Author: Zubon

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Experimentation

As near as I can tell, this summer’s Steam sale is less about making money and more about economic experiments. Sure, the revenue is nice, but the long-term value to Valve will come from seeing how people react and buy. There are flash sales, community choice, today’s deals, pack deals, and a few other ways to see sales. They vary in discount, placement, and duration, but you’ll see the same sales appearing multiple times in multiple places. Missed that flash sale? No problem, it’s tomorrow’s daily deal, and you’ll get a chance to vote to bring it back in a few days.

It is a real time experiment in marketing with millions of people paying to participate.

: Zubon

Missing Puzzle Piece

I increasingly find myself Googling the solutions to quests and puzzles on the assumption that they are broken. I sometimes find that I have been outwitted, but more often something is wrong with the game. That could be a technical error or a design flaw.

The Secret World has had some trouble with broken quests, and it is always upsetting to solve a puzzle and later find out the computer was not accepting the correct answer. You usually find that out after trying 20 “well maybe” guesses after the right one. I was just playing QUBE, which is enjoyable but has a couple of points requiring very precise jumps, which can be difficult when you apparently have no feet; you can look down and see yourself levitating somewhere off the platform you are standing on. Google, YouTube… okay, yep, I was doing exactly the right thing just 3 pixels off. Dodgy game physics are a related issue. Google, YouTube… okay, yep, just keep repeating that sequence of moves until the box slides instead of teleporting away.

On the design side, frequent readers know some of my pet peeves. The broken logic of adventure games is classic, as is that article, if you haven’t read it yet. Other games substitute “guess or brute force all options” for logic. Another old favorite is when you missed something because it was two pixels wide. Oh, I need a coin to proceed, and it was the slightly brown line in the sidewalk crack from seven screens ago? You know, I don’t feel bad for not taking the time to find that one. I’ve probably spent enough time trying to figure out what I was supposed to be finding.

I recall the early days of LotRO, which launched with many early quests involving things to click on the ground: a sack of bandit loot to reclaim, a mushroom to pick, a body to bury. With the newbie zones heavily populated, you could run to exactly the right spot and not find the quest objective because it was still respawning. Players cleared entire camps of dwarves without realizing that the clicky was by the first campfire, and how amazing that bodies could disappear and resurface! Modern tech has mostly solved this problem: the clicky disappears for you when you click it, but other players can also do so without rivalry.

: Zubon

Origin

I was hesitant when Steam launched. Let me get this straight: I will need a dedicated internet connection to play or access my games, I get no physical media, and if Steam goes away or cuts off my access — best of luck? What’s the upside here?

As it turns out, Steam has been an excellent corporate partner in my life. It has been reliable and has continued to improve over the years. It provides sales, updates, cloud storage, and matchmaking. The biggest downside is that its sales model encourages impulse purchases of marginal quality games. The only time I was not liking Steam was when I damaged a RAM slot on my computer, so everything loaded slowly; Steam pops up advertisements (“Updates”!) when you close a game, so Steam was refusing to close and let me have my computer back until it threw ads at me. Now I prefer digital distribution to physical media, because I lose CDs more often than Valve goes out of business. To the extent that you can say it about a corporation, I trust Valve.

I was hesitant when Blizzard moved everything to BattleNet, for all the same reasons. I might trust Blizzard, but Activision-Blizzard? I refused to buy SC2 until I found a rather good sale, and I do not own D3. I’m still not convinced that golden goose will go un-slain.

Does anyone trust EA? At all? About anything?

: Zubon

[GW2] Satiation Point

After wandering around for a while, you know what? I’m good. I could take this zone to 100% or try another few, but as a likely player of Guild Wars 2, I’m set until launch. I’m content to break at this point.

As a buyer, I am happy with the state of the game. It is obviously incomplete, notably the two missing races and the late game, but the content I have seen is in an enjoyable, playable state. A rather harsh judge commented that it was “good enough” two months ago. I could comfortably start playing now, with a solid commitment that the intended launch content will not become DLC, although I think the mass market would explode with shouts of “FAIL!” if the game launched with this much missing, to say nothing of the howls that would come from post-launch rebalancing on the needed scale.

As a tester… I’m not much of a tester. While ArenaNet really is treating this as testing, I mostly gave up betas years ago. I could try a buggy, poorly balanced version of content (not so bad, here) I’d be repeating shortly after anyway, or I can just wait for launch. I have other games I can play while I wait.

It’s been a good little time. I’ll poke at the next BWE to see what has changed, but mostly I’ll just look forward to August.

: Zubon

RMT

Years ago, goldsellers were the great plague of gaming. They were everywhere, they were annoying, they were criminal conspiracies that were hacking accounts and credit cards. I flipped the eff out when WAR launched without a working /ignore function and the majority of chat was goldspam during off-hours. Pitchforks and torches appeared when one of our former writers patronized a goldseller.

I know they’re still out there, so why don’t I hear much about them? I regularly get phishing spam at an address not even associated with a WoW account. I do not know how long ago I last saw goldseller ads, because they no longer mentally register, but my sense is that I have seen them recently. Account security is still a big thing, particularly for WoW.

Is it mostly a WoW thing at this point? There is only so much profit available in niche markets. Maybe companies have gotten better about anti-goldspam techniques.

I just don’t hear much about RMT in a F2P environment, and most MMOs have gone F2P or hybrid. If a player won’t pay for the game itself, you probably will not be able to sell him much gold. If a player is willing to pay to get ahead, s/he now can usually pay the developer directly.

: Zubon

Maybe it’s just me.

It Goes Without Saying

No it doesn’t! For any completely obvious observation you might make, you can also find someone who has obviously forgotten or failed to observe it, and you can probably find someone who sincerely disagrees with it. You can find someone who has failed to observe it at high stakes, like millions of dollars or at the risk of his/her life. People mess up the obvious all the time.

This observation probably also seems obvious to you. You know that people make obvious mistakes all the time. And yet you are still surprised by it sometimes. You can be oblivious to the obviousness of obviousness.

The Declaration of Independence holds these truths to be self-evident and then goes on to spell them out. It seemed kind of important to make them explicit. Also, you can name more than a dozen countries where you can still be killed for saying all of them in public.

So Ravious’s title is quite apt, and even if the principles seem patronizingly obvious, how long will it take you to name a dozen games that violate them? How many seconds will it take you to name a company that spent nine-digit sums developing a single-player MMO? You’ve seen me post about the obvious or trivial or review years-old games. Beyond the (obvious) fact that there are always new people to whom old insights are new, we forget old insights or forget to apply them because they seem so obvious. There are new implications to be found in old data. There are unknown knowns.

: Zubon

Fun and Relaxation

We are home from a two-week vacation. Fortunately, we came back with enough time to relax before going back to work, because vacation is something that demands recovery time.

A fair amount of folks’ talking past one another is because of the differing goals that they bring to the table. Some people are at a restaurant for the dining experience rather than the food. Some people are playing the same game as you but not for the purpose of having fun. If you’re an anti-social teetotaler who just happens to like sitting on stools at bars, you are going to be a very lonely voice in a discussion about what makes a good tavern.

The title suggests the big distinction I am thinking about. After work, some people like to chill while others want to do something. I don’t know how much of this is a factor of personality or type of work, although the two are hardly independent, and of course it can vary by the day. Some people are not going to have a good time going out to “have a good time.” Even within narrower frames, some people tend towards more challenging entertainments, say marathons instead of going for a walk or George Martin versus JK Rowling. Baseball is America’s favorite pastime — it is mostly downtime, punctuated by brief potential activity, less occasionally by actual action.

I do not have far to run with this idea today. I am just reflecting on how this covers many differing reactions. I am very insistent that a game be a good game, repeatedly arguing that if I just want something to do while hanging out with my friends, we have lots of options that do not involve monthly fees, level barriers, and a dedicated server with maintenance windows. Other people, eh, they’re not here for the game; if they have fun, bonus, but they’re just looking for something to mess around with after work.

: Zubon

Our Undead Are Different

Eric of Elder Game discusses more game development on his MMO in progress. This time: why the undead are evil, not “misunderstood.” It’s a lovely, short treatment of the question in world-building:

Early in Diablo 3, you meet a Necromancer. And your character basically says something like, “Hmm, you don’t see many of those around town!” This is the saddest reaction to necromancy ever. Necromancy should be evil. …
Most zombie flicks don’t suggest that it’s Grandpa inside that rotting corpse: it’s just a meat puppet. So if you can get over the shock of seeing Grandpa’s rotting body, reusing his corpse isn’t so evil. It’s almost a noble act: you’re up-cycling useless flesh into something productive! …
[Shifting to talking about his differing design:] Necromancy mostly uses hate-filled undead, but there are other kinds, mostly occurring naturally. Ghosts, wraiths, banshees, and so on are fueled by unpleasant emotions like depression, greed, agony, and jealousy. They’re all sentient, and all of them are feared…
The Combat Psychology skill now has direct tie-ins to undeath. If you make a skeleton feel less hatred, you’ll literally make him weaker. Psychoanalysis can kill the undead!…
Maybe depression in this world is now a serious public safety issue. Most suicides are committed by extremely depressed people, and if they come back as ghosts, haunting their loved ones, they can spread more depression like an infectious disease. What would society do? …

Worth reading.
: Zubon

Unknown Losses

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.
— Frederic Bastiat, What Is Seen And What Is Not Seen”

Spinks points us towards Battlechicken‘s battle with customer service: false positives on cheat detection and then a series of form letters rather than anyone responding to what she actually said. A week of fighting, blogging, and cancellation eventually led her to a human being.

I wonder how many players would have just quietly dropped the game, upset, on receiving the first email and not tried to fight back and argue their case. I wonder how many would have kept trying after the second and third form email.
–Spinks

This is a virtue of the vocal minority, the bloggers and the forum-dwellers: you (the developer) get feedback on why people are leaving your game to which your system might blind you. It took heroic efforts to find someone willing to entertain the hypothesis that the cheat-detection system was driving away customers. For the customer service rep responding to banned potential-cheaters, I can promise you that watching for that problem is very low on their rewarded activities, if they would be allowed to provide useful feedback on the question at all (if anyone with decision-making power was aware that the question might exist). These are the unknown unknowns, the blind spots where your organization is incapable of looking without violating the normal structure.

: Zubon