling MMO population is a big deal that can have huge effects on daily online, active players (or subscriber numbers).  The Guild Wars Live Team is doing just that for their game, where population decline is sometimes an issue.  They are doing this in the way of “daily” quests, called Zaishen Challenge Quests.  This information was just released in the Guild Wars 4th Anniversary content preview.

The goal of the Zaishen Challenge Quests was to direct the critical mass of players.  Each day players can go to and grab the daily quest, which features a new challenge for the day.  The challenge could be winning a PvP match, defeating a dungeon boss, etc.  When complete the players get all sorts of goodies ranging from gold and faction rep to Zaishen barter items.  The Challenge Quests are not daily quests, per se, because a player can hold on to them indefinitely (up to 3 at a time), and it seems like they won’t repeat that often.  Regardless, it seems like a great way to get players together.

There are plenty of other features coming like a pet zoo, expanded storage, and a Hall of Monuments upgrade, but I think the Zaishen Challenge Quests are by far the best thing announced in the April update so far to give Guild Wars a stronger heartbeat.

–Ravious
trial by stone

Why do we play MMOs?  For a lot of us it’s a game wrapped up with communication.  Humans are highly communicative creatures, and our (MMO players, especially ones that read blogs about MMOs) minds usually love games and game mechanics.  There are reasons that so many things in the 21st century revolve around communication.  In a lot of online games we have or add voice chat.  Lord of the Rings Online has built in voice chat for when you need to party.  In Warhammer Online my guild used a huge Ventrilo server.  X-Box Live uses a lot of voice communication.  Team Fortress 2 has it built in.  Etc. Etc. Etc.  For myself, I am pretty quiet… even when I shouldn’t be.  Even though I am alright at leading groups, I hate to describe how we are going to fight Igash, Lord of the Grand Stairs, with this new group makeup.  It’s not because I am shy (I assure you, I am not), it’s just I’d prefer to let someone else do it.  I just don’t like communicating via voice.  I’d rather type the entire strategy out.  Enter the Yapper…

If you have ever played any online game for a prolonged period of time where voice chat is involved, you must have come across a Yapper.  These people talk in the group like they have not spoken to another human being all day.  Some talk about real life happenings, some talk about world news, and some talk about how much the devs suck.  The thing they all share, I think, is that a Yapper receives some affirmation of life by allowing very little silence.  And, they are crucial to our games.

Continue reading The Yapper

With my recent street cred soaring after two interviews with people in the industry, I decided to cold call Richard Garriott to discuss his ticket for another chance to become a space tourist, I mean astronaut, another MMO.  I had to listen for half an hour about his trip in to space, and it did not get interesting until he brought up his contraband story.  Garriott told me how strict the Russians were at space camp (“not like NASA, where Tang flows like wine”), and that he had to smuggle aboard one of his favorite books, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, in a most uncomfortable crevasse.  However, once in space what could they do?  Kick him out? So, one day while he was using the vacu-pooper and reading the book, he saw an old piece of the space station float by out of the spaceship’s window.  This space junk, he said was his revelation to a critical, unoccupied niche in MMO gaming.

I was thoroughly confused by this point as Garriott threw around astronaut lingo like I was one of his comrades, and I asked him how Neuromancer tied in because I was at least semi-familiar with the book.  He cited two of the plot-rearing heroes in the book Aerol and Maelcum.  They lived in peace away from the “system” down below while enjoying their space-rastafarian lifestyle.  He said he was taking much of his basis from EVE’s drug trade gameplay, but instead of a covert-ops-keep-hidden-from-security gameplay, it would be more like sharing the new stuff in your hippy commune.  Garriott booted up the current build.  He said all he had created so far was his avatar (“Da Genahrall”) and the inside of his “tug” (I think he meant spaceship).  Garriott was then silent over the phone for about ten minutes, which was fine because my two year old had just startled in the Witch in Left 4 Dead and we had to deal with that.

Finally breaking the silence, I asked Garriott about further gameplay (namely, if there would be any), and he said that with the first round of capital infusions he was working on creating an AI that could create “righteous dubs” and inedible-art bento boxes.  When that money was gone, he would send some of the bento boxes to the investors in order to gain another capital infusion.  Garriott said the MMO would eventually focus on living in space as a free spirit, scavenging through space debris, playing a complex game of red paper clip, and spending hours floating around listening to “da ‘Mute.”  (I asked him multiple times to repeat this, and I swear this is what he said.)  Eventually, with the successful MMO he would once again buy himself in to space, and leave the new MMO far behind.  The pizza guy finally came, and I quickly wished him well while hanging up the phone.  Time to put another notch on my belt.

–Ravious
dealin’ wi’ th’ darkness, mon