Author: Zubon

.

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.

.

Punctuality

Things that are valuable are measured precisely and monitored closely. This is why diamonds sell by the quarter-karat and are kept under lock and key, while your water bill comes in hundreds of gallons and you might put off fixing a dripping faucet.

Lateness implies disrespect for yourself and others. You have only so much time, and treating it cavalierly suggests that it has low value to you. Or perhaps you are strategically late, on the assumption that everyone else will be waiting when you get there. You find others’ time cheap. All we have in this life is fading time, and wasting others’ is slow murder by degrees. But it costs you nothing, as long as you are the last to show up.

“It’s only five minutes. How impatient are you?” No, it’s five minutes per person. In a twelve-person raid, five minutes late is an hour wasted. And it is rarely “only five minutes.” In a forty-person raid, fifteen minutes late is ten hours. I have seen raids and groups that consistently take as long as an hour to pull together. How many entire days are wasted per week waiting for the raid to start?

Lateness cascades. The group is not together yet, so brb bio. He’s still gone, so get a drink. We’ve been waiting ten minutes, someone needs to go check on the oven. Now we’re starting too late, someone won’t have enough time to finish the dungeon, gotta run, good luck. Recruit again and repeat. People learn that being on-time means waiting while lateness is not punished (indeed, people seem grateful when a late-comer lets them get started), so why put any effort into being on time?

But it’s hard to be the guy who says, “We do not have a full group/raid logged on and available at the start time, so this week is canceled. We’ll try again next week.” “It’s only five ten fifteen thirty minutes,” and I guess we’re committed to going through with it after waiting a half-hour. No one wants all that time to have been wasted.

: Zubon

Resolution

This year, I renew my often-flagging resolution not to look forward to things. There were three MMO releases I was looking forward to in 2009. The first made me physically ill just from looking at the graphics. If you and your friends made your own version of WoW in your garage, it would look very much like the second. The third I tried with my wife, computers side-by-side, prompting the following exchange:

“I wonder if this gets fun at any point, or if it always sucks.”
“Okay, just so you know we’re on the same page here.”

Here is to low expectations in 2010.

: Zubon

New Year Planning

As we head to the annual New Year’s LAN party, I post my annual off-topic reminder. I moonlight in traffic safety when not living the glamorous life of a gaming blogger, and midnight to 4am on January 1 is the worst time of year for alcohol-involved crashes (July 4 is a worse day, but January 1 packs a lot into those 4 hours). Your tolerance is probably not as high as you think it is, nor is that something you can judge well after you lose count of drinks. Even if you are fine, that other guy isn’t.

  • If you can, party somewhere you can spend the night.
  • Failing that, a designated driver is a good thing. Plan ahead on that instead of seeing who is least drunk at 3am. Spending the night is still better, because of the other folks who do not have designated drivers. Alternately: taxi.
  • Unless you are 100% sure of your state’s open container laws, keep any alcohol in the trunk. There will be extra police out, and you don’t want questions if you are stopped.
  • On the planning ahead front, don’t forget a pillow, toiletries, and condoms. You may not be planning on using the last, but remember that bit about your judgement after the fourth tequila and how many early September birthdays you know.

On the gaming front, before heading to the LAN party:

  • Patch your games.
  • Save patches to a shared folder for those who did not.
  • Update your drivers, but do not do that last; play for a bit to make sure the new drivers are fine before you arrive.
  • DotA is a great LAN game, but avoid surprises when one person wants to switch over to Demigod, another to League of Legends, and a third to Heroes of Newerth.

Nothing slows down the gaming like having someone patch for an hour before every new game. Don’t be that guy.

: Zubon

Software Toys

A game is something you play; a toy is something you play with. The divide is not a bright line, but I do find myself playing some games and thinking that I am playing with them. It usually relates to the degree of interactivity. When I click and then sit back and watch it go, the less it feels like I am playing something. Pandemic is an example: you set up a bit, get to push a few dials every now and again, but mostly you watch it go. Overlord is clearly a game, Evil Genius feels narrowly on the game side of the line, and Master of Orion 3 was probably on the toy side. Penny Arcade described it as a space empire management simulator rather than a game as such, and that is probably fair. Most simulators are toys rather than games. Details matter there: various editions of Sim City might fall on either side.

“Social games” are mostly software toys. Raising a virtual pet is not so much a game, nor is managing your virtual restaurant, farm, or fish tank. If the intended gameplay is for you to click some stuff and walk away for an hour, that is probably a toy. Which is really weird, because that in no way describes how we play with physical toys, but I almost always think of Facebook games as something I play with. Except Bejeweled Blitz, which is not a “social” game. And social games aren’t really social, since you just send each other presents or steal each others’ crops, instead of perhaps talking to one another. Wow, this is some severe abuse of terms.

This has also become an indicator of when I am about done with an MMO. If I think of myself as logging on to “mess with” the game, rather than play it, I am probably tidying up things before unsubscribing. Gotta get quests and vault space in order, in case I come back someday.

: Zubon

I just found D&D Tiny Adventures on Facebook, so if you’re my friend, you should totally play (with), just because I need more people to buff me. :p I like that they are advertising their product without any RMT add-ons to the game.

Skirmish Scaling II

skirmish mark value declining Yes, for the bargain basement price of 108 skirmish marks, you can upgrade your soldier’s power-over-time spell by 0.8 power every 3 seconds. 108 marks is about half what you get for a skirmish with the daily bonus. The herbalist likes to cast Nature’s Power on itself at the start of a fight, although it may decide to give you a recharge once its cooldown is done.

Looking at the other skirmish trainer options past rank 10, this seems typical. I could also spend 132 marks to upgrade the herbalist’s armor by 6. Six. Skirmish training is hard-capped at 20, but it seems soft-capped at 10. Lower ranks increase quickly and cheaply, which was the stated design intention, but the curve becomes a wall in the latter half.

It is a microcosm of MMOs generally: early on, large and quick increases in power; once you feel committed, increasingly small increments for increasingly large investment. On the other hand, I guess that encourages me to spend my marks on those Empowerment scrolls.

: Zubon

Taunting

I am enchanted by this notion of taunting as magical mind control rather than simply insulting an ogre’s mother. One aspect of 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons is dividing power source and role. A Wizard is an arcane controller, a Fighter is a martial defender, and a Swordmage is an arcane defender. If you want a taunt ability, you could build it as psychological trickery, a magical compulsion, a divine geas, or a psychic power. They all amount to roughly the same thing, but it goes with my favorite notion of detaching the mechanics from the fluff. This is a martial class, so it gets martial fluff, while those magical tanks get magical fluff.

: Zubon

Update with additional thought: D&D 4E also avoids the taunting question by using a mechanic called “marking.” A marked target is free to attack whoever it wants, but if the attack does not include the marking defender, it has a penalty to hit, and all the defenders get to do something extra in that case. You can ignore the tank, at which point the tank becomes a pretty good debuffing class that is free to go with its secondary function (generally damage).

Skirmish Scaling

So far, I have had almost no fun running any skirmishes in groups. The scaling is ridiculous.

Solo seems balanced for you to level your soldier alone. You would not have much trouble running them without your soldier out. The bosses drop easily, and I face harder fights in normal quests. Move up to small fellowships, and the repetitive fights are still trivial, even more so given that some of the fights are against two normal enemies. The encounters are also easy, although some of the lieutenants are fairly absurd (exploding for most of a squishy’s health). Then the boss appears, and that fight seems to be balanced for a full group of six, on the assumptions that all your soldiers are leveled fully and that your group learned to coordinate well despite never needing to before that one fight. Even that would not be a problem were it not for the suicidal NPCs that do not seem much tougher when you have a group going. Beating everything in a skirmish is not bad, but the NPCs actively run into fire auras, shadow DoTs on the ground, and anything else that can hurt them, while wanting to tank.

I feel as though I am forced to solo enough skirmishes to level up my soldier to my level, and then only join groups with others that have done so. In six to eight months, this part will be a smaller problem, when most main characters have decent soldiers, although alts will continue to be suicide in group skirmishes. Until I am willing to put in that time on every character I play, and ruthlessly kick anyone who has not, any group skirmish seems like a huge waste of time. It takes 30-40 minutes to test that because the very last fight is the only challenging one. That would be less annoying if you could re-try that fight after seeing what went wrong, but the NPC dies, so you fail and must start over. Putting a half-hour of grinding trivial trash between every re-attempt is a problem. More than half your marks come from clearing the last fight and getting the daily bonus; why risk getting only a third of the full reward in a group when you can consistently get the whole thing solo?

It is a worse situation than the normal problem of needing your friends to level to the cap before you can play with them. Not only may your characters have a level difference, so do your soldiers, and you all need to level your soldiers solo unless you are happy losing at the end and only getting 1/3 of the reward when you play together. Even if you are the one at the cap waiting for your friends, you still need to solo grind to bring up your soldier.

I joined a group for the raid-sized Siege of Gondamon skirmish. The last fight was turned up to three arch-nemesis class enemies, two of which had fiery damage auras. Conveniently for our raid, one of the flaming dragons went into anti-exploit mode despite fighting on a flat surface, so we took down the other and the boss. When it exited anti-exploit mode, it reset into drama mode and never exited, so the raid just stared at an un-attackable enemy until everyone quit.

: Zubon