Category: General

General

.

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.

.

Support

For those of us inclined to do so, the healer is a great role. Yes, it has problems in PUGs when three different people pull then blame the healer, but it is rewarding to see your friends made into boundless engines of destruction and victory.

Healing is great for marginal teams that are barely scraping by, but moving a team from “non-functional” to “winning” or from “winning” to “dominating” is a job for non-healer support. The best times I have had on any support character have been when healing is a secondary role. It is nice to have that in your pocket, in case things go pear-shaped, but support is at its best when healing is unnecessary. Debuffing is great, buffing is usually better, and control is invisibly wonderful if often fragile.

As with many things, City of Heroes does this the best of any game I have played. It is not readily apparent in the early levels, when defenses and abilities are weak and healing is necessary. It starts in the mid-levels and comes into its own in the late game. Everyone who got tired of things in the 30s? You missed the best part of the game (although I concede a love for the frantic newness of the low levels). Kinetics is the big star, with Fulcrum Shift as its last ability, putting your entire team at the damage cap. Life at the damage cap is a beautiful thing. Along the way, Defenders might put you at the speed cap; put all enemies at the speed, damage, or accuracy floor, or all at once; give everyone endless endurance (mana) and regeneration good enough to make healing redundant; and be the best pulling class around. Controllers do all of that with slightly lower numbers and the bonus ability of turning the enemies into statues. If you were not loving the game in the late levels, you were playing with/as a healer and not a Defender.

This is not CoH-specific. Playing a support mage in Asheron’s Call was a beautiful thing, letting my friends specialize all their attacks while multiplying their damage. There was a special joy in debuffing an enemy’s magic skills and watching it fizzle its attack spells repeatedly. My Theurgist in Dark Age of Camelot was a primary damage class that was more valued for its run buff, stuns and slows, and especially the bladeturn chant (self-refreshing group buff: the next enemy attack misses). A Minstrel will improve his legendary items’ healing cost and power buffs in The Lord of the Rings Online, but one “required” legacy is increasing the group melee damage buff, and the damage reduction from traiting for buffs is greater than the healing increase from traiting for heals. World of Warcraft is kind enough to make many buffs last ten to thirty minutes, for your ease as a buffer.

The life of a healer is usually boredom or panic. In a good group, there is not much to do. In a bad group, there are too many people demanding your attention at once, and in a badly designed encounter, you have people going suddenly from full health to nearly dead. Buffers are not half-AFK waiting for a green bar to go down, and there is always something interesting to do as a debuffer.

: Zubon

More Randy Farmer on the Real ID fiasco

I promise this is my last post on the Real ID debacle at this time.

That said, I shot some questions to Randy Farmer about this whole thing while it was still raging. This was yesterday. Since then, Blizzard recanted and the sun is apparently shining again over the green valleys of WoW. However, I think Randy’s answers are very good info regarding community issues, regardless of the final outcome of all this.

My questions and Randy’s answers after the break, brought to you by Left Click. Powering the Internet, one Left Click at a time.

Continue reading More Randy Farmer on the Real ID fiasco

Eternal Vigilance

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25968987278&sid=1

“I’d like to take some time to speak with all of you regarding our desire to make the Blizzard forums a better place for players to discuss our games. We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.”

Recanting this failure was a good move.

Next time do what most polite, centered and sensical people all over the world would do: ask.

The ESRB certifies anyone these days…

Some gems from Blizzard’s privacy policy, as certified by the ESRB:

“Blizzard Entertainment and its affiliate companies (collectively “Blizzard”) respect the privacy of its on-line visitors and recognize the importance of providing a secure environment for them.”

Great start. We’re off to a good one.

“Blizzard Entertainment adheres to the Safe Harbor Principles that were established by the U.S. Department of Commerce in consultation with the European Commission to comply with the European Commission’s Directive on Data Protection that went into effect in October 1998.”

Not really. at the very least, once the proposed changes go live, I imagine Blizzard would be breaching the third Principle: “Onward Transfer – Transfers of data to third parties may only occur to other organizations that follow adequate data protection principles.”. IANAL, though. You can read about the Principles here.

It gets better.

Continue reading The ESRB certifies anyone these days…

…Was This T-Shirt

The subject of this post is a part of a well-known joke, as much as one can call a bloody, mush of hamburger on the ground in the barest form of a beaten horse a joke.  The joke goes that vacationers go to paradise and bring back as a small token of affection a gift to the chumps left behind in the form of a t-shirt emblazoned with “My parents / kids / ex-friends / I went to [paradise] and all I got was this t-shirt.”  Transcending the joke, the t-shirt acts as an achievement notification to others.  Clearly, someone went to the place on the t-shirt, and now the foreign object is being worn for all to see.  MMOs have a similar article in the form of exclusive appearance items.

Continue reading …Was This T-Shirt

Multiplayer Conundrum

I occasionally post comments here on non-MMOs that have single- and multi-player options. I usually comment after the single-player experience. Someone invariably comments that I am not giving the game a fair trial unless I try the online multi-player. The games for which I do try the online multi-player, the other players are so horrible (as humans, not as skilled players, although sometimes both) that I refuse to play the game long enough to give it a fair shot. There need not even be many troublemakers: the perfect game to grief is one with few enough players that your impact is felt but too many to organize a kicking/banning, and bring a friend to become immune to most attempts to eliminate you.

The next comment, then, is that playing with a random online community is not giving it a fair shot. You need to have a guild/clan/whatever, be active on this message board with good people, visit this site, etc. Basically, bring your own community with you, sometimes for both teammates and opponents. Beyond the time investment that demands for a game (some of these “fair shot” multi-player conditions take longer to set-up than it does to play through the whole single-player game), once I am at the point of already playing with my known group of friends, it no longer matters much what we’re playing. The game is not contributing much at that point; I have done all the heavy lifting out-of-game by bringing the group. All we ask from the game at that point is not to be so horribly flawed that it ruins our time together. We’ve all tried things that horrible.

Basically, my ears are still ringing from someone’s mic spam while trying to find the mute command on a new game (as far as I can tell, it depends on “kick teammate” rather than having a mute), and I am feeling kindly towards those games that severely limit your in-game communications options. Limiting player interaction impairs a basic function of your game, but it prevents random people from actively making your game a worse place to be.

: Zubon

Puzzle Kingdoms

I heard good things about Puzzle Quest, so I picked up Puzzle Kingdoms on Steam during their summer blowout. It was not worth the $1, and I wish I had spent the time playing some random flash game.

Unless things change dramatically later on, it is just the one mini-game with some minor variations, like Bejeweled with some add-ons. You can go play Bejeweled right now. You and the computer are playing against each other on the same board with alternating turns, so it is a matter of playing denial while hoping something interesting falls into place. Of course, it falls into place in time for your opponent’s turn, so there is waiting and luck. The computer is tactically infallible but strategically hopeless, so it is a matter of getting an unsatisfying victory over an inept opponent, watching that opponent exploit something you cannot see (but it sees every possible combination), or hardly seeing what happens as it gets four or five combinations somehow falling from off-screen. The computer’s prescience is unlikely to be enough to save it, although it is a wonder to see it get two kills in one turn from blocks that were not on-screen when it started.

The gameplay is passable, although I found Warriors End a better version of the same thing. If you want that kind of thing, you get nothing else, so go to. The story is just bad: our hero is apparently conquering peaceful countries for their own good, but it’s okay because the dark lord is making them unhappy with magic boxes. You must destroy the magic box, even if that involves killing a path through a country that does not want your help. Nation-building through Bejeweled-based regime change.

There are also “RPG elements,” for when you feel like grinding a bit. Because sometimes mindlessly playing the same little thing and getting imaginary rewards is relaxing. It’s what we do here.

: Zubon

Oh, and Torchlight is $5 on Steam right now, in case you missed it during the last holiday sales.