Category: General

General

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Lori Drew Dismissal

While it will not become final until filed next week, Lori Drew’s conviction has been dismissed. This is important to gamers and other online folk, because the government’s theory in the case was that any violation of Terms of Service should be viewed as the same offense as hacking (“unauthorized access”), and therefore a federal crime. This would be a fun way to get rid of certain people we don’t like, but is probably one of the less intelligent legal theories to come out of California recently.

: Zubon

Gated communities

People complain a lot about the “gear gating” in Lotro. If you want to fight the new boss, you have to get the gear from the previous raids. We just want to experience the content, even if we can’t beat it with a PUG group.

When I think of it, isn’t almost everything in an MMO gated in one way or another? You can’t do everything in the game right from the get-go. If you want to fight that boss at all, you’re going to need to level up. If you want to get access to the zone he’s in, you’re going to have to do the last quest in a chain of quests that grant access to Moria. If you want to do that quest, you have to do all the pre-quests.

MMOs are all about gated content. You can’t meet Boba Fett until you do all the pre-quests. You can’t try the Battle of Lothlorien until you’ve earned enough reputation points. You can’t wear the cool armor until you get the drop. You can’t fly the cool ship until you save up the cash. You can’t summon the cool monsters until you do the quests to get them, and that’s only after you do the quests to become a summoner and all the leveling needed to start the quests. You can’t ride a chocobo, a horse, or a boat unless you’ve done the quests and have the needed level.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t completely hate gating. It’s necessary in a way. If I play Mega Man, I expect that I’m going to have to beat cut-man if I want to gear-up to kill made-entirely-of-paper man. And I know I need to beat every level and every mini-boss before I kill the last boss. But those are solo challenges.

I’m not expected to wait for a group of other mega men and women so that we can take down cutman. When the boss dies in Mega-man, I’m not typing /roll hoping that I get to be the one who wins the gun I need to fight the next boss. And the length of the levels doesn’t exceed an hour.

Gating of some kind is good. I like that story quest 1 leads to story quest 2. But gear gating with rare-drops, long instances, stupidly difficult bosses, or horrible grinds isn’t fun. It’s frustrating.

IP Onslaught

I am not sure what I think about this.  38 Studios has a dream team of creative minds.  R. A. Salvatore and Todd McFarlane alone could create an Arcadia beyond most mere mortal’s dreams.  Add in all their concept artists, game designers, and even coders (they have imaginations too!), and of course a great world is going to be created.

That being said, I feel like a bipolarized consumer of intellectual property (“IP”) when it comes to MMOs and offspring media.  Continue reading IP Onslaught

Learning Curves on the Shooting Range

My wife hesitates to try cooperative multi-player games because she does want groups depending on her to do something she does not know how to do. If your tank does not know her job, you wipe. If this is your crowd controller’s first time in a complicated fight, you may be in serious trouble. This worked fine in City of Heroes: not only could she solo for almost everything, but when she did group, she was a Scrapper who did not care about dying. There are very few cases in CoH where anyone cares if the Scrapper dies or has less than the perfect DPS setup.

As I am learning Team Fortress 2, I see that, but there is another factor: many of the people shooting me already know what to do. There are nine classes to learn, most with some special feature, six of whom have three additional options for their equipment; there are also all the maps to learn, some with multiple stages, all with their scattered refills, control points, backdoors, ambush spots, ramps, etc. While you are trying to get the swing of all this, one guy is lobbing pipe bombs at you, and you will be shot in the head in you pause in a sniper’s field of vision.

Some things are more intuitive than others. Protect this point, check. Move the cart along that line, check. And then you find that the map has multiple vertical levels, a little room with ammo and health, back stairs that everyone else on your team seems to know, and windows that you may or may not be able to shoot through. While someone with a flamethrower is leaping around the corner at you.

One of the great barriers for PvP games is that they are not newbie friendly. If veteran players are alongside green recruits, that is great for training the new guys and integrating them, and horrible for having their first night of play involve being shot in the head twenty times by guys they never saw. TF2 is kind enough to give you a picture of your killer, so you can see where those snipers are after someone kills you.

: Zubon

Like WoW

Describing Aion as “WoW with wings” caused one commenter to conduct a whole review and ranking system comparing, in his opinion, which MMO was most similar to Aion.  As was to be expected, it was differentiated from World of Warcraft at every possible instance.  Comparing an new MMO to World of Warcraft is a pretty common occurrence throughout the MMO blogosphere and game forums.  It is damn near the MMO locus.  Yet, there is much to differentiate even Runes of Magic ffrom World of Warcraft.  So what does WoW-like mean? Continue reading Like WoW

Enjoy the Maze

A behavioral scientist is a type of psychologist who spends a lot of time putting rats through mazes. Sometimes it’s a big maze, sometimes it’s a very small and simple maze. The one thing they all have in common is the cheese at the end.

The rats behave consistently. They move through the maze as fast as they can to get to the cheese. That’s just natural reward seeking behavior. Every rat we test is always going to get to the cheese as fast as they can. At no point do the rats ever slow down and just enjoy the maze.

Yet, our MMOs keep asking us to enjoy our maze. In the case of Lotro’s summer-festival maze, they mean it literally. But I wouldn’t be going through that maze were it not for the reward. I could get a new wall-paper for my house or a new fish-slap emote!

Our video game masters don’t want us reaching the end of the maze and getting full too quickly… so they ask us to slow down. We don’t. So they make the maze longer. They tilt the maze so that we’re struggling to go uphill to get to our cheese. Bastards! Why couldn’t they just make our maze more complicated and puzzle-driven? Then at least I’d feel smart when I beat the other rats there. Feeling smart is an especially nice little piece of cheese.

Really, if they wanted me to slow down, all they have to do is drop little bits of cheese all throughout the maze. Then I’d actually have something to stop and enjoy.

Player Respawn Timers

Most death penalties come down to lost time, in its various incarnations of lost experience points, item repairs, corpse runs, and debuffs. As death penalties become increasingly light, one type almost invariably remains: you wasted the time you spent failing, and now you need to run back to continue. (If you die in a group, you may just sit out a while until rezzed, hoping your group does not wipe at -1 member, or a shorter time with -2 members during the rez.)

This time-to-return can be very important. If it is very short, and the death penalty is otherwise small, you zerg things: just keep dying and coming back until you get through it. It is a measure of how far we have gotten past meatspace that we can now intuitively see solutions that include “die and come back” as part of viable plans. To take the first few examples that come to mind: our LotRO static group wiped on an overpull with adds last week, but ran back to clear it easily since we had taken out 75% of the enemies on the first try; LotRO three-man instances are short enough for people to die and come back while someone keeps the boss from resetting, and some turtle-raiding strategies involve planned deaths to reset the stacking DoTs; fights against CoX archvillains and giant monsters often involve multiple resurrections and hospital runs/teleports, and the Hamidon raid usually involves planned near-wipes.

This is usually not a good thing for the game. Continue reading Player Respawn Timers

Zubon, Behind the Curve

I have been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2 this week. This leaves me with little to talk about, unless we want to delve into specifics of maps or what classes appeal to our playstyles. Also, welcome to 2007. That’s not as bad as I thought, since I did not realize it was new when I got it as a part of the Orange Box. I have been thinking of going through the classic games that I missed, then talking about them a decade later. That might feel a bit like saying, “Have you heard about this ‘Pac-Man’? It’s a really neat, maze-based game in the classic arcade style!” But I should play through KOTOR and Planescape: Torment sometime. Yeah, I know. I’ve never played any of the Ultima games either, and only two Final Fantasies (and not even VII). So, while I am on MMO hiatus, I may be talking about some truly random stuff.

: Zubon