I opened a can of chili. Recognizing the sound of the can opener, the cat was immediately, vocally, constantly demanding to be involved. I gave her a small sample. She sniffed it and walked away with no more attention to the matter.
: Zubon
Category: General
General
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Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.
.Playing Together
I consider a game alt-friendly if it has a relatively short time between when I start a character and when I can meaningfully play with my friends. These games support the creation of a stable of characters, a toolbox. Games with slow levels or long grinds encourage having a main character, and alts definitely have a subordinate status. You may play your low-level alts with your friends, but that is clearly a separate activity where you are all messing around on alts. You would not bring one of those alts on a serious guild activity without taking it through the long slog to the level cap.
The three dominant factors in MMO alt-friendliness seem to be up/down-leveling, time to the level cap, the distance between effectiveness/nominal cap and the absolute maximum.
More Gaming Metaphors From My Cat
Food that is given to you is never so tasty as food that you have taken from someone, although it may get boring immediately after the “taking” is finished.
: Zubon
This post is incendiary
If you were to sit me down with a cup of coffee and show me all the MMO(x)s we have created since we ever started creating these things, and after showing me all those pretty pictures you were to ask me, “So, J, in your dispassionate and academic opinion… which one do you think is the best ever?”… what would I say?
The answer is simple. I would take a sip of that coffee and, beyond even the mere hint of irony, humor or doubt, I would say “In my mind, the best MMO(x) that we have created so far, for sure, would be EVE Online”. Then I’d watch as I would get rocks thrown at me. As always.
But consider this…
Work in Progress
More than other games, MMO experiences have a time stamp because the game itself changes and our experiences with the “same” piece of content might be radically different.
This is especially true in the early days. Yesterday’s dungeon discussion had some sharply divided experiences, and those could be caused by class, gear, strategy, or the dungeon’s having been updated a half-dozen times in a month. I finally tried WoW so I could see how the zones looked before the Cataclysm revamp only to find that the veterans’ experiences were radically different due to other changes that had accumulated over the years. My trip through Guild Wars: Prophecies included heroes, lots of elite skills, and PvE skills, which changed everything even if none of the Prophecies content had changed.
As a LotRO player, I recall approaches to Moria boss fights that went from “standard practice” to “exploits we patched away.” Sometimes you need the good bugs to get past the bad bugs. Some grognards talk about how hard X was during their day, and some of them did Y while it was easier, broken, bugged, etc.
The population shift is also a big change over time. The original wave of Warhammer Online players experienced public events 1.0 as intended, but as early as a month later many zones were ghost towns and you never saw the last event phases. In September 2012, players bemoaned that the Guild Wars 2 economy was broken because scraps of jute were very expensive. Come September 2014, players may bemoan that the Guild Wars 2 economy is broken because craps of jute were almost worthless. It seems to be a rare event for a game to maintain a steady population spread rather than having huge clumps at the top and bottom levels.
“Trammel” and “NGE” are extreme cases you need not mention. Everyone knows to distinguish between before and after those chasms.
: Zubon
Project Gorgon Kickstarter
You have probably reading about the really indie MMO development of Project Gorgon at Elder Game, friend of Kill Ten Rats. The latest update was about randomly generated weapons that give animals emotional problems. Previous updates have discussed cow PCs (and milking them) and other fun quirkiness. Calligraphy is an important skill for improving your swordsmanship.
The developers (both of them) worked on Asheron’s Call 2. Give them money.
: Zubon
Defying the Sophomore Slump
Our blogging world has adopted Guild Wars 2 en masse. Orcs Must Die! 2 was an unexpected treat earlier this summer. Torchlight 2 will be out later this month, and I preferred waiting for Torchlight 2 to playing Diablo 3. Borderlands 2 is coming. Team Fortress 2 remains my go-to FPS, and it added PvE content earlier this year.
Like TF2, some games reached their defining points only in their sequels: Master of Orion 2, Diablo 2, Street Fighter 2, WarCraft 2. Second try’s a charm?
: Zubon
Censoriousness and Circumvention
Victor Mair at Language Log posts about a Chinese news blackout, with online censorship that includes an inability to search for relevant terms. Such is the nature of running a search engine under a censorious government. The post is interesting for the means used to circumvent censorship through nicknames, references, and homophones. This last is especially flexible in Chinese, although gamers will be familiar with a great many ways to beat name and chat filters.
Commenter Jason observes: “China has a strategy of censoring just about anything, randomly and arbitrarily, which makes drawing conclusions about what’s important based on whether it’s censored or not a difficult proposition.” This is an exciting strategy, likely stumbled upon rather than by design (perhaps now intentional). Absence is meaningful when it is conspicuous, but it can be made inconspicuous through overuse. It takes an authoritarian regime to practice the strategy on that scale, but they have one. Someone in the Communist Party bureaucracy has the job of really serious theorycrafting.
: Zubon
Quote of the Week
I know people for whom the sum total of the “game industry†is Angry Birds, Madden, and Call of Duty. These are not vile “dudebros†… they’re just people who can literally play like three games all year and feel like that was a good year. They’ve got a game to play with their friends, a game to play by themselves, and something to do in line at the Butt Store or whatever. As a point of comparison, I have been installing a game while typing this paragraph.
— Tycho Brahe
Designing Kickstarter Rewards
Eric asks how he should set up Kickstarter rewards to encourage early investment in his solo MMO project. I want to point out three examples with a few key points that seem to draw backers (and I like):
All of these Kickstarts received more than 1000% funding, and I would like to highlight a few things. Continue reading Designing Kickstarter Rewards