Category: General

General

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Static Grouping

For those of you who do not use the term, a “static group” is a way of approaching MMOs and similar games where you and your group of friends each have a character set aside strictly for playing together, all of you. For pen-and-paper players, this is just how you did it: you had your group, and you played together. You did not solo and you did not PUG. The Casualties of War have static groups for several games, and I joined the LotRO group once I found out it was on Landroval. Wednesday, 8pm Central, we all log on and run through a quest hub or two, maybe half an epic book.

Over time, you will lose members. It can be hard to fit someone new in except when you switch zones, because they will not be at the same quest point that everyone else is. Active recruiting can be done, and you may want alts who can be moved into the appropriate level range. I am on my third character joining our static group: our first was just who happened to be available and in the level range when Ethic needed another body, the second was my Loremaster, and then I moved to our back-up healer (Rune-Keeper) for when our Minstrel was unavailable. A few others have switched characters as well, as we caught up to old mains or as they decided to play the static group characters more than the once-per-week.

The most critical thing, I think, to keeping this going is also surprisingly easy: double up on key group roles. You want at least two healers and two tanks. If your game has hybrid classes that could fill several roles, great. This is essential because many times someone will be missing, and other times someone will drop out. If you have one healer, and s/he leaves, you no longer have a group. I switched to my Rune-Keeper when we needed that second healer, and I have been the primary healer for twenty or thirty levels now. I say this is surprisingly easy because people lean towards group-friendly classes if they know they will never PUG or solo. We have had a Hunter and a Champion in the group at times, but we have also gone without any primary DPS classes for months. Lots of support, lots of CC: all those roles you might want to play but could be painful to solo. We also lean towards group-friendly specs, and I wonder if I am the only Rune-Keeper leveling up with almost entirely healing traits slotted.

City of Heroes will eventually have its perfect version of this with multi-member leveling pacts. You will be able to bind a group together so that all experience is shared. Even if Bob misses a night, he has the exact same xp total as everyone else. City of Heroes also makes less strict static grouping easier, as all missions are shared instances that everyone gets a bonus for completing. The most flexible version, however, came in City of Heroes/Villains superteams. Someone designs a class template that works well with itself, say have everyone be a Radiation/* Defender or */Radiation Controller. Then your team is whatever 8 people are online at the time. You all have group-friendly builds because you never expect to solo, including all those Leadership toggles that are weak alone but stack nicely. I was fond of Brutal Speed, a villain group with all AE damage Brutes and Kinetics Corruptors. No one took the Fitness pool because triple-Speed Boost makes it irrelevant; everyone took the Leadership pool. Take 5 from group A and 3 from group B, and watch the wrecking ball fly. Superteams add flexibility by making everyone replaceable, so they can keep going long after half the people get bored and wander off.

Lifetime subscription games add one other bonus: if I had a monthly fee, I would not pay to play 2 hours per week. Even if I am bored with LotRO, I can still be interested enough to play 2 hours per week. The lifetime accounts keep people around for the static group that needs more than a year to reach the level cap.

: Zubon

The Breakups

I unsubscribed to Dungeon and Dragons Online today.  I really only subscribed to get the 1000 points, which was all I needed to buy the 32 point build.  Now I have a dual-wielding khopesh paladin, and all is well.  They will still get my money in non-monthly ways.  The breakup was easy.  Logged in to the master account.  Do you want to unsubscribe?  Are you sure?  Done.  If you want to help us with an exit survey, that’d be swell. I almost had to search to find that last sentence it was so inconspicuous. The relationship we had wasn’t working, but the breakup was clean enough to tell me we could still go have a beer once in awhile.

The so-called number 1 MMO was a different story. She started crying, showing me cute and “memorable” pictures of stuff we might have shared.  I had to scroll through her sob story of how she might change for me, and then she begged for help.  All I could say while wishing my friend would call now telling me my Aunt died was “it’s not you, it’s me.”  By the time I got away I was embarrassed for her.  Would I have to go through this every time I wanted to hang out with her?

Like Dan Savage, I seek to employ the campsite rule outside of… well, campsites.  I want to constructively tell the devs why I am leaving because it can only benefit everybody.  But, when I am being paintballed with marketing cowdung my constructive thoughts go right out the window.  On the other hand, when it is clear the company respects my time and money, I will actively seek out the feedback link.

–Ravious
put a leash on her, turkish

Duty to Tweet

In our continuing, sporadic monitoring of Web 2.0, we note a news story with Eugene Volokh’s comments on an arrest for failure to Tweet.

“We asked for his help in getting the crowd to go away by sending out a Twitter message,” [Det. Lt.] Smith said. “By not cooperating with us we feel he put lives in danger and the public at risk.”

I must confess that I too, having no Twitter account, did nothing to stop the problem. I apologize to anyone who has been damaged by my lack of 140-character updates. Ethic, however, is Tweeting.

: Zubon

Content Managers

While I am enthusiastic about consumer choice, I am displeased with the number of competing game management programs out there and their assorted exclusive deals with various games. I am not quite to the point at which I will skip buying a game because it is not available through a given distribution network, but I am tempted, especially when some have online multi-player only through some other service, which may not be the one I used to buy it. I don’t need more log-ins, and I don’t need more networks sending me e-mails and pop-ups to suggest buying more things from them.

As our cell phone using outside the US know, interoperability is not a strong point here. We finally have it with most instant messaging and text services. Come on, team, let’s get our game networks linked up.

: Zubon

One-Click Update

Auto-update is a wonderful feature for content management systems. Steam will update my games while I am not paying attention. Several other producers have similar updaters. These are great. If I need to plan ahead or budget time, I am less likely to play. PC games will benefit to the extent that they resemble console games: push the button and it works.

An absolutely necessary feature is that the game can update itself without my babysitting it. Give me an “Update now?” button and otherwise leave me alone. If I need to manually re-start the program several times, I am going to get bored and wander off half-way through; that other company over there has games that work when I click them, and I only have so much time to wait today.

The worst version of this comes from games that update patches successively, instead of automatically bringing you to the latest edition. As they say on the internet, FAIL. Update, apply, update, apply, update, apply… This can be acceptable if it is one-click, so I can let it run when I go to bed. This will not be acceptable if it goes through a lengthy version of that when I want to play.

The worst offender I have seen is a game still in beta. I appreciate that they have frequent updates, but it updates one patch at a time, and each needs me to click, “Yes, download”; “Yes, install”; “Yes, finish.” It might also ask me to manually re-start the game after each “finish,” but I don’t remember because I stopped thinking about those clicks one day when I tried to get through about 10 patches. I have spent far more time downloading and updating that game than playing, and if just getting the game on my computer is that tedious, my hopes for the game itself are low. I understand that different guys program different things, so one system does not reflect another, but if your game is already not fun before I even play, that is a bad sign in the same way that a lousy, non-skippable tutorial is.

: Zubon

Psychology to the rescue

Here’s a simple solution to curb the inevitable overpopulation of Jedi characters in SW:TOR. We’re already expanding on the lore as it is with those weird new classes, so what’s one more spot on the leopard anyway? Just add this bit:

“The venerable Jedi knights search far and wide throughout the galaxy in a constant search for force-sensitive individuals. Those with the ability are brought in to be tutored and trained in the ways of the force, and are able to wield impressive powers that put them above most other living beings in the galaxy. Training, however, is grueling and in order to safeguard the purity of the force and keep their numbers manageable, all new Jedi initiates undergo a cleansing ritual in which their testicles are removed.”

Let’s see how many go for that once it’s made canon.

Goodbye To You

Since no one is reading on Thanksgiving anyway, let’s serve up one of those song posts that no one cares about. As is often the case, this is a break-up song. We have relationships with these games, their communities, and our guilds, sometimes far more emotionally involved and dramatic than our romantic entanglements.

This one goes out to all of you in on-again, off-again relationships with your game of choice. You just keep going back to him, don’t you, no matter how abusive the relationship may be? At some point, you have to accept that the dream has died and move on, no matter how much time you have invested. That investment is never going to pay off. Don’t worry; you’ll find a new infatuation to keep you company, and here is Michelle Branch to sympathize while you’re on the rebound.

I’ve been searching deep down in my soul
Words that I’m hearing are starting to get old
It feels like I’m starting all over again
The last three years were just pretend
And I said

Goodbye to you
Goodbye to everything that I knew
You were the one I loved
The one thing that I tried to hold onto

Buffy fans may recognize this from the end of “Tabula Rasa,” an entirely appropriate use of the song.

: Zubon

“Zubon, don’t be so hard on yourself about the song posts. No one cares about the other posts, either.”