Category: General

General

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Light Themes

You know, MMO’s aren’t particulary good at theming.

Take the medic class in Star Wars Galaxies.  Sure, when the game launched you could be a doctor and sit at the hospital doing doctor things, but today’s medic is more combat oriented.  The purpose of having a medic to take into groups is clearly driven by the tried-and-tested gameplay mechanic of having a healer in a group along with a tank and someone to deal out the damage.  The medic as it stands today, doesn’t really resemble any kind of medical professional, either in reality or in Star Wars.

This medic class can instantly heal a person who’s running and shooting with a “bacta bomb” or heal an entire group of people in mid-combat with a “bacta spray”.  Playing a medic doesn’t feel like playing a medic.  It feels like playing an MMO healer with skills like “group heal” and “single-target heal”.

To be fair, playing a healer in fantasy MMOs doesn’t fair much better.  You know if you pick a priest in a game that you won’t be doing much praying.  You won’t have to attend church or give any sermons.  You’re going to run around clicking buttons that make your friend’s health-meter go up.

Continue reading Light Themes

Redefining Value

I have changed my mind completely. For most people, MMOs are horrible entertainment value for their cost. This is by design: the mechanics stretch the content across the maximum time possible, rather than deliver the fun in the most efficient and effective way. The money cost is cents per hour, but the time cost per entertainment unit is far larger than in other forms of entertainment.

Continue reading Redefining Value

Chipotle MMO, Redux

Paul Barnett, Mythic’s Creative Director, is front-lining a round of some very interesting interviews.  MMOGamer has a brutally honest interview where the interviewer explains exactly why he stopped playing Warhammer Online.  The piece seems very real and far away from any marketing agenda.  There is also a video interview at Able Gamers, which is quite good.  I love how Barnett explains things.  He should have been in What the #$*! Do We Know!? or Life After People to also give his thoughts on quantum spirituality and mass extinction.

Anyway, in a follow up to the post on a highly-focused Chipotle MMO, I wanted to present an idea that Barnett gears toward in both interviews: asset-light games.  Two snips from the interviews:

We’re getting more casual players, and wider audiences who are less obsessed with the old-school. You’ve got people who want to have their gaming time defined. “I’ve got half an hour before I’m going out. I know playing this game will only take half an hour,” or “I’ve got to put the kids to bed. I know that if I let them play this game, I can say ‘you’ve got one more level’,” knowing that one more level means 30 minutes and you can get them to bed. (from MMOGamer, emphasis mine)

So I think in the modern era you’re going to see more and more asset-light online games.  You’re not going to see as many asset-heavy online games, purely because they cost too much money and I think that that’s how the market is going to diverge.  So you’re going to have people who do things like . . they want to play Fishing online, asset-light.  They throw the rod with their iphone.  They really knock in buy using their little finger and they catch fish and they feel very happy, and it’s a sort of very shallow, very quick game and it doesn’t really take much effort.  You play it maybe for a total of maybe 5-hours in your life but you play it in 2-minute chunks.  There are going to be more games like that . . . fun, interesting. (from Able Gamers, emphasis mine)

 I completely agree with Barnett.  More and more online games are going to be designed for specific activities for a specific amount of time.  I can only imagine what would happen if Popcap (you know, the other game company that prints their own currency) decided to make an MMO, but I would bet my bank account it would be a Chipotle MMO.

–Ravious
I’ll just ask the first sand creature I run into

Hat Tip: Sanya Weathers at MMORPG Examiner

Wish list

Today on the Lotro USA boards, a developer asked “What would make you want to log in?  I’ll stay afterhours to build it”  He makes quests, deeds, and areas, so he asked that suggestions be limited to something he could actually do.

I’ve been watching the thread grow all morning.  Unfortunately, I play on the European version of the game, so I can’t post on the American forums, but it’s quite interesting.  How do you say what you want in a quest with just a forum post?  I want content that has a good reward, that is fun to play, that feels good… I want content that doesn’t suck.

It’s easy for me to nit-pick individual game mechanics like a DOT in PVP being removable, or a particular class being overpowered.  But when it comes to world-building, it’s like art.  It’s like trying to describe what kind of painting I’d like.

Chipotle MMO

For those blessed to have one nearby, Chipotle is a “Mexican” fast-food eatery.  The menu is sublime.  Customers choose a base (taco, burrito, salad, etc.), a protein (steak, carnitas, chicken, etc.), a salsa, and a few more condiments.  Compared to many Mexican-food eateries, including Taco Bell, the choices are simple, but the comparatively few things that Chipotle offers beats most of said eateries hands down.  In-N-Out Burger and Chik-Fil-A are two more food chains that follow this principle of few offerings that can’t be beat.  This is not a new concept by any means.  America is one of the anomalies in the world that has the restaurants that serve just about everything one could want from pizza to steak to tacos to salmon.  If I had a choice I’d rather go to a hawker court and buy from three separate stalls, and receiving a food item of mastery from each cook who has dedicated his or her career on that one item.

This post brought to you by my tinfoil wrapped carnitas burrito.

I thought about how so many MMOs seem to want to be an Applebee’s.  Combat is central, but not always refined.  There is crafting.  Player housing.  Pets.  Solo PvE.  Raiding.  Quests.  Missions.  Stories.  NPC’s.  Titles.  Traits.  And, all manners of PvP.  They are all over the place trying to dip their hands in to a bit of everything in order to keep your interest (read: subscription).  What if we had MMOs that would rather be like Chipotle?

Continue reading Chipotle MMO

Real Life Lacks Chat Channels

The chat system is a major flaw in the design of the universe. Generally, all communication is proximity-based. There are technological workarounds that let you speak to someone remotely, and you can modulate your volume, but the lack of normal user-defined chat channels is a major problem.

Take parties or bars, for example. I do not like being in a room with twenty-plus people, all of whom are shouting to be heard by the people immediately around them. Why can’t we set this to a series of chat rooms so that people are not talking over each other? Even if the IRL server has a limit on how many channels it supports, could we at least get a few per zone? That would keep the noise down, and it would have the added benefit of not forcing people to be next to each other if they want to communicate. Bob could stay in the conversation while he goes to get a drink, and you could send a tell to someone across the room without using a shout.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the new system of cell phone-based tells. It is a great improvement over the old system. I just think we could do so much more if we got past this spatially defined paradigm that our chat system seems stuck in.

: Zubon

Also, my wife thinks I’m no fun at parties. Curse my sensitive hearing!

The Players Are Not Monolithic

People post claiming to speak for “the players,” or developers talk about what “the players” want, but there is no single coherent bloc of “the players” (see also “the people” in voting blocs). There may be a majority, or a vocal minority, but “the players” are a diverse group with conflicting interests, even if you have a highly self-selecting group of players organized around a single niche.

floon
The Lord of the Rings Online Team
Re: Minstrel Icons

Originally Posted by Sirus05
/rant on

Can we please, please, please stop changing the minstrel icons? I absolutely hate logging in to a new patch, and find the icons are all changed around again. I can appreciate that the icons look pretty, and that this latest change of icons on the test realm is in response to the last time they changed the icons, but it’s getting really confusing having to relearn what the icons mean every single patch.

/rant off

So what part of the icon thread the last time confused you? That you guys had valid criticisms of the icons, and that we changed them based on the very passionate response of the minstrels?

Can we please, please, please remember what you guys asked for just a month or so ago?

Why does this particular example bother me? First, the quoted poster preempted the developer’s response by saying he understood exactly what the developer went on to say. Second, the response is an incoherent, “Some players, possibly including you but who knows, complained about change x, which we are changing again, so why are you complaining about changing x again?” Third, a complaint about procedure (changing something every update) is a separate matter from the content (is this one a good change?). Fourth, as a developer, you do not get to mock your players for providing feedback, particularly when it is legitimate for the previous three reasons. If you are supposed to be one of the professionals here, you must act like a grown-up, and you do not get to abuse your paying customers just because you cannot please everyone.

: Zubon

Or maybe I’m just annoyed at the people who keep changing our forms at work, so I need to get a new one every time I go through the process. Yes, I get that the new form is easier to use. It has gotten a little better each of the five times you have changed it in the past two years. Unfortunately, dealing with a new form every time takes me longer than the hassles in the old ones.

A tale of two groups

A few days ago, I was in the 16th Hall.  We were trying to do it in Hard-Mode.  This meant that after a couple of hours of making our way to the last boss in this area, we were going to have to kill the last boss without killing any of the tiny weak little bugs.

Along the way, I accidentally rolled on (and won) a coin for some armor that wasn’t for my class.  I felt like crap about that.  I also accidentally sent my pet to attack an orc I didn’t mean to.  It dragged a whole bunch of orcs back towards us and killed the entire group.  I lied and said my pet had some path-finding issues.  I feel bad about lying, but I felt really emberrassed about killing the group too.

In the final room, we died to the boss the first two times without doing much damage on the boss.  We weren’t doing so well.  On the third time, I set my pet to attack my target instead of passive.  I figured “I’m not going to be attacking any bugs, so this way it’ll attack the boss when I attack it and the mushrooms when I attack those”.  During the fight, our tank was being chased by the bugs.  I threw an AOE debuff on the bugs to keep them from hurting the tank so much.  It was a non-damaging de-buff, but my pet took this to mean I was attacking the bugs.  It flew over to the bug and killed one in a single hit.

We failed hard-mode.  Everyone saw in chat that it was my fault.  The group broke up with a lot of angry people.  I felt like quitting Lotro.  It was awful.  That night, I kept thinking about how good I was in SWG at leading groups through the instances, and how awful a player I am in Lotro.   I found it hard to sleep after that.

That was one group.  Last night I joined another pick-up group.  This pick-up group was for the Turtle raid.  They wanted a loremaster for the power-regen abilities.  I changed my traits and equipment in preperation for the raid.  I had the best food, the best scrolls, and I even used destiny points to purchase temporary buffs.

We fought it and everyone started dying towards the end.  I was the last person standing.  This was mainly because when I died, my eagle brought be back to life.  When this happened, the DOT started over on its timer, and I could survive fairly well.  There was me and a hunter alive when it was at 10k.  I was healing the hunter and giving him power, but the hunter got too close and died when the turtle was at 3k.

It was just me and the turtle.  I was running from it and dotting it.  I typed while I was running around that I was going to solo the turtle.  My health was near empty.  My pots were on cooldown.  The acid damage was ticking away and I was slowly dying.

Everyone was talking in raid chat.  “Kill it!  Kill it!” and “Why are you runing?!?”

Of course, no one questioned my tactics when the turtle finally died to my hand.  I stood triumphant.  Eleven players could only lay on the ground and watch me fight.  I rez’d their minstrels and soon they were all on their feet and celebrating.  The raid leader was even clapping for me and /cheering me.  It didn’t matter to me that there wasn’t anything for a loremaster in the chest at the end.  I had saved the entire raid.

I couldn’t sleep after that.  I’ve been replaying that moment in my head all night and into the morning.  It’s 6:00am now and I still haven’t been to bed.  God… that felt good.  No… it feels good.  For the rest of my character’s life, I’ll remember when she got the killing blow on that turtle.

What Gets Measured Gets Done

if you display each user’s post count under their username, then people are going to start posting a lot. If you implement a karma score, then people will try and do things that maximize karma. Not only [is] exposing information about valued work important, not exposing information can also be an important design strategy.
– Xianhang Zhang

If players have achievements they can see, many will go out of their way to get them, and a subset has gotta catch them all. If you let other players see what achievements they have finished, you will see more achievement-seeking. If you only (or more easily) show how many achievements people have completed, they will tend to get the easy ones to drive up that count. If you add varying points for each achievement, you will see min-maxing based on the difficulty-reward of achievements, with forum posts on how achievement x is too easy/difficult for its reward.

In The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢, you cannot see how many deeds someone has finished, only their equipped traits. You should expect to see people polishing the virtues they equip and ignoring the ones they do not, because both function and style reinforce that. You cannot see someone’s crafting ranks, but when they added auto-generated forum signatures, crafting ranks were listed on there. I don’t suppose that anyone has the data, but I would expect to see a bit more crafting done after that point, particularly for people more active on the forums (and using the character signatures).

We will also expect some counter-culture blowback: people who do no crafting or avoid achievements specifically so that they have 0s. They just need some way to signal “I am a conscientious objector” rather than “I am a scrub.”

: Zubon

Friday Feature

SWG used to have something called a “Friday Feature”.  They would show a tiny piece of something from a future update, or highlight some aspect of the game.  The Friday Feature was sometimes just a list of statistics, and sometimes it was just a rehashing of information already on the forums, but it was always there, and it always kept me thinking about SWG on Fridays.  Even though I’ve stopped playing SWG, I still keep checking the web page each Friday to see if anything new has been added to the game.

The Friday Feature was really a great way of getting a share of my head-space.  The more I think of a game, the more likely I am to go back and play it, or try it for the first time.  All the controversy with Darkfall actually had me in their store on multiple occassions to try and buy the game.  News stories about an EVE corporation leader scamming his friends actually contributed to my husband downloading the trial.  He even went on to purchase EVE.

By contrast, Final Fantasy XI was terrible about letting American players know what to be thinking about.  I can’t speak for their Japanese players, but Americans had no clue what was new in the game until it was already out.  Blogs and forums help fill the void, but there’s nothing like hearing from the horse’s mouth tid-bits about what’s coming next.