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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LotRO Harvest Festival

It is pretty cool, especially the new Haunted Burrow. A Casual Stroll to Mordor has a full guide. And, thanks to F2P, you don’t even need to be a subscriber to see it. The main events are all in lowbie-safe areas.

They keep adding more to the festivals each year. I like that. I also like when MMOs keep adding more little festivals. The long-run goal is for something special to be going on all the time.

: Zubon

More Unthinking Play

Anything you do in real time will benefit from repetition. If you need to consciously think about what you are doing, you may not have time to do it at all. If you can do it, you are performing suboptimally and probably focusing on your specific actions rather than incorporating them into a larger strategy.

When I started playing StarCraft II, I would refer to a friend who was jockeying to get into a diamond league, saying, “I don’t want to be that good.” Which is to say, I do not want to engage in the planning and repetition required to be that good. I am still thinking about my build order and looking around to see where ramps are on this map, rather than just building automatically and knowing the terrain.

You can think about only so many things at one time. If you think of your build order as a series of five steps, which you are working on while setting up your economy, you have about exhausted your mental resources. If you have played 1000 games and can subsume all of that under one mental unit of “Reaper rush,” you have lots of active attention available for strategizing and scouting. If you need to flip through three buildings and mouse-over some icons to find the research you want, you have lost time that your opponent has spent micromanaging his units. For him, it is practically Pavlovian to respond to the sound of an upgrade finishing and start the next level.

My early multi-player games were a series of constant re-discoveries of what things from the single-player campaign do not exist in multi-player play. I may not have played Zerg or Protoss as much, but at least I do not need to un-learn things to play those races. Except Scouts and Guardians from SC1, I miss those.

: Zubon

Torchlight Sets

Tesh reminds me of Torchlight’s set items. I was excited the first time a purple item dropped, which might just be conditioning from MMOs that make purple the color of awesome, but upon reflection I never found much use for sets. As Tesh says, you out-level items very quickly; in Torchlight, leveling every 15-20 minutes is taking your time.

Ah, but there is shared storage and inter-generational item transfer in Torchlight. You can gradually build up the set and make use of it every run. Well yes, maybe if I enjoyed inventory management more, but that seems like a lot of work for a small bonus. Meanwhile, there are awesome non-set items I would need to give up, and I can risk them at the enchanter all I like without threatening to gimp the set. (Given enough times, you will have items survive 10 enchants, and given enough times, you will have set items disenchanted on the first try. One of the former gives me a permanent “best in slot,” while one of the latter breaks my set.)

But this assumes that I play Torchlight enough for it to matter. How many runs would it take to get a full set of 4-6 items in the same level range? 6-10, if you are lucky? And then that set is the best for maybe an hour or two per run? If you beat Torchlight once a week, that is probably worthwhile, although after 10 runs you will also have some very nice non-set items. I would be surprised to find many people who play through Torchlight once a month.

It seems like an over-designed subsystem. It works very nicely if you play for hundreds of hours, but it is just noise if you beat the game once with each class.

: Zubon

This is the reverse of Magic: the Gathering. The original designers knew the system would have problems if players spent hundreds of dollars on cards, but if lots of players were spending hundreds of dollars on cards, great!

Oh, and read the comment from Darius at Tesh’s. Interesting notion!

Stricter Comment Policies

Geoffrey Pullum has become annoyed with a couple of common comments:

… Unable to bear any longer the tedious work of seeking out all the instances of these two comment types so I can delete them, I have decided that from now on I will hunt down the relevant commenters and kill them. …

From now on, if you are going to post either of the two sorts of comments I have just described, please supply your actual name and residential address so I or Language Log security staffpersons Luca and Enzo can track you down.

I appreciate that there may be some legal issues with this policy, and some believe that death is too harsh a punishment for Language Log writers to be handing out… But the “let-everyone-have-their-say” softies who criticize my policy have no idea just how many boring self-satisfied twits have posted almost exactly the same thing over and over again down the years. Yes, death is a severe sanction. But I think people should look at things from my point of view. It is really irritating.

Keep in mind also that both kinds of commenter think that they are being enormously clever and witty and original. This is frightening: remember, these morons are out there somewhere, ready to get seated next to you at a dinner party or on a plane and bore you senseless. …

Hope, Hype, and Expectations

It takes me six months to forget exactly how bad hot dogs taste. I occasionally have a good one, but mostly it is a process of thinking, “it cannot be as bad as I remember, even if I said that six months ago.” It is like Hofstadter’s Rule, only for lower quality rather than longer time.

I look forward to games on two-year cycle. Maybe that is how long it takes me get over the last disappointment. When did Warhammer Online come out? How disappointing was that? Hey, the 2011 MMO crop looks promising.

It is easier to meet expectations if you do not set them too high. After everyone tells you to read/play/watch something, it has a lot to live up to, whereas “so bad it’s good” can be enjoyable under that expectation. Perhaps my greatest disappointments have been cases where I thought I had lowered my expectations enough, but people told me that it was okay as long as you went in with low expectations, so I unconsciously raised my expectations about how well it would go. “It’s not as bad as you’ve heard” is dangerous.

Which is to say, look forward to some really bitter posting next year, even though I explicitly know better! My mental hardware is made of meat; I may truly be unable to help myself.

: Zubon

Balancing for Upgrades

I have frequently cited the difficulties of balancing a game in which the players have upgrades. Either you assume that players will be mostly/fully upgraded, in which case the base content is nigh-impossible without them, or you balance it so that players can beat it without grinding in-game cash for upgrades, in which case it will be face-roll easy for anyone upgraded.

The clearest example I have met yet is Notebook Wars. Flying into the last mission without a fully upgraded weapon, the final boss took 15 minutes. Its attack pattern is about 5 seconds long, so you might imagine those were not the most exciting 15 minutes of gaming I have, but you know the bloody-minded need to finish it when you’ve gotten that far. For bonus fun, the shots you dodge in that fight have a slightly larger hit box than the graphics for them.

There is a downward spiral to this. I upgraded for defense before offense. The cash for upgrades comes from killing things, not surviving or beating missions. On the second row of missions, I saved up for the best ship (defense), so on the third row, enemies were flying off the map before I could kill them. It was ridiculously easy because I did not need my new ship’s increased speed; its increased hit points let me turn on autofire and go AFK during the level 11 boss fight. (That fight, by the way, would be a great place to farm money if you were so inclined, because the boss spawns enemies that are worth a lot.)

Or maybe the designer meant to have a 15-minute long boss fight on the idea that really long fights are epic.

: Zubon

[Update: the latest Zero Punctuation addresses this same topic in a game that has a budget.]

Labels and Tooltips

A principle articulated in The Design of Everyday Things is that a label is a confession of failure. If you need to label the light switches in your house, they are arranged unintuitively, and this is especially a problem if the lights are off. The door could have a push bar/plate or a pull handle; if you need to write “push” or “pull,” you are compensating for a design that may look pretty but fails to make the use of a door obvious.

Sometimes labeling is required. There are rarely intuitive mental mappings between a bank of buttons and their functions. You label the button on the phone for hold or mute. Computer UIs are generally in this category. (Icons also count as labels.)

Within that, you can have better or worse. The arrangement of arbitrary buttons can be intuitive or meaningful. The icons can be suggestive. Aspects can be made more or less prominent as relevant. Remember to adhere to industry standards unless there is a good reason to try to re-route what people have been trained to find intuitive. Remember that you are mapping functions to the keyboard as well as the screen, and you rarely get to label the keys.

Tooltips are one of my favorite principles in UI design, one so common that I forget about it until the tooltips are not there. You have to hate a screen with forty buttons that expects you to memorize what all forty icons mean. If I mouse-over something, it should tell me what it is after a moment’s delay, ideally with even more information if I keep hovering. I should similarly be able to get information on how to interact with items and objects in the world, rather than trying to remember what key throws a grenade.

I look forward to augmented reality so that we can have tooltips in meatspace.

: Zubon