Author: Zubon

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Understanding Equivalence

I have an occasional series on depictions of women in gaming. These posts, here and elsewhere, will almost always get a “who cares?” comment. (Because it is worthwhile to post that you did not think something was worthwhile to post.) Chainmail bikinis are either unimportant or perfectly justified.

We could discuss what happens to your customer base and gaming culture when half the population at first glance says, “This is not a place for me.” But why bother when LMFAO has provided some of the most insightful commentary with their video “Sexy And I Know It.” Seriously. A simple gender-flip of a standard music video makes many people “uncomfortable,” “traumatized,” and “deeply scarred.” (In case the preceding failed to warn you, the video is not completely safe for most workplaces.)

To understand what the big deal is, imagine that video being completely serious. Imagine having at least one-third of male characters in your game looking, dressing, and moving like that, including the robot(s). Imagine a world where as much effort is given to lovingly rendering that “wiggle wiggle wiggle, wiggle wiggle yeah” as breast jiggle.

There is a false equivalence in the unrealistic depictions of men and women in gaming. Men designed by men for men will tend to look a bit different from men designed by women for women, and “men designed by men for women” is not the same thing. (It is amazing how many boys call something “gay” when it is perfectly heteronormative but for the other half of the population. The notion that sexualized depictions of men are “gay” is a barometer of how male-centric one’s perspective is.)

You have a vicious circle if you are reducing your female audience through marginalizing depictions and then using that skewed audience to justify the depictions.

: Zubon

Yes, some women like musclebound men in spandex and fantasize about hunting demons in thigh-high stilettoes; outliers do not shift the median. My circle of gamer friends includes a burlesque dancer, but she is not usually in those outfits.

Update: image of mesmer armor, captioned by the poster: “I think this is THE image that sums up the problem with GW2’s armour..”

Selling Your Game on Kickstarter

If the last big trend in MMOs was the hybrid F2P model (headliners: Turbine), the potential next big thing is Kickstarter. Double Fine had a rather prominent, $3 million success on that. From the developer’s perspective, Kickstarter must be the best thing ever: get people to buy your game before you have even started making it. You know the game will be profitable because you don’t get started until you have already sold enough copies, plus some bonus cash from people who will pay $1,000 to have a weapon named after them or such. I’m interested in seeing where this will go. Or maybe it will be another fad that disappears in three weeks, but let’s look around.

Continue reading Selling Your Game on Kickstarter

A Stable Bass

This is one of the occasional music posts, so depart here if those annoy you. This one gets the WoW tag: we have a five-person group with three in the flashy front roles, but I’m focusing on the two in the less visible roles. Rather than one song, our music of the moment is Pentatonix in the third season of The Sing-Off. You can see all their performances in this compilation, but I encourage you to pursue the YouTube links for videos from “mrduckbear11,” who posts clips from the show, because the judges’ commentary is actually useful rather than just “the nice one, the mean one, and the overly excited one.”

The Sing-Off is essentially American Idol a cappella, skipping the part where you humiliate the lousy singers. The winners in the third season were a small, young group that was mostly noted for their interesting and risky arrangements. Five people, three lead singers, lots of interesting sounds. Listen to at least a few, and then listen to a recurring theme in the judges’ commentary: their percussion and beat box are great and tie everything together so that their lead performers can shine. Try starting at 4:30 on OMG or 6:08 on the Forget You/Since U Been Gone mix. Shawn Stockman’s phrase is “meat and potatoes”: they are strong on the fundamentals, not just the flair. Compare that to Delilah, another group from season three that started with one of the best performances in the series but was eliminated after a performance with a brilliant lead but a failure of support. The lead on that is actually better than The Band Perry, but the commentary is on-point: it becomes discordant without a base to stand on. Compare to Ben Folds’s discussion of their first performance, when the support worked well.

Do I need to unpack the analogy at this point? We even have the perfect analogue with a 5-person, 3-DPS group. You need those big, shiny numbers to win, but they don’t matter without your tank and healer. It got me thinking about the offensive line in (American) football: it is an unglamorous role with almost no statistics to support who is better or worse, and the camera is on the guy running the ball, but you can definitely tell when the offensive line fails and the quarterback is crushed before he can try to do anything interesting. If you know to watch, you can see the tank quietly being a superstar, but good support is usually invisible. (Grabbing another game, a friend loves to watch StarCraft replays at LAN parties and should about how the player trying to do something flashy or cheesy gets crushed on fundamentals. Grabbing a third, I still play League of Legends Dominion occasionally; people chase for kills, but capping the points wins the game.)

Do you have a favorite fight where the tanks and the healer really take front stage, rather than seeing people compare kill counts and damage meters? Flip back to the mix video and try 2:53, where the background gets center stage, the a cappella equivalent of a drum solo. Part of the appeal of City of Heroes was how support could be strong, essential, flashy, and featured, while a damage source is a damage source, and then there is the difference in LotRO DPS compared to WoW.

: Zubon

This comes on the eve of the Guild Wars 2 launch, a game eliminating healers and tanks, and I’m nearing the end of my time in Guild Wars playing a ranger as a support class.

A Bad Case of “While I’m Here”

I have several times described myself as making a 5% adjustment to my gameplay in order to work on achievements. That mostly comes through applying a bit of planning and re-arranging my order of content consumption to avoid repetition and grind. I have developed a hatred of being sent back to kill a named enemy that I killed on my way to the quest giver; it is much better to stack incentives if you can foresee it. Guild Wars is particularly good for that because of the rotating Zaishen and other daily quests, so you can plan ahead to combine errands. If you mostly play on the weekends, 5 minutes of picking up quests mid-week can significantly increase your rewards.

Dynamically combining errands, rather than checking upcoming quest lines, is what I call “While I’m Here…” syndrome. I take the Zaishen Vanquish, and I’ll see if I can capture any new elite skills in the zone while I’m here. Maybe I have a quest or two I can advance while I’m here, and I certainly will want to tap the walls to get any cartography points available while I’m here. There could be an outpost I did not need to visit during the main quest line, so I could unlock that while I’m here. And of course if I can get points towards any reputation grinds, I’ll want those while I’m here. Sometimes it starts a bit earlier, because maybe I am here for the Zaishen Bounty, and I notice that I cleared 30% of the zone on the way through, so maybe I should vanquish while I’m here. Hmm, now I have +10% morale, and the next zone over has no adjoining outpost, so maybe I should vanquish that one too while I’m here (or maybe I did that to a previous zone on the way to a vanquish without an adjoining outpost). You can roll this into any quest, dungeon, unlock, etc.: there is probably another goal you can partially advance while you are there.

I find many new players to be very impatient about unlocking their Hall of Monuments points. They got the game two weeks ago, and they need to get to at least 15/50 by the time Guild Wars 2 comes out. Operative phrase: by the time Guild Wars 2 comes out. You get no bonus points for getting it done early. If that is your main point in being here, you should try to minimize your total time consumed, which will mean advancing your various goals efficiently rather than getting a few points quickly and then repeating effort to get the next points. How do you get five HoM points in one day without really trying? Consistently work on several goals and achieve them all at once.

I understand your emotional turmoil at seeing 7 bars 80% full but not completed. Get past it. It will take longer if you rush. You can get most of the may to a lot of titles just playing normally and paying minimal attention to your bonus incentives. “While I’m here” will take care of most of the rest. That last bit is all you need to grind, and there are no extra rewards for having it done before the first day of the early start. I’m right there with you now, looking at my rubies and sapphires and knowing that I could be at 30/50 in one visit to the rare materials vendor, but there are still gem-producing bits of content I want to pursue, so why waste my time and money if I can expect to find a few more along the way? I can instead check the vendor occasionally in case the price dips, try to finish my set of hard mode dungeons, and know that I already have 30/50 in the bag even if it is not on the scoreboard yet.

: Zubon

Time Consumption

I have been looking at my /played, and I am not convinced that a MMO has hundreds or thousands of times the enjoyment of Portal or Portal 2. There is a lot more to do, but there is also a lot more of “something to do.”

I am increasingly looking to entertainment that does not have a quota of content to fill. The need to have another episode, another hour of play, another month of subscription fees can be productive, but it also leads to filler. When I read George Martin, I really believe that he needs another 500,000 words to tell his next story arc. He is not fulfilling a contract requirement. When I see a TV show that was written to last 1 or 2 or 3 seasons, I am thrilled, because the creators had a story to tell. When the initial story is over and they are stretching for 100 episodes, maybe they found a great take on “the continuing adventures of…” or maybe they just wanted to get enough for syndication.

Despite this, I know I will continue to spend more time on things that are designed to take up time rather than continuously finding new sources of great, dense content. The world seems basically structured for that, and trying “just one” will consume as much time as twenty entertainment sources that chose to refine rather than bloat. Star Wars: TOR seems to have fallen on both sides of this problem: it is story-based, so it has a finite end point at which players quite; it is an MMO and yet another Star Wars tie-in, so it will “supplement” whatever story it has with bloat like mixing sawdust into sausage. Some cash cows attract quality talent because of their high-profile, high-paying nature, but in terms of getting the best entertainment per hour, we should probably be avoiding established IPs, avoid MMOs, and avoiding sequels.

Unrelatedly, I pre-purchased Guild Wars 2 and got my cousin’s kid the collector’s edition.

: Zubon

[GW] Documentation Update

It had previously been documented that when the player sets a flag, NPC heroes will run to it and make it their “home base.” The documentation has been updated to reflect the actual behavior: when the player sets a flag, NPC heroes will run directly into AE DoTs then do laps until they die.

We hope this documentation update will improve your understanding and play experience.

: Zubon

Balanced For

A level of difficulty entails certain assumptions. Problems arise when those assumptions do not obtain. Most difficulty settings assume some level of experience, either in player skill or numerical balance.

Numerically, a new raid tier assumes a certain gearscore, probably that almost everyone on your team has a partial set from the last raid tier. You could shoot lower or have a DPS check that assumes full tier 12 before you have a reasonable chance at tier 13, but that will lead to easy/difficult raids. The new raid will also assume that you already know all your class abilities and how to use them to counter common situations. Hard mode for the new raid will assume that you have beaten normal mode and know all the mechanics.

Pixel click bosses assume that you already know everything the bosses can do. Well, no, they don’t assume that, but beating them is balanced around that. You are expected to research or fail the first few times until you know what that icon means. If you have the time and resources to spend on first-hand research, you can be a trailblazer. If not, the wiki and Youtube are there for you. If difficulty were tuned to give you a reasonable chance walking in blind, you would probably find the fights trivial when you did not need to spend two minutes reading abilities and thinking about how they interact. (LotRO’s “In Their Absence” update did many things very well, including hitting this balance of fair bosses.)

When I say that Guild wars expects you to have the wiki open, I mean that the difficulty of encounters is tuned around players’ already knowing what those encounters are. You can beat many/most of them going in blind, and the mastery reward almost certainly involves knowing the encounters once you are past the tutorial missions. Later missions are balanced around the assumption that you have capped your equipment and that you have taken time to farm elite skills. With the right skill setup, missions can go from a 5% chance of success to a 95% chance of mastery. Even the hardest missions are not balanced around the assumption of the perfect build, so the perfect build can make it trivial, but an all purpose build may not work for all purposes, and it certainly might not get you to the mission bonus needed for the titles.

Most of us come from a single-player game background, and the “gotcha” moments there are so common that it is actually shocking to have a one-phase final boss. Oh look, I needed to bring two entirely different weapons to the final fight, and I lost half my health for not leaping away from the boss the instant he died. Yawn. Okay, learn how phase two works, then re-load and re-do phase one. Let’s hope we didn’t waste too much time on phase one. Do I sound bored? I’m bored with it. It’s both obvious and nigh impossible to plan for, so the game is effectively taxing you X minutes by not having a save point between boss phases. You know it’s going to try to screw you over, just like you knew a big fight was coming when you found the stack of health and ammo.

That moment is far worse in multi-player games because it needs to be balanced around everyone knowing, so being the one guy who does not know means ruining it for everyone. That’s not fun design. You face lots of situations where there is a briefing before the fight and half the players are just following orders while trying to get some sense of what is going on here. That’s not a lot of fun as either the leader or the follower, and there is a narrow window for groups that already know each other to explore collectively without anyone feeling dragged along or held back … but you’ve already heard my rants about games that need you to bring all your own friends and fun to work (short version: so you might as well play anything because the game is not carrying its weight).

The numeric balancing is clearer. You can demonstrate that X DPS or Y gearscore is needed to reasonably beat a fight. The developers could even post that on the entry screen. Skill and knowledge balancing is much harder.

: Zubon

[GW] Tooth Enamel and the Aging Adventurer

This weekend, as I was taking a chocolate bunny from the remains of a land-going fish assassin, a man carrying 1250 ingots of iron in a belt pouch remarked to me that it was unrealistic that he could salvage wood from charcoal. I had trouble hearing him speak from a different continent, partly because of the way 13,507 gold coins were clinking in my pockets, but he strangely evoked another worry in me.

My character has not consumed anything but candy and alcohol for the past three months. “Not even skale fin soup?” No, allergies. To some, this just sounded like college, but he is getting on in ranger years, and I became seriously worried about the state of his teeth. Perhaps the alcohol will kill the bacteria?

: Zubon

[DD] Financial Models

As I write this, Dungeon Defenders costs $14.99 on Steam and has $39.84 worth of DLC. This soundly trumps last year’s post on Civ V, and it is something I did not see coming for this game. Only a few dollars of that is purely cosmetic; it includes new classes, missions, holiday events, and conventional expansions. At the end of last year, you could get the whole game with all expansions for $6.20 on sale. If this works for them, Trendy Entertainment has found a highly profitable variation on the cash shop model.

Of course, this comes nowhere close to Railworks 3: Train Simulator 2012. As I write this, it costs $34.99 and has $1,869.03 (not a typo) worth of DLC. It seems to be priced to be competitive with buying actual miniature train sets.

: Zubon

Update: as commenter Galaji mentions, the Dungeon Defenders holiday event DLCs are free if you get them at the time. I was rather surprised by the Presidents Day event.