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.
.In games, a slog is bad. A romp is good, but can easily become so rapid you stop experiencing the game and end up merely experiencing the speed of your progress. The trick is pacing a game so that the player still feels as though they’re romping but is also going slowly enough to feel like they’re experiencing a LOT of stuff.
: Zubon
The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Siege of Mirkwoodâ„¢ launches in a week. I am wondering what happens two months down the line.
Turbine’s Middle-earth has a punctuated equilibrium, with the level cap jumping once a year and the end-game moving a little further from the tutorial. If the future resembles the past, the mid-year additions will be less severe than Blizzard’s tiers of equipment, more of breadth at the cap than another ladder to climb. (More cynical version: many treadmills rather than one long one.) This leads to launching with a slim end-game, building it up over time, then moving to a new, slim end-game.
I have not gone far in Overlord. I question whether the gameplay will become much more interesting than “throw a wave of imps at it,” and I found my drive to look further stymied early on by the corruption score.
Overlord includes the familiar karma score, in which all ethical decisions fall on a single line. The moral meaning of every action is absolute and completely independent of intention. A surprising amount of violence and destruction has no moral component at all, just specifically defined moral decisions. Most of the early ones are clearly labeled, although you can get a corruption score before being told that it exists (“Hey, if I click on this guy, a green number goes up. I wonder what … oh, my gremlins killed him.”), which must make for some fun surprises and re-loads when you unexpectedly shift yourself in an undesired direction.
On another “best practices” note, flip through the Game Info section on the City of Heroes website. That is really good. It does not have everything the wiki does, and it really should not, but I could actually point someone to the official site to learn about the game. I could ask for a bit more about the archetypes, but it goes through the various types of rewards/loot, you have lore on the setting and the enemy groups, there is a lengthy section on the Mission Architect, and it is all well organized. This is a useful official site that is easily navigated. It even includes the recommendation to pick a power pool by level 12 so you can get your travel power ASAP. Whoever put this site together did good work.
I know, they have had five years to put a good site together, but so many games fail to use the site as much more than a promotional tool.
: Zubon
Returning to last week’s big theme of item shops, City of Heroes shipped Super Booster IV: Martial Arts last week (discussion thread). In addition to emotes and costume pieces, it includes a power (like the other Boosters):
Ninja Run power:
Dash through the city with the agility of a ninja! The Ninja Run power is a travel power enabled through the purchase of Super Booster IV: Martial Arts and is available for use at level 4. Use Ninja Run to strike fear in the hearts of your enemies as you increase your run speed and leaping abilities, and the best part? It doesn’t use one of your power selections!
The previous powers were different. The first was a self-destruct: amusing, but of limited use, especially when it sends you to the hospital (no rez). The second gave you an other-only buff: rather useful, but not something that made you more powerful. It is hard to get angry about paying for the ability to help others, but let’s not doubt that nerd rage is out there. The third did not have a power as such. This time, though, it is a power, and a desirable one, and they are advertising it as such. Travel skills are not exactly game-breaking, and this one is slower than the others, but you get it earlier and (as they say) with no power slot consumed, meaning that you can use that slot for something else. Because there is no prerequisite power (you can pay for that another way: subscribe for 5 years to be able to pick travel powers at level 6), that frees up another slot if you were only taking Combat Jumping to get Super Leap. The most important effect is not selling a permanent, slightly sub-par travel power; it is effectively selling an extra power slot or two for all your characters.
Come to think of it, that is a heck of a deal for $10, especially since it applies to all your characters. Other games are selling you a mount or decorative pet for $10. Here, they will top that and give it to every character you have.
: Zubon
Reading the latest League of Legends patch notes, I noticed this format:
- Tantrum Damage modified from 115/130/145/160/175 to 100/120/140/160/180
- Curse of the Sad Mummy Duration reduced from 3 to 2.5
Notice the “from” and “to” with exact numbers. It does not say, “Tantrum Damage modified. Curse of the Sad Mummy Duration reduced.” This is especially important for test notes, as you want people to test if the numbers actually come out that way, especially since some of the notes are correcting ability numbers or text so that they match (ditto for graphic effect and area of effect).
While we are talking about doing things right, I may have attacked the City of Heroes patch notes before, but one thing they do well is pointing to themes. Some of that is the advertising copy for, “Come try our new stuff! It’s awesome!” but the valuable part is expressing the developer intent in the patch notes. “We observed that players were able to reach unintended levels of defense through stacking buffs and abilities, so we are adjusting this through the following changes…” Even when there is no theme, that is helpful: “We are making a variety of balance tweaks to powers across all classes, correcting a variety of issues that have accumulated over time. There may be some unexpected effects from making so many changes at once, so we would appreciate it if you would pay attention to X while testing.” For test notes, explain what you want tested. For live notes, explain your intent before you need to explain it in each of twenty forum threads.
: Zubon
Given a large number of trials, any random series will produce a large number of perverse-looking short streaks. If 100 people flip a coin 5 times, you should expect 6 of them to get the same result on every flip, but it will look strange to those 6 people. One-in-a-million chances happen all the time in a world of seven billion people. If millions of WoW players attack 100 times a day each, that is a lot of chances for long streaks of misses (and longer strings of hits).
More recently for me, it took two weeks to complete the Chasing Marcia achievement because one of the daily quests just did not appear for two weeks. What are the odds of that? Well, not bad. There are 5 quests, so 0.8^14=4.4% chance that any one quest will not appear for two weeks, but since there are five ways it could happen, there is a 22% chance. You should expect that to happen quite a few times each year, and if you started the dailies today, you should expect that 22% chance it will take you more than two weeks. (Maybe Blizzard does have some kind of streakbreaker in there, and maybe I just hallucinated having done the daily on a day I missed.)
I know all this and was just vaguely amused at the fishing streak. A similar thing contributed to my leaving The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ for about six months. I was trying to complete the Annuminas armor set, which involves getting the boss drop in each of three dungeons. With six fellowship members, that is a pretty clean 1/6 chance, minus the occasional member who just felt like running the dungeon but did not need that piece. In 16 tries, I won that 1/6 roll once. This should not be surprising: the expected value is to run each dungeon six times, and for everyone who wins a roll on the first time, there must be someone who just keeps running it and running it. I was not even up to 18 tries, and who knows, maybe it would have worked out perfectly and I would have won the next two. Independent probabilities, however, do not work that way: you still have a 1/6 chance, and I should expect another 12 tries to finish the set. And by that 16th trip, you get really sick of telling the new people to keep the silence-aura ghosts away from the healer.
Hence the approach of giving everyone a few badges, 1/6 the necessary token, or whatever.
: Zubon
Most MMOs make it difficult to play with your friends. Levels are a common culprit, as are character- (not account-) specific friends lists, but servers are today’s topic (and City of Heroes solved both those problems anyway). My friends play World of Warcraft on however many servers, and I can pick one on which to spend two months leveling to catch up. We have never been able to get everyone together on the same server for any game but EVE, except when we had so few people playing that we could not field a full group anyway. Whatever else you may say against the Champions model, it avoids this. There may be fifteen copies of that zone you are in, but you and your friend can meet in the same one no matter where you started.
It is a hard thing to make someone choose which 99% of the population to wall himself off from before making his first character.
Another virtue is the inherent scaling. Games have this problem across their lifecycle: how can you accommodate both early crowding and the later population shift? You do not want The Shire clogged with 500 hobbits at once, but you want new hobbits to be able to play once the horde is level 50, and then you want the level 50 experience to remain fun after the horde that sat there for nine months moves on. What about that group content?
In the early days of City of Heroes, you might have seen a dozen copies of each low-level zone as additional instances spawned. Champions Online takes the next step by eliminating the top-level server. Each zone has a lower population cap, so it is easier to have the “right” number active in it, and more instances appear as the incoming population expands.
There may not be a shared world, but you always have the right number of shared playgrounds.
: Zubon
The Steve Jackson Games Daily Illuminator turns 15 today. It is, to the best of their knowledge, the oldest blog still being updated regularly. Yes, it mostly exists to advertise their products (Zombie Dice this spring!), but the random internet items that proceed the daily product spotlight can be fun. As a RSS subscriber, I don’t even see the daily product spotlight. A personal favorite is the occasional chronicling of how we now live in the future, what with bladeless fans and people becoming cyborgs so slowly that no one much notices. Or I suppose you could just watch for DARPA RFPs for super-soldier suits and mechs (actual US military research), but it helps to have someone else spotting.
: Zubon
Conflict of interest watch: I once published a column for the Steve Jackson Games online magazine.
The production skills have almost no gameplay value. They can produce useful in-game things, and it is something to do as MMO players always need, but there is no fun in it. Recipe + ingredients + click + wait. It is convenient and dull, especially in volume. It encourages alt-tabbing, never a good sign for game design.
I find the gathering skills inappropriately engaging. The world is full of little boxes of candy, just for me! I was tempted to drop Blacksmithing, pick up Skinning or Herbalism, and gather my little heart out. At least you are out there doing something besides watching the little bar fill, and it progresses naturally as you play. Continue reading WoW Crafting