Author: Zubon

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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.

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Upcoming Changes: Lord of the Rings Online

The first part of that barter wallet I have been wanting is coming next week. They are starting with skirmish marks. It also includes a fix for one of my weekend complaints, the re-spawning final boss. If you did not buy the Lone-lands quest pack, congratulations: it will be free, which I think covers all the revamped low-level content.

This is a broad quality of life update. Our friend Eric Heimburg should be thrilled at how they let their systems designers loose. Revamps include two classes, farming, the crafting window, the vault window, a new quest sub-type, and more reputation gain opportunities.

: Zubon

Comment Spotlight

Crud, there’s a bug? Better go back to WoW.
— moondog548

How can so few words contain so many levels of meaning? I had wanted to comment on the usual lack of a middle ground between “dismissive” and “CRISIS!” but I think expectations are the more important point here. Every boss is bugged in a dungeon you visit for the game’s central quest line, more than a year after it went live? Par for the course. Any hope otherwise is risible, worthy of taking the time to publicly mock.

You really do get what you pay for, and you deserve it. If you are willing to pay for things as-is, or as-is plus a hope that they will get better, companies will happily sell them to you. Cryptic has been experimenting with how early in the development cycle you can start selling the game. WoW is what passes for highly polished in our genre; save the real “when it’s ready” for people who demand it.

: Zubon

Weekend LotRO

I decided to play a bit of LotRO over the weekend. If you have also sat out the last year, good news: you can catch up on all the new content for existing characters in a week or maybe a hardcore weekend. Most of the big additions to LotRO have been redecorating lower-level areas and adding the cash shop.

I joined a group for the Water-wheels works, having missed that dungeon while on a previous break. There are two boss fights. The first boss reset five times. After the first couple, we all ran on top of the spawning point to fight; the next two resets involved the boss running past us until it reset. We eventually ran past the boss and kept him on the far side of the area. The end boss respawned immediately after we defeated him, so we never got a chance to open the chests and get our reward. It’s good to know that, while they may be slow about introducing new content, they at least are equally slow about fixing bugs in old content.

: Zubon

Gift Economy

To avoid having people set up 10 accounts and send themselves lots of free daily gifts, my Facebook restaurant game limits you to trading ingredients 1-for-1. You can set up extra accounts, and you can all send each other those daily gifts, but you cannot then go to each of those 10 accounts and send yourself the 10 gifts each received. Ignore the multi-account question and consider what this does to the game’s economy.

The best way to get what you want is to give it to someone else. First, if you need lots of beef, the easiest way to signal this is to send everyone beef. (You could also post it explicitly.) The default Facebook “send one back” option will get you beef. Let’s say you still want more beef. If the people you sent it to did not want it, you can trade with them, your whatever for the beef you just sent them.

To me, the interesting part is the deflation in the meat market. Flood the game with as much beef as you can for as many days as you can. This is entirely given away, so while you have lost nothing, you have gained no beef. But you still want beef, which other people now have excess amounts of. You can trade anything for beef, because people have more than they know what to do with.

In an MMO, when you flood the market with something, you are a seller and are driving down your own price. In a social media game, when you flood the market with something, you are a gifter and are driving down the price you pay.

: Zubon

The Early Incursions: Asheron’s Call

In 1999, I learned that Ultima Online was an actual game, not a theoretical project. I had heard the name before, but I had somehow gotten the notion that it was a bit of science fiction. Considering how revolutionary Neverwinter Nights on AOL seemed, just a few years earlier, it was far-fetched to think that we were already living the cyberpunk dream of fully realized virtual fantasy gaming.

What I imagined under the name “Ultima Online” and the reality were rather different, but I would not come to learn that for years. I did not look into it immediately because my friend who told me about it went on to describe it as already broken. She told a story that I have never checked in the past decade: the code throttled how many grand masters there were of each skill by making it harder to advance as more people were advancing that skill. This would reward less common paths, but if 10,000 people were making horseshoes, blacksmith advancement would be very slow. So went her story, “sword” was an obviously popular skill, so improvement there went at a glacial pace, and characters were being slaughtered by chickens and deer as they vainly tried to get their first few points, while the first grand masters ran rampant.

Google was young in those days, and we were not in the habit of verifying what some guy said about online games. More importantly at the time, it seemed perfectly plausible. We all know some poorly implemented systems that spoil grand projects. Heck, it still sounds plausible, doesn’t it? The founding MMOs had experiments that did not always work. If I told you that some obscure MMO (and you know I love to cite obscure crap) had such a newbie-unfriendly system, where you ended up slaughtering 500 bunnies to compete for a limited number of sword-advancement points per server per day, you might just shake your head and mutter something about Korean grind-fests.

The effect was that my group of friends did not rush to UO. (It would be a year before I knew what EQ was, even after seeing it in stores. “Oh look, yet another fantasy CRPG I have never heard of.” Why would I bother picking up the box?) No, some of them joined late in the beta for this exciting new game called Asheron’s Call… Continue reading The Early Incursions: Asheron’s Call

Minecrafting

I had enough positive recommendations for Minecraft to buy it with little more research than “it is Lego on crack with zombies that try to eat you at night.” Digging has been surprisingly entertaining, although I was excessively distracted by marking my tunnel entrance with a landmark that became a sky-shattering obelisk.

I will soon be comfortable enough to go visit others. Do y’all recommend any servers, communities, etc.? I am unfamiliar with the customs of this corner of the online world, so I would hate to find my play considered defacement of someone’s world. (I am still debating emigrating from my home TF2 server.)

: Zubon

Quick Game

I have complained about perverse randomization frequently this year, and I am sure it will come up as I continue to play a few rounds of Elements per day, but I just heard a winner from NetHack, the archetypal roguelike. Random roll: a monster started with line of sight to the character’s starting point. Random roll: the monster had a wand. Random roll: it was a wand of death. I presume that your odds of dying before your first action (in a perma-death game) are very low.

: Zubon

Triceratops Summer: Beyond the Illusion of Permanence

What do you do when there is no tomorrow? Blizzard invited me back for a free pre-Cataclysm week, and this might inadvertently be the best possible gift to my MMO mental health.

What would you do in your MMO if progress were not saved? Would you even play? The immediate effect I see is the removal of Achievement. Yes, the servers will save whatever I do, but it is not as though I will be re-subscribing. The characters effectively go away after that week. How would you play differently if your characters were deleted at the end of the week?

This should be Explorer heaven: see as much as you like in a limited time frame. There is not much for the Achiever, as character advancement is meaningless, which raises the further question of how meaningful it ever was. And how far can you advance in a week? Okay, that could be an amusing Achiever expedition. There might be more for the Socializer, but I never much loved my server, there are few I would want to see that I do not have access to out-of-game, and I am not one to form new bonds only to sever them a week later. It could be Killer heaven, except that my characters would be several thousand gearscore behind the competition (and/or a large level grind).

I do not know if a week in WoW would be worth the download and install time, but the offer has given me much food for thought about what I do in-game and why.

: Zubon