Author: Zubon

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[TT] Betrayal at House on the Hill

Yes, that’s the real title.

Betrayal at House on the Hill is one of those games you want to like for its atmosphere and for what it does well, but I have yet to find myself able to because of two significant problems.

You the players are a group of people who have come to (the) house on the hill for reasons. In the first phase of the game, your group of up to six are exploring the house. You find interesting rooms, events, items, and hauntings. The house is subject to impossible architecture, because you draw the next room randomly, which is perfectly in tune with the haunted setting. Eventually, one of those haunt cards starts the second phase, the Haunt. One player becomes the traitor, and based on what triggered the Haunt when, you start one of fifty Haunt scenarios, which could be an actual haunting, alien abductors, cannibals, or pretty much anything on the big board in The Cabin in the Woods. When that happens, one of the players becomes the Traitor, and now you have different teams and rules and goals. That is a great idea for a game, with a lot of variety, atmosphere, and potential fun.

The first problem is that Haunt/Traitor transition. The Traitor goes into another room, and now everyone reads rules. You know that part at the start of a new board game when maybe one person knows the rules, and you spend a long time reading and/or explaining the mechanics, and maybe you need to work out some ambiguities in the rules and fumble through it for the first quarter of the game? That happens pretty much every single game of Betrayal, and it happens as the central event in the game. Continue reading [TT] Betrayal at House on the Hill

The Chosen Ones

While researching yesterday’s post, I discovered that an MMO trope is perfectly true in the Star Wars Expanded Universe: there is as endless supply of The One and Only Heroes. The NPCs in your MMO tell you that you are unique and special, that only you can save the day, and then they say it to the forty people lined up behind you to turn in the quest. Writers seem to feel much the same way about their protagonists, so unique and special things happen all the time even if another author in the same shared universe (or several) already used that unique and special slot. By now, there were hundreds if not thousands of Jedi and Sith running around during the time of the original Star Wars trilogy. If no one has yet written about a hidden Jedi academy or Sith cloning pool that moved that number up by some significant digits, it will happen sometime.

For example, Wookieepedia has a disambiguation page for Darth Vader’s apprentice. He apparently went through them on the order of one every two years, and you’d think he would have had at least one around for the original trilogy. Just yesterday, yet another Jedi who survived the death of all the Jedi joined the canon for a new series. And then we have the quote, “Palpatine established a number of organizations composed by Dark Jedi“; not just many of them, many organizations of them.

See also the many fantasy novels with the only good member of an evil race, because this author’s Drizzt clone is not a drow (although some of them are the only other good drow/whatever).

You and your group of friends are all The Chosen One? You’re in good company.

: Zubon

Choosing Sides

On this holiday, I was pondering the Empire’s relationship with aliens, robots, and cyborgs. Emperor Palpatine considered non-humans, err, less than human and ran an Empire dominated by humans. He did, however, have armies of droids (especially if you admit that the prequel series was made), and the best known symbol of the Empire was more machine than man. (I still love General Grievous from the cartoons.) The villains have lots of big, menacing machines and devices. The heroes have lots of friendly aliens.

Ingress features factions with differing visions of humanity’s future development, one leading towards man-machine hybrids while the other welcoming alien influence. The Resistance is the Empire and the Enlightened are the Rebellion. Which is also more or less the state of the balance of power in the game.

: Zubon

Pure Grind

Trying one of the recent games at Kongregate, I discovered a game (and accompanying achievement) for pure grinding, Mighty Knight. It has the usual more-or-less required upgrades, but some “quests” remove the “more-or-less” by removing all player input. Those quests are to have your NPC companions defeat all the enemies. You cannot command, control, or guide them in any way except for buying them better equipment. Your NPC companions also select targets at random and fight them to the death, no matter what else is going on around them.

As I type this, the game is rated 3.9/5. Either most folks operate on the 7-10 rating scale or the average gamer just utterly baffles me.

: Zubon

[LoL] Conditional Probability

Argument: in ARAM, if you are considering dodging, you almost certainly should, because no one on the other team has.

Assumptions: You can pick the winner of roughly 80% of ARAM games just by looking at team composition. Most people prefer being on the winning side of that than the losing side. The penalty for dodging is less than the penalty for playing a hopeless game, in the sense that you can waste 20 minutes in a game you cannot possibly win or spend a similar amount of time doing something else while waiting out your dodge penalty. And here is the critical assumption: you can tell if your team composition is bad, and you are likely to dodge if (before seeing the other team) you think your team is likely to be worse than the opposing team.

If you think your team composition is better than average, you are very unlikely to dodge. If you think your team is about average or slightly worse, you are not very likely to dodge. If your team is bad, you are somewhat likely to dodge. And if your team composition is horrible, you are very likely to dodge. But you already knew that, so what am I trying to add here?

The decision is symmetrical, with the other team facing the same decision. Given that no one on the other team has not dodged, you must find it very unlikely that their team composition is horrible and somewhat unlikely that their team composition is bad. (And remember, each of 5 people can dodge, so none of the 5 said “not worth it” and dodged.) Now re-assess your chances given that. If your team composition is bad, it is not only that your team is below average, but also that the opposing team has not signaled (by dodging) that their team is bad or worse. Five people on the opposing team think they have a good enough chance of winning with their team composition. Given that, how confident are you of your team composition?

Applying this recursively would leave us only playing with “above average” teams, because someone would dodge unless the team composition on both sides was at least “good.” (If all the horribly composed teams dodge, that means “bad” is as bad as it gets, so all the badly composed teams dodge, which means “average” is as bad as it gets…) But what is one to expect from a game mode where randomness dominates? But then, why are you playing ARAM if you are not comfortable with the “AR”?

: Zubon

[PvZ2] Party Month

Plants vs. Zombies 2 is having a Pinata Party every day in May. This might help recreate some of the novel challenges the original had in its bonus modes and minigames. Also, the new boss (Far Future) is out.

Just a note for folks who might be interested but who have not played lately.

: Zubon

Gaming the Gamification of Games

Content delivery systems have gamified games by building their own level and achievement systems. Kongregate and Steam are two that I use. Kongregate flash games may have levels, points, and achievements, and then Kongregate itself has badges, points, and levels, and now pets that may appear in games. Steam games have had achievements for a long time, and now Steam itself has a trading card mechanic that leads to crafting, badges, and levels.

Steam has started tying its seasonal sales to those. In past years, you received the seasonal achievement for gaining achievements, voting, shopping, and otherwise using Steam. Those are now mediated through trading cards (and those trading cards now incinerate at the end of the event, rather than sticking around for latter day trading, which I think was uncalled for). And crafting completed sets of trading cards during the seasonal events awards seasonal event trading cards.

I am sitting on five sets of cards and waiting for the next seasonal sale event, because it will be worth marginally more to cash them in then than now. I am gaming the gamification of games, and the absurdity alternately amuses and irritates me.

: Zubon

Realization, Retention

I am led to believe that Ingress has a significant player retention problem around level 5-6. I do not know if there is data to support that, but it is the perception I have heard from several sources, and it appeals to my confirmation bias. I see three significant player retention issues, all of which will set in around that point, with one offsetting retention asset around that time. I am aligning these with our MMO Bartle types.
Continue reading Realization, Retention

[TT] Online Tabletops

Have you used the online or mobile versions of tabletop games? What do you think of them?

Letting the computer take care of setup, dice, math, etc. is a really convenient thing. I have heard of people who will go to their respective computers to play Settlers of Catan rather than sitting at a table because of the convenience. You could play Carcassonne on your mobile device. My friend has a Dominion card randomizer app, and a smartphone is smaller than the stack of randomizer cards if you have all the expansions.

Games like Risk, Titan, or Axis & Allies, with lots of pieces and long play times, seem better on a computer than in physical space. I have a cat, you have children, and Ethic lives a day’s drive away, but the electronic board is there, safe and sound and remotely accessible. Pen and paper RPGs have a mixed record with online tabletops, but computers do handle miniatures and dice nicely.

Or do you then get into “use the medium” concerns? Now that you are no longer on a tabletop, how many vestiges of the tabletop do you want to keep? You start the long, gradual slide into computer games rather than computer-mediated tabletop games, and the whole point of Tabletop Tuesday is to avoid that.

: Zubon

Runaway

This post has a good explanation of long-term design issues in Ingress, similar to the ones that sunk Shadowbane.

In board game circles it’s referred to as the “runaway leader” effect – winning makes it easier and easier to keep winning. It has a few advantages – it is a more intrinsically realistic dynamic. There are some games, like Monopoly, in which a runaway leader taking over is the entire point of the game in the first place. However, runaway leader positive feedback loops are not viewed as good design for longer games because players tend to dislike games where the outcome is decided very early on but they are obliged to keep playing. While nobody is actually obliged to play Ingress, player attrition rarely helps with the underlying balance issues. Note that a game having a runaway leader effect doesn’t mean that a team in a weaker position cannot ever achieve victories – it just means that the odds are heavily stacked against them.

Like Shadowbane, Ingress is not asymmetric, so the rules are not tilted against either side, but the mechanics do make it easier for the winners to keep winning, which tends to have the effect of driving out the losing team and reducing the influx of new players (on either side, because winning unopposed on an empty field in a virtual world gets boring quickly).

I am debating whether I am interested in continuing to play. I live and work in one of those heavily dominated areas, so if I want a competitive environment, I need to drive an hour away. And people who have farmed in the non-competitive environments do that same drive with their farmed gear.

The rumored third faction only makes the runaway leader effect worse unless there is reason to unite against the winning team. MU in Ingress is like PPT in Guild Wars 2: territorial control is all that matters for the scoreboard.

: Zubon

While the rules of Ingress are balanced, the flavor text spurs the current imbalance towards the Resistance. Oddly, the linked post has a commenter who says this is a good thing because it keeps the game competitive. I’m not sure that person understands what “competitive” means.