Author: Zubon

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Daily Quests

Quests available:

  • Workplace Outfitting
  • Afternoon Nap
  • Dinner Preparations

*click*

Workplace Outfitting
Off to work again, are ye? Not just yet yer not! The guards’ll stop ye at the gates if ye try to get by in that get-up. No, this is an infiltration job of the most dangerous sort, and you’ll need to blend with the natives, or end up skewered on a pike!
Objectives:

  1. Subquest: No Two Alike
  2. Subquest: After Nap Time
  3. Subquest: Tie Tie
  4. Subquest: If You Start Me Up

Rewards:

  • Workplace Reputation (200)
  • Effect: Basic Warmth (duration: 12 hours)

Accept — Decline

*click* Continue reading Daily Quests

Sets of Sets

The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ Volume Two: Mines of Moriaâ„¢ introduced many quests and deeds that are sets and sets of sets. What does Zubon mean by that, and why does he like it more for deeds than quests?

Take 2.5.5, in which you defend three places in Moria. You get one quest, and the goal of that quest is to complete three sub-quests. You now have four quests in your quest log, and as you complete the first three, it checks off the objectives on the frame quest.

Deeds work similarly but invisibly. When you finish all the deeds in a Moria instance, you are awarded a hidden deed and title for doing so. Hurray, you are a Curator of the Forgotten Treasury! There is a hidden deed for exploring all of Moria; you complete this by completing all the exploration deeds in Moria; you complete these by reaching all the exploration spots listed on those deeds. These are neat little bonuses, and I would like to see previous zones and instances retrofitted with them. But then, I like deeds, and getting deeds for getting deeds is meta-joy. (Was Annuminas the first of these hidden set deeds?)

Why are quests less successful? You can have as many deeds in progress as you like. Quests are more limited. Consider the quests for the six radiance instances. The Twenty-First Hall has two quests to go help people in those instances. Each of those quests is to go help several people with quests in those instances. Some of those quests are to help the person in multiple ways. The Grand Stair is the big one here: if you complete all the quests, you will receive more than half a gold piece in quest rewards because: Alice tells you to help Alice, Bob, Carl, and Dan; Alice wants you to fight fire orcs and their boss; Bob wants you to fight goblins and their bosses; Carl wants you to fight shadow orcs and their boss; Dan wants you to fight orcs and trolls, each of which is a pair of quests to fight them and their boss. All of that is one checkbox on the top-level quest to go help in the radiance instances. In a way, this is neat. In another way, good golly I need more quest space. I decided against seeing if I could cancel the top-level quests and pick them back up for insta-credit after completing the sub-quests.

But back to deeds, you get another quest slot for every 40 deeds you complete. More deed-hunting!

: Zubon

Individual Expression or Group Coherence?

I thought that limited class options helped pick-up groups in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ while making City of Heroes PUGs sometimes vulnerable to ineffective “concept” builds. Ravious commented that Guild Wars PUGs were improved by being able to see what skills other people were using, with the implication that you could educate the newbs or avoid people who look useless. (For the unfamiliar: you equip one bar of abilities in Guild Wars, and that is all you can use until you go back to town and change your bar. Many options, few available at once.) These experiences suggest to me that putting characters in small boxes lets you build things more easily.

Is this trade-off I am proposing between ease of grouping and narrowness of class roles a false dilemma? Can you have highly flexible character roles and still have the ability to assemble groups quickly? DC and Champions Online have both planned to bridge this divide by having roles that change on the fly instead of classes. That is, you build your character with “fire hammer,” “healing flames,” “fire shield,” and “blinding smoke,” and have a dial that makes you a DPS, tank, or support class. If you turn it to DPS, you deal more damage, but take a defensive penalty (alternately: set the dial to give only bonuses and not mention that the penalty is built in).

If the trade-off exists, which direction should your game take? I am a fan of individual expression, but as a game designer I would be more interested in seeing people play together frequently and smoothly. Bind people to each other, make cooperative play in your game a good thing, and let social factors help you retain players. This is why you add bottlenecks, downtime, and forced grouping: bring people together for interaction and bonding. Or maybe this is all crap, because WoW made its billions as an extremely solo-friendly game, but then the end-game is entirely raid-centric, forcing people into class roles.

Do you like being able to over-specialize? Planned supergroups in City of Heroes are awesome. Brutal Speed was a simple City of Villains idea: Corruptors with Kinetics, Brutes with AE attacks, everyone with Leadership, no one with knockback. A standard group was any 5 Brutes and any 3 Corruptors, with no further thought needed. No one needed to take Hasten or Stamina, because you always had 3 Speed Boosts available. And the little Leadership toggle bonuses stacked nicely when everyone had them. In The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢, our Casualties of War group has low DPS because we all went with tanks and support classes. Why go for that soloing build if you will always have a group available?

: Zubon

Yes, Get It Right

I keep hearing this in a LOTRO context, but it’s a general point: “It’s a no-win situation. Release now and people will complain because about bugs. Wait and fix the bugs, and people complain about a lack of updates.” Man, it’s just like your boss down at the Pizza Pit. He always wants it “done right” and “on time.” What a drag.

This is why we cannot have nice things. Too many gamers do not care or have given up hope of anything better. Zones were crashing last night, and I was listening to people in the global channel chorusing, “It’s an MMO. Get used to it.” They shout down people who want to be able to play the game they paid for.

When players complain, why do so many responses end with “or go play WoW”? Our commenters have “WoW has/had problems too!” hotkeyed. That’s right, WoW swept and vastly expanded the market by making an MMO only as buggy as a regular PC release. That’s what “polish” means at this point.

You will keep getting broken games because you are willing to pay for them. You are willing to reconfigure your system, learn the work-arounds for bugs and incoherent “working as intended,” and crawl through barbed wire to get your nugget of fun. Meanwhile, the mass-market will not put up with that crap, so they get a well-done, profitable MMO-lite, while you hide in your irrelevant niche with the broken shell of your dream game, complaining about the Big Mac-eating, Usher-listening mainstream. Because everyone ships late with bugs and missing features, so STFU and accept it.

: Zubon

srsly? You went with Usher there?

Chronicles of Spellborn Intro

Melmoth says it all. Keen echoes him. My main reaction was, “‘Go kill boars and bears.’ Are you serious?” Later this week, I will spin this comment into a post about how great the Warhammer intro is. I will otherwise quote them to review:

I had visions…that character customisation was aiming for City of Heroes levels of flexibility…. there are statistically a large number of overall outfits that can be created. Fundamentally though, there are a pool of five or six sets of matching armour available, and the same of clothing, and one can mix and match from each set to create a unique look.
…
Am I at fault for setting my expectations against the output of their hype machine? … I’ve come to realise that the amount of money these companies spend on marketing could be spent on improving their game such that it’s not an embarrassing bug ridden piece of half-realised promises and pie-in-the-sky design ideals.
…
Disappointment set in fairly early on in my experience…
…
I’ve experienced all of this through only the starter area, and people may decry my passing judgement based on such a small section of the game, but let me explain…

…the problem for me is nothing stands out and grabs me. I didn’t once feel like “I must play this game!” or “This game justifies spending money” or “I want to log in when I get home!” – ultimately I didn’t think “This is a ton of fun”. I had to think about why for a second. The answer here is that Spellborn just does not stand out. Why would I (or you) stop playing WoW, or LotRO, or Darkfall, or any other game to play Spellborn? I couldn’t come up with an answer.

If you have nothing better to do, or at worst want to risk downloaders remorse, give it a try. …

: Zubon

EASK

I have come to realize that I am an enthusiastic Explorer but often a prickly Achiever. I am most fond of exploring gameplay, rather than being visually stimulated by whatever the new zone is. Most MMOs gate the Explorer content behind Achieving, which works fine at lower levels when things go quickly, and then becomes really annoying as you proceed.

Gating new powers behind levels: fine, good way to let people get used to a few before hitting them with everything. Games average two per level to one every other level, then slow down. Eventually, you might get one every four levels, and that one is an upgraded version of an existing power. Meanwhile, leveling goes from twice a night to every few days. Instead of trying a few toy every thirty minutes to an hour, I am trying a new toy every week or two. That is when a grind can become really annoying.

Continue reading EASK

Alts as Travel Management

The epic quest chain likes to have a central contact who sends you to all corners of Middle-earth. And back. And out and back again. You go from A to B to A to C to B to A to D to A to somewhat near A to A to B to A to… I am getting used to paying large amounts of silver for slow horse rides, now that I am leveling up non-Hunters, but some places do not have stables. Your map back to A has a one-hour cooldown.

I deal with this by having alts. Log on a character, play until you run out of convenient travel options, then move to the next. If my gaming session is long enough, and it often is, I can cycle back to earlier characters to do a few more steps in the quest chain. If I am feeling really ambitious, I can map them all home before work, so they will be there with minty fresh timers when I get home.

Completely destructive of immersion, flow, grouping, and social interaction? Sure, but when the game would otherwise insert a 12-minute travel break (actual time from Rivendell to Echad Dunann on a stable horse), it is not much worse to round that up to an hour and play another character, which might be more fun than waiting on a horse. You can clear dread similarly.

: Zubon

Turbine’s Recent Technical Record

  • Release Volume Two, Book Seven, a content-light patch that breaks, among other things, pet and enemy pathing in several zones, placing some targets in permanent anti-exploit mode.
  • Add a more reliable way to get Second Age legendary items. Between the test and live servers, change the reward table so that it is less reliable.
  • Let players complete a quest 20,000 times per server to unlock a new raid. Never put it on the public test server, open it with broken lockout timers, and shut it down within twelve hours.
  • Release the Spring Festival. Shut down the horse race within twelve hours.
  • Launch a “welcome back weekend” so that more players can see these. Start a log-in queue.
  • Their web sites and other games were unexpectedly down for an extra twenty hours or so, but eh, that happens during a datacenter move.
  • Realease an April Fool’s event. Shut it down within twelve hours.

There are many good things mixed in here, like a pretty zone and a very successful Spring Festival maze. But you do not say, “Most of the links in this chain are adequately strong.”

: Zubon

Update: and now log-in issues, which render the rest moot. Good communication on that issue, though.

In Further Praise of PUGs

Another virtue of pick-up groups is that many are better than my guild groups. My kinship, while a fun bunch, is not a great late-game guild. We have horrific wipes on bosses that I beat with PUGs the day before, and it can be tiring when half the group needs an explanation for every significant fight. We have a great many level 60s these days, but I doubt we could field a team to raid The Watcher.

One advantage of joining many PUGs is that I learn different ways of approaching fights. I can learn from people who have done it before, and I get experiments with many group types. I am the bee, flitting from PUG to PUG, cross-pollinating before heading back for honey time.

I recall my first guild trip through the Sixteenth Hall. Two people had never been there. Two enjoyed it and ran it frequently. The last member and I ran it frequently with PUGs. The moment that stood out was just before the second boss. For those who have not done it, there are two identical rooms, each with a wheel to turn, each with a large group of elite enemies, each with a bunch of ground objects that spawn more enemies. The guild plan seems to have been sending someone on a suicide run to get each wheel, rezzing afterwards. I did not even ask before starting my standard PUG plan: AE root, the ones immune to root come, we fight them around the corner (away from rooted archers), finish off the rest, and avoid the ground objects when getting the wheel.

This is not to say that I have learned nothing from the guild. They are very good at Skumfil’s hard mode, granted again with a two-suicide plan to make the rest of it easier. But I wonder at times if I might be happier with a group that actually puts things on farm mode.

: Zubon