Category: General

General

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Kill Ten Orcs

I have been playing Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (I know), and I am finding the gameplay rather satisfying. It uses the same base mechanics as the Batman: Arkham * series, which is good. It is, however, more than a little bloodier. Batman does not kill anyone; Talion puts his sword through every skull he can. That dude’s gotta have some serious upper body strength, the way he’s moving steel in and out of bone.

I need to start paying more attention to the missions. I have been enjoying the open world aspects of it a lot: wander around, sneak up on uruks, gather herbs, maybe find a little boss mission. Most satisfying boss missions? When the captain is vulnerable to ranged attacks. Get in the right position, one fully charged headshot, assassination complete, gg.

: Zubon

[GW2] Four Map’s Metas, pt. 1

The Heart of Thorns expansion brought with it four new open world PvE maps. Each map has a “meta”, a map-wide goal, much like the core Dry Top and Silverwastes. Overall, there is good and bad. I hope that ArenaNet takes the time to smooth out the rougher issues, and I hope they learn from what works.

To just jump in, the overall issue I have is the player knowledge requirement of when a map starts. I have to remember that the Auric Basin boss occurs on the odd hour. I think Verdant Brink resets half an hour earlier with night then occurring an hour and twenty minutes later. No idea about Tangled Depths, which is not fun, and Dragon’s Stand does its own thing.

It was easy enough to learn one map, Dry Top, which reset on the hour, every hour. Silverwastes, like the new Dragon’s Stand, was map dependent; although, the latter is timed. Now there are a bunch of new maps with varied start times, and I feel that there needs to be something in-game, such as the map UI, that tells players the timed status of the map. Then armed with that knowledge, and knowledge of how long I can play, I can make pretty good decisions on what I want to do. Anyway, off to each map… Continue reading [GW2] Four Map’s Metas, pt. 1

Humble Monthly

The Humble Bundle folks are trying something new, a monthly subscription service. So you pre-pay for games without knowing which games. That sounds bad.

Spending $150/year on games I don’t know and probably won’t play seems like a bad investment. In the early days of Humble Bundle, I bought quite a few out of a mix of supporting the charity of the week and the indie developer of the week. Years later, my Steam catalog is bloated, and I have liked a small percentage of the games. Over time, the Humble offerings have expanded in various directions, and they more or less feel like a perpetual Steam yard sale on indie games through a different store front.

If I had more trust in their curating, this would probably be a great deal. If you buy almost every Humble Bundle, this is for you. If you maybe see a few games you like every few Bundles, bad. And I’m not especially sold on LootCrate-style deals where you pay someone to go buy things for you, but then I have rather niche tastes for my major interests.

: Zubon

Soliciting Entitlement

I am totally on board for scolding people for an exaggerated sense of entitlement, but many gaming companies are literally asking for it. MMOs have long solicited player participation in development, from requesting suggestions to testing implementation. In a Web 2.0 world, more developers started inviting players to participate. “Make your voice heard!” Games being Kickstarted frequently offer beta board access as a reward so that you the customer can help guide the development of the game.

I have seen good, implemented solutions come from the suggestions board, and I have seen games that really do have player-influenced or even -driven development. I have also seen a lot of companies decide that is good PR, set up a suggestions board, and maybe harvest a few ideas but mostly just do what they were going to do anyway and maybe point to a thread and say, “because you demanded it!” It is so much marketing BS, just as we recognize that people are not really “testing” the game in that open beta. Some suggestions may have merit, and maybe you have a new idea, but the designers are not waiting with bated breath for the next epiphany from the armchair designers.

I have trouble saying that the players have an unfair expectation that they should be listened to when the company says they are listening. Using the two senses of “expectation” from that link: as a realistic assessment of what the company is likely to do, one should not place high odds on the company being guided by your suggestions; as a normative assessment that people should follow through on their promises, one is completely fair in thinking that a company that says it is listening should listen. If you say you are listening to create customer buy-in, then do not particularly listen, you totally deserve it when those customers react badly to the realization.

If a company never claimed to be listening, you can maybe argue that it would be better if they did, but you do not get to claim a sense of personal betrayal.

: Zubon

Bleak Blaughust Game Dump

It’s a weird thing: the mind. Throughout summer, the household was in a nice routine. At the end of July it was like a flip switched. School was only two weeks away, but suddenly both the kids and Mrs. Ravious wanted school to start. Stress piled on, and instead of viewing Blaugust as a fun challenge it became an obstacle. I knew that I might get the first five under my belt, and then I would spectacularly fail. So I followed Homer’s advice and took most of August off. Refresh the juices. Continue reading Bleak Blaughust Game Dump

MMO Questions

A while back, I put together the following set of questions for MMO developers. But when was the last MMO release that might have interested you enough to ask them? Still, for reference, things I want to know if you want me to play your new MMO:

  • What standard MMO elements are you using that will appeal to current MMO players?
  • What changes are you making to the standard MMO formula that will draw players from their current games?
  • What unique features will your game offer that are not available anywhere else?
  • How can I customize my character, at creation and over time?
  • What is your intended increment of gameplay? What can I do if I can log in for:
    • 15 minutes?
    • 2 hours?
    • 10 hours?
  • I have gained ten levels. How does my play experience differ other than going from “10 damage per attack against 50hp goblins” to “100 damage per attack against 500hp goblins”?
  • I have been playing for six months and my friend wants to start playing. How soon can we play together without my creating an alt? How do your systems support this?
  • I have been playing for six months. What goals am I pursuing? What am I doing that I could not do at the end of my first month?
  • What will happen:
    • in my first hour that will make me want to buy the game?
    • in my first month that will make me want to subscribe?
    • in my first year that will make me want to stay that long?/li>

: Zubon

Errors and Lies

Playing dumb is a viable strategy. In multi-player competitive games, players tend to coordinate against whoever is in the lead. If you look like you are stumbling while you move into a better position, you will be ready to strike while your opponents are looking elsewhere. This can become difficult in iterative games; my tabletop group knows me to be too good a strategist to buy too much of this, but they seem not to have caught on that I will complain about crummy randomization both when I get horrible luck and when I want to distract attention from how well I am doing.

In Town of Salem, I am rarely sure of who is an idiot and who is engaging in obfuscating stupidity. A standard villain strategy is to run out the clock by preventing useful discussion, because a town that cannot coordinate information cannot find the mafia. Idiot chatterboxes are more likely to be villains, but this is a F2P online game, so you have lots of idiot chatterboxes and trolls. Is this person sabotaging discussion or just legitimately useless?

Say some information gets through that. Then the town starts puzzling out how to deal with it. Few players know exactly how all the roles and rules work. If you know, you might mis-apply those rules in this circumstance. If you know, you might lie about how those rules apply if the truth would get you killed. Then you have incomplete or wrong information, because other players are taking secret actions and may not mention that your logic is valid but your premises are false. Sometimes players will guess the right answer despite having invalid logic, which is aesthetically displeasing, although sometimes players do have a valid deduction but are presenting an unsound argument intentionally because telling the real reasons would get them killed. And then the original “information” might not be true, due to error or lies.

Most people know at least one Raymond Smullyan puzzle of the format “one always tells the truth and one always lies.” More advanced puzzles introduce the complication that people can be wrong, so you have insane liars who always say true things because they believe false things. It is often unclear whether you are winning/losing by your own merits or are the beneficiary/victim of outrageous fortune.

: Zubon

Scaling

I played a Trapsin in Diablo II. It was a fun class that turned the game into action tower defense. Drop traps, throw my pitiful attacks at the enemy, and kite them around traps until they fell down. I was particularly fond of the the exploding corpse trap and the cow level. Explosion damage scaled based on the enemy’s hit points, and cows were big tanks. Killing the first one took a while, then they fell like dominoes as high-damage corpses converted cows into more high-damage corpses.

This scaled nicely based on enemy hit points but not on group size. Enemy hit points scaled up with group size, but the trap’s damage was scaled on the enemy’s base hit points, not its scaled hit points. That is, the trap that was devastating on a solo map did less and less as the team size grew, because enemy hit points increased but trap damage did not. (Granted, neither did any other damage source, but there is a large difference between falling dominoes that take out a whole group and “kite, 1 dies and damages several, kite more, 1 dies and damages several, kite more…”)

With no allies, I could solo the map easily by knocking over dominoes. Every additional ally made me relatively weaker. One direct damage specialist was nice for knocking over the first cow, but past that, the game incentivized me to be alone with my exploding corpses.

There were definitely situations for which grouping was a better option, but it sapped my favorite activity in-game.

: Zubon

Guessing

Under the original rules of Mafia, random lynching is necessary, viable, and a good investigative tool. It is the only option the non-mafia players have without adding investigative roles to the game. Pure chance gives the innocents good odds of finding the mafia before losing, and careful observation of discussion and voting often reveals the mafia. So when I see random lynches suggested in Town of Salem, I have mixed feelings; it should help, but given all the special roles, it seems unnecessarily risky and random in a way I find distasteful.

In a game of social deduction and bluffing, winning through random luck is aesthetically displeasing. It violates the Theory of Fun learning aspect of the game, and it feels a lot like the cheesy one-trick ponies who go for an easy win or a quick loss. Give those players a town killing role like Vigilante or Jailor, and they just go for it: soaking up praise if they kill a good target, shrugging if they kill a bad target. I generally do not trust people who exult in random violence.

I had a recent game where the town effectively lost on night 2 because we had two Vigilantes, both of whom shot randomly, both of whom killed fellow townies. For those who have not played Town of Salem, Vigilantes kill themselves the next night if they kill their fellow townies; in a game with 15 players and multiple teams, you can imagine how good your odds are after losing 4 teammates to friendly fire.

But if both Vigilantes had randomly killed mafia members, the town would have had an easy win and celebrated its brilliant heroes. We are happier to win through no virtue than to lose by our own fault.

: Zubon

Special Abilities

When I started playing Town of Salem, I wondered if the game’s roles would spoil me for normal games of Mafia/Werewolf. They certainly give me the wrong expectations. In a normal game, few to no players have special roles. The Town is working on little better than random chance until they see a few votes. The game is very different without investigative roles.

Hypothesis: most of the recent posts about leavers arose from people who did not like their roles. There is one great way to eliminate all those people up front: no one gets a special ability. Those players will not show up to that game to begin with.

I am increasingly speculating that leavers are cheesy one-trick ponies. He wanted a killing role. Doesn’t get it? Gone. And it needs to be one of the good killing roles, like a Serial Killer! Arsonist has to wait a while to kill — gone. Bodyguard must protect instead of actively killing — gone. Consort role-blocks — that could be okay, and it might become a killing role. (This undermines my premise of nearly random suicides.)

: Zubon