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.

Everyone Wins?

Asynchronous PvP creates the unusual possibility of having something called “PvP” that never brings you into direct conflict with another player, where everyone playing wins, and the computer takes the losses on behalf of the players. Reward-seeking players will often create nigh-asynchronous PvP situations.

Given the chance to pick the fight, most people pick fights they know they will win. Given three potential targets to attack, with equal rewards for each, most players will pick the weakest target. Or the weakest (for them) — if you play Scissors, you will choose to attack Paper while you are online, then your offline team will be attacked by Rock.

It can be frustrating to have offline losses you cannot do anything about, particularly if those are scored for competitive rewards, but if PvP must come out to 50% wins on average, everyone seems happier when the computer takes almost all of the 50% losses.

Most of my links there cite examples from Marvel Puzzle Quest, where indeed you almost always win any fight you choose to participate in and lose most of the offline fights. Reference also Guild Wars 2, where karma trains are 90+% PvE content under the name WvW, where everyone gets more reward from trading captures on undefended towers. Look back to the less extreme case of early LotRO PvMP, where most people won most of the time because each team flocked to the battlefield where it was winning.

I can’t say it is much/any worse than the regular PvE grind, apart from the design time half-wasted on PvP content that will not be used for PvP. Maybe I should be pleased for the species that self-interest makes cooperation a favored path even with an explicitly defined competitor. But it seems hollow.

: Zubon

Door Locked

If only I were the freaking Batman and had some way to deal with a locked door.

: Zubon

[TT] Streamlining in the Chapel

Perfection is attained, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away.
– Antoine de Saint ExupÃ©ry

The basic idea of Big Money is to maximize the value of each card in your deck. Where Big Money does that by adding only high value cards, the Chapel strategy is to trash your low-value cards.
Continue reading [TT] Streamlining in the Chapel

Smooth Launch

None of us here seem to be leaping into Elder Scrolls Online, but the one thing I’m not seeing on my RSS of MMO bloggers? The usual Day One issues with logins, authentication, servers, unrecognized keys, queues, and whatever your online game of choice suffered through in its first weeks.

As far as MMO launches go, yesterday might have been the smoothest Iâ€™ve ever experienced. Everything worked, there was no queue, I didnâ€™t have to jump through any hoops, and I was able to play the game as if it had been live for 6 months. Being able to patch-up the beta client was huge too. Hats off to Bethesda, they nailed day one.
— SynCaine

We have seen many games from companies with more MMO experience fail that Day One readiness check, so let’s give proper accolades for doing it right. The server team: if they’re doing their job right, you barely notice they’re there.

: Zubon

[TT] Gamer Games

We pause in the festival of Dominion for a general reflection on the audience for a game. Like most people in my generation, my wife plays games at times but would not characterize herself as a gamer. She knows who Mario is but not Master Chief. She plays Dominion with me and enjoys it.

We have also played Android: Netrunner, which she did not enjoy. She gave it a few chances, she tried several options, but no. This is a gamer game, not something for a general audience. She would play again if I asked her to, but she would not have fun. It is a particular sort of fun for a particular sort of person.

A gamer friend noticed that I had Android: Netrunner and was quite keen to learn the game. He enjoyed it. His fiancÃ©e watched a bit of the game and concurred with my wife: she would not refuse to play, but it did not look like fun. My gamer friend also has the Game of Thrones card game, which is from the same publisher and has some similarities. The two of them had played that one, and the fiancÃ©e had the same reaction, hence the recognition that she would not enjoy Android: Netrunner. I presume I would enjoy the Game of Thrones card game and my wife would not.

I will refer to some things as bad games or not meaningfully games at all. Candyland and Craps are non-games: no choices, just randomization. Monopoly is a bad game, intentionally designed to be a bad experience, and I may come back around to its major design flaws. Other games are for particular audiences or purposes. They can be good, but not for everyone. We should celebrate games like Settlers of Catan, Apples to Apples, and Plants vs. Zombies for being accessible to non-gamers and still of great interest and enjoyment to gamers.

: Zubon

[GW2],[DAoC] WvW v#1 or v#3?

One mechanic that Dark Age of Camelot worked out for Realm vs. Realm combat that Guild Wars 2 has yet to meaningfully attempt in World vs. World combat is providing a reason for the two #2 and #3 servers to both attack the winning team, rather than having the #1 and #2 servers attack the weakest team. Rarely, out-of-game efforts will lead to two Davids’ conspiring against Goliath, but this is rare because the reward structure incentivizes picking on the weak rather than challenging the strong.
Continue reading [GW2],[DAoC] WvW v#1 or v#3?

“Chicken From Hell”

In Plants vs. Zombies 2, my wife’s bane is the zombie chicken. The Wild West’s Chicken Wrangler Zombie (!!) leaks chickens when he is damaged. The chickens are archetypal fragile speedsters: they move and attack much faster than zombies but instantly die from any damage. (Spikeweeds are particularly funny, as huge waves of chicken wranglers become massive clouds of feathers.)

What kinds of chickens are these that can sprint faster than zombies on rockets and kill you just as effectively as the Gargantuar? Recent news stories explain: that kind of chicken. Time travel is dangerous!

: Zubon

Find the Exploiter on the Graph

My alliance was winning the current war in Game of Thrones Ascent, but it turns out that an estimated quarter of our victory points came from exploits. It was possible for players to instantly craft an expensive item using no resources, which could then be sold for silver — an infinite money exploit limited only by how fast one can click. And here I thought our camps were getting repaired quickly because we had allies sending us repair actions. The alliance was docked those points and four players were permabanned.

Folks on our team talked about whether the whole alliance should be penalized for the actions of a few, how much could it really have affected things, and weren’t people in other alliances using the same exploit? And then the developers posted this graph. There is no scale on the left, but you can pretty easily pick out three of the four people using the exploit. One of them seemed to realize that keeping it on the down low was a good idea. The other three contributed about as much silver to the alliance war as the next 97 people combined. Once the developers knew what to look for, that kind of stuck out.

In a previous alliance war, our alliance was also severely docked points because some players were using a modded interface. It did not give anyone special abilities, it just let you perform actions quickly rather than clicking many times to launch 1 attack.

Because Hear Me Roar is one of the largest alliances in the game, we are still safely in second place, and the new first place alliance is allied with us (yes, the terminology there is unfortunate). I noted previously that my part in the team is sending help to our allies, who send us help in return. On the developers’ accounting of our victory points, it notes that our allies gave us enough aid to repair 234 camps from “destroyed” to “fully operational,” so the support squad feels pretty good despite the devastating setback.

: Zubon