Author: Zubon

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Good Change: Event Introduction

Book 8 is live. When you log in, the Summer Festival will have started. But how do you know what and where everything is, especially if you are not a forum-reader? When you log in, you will have mail waiting. You get “Invitation to the Summer Festival.” It starts the quest “Invitation to the Summer Festival.” This tells you what city to visit to start, and the quest guide will take you straight to the spot. The quest awards the Summer Festival Guide, the fishing intro letter (in case you forgot how to fish), and a free festival token.

This is a good way to introduce people to the event. *clap*

: Zubon

(Known Issues with the new patch.)

Zubon, Behind the Curve

I have been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2 this week. This leaves me with little to talk about, unless we want to delve into specifics of maps or what classes appeal to our playstyles. Also, welcome to 2007. That’s not as bad as I thought, since I did not realize it was new when I got it as a part of the Orange Box. I have been thinking of going through the classic games that I missed, then talking about them a decade later. That might feel a bit like saying, “Have you heard about this ‘Pac-Man’? It’s a really neat, maze-based game in the classic arcade style!” But I should play through KOTOR and Planescape: Torment sometime. Yeah, I know. I’ve never played any of the Ultima games either, and only two Final Fantasies (and not even VII). So, while I am on MMO hiatus, I may be talking about some truly random stuff.

: Zubon

Drift 1: Loss of Context

The game will introduce a mechanic to you early on, something perhaps unusual but reasonable in context. Over time, the game will expand from its simpler beginnings. By then, you will be so used to the mechanic that you will rarely pause to notice that it makes absolutely no sense in its new or expanded context.

Example: The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ uses “morale” instead of health. You don’t die, you just get too disheartened to continue, and you must rally. Sure, goblin spears to the ribs hurt, but you can keep fighting so long as your morale does not flag. A Minstrel’s songs raise your spirits, and you carry on. Then you start meeting trolls, the sort that would crush your skull and limbs with their giant clubs and rocks. You could conceivably rally through a few broken ribs. Then you get to poisoned water that instantly drains all your “morale.” Insta-death from morale drain? Then you get to lava flows, where you burn to death and your armor melts. Life is just a song away!

Example: pills in Left 4 Dead. Reasonable for ignoring scattered cuts and bruises, and then someone starts carving a hole in your chest.

I wanted to use Katamari Damacy as an example, when you start rolling up clouds as if they were huge sheets of plywood and fire that still burns, but Katamari Damacy is sufficiently insane to defy logic anyway. Instead, tell us your favorite example from your current game. Telling riddles to wolves? Backstabbing buildings? Tripping gelatinous cubes?

: Zubon

Time to Cap

Commenter Alucian states:

unlike other MMOs, Blizzard actually scales xp needed to level and gained from quests with the current number of levels to max. They ensure it takes the same amount of time to get from 1-endgame whatever the max level may be.

This is an interesting notion to me, one I have not considered because I have been through only one level cap increase (CoX does not count) in my ten MMO years (old old old). Every time you increase the level cap, you can change the rate of experience accumulation so that time to cap is unchanged.

Would you wait a few months after the new expansion to do so? On one hand, you don’t want existing players to feel like their “work” has been “cheapened.” On the other hand, the expansion will not be terribly helpful in recruiting new players if they see months between them and that shiny new expansion. There is also the scaling o, that. Many games seem to want the last ten levels to take as long as all the levels before them, or the expansion to take as long as the old “late levels.” You would need to halve the old late levels’ leveling time to make the new time-to-cap fit, with the new late levels taking as long as the old late levels did.

If you keep re-scaling experience, and your level cap keeps rising, you eventually will have players leveling by walking near the newbie zones. Alternately, your time to level through later expansions would be increasingly short, although that might not be an entirely bad thing. If you do not keep re-scaling experience, you start seeing a dizzying distance from level 1 to the cap, particularly if you obey that principle of how long the last 10 levels should take. You could keep that time constant, so 1-40 takes 120 hours, 40-50 takes 120 hours, 50-60 takes 120 hours, etc. I think it would quickly become insane with the “50-60 takes 240 hours, 60-70 takes 480 hours…” interpretation.

: Zubon

Of Alliances and Meaningful PvP

While I’m mostly between MMOs, I am trying Evony [Update], from one of the many ads you may have seen. It resembles Travian in many ways, including the faster pace once fighting starts. I was not sure if I wanted that, what with the whole “job” thing versus a server potentially filled with people who have nothing better to do on summer vacation. Thus came a simple plan: I joined the second-meanest alliance on a newly formed server. Attacking me now risks the wrath of about 400 other people who have nothing better to do than crush every red flag in the area.

This weekend showed an interesting example of that. Looking in around lunch time, there was a discussion of some fellow who had attacked an alliance member and been rude in mailed discussions. He had a strong defensive position with two large castles next to each other, each with thousands of troops and traps, along some friends nearby. “Bring it on” must have seemed like a reasonable thing for him to say, especially when some of us (like me) were over an hour’s travel away from the fight. And then he was attacked something like 100 times that afternoon, until there was nothing but a flat bit of ground.

This is a problem that has been noted for PvP games: once a customer has only a flat bit of ground, it is hard to get more money from him unless he has such a need for vengeance that he vows to RMT his way to victory. When winning means driving someone from the game, that cannot be good for the company, worse if a large alliance gives up and quits en masse.

On the other side, I played Team Fortress on some random servers this weekend. I had a good time, discovering that I really liked the Heavy, which is good since my two favorite classes do not have their achievement/item packs yet. Here, when someone dies, he comes back 11 seconds later with no penalties at all. After a pair of snipers trade deaths three or four times in a minute, I begin to wonder about the point of it all.

: Zubon

On the Blogroll: Psychochild

We have a great many sites on our blogroll. Why not take a little time to talk about some of them? Besides, it’s Friday, and you’re either looking to avoid work or need something to read over the weekend. Let’s trawl through our friends’ archives and see what’s interesting.

This week: Psychochild’s Blog, written by Brian Green. He is best known for running Meridian 59, but he has done other things.

Continue reading On the Blogroll: Psychochild

Flash Variations on a Theme: Tower Defense

Consider as a case study three variations on the same type of game:

Each has that familiar gameplay that you know I love: building defenses that blow up armies of mindlessly marching monsters. Each has taken it in a rather different direction. (Each is far longer than the last batch of flash games.)

Continue reading Flash Variations on a Theme: Tower Defense

The Horrors of Free Chat

On the free DDO announcement post, a commenter asks, “what exactly does ‘limited chat’ even mean?” Another commenter responds, “Unlimited chat for free in an MMO = GOLDSPAMGOLDSPAMGOLDSPAMGOLDSPAM”

What worries me more is the chat itself, and this is not DDO-specific. I have been toying around with a FTP RMT (free to play, real money transaction) game, and the newbie chat… omg lol u girl? This must be what you WoW players call “Barrens chat” or some such. Every stereotype of online and juvenile idiocy: there it is.

Look, kid, it doesn’t matter if anyone else in the channel is a girl. If someone claims to be, he could be lying. If she really is, she is not going to e-mail pictures of her girl parts to random people in-game. Or maybe she will, but in that case, she probably has already them posted somewhere, so go Google them up.

Look, kid, we get that you like Runescape. Yes, great, best game ever, much better than this one. Shut up. There are lots of good evolutionary psychology reasons why humans shout about how great the tribe is, even when it is completely inappropriate. Convince your simian lower brain functions that this is one of those inappropriate time.

At least the constant guild recruiting spam blocks out most of the pain, and the Chuck Norris jokes cover a bit of the rest.

: Zubon