Author: Zubon

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[GW] Tickets

Canthan New Year has introduced me to one of the weirdest pieces of game design I have ever seen. You can buy tickets for minigames on the boardwalk. There are three games, and there is no other use for tickets. One of the games is an unexciting whack-a-mole, and it costs 1 ticket to play for several minutes.

The other games are squares of 9 and 16 rings. You stand in them, and there is a random distribution of winners and losers. It costs tickets to play, and you can win more tickets. The end. You can go AFK and stay in your ring, thereby winning or losing in each round until you run out of tickets.

You will run out of tickets, because both ring games are net losers. You can profit in the short term, but if you stand in the ring long enough, you will run out of tickets. If you quit during a positive-sum short run, you can sell your tickets back or play more whack-a-mole.

You can pick up some tokens and Gamer points with whack-a-mole, but otherwise the game tickets are a pure way of converting time and money to points towards the Lucky and Unlucky titles. You otherwise increase them by picking locks (or failing to).

Capping either title in the most efficient way possible will cost you millions of gold and thousands of hours. It is as if they anticipated Cow Clicker, minus the clicking.

: Zubon

[GW] Henchling Variety

It was pretty exciting to realize that you are not limited to human henchmen. You can pick up a Tengu or even a couple of rot wallows. I don’t know why I’d take them over my heroes, but they seem like a decorative touch for players in hero-less campaigns.

It was disappointing to see that Argo does not get Argo’s cry as a henchman. Nothing quite like a AE spell that does 240 DPS for 9 seconds in a game where most things have 500 hp or less.

: Zubon

Less or fewer? I want to say “fewer,” because hp are countable, but I think of it as a pool, like a pool of water, and you use “less” on collective quantities like that.

[GW] Turtle Power

The Luxon are a nomadic people in Guild Wars who use giant turtles. When I first saw one, I immediately wanted to tame it as a pet. Then I noticed that it was being used as a beast of burden. And Dungeon Siege thought it was so fancy with its pack mules. Guild Wars 2 needs this: no bags, packs, etc., just a giant turtle that follows you around and stores your stuff.

Then you enter the first Luxon town, and the buildings are on even bigger tortoises. They have ambulatory, turtle-based homes. Guild Wars 2 needs this: player housing should include a tortoise option. The Asura can use box turtles.

: Zubon

Obfuscation

The opposite of Pixel Click Bosses appears in games that are too eager to give the player data. They want the indication to be clear and highly visible. Unfortunately, the game is still going on underneath those indicators. The game is not hiding the new factors by using too few pixels; it is hiding the existing factors by using too many.

I cited this with Arkham City. Chuck the Sheep is a recent flash game with the same problem whenever you reach a new section of the map. “Congratulations! Welcome to the next area! We’re using font size 72! Oh, and there is a duck flying at you underneath this text!” Guild Wars does the same thing in Tahnnakai Temple. Like all the Factions missions, it is timed, but it has a visible timer because you can lose by taking too long at each stage. That timer occupies the exact same real estate as the NPC pop-up text explaining what is going on.

: Zubon

Oh, and do you want to read what is going on? Every minute you spend reading the quest text is one less that you have to reach the Master’s reward.

Forward Progress

The Guild Wars death penalty is wiped when you head back to town, so there are no permanent setbacks. At worst, you can fail to gain. You will usually come out at least marginally ahead: a little gold in your pocket and experience toward a skill point. After an evening of utter failure, you still gained a bit of rep, added 0.3% towards Cartographer, and banked some change.

Item wear is a minor death penalty and gold sink, but it can lead to your losing progress in a night of play. However many hundred times you are supposed to fail a raid, you are losing each time you do unless the raid comes with enough trash to pay for your repair bills (and that is just wrapping in the farming you could do outside the raid). You have heard of people hitting their heads against a wall so hard that all their armor broke and they could not afford to fix it. Then there are the expected consumables of potions, food, scrolls, etc. that get burned for each attempt. Those are dispiriting evenings, when you leave with less than you started with, and that experience cannot be wholly beneficial for player retention (which is funny when the game that avoids it does not have subscribers).

EVE Online is a game where you can lose everything you own but keep making progress because skill training is time-based. You are supposed to lose ships over time. Don’t get attached. Even if you are down some ISK, your skill points keep increasing.

There is something to be said for a lack of consequences. It’s a game.

: Zubon

Closed Doors

This could just be the completist or Achiever in me talking, but players do not like to be told that they missed something and must start over if they want it. We MMO players are usually content that there are cosmetics available as one-time event rewards or such, but if something has gameplay value or is an ongoing part of the game, you can see people going through physical pain to reach it. It is bad enough that single-player games have Achievements that require you to do X before Y or else reload/restart, losing some hours, but how about an MMO where you might have that character for years? MMOs are virtually without consequences, so the one piddly consequence is a proud nail even if it only means you cannot have a title.

City of Heroes used to have the Isolator badge restricted to players who for some reason farmed 100 enemies in the tutorial. No point, no benefit except this, and nothing indicates its existence. You just need to know in advance that it is there and put in the time for it during the most boring part of the game. That is like design decisions duct taped together. That was compounded in Issue 7 with a change seemingly designed solely to taunt the players: one of those enemies would spawn every 45 minutes in the highest level PvP zone. Issue 11 added a mission that let players farm it post-tutorial, and the City of Villains equivalent was always available later via a mission on the tutorial map.

LotRO has “The Undying,” a title track for not dying until level 5/10/14/17/20. If you want to pursue that link, you can see some related unhappiness. Recommendations for getting the title were usually to solo (no PUG risk) and NOT to take the easiest content; you were in a race against the inevitable lag/bug/crash that would kill you, so you needed to get experience at a sane rate rather than trying to farm the weakest enemies. MMO designs that discourage grouping and trying challenging content are not good. The Guild Wars equivalent was even worse (earn more than 1,000,000xp with no deaths, go!), and it was mutually exclusive with another title. That changed in a 2011 update that made Survivor for earning X xp since your last death rather than without ever dying. This helped many slightly unbalanced people avoid going entirely off the deep end.

Feel free to toss in your favorite from other MMOs.

: Zubon

[GW] In Medias Res?

Flipping to the Factions campaign with a Nightfall character, it feels like some important story elements were left out. No no, don’t tell me, I can work it out from inference and wiki, but again pretending that you had not already run through Factions, imagine the new player.

There is a plague in Cantha. That sounds bad, and I’m objectively anti-plague (outside the Epidemic skill), so off I go. I meet up with Brother Mhenlo who is an old friend of my character that I’ve never met before. I’m from Istan, who’s this white guy? Oh, he’s someone from Tyria who I meet when I start a Prophecies character. Who apparently trained under Master Togo and, what, did a tour of duty as a healer with the Sunspears? Is that where I met this guy? This NPC is far better traveled than I am.

I was called into Cantha to deal with a plague. Afflicted monsters, check, I’m on this. The plague rots the soul as well, check. First mission, lots of Afflicted, big fights and it ends with Shiro. Shiro is the guy behind the plague, and he is some sort of death god or spirit guide who is breaking the death god rules to take over the mortal world? But he was just in a cinematic, alive and talking to a fortune teller? Vizunah Square is only the third mission in this campaign, but there seems to have been a lot of exposition in that prologue, unless the Factions players are also just along for the ride until things get explained later.

I’m apparently saving these people from a plague and a death god, and I’m off to become some form of ascended being to facilitate that. I haven’t gotten a chance to care about the people I’m supposed to be saving. Most of them seem to be named “Canthan Peasant,” and they live in what appears to be a ramshackle slum that covers a third of the map (big town, desperately in need of some zoning laws). Folks referred to Factions as the quick campaign, and things are indeed moving very quickly. Plague, death god, run across an entire zone, assassins, NPCs on your side who seem to hate you, different assassins, plagued assassins, keep running across zones, more scornful NPCs, take a different winding path across that zone, escort missions with suicidal NPCs, and they’re all timed missions. Go!

: Zubon

[GW] Your Thanks Are Enough

Today I found the quest Too High a Price. There is a loan shark involved, and “I tried to return the money, but he is demanding that I pay him a fee of 250 gold! We do not have that kind of money.” The quest reward is 175 gold. Maybe it takes NPCs a long time to make 75 gold. The player, of course, takes the money from someone who needed a loan shark to afford life-saving medicine, in a setting where a plague is transforming people into monsters and potentially devouring their souls.

One notion I like about GW2 karma is that the rewards make more sense and you should feel less like a jerk for taking things from the poor people you are supposed to be helping. The farmer has some spare vegetables, or will give you a good deal on buying sheep.

: Zubon