Author: Zubon

A mood improvement technique I have been trying is quitting on a high point. If things go really well, call it a night. If things are as good as they can reasonably get, don’t wait for them to get worse, just take your win and leave. The two things you remember most of your experiences are the most extreme case and the last thing that happened; if you make them both the same positive event, you double-win.

: Zubon

Title reference: in Margaret Weis’s Star of the Guardians trilogy is the claim that the Greeks used this phrase to express “this is the high point in your life.” That is a bit more extreme than logging off.

I recently received the usual e-mail asking me to help some African official move millions of dollars through my bank account. I was obviously selected carefully, because he had 30kb of names in the “to” field. The interesting twist on this scam was that it was supposed to be gold, not US currency, and the e-mail had links to several stories about commodities markets and the gold standard.

The gold-sellers who are trying to steal your account information through phishing e-mails are often insufficiently sophisticated. Some are very good, with copies of real companies’ sites and artful URL deceptions. Most seem to rely on bulk, making a token effort and sending it to as many people as possible. If you get a 0.01% hit rate when sending a million e-mails, that’s not bad money for the effort.

The 419 scammers are intentionally being unsophisticated. Many of them really do speak better English than that, or at least have access to someone who does. The ruse has two purposes in the scam. First, the kind of person they want to take advantage of is more likely to respond to an unsophisticated request. Either you are charitable, and therefore feel sorry for them, or you are predatory, and therefore think you can put one over on them. Either way, you are drawn in. Second, assuming you are drawn in, if they manage to get money from you once, they can plausibly claim a misunderstanding and try again on the same victim. He does not look bright, and his English certainly is poor, so he has a convenient excuse for whatever goes wrong; come on, give him another chance.

As ever, don’t click the links, don’t give out your info, yaddah yah.

: Zubon

My offline gaming has explained my online gaming history to me. I am a carebear because I want to play with friends, not against them.

I can be intensely competitive, but I prefer to be cooperative. We should all be on the same team. We should all win. I would rather have an allied victory than conquer the entire board; even in a single-player 4X, I have this unhealthy tendency to let others grow and prosper rather than playing aggressively. The joy of PvE is that we have two sides, and all the Ps are on one side of that divide.

I like my PvP in small, discrete units. FPS games are conveniently concentrated doses. Games with “duels,” “matches,” and “rounds” are usually the right length. If I need to log in more than once for a “campaign,” we are probably not in my element. I don’t want to spend days dwelling on how to destroy you. I can be rather good at that, but those are not thoughts I like having in my head.

I have had some pen-and-paper RPG time lately, and I like working as a party. If there is serious intra-party conflict, I would rather skip sessions when the problematic players/characters are present. I played Diplomacy this weekend, and eight hours of suspicion and war were incredibly engrossing but not how I want to regard my fellow players. I have also been playing some Eurogames lately, and I enjoy the common characteristic that, while the games are interactive and competitive, there are fewer instances of directly striking at each other, and players are rarely eliminated mid-game.

I do have a fondness for games where it is many-against-one, with a dungeonmaster-equivalent who is explicitly “against” and not a neutral arbiter. Those are hard to find and balance. Isn’t there a zombie FPS in which one player is effectively L4D’s Director, sort of a RTS versus his FPS friends? [Zombie Master — thanks, Mikeful.] I like that notion more than survivors versus infected.

: Zubon

Whenever I post on grinding, there are the inevitable comments from people who enjoy it. The note that seems to be missing is, “in some ways, in some contexts, at my option.”

Good grind gives you the choice in those things. Having played MMOs for years, I clearly must love me some mindless repetition for its own sake, and sometimes that is really what you want. Killing ten rats is reliable in its difficulty and reward, comforting in its consistency. There really are times when you just want to farm something. It lets you decompress after work, it gives you something to do while chatting, or it lets you gear up to or down from more intense activity.

There are many examples of good grind. The game might not kick you out after you beat it, so you can keep playing if you like. “Survival mode” is popular, in which you click the button for an endless stream of zombies. I love New Game Plus in all its forms. (My apologies again to Kingdom of Loathing for whining that it was feeling grindy on my 80th Ascension or so.) Or maybe you can do a bit of rat-killing on the side for a cosmetic reward or a small, non-essential buff.

Bad grind is required. Bad grind is when the NPC says, “Now go do that five more times!” before you get any new options. Bad grind is when no NPC says that but the next boss is balanced around your having farmed five more levels. Bad grind is when a game has 8 hours of content and makes you repeat it 5 times so that it feels like 40 hours of content before the big end scene. Bad is when “New Game Plus” is required to get to the “real” game (arguably: or all the trophies/badges/achievements). Bad grind is when the repetition is not the game itself but is keeping you from the rest of the game.

There is an intermediate case where the grind is the entire point. (Some might say that MMOs inherently fall into this category.) You know walking in that you are going to be doing the same thing for hours. That is why you are there. Either you classify the whole thing as “not fun” and skip it, or you wallow in it. The only problem is those poor souls who wandered in expecting something else.

: Zubon

City of Heroes has practically an embarrassment of riches in game design. I keep hearing design dilemmas in other games and thinking, “Oh, City of Heroes solved that problem years ago.” The solutions are usually heavily reliant on instancing, but how much of your WoW time are you spending in instances anyway?

Many games borrow the City of Heroes sidekick system, in which you can bring a teammate up (or down) to your level. City of Heroes has gone beyond that: everyone on the team is the same level, and all the instanced content is always the right level. It really is that simple. Set everyone to the same effective level. Set all the enemies to that level (or let the players dial up the difficulty). Done.

Some of this works due to a good design in ability acquisition. You do it once. City of Heroes trainers do not try to re-sell you Fire Bolt every five levels with a new number attached. You buy it once and it scales with your level. If you join a team that changes your effective level, your abilities scale up or down appropriately.

Not enough content in a level range? Every quest can work for every level range. Friends just joined, or you are joining a group of level-capped friends? Everyone can play with everyone else. And content scales to team size, so bring as many friends as you like.

Fun bonus thought: if Blizzard really wanted to, they could have the hit points and damage of every enemy in every instance scale to the gear score of the party.

: Zubon