Category: General

General

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Of Foot Soldiers and Heroes

Copra has a great point on Warhammer:

the characters are soldiers fighting for their faction. And this is where it becomes a different bowl of porridge. The players assume their role as warriors for a cause, and are not in fact expecting to be the heroes or the protagonists of the great storyline.

I criticized The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ Volume 1: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ for this. I stand by that, but I like what Warhammer is doing. Warhammer does not create the expectation that you are The Hero of The Realm. You are one of many. You do not solve problems; you beat back the enemy for a while. There is not an epic story going on, one that logically has a beginning, middle, and end. There is endless war, and you are taking part in it. It does not declare itself the most epic fantasy ever and then force you to watch instead of being the protagonist.

Would you rather come over for soda and board games, or be told that I am having the greatest party ever so could you please come over afterwards and help clean up?

Of course, the eternal, meaningless war with no victory leads to its own problems of “this does not matter.” But I notice that I keep saving the city and the problem never goes away.

: Zubon

Deep Thoughts on Gaming: Part 1 – Time Value

Due to a hectic work and school schedule, I’ve been forced to put gaming on the back burner. That’s hard when you enjoy it as much as I do, and thus when you know you have some time to play, you look for completely different things in a game. Also, taking a step back from gaming more than I have in probably 10 years, you look at games themselves differently. As such, here’s the first of several articles I plan to write on more of a meta level of gaming than I usually post.

First off, the biggest concern for a time-pressed gamer, the Time Value, aka “What do I get for what I put in”.

Continue reading Deep Thoughts on Gaming: Part 1 – Time Value

Is Yahtzee Happy?

I know that I complain a lot about the games I play. Complaining is kind of what we do here in the blogosphere. And then there is Yahtzee. Yahtzee is the popular video blogger who likes Portal, Psychonauts, Guitar Hero, and cursing whilst wearing a hat. That seems to be all the joy that he receives from gaming. When he does give praise, it usually comes in the form of, “I like this part of the game; if only it were not wrapped in in the flaming, feces-covered corpses of a thousand dead puppies who all had their eyes gouged out by the falling horns of unicorns that were decapitated by evil monkey pirates, who were in turn raped to death by the even more evil developers of this festeringly putrid game.”

Only it sounds better in his accent.

: Zubon

Kind of hard to argue with the webcomics comment. It has pretty much been like that since hitting First and Ten.

The Cream Sinks

J. and the Australian Gamer Podcasters have realized an important truth, namely that most user-made content is crap. Then again, most x is crap for all values of x. The question, I comment there, is whether you have tools to separate the wheat from the chaff (to jump metaphors). The goal is to set a million people loose, let it be 99% crap, and still get the work of 10,000 talented people (and remember that even talented people produce a lot of crap to get their good stuff).

Editing is hard. I will not even get into that here, except to note that many companies edit their own stuff too poorly to consider harvesting user-made content. If your internal content-production still gives mostly crap after filtering and editing, what hope do you have?

Continue reading The Cream Sinks

Weekend Recovery

I spent far less time than usual in MMOs this weekend. I am still in the habit of being in my computer chair, but I had a few reasonable play sessions rather than a continuous binge. The weekend felt so much longer.

MMOs are great for flow, as well as being ideal Skinner boxes. Time gets away from me (and the wife in the back row: “I know“). It was like getting hours and hours back. I’m not sure what to do with the cognitive surplus yet. I’ll probably blow it on another game. I hear that Spore is out.

: Zubon

Fever Pitch

This is what it’s all about. The day before you can first log in to a new MMO. Everyone’s talking about it. People are excited because this is the best game ever. People are holding off because all new MMOs need 6 months to really be ready to play. People are angry because it’s just more of the same old thing.

It’s a fresh start, a new beginning. New adventures with old friends. Old adventures with new friends. Finding a new guild or moving with the old guild. New game mechanics to figure out, or just to figure out they are the same as the old. A new class, a new race, a new sex. What name should I choose? Should I use the old name so people know me right away? What if someone grabs my name before me? Maybe I’ll choose a new name and new identity, I was kind of a jerk in that last game. I think I’ll create a character on each server to save my name. Ah, who cares if someone else gets my name.

What server should I choose? Maybe the first or last alphabetically? Oh I know, I’ll pick the coolest name so I will be on a popular servers. No way, I want a quieter server so I’ll go for the lamest name in the bunch. Nah, I’ll wait until they add a new server and I’ll join that one.

Anyway, for me this is where it all begins. A new game. Whatever you plan to do and wherever you plan to do it, I hope it is everything you had hoped for and more.

– Ethic

Tech Support Pissiness

It has been noted that nothing gets me in Yahtzee-mode faster than technical issues. I sometimes start to feel bad about this, until I remember that an MMO is a service not a product. We put up with a lot of bugs. A lot of bugs. Like, hey, whoa, a lot of bugs. If you cannot list 20 bugs in your current MMO, you are not trying, and that is before considering balance issues like “this quest is brokenly difficult and gives you jack for a reward.”

I’m an MMO player, meaning I’m a masochist, so I deal. If the bug is an account or log-in problem, I’m not a player, so I can’t deal. I can fume. Oh look, a convenient form I can send in (web form; they’re not going to give you an actual e-mail address to contact). Someone will get back to me in one to two business days. You can fill in how useful that is.

Those are infrequent. The ones that upset me more often are the ones we do put up with. Example: the boss of an instance resets half-way through and breaks, so he cannot be fought. Wait on tech support, and you are helpfully informed that they know about the issue, nothing to be done; feel free to reset the instance and start over. And we come back the next night or next week to try again. How many times have you had some variation on this discussion: “We completed it but did not get the reward.” “That sounds unfortunate, but we cannot give you the award. Is there anything else we can help you with?” I have it far less often than I used to, back before I gave up hope. Getting useful tech support is a pleasant surprise because it really is a surprise.

: Zubon

I shouldn’t blog late at night.