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.
.In the Plants vs. Zombies games, you use walnuts in place of walls (pun intended), with variations like tall-nuts and infi-nuts. You will see other vegetables like butter-flinging corn (kernelpults).
This leads to odd descriptions of games. “I was flinging so much butter, they never even touched my nuts.”
: Zubon
How do you prevent, mitigate, balance, and/or resolve population imbalances in games with persistent team-based PvP?
Continue reading Friday Game Design Open Forum: Solve Population Imbalances
Ever have one of those days where you will not commit to watching a full movie, but you end up watching five television episodes? My gaming has been like that lately. If it takes longer than a half-hour, I’m probably not motivated to commit to that, even if I might still sit down and play things for a couple of hours.
Casual games have been helpful for that. You have a break point every few minutes if you want to decide you are done, even if you keep playing “one more round” for an hour. Pixelo? Great. Match-3 games? Stellar. It battles against my intentionality in that I did not sit down with the need to play 20 rounds of match-3, but once I’m in, I’m rolling and having a good time.
Which is the goal.
: Zubon
I attended the fifth Interitus anomaly this weekend. On the overall score, it was a dominating win for the Enlightened, largely on the basis of the special rule added for this one: every link from several cities to one particular portal in Texas was worth 20 points in the overall score. Before the event, teammates described that alternately as “Calvinball” and “a fair chance for the Enlightened to come back,” the latter of which made less sense to me since either side could go for it. There were 102 documented links (and more submitted late) for the Enlightened and 0 for the Resistance, making it a second golden snitch worth even more than the first one. I have no evidence if this was again running up the score on an empty field except “102-0”?
The nature of that extreme swing was somewhat cloaked because the points were awarded to the two primary sites, so it looked more like two big wins for the Enlightened. Removing both those points and the Resistance points for the global score, the Enlightened carried Santiago and squeaked a victory in Cincinnati, with the Resistance carrying every secondary site by at least 2:1 except for the one the Enlightened won 27:1.
I was on the ground in Cincinnati. Continue reading Interitus
League of Legends is a game I tend to play when I am not interested in any current MMOs. I appreciate the self-contained nature of each round, versus the ridiculous accumulation over time. I usually quit for several months after the toxicity of the playerbase gets to me, but I find that less of an issue in ARAM. Instead, I find myself quitting because the servers are lousy. I must have had three games in a row where it was a 5v5 game, but I cannot recall that off-hand. I just had two 4v5s in a row, one of which was a 4v4 for the start of the game until a 9th player connected. I know I have several “leaver” marks on my record because the game crashes, I was disconnected, or whatever error causes the game to think that you installed a new firewall between games because that is a reasonable assumption rather than the game’s having connection issues yet again.
I used to make jokes about how many people blamed deaths on lag, but I’ve certainly had those times when I lost half my health while the server decided what I was doing. I used to get annoyed at players who quit or never showed up and wasted everyone’s time, but given the number of times I have been unable to connect to a game, I cannot honestly blame the player. I cannot blame their computer or connection either, because mine will work perfectly for two games then be unable to connect to a third.
This is no easy network engineering problem. You want servers that are reasonably reliable and close enough to your players to reduce latency, while also needed to be close to players who may be anywhere on the globe, a problem only worsened when you form a team with your friend from another continent. A good algorithm for which server to use for a game must be about as hard as for matching up players. But still, it is one of those problems your players reasonably expect you to have addressed when your business is online gaming. And having a 95% solution is not good enough because losing 1 of 10 players every other game is the whole problem.
: Zubon
xkcd explains how a fake entry in Wikipedia gets repeated elsewhere then cited as support for the fake entry. There is, you might guess, a Wikipedia page on this phenomenon, although it does not cite xkcd. It does, however, cite an article just published on the subject. This article links and cites the Wikipedia page on the phenomenon.
I really want that to be a prank at a higher level of recursion.
I would also like to note that “circular reference” references circular reporting, which references circular reference. Disappointingly, self-reference does not reference itself.
: Zubon
I am planning on attending an Ingress Interitus anomaly (gathering/event) this weekend, but I am no longer sure why. It is kind of like playing out the games of a “best of seven” series when one team has already won four. You can still play for the battle, but the war has already been won.
I don’t know if it was true in previous event series, but the event details include the note, “Research suggests the the [sic] outcome of the Interitus Anomalies will be dependent on total Values accrued by the Factions across the entire Interitus series of Anomalies.” One of the cities in the previous anomaly, Kansas City, was so lopsided that the blue team won by 1500 points. Outside Kansas City, the score for the entire anomaly was about 1500 for each side. That metaphor about running up points on an empty field? At least in “best of seven” that would count as just one game.
Funny thing is, Kansas City was an outlier but only as a matter of degree. Most of the anomaly events seem to be blowouts for one team or the other, with 5:1 scores not uncommon. If the game is not intentionally designed for this to happen, balance went astray a long time ago and has not been seen often since.
: Zubon
Today has been “Be A Tourist In Your Own Town” day. The passport includes admittance to the local zoo. The local zoo has about a dozen Ingress portals. While you might not pay the normal zoo fee just to capture some imaginary portals (although it looks like some local players have annual passes), for part of a package that costs $1, you might go.
The local Ingress communications channel has been filled with players capturing zoo portals, linking them up, re-taking them from the other team, and generally making an imaginary warzone of the place. The only thing the normal zoo visitors would notice is that a few people are staring at their phones instead of the animals (more than usual) and may be very particular about where they are standing.
: Zubon
Try visiting something like the Ingress intel map and looking at Lake Buena Vista, FL (Disneyworld): theme parks all over Orlando and the surrounding area, with every ride, attraction, and statue marked. Some people are having a very different experience in the Magic Kingdom.
Wildstar gold spam comments outnumber WoW gold spam comments at least 2:1.
: Zubon
The meatspace risks of online gaming are minimal. It is so rare as to be newsworthy when an online gaming confrontation leads to physical violence. The few incidents I recall were all in east Asia, so I estimate my own risk even lower.
In Ingress, face-to-face encounters with the opposing team are common, although few I would describe as “confrontations.” (Is it a bad sign that it is already “few” in less than two months?) Interfacing through our phones, the character of interactions is somewhere between online gaming and what you might reasonably expect from face-to-face encounters, modified by differing norms in assorted virtual and meatspace communities, particularly as people travel and those interact.
Online, you get a very low number when you multiply the odds that someone would want to do you harm times the odds that they could find you times the odds they would find it worthwhile to travel, risk prosecution, risk harm to themselves, etc. Unless you are in the same gaming cafe, your aggressor faces greater safety risks in traveling than you would from even the most blatant trolling.
If you are actively playing Ingress, your location can be pinpointed within 100 meters, along with a timestamp and a predictable direction of travel based on recent activity. The players may not be marked on the map, but you don’t need to be a genius to follow a line or approximate the center of a circle. And if you are blowing up portals, there is a very good chance someone within reasonable driving distance set them up. And as I have mentioned, some people take the game very seriously, have quick reaction times, and and will bring friends and/or cars. While the vast majority of people are decent and/or scared of repercussions (I am not aware of any Ingress-related violence), your odds on “can find you” and “reasonably close” are vastly higher in an augmented reality game than online.
Recently, any time I have been out playing (attacking, linking, etc.) rather than just hacking as I go for a walk, someone has driven up. Yesterday, I took a low-level player out to gain some levels, and the counterattack SUV was on-scene before we had walked 100 meters. That put her personal risk calculation too high (versus the value of capturing imaginary portals), and she decided to do something else with her day. And given the unhappy reaction from the man who immediately knew that cheating was going on when the lower-level account conveniently disappeared as he arrived, I must say her calculations were probably better than mine.
: Zubon
Update edit: I was wrong, I am aware of one story of Ingress-related battery and a few of minor defacement of property, but I don’t know how well sourced those are. One player says an opposing team member smashed someone’s phone, which is apparently a story well known in the area but doubted by the accused’s teammates. And then folks who put bumper stickers for Team A on Team B’s cars. I recall seeing online discussion mentions of assorted minor criminal activity between Ingress players, but again, I do not know how well sourced those are versus “my friend said his friend said…”