Author: Zubon

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It’s All We Have

What gets rewarded gets done. You know this because your game has incentivized you to do insane things that you would never have done on your own, like camp the same spawn for days or wake up at 4am to play an online game at just the right moment. (Also, job, you get money for being there.)

Your decision as a consumer is essentially binary: buy or do not. (There is no try.) If you are willing to give them your money right now, your message is that this product is worth what they are asking for it right now. MMO players are famous for complaining endlessly about games and then sending the $15 anyway. Because hey, maybe they will take the money as a sign that you have hope rather than that you approve of where it is right now, right? Mmhmm. Do you have a lot of products in your life that you buy in the hopes that they will use your money to get better later?

Maybe they will get the proper interpretation, that you are unsatisfied but consider it the best option available. All companies have competitors, and a new competitor or product might steal your business if they do not improve. Mmhmm. Or are you one of the two dominant MMO player types: sticks to a game for years through thick and thin, or jumps from new shiny to new shiny in search of The Game? There is some margin at which they need to fight to keep some customers, but that is just triage, and almost all the vocal players are in the “no help needed” and “no help possible” categories.

Your only threat is your ability to take your money and leave. Yes yes, and take your guild with you, we know how important and influential you are. The key thing is that you must carry out your threats. Talk is cheap, and years of indignant forum posts have devalued it further. Threatening to cancel is not threatening. It is a low-cost signal, something anyone can do with no effort, and without actually canceling. You will think of reasons to give it another month or two. That’s how human psychology works: you will rationalize why you should keep doing what you are doing. It works the other way too: once you cancel, you will find ever more things that they must do to regain your patronage.

This is not complex game theory. You have one tool.

: Zubon

Bonus points if someone can find me that quote along the lines of “shut up and send me your $15 little man. I need to make payments on my Ferrari.” My Google-fu is failing me on an approximate quote search, and I cannot remember the site that archived fun bits like that. to commenter Afterhour, and having the exact quote led me to the wiki I wanted.

Failure to Explain

While it’s against our policy to share exact formulas (in order to keep guilds from gaming the system), we do want to be sure and clarify these mechanics to the best of our ability for those guilds who are concerned about how guild leveling actually works.

The best of their ability is very poor. “It is a sound system involving a lot of math” does not tell us anything. “The system takes into account the characters’ level, and is balanced in a way to allow guilds of all sizes to level up at comparable (but not necessarily equal) rates.” This statement also translates to “we’re not going to tell you anything useful.” The best I can infer from the post is that completely inactive characters do not count against you, but mules and slightly active alts do. So Casualties of WAR was completely right about severely limiting alts, until we get a conflicting statement down the road.

The guild leveling system was obviously not part of any open testing. No one is allowed to know how it works, so we cannot tell if it is working properly. That is one way to keep the bug count down.

Conveniently, it does not matter in the long run. Every guild that sticks with the game will hit max level (or near enough) in several months. And what are the odds that anyone will quit because it took too long to get a guild emblem on their cloaks? Everyone will stick the guild leveling system in the “ignore” box soon and not think about it until someone looks at the code in two years.

: Zubon

Different Review Philosophies

Our friends at GamersInfo.net say this:

No game shall be compared to another game unless it is a sequel. All games should be reviewed on their OWN merits or you run the risk of the player not understanding the comparison.

You may notice that I work on more or less the opposite philosophy. I see everything in a web, with connections to all the other places from which this game got its ideas. I might throw in some books and movies too. I am also quite happy to label a game as “[existing game] +/- 5%.” Because if you are not going to innovate, I am not going to pretend you started with a blank page. If you already know the industry standards, saying how this game differs slightly is how I will express myself most clearly. If you do not know the industry standards, you are probably not reading a MMO blog.

But we love our friends at GamersInfo.net and wish them well on their approach to things. We are just not that kind of site.

: Zubon

Leveling Curve

Seriously Casual addresses the problem. First, there is not enough PvE to go around starting in the 20-ish range. I am fighting +3s and +4s regularly. Guildmates speak of completing all the PvE in all three areas without out-leveling the tier. For me, this has been a limited problem since I like leveling via scenarios, but if you are in long Destruction queues or a low-population server that doesn’t work. Even now, I am looking at a lot of scenarios before I am past the bolster point of tier 3. I do not feel the need to reach level 40 quickly, but I do not want to spend my RvR time feeding points to higher-level opponents. When players receive condolences in guild chat for reaching a new tier, that is a bad thing.

There are lots of games offering slow PvE grinds. That is not why we signed up for Warhammer. My buddy Cameron had the goods earlier, but then the ladies tell me he has always had the goods.

: Zubon

This? Changes little unless the numbers on that are large. Really, I can repeat one quest two to four times? That makes it much less grindy! That’s unfair: maybe it will help tier 2, but then I hit the wall in tier 3. Maybe I was already eating the tier 3 content in tier 2, so I did not notice. Maybe the later phases of “experience enhancements” will add up to more. I would gladly accept a retroactive boost to those quest rewards, if that is part of the plan. (Turbine can do that, nudge nudge.)

Update: oops, that is CHAPTERS 10-22, not LEVELS. Okay, that could make more of a difference. Again depending on the numbers, and again I could use that retroactively because I already did a chunk of that.

Update 2: having logged in, I can’t tell if it was retroactive. I forget how full that bar was. I scheduled this post before the Herald update, and I’m not sure how much is still relevant. Read Cameron anyway. I’m locking this down. Credit to Mythic for reacting to things quickly.

Holy crap, that was a big number. >3000 for a scenario completion. I must poke around and see what’s about.

Grind, Baked Right In

Farm status is a horror of gamerdom.

What is the point of grinding anything? Does Naxx get more fun the fifteenth time or something? It only makes sense as a business model that makes people play a long time to get to the end, so you keep them looped in for monthly fees, but then you are also selecting for an audience that has lots of time, and therefore will be logged in more. Maybe the cost of 40 hour/week players is not much worse than 10 hour/week players; there must be money in it.

I do not want to do anything more than three times. Once is an introduction, twice is learning, three times is demonstrating mastery. Past that, I am just repeating it because someone thought it would be funny to put the prize at the end of a treadmill. I am done with that.

Continue reading Grind, Baked Right In

A Fable

My gamer buddy Andrew was late to my wedding reception. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought I had more time.” His wife looked irritated, but we just had to laugh.

Andrew had perhaps the worst time management skills in the world, a bad trait for a gamer, when there is always another shiny a few minutes further along. Or maybe he just always underestimated how long things would take. Whatever it was, his line was invariably, “I’m sorry, I thought I had more time.” We would occasionally hear it as he ducked out near the end of an instance, as he headed off to some event or late to bed. Mostly his wife Sharron heard it as he finished his playing with us. Many a night, as he was shutting down TeamSpeak, we completed it for him in chorus as his connection closed part-way though. Did you get the dishes done while I was out? “I’m sorry, I thought I had –” Honey, we were supposed to leave twenty minutes ago. “I’m sorry, I thought –”

Andrew was 24 when the crash happened. Sharron raced to the hospital when she got the call, but Andrew never made it. 24. I wonder what he was planning to do; we never discussed career plans much. I wonder how many more hours he would have spent with her instead of us if he had known. We never really meant it when we said those would be his last words. He didn’t even get the chance to say them. I’m sorry, Andrew, we thought you had more time.

: Zubon

Negative Campaigning

Ardwulf claims to be for Order, but can we trust a man who lives a double life? Where was he when the forces of Chaos stormed Stonetroll Keep? Where was he when our Dwarf allies were routed at the Mourkain Temple? He was at Mount Bloodhorn, playing at being a Greenskin. When the call to war comes, will it be a Bright Wizard that answers, or a Black Orc?

Ardwulf is a friend to orcs. Is he a friend to the Emperor?

Paid for by Sigmarites for a Purer Ostland

: Zubon

Z-Axis

The game is shaky on it, particularly with respect to floors and ceilings. If you use an area-effect attack in a cave, everything on tunnels above and below you might come running for you. That is if you are lucky: they also might start hitting you through the ceiling. This is a fun way to discover when a building has a basement or a hill has a cave: attack enemies on the surface and see if invisible monsters start eating your ankles.

Did I mention that I have an AE-specialized character? Good times.

: Zubon

Define “New”

800, really? 800 new monsters, you say? How many of those are the same guy with a slightly different name and color pallete, plus or minus a few hit points or abilities? Heck, how many of those are new models, rather than declaring this green-ish orc the “orc mauler”? Would 40 be a fair guess? It feels optimistic; the 158 types of undead must have at least 10 models amongst them, but I don’t know that the 321 types of orcs have 20.

This from the game that advertised how many characters had been made.

: Zubon