Category: General

General

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It’s the Little Things

Should I get excited about updates to Restaurant City? It is probably my favorite Facebook game. In my defense, it is not that exciting, but it added a bunch of new things to click and ways to interact with your restaurant and your friends.’ You can now protect your friends’ restaurants from predatory penguins and sleeping bears. Let me tell you, we often have sleepy bears around my house.

Players now have the opportunity to clean toilets by hand. Joy! If only it were a one-click function in real life.

: Zubon

Computer maintenance is also one-click in Restaurant City. Convenient!

Towards a Perpetual Stream of Events

I like festival time in Middle-earth. There is a festival for each season, and each runs about a month, so either it is festival time now, or it was last month, or it will be next month. World of Warcraft has something similar with its seasonal events. About half of each month is a festival.

As games age and have more events, they should repeat and accumulate rather than cycling out. All seasonal and holiday content can be re-used for future years. (I gladly exempt Kingdom of Loathing‘s Crimbo season from this rule, as I always look forward to the next winter solstice’s insanity. They do recycle all the other holidays, however, and they appear whenever either the real-world or in-game calendar would have them.) Just keep adding a few more each year until the game world is always having some kind of festival. If you run out of seasonal and holiday events, re-invigorate some little-used town with a local event. Have competing local events on the same theme. Come to think of it, having competing potato queens as event quest NPCs would be awesome.

City of Heroes has a slightly different take on this. Instead of adding new holidays each year, they add new events to existing holidays. The previous content still exists, but each year makes it bigger. Halloween features trick or treating and the great pumpkin and costumes and a haunted giant and zombie attacks and the apocalypse and oh my goodness.

: Zubon

Blame November Rain

This week has been really “blah” all around.  There have been some exciting things.  Like a possible new boss battle in Guild Wars.  The Volume 1, epic quests becoming soloable in Lord of the Rings Online.  And of course, the Evil Empire’s RMT sale of drunk panda pets.  It’s all great, I guess.  I would probably care more if it had not rained the past two weekends.

Mostly I have been plugging away at Borderlands.  I gave up on multiplayer.  Yes, I have tried every suggestion (GameRanger, Hamachi, port opening, etc.), and 90% of the time the system refuses.  What drives me absolutely batty is that 10% of the time it lets me co-op and nothing has changed!  Until I see a fix from Gearbox, I am just going to assume I bought and am playing a singleplayer FPS.  And, quite a good one at that.

Last night I decided to head off to bed after turning in a quest, and along the way I got a purple-named revolver that shoots AoE electrical bursts.  I stayed up for another half an hour just roaming around the main zone looking for bandits to electrocute with magnum bullets.

–Ravious
she sure got the boogie

Much ado about not a damn thing

So, as you might have heard, the almighty Blizz is selling cosmetic, non-combat, just fluff pets via their game store. Wow.com has the lowdown. I’m reading people up in arms about this already. I don’t see the problem. I actually think it’s a pretty good move. We talked about this a while back.

As usual, I wanna learn, so if you don’t support this move, I’m all ears. Tell me why. Just to provide some framework, here’s how I see it: I don’t care how much money Blizzard has, they’re still well within their rights to want more of it. There’s little debate there in my book. If they had put these stupid pets as .001% drop rate loot from $NASTYBOSS at the end of $LONGASSINSTANCE, people would have complained. If they had put it as acquirable rewards from a $KILOMETRICREPGRIND, people would’ve complained. It’s cosmetic. It doesn’t affect gameplay. It’s just a bunch of pixels next to the other bunch of pixels you call your avatar. Can’t offer it for free. Work must be compensated, so there you go.

Not even the fact that half of the proceeds from each sale of that despicable pandaren goes to a charity seems to quell the sentiment. Too expensive? Don’t buy it. Don’t like it? Don’t buy it. You think the pets are silly (I do)? Don’t buy them. Simple as that, folks.

There’s a ton of things to grill Blizzard for. This ain’t one of them. I applaud their move let the masses eat cake fluff.

MMO Restaurants

I see this, and I cannot help but think of Anthony Bourdain’s view on restaurant changes.

By now, unsurprisingly, our restaurant was rapidly failing.  I began to see for the first time, what I would later recognize as Failing Restaurant Syndrome, an affliction that causes owners to flail about looking for a quick fix, a fast masterstroke that will “turn things around,” cure all their ills, reverse the already irreversible trend toward insolvency.  We tried New Orleans Brunch – complete with Dixiland band.  We tried a prix fixe menu, a Sunday night buffet; we advertised, we hired a publicist.  Each successive brainstorm was more counterproductive than the one before.  All of this floundering about and concept-tinkering only further demoralized an already demoralized staff.

I sincerely hope free-to-play Tier 1 in Warhammer Online brings an influx of new blood and success to Mythic.  My gut reaction, though, was not hopeful.

–Ravious
let’s call him Bigfoot

Sleep Dep

I am not getting enough sleep lately. My apologies if I am snippy.

Work continues to demand that I show up if I want money, and then there is the rest of having a house and being a grown-up that looked much easier when I was very small. I could deal with just those, but I also enjoy our assorted entertainments, and I have been getting to bed late trying to keep up with them.

I hit 80 in WoW, we have our weekly Casualties of War LotRO night, Borderlands just shipped, I keep hearing good things about Torchlight, I have been trying Left 4 Dead again (Boomer!), Team Fortress 2 is often fun, I have a half-dozen Facebook games that I poke upon occasion, and there are at least two worthwhile new flash games a week. I have Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep next to me, which I should renew at the library, and John Dies at the End by David Wong just got national publication. I have not watched any of Dollhouse this season yet, I am seasons behind on Heroes and Lost (is it worth watching?), a friend has been pushing me to watch Dr. Who for over a year, my brother has been promoting Big Bang Theory for longer, and I have a huge list of shows, movies, and books that sounded interesting on TV Tropes. My RSS feeds send me 200 blog posts a day, I might have that many Facebook updates, however much e-mail, and all the other things I see and do online. Oh, and I blog.

Work itself can be wearying, and I value having so many competing sources of entertainment. Trying to keep up with just some of them, however, keeps me awake long into the night, still typing away as your mom asks if I am coming to bed anytime soon.

: Zubon

Darkness in my Soul

I have seen the Abyss, and it is Pixie Hollow.  My wife told me last night that she and my 3 year old daughter, Claire, were playing together as much as my 6 month old permitted them to.  Claire does not yet have the capabilities to control a mouse (she just likes the scroll-button, scroll buttons, oh yeah, like that heart attack… what), but I have been teaching her to move with WASD and jump off talens in Lord of the Rings Online.  I digress.  Last night I farmed mats for Claire while she slept playing a faerie she randomly named Coconut Rainbowmist.  I am not sure whether this was a triumphant stepstone towards creating a gamer family or something else.  I got points with the wife for actually gaming, which is an activity where I usually cash them in.  Still there is a foreboding presence in my soul that I cannot shake.  Maybe I hit upon some patterned node too complex for my mortal mind to comprehend.  I can’t wait to return to my own niche tonight.

–Ravious
all laid aside disguise but you

Do You Click on Mystery Threads?

My post titles are usually subject headings or literary references. You usually know what you are getting from the title and category, and if you do not care about Champions Online or crafting, you can skip those posts easily enough. I am fond of meta-data that helps us improve the noise:signal ratio.

I frequently see forum posts with titles like:

  • Just one question…
  • Devs, what are you thinking?!
  • ridle me this
  • A humble request

These are just bottles with “drink me” on the tag. There is no indication of what might be inside, and there is a very good chance that it is poison. But there are also some great gems and good discussions. (I just leapt off that metaphor.)

I guess this is a question of how you deal with sources with a middling signal:noise ratio. I like sources near 1:0 or 0:1, because I can track the former and ignore the latter. I am not sure where my cutoff is for willingness to dig through trash in search of gems.

: Zubon

Wow, that last sentence applies pretty broadly, doesn’t it?

Power of 10 Achievements

One way to run achievements is to encourage breadth. Have achievements for doing everything once or a few times. Complete this dungeon, kill ten rats, cook every type of pie. I advocate this for Explorers, of which I am one. It encourages players to see all of your content, therefore extending the time until they get to the end and complain that there is nothing to do, while rewarding long-duration playthroughs. It can increase retention that way while serving as a checklist for players looking for something to do. It can also be expensive, because you need an entirely new thing every time you add achievements.

One way to run achievements is to encourage grinding. Have achievements for doing things repeatedly. Complete this dungeon 10 times, kill ten thousand rats, cook one hundred pies. I advocate this for Achievers, which I am secondarily. If you are going to track and display how many rats Bob has killed, as I think you should, you can then tack awards onto it. This is easy to develop, because you just add a name for each power of 10 for each enemy type. You get that Explorer award for the first kill of each enemy type, then add another tier for 10, 100, 1000, …, 100,000,000. You do not even need names for all of them at the start, because you will have lots of time between the time he becomes Bob the Super-Epic Ratslayer for 100,000,000 rats and Bob the [prefix] Ratslayer for 1,000,000,000 rats. Then add meta-achievements, for having killed 100 of everything. This means that there is always something more to do, more to Achieve, and it can increase retention with a never-ending checklist. Not everyone will pursue it, but if people will pay you to run on an achievement treadmill, set it up and take their credit card information.

The latter idea came to me first, and I find myself turning away from it. First, I would not want to do it myself. If I played a game for 10 years, it might be nice to know that I had killed 2,405,353 goblins, but then again I might see that (or my /played) and think of what else I could be doing with my life, and I certainly do not need the logarythmically extending bars ever before me. Also, I think it would encourage aberrant gameplay. If there is some reward, any reward, for killing ten million rats, someone will do it. You may not like what they do to optimize rat-killing time. Without the impetus to exploit them, certain holes and bugs could just sit there until you get that far down your priority list, instead of having the forums burning up with the implications. You can also burn out players that way, ones who start to see through the grind and wonder why they are killing that next million rats.

I suppose that is a financial decision. Which is the larger pool of subscriber dollars: retention of obsessives or loss of burnouts? Since I personally would not want to be racing that treadmill, I would fall on the “loss” side. But you will always make more money on the mass market betting against my preferences, so let the eternal achievements go forth for greater profits.

: Zubon