Category: General

General

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Drift 1: Loss of Context

The game will introduce a mechanic to you early on, something perhaps unusual but reasonable in context. Over time, the game will expand from its simpler beginnings. By then, you will be so used to the mechanic that you will rarely pause to notice that it makes absolutely no sense in its new or expanded context.

Example: The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ uses “morale” instead of health. You don’t die, you just get too disheartened to continue, and you must rally. Sure, goblin spears to the ribs hurt, but you can keep fighting so long as your morale does not flag. A Minstrel’s songs raise your spirits, and you carry on. Then you start meeting trolls, the sort that would crush your skull and limbs with their giant clubs and rocks. You could conceivably rally through a few broken ribs. Then you get to poisoned water that instantly drains all your “morale.” Insta-death from morale drain? Then you get to lava flows, where you burn to death and your armor melts. Life is just a song away!

Example: pills in Left 4 Dead. Reasonable for ignoring scattered cuts and bruises, and then someone starts carving a hole in your chest.

I wanted to use Katamari Damacy as an example, when you start rolling up clouds as if they were huge sheets of plywood and fire that still burns, but Katamari Damacy is sufficiently insane to defy logic anyway. Instead, tell us your favorite example from your current game. Telling riddles to wolves? Backstabbing buildings? Tripping gelatinous cubes?

: Zubon

Reason to Return

Players take breaks from MMOs.  Some are short, and there is no reason to stop subscribing or to uninstall.  Others are more on the sabbatical nature.  The latter is usually accompanied by some sort of burnout, boredom, or other negative feeling resulting in a far longer break than the usual refresh.

There are reasons to return, and the biggest are usually the game changing, world-expanding expansions.  But, I don’t want to talk about those because their very nature is set to get players to return.  I want to talk about the free content updates and maintenance updates. Continue reading Reason to Return

Hostile Takeover

Another person from my SWG guild has joined us in Lotro. Although not all have actually continued playing, that’s the 6th person from our old guild to follow us over. Each of these people have been admitted to our current kinship. In the kinship’s teamspeak server, we often out-number the original crew. It’s beginning to feel like we are slowly taking over the guild we joined.

It’s not that any of us are officers… we don’t get to decide rules or anything. But the topics of conversation and the mood of the kinship is influenced by the conversations we have with each other. For the veteran players, the game is stale, old, and far too much of a grind. For us the game is complicated, new and exciting. We’ve actually contemplated creating our own separate kinship. In fact, we did. But we only put our alts in it for now. It’s something to fall back on if our current kinship doesn’t work out.

Even if we are not officially a separate kinship, we clearly act like one. We group with each other and help each other out. We talk to each other about old times and send each other crafted goods. We are all so close-knit. We started playing this game at the same time, and we started playing our last MMO together at roughly the same time. By contrast, most of the other people in the kinship started playing Lotro two years ago.

Will we ever feel this closeness to the veteran players of our kinship? I don’t know… but I honestly doubt it.

Time to Cap

Commenter Alucian states:

unlike other MMOs, Blizzard actually scales xp needed to level and gained from quests with the current number of levels to max. They ensure it takes the same amount of time to get from 1-endgame whatever the max level may be.

This is an interesting notion to me, one I have not considered because I have been through only one level cap increase (CoX does not count) in my ten MMO years (old old old). Every time you increase the level cap, you can change the rate of experience accumulation so that time to cap is unchanged.

Would you wait a few months after the new expansion to do so? On one hand, you don’t want existing players to feel like their “work” has been “cheapened.” On the other hand, the expansion will not be terribly helpful in recruiting new players if they see months between them and that shiny new expansion. There is also the scaling o, that. Many games seem to want the last ten levels to take as long as all the levels before them, or the expansion to take as long as the old “late levels.” You would need to halve the old late levels’ leveling time to make the new time-to-cap fit, with the new late levels taking as long as the old late levels did.

If you keep re-scaling experience, and your level cap keeps rising, you eventually will have players leveling by walking near the newbie zones. Alternately, your time to level through later expansions would be increasingly short, although that might not be an entirely bad thing. If you do not keep re-scaling experience, you start seeing a dizzying distance from level 1 to the cap, particularly if you obey that principle of how long the last 10 levels should take. You could keep that time constant, so 1-40 takes 120 hours, 40-50 takes 120 hours, 50-60 takes 120 hours, etc. I think it would quickly become insane with the “50-60 takes 240 hours, 60-70 takes 480 hours…” interpretation.

: Zubon

Of Alliances and Meaningful PvP

While I’m mostly between MMOs, I am trying Evony [Update], from one of the many ads you may have seen. It resembles Travian in many ways, including the faster pace once fighting starts. I was not sure if I wanted that, what with the whole “job” thing versus a server potentially filled with people who have nothing better to do on summer vacation. Thus came a simple plan: I joined the second-meanest alliance on a newly formed server. Attacking me now risks the wrath of about 400 other people who have nothing better to do than crush every red flag in the area.

This weekend showed an interesting example of that. Looking in around lunch time, there was a discussion of some fellow who had attacked an alliance member and been rude in mailed discussions. He had a strong defensive position with two large castles next to each other, each with thousands of troops and traps, along some friends nearby. “Bring it on” must have seemed like a reasonable thing for him to say, especially when some of us (like me) were over an hour’s travel away from the fight. And then he was attacked something like 100 times that afternoon, until there was nothing but a flat bit of ground.

This is a problem that has been noted for PvP games: once a customer has only a flat bit of ground, it is hard to get more money from him unless he has such a need for vengeance that he vows to RMT his way to victory. When winning means driving someone from the game, that cannot be good for the company, worse if a large alliance gives up and quits en masse.

On the other side, I played Team Fortress on some random servers this weekend. I had a good time, discovering that I really liked the Heavy, which is good since my two favorite classes do not have their achievement/item packs yet. Here, when someone dies, he comes back 11 seconds later with no penalties at all. After a pair of snipers trade deaths three or four times in a minute, I begin to wonder about the point of it all.

: Zubon

On the Blogroll: Psychochild

We have a great many sites on our blogroll. Why not take a little time to talk about some of them? Besides, it’s Friday, and you’re either looking to avoid work or need something to read over the weekend. Let’s trawl through our friends’ archives and see what’s interesting.

This week: Psychochild’s Blog, written by Brian Green. He is best known for running Meridian 59, but he has done other things.

Continue reading On the Blogroll: Psychochild

Problems with user content? Not new

One of the advantages of being old and decrepit, like I am, is that you remember old inconsequential stuff that may or may not matter (also that you forget important stuff that is necessary now but that’s not the point). There’s an anecdote from way back in the day that deals with the problem of user content. I don’t know if this anecdote is true, but from what little I’ve read around, some of the people involved do validate it.

Goes something like this…

Continue reading Problems with user content? Not new

Separate Games in Games

If you’ve played SWG, you know space and ground are separate. There’s a divide there. When you earn space-xp, it doesn’t help you very much on the ground and vise-versa. In Lotro it’s the same story for creep play and freep play. Nothing you do with your elf feels like it has anything to do with your orc.

When I think about all the different kinds of xp to work on in games, such as crafting xp, entertainer xp, and faction/reputation points, I think there’s a similar feeling of separation. It’s like having a large number of games and mini-games smashed into one big game.

On the other hand you could have a world like EVE. In EVE there is no xp per se, just Isk (Money). Whatever you’re working on, you’re working on Isk. Could you imagine if all the fantasy MMOs and Sci-Fi MMOs out there only had the gathering of cash as the sole form of advancement?

Having a lot of different kinds of xp or different games to play in one MMO makes for a lot of variety. On the one hand, doing vastly different activities to advance different things makes for a lot of variety. Sometimes you can be working on two or three things at once (XP / Cash / Quest rewards) and it feels extremely satisfying. On the other hand, if you get really excited about something like PVP or Space-xp, it feels like that’s the only thing that’s in the game. Everything else is just a diversion with rewards that don’t influence your “real” game.

The Horrors of Free Chat

On the free DDO announcement post, a commenter asks, “what exactly does ‘limited chat’ even mean?” Another commenter responds, “Unlimited chat for free in an MMO = GOLDSPAMGOLDSPAMGOLDSPAMGOLDSPAM”

What worries me more is the chat itself, and this is not DDO-specific. I have been toying around with a FTP RMT (free to play, real money transaction) game, and the newbie chat… omg lol u girl? This must be what you WoW players call “Barrens chat” or some such. Every stereotype of online and juvenile idiocy: there it is.

Look, kid, it doesn’t matter if anyone else in the channel is a girl. If someone claims to be, he could be lying. If she really is, she is not going to e-mail pictures of her girl parts to random people in-game. Or maybe she will, but in that case, she probably has already them posted somewhere, so go Google them up.

Look, kid, we get that you like Runescape. Yes, great, best game ever, much better than this one. Shut up. There are lots of good evolutionary psychology reasons why humans shout about how great the tribe is, even when it is completely inappropriate. Convince your simian lower brain functions that this is one of those inappropriate time.

At least the constant guild recruiting spam blocks out most of the pain, and the Chuck Norris jokes cover a bit of the rest.

: Zubon