Author: Zubon

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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.

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Complete the Gaming Metaphor

This is my first time touring around Las Vegas. The hotels are also casinos, malls, theaters, and/or theme parks. They have various themes and decorations. The casinos are the most consistent, both in prevalence and content. Underneath the decorations, the casinos that take up so much of the floorspace are nearly identical, down to having the exact same video poker and slot machines repeated by the dozen in each building. The settings vary widely, so this place is a Roman forum with high-end shopping establishments that don’t exist in most states, while the place across the street seems to have skipped having a theme at all, and its in-hotel mall is at the low end, complete with minimall food court and a half-dozen jewelry stores that all claim to be going out of business soon, everything must go, deep discounts!!! I am sure that the experienced gambler could spend hours pointing out ways that the table games differ or how one casino makes better use of its floor space in terms of flow dynamics, but the core content featured inside is the same everywhere I have looked.

: Zubon

[GW2] Leveling a Crafter

The way leveling XP gain works in crafting is this: For leveling a discipline from 0-400, you will gain 10 levels along the way. By maxing out all 8 disciplines, you will gain 80 levels. That means you could dedicate a character to crafting, feed it all the mats you get on other characters and level it all the way to 80 without ever needing to kill a thing. As hardcore crafters, we think that is pretty cool.
— Linsey Murdock (ArenaNet Game Designer), Guild Wars 2 beta forums

To note, Guild Wars 2 lets you use 2 crafting skills at a time, but you do not lose progress in a skill when you switch to a new one. There is a cost to switch which two are active, scaling to your level in the crafting skill. : Zubon

[GW2] Weapon Skill Unlocks

Your skills with each weapon unlock through use. You start with one skill, and then you unlock #2-5 by killing 5, 10, 15, and 20 enemies. (It counts as a “kill” if you do any damage, so hit those events as AE away.) One-handed weapons only have #2 and 3, off-hand items are always #4 and 5, and two-handed weapons use all five slots. For those off-hand items, you advance them if you already have #2 and 3 done on your main hand.

An Engineer will do this without noticing. Pistols can be used in either hand, a shield in the off-hand, and rifles and (underwater) harpoon guns are two-handers. 50+50+50+35=185 kills to unlock everything, 50 of which must be underwater. Don’t worry, Engineers have lots of options because they get kits in their utility skill slots. A Warrior will be spending a bit more time even collecting weapons, with 11 weapons available in 21 combinations. That’s 520 kills. The Elementalist has just 5 weapons, the second-fewest, but remember that I said each weapon has four elements. An Elementalist needs 200 kills per attunement to unlock everything, so 800 kills, 200 of which must be underwater. Elementalists gets nice AE skills, so you could spend time in crowded events and unlock many of those quickly, but 800 remains a large number.

In the long run of the live game, you need to do that once ever, and you will certainly kill more than 800 enemies over the life of a character. Still, they’re looking at that:

This is definitely a problem that we would like to address. While it only happens once per play through on a given character it still feels a bit unwieldy on Elementalist.
— Jon Peters (ArenaNet Game Designer), Guild Wars 2 beta forums

: Zubon

In GW2 BWE1, I tried an Engineer and an Elementalist. You notice that difference.

Achievements as Signals

I have previously mentioned that games with achievements have better sales and ratings, which is to say that you can both make more money and increase the average user’s enjoyment of your game by incorporating achievements. That’s a significant win-win for tossing in some decorative trophies.

If your game does not have achievements in it, you are probably leaving money on the table. While business acumen and game design are not entirely overlapping areas, and some people take a principled stance against achievements, I worry about the quality of the product you are selling if you are overlooking proven methods of improving both your sales and the perception of your product. Bad decisions are correlated with other bad decisions.

This has become a signal I use when shopping on Steam. It is not an overwhelming factor, but it has helped avoid some marginal purchases. It is a signalling game: whether or not you like achievements, their presence or absence potentially says something. Unless you are explicitly counter-signalling by pointing out the lack of achievements (the way Magicka points out its lack of side quests), I’ll tend to assume the worst. Not caring in one area can be correlated with not caring about others. Maybe adding achievements is harder than I think, but how many copies of indie games sell when Steam has its semi-annual raffles and awards tickets based on achievements?

Basically, I am asking the game to say, “shibboleth.” Know that this will be used elsewhere in your life. If your cover letter or resume has the keywords that indicate that you are “one of us,” you are more likely to get an interview. If you fail to observe the server’s conventions in your LFG message, you are less likely to be invited to group. Fly the colors if you want to connect to your tribe.

: Zubon

There are lots of fun examples of meaningful failures to say, “shibboleth”; if you use an eggcorn of a key technical term, you are signalling that you do not know what you are talking about.

[GW2] Wandering, Geographically and Mechanically

I really enjoyed my evening with Guild Wars 2: Beta Week Event 2. (In case other people on your RSS feed are talking about GW2 BWE2, that’s what it stands for. You’re welcome. We love you, too.) I was moving through settled territory, so it was not exactly testing the cutting edge, but it was nice to see how some items had changed since BWE1; “Dat Effin’ Shaman” was retooled, although “Dat Effin’ Effigy” was carving a path through the soloers until it reached a concentration of players.

I was not playing with anyone, but I was rarely alone. I participated in at least a dozen events and hearts over the course of a couple of hours, just wandering around the Plains of Ashford. I may start using Wandering as a term for the low-key version of Exploring. Doot dee doo, there’s a piece of the map I haven’t explored, a heart I haven’t filled. Let’s go over there. Oh, there’s a monster type I haven’t killed this weekend, let’s get one of those. Hey, event, why not? I completed perhaps a third of the zone and gained a few levels. I noticed that my effective level changed as I moved about, which could be a bit more visible, but you just operate on the principle that the content will always be relevant-level instead of ROFLstomp.

For those not playing, you may have read that your skills are weapon-based. Change weapons, and you change skills (for your first five). I was playing an elementalist, so I could wield a staff (2h), scepter (main hand), focus (off hand), and/or dagger (either or both hands). That gives me five combinations of fifteen skills, plus another five using a trident underwater. You unlock them through use, so kill X things with weapon Y to open all your options. But wait, there’s more! The elementalist’s special feature is having four elements, so you can swap between them. Each element has its own set of skills, so the elementalist has 80 skills rather than 20. You can see how you can spend an evening just flipping between weapons, unlocking skills, experimenting, and occasionally making intelligent use of the ones you like. Event with 10 people around? Hello AE skills!

There have been quite a few improvements to the game’s functionality, and one or more of us will post about those in the coming days.

: Zubon

NDA Drop

Hey, Ravious! Scrolling through the archives, I noticed this gem from 2009. Since the link in there died, let me quote Mark Jacobs:

As to NDAs, the rule I’ve always gone by is my “time before release rule” in order to judge the confidence the publishers have in their new game (doesn’t apply to ports or games that are already out in other places). I add a +1 for every week prior to release that the game’s NDA has been lifted and come up with a score. If <4, there’s a lack of confidence in the product, if you are >8, they really believe in the game. WoW had a great score (the highest I believe) and some of the MMOs that failed, had, as expected, low scores. A score of 4 is just about the minimum you should expect from a MMO publisher.

So where does that put GW2?

: Zubon

Crit and Botch

Regular readers know that I love little differences with big effects. Elegance in design is a thing of beauty, and tracing the secondary effects of a small change can yield big results.

Our friend Tesh has a good example with critical hits in Zomblobs! (under development):

Criticals in Zomblobs! happen when all of the dice you roll show the same number. … Most curiously, these criticals are easier to score the fewer dice you roll. Weaker attacks have greater potential to hit a little bigger. This particular “crit” design is therefore more of an “underdog” mechanism, rather than a “win more” mechanism. Instead of harder hits probably hitting even harder, it’s the weak hits that are most likely to slip in a little extra punch.

Simple, elegant, effective. On the other side, it reminds me of the old World of Darkness botch mechanic. Under the previous generation of their system, 1s cancelled out successes, and having negative successes led to a critical failure. Higher skill gave you more dice to roll, and higher difficulty meant needing a higher number to succeed. The net effect was that, for very difficult tasks, having more dice meant a greater botch chance. In some sense, this made sense. If you are an utter novice, it is hard to get far enough in to really mess things up; it is the middling-low range of competence that is really dangerous. On the other hand, you can see the statistical perversity of a system where getting better can hurt you. The designers there did not have the numeracy and/or interest to trace through the effects of their system.

: Zubon