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.
.Promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don’t do it to anyone unless you’d also slash their tires. – Black Belt Bayesian
If you are willing to lie to me about something trivial and easy to verify, like a video game, why would I trust you with my credit card information?
: Zubon
Hat tip: Eliezer Yudkowsky
Mark Jacobs may not think the game is doing well, but that is a very respectable success. I hope that WoW has permanently expanded the industry to allow more games to exist with those kinds of subscriber numbers. If 100,000 becomes the mark of a “niche game,” then MMOs will have hit the big time.
: Zubon
“If you accept buggy games and shady PR, you get the games you deserve.”
I could probably replace a quarter of my posts with that. The message seems not to get through. Then again, it has not gotten through on non-game fronts for a few thousand years, so my hope is misplaced.
: Zubon
No other subscription-based MMORPG that I am aware of has ever added 4 new careers to its game as part of a regular update/addon/free expansion.
– Mark Jacobs
City of Heroes came out in 2004. They added four new archetypes to the game before Warhammer released. They also never cut them during beta.
: Zubon
Hat tip to The Common Sense Gamer for the quote.
Since yesterday’s post was inspired by Language Log, I thought I would cite them again on user interfaces.
Don’t worry about me. I’ll figure it out by trial and error. I simply offer this to you as proof number 37 (I have made mention of many such examples in the past: road sign psycholinguistics and so on) of my claim that human/machine interface design today is in a state of total freaking disaster.
He is talking about projectors, ovens, and clock radios, but the discussion is especially relevant to MMOs. We are used to having forty hotkeys along with five chat tabs and a heads-up display that looks like a flight simulator. We forget that this is potentially insane.
I could point out that designers should pay more attention to the interface, that a MMO without UI-mod ability is a broken MMO, or that developers should prepare to adapt mods into the official UI after the players find a way to compensate for designers’ failure to pay attention to the interface. Feel free to take that direction in the comments. Instead, I will just point to WoW, which has more or less followed that cycle but also has a pretty easy interface for new players. The flight simulator display is for the advanced raider who can use forty buttons without thinking about it. The starting UI is simple enough for granny to start beating up wolves and bunnies. If, you know, your grandmother thought it was all right to beat up puppies because some dwarf told her to.
: Zubon
Three people on that Language Log thread cited The Design of Everyday Things by David Norman. I have added that to my (very long) reading list.
Jick’s comment on yesterday’s post meshes well with recent discussion of fairness. Let me introduce you to the Ultimatum Game, a favorite of experimental economics. There is a pot of money; player one allocates it, as much as he likes for himself, the rest for player two; player two chooses to accept this (and they both take their money) or reject it (and both get nothing). That is it.
Simple economic rationality suggests that you take whatever is offered: free money. In practice, people will start turning down free money if it means the person making the offer gets a much larger piece of the pie, with most people bailing in the one-third to one-fifth range. In the vernacular, screw that jerk.
That would be my translation of Jick’s comment as well: screw that jerk who bid $1 over the other The Price is Right player. Just because the rules let you do something does not mean that it is fair. Of course, the English word fair is a horrible mess. English speakers mash a dozen concepts into the word and equivocate madly. Does fairness mean playing by the rules? An equal outcome? An outcome that satisfies the most people? An outcome that rewards people based on their inputs? If asked to pin down a definition, many people will pull another vague term like “equitable,” which has the same problem. Bart Wilson has been trying to work that out.
I am not criticizing Jick’s point. I do not agree with it, because I think competitors in a game environment should do anything within the rules to win, but it is a viable social norm. Are there conditions under which you should not really try to win? Let us explore a few variations on Ultimatum below the break.
On the way back from the conference, I caught the opening of The Price is Right on TV. If you have not seen the game show, the first game is “Guess how much this item is. Whoever is closest without going over advances. If everyone goes over, we do another round of guesses.” They showed a fancy table then asked the four contestants to guess. $2400, $2195, $1200… You, as a gamer, know that the proper answer for #4 is $1201 (or possibly $1). You know this without even knowing the item in question, because unless it is some fantastical table worth more than $2400, the largest ranges available are $1-$1199 and $1201-$2194, and you can get a do-over on $1-$1199. But no, he went with $1900, and the item was $1400.
If you ever wonder about the failure of strategic thinking in your pickup group, remember this man who chose a $295 range over a $994 range that included the $295 range. He had 699 options that were strictly better than the one he chose, in a competition for real money and items, and he went with $1900.
On an unrelated note, I also caught the tail-end of Rachel Ray’s program, which was right before. I never knew that there were commercials for K-Y jelly and cottage cheese. Not together.
: Zubon
Lately, I have inordinately enjoyed Warriors End at Whirled. It is a flash game that plays like bilging in Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, except that instead of water levels going down, you have warriors on the top who are blasting each other. If you have played Corpsecraft, their headline game, you know the same mechanic. There are no graphics to speak of, although that could be awesome. My team is based around Rex, who has the Distracting Pants power. Without this game, I might have gone my entire life without thinking, “My pants are insufficiently distracting.” And what kind of life would that be?
A new grind: emotionally satisfying for a while, and available in very small doses. And I am a stellar bilger, so this is right up my alley.
Also, Whirled will apparently give me candy or something if you sign up from my link. Full disclosure. I have no idea what you can do with the points and coins, but I will learn someday. Like Kongregate, another site for little games with points and trophies attached.
: Zubon
Yeah, “Warriors End,” no apostrophe. Like Rainbows End.
Any recommendations? Warnings? Sadly, there will not be a gaming conference immediately after this one. Also, I am missing City of Heroes double xp weekend, but don’t let that stop you from enjoying it.
: Zubon
Considering the number of bugs in their previous releases and patches, should we now presume that they did not want EVE to be lonely as the only MMO company with a patch that has deleted system files?
: Zubon