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.
.Eric Heimburg has a good post about why it may be cognitively impossible for some people to obey Rule 1 of raiding (“Don’t stand in the fire”). For more fun on this, I recommend the University of Illinois Visual Cognition Lab, particularly under “Gradual changes to scenes,” where they will tell you what is going to happen but you will still miss it.
: Zubon
It’s Magic without the CCG elements. That’s kind of like D&D without the RPG elements, which Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro is also doing. That removes some problems but also much of the core game.
By “without the CCG elements,” I mean that there is no deck-building. You can pick one of several pre-made decks. There is some minor deck-building when you unlock new cards for each deck, but you cannot remove existing cards you do not like. On the upside, that removes the standard CCG structure of encouraging you to spend ridiculous sums on getting the perfect deck. On the downside, that removes the entire strategic element of the game, leaving only the tactical side of playing what feels like someone else’s deck. And the decks, while effective against each other, are stocked with trash that you would not use in a normal Magic game.
Playing through the campaign (against a series of computer-controlled decks), it is hard to shake the feeling that winning comes from who gets better decks/draws or from the weakness of the AI, rather than player skill. I have lost games watching enemy creatures fly in while I could do nothing to stop them, and I have won games where the computer never seemed to be able to do much. Then again, it might just be that the basic green deck is a blunt instrument requiring almost no thought: land, creatures, very few instants or special abilities. You only need to win once to advance, so one lucky draw and you’re set (limiting mulligans on the opening hand is somewhat silly when you can costlessly reset the duel).
Playing online might differ. I am always hesitant to test some random online community. It would be playing against others facing similar deck constraints, so again that mix of deck, luck, and minor tactics. For the tactical, there is a series of “win this turn” puzzles, each of which involves a few minutes of reading cards and seeing where the path to victory lies.
I picked this up because I was mostly enjoying Elements, saw the ad (free expansion with pre-order), checked some reviews of the console version, and thought it might be worth $10 to try the market leader. It was a low risk purchase compared to real Magic cards or a night at the cinema. Entertaining in an early binge, but likely lacking in staying power due to the low deck flexibility. I will let you know if that assessment changes.
: Zubon
“…you can donate one or all of your vital organs to the Aperture Science Self Esteem Fund for Girls? It’s true!”
Portal received a couple of updates this year, but I had not checked what. The ending now differs slightly (story, not gameplay). There is also a new achievement, “Transmission Received,” which is a sort of mini-game in which you take radios scattered throughout the levels to unmarked points for coded messages. You can tell that you are close because the radio starts getting static; when the light turns green, you’re there. Veteran players will notice far more radios than before in the game.
The radio in the starting chamber is one of them. Just carry it with you until you hear static. That will get you started. Do you know Morse code?
: Zubon
To adapt a line from Scott Adams, what matters is how many people love your game, not how many people hate your game.
If you make the best MMO ever, the most popular MMO ever, there will still be approximately 300 million Americans and 6.5 billion other people who will not be playing your game. That is your best case scenario. Even amongst gamers, most will not play it, and you will be ridiculously successful if you can get most MMORPG players to download the trial. Even if you are the WoW-killer, your game is still a niche in a niche.
This is a freeing insight. It does not matter how many people hate your game. Their dislike has no more effect on your success than the indifferent billions. Your game is not going to be all things to all people or even most things to 0.2% of people. You can focus on the base and make the game for them, rather than trying to reduce the scorn of people who are never going to be on your side anyway.
It does not matter how many people hate Darkfall. They quite happily fill a niche that has some very passionate support. It does not matter how many people hate Twilight. Stephenie Meyer is making her millions from the people who love it. It does not matter how many people hate xkcd or Rob Liefeld or Justin Bieber or the New York Yankees (although you can monetize some of that anti-fandom).
For the success of your game, vaguely positive is the same as indifferent is the same as opposed is about the same as vocal hatred. They are all non-subscribers. The people who matter are the ones who will play your game, who will pay to support it, who will recruit their friends and set up fan sites and build support tools and run in-game events. Unless you actually do suck, you get ahead by increasing your positives, not decreasing your negatives.
: Zubon
Our very own Ethic comments on LotRO going free-to-play:
Since we are going this way now, let’s get Asheron’s Call and heck even Asheron’s Call 2 running on the same model.
The return of AC2 is an appealing notion. If that happens, I need a way to reclaim an old account with just the associated e-mail address (not the log-in name). I never made that Lugian Tactician. I also have an old AC1 account in storage; I might remember the account name on that one.
: Zubon
Ardwulf explains why a game doing well might change its pricing model:
The key factor here, I think, and the one that led Turbine to this decision, is that DDO subscriptions have increased under its free-to-play model. And not just jumped a bit, but tripled. Not to mention that overall revenue is up tenfold, last we heard.
Pretend for a moment that you are a Turbine executive, circa 2008. Someone on the DDO team presents the free-to-play proposal. S/he includes a slide predicting that subscriptions would triple. You would have laughed him/her out of the room, wouldn’t you? I would have expected some decline in month-to-month subscribers with potentially increased revenues from new and old players engaging in microtransactions. This must be the most successful free trial program ever, to say nothing of the microtransaction revenue.
: Zubon
Some people are very unhappy with LotRO moving to DDO’s payment model. Keen has a harshly worded example with more comments then we’ll ever see on a post. This is not just LotRO-specific, however, as many people like to say things about games that they neither play nor would have played.
If you are neither a customer nor a likely customer, the company does not care about your opinion. They are not losing any money by doing things you don’t like. They are not gaining money by doing exactly what you want. If you are already not a customer and their business model moves further from you, you cannot become any less of a customer. Yes, there is some chance that you could have become one, but most people who are “planning to play next year” will still be planning to play next year rather than actually playing and paying. Odds are, you are not the marginal customer.
If I am a vegan, KFC does not care about my perspective on the Double Down. My opinion on the latest patch to Warcraft, Warhammer, or City of Heroes does not matter much unless it includes the phrase “I resubscribed” or drives you to that state (or out of it). This will not stop me from commenting, I’m sure, as that is kind of what we do here in the blogosphere. But let’s keep perspective, considering the normal importance of an online gaming blog post.
: Zubon
With any luck, Bioware will tell the lot of us off and take The Old Republic in a direction that current MMO players will find inconceivable. In the best of all possible worlds, you will recognize its connection to the original EverQuest the way you recognize the connection between Pac-Man and Quake. Because we have ruined these games by defining the RPG out and setting for killing 10,000 rats because it will improve our gearscore.
Darren senses that Bioware is missing the point of MMOs. Good for them. Our niche market is a horror of trying to stretch out the fun instead of making it more fun. Portal did not become a huge hit because it made you execute the same maneuver 50 times before moving to the next level.
World of Warcraft did not become a huge hit by catering to then-current MMO players. It so vastly expanded the market that it effectively created the whole thing; which has had more players, World of Warcraft or every earlier western MMO combined? Bioware is looking for that kind of success, and they are going to succeed or fail big. They are not going to settle for a few hundred thousand players. While there are a lot of developers that could live quite nicely with that playerbase, as a corporation they are not devoting resources to niches. They can try to poach a few million current MMO players, or they can take the market in a different direction.
I have no idea if the game will be good, successful, or even something that I want to play. But I will be disappointed if it ends up appealing to the current MMO market instead of trying to reach different players.
: Zubon
House of Leaves has the best dedication page ever.
Should I blame CRPGs for grinding, or do we want to go back further? I remember long ago in the original Final Fantasy, seeking out wandering encounters so that I could get that bit more experience or treasure for taking on the next boss. I suppose I should not be surprised to find it in online multiplayer flash games. You see it everywhere once you start to look for it. But why, because people feel like there is more game if they spend longer squeezing the enjoyment or accomplishment from it? Time spent is a cost, not a benefit!
One night last week, I was in very poor spirits while playing Elements because of losing two games in a row after a 2/15 chance failed to come up in 30 tries. (Even worse than that 1.4% chance, really, because it was two 15-set trials of sampling without replacement with a 4/30 chance. The odds were around 4/15 by the end of each.) The night before I hit the computer’s perfect counter-deck to mine three times in a row, and I’m still vaguely bitter about that game where a 1/3 chance happened 8/13 times. The next night a 6/30 chance did not appear in two 15-turn games. In games that are completely random like craps or roulette, you just roll with streaks, but it is frustrating in a deck-building game like Elements or Dominion where managing probability is the whole point. Every plan breaks at a certain degree of perverse unlikelihood.
The next day I was reading Battle Royale
The universe holds more perversity than you can survive. You think you have planned for every possibility, and then a meteor hits your house. All of life is an example of gambler’s ruin. You cannot live forever because, given an infinite amount of time, not only will everything go wrong that can go wrong, but also it will all go wrong at the same time. And, just in case you can survive that a few times, since we are talking about forever, it will happen an infinite number of times.
Which puts that card game issue in perspective.
: Zubon