Author: Zubon

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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.

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Refuge in Audacity

Don’t get petty with me. Trying to see what you can slip past the radar is just annoying. You’re trying to see how far you can go before you get smacked down? How about this: don’t slip past the radar, rampage past it in your Bagger 288 that’s painted with flaming, hot pink skulls, where the flames are painted on and then really set on fire.

Sociopathic serial killer works as police detective? That’s good television. Supposedly humorous situations based on mis-communication and unfair treatment of some poor sod? Cringe-worthy. Spock cuts open skulls to see how super-powers work? Stellar. Annoying people in an office? Dang it, I work in an office, I don’t need to see that on TV. If you’re doing that last one, it needs to go as far as Dilbert, where you co-workers really are trying to kill you, not hatching Machiavellian plots about whose turn it is to make coffee.

Wednesday, a common reaction was looking down on the notion of Crimecraft. Many of us happily play orcs that plan kill the villagers, steal the cattle, and burn down the houses. Demonology and genocide? We call those hobbies. Petty street crime? Dang it, that’s the guy who stole my CDs!

Entertainment needs enough distance to shed some recognizability, or else you start sympathizing with the poor sod. I had to pause Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle at least ten times to bear the suffering of the petty humiliations of Harold’s life. And then I watched a horror movie straight through, noting the poor camera work on the disemboweling.

: Zubon

Consumer Expectations

Bryan Caplan writes an argument about insurer reputation that starts with bad drivers and passes very close to our subject area:

[Many dissatisfied people] have unreasonably high expectations about the kind of treatment other people owe them. The clash between their inflated expectations and reality is the cause of their bitterness.

When people scoff at the power of reputation to constrain business behavior, they’re basically making the same mistake. If you think that paying the standard market rate entitles you to top-of-the-line quality, businesses will constantly disappoint you. I call this the Law of Inflated Expectations: The main cause of cynicism about business is consumer narcissism.

50 cents a day, and that’s without the discount plans. Maybe I can argue that the world owes me something for my $50 up front. Maybe I can see that premium game someday, charging $30+ a month and having high quality for a small population. Maybe I can keep whining.

On another note, if you require 1 hour of CSR time per month, that wipes out the profits from having you as a customer.

: Zubon

Dreams Undreamt

A Casualties member mentioned Crimecraft last night. Ah, a gang-based online thing. “I’ve never dreamed of being in a gang, so not really interested.” Then I thought back through some previous games. I never dreamed of being a dwarf that set people on fire by writing on a rock, of making charcoal and growing flax, of summoning headless ice monsters that rained frosty death upon my foes, of being a buffing psychic cyborg, of…

: Zubon

Autobalance

I commented last year about the multiple LOTRO PvMP battlefronts:

One interesting outcome is that most people win most of the time. The side with more bodies usually wins, or the winning side quickly becomes more numerous as fair weather friends join and leave their respective teams. There can be multiple fronts, so 75% of the freeps might be at the lumber camp beating 25% of the creeps, with the reverse happening at the mine: both sides had a win, and most of the players on each side were part of that win.

This weekend, I had the opposite experience playing Team Fortress 2. Two times in a row, playing Gold Rush, I was auto-balanced to the losing team within the last minute. With players joining and quitting the teams, you have the opposite effect of PvMP, where the majority of the players are losing most of the time. There is a cap on how many people can join the winning team, and if you are winning, you are less likely to quit. There is never a cap on how many people can quit, so a lot of the losing team leaves, which cycles in new people who also get crushed 5 seconds out of the spawn. Why did no one mention on chat that there are two Heavy-Medic pairs at the spawn? They all quit, and a quarter of your team just joined the map. A quarter of your team is loading in or out while the winning team makes more progress. If people are not joining for the losing team fast enough, they will be taken from the newer players on the winning team. Hit tab, and you will see one or two high-scoring players on the losing team (who have toughed it out), and no one else there above 50; on the winning team, if there is anyone below 50, he has scrolled off the scoreboard. There is no way to overcome this, because half your team will be dead or loading in as you join the losing team, and continuously from there on, so you cannot make any progress. A previous night on this server, I saw the blue team fail to ever move the cart. After a few minutes, no one survived as long as five seconds outside the base, and most never made it to the doors.

My new plan is always to check the scoreboard before joining a team. If one team is way ahead on points, there is no point in joining. Even if you can join the winning team, you will be auto-balanced away. You could try to stay long enough to reduce your chances of auto-balance, but you’ll probably get kicked for a reserved slot.

: Zubon

Why You Should Not Listen to Me About Champions Online

I have a shelf of Champions books from my youth. In my mind, the 3rd 4th edition Big Blue Book is one of the foundational PnP RPG books, a strong attempt at a system that strove for mechanical perfection while leaving the flavor entirely flexible. The standard example is the power Energy Blast. It covers all energy attacks, and whether that is fire, ice, or gamma beams is just a special effect. Give it an area of effect if you want a fireball or cone of cold. Take the cone, make it fire damage, and remove the range to make a flamethrower. Add “no normal defense” to make it poison gas or a monomolecular needle. Add “variable special effects” if you want the one power to be able to shoot fire, electricity, darkness, whatever.

If you ever used the Hero Games system, you know that it rewarded planning and math, two areas where I do well. It also was often painful to use in practice, with a lot of dice and math flying around for every turn of combat. As a superhero game, Champions made it even harder to track by going 3D, with flying, burrowing, and phasing characters that make your miniatures difficult to use. Long before there were MMOs, I thought that this was exactly the kind of problem that computers could solve, tracking locations and doing all the complicated math while letting the players play.

You can imagine how I reacted when Cryptic took the standard example, briefly explained the Champions PnP system, then said they were not going to use that. You probably saw similar reactions from Tolkien fans when The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ announced each of its fireball-chucking classes. “You took the game I have been waiting most of my life to play and did what?!” Maybe the marketing plan looked better with fifty different energy blasts, rather than one with ten damage types times five shapes.

In terms of whether it is a good game, never trust the views of the people who actually care about the setting. I am surprised to see people who play World of Warcraft without having played any of the Warcraft RTS games, but I also trust their view of WoW qua game not to be clouded with baggage about how Illidan was retconned. When a Champions review seems to take Foxbat personally, or objects that this is not the “real” Doctor Destroyer, stop reading there.

: Zubon

Unless they are mentioning that there are fake Doctor Destroyers, like how Dr. Doom has his Doombots. That’s okay.

Morrowind Singularity

I am reading Vernor Vinge’s Marooned in Realtime, the well-known book about people who missed The Singularity. Last night, a character explained how an intelligence explosion works. You find ways to improve intelligence; you use that enhanced intelligence to improve intelligence further; repeat as necessary. At some point, you figure out the fundamental principles of the universe and build your own using common household items.

Anarchy Online and Asheron’s Call players have their own recursive self-improvement. Cast your level 5 spells to buff your stats, which lets you wear better equipment, which lets you cast level 6 spells, which lets you wear better equipment… That process caps due to game design choices like diminishing returns and spell durations, as opposed to the intelligence explosion, which is self-accelerating.

Only this morning did I learn that Morrowind includes intelligence explosion as a mechanic. You can beat the game in less than fifteen minutes, starting with the step “Create and drink Fortify Intelligence in batches of 5.” It is like having a skill that grants you bonus experience every time you earn experience, where you improve that skill by earning experience.

And now I have the compulsion to re-read Godel, Escher, Bach.

: Zubon

More Pricing Innovations

Champions Online is following The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ in offering a lifetime subscription, along with a discounted long-term subscription. As with Wizard 101, I favor trying more pricing options. The monthly subscriptions appeal to me as someone who binges madly on everything, but the long-term plans help me play more casually, without “must get my money’s worth” building atop “must consume new pleasure.” But that is not the innovation.

Champions Online is offering this option for one month, while the NDA is still up. And planning to have a microtransactions shop. Seriously? $200, sight unseen, and you already know it is going to change after release, and there will be other plans to generate revenue from lifetime subscribers (see again: The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢). That is some chutzpah.

: Zubon

The Controller

I haven’t mentioned Melmoth enough, which is a shame, because Melmoth is pretty awesome. Also, I still need to read Melmoth the Wanderer, but that’s a different issue. Anyway…

“We could be heroes” is his meditation on crowd control, something City of Heroes does with the usual crazy awesomeness that comes from embracing AE gameplay. He shares my usual lament of tank-and-spank MMO heroism, usually based around fighting one thing at a time. Because the hero’s journey goes from one pig to one slightly larger pig.

In City of Heroes, if you can still see your character under the pile of mobs that you’re fighting ‘you’re undertaking the task in an incorrect fashion’, as I believe the cool kids say down on the MMO street. … crowd control in PvE is a viable and interesting game-play alternative to the soft “Yo mamma!” control that the average MMO tank possesses. The controller could be the enabler to huge battles in other MMOs, without having to unbalance the player characters such that they must always face an entire battalion of enemies at a time in order to feel any challenge, and where any lone mobs would therefore simply implode the moment a hero arrived in their zone. Controlling a battle can be tremendously rewarding as a player, watching the ebb and flow of the various enemy groups and locking down those that might otherwise overwhelm your party, judging when to use AoE powers that will inevitably draw massive amounts of ire from the mobs when they eventually break free, and when to simply neutralise the more potent individuals of a wave of mobs – the healers for example … and unlike healing it would be very hard to reduce it down to a bunch of bars that you simply play whack-a-mez on.

City of Heroes crowd control was toned down years ago, on the theory that fighting a bunch of statues is no fun, but it is still head and shoulders above what any other game will let you do. And admit it, you want a confuse spell for the enemy healer/debuffer, to make him work for your team until your sudden but inevitable betrayal.

: Zubon

Divergence

At IMGDC 2.0, we met the folks from Stainglass Llama, a small studio making a game called Divergence. You may know my standing policy of not paying attention to anything more than 6 months from release, which has kept me from thinking about them. They are still working on it, and more than six months from release, but you might be interested.

If nothing else, this is something good to read for those of you hoping to live the dream of making your own MMO. We’ll show them all, right? Middleware is better these days, but it is still hard. If you look through their news history (the old site is more functional at present), you can see milestones like having a world they can walk around, actually being able to connect to that world, and getting basic chat. All those things that you consider basic and necessary? It takes a bit of work to get them going yourself. Filling in the content is even more work — even when it is not hard, there is a lot of it. For an easy extrapolation on that “develop content” problem, try making something in the City of Heroes Mission Architect. How long does it take to make one good story arc, including all the troubleshooting, text editing, making unique enemies, etc.? Okay, now multiply that by 1000 for the full game, and that is just the quests, and you had all the tech and art supplied for you.

They’re starting to fill all that in, so if you have ever wanted to get in on the ground floor as alpha starts up, here is a chance. They would love your attention and discussion. They would also love your money, if you have been hoping to fund an MMO. (On another front, our old buddy Nicodemus is wondering about funding a start-up via Twitter connections; I suppose it spoils that question for me to mention it here, but if you have the few hundred k for augmented reality development, I’m sure Robert Rice would love to talk to you.) I’m not sure at what point such the proper phrase goes from “dream” to “investment,” but then I am a professional skeptic and evaluator by profession, so don’t let me rain on your parade.

It’s Friday. Dream a little.

: Zubon

CRPG

In current gaming parlance, does “RPG” mean anything except “character advancement”? I see lots of games “incorporating RPG elements,” which means that you level up. If they’re really thinking outside the box, you skill up, or you unlock achievements for character advancement. You get more actual role-playing in Second Life or on LiveJournal, and neither of those have levels.

: Zubon