Author: Zubon

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Asking

My attitude towards questions in general chat is a mix of sympathy and scorn. I see where Endgame Viable is coming from, because people ask some fundamentally stupid and lazy questions, ones where the answer was probably already on-screen but they clicked past it instead of reading (or asking that exact “endgame viable” question in a newbie zone). I am also the veteran of a dozen MMOs where broken quests were the norm rather than the exception, so it seems reasonable to ask whether you have the right answer. I suppose my dividing line is between “is this the right answer?” and “what is the right answer?”

I just played Anna – Extended Edition. (Quick review: creepy atmosphere, nice story breadcrumbs, some interface dodginess.) It has some of the classic adventure game insanity I described in the linked post and Old Man Murray described in the post linked therein. It matters which of several bladed objects you use to cut particular objects, and essential items are hidden in drawers (but some desks’ drawers are purely decorative and cannot be opened). I am pretty sure this is a game where the atmosphere is the point more than the game itself, and I felt only the most minimal shame in having a walkthrough open on my second monitor. While the point of a puzzle game is to solve the puzzle, I do not feel lessened because I did not guess I was supposed to find baby hair in an object in one of the cribs, nor that I did not independently guess which dark brown rectangles on one of fifteen shadowy shelves per room was a book.

In MMOs, the social aspect of the game is supposed to be part of the game. If content is meant to be puzzled out on your own, not in cooperation with others, it pretty much needs a big sign over it saying, “Go in unspoiled!” because our default is to collaborate. You could solo the scavenger hunt, or you could work with your friends. And with 100,000 “friends” playing, at least 100 of whom will update a wiki or post a comment, it seems little wonder that people expect the guide to be written for them.

I am all for asking for a nudge, direction, or confirmation in general chat. I think my wife gets a better puzzle game experience than I do because I either force my way through it or Google the help, while she has someone in the room she can ask, “Am I doing this wrong, or am I doing the wrong thing?” I wish we had a better way of teaching new players to ask that question rather than “tell me how to do it.” Whatever your thoughts about giving a man a fish or teaching him to fish, “can you fish in rivers or just lakes?” seems like a fair question.

: Zubon

Postive Sum, Zero Sum, Negative Sum

EVE Online and meatspace violence are examples of negative sum PvP. The stakes are what people bring into the competition, some of those stakes will be destroyed in the competition, and what the winner gains is equal to or less than what the loser lost. (Meatspace political lobbying is negative sum PvP for society as a whole.)

Tournament standings and poker are examples of zero sum PvP. There is a fixed pool of stakes, and your gain is exactly equal to someone else’s loss. Most status games (explicit or not) are zero sum, with status as a relative good such that one can only rise by displacing another. (The tournament itself can be a gain for competitors, but the fixed nature of the prize pools makes the competitive elements zero-sum. For me to get the first place prize, I must prevent someone else from getting it.) (Poker with a rake is negative sum for the players.)

Games are increasingly fond of positive sum PvP. Everyone fights, everyone gets a prize, everyone comes out ahead. In League of Legends, everyone gets influence (and winners get more). In Guild Wars 2 sPvP, there are no permanent costs, and everyone gains glory, rank progress, and achievement progress (and winners get more). (Meatspace economic competition is positive sum PvP for society as a whole, where winners are decided by producing greater value for less cost rather than by political lobbying.)

In all of these cases, we tend to discount or ignore the time spent. If you enjoy the game, spending time is not much of a cost, anyway. Time spent being entertained is the benefit, not the cost, although the time spent in-game almost certainly has a higher earnings potential than the cash value of the in-game benefit you gain, although you can potentially profit by poker. (In meatspace, the time spent may be the most important thing.)

Marvel Puzzle Quest tournaments use a mix of positive and zero sum systems. When you defeat an opponent, you gain points, usually more than they lose for losing. Those points add up to benefits (positive sum). There is also a ranked tournament structure with a fixed prize pool, where advancing necessarily displaces someone else (zero sum). Because you can spend in-game resources in the tournaments, the tourney competitions can become negative sum, although given rewards per win, you would need to be burning it fast, which can happen in the fight for first place.

: Zubon

Spoiler Ettiquette: Warning as Spoiler

The fact that I am explicitly not giving you information gives you information.

In drafting a post, I wanted to avoid spoiling something, one of those cases when you want to recommend something without saying why so that someone can experience the rare joy of having all the surprises. “Just go watch/play/read it. It’s that good, and I don’t want to spoil anything for you.”

But now you know there is something to be spoiled. If it were a mystery, and I said I did not want to spoil the ending for you, that would not be new information; you expect there to be a big reveal at the end. If it is an action movie, and I tell you I want to avoid spoiling the ending, that immediately tells me the ending is not “the hero kills the bad guy, gets the girl, and saves his child.” If I tell you I cannot tell you anything about it at all, that tells you it will be a deconstruction, mind screw, or otherwise filled with twists and not what it seems. The content of the surprise can still be a surprise, but knowing that a surprise is coming makes it less surprising, and your suspicious mind starts looking for clues that might have passed you by if you were not primed to expect a twist.

At some point, it becomes fair game. If you do not know about Rosebud or Luke’s father, sorry, those are public information. By now, you know that Bioshock and Portal have big surprises at their midpoints, even if you do not know what those are (and you probably know).

But how do you protect the secret without revealing the fact of the secret, other than just lying about it?

: Zubon

Idle Games

Playing through A Dark Room, I was distressed upon the realization that the resource-gathering portion of the game was an idle game. I went in completely unspoiled, but that is the kind of thing you need to warn someone about. You should also warn them of the scale of idling expected. There is a big difference between games with a few hours of idling built in and a few weeks (or potentially endless).

I am often amused by idle games but I find them insufficiently interactive. That is kind of the point of them, but I do things with my computer. My idea of quality gaming does not involve starting up a game and going to bed. I also need there to be a gameplay payoff at some point. A Dark Room does that. The classic idle game, Progress Quest, does not. Anti-Idle is stuffed full of mini-games, so much so that you could think of it as an anti-i… oh, I see what you did there.

But then, I’ve never seen the appeal of visual novels (versus actual novels) either.

: Zubon

It Pays for Itself

…or rather, “someone else pays for it.”

My Team Fortress 2 buddies have seriously gotten into Mann vs. Machine mode, and I was recruited as a reliable Engineer. I spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 on tickets and a backpack expander. I certainly don’t begrudge Valve the money, given how much play time I have gotten from TF2.

The last time we completed a tour, I received a professional sniper rifle killstreak kit. For non-TF2 people, that is a fancy cosmetic item that attaches to the standard weapon for a popular class, but it takes a bunch of other resources to use it. And, to my shock, it sells for about $50 on the Steam market. Mine sold for that in about a week, which netted enough in my Steam wallet to pay for my initial cost, then all the MvM tickets I am likely to use this year, and then a game or two besides.

I am happy to take the sponsorship, although I am shaky on why one might spend that much on one component for one cosmetic item for one weapon for one class in a game. Maybe it is a really nice cosmetic item. As it is, there are apparently people who are willing to sponsor me to play games with my friends and get bonus items, as long as they get one of the rarer bonus items. Pro circuit it’s not, but deal.

: Zubon

Rebalancing under F2P/P2W

I may have understated the amount of “pay to win” in Marvel Puzzle Quest, although I would think that we would now be past outrage at the notion that “free to play” games have a revenue model. I am not sure whether to be more concerned about the sanity or the honesty of someone who claims to have spent $100+ on Puzzle Quest. I must guess sanity, as there are surely whales in every F2P pool.

Let me explain the drama of the moment, which is like a microcosm of our usual MMO rebalancing drama. Last week, Ragnarok (evil cyborg Thor clone. This is a real thing in Marvel comics) was the best character in Marvel Puzzle Quest, largely because of a very inexpensive ability that did nice damage and fueled his other ability. You know how people tend to hate rogues/thieves in MMOs for having abilities that do high damage on low cooldown with almost no cost or risk? Yeah, that, only make him as tough as Thor. So they nerfed him, tripling the cost of that key ability while reducing its effect, knocking the #1 character out of the top 10. After that, they announced rebalancing, which looks like weakening the other top characters while adding value to the rarest/most expensive ones (which are currently nigh-worthless).

I can see why you would be upset if you are the guy who just spent $100 to P2W, and they took away your W the next day. That is a heck of a thing to do to players who are your revenue source, and it must hurt their revenue for a while, since that list is like a promise to nerf the characters you might pay for right now. If they fix one per week, that’s scaring off revenue for about two months, although they might get some from buffing the most expensive characters as two of the first three changes.

In most P2W games, you should expect steady mudflation as they add new tiers of “best” to buy. You do not expect major nerfing of things you already bought (although League of Legends players certainly saw some cycles of that with new champions). As with the Kingdoms CCG example, it is good for the long run health of the game, but how do you re-establish trust with paying customers after doing something like that?

: Zubon

Asynchronous PvP

At one point, PvP was seen as the solution for community problems. Yes, the developers and moderators could take action against problem customers, but nothing says “you’re fired” quite like killing someone and setting fire to all their stuff. You can also see why giving players that power could be problematic, for example in the officially non-PvP Sims Online where mafias would extort resources from new players under threat of mass-downrating them as griefers. In practice, apart from A Tale in the Desert, most recent games have made the consequences players could impose on each other small, avoiding having players driven out and instead implementing things like automatic group-finding that minimize any social consequences for sociopathy.

In an environment of anonymity, low consequences, and high competitiveness, PvP communities are often quite toxic. I have known people to use trolling as a form of crowd control, as a quick comment or two can leave a target typing for minutes and agitated for an entire round.

One approach occasionally in use is asynchronous PvP. “Asynchronous” means “not at the same time,” so one player sets up a computer-controlled challenge and other players face the challenge. Elements has an an arena, so the computer controls a player-built deck. Marvel Puzzle Quest remembers which team you last used to attack and controls it as your team for defense.

This converts PvP to another form of PvE. In many circumstances, there is not even a way to tell which opponent used your defense as a challenge target. You might talk smack out-of-game, but in-game there is no direct interaction with your PvP target.

The advantages of player-built, computer-controlled teams are known. Some strategies work better or worse in the hands of a computer, and building around the computer’s AI is a skill in itself. Tricks tend to work less well because the computer is not in on the trick, but items needing precision application can safely be left in the hands of a pilot who “thinks” in micro-seconds.

: Zubon

[GW2] Testing: Every Other Tuesday

I find every first Tuesday of the bi-week is like an expansion release. The energy in the air is huge. It’s exciting to see so many players running about, helping each other, and generally figuring things out.
— Ravious

Well, yes, somewhat, but my guild spends half of that Tuesday evening complaining on TeamSpeak about poor testing. Almost every release, the new content has at least one significant bug. Almost every release, at least one piece of new content is not working as intended or providing rewards when it is supposed to. Almost every release, something that worked before breaks. There were a few releases in a row that broke guild chat. Every other Tuesday, you expect at least 5 updates as the next bugs are fixed and you must reboot in the next 45 minutes … 40 minutes … 35 minutes … you zoned, rebooting.

Every first Wednesday or Thursday, my guildmates are a lot happier. The weekend warriors get low-bug content, and the old content is usually restored to working order. Every first Tuesday is a mix of excitement and vocal anger.

: Zubon

Tanking

Marvel Puzzle Quest players use “tanking” to mean “intentionally losing matches” rather than “absorbing damage.” This is a method of manipulating the matchmaking algorithm, and it is reportedly quite effective.

The idea is this: if you win 95% of the time, you will be grouped with other players who win 95% of the time. It is easy to win almost every match because you can “skip” in PvP after seeing the opposing team, so you do not start matches you know you will lose. If you do that enough, you start seeing level 100 opponents in your first few weeks, at which point you can skip all you like without finding a good fight. So every now and again, you need to lose a tournament intentionally, just keep challenging and losing, and then your next few tournament groupings will be much easier. Otherwise, you will not make it into the top 10% of your tourney grouping to get the new heroes you need to have a chance against those harder opponents.

This is an unfortunate mechanic. We want matchmaking systems to provide evenly matched opponents, but the asynchronous PvP system that Marvel Puzzle Quest uses seems to encourage guaranteed victories until you hit a wall of very likely losses. Neither end of that pendulum is good game balance.

: Zubon