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.

.

Sleep Dep

I am not getting enough sleep lately. My apologies if I am snippy.

Work continues to demand that I show up if I want money, and then there is the rest of having a house and being a grown-up that looked much easier when I was very small. I could deal with just those, but I also enjoy our assorted entertainments, and I have been getting to bed late trying to keep up with them.

I hit 80 in WoW, we have our weekly Casualties of War LotRO night, Borderlands just shipped, I keep hearing good things about Torchlight, I have been trying Left 4 Dead again (Boomer!), Team Fortress 2 is often fun, I have a half-dozen Facebook games that I poke upon occasion, and there are at least two worthwhile new flash games a week. I have Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep next to me, which I should renew at the library, and John Dies at the End by David Wong just got national publication. I have not watched any of Dollhouse this season yet, I am seasons behind on Heroes and Lost (is it worth watching?), a friend has been pushing me to watch Dr. Who for over a year, my brother has been promoting Big Bang Theory for longer, and I have a huge list of shows, movies, and books that sounded interesting on TV Tropes. My RSS feeds send me 200 blog posts a day, I might have that many Facebook updates, however much e-mail, and all the other things I see and do online. Oh, and I blog.

Work itself can be wearying, and I value having so many competing sources of entertainment. Trying to keep up with just some of them, however, keeps me awake long into the night, still typing away as your mom asks if I am coming to bed anytime soon.

: Zubon

Great Moments in Licensing

Turbine has the right to use anything from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Turbine does not have the rights to Tolkien’s other works, even Tolkien’s other works set in Middle-earth.

The nine Ringwraiths appear in The Lord of the Rings. The Witch-king of Angmar is the one you may know by name, he being the leader of the Nazgul (and either you know the fight or there is no point spoiling it). Khamul, his second in command, is named in the Unfinished Tales. He will appear as the Big Bad in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Siege of Mirkwoodâ„¢. Turbine has the rights to the character and his appearance but not his name. He will appear as “Lieutenant of Dol Guldur.”

: Zubon

Update: title edited at Brian’s suggestion. It is a licensing issue, not directly copyright.

Hunting With Nesingwary

Glad ye could make it to Northrend, lad! I knew ye cut yer teeth on raptors and wee elephants in the last hunts, but now yer in the real game. We’re settin’ ye against the fiercest cats in these lands, but only to prepare ye for the greatest of them, a beast so fierce we only know it exists because of the people who ne’er came back! And how about a rhinoceros so singular that ye’ll need to invoke the spirits of the dead to find it? Of course, we could not let ye go without a bit of crocodile wrestling, although the crocodiles’ kneecaps will be higher than yer head. Does pulling the teeth from live, 30-foot long cobras sound exciting? And ye’ll get to kill some zebra-striped giraffes.

“Excuse me, what was that last one?”

Longneck grazers. Four-legged things with brown bodies, long necks, gazelle horns, and zebra-striped legs. Kill some.

“…”

Look, we’re hungry out here. Unless you brought some tacos from Dalaran, giraffe steak it is.

: Zubon

Do You Click on Mystery Threads?

My post titles are usually subject headings or literary references. You usually know what you are getting from the title and category, and if you do not care about Champions Online or crafting, you can skip those posts easily enough. I am fond of meta-data that helps us improve the noise:signal ratio.

I frequently see forum posts with titles like:

  • Just one question…
  • Devs, what are you thinking?!
  • ridle me this
  • A humble request

These are just bottles with “drink me” on the tag. There is no indication of what might be inside, and there is a very good chance that it is poison. But there are also some great gems and good discussions. (I just leapt off that metaphor.)

I guess this is a question of how you deal with sources with a middling signal:noise ratio. I like sources near 1:0 or 0:1, because I can track the former and ignore the latter. I am not sure where my cutoff is for willingness to dig through trash in search of gems.

: Zubon

Wow, that last sentence applies pretty broadly, doesn’t it?

Power of 10 Achievements

One way to run achievements is to encourage breadth. Have achievements for doing everything once or a few times. Complete this dungeon, kill ten rats, cook every type of pie. I advocate this for Explorers, of which I am one. It encourages players to see all of your content, therefore extending the time until they get to the end and complain that there is nothing to do, while rewarding long-duration playthroughs. It can increase retention that way while serving as a checklist for players looking for something to do. It can also be expensive, because you need an entirely new thing every time you add achievements.

One way to run achievements is to encourage grinding. Have achievements for doing things repeatedly. Complete this dungeon 10 times, kill ten thousand rats, cook one hundred pies. I advocate this for Achievers, which I am secondarily. If you are going to track and display how many rats Bob has killed, as I think you should, you can then tack awards onto it. This is easy to develop, because you just add a name for each power of 10 for each enemy type. You get that Explorer award for the first kill of each enemy type, then add another tier for 10, 100, 1000, …, 100,000,000. You do not even need names for all of them at the start, because you will have lots of time between the time he becomes Bob the Super-Epic Ratslayer for 100,000,000 rats and Bob the [prefix] Ratslayer for 1,000,000,000 rats. Then add meta-achievements, for having killed 100 of everything. This means that there is always something more to do, more to Achieve, and it can increase retention with a never-ending checklist. Not everyone will pursue it, but if people will pay you to run on an achievement treadmill, set it up and take their credit card information.

The latter idea came to me first, and I find myself turning away from it. First, I would not want to do it myself. If I played a game for 10 years, it might be nice to know that I had killed 2,405,353 goblins, but then again I might see that (or my /played) and think of what else I could be doing with my life, and I certainly do not need the logarythmically extending bars ever before me. Also, I think it would encourage aberrant gameplay. If there is some reward, any reward, for killing ten million rats, someone will do it. You may not like what they do to optimize rat-killing time. Without the impetus to exploit them, certain holes and bugs could just sit there until you get that far down your priority list, instead of having the forums burning up with the implications. You can also burn out players that way, ones who start to see through the grind and wonder why they are killing that next million rats.

I suppose that is a financial decision. Which is the larger pool of subscriber dollars: retention of obsessives or loss of burnouts? Since I personally would not want to be racing that treadmill, I would fall on the “loss” side. But you will always make more money on the mass market betting against my preferences, so let the eternal achievements go forth for greater profits.

: Zubon

The Tyranny of Habit

Looking at Borderlands, I was immediately drawn to the class that gets a turret. Ooh, and they can heal! I was secondarily drawn to the sniper/pet class. It took me a few minutes to realize that I had just picked exactly the same thing that I play in every game: support, ranged DPS, pets and tower defense.

Freakishly, playing World of Warcraft was something new for me. My Paladin melees. (It is my wife’s approach: “I have a sword. I hit things.”) I am still not one to tank, but I could.

: Zubon

What’s Wrong With Borderlands?

The quick description seems to be “a FPS with Diablo-style loot and questing in the Weird West.” Every comment I have seen has been positive, along the lines of “it is pure, concentrated, liquid awesome, with a side order of flaming orgasm.” The most negative I have heard is “moar!” Heartless has been blogging it since he got his new URL, and I am particularly fond of this video. Steam will give me 10% off if I pre-order and buy-3-get-1-free so I can bring in all my friends for the coop mode.

Having played with Heartless and seen him go through a couple of other games, I expect that I will know what is wrong with Borderlands in about a month. Few people effectively express that anguished rage after initial enthusiasm that comes from a dream not quite fulfilled. It really is an art, and my version is just pissy analytic verbosity. Like that phrase right there. Anyway, maybe this is what we have all been waiting for, or maybe we will find that we did not miss Diablo-style loot after all. I’m thinking of picking it up, maybe getting the 4-pack so I can gift some friends, and I want to know if you know any landmines.

And if you haven’t heard of it, hey, crazy fun.

: Zubon

Internet Lesson: Pedobear is a Bad Children’s Theater Icon

The story mirror link does not get more amusing than the initial explanation that it happened, unless you enjoy watching normal humans trying to understand 4chan. In fairness to the theater, if you polled your workplace on who knows what Pedobear is, you would get a lot of blank stares.

Do not poll your workplace on Pedobear.

: Zubon