Author: Zubon

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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.

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Recurring Apocalypse

The City of Heroes/Villains Halloween event is on. As usual, previous years’ content returns (with changes: go door-to-door rather than camping one, and Spirits are not spawning as often as intended — sorry badge hunters). This year’s new thing is the Zombie Apocalypse, patterned after the Rikti Invasion. Sadly, the two zone events cannot happen at once, even with the LGTF, but that would be awesome, especially if they fought each other.

After Halloween, zombies will return as an occasional event, again like the Rikti (although presumably with no non-event trigger like the LGTF, although again: awesome). This leads me to again wonder: why would you live in Paragon City? Even after you get used to walking past werewolves, rock monsters, and alien invaders on your way to the corner store, the apocalypse is a recurring event. Welcome to Sunnydale?

: Zubon

The Ettenmoors

I can’t really go back. To a great extent, Warhammer’s open world RvR is everything the Ettenmoors wanted to be and is not. It is not greatly difficult to mentally transpose Order and freeps, Destruction and creeps, and see how (shock shock) PvP works out better in a game built for it. Compare the creep Defiler with the Greenskin Shaman: even the names are similar, but the Shaman is a much more fun, viable class. Would you rather play a Reaver or a Marauder? I had more examples here, but I am already losing the people who have not played both games.

One way that The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ Volume One: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ wins is if you think of creeps as “playing the monsters,” rather than being their own thing. If you just want players being a more realistic AI, where the real market is the freep classes, monsters work brilliantly. They even replicate the PvE mechanics: they have high hit points (and can trait for “ridiculously high”), few abilities, few appearance differences, large numbers, and little resistance to crowd control. They respawn quickly and tend to trickle in at a constant rate, although occasionally you get a huge train. You can easy pull a few, because people will rush out and be easy kills, although you risk pulling the entire zerg if you do that a few times. Healing still draws aggro, although the de-taunt abilities do not work in PvP. Players can capture and defend keeps, but if people wander off, the monsters quickly return things to the “all red” default state. And just like the tutorial, beginning creeps are easy fodder, weaker than all the real players.

You can debate whether that is the intended “monster play” implementation. The NDA for The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ Volume Two: Mines of Moriaâ„¢ fell this week, so maybe the PvP changes there are significant. It will take a while for the effects to shake out what with new levels, new gear, across-the-board defenses nerf, etc. How dead with the Moors be for that first month after the expansion releases? (Note to Turbine: the 5-10 page Dev Diaries are really annoying. I don’t want to load a new page every two paragraphs. You don’t have ad revenue, so why are you doing that? I never finished the Runekeeper diary.)

: Zubon

New Chronicles of Spellborn Site

The Chronicles of Spellborn has a new site live that is actually good. It may not be the best of all things, but it has what I want: gameplay information at the top. The game has an odd take on hotkey bars: you get one bar at a time that rotates with each attack. What especially interests me is that they have learned from City of Heroes:

Dress to Impress — What it really means.

  1. Right at character creation, you can choose from a large variety of clothing and armour, i.e. there is no “newbie clothing”. In other words, “you can look cool right from the start”
  2. Pick a ranged and a melee weapon from a vast assortment. Your attacks are based on Skills (like “Slash”). Such Skills can be executed with any melee weapon, be it a long-sword, double axe or dagger. That means, you can freely pick any weapon that looks cool on your avatar. When a Skill is executed, the avatar will automatically equip the designated weapon. E.g. when you use “shoot” the avatar will switch to his range weapon. With the weapon choice, you also determine your visual fighting style (one-handed, one-handed-with-shield, two-hander).
  3. You can wear the weapons and armours in any situation you want, because you can upgrade and customise them. You do not need to switch to uglier equipment because it is “better”. It means that even the short dagger from character creation can become your personal “epic” weapon if you upgrade it with powerful sigils.

: Zubon

Celebration System

Let’s hit the wayback machine. I don’t just want a ding, I want a lot more. I want an entire celebration system. No more of this “little graphic and audio effect” nonsense. Give me fireworks that shoot 100 meters into the sky along with Ode to Joy, as if this were Peggle. Send a message to my group, the zone, and my guild. Keep a permanent journal on my character that commemorates the moment with a time stamp, what put me over the edge, and a note about how awesome I am. Then have the nearest NPC send me a letter in the mail reminding me of how awesome I am, for the next time I hit a mailbox. And think of some more ways that the game can tell me just how great it is that I leveled. If I hit the level cap, have a statue that looks like me (at least when seen from my client). Ooh, better: have two lines of them along the path to the main castle (or whatever), with the number of statues set to the number of characters you can have on a server. If you cap all your characters, they all see lines of YOU YOU YOU OH SO AWESOME as you ride into the castle.

Also, give me a menu option so I can toggle all that crap off, at least other people’s meaningless ding spam. I mean really, this is all about me, not them.

: Zubon

That statue idea isn’t half bad, really.

Exit Survey

I was reminded recently about exit surveys. When you cancel a subscription, some game companies will ask you why, what was missing, etc. This makes sense to me, although it needs to be in the format “Your account has been canceled. Would you please tell us why you are going?” rather than making it seem like the exit survey is a requirement of the process (or worse, actually making it required).

I was surprised that Warhammer had no such survey, but then…

City of Heroes has a survey that was good but has become particularly inapt over time. There is a section asking if various things would help lure you back. About half the list has been implemented, but the question set remains the same. Nothing says “your feedback is important” quite like a survey that is more than a year out of date.

: Zubon

Are you worried that the upcoming Marvel game will distract Cryptic’s attention from City of Heroes? Yes / No / Undecided (Not an actual question.)

The Weekend in Warhammer

Is that magnet ability everywhere in tier 4? The Magus and Engineer can get a magnet at level 29, if they put all their mastery points towards it, so you see a bit in tier 3. The magnet, for those who have not seen it, pulls every enemy in 65 feet (“medium range”) to the caster and snares them for 4 seconds. The caster can also hit his AE root immediately, making the snare redundant. 0 casting time with a 20-second cooldown. Have teammates cast AE spells (or location-based AE DoTs before you cast it): 5-10 kills in about 5 seconds. This is awesome if it is on your team. If it is not your team, and the enemy team has two level 30 Magi with the ability… It works through keep walls in open RvR. The only defense is to stay at long range or have high Willpower and hope for a resist.

My Engineer is ~27.5 right now. I get an AE knockback ability at 28, from mastery points, which will only take ~3 hours. I have not had any interesting new abilities except from my mastery tree since level 20, and that one was at 22, so in one sense I am looking forward to that. In another sense, I gave up grinding, so it is a matter of how long it will take me to get around to that. If I am enjoying scenarios, rather than being magnet bait, I could do it in a night. I can get that Electromagnet ability at 29, another 6-10 hours, if I give up my Grenadier tree.

Spam: none.

Mail: I wrote this post while getting items from 4 letters on an alt. According to the State of Game, the mail system was designed to work well as long as very few people used it.

: Zubon

Massive Traffic

One complaint about Warhammer has more comments than anything else I have written in months. This must be what it feels like to blog about WoW: people care about the popular games, while I can say anything I want about the lower tiers of games and get three comments.

To make this perfectly general (and have some fun Monday morning excitement), I hereby hate your game. Whatever you are playing, I hate it. Come, rage against me or agree and talk about how much your devs suck. They’re intentionally trying to ruin the game! Because context also sucks, please make up whatever you like about me and use it as an element of your comment.

No, I know what really drives our traffic: Asheron’s Call 2. This will shock some of you, but this post on Asheron’s Call 2 is the most popular thing on the site, rivaling the front page. When it hits 100 comments, I may bake it a cake or something. An AC2 reference in a Warhammer post got more comments than the content of the post itself. This is now the first post in two years in the Asheron’s Call 2 category, and I expect to reap the benefits. Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!

: Zubon

Our biggest traffic spikes were driven by sites like Reddit or StumbledUpon, so we added the plug-in you might have noticed.