Zubon

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.

Portion Size

There is little silliness quite like using a souped-up, thousand-dollar PC to play flash games, but I tend to enjoy them when MMOs run stale. As I have heard many say about no cover charge DDO, it is a low commitment, short duration, high yield gaming experience. They are intended as self-contained blocks.

Most flash games do not feel the need for padding. If you are selling a game, you add in grind, repetition, fake difficulty, and other playtime extenders, because your players expect 40 hours of play for their money. If your business model is “none” or “ad revenue plus tips,” adding in an unfun hour benefits no one. So you get not only smaller portion size but higher content density within it.

The downside is that independent trials lead to quite a few failures. If you log on WoW and run your dailies, you know what you are getting. If you play the latest featured flash game, it could be really horrible. But there again, they are self-contained, so lousy parts are not defiling a larger game/world.

: Zubon

Improving TF2 Servers

Many Team Fortress 2 servers run hlxstats, and you do not win/lose normal points for kills until you have 20/50/whatever kills. This is a good practice. It would be even better if players could not be Snipers until that point. Beyond grumbling about newbs and one-shots, I see two factors in favor of this new policy. First, many new players seem to like to hide in the back, and teams self-destruct with 6 Snipers or, on servers where class numbers are wisely capped, the potentially useful Sniper slots are filled by the worst players. Second, no one aim-bots a Heavy. When someone new appears on the server and gets five headshots with no other kills, I am immediately suspicious. I see cheaters as more likely to find another server than wait 50 kills before getting their advantage back.

I am wondering how the new Sniper suit has affected the latter. The set bonus takes away your headshots but lets you survive any headshot. Newb snipers kill aim-botters in traded shots, while the new suit is useless for aim-botters. When I get repeatedly, uselessly head-shot as a Sniper, I wonder if the opposing Sniper is really good but has not adjusted to the new items, or if Valve added something specifically to watch aim-botters lose.

: Zubon

Borrowed Judgment

I have a recurring theme that the human brain is an unreliable piece of hardware. Seriously, meat-based information processing with no expansion slots? Another weakness of the organ is that we have trouble predicting how enjoyable, satisfying, etc. we will find something. How We Decide discusses how removing information can improve our decisions because we get distracted by details instead of focusing on what really matters to us.

Another potential way to improve your decision-making is to outsource where relevant and convenient. While you may have trouble predicting your outcomes, you can look at those similar to you and see how they rated it. If someone with similar movie tastes to you does not like a film, you probably will not like it either, no matter how excited you are about that latest sequel. Hence a use for our gamer blogger peeps: if you usually enjoy the same games that X does, and X says the beta is going horribly, cancel the pre-order.

It seems that most people read and comment on reviews primarily to engage in religious strife about whether some upcoming game they have never played is the messiah or the devil, but if you are planning to spend more than 100 dollars and hours on something, it might be worth availing yourself of useful heuristics.

: Zubon

No, the study is not a slam-dunk. The sample is WEIRD and the size is not huge. But it does agree with a body of research on failures in self-prediction. You would think you would be able to predict yourself better than anyone else, but no.

New Content Is Shared Content

Fantasy MMOs tend to start with race-based newbie zones and meet up some number of levels in, thinning to a smaller number of high-level areas before expanding again at the cap (discussed previously). Games with strictly divided PvP factions get a more strongly separated version of this, as you can send your night elf to play with your dwarf friend but not your orc friend. Some games will bring everyone together sooner, others will create several paths to the level cap. Please, make an alt while we work on the expansion.

You spend years making this base content. It takes a lot of work to recreate that leveling path several times, even if you recycle content across the paths (a roc is a red vulture, sure, why not). Unless you are Cryptic, this is something like a four-year development cycle. Now that the game is live, you are expected to patch in new content every one to three months while working on bugs and balance. At least you have some half-developed content that was meant for live, maybe even an advertised feature that was not completed on time; City of Heroes/Villains gets a special prize for patching in the last 10 levels after release twice. Oh, and you likely have an expansion every year or two, and that needs to be big enough to justify selling a new box.

Making new content for each faction is time-consuming, creates balance issues, and has limited value given the number of players at the level cap in multiple factions. Or you can make the new content once and send everyone through it. You will need faction-specific details, but the more overlap you have, the less content you need to develop. Add neutral factions that deal with everyone. Add common enemies. This conveniently encourages PvP and/or cross-faction teams, depending on how you set it up.

So you have one Outland and one Northrend. Albion, Midgard, and Hibernia fought over the one big dungeon, and now their descendants in WAR do the same. Superheroes and supervillains both fight the Hamidon, the Honoree, and Romulus (CoX is odd for having the Statesman Task Force and Lord Recluse Strike Force, very different parallel content). Holiday and event content is often mirrored, with the same content slightly redecorated for the factions’ cities or low-level areas.

I don’t know that I would prefer it any other way. It sometimes feels like corner-cutting, but I do not want to need level-capped characters across multiple factions to see all the new toys, and making two sets of them means more time or more cost. I would rather have two sets of content that I can experience on my main. Although it strikes me that Blizzard has the billions of dollars and the staffing and is still producing shared content at a Blizzard pace.

: Zubon

Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Assn. Oral Arguments

For those interested in the (to be decided) Supreme Court case in which California claims that content-based restrictions on expression (video games) are constitutional, you can download the oral arguments. Popular bits include whether the State’s legal logic would also let it restrict Grimm‘s fairy tales, how censors panic about every new media type, whether there are established community norms for violence, and if it matters whether video game violence is against humans or if Vulcans are close enough. SCOTUSblog has assorted briefs from the case.

Personally, I am expecting a crushing defeat for California, and it is embarrassing that content-based restrictions on expression can still make it as far as the Supreme Court. I understand the political reasons why several state attorneys general jumped on the case with amicus briefs, and I am further embarrassed for my culture that seemed like a winning political issue for them. I know that some of them are not returning to office after last week’s election, but I cannot believe that many of them lost on free speech grounds.

: Zubon

H/T: Volokh

Played Recently: Ghost Master

Reaching back a few years, this game combines a bit of puzzle and strategy with a bit of wanton mayhem. Decent, better in the early parts, but not recommended given the better games you could spend your time on. For a flash version without the puzzler parts, you could try .

You are haunting the house. You get a variety of settings with some movie allusions, including Ghostbusters, Evil Dead, and the Blair Witch Project. You empty a sorority house and uncover murder victims. Some of these are straightforward hauntings: scare some people, built up so that you can use bigger scares, and empty the buildings. Some toss in wrinkles like wards or exorcists. The puzzle parts come from the less straightforward levels and from unlocking new ghosts. In some levels, you lose for scaring people away before they do certain things, and you may not need/want to scare anyone away. In all levels, there are a few captive ghosts you can rescue by solving their personal puzzles.

Those puzzles are usually solid. They will have multiple solutions, so there are several ghost powers that will work for each situation. For example, if you need to light a campfire to unlock a fire spirit, you could cause a cold front in the area so that humans will light it, or you could lure a human over and use another spirit to cause the entire area to burst into flames. Some of them are less flexible, and some suffer from the usual computer game puzzle question of “what was this developer thinking?” Other times, you might be doing the right thing but not enough of it, or you might be doing everything right but the NPCs are being randomly uncooperative. If you have played Majesty, you know this last factor: “no, walk over THERE!” As with many puzzle games, what you want is not so much a hint or a guide but rather someone who has already done it who can say if you are on the right track. But there might be multiple tracks, so all they can say is how they did it. This aspect varies between trivial and ridiculous, with a limited number of satisfying puzzles in between. Few of the puzzles are absolute roadblocks; you can skip unlocking ghosts, and you will get the tools you need from free ones.

The haunting is briefly amusing. Scaring people and having neat tricks is fun. Some of the scares double as puzzle solutions, while some puzzle tools have no scare value. Hounding one particular person through a building, or just cutting loose with everything, can be entertaining. It palls fairly quickly, however, because you are just stocking the building with scares and waiting for people to leave.

A mix of interesting and annoying, the game includes problem-solving challenges, random guessing, and free-form mayhem. The first is good, the second is a little too common, the third is less visceral and satisfying than I had hoped.

: Zubon

Played Recently: Bloody Good Time

This First Person Something was released just before Halloween, and I picked it up on the Steam sale. I have played very little, stymied by the question of whether and how you can enjoy it.

A first glance suggested it as a cousin to TF2: cartoony graphics, first person play, over the top violence, kill your friends and laugh. It is cartoony, with a variety of B movie victims and villains. It is not a FPS because it is not really a shooter; there are guns, but you might instead kill people with knives or exploding sheep. It does not appear to be fast-paced action, with people bouncing around and shooting rockets. You move quietly and ambush people, but it is not quite stealth-based. It felt plodding.

It strikes me as unnecessarily complicated. I assume it becomes more intuitive over time. You have a health bar, but most things seem to one- or two-shot you. You also have bars for needing food, sleep, or a toilet, and although refilling one of those bars makes you vulnerable to being one-shot by anything. You start empty-handed and can equip weapons and murder aids, and you have separate buttons for switching items, equipping them, and using them. You may not always want them equipped, you see, because security guards will tase you if they see you armed. And you may want to change weapons frequently because there are periodic announcements about how the value of each weapon has changed.

There are several game modes, and maybe some are better than others. I presume the handling makes more sense with experience, and familiarity with the maps always helps. I have yet to see anyone else playing or talking about the game, and I doubt it will be all that exciting to go about stabbing computer-controlled beach bums and killer clowns. On the plus side, it has a manual.

: Zubon

Stop Agreeing With Me

The setting is usually a multi-player game with no subscription costs. Someone will log on and start chatting. Their immediate topic is how awful the game is and/or how it has gone downhill; games with built-in team-based voice chat are popular for this filibuster.

“You’re right. The game is awful. You should quit.” I just keep repeating it. Yes, since they put in that new item, awful, you should quit. Oh, and that cash shop, I know, awful, you should quit. That too, yes, awful, you should quit. I don’t think it works, but I have had someone switch teams on my TF2 server in less than 10 repetitions.

: Zubon

I rarely do that in games with paid subscriptions, since I do not want to deny the developers income if I think the game is worth paying for myself.

Old

In TF2, I have developed the practice of muting anyone whose voice has not changed if he complains about anything twice. There are good reasons to mute older demographics, but I have met too many whining 12-year-old boys to want to give the next kid much benefit of the doubt.

One of these recently reminded me of someone from my Asheron’s Call monarchy who was a bit of an annoying kid. He was earnest, enthusiastic about leveling, eager for attention, and very much attached to me after I went out of my way to help him one evening. Nothing wrong with him, I just did not have the energy to care for a puppy. I met another puppy in LotRO, and fending off the attentions of extroverted adolescents is much more important when they have access to built-in voice chat.

I say this not because I am shaking my cane at the kids on my lawn. I say this because I just realized that the “annoying kid” has probably graduated from college by now. He might have a kid or two of his own. The current batch of adolescents had not yet started school when I met him. I am old old old.

: Zubon