Author: Zubon

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Human Risks

Single-player gaming lacks the peaks that you get in good multiplayer gaming. It also lacks the troughs in bad multiplayer gaming. Your gaming preferences are going to be strongly influenced by how much weight you place on the most extreme experience versus the average experience and your relative weight of positive versus negative experiences.

If one really horrible thing can ruin your entire night, PvP will almost inevitably be a harrowing experience for you, and any multiplayer gaming is a crapshoot. Beyond just the effects of anonymity, wide exposure teaches you that some people are just genuinely horrible human beings. And they want to share that with you.

If you are the sort to laugh it off or counter-troll, the downside of PvP and multiplayer gaming is limited for you. If you seek conflict rather than avoiding it, the internet will always have more for you. If you remember the positive and forget the negative, the downside is temporary while the upside is lasting.

If you evaluate the quality of the evening by how many minutes you were having a good time, something like EVE Online will rarely be a good night for you. Scouting, mining, traveling… the median minute of play is pretty dull. Granted, the average minute of MMO play is poor relative to most other niches, but PvP gaming with lengthy downtime stands out as low average quality. If you evaluate the quality of the evening by the best minute in which you were having a good time, nothing is going to top PvP and multiplayer. If you place more weight on extreme rather than average experiences, even strongly negative events can be rated highly because you take the ebb with the flow.

A related factor is the context in which you will tolerate all this. You might tolerate perverse randomization but rage against human maliciousness. You might laugh off human stupidity but rage against poor design. You might tolerate poor design as long as the company is good. Introverts will have an extra weight against negative multiplayer interactions, because those are excessively psychologically taxing.

: Zubon

500 / 23 = ~22

I have argued before that seeing a game’s achievements tells you a bit about how the developers expect you to play and therefore whether you are likely to enjoy their game design. Even without explicit categories, you can see that a game awards achievements for beating the game, for 100% completion, for beating bosses with one hand tied behind your back, for exploring all the corners of the game, for killing 10 million rats, etc. It says something about the game or the developers if there are hundreds of achievements or they skew towards one category.

In Prime World: Defenders, 46/80 achievements are for defeating each of 23 maps with one of two hands tied behind your back; you will get some of them on accident, others take some relatively precise work like beating them with exactly 1 life left.
Two of the achievements I had not through are power of 10 achievements. If you scroll down to the least achieved achievements, you see “build 10,000 towers” and “win 500 games.” Does this game expect you to grind and reward you for it? Look at the math in the title. A game with 23 maps has an achievement for winning 500 games. Even with procedurally generated content, that is a LOT of times per map.

: Zubon

[LoL] Toxicity Case Study

We had a request for League of Legends Tribunal highlights, and SynCaine linked to a guildmate’s post. I clicked a few “warning” punishments from my case history, and this one stood out.

You can view Tribunal records even if you are not a logged-in LoL player, but just in case this link does not work for you, let me give you a transcript of what the reported player said in the first game. The below transcript, plus being reported 14 more times in 4 other games, will get you a warning. The language used is likely inappropriate for workplace reading, but then you are already at an online gaming blog.
Continue reading [LoL] Toxicity Case Study

[LoL] Leaving

I am back to having 4v5 games 50% of the time in League of Legends, so I am giving it up for at least a few months. It is a roaring mix of people who never connect to the game, miss the first 5-10 minutes, AFK after one tower goes town, intentionally feed, wait at base for 200 gold, or (to take my last example) have their mothers tell them to come eat dinner 20 minutes into a game.

Whatever system discourages leaving games has no visible impact. It is tolerant, because technical problems happen. You need to accumulate some number of offenses before action will be considered, and then punishment is possible, and then it may rise as high as a temporary ban. I presume some number of time bans will eventually lead to a permaban, but my short Tribunal history shows no permabans for that, as opposed to cursing at people. In a F2P game, you can have as many accounts as you like, so the main penalty is that you need to log back on and have less IP. Basically, you can do whatever you want, and you have no skin in the game; the sort of person who might get permabanned on a level 30 account would love the chance to start a new account and smurf/troll the newer players.

I have mainly been playing ARAM because the average toxicity seems lower. The attendant lack of concern for playing the game (“eh, it’s just ARAM”) is rather upsetting. I presume I could have fewer of these people if I played high ELO ranked games on Summoner’s Rift, but I don’t feel willing to wade up the stream of toxin to get there. Also, I am far from a platinum player, so I am worried the game would suggest that I park for a few months midstream.

: Zubon

[LoL] Efficient Communication

League of Legends has a simple vocabulary for praise and abuse. “That” before something means “is very good or inherently overpowered.” “This” before something means “is very bad or inherently useless.” You’re in the middle of a game and don’t have time to type a lot of invective, but the most important thing in the world is making sure other people know you are better than them at online games, so you can quickly insult your teammates with “this cait” to make sure everyone knows that your team is only losing because Caitlyn is not performing up to your expectations. Make sure to put it in all chat so the other team can share your scorn for your teammates. Alternately, if “this cait” is on the other team, this will let them know that their team is bad and they should feel bad. Because that is the kind of community the game still supports, even after things have improved.

This also technically gets around using profanity and verbal abuse, although Tribunal reviewers (and most other players) will recognize that people who use a lot of “this cait” will also throw out streams of profanity and racial slurs.

“that cait” is usually reserved for opponents, rather than praising teammates, again to emphasize that losing is not your fault. Ashe, of course, gets it more frequently on either team because of the meme.

: Zubon

Quote Mine

Eric at Elder Game is just winning all over the place in a post that covers a variety of balance topics. Two sample quotes:

I haven’t played much in years, but as far as I can tell, post Cataclysm, [WoW’s] balancing plan has been to say “fuck solo balance, we’ll just make it insanely easy for all the classes, and then nobody will care enough to complain.” Which… is a valid approach for certain audiences. [Like me! -Sandra]

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One of my rules of thumb is that an MMO shouldn’t balance gameplay via tedium. By that, I mean a designer shouldn’t say “Well you could become overpowered by doing X, but you’d have to do X for 500 hours, and who’s going to do that?” MMO players, that’s who. Because of the competitive environment, a lot of them will do whatever it takes, and they’ll curse your name for “making” them do it, all at the same time.

He goes on to explain how playing fetch will be used as a balance technique.

The second quote was an explicit part of balancing the original Magic: The Gathering. The developers balanced the game assuming a relatively small card environment. “This card is powerful, but it is rare, so that won’t be a problem unless people start buying thousands of cards. In which case, our game is a huge success, so no problem.”

: Zubon

Prime Grind

Continuing further in Prime World: Defenders has answered some questions.

Yes, the rarer towers are unambiguously better than the basic ones. Early on, my mostly upgraded wooden tower was boring but practical. As a great lover of DoTs, my fully upgraded poison tower is awesome yet practical, but the better towers are generally of the rarer rarities, and they can be upgraded further from there. I am told that the dragon tower is especially excellent for the mid-game, but I have yet to find that card, instead finding multiple sun and lightning towers (crushing individuals and groups, respectively).

Yes, the later levels are balanced around a resource grind. You must complete side missions to collect and upgrade cards, or else your numbers are not big enough to complete the main maps. There is a daily login prize for some reason (currently disabled by bug), so you could theoretically just wait instead of grinding, and you will be ready for those later maps sometime in 2015.

This game reinforces the critical importance of threshold values. An attack that does 50% of an enemy’s hit points is worth about as much as an attack that does 90%. Not exactly, because you can mix heavy hitters with fast or AE attacks, but there is a huge difference between 99% and 100%. This is where the better towers and upgrades become critical.

Oddly, the game has some anti-farming code. I found the 4th boss trivially easy and repeated it to see how quick I could complete that map. The 4th boss is now worth 0 silver and 0 xp. You are supposed to farm, but you are supposed to farm the random missions. I have reached the point where I need to farm the easier random missions to beat the harder random missions to farm rarer cards to beat the main missions.

Hmm, maybe I just need that much farm for beating it cleanly. I am caught in the circle of farming. Back to the regular mission chain! [Update: nope, needed a little more farming. On tower defense, the margin between “can’t beat it at all” and “can beat it 100% perfectly” is small.]

: Zubon

Prime World: Defenders

I am about half-way through the campaign of Prime World: Defenders. It is tower defense with collectible card game elements, which sounds like a game designed for me. Tycho at Penny Arcade has similar gaming tastes, so his recommendation convinced me to pre-order before a really good sale. And hey, pre-ordering gives you a little sale plus some little bonuses.

If you like tower defense, you will like Prime World Defenders. It has minimal mazing elements, mostly choosing which towers to build and (slightly) upgrade along fixed paths. Enemies and towers have the standard mix of air/ground, fast/slow, groups & splash, stealth, healing, etc. You have spells (1 until you buy talents) and no hero unit; this is not action tower defense like Orcs Must Die! or Dungeon Defenders. You can buy talents to improve overall effectiveness.

The collectible card mechanics are the non-standard element. It operates at three levels. First, towers and spells are cards. You get the basic cards as you progress, and there are rarer cards to be found. Having found relatively few, I do not have an indication that rarer towers are absolutely better, but they can be upgraded further. Upgrades are the second level: you can recycle cards to level up other cards, and artifact cards have no purpose except to recycle for larger values. Evolution is the third level: you can recycle duplicates to level up a card in a slightly different way, which unlocks the ability to upgrade the tower on a map. Towers therefore have two level counters: towers can become permanently stronger, and then within each map you can pay to make each a level 2 or 3 tower.

This advancement is both good and bad. To me, in terms of quality of play, it is on balance bad. It makes balance difficult, because the same difficulty does not work for fully upgraded towers and fresh-from-the-pack cards. My one fully upgraded tower minces enemies, and I cannot imagine how devastating a fully upgraded rare tower must be (unless that balance went badly in another direction and it is not worth finding and upgrading them). It is hard to get a satisfying challenge under these circumstances; you do not know if you have good strategy or just good numbers. Difficulty is so far aimed low, so you can complete the levels despite poor strategy or low numbers, and you can go back later to complete them with no leakage and/or either achievement. I like that this also allows you to play around a bit more instead of looking for the One Strategy that meets highly tuned difficulty.

If that is good grind for you, you will love this. There is procedurally generated content so you can get some variety in map layout and enemy composition, and you could spent weeks collecting and upgrading towers. If you would prefer to skip leveling and have all the content tuned for the level cap, Defense Grid will probably be more to your liking.

: Zubon

[LoL] Tribunal

I have started reviewing cases for the League of Legends tribunal. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. One case was decided in literally the first two words of the chat log. On other games, I want a replay or to see the text before or after the game itself.

Is there just something about Master Yi? A disproportionate number of people I see reported play Yi. It is like he is a lightning rod for foul-mouthed jerks and trolls.

: Zubon

[LoL] A Twist of Fate

I’m not much one for cinematics, but this is a nice close-up view of some League of Legends champions. On the gripping hand, it does not really show off what League of Legends is about. It is mostly one-on-one fights, which shows off the champions well, but it involves neither laning nor team fights. If you really want to show a League of Legends cinematic you need to put together a five-on-five fight around a tower with both minion waves hitting it.

I imagine that one good minute of that takes more time than this entire video.

: Zubon