Category: General

General

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Software Toys

A game is something you play; a toy is something you play with. The divide is not a bright line, but I do find myself playing some games and thinking that I am playing with them. It usually relates to the degree of interactivity. When I click and then sit back and watch it go, the less it feels like I am playing something. Pandemic is an example: you set up a bit, get to push a few dials every now and again, but mostly you watch it go. Overlord is clearly a game, Evil Genius feels narrowly on the game side of the line, and Master of Orion 3 was probably on the toy side. Penny Arcade described it as a space empire management simulator rather than a game as such, and that is probably fair. Most simulators are toys rather than games. Details matter there: various editions of Sim City might fall on either side.

“Social games” are mostly software toys. Raising a virtual pet is not so much a game, nor is managing your virtual restaurant, farm, or fish tank. If the intended gameplay is for you to click some stuff and walk away for an hour, that is probably a toy. Which is really weird, because that in no way describes how we play with physical toys, but I almost always think of Facebook games as something I play with. Except Bejeweled Blitz, which is not a “social” game. And social games aren’t really social, since you just send each other presents or steal each others’ crops, instead of perhaps talking to one another. Wow, this is some severe abuse of terms.

This has also become an indicator of when I am about done with an MMO. If I think of myself as logging on to “mess with” the game, rather than play it, I am probably tidying up things before unsubscribing. Gotta get quests and vault space in order, in case I come back someday.

: Zubon

I just found D&D Tiny Adventures on Facebook, so if you’re my friend, you should totally play (with), just because I need more people to buff me. :p I like that they are advertising their product without any RMT add-ons to the game.

Taunting

I am enchanted by this notion of taunting as magical mind control rather than simply insulting an ogre’s mother. One aspect of 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons is dividing power source and role. A Wizard is an arcane controller, a Fighter is a martial defender, and a Swordmage is an arcane defender. If you want a taunt ability, you could build it as psychological trickery, a magical compulsion, a divine geas, or a psychic power. They all amount to roughly the same thing, but it goes with my favorite notion of detaching the mechanics from the fluff. This is a martial class, so it gets martial fluff, while those magical tanks get magical fluff.

: Zubon

Update with additional thought: D&D 4E also avoids the taunting question by using a mechanic called “marking.” A marked target is free to attack whoever it wants, but if the attack does not include the marking defender, it has a penalty to hit, and all the defenders get to do something extra in that case. You can ignore the tank, at which point the tank becomes a pretty good debuffing class that is free to go with its secondary function (generally damage).

C”RP”G

I have been referring to our games as MMOs for the last while. This is mostly in reaction to the fact that “role-playing” has come to mean “character advancement” in modern gaming parlance. If you character levels up, with success as much dependent on character stats as player skill (don’t argue details on this point unless you can solo Arthas at level 10), you have a “computer role-playing game.”

Explaining Dungeons and Dragons to a World of Warcraft player, I was struck that the C/MMORPG take on RPGs is actually a return to its roots. Dungeons and Dragons sprouted from Chainmail, and it was an extension of tactical war-gaming that had each player in control of one character rather than one army. Exploring a dungeon was the archetypal activity: here is a challenge to overcome, here are your resources, work with your team to kill the monsters and get the treasure. Your (functional) role to play was tank or healer, not (the acting role of) the adventurous son of a long line of elvish sages. Acting out a character is an emergent activity in what we came to know as RPGs.

: Zubon

Welcome Back Weekend

It is a free play weekend on the two online games I play most, The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ and Team Fortress 2. There is nothing wrong with being new or being unfamiliar with how the game has changed, but it can get wearing when there are a lot of people asking the same questions every five minutes. That, and since they have no long-term interests, some feel free to strike up dialogues about which political parties and religions are wrong. And things can get a bit crowded. And they want to try skirmishes without leveling their soldiers (seriously, no more group skirmishes for me this weekend, because it is like having a mid-60s group with two mid-40s members). The Soldier and Demoman patches just dropped for Team Fortress 2, so my favorite servers are full of rocket spam (new achievements, yay) from people who I need to kill at least 6-to-1 to keep up my hlxstats score, but then I can get that at times, and it is fun clowning around with explosions everywhere.

: Zubon

Suppliers and Expansions

This forum post is dead wrong. For those who cannot click through, it is someone complaining about the auction house prices of consumable items and the components needed to craft them. Down-thread, he goes on to rant about price-gouging and arresting merchants who raise prices when items are in short supply. I left after he took the surreal turn of equating (not just comparing) the expansion to Hurricane Katrina and calling for tools to report and perma-ban sellers the same way that gold-spammers are banned.

We have covered this before, but let’s refresh for the economically illiterate. When supply is low, you want prices to go up. This is especially true in a MMO market for crafting materials, where the cost of entry is almost nil. If prices do not rise, supply will not rise, because people have better things to do with their time than farm materials for a few silver pieces (while getting mail and /tells about what horrible gougers they are). Higher prices induce more people to sell, which brings back lower prices with more supply.

Consider the original poster, who we will refer to as the whining, greedy destroyer (WGD). WGD sees the new expansion pack and wants to experience the new content. Does he want to log on an alt, grow tea leaves, make buff food, and transfer it over? Does he want to grab a different alt, run around the previous expansion’s zones to gather materials, craft consumables, and transfer them over? No, nor did he plan ahead on any of those. WGD wants to go do the new content now. He wants to raid and run skirmishes, which produce few to no consumable components. With a worldview that even Karl Marx condemned, he wants to consume without producing.

WGD instead wants someone else to do the farming and producing so he can consume. And he wants them to do it cheap, with a smile, instead of playing with the new content. And they should be banned if they will not. I mean, with all the extra gold being pumped into the economy by having higher level enemies, why should crafters get any of it? WGD has also missed the point that banning producers leads to even less supply. Because nothing helps the situation like actively making the problem worse.

If you think prices are too high, cash in. Leveling a gathering skill is quick, so you can even start from scratch. Farm, sell, and profit until prices are too low for it to be worth your time to farm and sell. If prices are too high for you to buy, but too low for it to be worth your time to farm and sell, why do you think it is worth anyone else’s time to farm and sell to you?

: Zubon

If you want to argue that there should be no crafted consumables, and everything should be available cheap on an NPC vendor, that’s a different design argument. This is just the stupidity of making a outraged claim to others’ time.

Interview with Undead Labs’ Jeff Strain

Jeff Strain over at the brand, new Undead Labs game studio took time out of his busy plane-hopping, zombie-stomping schedule to answer a few questions on the studio’s newly announced zombie console MMO.  (My real name is Zach so don’t be confused, but also don’t go spreading it around in case nasty lawyerssess finds me.)  Read on after the break to hear everything from velociraptors, the “MMO” term, and a debatably good place to hole up against a horde of zombies.

Continue reading Interview with Undead Labs’ Jeff Strain

Pre-Buff Nerf

Your game is balanced at the cap. Your new expansion pack raises the cap. How can you let players rise further without completely disrupting things? Nerf everything, then let the players work to get back to where they were. Then launch the next expansion pack.

Do I need a developer quote for something we have seen on so many major expansions? The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ is the one nearest to my vision. At the end of Shadows of Angmarâ„¢, players had quite respectable Block/Parry/Evasion percentages, some avoiding the majority of attacks. Percentages are dangerous things: they automatically scale, and once you’ve reached a certain point, you cannot give more without giving the enemies an ability like “evasion penetration” that feels like a Burglar nerf. When Mines of Moriaâ„¢ launched, those percentages were all changed to BPE ratings, which were much larger numbers that translated to much smaller BPE percentages. It was an across-the-board nerf to defenses. This, in player relations speak, was done to create the opportunity for future character increases (i.e., work your way back to where you were).

For Siege of Mirkwoodâ„¢, several other percentages and numbers were changed to ratings. Who would like to guess whether the rating translates to a smaller percentage than it used to be? Continue reading Pre-Buff Nerf