Category: General

I approve of the way the Guild Wars 2 Living Story achievements incentivize experiencing content. While a few of the mini-game achievements reward aberrant behavior, on the whole the achievements do a good job of directing people towards content, rewarding multiple styles of play, using new content to feature old content rather than making it superfluous, rewarding both exploration and completionism, and not encouraging unhealthy completionism.
Continue reading [GW2] Ride Guide

The recent talk of the internet is a series of reminders that humans are still social primates, a species known for pack behavior and escalating aggression against outsiders. The internet gives you a broader range of outsiders to reach and the digital equivalents of poo and punches to throw.

If you follow the links in some recent collections of stories about incidents, you will find an indie developer driven from the market, death threats for changing reload times in FPSes or advocating cosmetic changes to currency, and add rape threats if the target in question is female. Okay, that last one is slightly unfair: add immediate rape threats if the target in question is female, add rape threats against the men too if it goes on long enough. (“Long enough” can have very short values online.) Continue reading This Needs to Stop

kiantremayne comments:

There’s a problem with MMOs not valuing adaptability in general – WoW’s raids tend to be designed around characters that are optimised to do one thing well, and the whole ethos of the game and its competitors/imitators has been to push players towards making characters that are one trick ponies that perform that one trick very well. These players feel somewhat cheated if the game then throws them a curveball and that trick that has served them so well up until now doesn’t work. You would need a game where every fight is different right from level 1 to train players into expecting to have to vary their tactics. WoW doesn’t EVER do that – high level dungeons and raids tend to have a gimmick or a dance, but nothing that fundamentally requires players to vary how they play.

This is a good insight. You are trained to play a genre in a specific way. If the vast majority of North American MMO players have been trained to have deeply specialized characters, they will assume that this is just how you play MMOs and wonder what is wrong with you. And you know, I could be in the wrong here, and I certainly would be if I went into a WoW raid and expected each character to be well-rounded; Continue reading Responding to Incentives

A half-finished project is often worse than useless. A half-built house is exposed to the elements and provides limited shelter despite significant expenditure of resources. The prospect of the completed house and all its amenities drives us forward, but (as when you cross the uncanny valley) the resources become less valuable in an incomplete project.

In the age of perpetual beta, we are living in half-finished houses. Games go online incomplete with the first months’ revenue paying for getting the game into a fully playable state, then ongoing revenue carrying the game into a state that might qualify as “going gold” where the discipline of needing to ship a physical medium forces a relatively completed state. (I am well aware that many “houses” went gold by walling off the incomplete rooms and calling it “built.”)

I have previously commented on Cryptic’s exploration of how early in the development cycle one can ship. City of Heroes launched missing its last 10 levels, then City of Villains did the same, then we had Champions Online and Star Trek Online. Kickstarter has changed the pre-order equilibrium for some games, not shipping early but selling the game before coding has even started. That might actually help things — if you already have the customer’s money, you need not rush to revenue. “You’re only late once, but you can suck forever.”

There are merits to releasing half-finished. But testing always reveals that some of the early ideas were not fun, good, or workable. You are free to revamp those during testing, but if you already sold the game and people are already playing, they are going to feel betrayed when you change a fundamental on them. NGE might have been a good idea in terms of design and the long-term health of the game, but you must survive the painful transition.

As commenters suggested under the “releasing half-finished” link, while you do not want the perfect to be the enemy of the good, you also do not want the marginally-better-than-nothing to be the enemy of the good. “Good enough” is often not good enough.

: Zubon

The Steam summer sale reminded me that I own and installed The Witcher 2, so maybe I should try it out sometime? Trying it out reminded me of the two things in general circulation from review at the time: it is reportedly one of the great PC RPGs out there, but good luck playing it because the game features difficult combat involving many abilities with little to no explanation of how to use them. Penny Arcade had it about right: Continue reading Witchin’

The most ancient and wise Wilhelm Arcturus says a lot of words on the apparent status of the MMO blogging community. He seems to wonder if the golden age of MMO blogging, where the ‘sphere was a thing, is fading or gone. Things used to be so good… then, he says.

Wilhelm references the New Blogger Initiative, and I want to reference my post on the subject as well. A few people got it, but using a cowboy as a metaphor for a veteran blogger of the MMO ‘sphere speaks on many levels.  Maybe Wilhelm got it too since he spoke of not getting worked up at the latest drama rodeo. Continue reading Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

I have been playing Defender’s Quest: Valley of the Forgotten, which is pretty good. One unusual feature of its advancement system is a slider for how quickly you gain experience points and cash. Want to triple your rewards or stop them completely? You can do that. Want to remove the penalty for failure beyond “start over”? You can do that.

Defender’s Quest also classifies its achievements by difficulty. The hardest amount to “do everything perfectly in New Game++ with only one of each tower.” The in-game text goes on to note that New Game++ is really hard and that you probably want to turn on triple xp.

: Zubon