When playing Dominion, and your team has fewer points capped than the enemy, chanting “defend” is not the winning-est plan.
: Zubon
When playing Dominion, and your team has fewer points capped than the enemy, chanting “defend” is not the winning-est plan.
: Zubon
Still in it. Consecutive Dominion games were 4-on-5 and then the matchmaker set me up with 3 people who were on their first game of Dominion. Other games I’ve won by more than 400. As far as I can, it’s completely random who gets the epicly horrible team.
I’ve had the useful advice of “get better.” Okay, I’m consistently #1 on points for my team. I’m not sure how to overcome the whole “team” problem in team PvP, except for always bringing a pre-made team, and we’ve discussed that one at length already.
: Zubon
I’m apparently pretty bad at League of Legends, including the basic requirement of being able to field a 5-player team. I had 4 games in a row that went 4-on-5 for at least half the game. The funny thing is, in my entire time playing LoL, I can remember only a few times when the leaving player was on the other team. That is probably attentional or confirmation bias, and I know that randomness is scheduled to balance out over the course of 400 hours, but you lose the enthusiasm for those 400 hours after repeatedly losing due to perverse randomization in team composition.
I’m not suggesting that there is anything odd going on with a random number generator or anything like that. We should expect to see streaks in coin flips. And, given coin flips, there is no reason to expect the next series to be anything other than distributed according to binomial probability. But players can hit gambler’s ruin, get frustrated, and quit, which is a problem for the developers if this drives away paying customers. This is why many games have anti-frustration features like CoX’s streakbreaker that will force a hit after a sufficiently long string of misses.
No, I have no idea how to make that work (fairly) in a team PvP game where the problem is defecting teammates.
: Zubon
In theory, I like League of Legends. In practice, you need ~200 hours of play to get to ranked games, then enough ranked wins to get out of Elo Hell, before you stop seeing so many people griefing, feeding, quitting, etc. As the wiki link suggests, any good player will get through random grief and rise about Elo Hell … over the course of another ~200 hours of play
I have seen less in LoL: Dominion, but I may have just had a good few days. I have also gone days almost every game a 4-on-5 for at least half of it. In Dominion, idiots and quitters are more prominently felt, because capping and defending 4-on-5 just does not work even if the 5 are pretty lousy. One game today featured a player tripling up on the bottom (you usually send 1 or 2), then running past the minions, suiciding into a tower and quitting; the game is decided 30 seconds into it, and now we just wait for the timer to officially forfeit.
It’s a general problem in F2P games: players with no investment have no loss if they’re just there to watch the world burn. Real grognards from games where you paid by the hour (with small communities and active admins) can likely regale us with how you behaved or else. I’m debating how impressed I am that folks will play a game for ~200 hours and then continue to grief/quit/whatever in low-Elo ranked games. I suppose you’ll get xp while being an idiot for those 200 hours, because you keep leveling up win or lose.
I have no idea how the community moderation tools are helping this. I dutifully click the report button after games where folks leave, smack talk, and such, but it’s not like we get a report back.
: Zubon
Also known as League of Legends: Arathi Basin. It is live, a map with 5 capture points instead of three lanes. The overview has information about the new mode. I haven’t tried it myself, but the games should be shorter (~20 minutes).
Of course, quite a few League of Legends games are decided at the 20-minute point, because that is when a team can forfeit, but that’s another story.
Update, having tried it: Wow, that is a MUCH faster game. Team battles start within 90 seconds. I have been ahead 200 (of 500) and lost and behind 200 and won. The map is much smaller, the minions are fewer, and everything just feels very INTENSE NOW GO GO POWER! versus the stately pace of the League of Legends early game with its laning and harassing.
: Zubon
There is one school of thought that thinks F2P means “if you spend enough time, you can experience the whole game for free – paying is just a shortcutâ€. There is another school of thought that says “you will never see the whole game, unless you pay astronomical amounts of money, and maybe not even thenâ€. There’s a real conceptual rift between the two camps, and some games are finding themselves caught in the middle, or transitioning between the two.
— Brise Bonbons
I’d argue “astronomical,” although that depends on the model, and it’s really the models I want to discuss here.
We’re all familiar with pure subscription models, as well as subscription plus a small premium shop (WoW sparklepony, CoX booster packs). WoW, Warhammer, and others now have unlimited free trials along with their subscriptions. Most Western players have limited familiarity with the item shop model in its pure, evil form, although Allods players got a taste. I think it’s clear under these models that you will be ponying up some funds or you will not be getting much beyond the most basic experience; item shop gamers may have been fooled at the onset, but it should become quickly apparent once they’re into it.
The murkier middle comes from hybrid models and games that let you unlock content (“no cover charge”). Wizard101 has a very clear unlock model, in which you just do not get most zones unless you pay for them. League of Legends gives you access to everything, eventually, a little at a time, with some free permanent unlocks and why don’t you just give them $20 to get the handful of champions you really want? Turbine is the headliner for the hybrid subscription/pay to unlock model, with Dungeons and Dragons Online and The Lord of the Rings Online. You could theoretically unlock absolutely everything in LotRO without paying, although you would be creating and deleting characters to grind deeds until your very fingertips wore away.
And there really is tension between people who want to play for free, absolutely free, and those who are willing to pay and/or recognize that someone needs to fund these companies if you want servers to stay up. When I am getting a lot of value from a game, I don’t mind giving an extra $20 to Valve or Riot or whatnot. I look at my Settlers of Catan box and wonder if I should mail Klaus Teuber a check or something, based on the play value received. But I remember having no money, and I can see a bit of that perspective.
And then there are games that are just annoyingly in your face with their pleas for money. See, for example, the LotRO UI re-design that makes the shop the most visible UI item (poor design decision: the shop links are annoyingly present even if you cannot use them to spend more money, such as subscribers/lifetimers at the stables).
: Zubon
Item shops have done us the great service of asking, “How little do you value your time?” Putting a dollar value on what you are grinding for establishes that yes, you really are willing to do something you don’t especially enjoy for a reward worth a few cents per hour.
I mentioned League of Legends referrals lately. For each person who gets to level 5, you receive a 4-game IP boost (cost $2.23, although given the exchange between RP and IP, the value is about $1.00, so I assume people tend not to but those), and at 10 referrals, you get a free champion ($7.50). So a referral is worth about $1, maybe $2 if you can get 10 of them. You should put more effort into getting a free taco. Ah, but here is where it gets fun: people make multiple accounts and refer themselves to get the free champion. How long does it take to get to level 5? Not too long, I’m sure, and playing a few rounds of very low level LoL might even be fun, but people are going through that effort for the equivalent of $2.
See also: entering contests and drawings, where you can computer what fraction of a cent your expected value is. If you drive somewhere to pick up your lottery numbers, the gas you burned was probably worth more than the expected value of the ticket.
: Zubon
Item shops also helpfully raise the question of why you are paying to play a game where, given the option, you might pay to avoid playing (parts of?) the game.
League of Legends faces the same problem that many team-based online games have: other human beings. You are playing 5 vs. 5, and what are the odds that you can get 10 random internet people together without at least one feeding (intentionally or not), trolling, griefing, leaving… at least cheating, hacking, and glitch-exploiting have not been problems I have run into, despite their prevalence in other games. Even if everyone were trying, I don’t know how well the system does with balancing teams. The mix of newb and pro on each team often leads to some kind of balance in the aggregate, but then you have the apocalyptically awful as well as smurfs.
My rage of the day is simply getting a 5 vs 5 game going. Of my last 6 games, 1 had no disconnects. (Connectivity seems to be a commonly observed problem.) Some of those were against bots, so we had 4 vs 5 despite only have five possible points of failure. Even the bots are pretty rough in a 4 vs 5 fight.
: Zubon
Borderlands with all the DLC now costs as much as the DLC, which is 50% more than the base game. (And it is all 75% off on Steam this weekend, so if you meant to try Borderlands at some point, $7.50 is a good price point.) (The Borderlands trailer is still pretty awesome.)
See also ongoing discussion of joyfully spending money on F2P.
: Zubon
If you are attending PAX and do not play League of Legends, I would totally take your Sivir skin code. Because, hey, you’re not using it, right? ;) [Update: thank you Chris Roddam! I am hereby coded. If anyone else has a code but no use for it, two of our blogger friends in the comments were also interested.]
And if you are not playing League of Legends, I would also totally take your referral credit if you wanted to try it out. Because, hey, free champion if 10 of you do, right? ;)
Long weekend for me, so I’m going to beat up some bots right now. Cheers!
: Zubon