Author: Zubon

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What Gets Measured Gets Done

if you display each user’s post count under their username, then people are going to start posting a lot. If you implement a karma score, then people will try and do things that maximize karma. Not only [is] exposing information about valued work important, not exposing information can also be an important design strategy.
– Xianhang Zhang

If players have achievements they can see, many will go out of their way to get them, and a subset has gotta catch them all. If you let other players see what achievements they have finished, you will see more achievement-seeking. If you only (or more easily) show how many achievements people have completed, they will tend to get the easy ones to drive up that count. If you add varying points for each achievement, you will see min-maxing based on the difficulty-reward of achievements, with forum posts on how achievement x is too easy/difficult for its reward.

In The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢, you cannot see how many deeds someone has finished, only their equipped traits. You should expect to see people polishing the virtues they equip and ignoring the ones they do not, because both function and style reinforce that. You cannot see someone’s crafting ranks, but when they added auto-generated forum signatures, crafting ranks were listed on there. I don’t suppose that anyone has the data, but I would expect to see a bit more crafting done after that point, particularly for people more active on the forums (and using the character signatures).

We will also expect some counter-culture blowback: people who do no crafting or avoid achievements specifically so that they have 0s. They just need some way to signal “I am a conscientious objector” rather than “I am a scrub.”

: Zubon

Bertrand Russell on Miracle Patches

Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would not argue, ‘The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress the balance’; You would say, ‘Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment’

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be pleasantly surprised by the next update that promises to solve all the problems, but you must be surprised. Can you flip a fair coin and get heads 10 times in a row? Sure, that is only a 1-in-1024 chance, it must happen all the time in a world with many coin flips. But if someone is taking your money based on that coin, after 10 flips, you should be looking for a two-headed coin.

“They have learned their lesson” is rarely a safe assumption. If someone did a lousy job last time, you must raise your probability that he will do a lousy job next time. Otherwise, you are taking bad work as evidence that good work must be coming. Do you take good work as evidence that bad work must be coming? If you take both good and bad work as reasons to believe that good things are coming, you are shaky on concepts like “evidence” and “reason.”

To end on a concrete example, before turning it back to Mr. Russell, Age of Conan had what was by all accounts a miracle patch at the end of beta, and perhaps several post-launch. At it still had that quality we have come to expect from Funcom.

I wish to propose for the reader’s favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

: Zubon

Warhammer 40K MMO Announced

There you go. I would avoid caring about it for a few years, but some of you have been hoping for it since Warhammer Online was announced. Perhaps that is how they justify “one of the most eagerly anticipated MMOs on the horizon” [citation needed].

I am going to assume it is vapor and forget about it until they reach open beta, but feel free to talk amongst yourselves.

: Zubon

Demigod

Demigod is similar to Defense of the Ancients All Stars (DotA), but feels more like Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War than Warcraft 3. It has that pacing, with the back-and-forth around flags.

If you don’t know DotA, it is a custom map for Warcraft 3 that constitutes a new game and is starting to spawn a new sub-genre. You control one hero (of 80+) who levels up and buys items in classic CRPG fashion. Your goal is to destroy the enemy base, which is guarded by towers along the three entry paths. Waves of troops spawn at the end of each path at each base, crashing at the intersection. You support your troops, destroy enemy troops, and fight the enemy heroes doing the same, until one of you destroys the other’s base. It is a great game, and Warcraft 3 is worth buying just to play it.

Demigod is a lot of fun, and I’m not even playing it to its full potential. I have been playing alone with computer bots, learning how the heroes work. It is possible that it will all turn to ashes once I play real humans, who exploit imbalances instead of relying on an “as intended” AI, but I have been enjoying my time. I expect it to be even better on the LAN.

Continue reading Demigod

Make Them All Giant Monsters

Yesterday’s comments prompted a weird proposal: remove enemy levels entirely.

For those of you who do not know City of Heroes’ giant monster code, they treat all characters as even-level. You should have the same chance to hit (and debuff effect, armor, etc.) as everyone else, and you receive level-appropriate damage; I think damage does not scale perfectly, because higher-level characters seem to do a lot more even after taking into account higher level enhancements, and healing is still level-appropriate so level 1s do jack for level 50s.

What happens if you apply something like this to every single enemy in the game? You can still have levels, when you get new skills and improvements to them, but they are equally effective against every enemy in the game (modulo resistances). You can still have higher-con enemies, but they will be orange to everyone.

Continue reading Make Them All Giant Monsters

When Bigger is Better

One function of levels is to spread and pace content, and to guide you through it. If you have an epic tale spread across 1000 quests, you can make a game with 50 levels and have each award 5% of a level. The earlier parts will have simpler gameplay, the middle ones can transition to using skills more strategically, and hopefully you avoid making the ending “difficult” by pumping up the numbers.

Some players in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ have been complaining about leveling too quickly. If you stack rested experience with recent bonuses and the new leveling curve, you move through some levels very quickly. If you want a quest to be challenging, you need to plan on hitting it soon, because you will outlevel it within the week, at which point it is green and gray content. Mowing through grays can get boring.

City of Heroes, however, lets you keep almost all the content challenging no matter what level you are. Content is instanced, and levels scale. If you missed a story arc, hit Ouroboros and flash back to it; set your level lower with Ouroboros to make non-instance content challenging for your (new) level. You can exemplar down to play with friends, and task forces do that automatically. In the other direction, you can sidekick up, and Mission Architect can be rigged to auto-sidekick everyone. There is very little you can do at level 5 that you cannot do at level 50, and almost none of it is interesting.

Farming, powerleveling? Unlike many games, it will not hurt your City of Heroes character or make you miss content. You can always go back and do it, without its being trivialized. You can skip the entire game, but that just means you have the entire game as a menu before you, rather than whatever 10% is available at your level. Higher levels mean more content options, not just different ones, and you do not lose the old options.

Once again, I wish more games would learn the lessons that City of Heroes has been teaching for five years.

: Zubon

While I’m on the Subject of Niches

I have a year of A Tale in the Desert time under my belt. I play a variety of games that a major studio would not bother to spit on. I will not speak ill of someone else’s niche, except to mention if I tried it and it bored or annoyed the heck out of me. Which is to say, if you are like me, this is not your niche.

Now if you pretend that your niche is The One Game, and people only avoid it because they have personality problems you have diagnosed… I still probably will not bother to speak ill of it, because you need some seriously powerful delusions to rise to “worth mentioning” on this here series of tubes. I do not even mention a lot of the games I try, because it is not worth it to write a few sentences about them. Too trivial for a blogger to bother with: ouch.

: Zubon