Category: General

The kobold sniffed the air. Did it smell an intruder, its small brain wondered, but before it could begin to process this information, glowing green vines appeared at its feet. With a howl it took off after the elf already running off into the distance. As it chased the speeding elf, its feet hampered by the snaring vines, the elf tossed swarms of stinging bees and smoldering embers at it. Finally, the kobold could take no more and fell over, lifeless. A short distance away, the elf happily told his friends “Ding!”

These days, every level in every MMORPG is a celebration. This celebration began in the days of EQ, when leveling up truly was an epic situation. Unleveling, the “Gnid”, was also frequent in these days, but I’ll talk of that in part 2. Because you took so long to level, anywhere from several days to weeks, a level was a major event. People would shout to the zone their happiness, and you’d get some cheers and jeers back. It didn’t matter, because you finally leveled! The sound that this leveling made was iconic. I used to have it as my new mail sound. (I was really into EQ though – I had the “quest completed” tone as my computer shut down sound at work.) The sound was your only notification that something glorious had happened, and thus leveling became known as “dinging”.
Continue reading Why we DING! – Part 1: A Short History

Most of you are probably reading gaming blogs for news and drama, but if you are interested in issues of game design and business, you should go read the archives of Biting the Hand, dating back to 1997. I read the entire thing, along with the Tweety and Lum archives, before starting blogging. I should probably re-read it.

One reason Jessica Mulligan stopped writing Biting the Hand is that she was repeating herself. She was tired of pointing out the same lessons repeatedly as developers made the same mistakes. You could run your own blog for a couple of years just updating her columns with recent examples. Skimming, it is interesting to see how much times have changed and how much they have stayed the same.

To take an example, the February 1998 column, “Online Gaming: Why Won’t They Come?” has a pair of tables that I always think of when a new game launches. For those of you not pursuing links, it explains the subscription pattens of online games. Well-managed games rise for three or four months, dip when the buzz of initial release dies down, then get a word-of-mouth bump before settling into a long-term, stable population. Poorly managed games never come back from that initial dip, losing at least half their peak within the first year. So I always think of games as about to meet their fate around the four-month point. This column was the first thing on my mind when, 13 years later, I saw Keen’s recent post on three-month games. Wait, failed online games have always been 3-monthers. The issue of the moment is “theme park vs. sandbox” instead of “customer service,” but as Keen expands his inquiry in the comments, he increasingly is getting back to 1998. (And, as far as I can tell, is calling for someone to develop EQ or pre-NGE SWG.)

Of course, you can wonder whether developers are repeating old mistakes or embracing them as a new model. My college buddies switched gaming obsessions every 3 or 4 months. If you are expecting most of your players to do that, why bother to build a game with a year of content? Embrace churn, invest in advertising instead, and plan to invite those players back in a year when you have another few months of content. Whiners will leave no matter what you do, fanboys will subscribe on almost pure hope, so triage suggests focusing on the squishy middle.

: Zubon

See also September 1998, at which time Blizzard was the small, innovative company used as a contrast to the sclerotic corporate behemoths.

Games, even violent ones, frequently create situations where it is easier to create than destroy. Well, no, it is easier to delete a level-capped character than to build one, but in the normal course of MMO play, even your most destructive actions tend to build rather than destroy.

In the modern parlance, “RPG” means “character advancement.” This is what you are building. While your actions on-screen involve stabbing things and setting them on fire, everyone you kill gets better within 120 seconds while the experience you gain is permanent (outside old-school EQ). You earn money faster than you can reasonably burn it, and some games include character advancement while you sleep.

Are there any in-game actions that would actually harm Azeroth? You could hack the servers, you could reduce Blizzard’s revenue by being enough of a jerk to drive away players, but could you actually destroy Stormwind, defeat the Horde, or even permanently kill a single wolf? The worst you can do is throw away your own advancement or impede others’ in limited ways.

Everywhere else in your life, building is hard. Left alone, things fall apart. Reality is a treadmill, where your house and body need maintenance just to avoid getting worse. Bullets are cheaper and more effective than equipment for keeping them out of people. Kipple accumulates. It can be pleasant to pretend that things out of sight remain as they were instead of atrophying and decaying.

: Zubon

Setting aside content-based restrictions, how do and should games implement names? That is, what text can you enter into that field?

Options here include whether the game allows spaces, numbers, punctuation, or other special characters such as letters not used in that language, smilies and hearts in the character map but not on standard keyboards, etc. The issues of which letters/characters to allow will vary by language, and spaces and punctuation affect the chat system.

Continue reading Your Name Here

Yesterday afternoon I headed out of PAX East. I had to go basically right after the Guild Wars 2 panel, Saturday afternoon, but I left on an extremely high note. I am still internally digesting the culture there. When so much of our hobby is selfish, I find it amazing that gamers can get together to share the love and passion.

The first place gamers share this love is in the line before the show floor opens up. One group near me opened up some Magic the Gathering Duel Decks, and played the card game while waiting. Another group played an interesting variation of game trivia and hangman. Plenty of people were embedded in to the latest iteration of Pokemon. Once the horde was let go, this camaraderie merely became mobile.
Continue reading Back from PAX East

Tomorrow morning, I am heading off to PAX East in Boston. My itinerary is pretty light, but since this is my first PAX, I want to remain pretty flexible. Friday, my main target is the evening NCSoft Meet and Greet at the Westin Boston Waterfront Hotel, but that will give me lots of time in the afternoon to dip my toe in the show floor. I will be joining the GuildMag et al. krewe at the Meet and Greet for a live video podcast somewhere around 9-11 PM EST. My plan is then to see who is more German, me or Martin Kerstein. The benchmark will be grain alcohol. (Mine will really be water, but I am a student of Dr. Lightman, and I intend to get answers. Answers to questions!)

Saturday morning we have the most awesome Bloggers & Breakfast, sponsored by yours truly and mostly Syp over at Bio Break. It’s not exclusive to bloggers, so if you are a blogger, reader, commentator, developer, or Google search bot, please stop on by for buttery camaraderie and badass croissants. Saturday for a late lunch it appears the Guild Wars 2 community meet’n’greet will happen in the food hall of the convention center before the “Guild Wars 2 – Fantasy MMO Redefined” panel. Then we’ll all head, like a pack of feral animals, to the panel together. Woe to those standing in line in front of us.

So if you see a red-headed dude running around in the above shirt, be sure to say hello! I’ll give you an ultra-collectible, just now laser-printed, business card with the same logo in return. I am going to try and hunt down Trion Worlds and Turbine as well, and if anybody has any Aion, City of Heroes, or Guild Wars 2 questions they want answered, I’ll do my best when I meet up with NCSoft. Hopefully next week I will have lots to share!

–Ravious

The population distribution on forums has very long tails, but I still find myself curious about some of these people. There is a substrain of fanboyism that I call apologetics: some fans cheer their games or boo the others, but these folks are devoted to defending the game against complaints, right or wrong, and seemingly most loudly when least defensibly.

The stages of denial seem to be denying that something happens, denying that it is a problem, and denying its importance. This is the politest case, assuming it does not collapse into personal attacks during step one. To take last week’s example (now solved), this was an obvious and acknowledged problem including a customer effort to track it, and here we have players announcing that they play on four lag-free servers and maybe you should stop buying K-Mart blue light special computers. When Qaddafi says there are no problems in Libya, I get the motives and delusions in play, but is there some sort of e-peen value to defending the honor of a corporation’s servers?

A recent favorite is a highly rated comment on a flash game that paraphrased to: “Okay, this game isn’t very good, but you should not badmouth it because the guy makes a lot of flash games and many of them are better.”

Some people troll, but you get the sense that some really see themselves as the company’s defenders. They think they are helping. Maybe they believe their own propaganda and think their games are perfectly balanced, lag- and exploit-free utopias, undermined only by an impossible to please playerbase. They at least think you should believe it. They are rude and abusive to people with (potentially legitimate) issues. Do they really think the Alpha Nerd approach works? Maybe that the problems will go away if they can drive away dissenting players? I can almost hear Sanya saying, “Stop telling my customers to go back to WoW!”

: Zubon

I have somehow gotten this far without blogging about the Alchian-Allen Theorem, but it is an economic principle you should understand in this international games market. It also applies to cartoons and dating, so stick with me through the econ.

Let’s start with those cartoons. You should expect anime in the English-language market to be of higher average quality (or at least broader appeal) than the anime in Japan. Why? It is not worth the cost to translate and localize crap shows. Fan-subbed series should be of lower average quality because companies will have already brought over the more lucrative (higher quality and/or more popular) titles. (Notable exceptions: bootleg fan-subs torrented while something is still mid-season; shows that are “too Japanese” to survive localization but are great if you know the culture.)

More generally in entertainment, you should expect the titles imported to be some of the best ones that country/language/culture has to offer. At least, you should expect them to have broad appeal, which is often but not always a sign of high quality. (Can I stop doing that disclaimer? Assume “better” means “better bottom line,” which is often associated with quality but sometimes with appealing to the lowest common denominator, which is not always bad either.) Lineage and Aion are probably the Korean MMOs with the most appeal in the Western market, ditto the Final Fantasies from Japan. Weird licensing issues pop up, but if the money is good enough, you can expect those highly profitable games to come over. Second tier, maybe. The equivalent of our crap games? Not worth shipping. You may have noticed other titles coming over using lower fixed costs, notably less effort at localization (contribute your favorite lousy, completely unprofessional translation) and less advertising, and you may have noticed that many of them are really poor. (The same applies in the reverse direction. WoW has many Chinese subscribers; has Age of Conan been localized for China?) As fixed costs drop, you should expect more options but lower quality or more narrow appeal. Recettear had a great localization, but a limited number of people will get excited about a fantasy adventure game where you run the item shop.

Oh, I promised you sex. This applies to human interactions as well. If you have a long-distance relationship, you will probably expect it to advance by leaps and bounds when you meet in-person, because you did not fly 5000 kilometers just to watch TV together. Similarly, if you go to something like E3, PAX, BlizzCon, etc., you are going to expect a really good experience when you drop hundreds of dollars to attend; if you go to something more local, your expectations will not be as dialed up, and you are not as invested. Let’s re-phrase that: if you live in Anaheim, you might go to BlizzCon if you think it looks pretty good, but if you live in Boston, you are only going to BlizzCon if you think it will be really awesome; same convention, different thresholds and expectations. These kinds of raised expectations can go well or lead to really huge disappointments as all the dreams (and money) you had invested in this person or convention crash on the shoals of reality.

: Zubon