Author: Zubon

.

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.

.

The Power of Arithmetic

I participated in the Brutal Speed kickoff this weekend. The idea is to make one of a small set of characters that will all work well together, so that team-formation is as easy as “3-5 from pool A, 3-5 from pool B, go.” Pool A is Brutes with area effect damage. Pool B is Corruptors with Kinetics.

It works very nicely, and I took a new character to level 18. People who spent more time playing probably hit 30; I saw 28s as I logged off Sunday. We are expecting some to hit the level cap in about two weeks of hardcore play. This is just normal play, not getting powerleveled by your friends or twinking with outside resources.

One detail is that everyone must take Assault and Tactics, two buff auras from the Leadership pool. Assault increases damage, stacking to +97.5% in the standard team of five Brutes and three Corruptors. Tactics is a to-hit buff, stacking to +65% out of the box and +101.3% once fully slotted. Everyone will do double damage and never miss.

And sweet mother of pearl, it is all starting to come together. As we hit 20, the Corruptors all get Speed Boost, so everyone will be able to attack constantly with no worries about endurance. Because every team will have multiple Speed Boosters, people can skip the Fitness pool and instead take three powers that add More Smash. This could be fun.

: Zubon

Completely Unrealistic Estimates

I have referred to “changes that would just take 5 minutes to make” before. There must indeed be cases where the fix really is that simple: I remember one case where the problem was a misplaced decimal point. Most of the time, however, the players saying that have no idea what they are talking about. And the developers want to hit them. If the fix really were that simple, it probably would have been done by now, unless the suggestion is also some stupid balance- or game-breaking idea. No, fixing the AI is not just a matter of telling it not to jump off the cliff. That is a complex behavior to teach it, and teaching cliff-avoidance might break half a dozen other things.

Do feel free to continue browbeating developers for having hard-to-modify spaghetti code. Documentation may seem optional when you need to release in six weeks, but six months after release you may not still have the guy who remembers what half the variables mean. The more flexibility you can build in at the start, the better your reaction time will be later.

: Zubon

Recent Issues

City of Heroes/Villains is having a reactivation weekend, so you can come back and visit if you are interested in seeing the new stuff. Now seems like a good time to pause and reflect on Issue 9 and 10. Issue 9, “Breakthrough,” introduced inventions, the auction house, and some new end-game content. Issue 10, “Invasion,” gave us the Rikti War Zone, late- and end-game content.

This is going to be fairly long, so I am just going to insert the break now.

Continue reading Recent Issues

City of Heroes Plans for Friendship (Maybe)

A Random Battle from last week fought over why MMOs use servers to keep you from playing with your friends. I have had a couple dozen friends play City of Heroes over time, but being spread across servers was always an issue that kept us from meeting up, joining together, and keeping them from quitting. There have been previous notes that chat and auction houses go across servers in City of Heroes.

When testing server transfers, Cryptic mentioned that they are looking at a potentially server-less game, in which you can team with anyone regardless of server. I imagine this could be done either as putting everyone on one big server or allowing teams to enter instanced missions from the doors on their respective servers. The follow-up clarified that this is a “maybe, someday” idea, not a “next issue, we promise!” idea. If they do it, not in 2007.

That would be really cool. It feels a little like slipping toward Guild Wars or Diablo as a model (big joint chat room leads to instances), but if you can never have an impact on the game world anyway, why not share that game world instead of making little copies of it? Of course, if you all shared one world, you could let players influence it without worrying about maintaining story and development across divergent shards…

: Zubon

Someone Else’s Survey

Going completely off-topic, a professor of my acquaintence is conducting some survey research. I thought we might be a different audience than he normally reaches, so I offered to post a link. Hence, link: SURVEY. Completing the survey enters you in a small drawing. It does not take long. To avoid biasing your answers, please do not read the comments on this post until you have taken the survey.

Thank you. And now back to our gaming blog.

: Zubon