Category: General

General

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So, what am I missing?

I have to conclude I’m either missing things, or doing them terribly wrong. Just to give it a fairer shake (and to keep Psychochild from hitting me below the belt) I went ahead and grabbed a trial key for Fallen Earth. I didn’t think it twice when I saw them available because, one, that was one of my original semi-complaints -the lack of a trial- and two, it wouldn’t be the first time I had to eat crow about a game I originally disliked for whatever reason and ended up winning me over big time. I don’t mind being proven wrong if I end up with a good game.

Problem is, it’s not really clicking. In fact, something funny happened; my original complaints about the visuals, while not entirely invalidated after judging the game “the way it’s meant to be judged”(tm), have been lessened. While the rest of the stuff in the game, which I had no way of experiencing from mere screenshots and which I had assumed to be good because of comments from a lot people whose opinion I value, ended up being quite the disappointment.

Let’s go piece by piece, like Jack the Ripper:

Continue reading So, what am I missing?

The Tyranny of Habit

Looking at Borderlands, I was immediately drawn to the class that gets a turret. Ooh, and they can heal! I was secondarily drawn to the sniper/pet class. It took me a few minutes to realize that I had just picked exactly the same thing that I play in every game: support, ranged DPS, pets and tower defense.

Freakishly, playing World of Warcraft was something new for me. My Paladin melees. (It is my wife’s approach: “I have a sword. I hit things.”) I am still not one to tank, but I could.

: Zubon

The 2% MMO

The one thing I hate in DIKU-style MMOs more than grinding, more than the level cap gear-reset, more than content gating is quite simply bonuses.  I hate bonuses because there is such a delicate balance between the growing player stats and mobs stats up the leveling food chain that the bonuses have to appear to be insignificant.

Take one of the best crafted jewelries in Lord of the Rings Online right now, the glowing aureate band.  It has a bunch of strong stat and morale bumps, along with a stepchild bonus to parry rating.  +124 parry rating is about the equivalent of 0.33% more parry chance.  That means that statistically speaking a player will parry 1 out of every 300 attacks made against him or her.  It seems petty.  Was adding the additional parry rating the item dev’s attempt at a joke? Continue reading The 2% MMO

Internet Lesson: Pedobear is a Bad Children’s Theater Icon

The story mirror link does not get more amusing than the initial explanation that it happened, unless you enjoy watching normal humans trying to understand 4chan. In fairness to the theater, if you polled your workplace on who knows what Pedobear is, you would get a lot of blank stares.

Do not poll your workplace on Pedobear.

: Zubon

Metaphor From the Road

You have a great maintenance plan that takes into account the 25-year lifespan of the highway as designed. Each year, you perform maintenance that effectively replaces 4% of the road while doing minor touch-up work on the rest. You are on a different span of the road each year, only coning-off 4 miles of a 100 mile span. You proudly regard your system that keeps as much of the road as possible in as good of shape as possible, this year and every year.

To your users, it looks like the road is continuously under construction and never fully available. The four miles of construction lead to backups that extend further, and they are there every year. Why is this road always breaking down? Can’t they build it right?

: Zubon

Reverse Ad-Libs

Elder Game is one of my favorite MMO blogs, and each post is worth its weight in gold (especially at about 12 a year).  Eric gave me a morning chuckle hypothesizing the creation of Champions Online’s profanity filter such that the filter started attacking NPC text.  When NPCs are saying stuff like ““put that $#@*^!& a pine box”  what do you think the normal MMO player replaces with the censored text?  I think that would be a fantastic April Fool’s joke for an online game.  Create a “censor bot” that replaces a few words in every NPC’s text with the comically stylized cussing text.  It just sucks, especially in Champions Online’s case (according to Eric), when it is not really a joke.

–Ravious
#$%!!@#%

This Week in Sexual Objectification: Mobile App Edition

Pepsi advertised one of its brands last week with an iPhone application (new link) that divided women into 24 categories and provided recommended pickup lines to help you “score” with them. What puts it over the top into real notability is that its developers have embraced Web 2.0 and included a “Brag List” so you can name and share your conquests on Facebook and Twitter. After the world noticed, Pepsi issued the usual non-apology.

Classy.

: Zubon

A DLC Too Far

Borderlands is an online game I am keenly interested in.  Keen enough that I already bought it on Steam for a 10% discount.  In my morning tweets I saw Gearbox write that DLC (“downloadable content”) was already coming for the unreleased game (Borderlands drops 10/26).  Not only was it DLC, it was DLC that players had to buy!  My immediate thought was outrage.  How dare they?  To ask for more money before I even got to play the game I paid for was a slap in the face.  (The last 5-words, in a perfect world, would be written in a self-debasing sarcasm font.)

After looking at the neat DLC pictures of a zombie isle, I had another idea.  Gearbox devs were the good guys here.  They were letting me, the customer know, the specifics of their business plan before people shelled out for the game.  Players that were interested in Borderlands as a service would now have a more concrete understanding of things to come.  MMOs are definitely a service, and so many times we buy the initial offering without having a good understanding of the specifics of the bargain.  How often will we get content updates? How about paid-expansions and their cost?  What exactly does our subscription fee cover? A lot of times it is pure faith in the developer.

Now Gearbox’s DLC has the bonus that it is likely completely optional for Borderlands, but in our DIKU-world, MMO players don’t realistically have that option of choice.  The expansions either raise the level cap, gear cap, or just simply add in new must-haves.  It’s a siren’s song, and stuffing your ears with cotton might mean all your online friends leave you behind.  So it is nice, despite my initial outrage, to have a company show their hand for the customer’s benefit well before they “need” to. 

–Ravious
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