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.
.This is one of those must-see applications of the gamer mindset.
Our good friend Wilhelm2451 explains how Nintendo has a Pokémon device that rewards walking, which is a good thing. It goes all the way to 7,500 miles worth of Achievement, which “encourages aberrant gameplay,” as we might say around here. He then goes on to demonstrate a creation that gets Pokémon to register 120 steps per minute.
Alternate title: “Cheating at Walking.”
: Zubon
What kinds of idiots are making these games, eh? They can’t seem to put together a world with a thousand-plus players at a time each with dozens of items and skills interacting with tens of thousands of NPCs and other objects, dynamically and in real time with a playerbase across several continents using a range of hardware with a random pastiche of software, duplicated across dozens of servers scattered across the country or world and dependent on an international communications network entirely beyond their control. NOOBS!
There are only a dozen classes each with a half-dozen specializations that each vary in value across different circumstances that may vary in abundance and prominence across the levels, in solo or group play, in groups of different sizes, or in PvE and PvP. I swear, there is a conspiracy to keep my class down, with the way that everyone else gets money hats while I get nerfed every patch. l2balance NOOBS!
It’s not like they have dozens of people working with a sprawling code base where a mistake or typo can be multiplied in effect across the entire game. Every other workplace in the world has perfect documentation of all changes and accurately predicts the third-order effects of what are ostensibly small changes to the way some operations are calculated on the back end. It’s like you NOOBS are trying to ruin the game!
: Zubon
Sometimes you have a rough night in-game. Things just did not work. The tank was not controlling aggro while the mage was over-nuking and the healer was consistently a few seconds late. You had trouble getting a group, then half the people quit and two idiots started arguing about where to go next.
I have occasionally heard about nights that went badly due to one’s own problems. “I’m just not on tonight, guys.” I see that more often with guild-only or -majority groups. When people are with pickup groups, that is when you get the stories about all the other idiots out there.
When it is just us in a group, things are just going badly. We got unlucky, that add came out of nowhere, and the spell did not go off due to lag.
When I am with a pickup group, I am surrounded by morons. He should have known better than to pull those linked mobs, we have the worst healer on the server, and that other guys is half-AFK even when his Etchasketch computer is not choking to death.
You make mistakes because, hey, mistakes happen. You can’t win them all, and sometimes you swing and miss five times in a row for no reason. Other people make mistakes because they are incompetent or they hate your guild and are trying to get you killed. They are probably laughing about it on Teamspeak while calling you a noob.
And then the idiot blames it on you.
: Zubon
After wondering why we do not see more companies with multiple MMOs linking their games, I have come to wonder the same thing about Facebook. The leading developers (and many of the next tier) have about a dozen games each, usually clones of each others’ (“No really, our farm is different!). Despite using Facebook as a common platform, the games are almost entirely separate. They frequently even have separate cash shop currencies for their games.
There are exceptions. Cross-advertising is more common, by which I mean not just having “play our other games!” at the top, but placing decorative items in each game that reference the others. PlayFish (EA) has one currency across its games. Digital Chocolate sells you in-game character cards that apply to all their games, so your new hero does whatever is appropriate in all of their games at once; that seems like a great incentive to try more of their games and to spend money on them.
Why not have incentives to try all the games, really get someone entangled? The same company will have a farm and a restaurant and a city and a pet shop and… Why is there no option to send crops from my farm to my restaurant? Why can’t I have my restaurant and pet shop in my city? Why can’t the safari game send pets to the pet shop? If you could link all these games together, you would more or less have an MMO, one that is more crafting- than combat-focused.
Then we just need a way to link Farmville to World of Warcraft, and the world will end.
: Zubon
A while back, Kongregate added “kreds” so that you could donate to developers and for other potential uses. You now see flash versions of the standard browser games where you can pay for bonuses, more turns, etc. There are some games with a free level with an option to buy the rest; when one had a badge added, that received just a bit of negative feedback.
The game of the week is Bloons Tower Defense 4, which has dived into microtransactions. It added a level grind, which you can pay to skip past. You can pay for a earning twice as much money in-game. You can pay for a variety of bonuses to your towers.
Feel free to discuss what you think of this as a development tactic. If you are one of the developers, please let us know how that is working out for you financially. I just wonder how it goes on a game where everything is done client side. If I want more in-game money, I can edit it in. It is not as though that can be violating the purity of the game or even particularly cheating when the developers will let me pay for the same privilege.
: Zubon
I can excuse having the archer pull. The arrow is silent, and orcs yell all the time, so no one notices anything when Grok’thar bellows and goes rushing down the hallway. He’s just like that. The same for when you bean an ogre: he may have been knocked silly, but shuffling about and drooling is normal for him. I can even buy the sniper rifle pull, because I assume a silencer.
My Sonic Defender pulls by screaming. Literally. Her attacks are Scream, Howl, and Shout. The guy five feet away does not notice anything. Once I got Screech, I could stun someone in the middle of a group, scream him to “arrest,” and then start on his friends before they notice. Let’s suspend disbelief a little further: you can focus sound waves similar to the way lasers focus light, so maybe someone nearby would hear nothing from a well-focused sonic attack.
What about the guy with the fireballs? When my Ice Blaster chucks a head-sized block of jagged ice at your friend, do you not even notice its hitting the ground? What if I pull a torso-sized chunk of concrete from the ground and knock someone across the room? “Bob’s running off down that hallway again for no good reason. Grok’thar, did you leave this concrete here?” Does anyone see the pitched battle with grenades and flamethrowers on the other side of the room?
At least my Psychic Blasts make sense for that. Only how does he know where to run when someone punches him in the brain? Maybe only the target can see the psychic bolt coming. City of Heroes has properly recognized that psychic power manifests itself in glowing pinkness.
: Zubon
“You could spend quite a bit of time watching ineffective broccoli promotions on the internet.”
– Tyler Cowen
More people bought it without the queue, and more will, but we know that at least 140,000 people bought the sparkly pony. At $25 each, that is $3.5 million. There are costs to making it, dealing with billing, etc., but we’ll ignore those along with the people not in the 140,000. For the moment, I just want to help you get an idea of how much money they already got for the sparkly pony, since most of us have trouble visualizing numbers like $3,500,000.
Take all the money you have, including all your savings, your retirement fund, and any equity in your house. Now add in everything you are going to earn at work for the next ten years. It’s probably more than that.
: Zubon
Donate blood. If you can, you ought. Fewer people die, and the survivors share your blood type, so you will have more people around who are potential donors for you. It’s win-win. You also get a cookie.
As part of their social media, the American Red Cross site has avatars for download. Most of them are variations on “I gave” and “please give,” but note the avatar to the left. I don’t know about your favorite FPS, but in Team Fortress 2, everyone I kill gets an image of the kill along with my name and avatar. Now with every headshot I can show off my civic spirit, encourage others to donate blood, and taunt my enemies. I am also thinking of changing my spray to one of the “give blood” avatars, to decorate the enemy base.
: Zubon
in one easy step!
Following Tobold’s link to NanoStar Siege, one of the other games from that company is NanoTowns. There are a variety of these on Facebook, usually Farmville clones with a different graphics theme, although this one is interesting in that it does not have the standard formula of “click 20 times then wait 12 hours to harvest.” It instead is the sort of thing where you do a lot of clicking every five minutes, and you use the resources you gather to complete “quests” like “Could you get me some fries?” If you have a large enough city, you can presumably keep clicking indefinitely once it starts taking more than five minutes to go through your city.
And then I bought a taco stand. I suspect there is decimal place error, because it costs less to make it NOW than to wait five minutes. Maybe they meant it to be 550. And it sells for 29% more than it costs to make it. If only the game had a multi-create or multi-sell, this would be an infinite money loop. As it is, it is a tediously long positive sum money loop that requires many many many clicks. There does not seem to be a limit to how many times you can click; you can see that I went as far as 70 wondering if it would stop.
Oh, this isn’t good. You can start it up and then hurry the completion. Hurrying the completion gives you money back. The game is not really sure how to feel about that; it gives you the money then fails to hurry completion. You can then exit that window and re-hurry. Smaller profit, fewer clicks, two nigh-infinite money loops in one!
And if anything brings home the gameplay of the standard Facebook game, it is “tediously click here for as long as you like to watch your numbers increase.” Kind of like ProgressQuest without the “fire and forget” feature.
: Zubon