Author: Zubon

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Why I Will Never Be a Great Guild Leader

An MMO guild needs constant renewal. If you are not recruiting, you are dying. People unsubscribe all the time, so you are trying to keep a colander filled.

I am not all about the new recruits. I may not learn their names until they have been around a while; until proven otherwise, I assume that everyone is just passing through. I do not have the reserves to get emotionally invested in a series of people who are going back to X or just playing until Y comes out, whether or not they mention that. There is a self-fulfilling prophecy in expecting people to leave soon, but over the years I have invested a lot of attention and gold in people who did not always bother leaving the “this game just isn’t for me” note. I understand that many people are capable of taking an appropriate level of interest in an acquaintance, but I do not relish the hazy zone between “some guy” and “close friend.”

I prefer a small, tight-knit group. This is hard to maintain across games, jobs, families, time zones, to say nothing of across the years. This would be a major factor of my taking the year off MMOs.

: Zubon

Unforced Grouping

There is a good post on socializing and not at Of Course I’ll Play It. Keep reading for the comments, which are also good. It starts in the context of social media games and addresses the age-old topic of forced grouping. I will not repeat what you can read there.

I want to group more than I do. A good group playing experience is far better than solo, but a bad group playing experience can be actively bad, not just worse than solo. Solo is reliable, subject only to the vagaries of the game itself. Solo is also low-investment. Putting a group together for X can take a long time, and it may never come together, and then I have the risk of its making my night worse than not playing at all.

Finding the right guild is a huge boon, because that gives you a reliable source of good group experiences. That is high investment, maybe less so for the extroverts. That is a better investment if you tend to play the same game for a long time or if you have a large, multi-game guild that will be consistently available in whatever game you play. (Of course, if the guild is that large, it may not be much different from a PUG with strangers.) Otherwise, you start fresh in a new game, trying to find a group that has the right social norms, has people in your level range/time zone, and is otherwise a good fit. There are many posts to be made on “finding the right guild for you.” I miss my City of Heroes supergroup, but we moved on in different directions over the years.

: Zubon

“RPG Elements”

On one hand, I am sick and tried of seeing this in half the games being released. It does not mean “role-playing,” it means leveling and/or unlocking abilities. I am still unhappy about the usurpation of the term, and I get tired of grinding in games. The big fight at the end was either balanced assuming a certain amount of leveling, in which case the grind is required, or the levels really are a bonus, in which case the big fight will be trivialized. Neither is good for your game.

On the other hand, I do like customizing characters. It seems that the standard way of doing that is via leveling up and unlocking abilities along the way. This is a good way of introducing options gradually, to give time to learn them, but I would also like a “just give me all the options” button so I can decide how to approach the learning curve. I love being able to pick out how my character looks, how he specializes abilities, what equipment to use, etc. I will put in extra hours to unlock options I will never use, just because I like having more options.

On one foot, that is what it comes down to: we react to the ability to “earn” things whether or not we say we like it. People rate games higher when they have achievements, and we completionists must click off every last thing. If players will lock themselves in Skinner boxes, it is not shocking that developers will offer them.

On the other foot, the other alternative seems to be packing the game with even less optional crap. We decided at some point that games needed to have X hours of gameplay, and you extend your content across X by whatever means necessary. We could have taken the other path, making low-/no-padding games like Portal, but go try to sell a 5-hour video game. This is why we cannot have nice things. Freaking flash games add padding to extend their playtime.

On an unspecified fifth limb, even if I fall prey to your padding, I will still hate you for it. Yes, I am a badge/achievement whore like no other, and I gotta catch ’em all. (So it’s a good thing I do not play Pokémon, Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh…) I don’t know how much that will help your bottom line: you are not getting more money from me on a single-player game; in a single-player game I also likely have the option to edit the grind away; in an MMO, I am unhealthily hardcore and am more likely to push a month or two really hard rather than spread the grind over many subscription months; and at any rate, if most of my time was spent grinding, that is the impression I am likely to write about. Not that you are making games for bloggers, but is a buzz of “it pads its content with a ridiculous grind” better than “it is short”?

: Zubon

Elements Slowdown

The Top 50 (Tier 4) is an oddity. These are the decks from the top 50 ranked players. Some of them have set up farms to give you easy/free rare cards. Others are using their usual decks, while some are intentionally designed as anti-player decks. They are mostly or all upgraded cards, but because players can (do) set up farms, the game gives you the un-upgraded versions; rare cards are worth decent money, but you face half the False God difficulty (fully upgraded deck) without the increased reward.

The most annoying thing is decks designed to slow things down. There is first the usual dichotomy between speed and control in CCGs: the basic plans are to burn down the enemy now or keep him from doing anything and then implement a late-game plan. If you are farming, you play for speed, because your goal is to get as many wins (cards) as possible as fast as possible; speed vs. speed, speed vs. control, and control vs. control are all potentially interesting matches. Some T50 decks complicate that by never really intending implement that late-game plan. They just want to annoy you. The amusing ones go heavily for life gain. They might have an attack or two, but mostly they are really big punching bags that heal themselves. The most frustrating ones are large decks that plan to seize control and never do anything until you run out of cards. That is the late-game plan: counter everything and hope the player has no way to prevent decking out. The deck’s secondary objective is winning, in the sense of defeating the player, although some of them are rather good at that (remember: fully upgraded, designed by top players, and no cards “wasted” on offense) unless you have very fast control or damage. The deck’s primary objective is to take as long as possible. The deck-builder wins if you, the player, want to stab him in the throat as the game drags on.

In PvP, this is a perfectly viable approach. Even without Millstone-equivalents, building a huge blob and taking the punches can be a winning strategy. You get the bonus of watching frustrated opponents seethe. I have seen several versions, including one explicitly named “Rage Quit.” But if you play one of those in PvP, you must sit there as long as your opponent. Heck, he might have his own control deck, with both of you expecting a long game. When you set it up for the computer to control, you are just making a land mine filled with glue, waiting for players to get trapped. You don’t get to see them wriggle, unless they post on the forums about how much they hate you, but you know the computer can spring the trap on dozens of innocent victims at once.

It kind of makes me feel bad about NanoStar Siege. While deciding it wasn’t something I would play in the long run, I noticed that you could improve your defenses with in-game coins without leveling up, and that there was a daily reward for logging in (and for winning or losing when others attack). I could log in occasionally, collect cash, and upgrade the increasingly ridiculous defenses. Yeah, go ahead, pick on the low-level account for easy points. Go for it. Too bad for the people looking for even-level opponents who hit that.

: Zubon

Elements Decks

I am still enjoying Elements.

If you play un-upgraded, you have a good range of deck options even without the trainer. Building a strong un-upgraded deck costs in the 500-1000 electrum range if you start with none of the cards, so it does not take long to bootstrap yourself into having several options for excellent tier 3 decks. You will probably earn back what you spent well before you get bored with your new toy, and you will earn cards for your next toy along the way.

My difficulty remains the cliff of upgraded cards. Tier 3 is trivially easy with a fast deck, but difficulty ramps up quickly from there. Tier 5 brings in half the False God issues, including extra quanta, draws, and health plus scattered upgraded cards. Tier 5 is not terribly difficult once you upgrade a half-dozen key cards in your deck, although it requires a different plan because you cannot rely on blazing speed against a double-health target. The Tier 6 False Gods are that cliff, some of them able to deal 100 damage by turn 4-7. Bootstrapping there is a lengthier process.

Because a fully upgraded deck costs in the 50,000 electrum range, you have far fewer options when trying the upper tiers. Once I have a fully upgraded deck, it will be easier to get to a second one, but that is a lot of games with the one deck. There is the familiar, gratifying feeling of illusory accomplishment as each upgraded card improves that initial deck. But altoholism, as ever, means going back to the newbie areas; I cannot expect much against False Gods when using a deck with only a couple upgraded cards.

Is it a sickness that I am not just using the trainer? If all I care about is the gameplay, I can skip the first C of CCG. I seem stuck on the notion that it is not the “real” game.

: Zubon

“No Cover Charge”

Informis, commenting at Keen and Graev’s:

Apparently, “free-to-play” these days really means “no cover charge.”

I assume it has been said before, but this is my first time seeing this phrasing, and I like it. Can we all start using that to refer to Wizard101, Dungeons and Dragons Online, and other games with the not-quite-F2P pricing model? I’m not sure that “NCC” will catch on as an acronym, although there would be a special glory in applying it to Star Trek Online…

: Zubon

Dopamine

I am reading How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. I need to read further to decide whether it will be worth recommending, but chapter 3 has some great insights for reward systems and game design. Chapter 3 is about errors, how our simian brains will vainly search for patterns in randomness and provide excessive neurochemicals to keep us focused on what is actually unpredictable.

We are a pattern-seeking species, with self-programming neurons that seek to predict risks and rewards. We are very good at developing intuitive understandings of situations in which we do not have enough time for a rational analysis, kind of like how your dog can catch a frisbee even if he cannot do the math of plotting three-dimensional vectors in real time. Unfortunately, we apply the same mental programming to completely random sequences, seeing patterns that do not exist and feeling bigger highs from wins strictly because they are unpredictable.

I say that again: unpredictable wins produce greater emotional reactions. Your brain is programmed to look for surprises, and if it really is a random system, success will always be surprising to some degree. Continue reading Dopamine