Author: Zubon

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Wiping By Design

I have many disagreements with the dominant theory of raid design, one of which is gear-based alternative advancement that divides content into tiers based on arbitrary numbers rather that create fake difficulty. Whether or not you like synchronized dancing online, you should see something perverse in a system where everyone might perform all the steps perfectly but still fail the dance because they have not spent enough hours grinding gearscore.

The math on this gets interesting when the target gearscore is above what is possible as you start a new tier. This is one way to spread content over time. The first time you visit a new tier, let’s say that your gear plus tactics plus random rolls give you a 20% chance to beat the boss; the other 80% of the time, your tank is not geared enough to take back-to-back crits, your DPS does not down the boss before a lag spike leaves someone in a pit of fire, etc. An 80% chance of failure sounds pretty bad, but many players seem willing and able to accept it, especially given that you can try more than once per night, and you have a (1-0.8^5=) 67% chance to win before you wipe 5 times.

That sounds pretty standard for raiders. You wipe a few times, but you down the boss. As you practice and improve your gear, you wipe less, and then you get that boss on farm status. You might be performing exactly the same dance steps, but your gearscore is higher, so you no longer are facing a 4-to-1 odds for exactly the same sequence of button presses.

This strikes me as perverse and unsatisfying for the same reason that Desktop Dungeons did. You might have been a few percent more on-the-ball that time you won, but more likely the dice just fell slightly on your side of the margin of error. You get the illusion that you did it, yay team, but you are just grinding finite probabilities (or, when your gearscore is higher, grinding near certainties).

On the other hand, all my respect to those who overcome massive gaps in gearscore to succeed through perfect execution. The folks who are consistently getting server firsts a month before most people can beat phase 1 are not just hitting 5% chances consistently.

: Zubon

Entering Moria Again

When last we saw my Warden, she was hitting the mid-40s. I ran most of the quests one conveniently could in all the zones I listed. I never found groups for the Angmar instances, but I did solo the rest of Volume 1.

That puts you at 55, with no skirmishes, instances, or grinding. That is your measure of how much 45-50 content there is in LotRO: it lasts you until 55. The 30 seconds I spent in Moria were to drop off Book 1 of Volume II (unlock legendary items, so I could start earning IXP).

Also on the “with no grinding” note, I finished my legendary trait pages at level 53. You can start finding those pages at level 39, so that is how long it took with no effort devoted to farming. I can only imagine how horrible those pages were in the very beginning when only one type of monster dropped each set of four. That grew to humanoids in two zones (half of each book in each), then humanoids in four zones (half of each book in each pair), and I am told that any humanoid in Moria could drop any page if I still needed them.

If I wanted to, I could skip Moria entirely by running/riding the entire length and starting on Lothlorien reputation. But that would be silly.

: Zubon

Prior Art and Three-Month Games

Most of you are probably reading gaming blogs for news and drama, but if you are interested in issues of game design and business, you should go read the archives of Biting the Hand, dating back to 1997. I read the entire thing, along with the Tweety and Lum archives, before starting blogging. I should probably re-read it.

One reason Jessica Mulligan stopped writing Biting the Hand is that she was repeating herself. She was tired of pointing out the same lessons repeatedly as developers made the same mistakes. You could run your own blog for a couple of years just updating her columns with recent examples. Skimming, it is interesting to see how much times have changed and how much they have stayed the same.

To take an example, the February 1998 column, “Online Gaming: Why Won’t They Come?” has a pair of tables that I always think of when a new game launches. For those of you not pursuing links, it explains the subscription pattens of online games. Well-managed games rise for three or four months, dip when the buzz of initial release dies down, then get a word-of-mouth bump before settling into a long-term, stable population. Poorly managed games never come back from that initial dip, losing at least half their peak within the first year. So I always think of games as about to meet their fate around the four-month point. This column was the first thing on my mind when, 13 years later, I saw Keen’s recent post on three-month games. Wait, failed online games have always been 3-monthers. The issue of the moment is “theme park vs. sandbox” instead of “customer service,” but as Keen expands his inquiry in the comments, he increasingly is getting back to 1998. (And, as far as I can tell, is calling for someone to develop EQ or pre-NGE SWG.)

Of course, you can wonder whether developers are repeating old mistakes or embracing them as a new model. My college buddies switched gaming obsessions every 3 or 4 months. If you are expecting most of your players to do that, why bother to build a game with a year of content? Embrace churn, invest in advertising instead, and plan to invite those players back in a year when you have another few months of content. Whiners will leave no matter what you do, fanboys will subscribe on almost pure hope, so triage suggests focusing on the squishy middle.

: Zubon

See also September 1998, at which time Blizzard was the small, innovative company used as a contrast to the sclerotic corporate behemoths.

Sari-Surma: An Example of Reasonable Puzzle Bosses

This week’s update to The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ brings with it a new instance cluster: 2 small fellowship, 2 full fellowship, and 1 raid. My first partaking was one of the full fellowship dungeons, Sari-Surma, and let me compliment the developers on using new abilities and mechanics in a way that feels fresh, difficult, but not unfair.

We have previously cited problems with puzzle bosses in MMOs and the particular difficulty with that given LotRO’s icons. I must admit to paying a fair amount of attention to icons, but the fights in Sari-Surma had several elements that made their use of both new and old mechanics fair, challenging, and mostly entertaining. This is especially important when they are bragging about adding hundreds of new abilities to the enemies.

First, the trash preceding a boss uses the same/similar abilities, or the boss will summon those trash as minions. This makes the trash fights a learning opportunity, not a waste of time. Continue reading Sari-Surma: An Example of Reasonable Puzzle Bosses

Blogworthiness

Would anyone want to read the story of your life? On a gaming scale, would recounting your adventures of the day sound like an adventure? For we the bloggers, one way of measuring how interesting a play session was is whether there was anything worth blogging. If you did not do anything worth speaking of, why did you do it?

Contrast: Ravious is blogging daily about his adventures in Rift, while I mentally summarized my weekend play as “I did two quest hubs worth of Forochel on my new Warden.” New and exciting tends towards extremes of good and bad, with new insights to be had, while my third trip through Forochel yields nothing new. A strong argument against the twentieth day of running dailies plus an instance is that your only likely story is that someone you grouped with was brilliant/awful.

If your story is not growing, you are not growing.

: Zubon

To Create and Destroy

Games, even violent ones, frequently create situations where it is easier to create than destroy. Well, no, it is easier to delete a level-capped character than to build one, but in the normal course of MMO play, even your most destructive actions tend to build rather than destroy.

In the modern parlance, “RPG” means “character advancement.” This is what you are building. While your actions on-screen involve stabbing things and setting them on fire, everyone you kill gets better within 120 seconds while the experience you gain is permanent (outside old-school EQ). You earn money faster than you can reasonably burn it, and some games include character advancement while you sleep.

Are there any in-game actions that would actually harm Azeroth? You could hack the servers, you could reduce Blizzard’s revenue by being enough of a jerk to drive away players, but could you actually destroy Stormwind, defeat the Horde, or even permanently kill a single wolf? The worst you can do is throw away your own advancement or impede others’ in limited ways.

Everywhere else in your life, building is hard. Left alone, things fall apart. Reality is a treadmill, where your house and body need maintenance just to avoid getting worse. Bullets are cheaper and more effective than equipment for keeping them out of people. Kipple accumulates. It can be pleasant to pretend that things out of sight remain as they were instead of atrophying and decaying.

: Zubon

Your Name Here

Setting aside content-based restrictions, how do and should games implement names? That is, what text can you enter into that field?

Options here include whether the game allows spaces, numbers, punctuation, or other special characters such as letters not used in that language, smilies and hearts in the character map but not on standard keyboards, etc. The issues of which letters/characters to allow will vary by language, and spaces and punctuation affect the chat system.

Continue reading Your Name Here

Character Log

LotRO character log One neat toy at My LotRO is a character log that tracks when you complete quests, level up, finish a crafting tier, buy a house, finish deeds, etc. The game remembers it, so Turbine makes that available to you. The game does not remember when you get loot, which I suppose is something most people would like to track; a future game or implementation could track armor sets the way the Warhammer Online Tome of Knowledge does, which I think would combine brilliantly with the cosmetic armor system (making them unlocks, not (just) inventory items).

I am shaky on the practical uses for this log, other than gazing in wonder at what you were doing in-game on this date in 2008, but then toys don’t need uses.

: Zubon

About

This is Ethic’s site. Because I have the most posts, my name is above his on the list to the right, so I am the one who gets many of the e-mails from people who want to pay us $2/month to post flash ads for their casinos. But if you look at our traffic, we are mostly Ravious’s Guild Wars 2 news site.

: Zubon