Author: Zubon

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Using Game Reviews

I have previously recommended trusting others’ experiences over your own expectations because the preponderance of the data suggests that your expectations are about as high quality as you would expect from a social primate born into an information age. I have recently been going through the many games that have come with Humble Bundles and Steam packs, and I am finding Metacritic really valuable.

Example: Guardians of Middle-earth. “I like Tolkien, that sounds interesting. I missed the LotR games that came out when the movies did.” Click from Library to Store page to see what it’s all about. “Hmm, a MOBA. I don’t know if I need another of those, but LotR DotA could be…” Metacritic: 56%. “Holy crap.”

A useful application of Bayes’ theorem is that sometimes an indicator in one direction means a lot more than an indicator in the other direction. There are classic examples, but gaming journalism provides another: negative reviews mean a lot more than positive reviews, particularly for major studio releases. High scores are the default and low scores on advertisers tend to be rare and dangerous. Games with bugs that would format your hard drive have gotten scores on the standard 7-9 scale. So a 56%? Holy crap. Okay, next game…

: Zubon

Update: commenters mention going beyond scores. Agreed.

[GW2] Bugged Ending

After having a WvW Season One that was so bad I got two months’ worth of “this is really horrible design” posts out of it, the Living World Season One has also ended badly. It’s as if NC Soft is looking ahead to WildStar’s release and preparing people to switch MMOs.

A year and a half in, GW2 has two reputations: zergfest and buggy as hell.
— Bhagpuss

I have needed to update Guild Wars 2 literally every single time I have played since the new content was released. The difficulty has ranged from trivial to impossible, the rewards from luxurious to absolutely nothing, and I really have no idea what to expect when next I log into Guild Wars 2. Commenters on Ravious’s post noted the toxicity of chat during the events, and I think it is strongly fueled by frustration with “No really, I did this exact same thing yesterday and it worked fine, so you must be doing it wrong.” Surprise! The rules changed since the last time you played, and it might be documented if you look in the right place on the forums. Map chat is effectively a series of urban legends about what the rules and scaling might be today. Today someone said that there is now a cap of 50 people dealing damage to an assault knight at one time. Is it true? If so, was it true yesterday, and will it still be true by the time you post your comment?

Some days, the new content has catered to a zergfest. Other days, it has tried to train players not to zerg. Good luck organizing 150 random people in your instance of Lion’s Arch to react to how the rules work today.

The design of the season-ending content could be brilliant. I really don’t know. The execution is so poor and bug-ridden that I don’t know whether it is well-designed or -balanced. It involves many moving parts that may or may not interact properly when you log in. It is a bad sign when you need to include a “just skip to the finish” portal.

Maybe you had a different experience. Maybe it worked a way you liked when you played through. Surprise! There was another update, so maybe you can replicate that experience, maybe not.

: Zubon

Update: is “bug” the right term for “not working as intended and needs to be re-balanced immediately”? Because the content works mechanically, usually. As in, actions happen and numbers fly up. But there have been many updates to change those numbers, to add new mechanics to get balance where it was intended to be, to fix actual bugs, to…

On the Benefits of Coasting

I have trouble letting go. For long periods of time, I have games that I am not interested in playing but for which I expect to regain interest later. For single-player games, that means shelving them, and I can play Civilization again when I have the free hours. These days, most of my games are online multiplayer games with incentives for frequent play over binging, so I spend a fair amount of time “coasting.”

Efficient use of dailies is a core example. Most MMOs have dailies now, and many have rested bonuses, once per day rewards, etc. You can cash in several of those quickly and call it a day. Most social media games have a daily login bonus, a process you can productively reset every 24 hours, etc. You can bounce off a half-dozen of those while reading your RSS feed. Games with updates frequently have festivals and events, and you can get 50% of the reward in 5% of the time if you just log in, pick the low-hanging fruit, and accept that you are not going to grind enough to get the top tier reward.

This is a reason why I have never run out of karma, money, laurels, etc, in Guild Wars 2 and why I have 600 levels of characters despite having been “on break” for about half the game’s lifespan. In less than 30 minutes, I can get a small stack of rewards. I don’t need to do that every day to have a huge stockpile when I get seriously interested in playing 3 months later. I have a routine of visiting a half-dozen games, seeing if there is anything new, getting double rewards for whatever strikes my fancy, and wandering off.

Because I am exactly the sort of player who likes to play in binges, and nothing fuels that like coming back to a stack of gold pieces, 20 points to assign to abilities, an entire screen of unlocked rewards, a new festival…

: Zubon

[TT] Dominion: The Village Trap

The Village trap is the opposite of Big Money. It is the tendency to buy too many actions, to hope for big but unlikely combos, and to look for the awesome instead of the effective.

Did you know that there is a five-card combo that will win the game in one turn? Do you want to guess the odds of buying, drawing, and playing that combo before someone else wins the game?
Continue reading [TT] Dominion: The Village Trap

Remarkably Honest

The latest update to Dawn of the Dragons is the sort of straight-up slot machine that one expects from F2P games of its like, surprising only in the relative rarity of that sort of thing in this particular game. I mean, they advertise the “expedition” packs with random loot tables for real money currency, but the festival “vortex” is a blind draw from an unknown table, the “fortune teller” is the same for buffs, and the “gambit” is a literal raffle. Adding a “Winner’s Board” to show off the better prizes is a nice touch.

loot pinata
And then there’s this guy. The new Event Raid is a literal loot piñata. For some reason, that just tickles me.

: Zubon

Dodging Bullets

Unless challenged to think otherwise, people quickly move from “Phew! Dodged a bullet on that one!” to “I’m a great bullet-dodger.”
— Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman

This is not restricted to gaming, but I notice a lot of gamers are unaware when they are fortunate and instead believe that they are highly skilled. Wait, no, these are gamers, so they instead believe that other people suck because they got a worse roll of the dice. Consider the question of how difficult content is.
Continue reading Dodging Bullets

[TT] Dominion: Big Money

Big Money is the benchmark strategy for Dominion. Understanding that means you are no longer a newbie. Big Money is the baseline against which all other strategies are measured. Big Money is also very dull, and moving away from it has been one of the more important design goals of Dominion’s expansions.

Big Money is a simple strategy: unless you can buy a Province, buy a Gold or a Silver. That’s it. Continue reading [TT] Dominion: Big Money

DLC as Inflation

Years ago, I pondered reducing quantity as a means of avoiding raising price. I will avoid repeating the examples, since the link is right there.

In our present games, quantity is reduced via moving content to expansion packs and DLC. Players notice when you increase the average cost of a game from $40 to $50 to $60, and at some point it becomes hard to make that next jump, especially if you need to be the first company making that jump. So put less in the box. Heck, that’s even good publicity because you are now releasing an expansion pack sooner, and more expansion packs. You’re putting out so many updates, you’re selling something called a “season pass” for all that DLC. So what if the amount of non-procedural content in sequel+DLC is less than the original game? How many reviewers rate the game based on that?

This is not necessarily a bad thing. It does cost money to make games, and costs do increase over time. At some point, either the base game costs $80, or you are buying that same amount of content in a $40 with two $20 expansions. It doesn’t matter that you used to be able to get that much game for $40, any more than it matters that you used to go watch a double-feature at the cinema for a quarter. Costs rise, and this is one way that customers have chosen to absorb them. I say “customers have chosen” because the company would be perfectly happy to take your $80 up front with one release date, but it turns out that more players will give them more money if they sell it in smaller pieces. You get the game business models you are willing to pay for.

There are some obvious ways we benefit from that as players. If you have exit points at $40 and $60, you can decide that you don’t like the direction the game is going; if you pay $80 up front, you’ve already paid your $80. You are also getting that first $40 worth of game sooner, and given the popularity of playing beta and early release games, that seems to be an in-demand option. Each part of the game needs to justify itself as being worthwhile, rather than just getting one score for the whole game and hoping the reviewers forgive some problems in the third act.

There are some obvious drawbacks in terms of game design as well. Insert your favorite twenty stories about perverse game monetization strategies. Having that spread of DLC and expansions can fracture the playerbase and promote “pay to win” via power creep. Hey, if you need a way to sell that third expansion, how about “you’ll be more powerful if you buy it”?

Like most design and business decisions, this can be done well or badly. I would just like us to be more conscious of it and buy games for value and quality design, rather than letting our primate brains react to big numbers on the screen. But we’re gamers, and we react to big numbers on the screen.

: Zubon