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.
.Did you know that Douglas Shuler plays City of Heroes? Being nerds, you might know him best as an artist from Magic: the Gathering. Serra Angel was one of his. He recently posted a link to a poster he made. He made 3D models of all 41 members of his supergroup, and posed them on the Atlas Park steps. Remind me to recruit a professional artist to our supergroup. The best we have is someone who teaches pottery.
: Zubon
The latest in our continuing series on “Hey, isn’t great how fast technology is advancing?”: “10 Incredible Old Computer Ads.” I apologize for that site’s being somewhat ad-laden.
I clearly remember a friend’s joy at finding an old modem advertising BLAZING 9600 speed. Or recall that scene in Hackers, where they are having quasi-sexual fantasies about a 22800?
: Zubon
Tobold has his own mini city. It’s like Sim City, “Only there is no gameplay. The only thing you can do is to post links to your city…” Great, so we can send him thousands of useless little people by clicking on the link once a day and getting all our friends to do the same. By the look of it, we can flood him with criminals if no one clicks the link to add security. You know, if you are into that.
: Zubon
Sweet and sour chicken, here we go. I stir fry it with no breading (I do not like breading), but it is still recognizably the same thing. Mix it with some peppers, onions, and sauce, and we are golden. I don’t have sweet and sour sauce right now, but this pad thai sauce will work in a pinch.
The chicken in the fridge is a bit old. How long ago did I defrost that? I would hate to throw a whole pound of chicken away. I probably should have cooked it sooner, but I had a busy weekend. I forgot to defrost something new before heading to work today, so we will just go with this. Add more sauce and spices, it will cover the taste.
Excellent, all done. The wife thinks it tastes a bit off, but she has always been picky. I’ll eat anything. See, this tastes fine. Okay, that bite was foul, I’ll admit. Maybe I got lucky with the first few pieces of chicken. The awful thing is, it was a big mouthful, and I have no idea which bit of chicken was bad. Now it’s all half-disgusting. Do I spit it out or quickly chew and swallow?
I’ll just start taking smaller bites. If I hit a slightly rancid bit, I can spit that out and try the next one. And these peppers, we just got them from the farmer’s market, these are fresh. Granted, I overcooked them to sautéed instead of stir-fried, so they are flaccid, but they’re still excellent peppers. I can enjoy this food, at least 90% of it is good. And I have a lot of leftovers, so I can make several meals of this.
: Zubon
A frequent problem we have is folks writing for the wrong medium. We have great stories that make lousy games. We have people who want to write the great American novel and are trying to insert it as NPC text. And so on with lousy movies made from books, lousy novelizations of great or lousy movies, etc. If you are writing for a game, it must contribute to the game, and if that stifles your artistic dreams, you should probably be writing for another medium.
I was reminded of this by the D&D website. They have a video answer of the day. To save you the time of watching it, the answer is “yes, but we’re not going into specifics yet.” For ten words of content, you want text, not a video of someone talking. On a broader note, I have gotten sick of logging into the various parts of that site to find content that might have been useful text a few months back, so please stop using all the fancy web toys someone sold you and just give us information.
Okay, I feel better.
: Zubon
“The ability to inflict that huge amount of actual, real-life damage on someone is amazingly satisfying” says [chief executive of the GoonFleet Corporation]. “The way that you win in EVE is you basically make life so miserable for someone else that they actually quit the game and don’t come back.”
With the latest brouhaha and folderol about how video games are polluting our nation’s bodily fluids, I am reminded that this is an election year. This is a link to the Video Game Voters Network. Each party has at least one primary candidate running against free expression. One ran ads against violent video games in her re-election campaign, while another is against free speech more generally. The leading anti-video game advocate, Senator Lieberman, is sitting out this election cycle so far, apart from endorsing Senator McCain.
People still burn books, you know.
This is not an open thread on the candidates, but if you would like to discuss their views on video games, free speech, or expression generally, feel free. Please be polite and on-topic, as if everyone (the candidates included) were in the room, rather than the standard internet political discussion. (We usually avoid politics, and I do not want to use the Mod Stick on the comments.)
: Zubon
There is a bunch of stuff between Issues 11 and 12 in City of Heroes. A big batch just hit the test server. Notables include displaying real numbers, rather that “moderate damage” and “slow recharge”; faster leveling, particularly in the 13 to 20 and 36 to 50 ranges; big tweaks to MoG and Rage; the end of in-game e-mail spam (but we will still get many /tells); Assassin Strike boosts so that Stalkers are now desirable for archvillains; and fixes to many bugs, including the one that makes my Acid Mortar shoot me in the face.
As others have noted, some of the recent changes to the game have been counteracting old design decisions, sometimes in a clunky way. The game had no loot, and now it has several versions of salvage, all separate from recipes. The game had almost no numbers, and now a system is being made to display them.
If this excites you, my set of free trial/invite-a-friend-back codes are almost all refreshed, so I can send you some free time.
: Zubon
Updated to strike out things that died in testing; maybe Issue 12.
Kill Ten Rats authors have previously come out for selling RMT fluff, and have featured games that use that funding model. What games will sell you more character slots? Guild Wars does. Sword of the New World effectively does so, selling slots for in-game currency that you can buy with meatspace dollars.
For the player, this offers convenience and potential savings. All your characters are associated with one account, so you have one monthly fee, you need not re-buy the expansions, and any special account upgrades (RMT fluff, veteran rewards, etc.) apply to your new characters. Keep all your characters on the same global name in City of Heroes.
For the developer, this has some advantages over trying to sell second accounts. You have fewer of the problems that arise from people using multiple characters at once, many who will not but another account will pay a one-time upgrade fee (maybe multiple times), and you get that money now. Policing for discipline is easier when the player is not a hydra. The only ongoing cost is storing more characters per account (perhaps not insubstantial).
Let’s say $5 for one additional slot per server, and you must buy at least four at a time to prevent transaction costs from eating the money. Alternately, you could have several subscription options, some of which offer more character slots or other premium services, but you would need to decide what to do if a guy with a 16-character account wants to cut back to a non-premium account.
: Zubon
This is one of my favorite insights.
ROUNDERS: This group rounds things off. A problem that’s a two on a scale of one to ten gets rounded to zero. If a rounder has five problems that are all about a two on a scale of one to ten, he’ll tell you he has no problems.
ACCUMULATORS: Accumulators add up all the little problems until they equal one big problem. If an accumulator has five problems that are each a two on a scale of one to ten, that feels like having one problem that’s a ten.
Rounders are generally happy, because they perceive their lives to be mostly problem-free. Accumulators are often miserable because “nothing is going right.â€
If you are a rounder, a game can have a thousand bugs without there being any real problem, because no single one is large enough to be a deal-breaker. On the other hand, six rounds up to a ten, so any fairly big thing could end it all.
If you are an accumulator, the problems keep stacking up. A typo here, a pathing error there, and eventually a 3% too long load time is the final straw. You quit with a forum post listing a dozen broken things, and you get really angry when the rounders dismiss them one at a time instead of seeing the big picture.
So are you the idiot who puts up with anything until one slightly more buggy than usual patch crosses your threshold into the apocalypse? Or are you the idiot who cannot work around minor bugs while the game finds its legs? And don’t you hate that other kind idiot who just cannot see what is wrong here?
: Zubon
