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.
.Kendricke, friend of of Kill Ten Rats, guild leader, blogger, and Clockwork Gamer, is now an Associate Producer at Activision. Despite our most popular post of the year, we congratulate him. He is taking a break from the porn star life to see how the other side of the equation shapes up.
Let us know how that works out, especially since that’s the title I’d be aiming for if I ever try to enter the industry.
: Zubon
Being a rare class is a loot boon in the Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ raiding environment. Tell me if you are seeing something similar/different in your game/server.
First, understand that (at least on our server) raid loot is awarded by a standard need/greed roll. I know of guilds that use DKP and such for their guild raids, but the game is very supportive of casual raiding, so I have never been on a raid that used anything other than need/greed (with master looter enabled). This does give an under-equipped character greater rewards for raiding, but no one seems to care much. Even if there were DKP, how many would you need to spend in competition with your guild’s other level 60 Warden?
We noticed that we had a dozen level 60s on last night, so we called in impromptu turtle raid. Our team make-up was rather good without much fiddling, despite what looks like a ridiculous class balance: we had 6 Hunters, 2 Minstrels, 2 Burglars, 1 Guardian, and 1 Champion. For the non-LOTRO players, the turtle raid calls for tank rotation due to a stacking, incurable DoT, and the easiest way to do that is with a Burglar’s Enrage ability, which makes the enemy attack at random. That makes everyone a mini-tank, spreads the damage, and makes it a race between your DPS versus growing damage-over-time. The ideal team would probably be 10 Rune-keepers, 1 Burglar (for Enrage), and 1 Loremaster (for fire damage debuffs).
As one of the 6 Hunters (before dropping to let a Captain join), I realized that my odds of getting loot were not great: 1/9 that any item is for Hunters, then 1/6 that I get it. Hunters are the most popular class, so every group of six for every raid will have at least one Hunter. Minstrels have a similar problem, caused by their necessity rather than their popularity. Meanwhile, if you came to our raid with one of the other seven classes, only a Burglar would have needed to roll to take home his/her class’s First Age weapon. I have not checked how the raid turned out, but that was a greed roll if the drop was for 1/3 of the classes.
A similar factor explains why Hunter items are always ridiculously expensive on the Auction House. For every person who needs a good Warden javelin, three need a good Hunter bow.
: Zubon
I keep citing Rainbows End as a vision of the near-future, and here is a big step towards it: an implementation of wearable computers using currently available technology. A bit of miniaturization, work on those contact lens monitors instead of projecting it, and we’re there. The video is very worth watching. (Yes, it is a tech demo, so I assume it took many takes and some careful positioning of how things were projected, but those are technical details that can be worked on, given that she refers to “ten years from now” rather than “buy my product now.”)
: Zubon
Thanks to Steven Jackson Games for the link.
Players occasionally say absurd things like, “It would take five minutes to fix this little bug.” Which, if it were true, would probably have already been done. My new favorite example for either “wow, this must be way harder than it looks” or “wow, they really don’t care” is the color-change bug for City of Heroes global chat.
Global chat, by the way, is one of those great features that every game should have, along with global friends. CoH is packed with features every game should have, especially given that CoH has had most of those features for at least four years, if not since launch five years ago. Global chat lets you set a cross-server channel, so you can talk on any of your characters, on any server, across instances, time, space, whatever.
Way back eleven months ago, I listed this as one of my favorite new bugs introduced. They let players set chat channel colors, only instead of working, it randomized chat channel colors every time you zoned. Unless you are on a long mission, you zone constantly in City of Heroes: into your base, across the city, in and out of buildings, in and out of missions.
City of Heroes is once again inviting players back to see the new stuff, while this bug still exists. Every player who uses global channels, which is everyone in the slightest contact with the community, will see this bug moments after they log in, and it will recur and make itself known every time they zone. If they zone quickly with an active chat channel, the same channel will appear in a rainbow of colors as it picks a new one with each zoning.
This must be the meanest bug ever seen. I cannot imagine a company willingly leaving something that visible, even if that minor, in the game for a year.
: Zubon
I have had a bit more time with my Rune-keeper since my initial impressions. The class solos brilliantly, with great damage and few problems with being a cloth caster. It teams very well, burning through enemies on the easy stuff and healing during the hard stuff. I still feel the need to apologize for throwing around lightning and ice storms in Tolkien.
Your MMO must convince me that it is worth playing in less time than it takes me to download the next one. If your tutorial/introduction does not include heavy doses of awesome, soon, you will not be getting my credit card information. If you cannot bother to make the game look good in the one bit that you know every single player will see, I must assume that the rest of the game is worse.
Warhammer does this very well. Tutorial? More or less none; proceed straight to the war. You start on a battlefield. I started as a Greenskin, which is probably why I bought the game. Take a few steps forward from the log-in spot, and you can see dwarves attacking. The Dwarf area is much the same, with squigs and goblins running around the cave next door and giant cannons pointed at the enemy. NPCs are blasting each other in case you did not get the idea. The elf pairing has the gentlest, and therefore worst, introduction. Your starting spot feels safe, and your first enemies are tiny fairies. Even there, you have attacking forces 10 seconds away, and the good guys get to shoot down harpies with a ballista. Win.
The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ does this pretty well. The opening is pretty tame, but it immediately tosses in the things you want from Lord of the Rings. If you are a hobbit, you immediately see a Black Rider. Dwarves start next to Gandalf in a scene referenced in The Hobbit, and they proceed to a troll fight. Elves get a troll too, and humans and elves both start with the world burning down around them. It is not a great, action-packed intro, but it gives you the setting while you get your bearings.
City of Heroes is a mixed bag. Outbreak is very weak, notably the “run in a straight line” bits. Breakout is better, with a more interesting map and a mass NPC slugfest. The real awesomeness of City of Heroes, however, is the costume designer. Even before you put your character in the world, you pick from a mess of powers, see the cool toys that lie in wait, and then probably spend a ridiculous amount of time playing with paper dolls. That kind of thing makes the slow start of actual gameplay tolerable.
Many other games do it badly. I don’t even bother to mention most that I try. They were not worth the time to download, even if I downloaded while I slept. That thread has a bit of hate for Age of Conan, but they had the presence of mind to make the 1-20 game one of the most celebrated bits of content around.
: Zubon
Anyone want to comment on WoW’s opening? I tried a few way back in beta. The Undead was the most impressive. Dwarves were kind of meh.
A favorite little moment in City of Heroes was when my friend Adam maxed out his Sniper Shot. This was back before Enhancement Diversification, back when Hamidon-Origin Enhancements gave +50%. One of them was +50% to range and +50% to damage. Slot six of those in a power: quadruple range and damage. Put them all in a snipe, which already has a lot of range and damage.
The range of the attack was beyond the game’s draw distance. He had to assist off a spotter to test how far it went. We were testing on grays, which was good because it was also well beyond the distance at which you would be rewarded for the kill.
: Zubon
This is, of course, less impressive than the Canadian sniper who holds the record for a kill at over 1.5 miles.
Re-reading Asimov’s “The Last Question” reminded me of that day’s vision of computers. As computers became more powerful, they would become larger, with millions of banks of [transistors/vacuum tubes/integrated circuits]. Asimov’s stories refer to city- and planet-sized supercomputers, usually with limited access but sometimes with many terminals so that anyone can ask The Computer a question. Asimov’s computers exhibit increasing returns to scale, so computing becomes centralized with large computers running everything, overcoming the Hayekian knowledge problem through massive computation. This seemed as obvious a future as flying cars. Then PCs came, and we have since learned a great deal more about how size affects computation speed.
We now live in a networked world. We have massive numbers of small computers that cooperate. Your computer is pretty good, but its greater value comes from being able to connect to this server and a million others. Your life features distributed computing, torrents, Wikipedia, and all the Here Comes Everybody Web 2.0 fun and games. Your gas pump has a credit card reader and may have a news feed. Your stoplight monitors traffic, changes timing, and talks to its own network. Your cell phone has more computing power than the entire world did when your parents were born.
Now this future is obvious. Rainbows End charts the near-term implications brilliantly: computers light and thin enough to be sewn into clothing, contact lens monitors, enhanced reality, and ubiquitous wireless internet tying everything together. Everyone and everything is networked at all times, and many of us carry our own little self-selected worlds with us. Smaller computers, faster access, more personalization.
I wonder what future will be obvious sixty years from now. Biological computing, with living cells in place of circuits? Direct neural interfaces with re-programmable brains? Uploads and emulations? Nanotech is an extension of our current line of thought. Perhaps an AI singleton will start converting mass to computronium, and we will arrive at Asimov’s planet-sized computer by a different angle.
: Zubon
I made a simple story for my first Mission Architect story arc (#91818), “Not the Destined One.” I would be glad to hear any feedback you might have. It is a villainous arc, but you can run it as a hero. Not terribly difficult, light humor.
: Zubon
Now that I have re-subscribed to City of Heroes, I can give out codes for free time. If you want a trial code or one for “welcome back” (must have been unsubscribed for 90 days) leave a comment. I can see the hidden e-mail field. You get some free time, and I do too if you give them money. See that huge ulterior motive? And yes, this comes right after the “why should I care about $15?” post. Hey, free trumps irony. It keeps me poking around Mission Architect.
: Zubon