Category: Lord of the Rings Online

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[GW] The Humans Deserve To Lose

or “NPCs I’m glad are dead for GW2”

On a scale of 1 to suicidal, Prince Rurik is one of the worst escort NPCs in the universe. He’s actually not a bad fighter, but he feels free to dive into large groups of enemies, and if he sees you fighting one group while you try to be his bodyguards, he will take a sharp turn to find more. You must protect him in quite a few missions, and his suicide will lead to mission failure despite the way he dies a completely pointless death a mission or two later. Sara Oakheart from LotRO was a great competitor for “worst escort NPC ever,” as she charged quickly ahead and then cowered, also appearing quite often, but her death meant that you failed an optional side quest, not that the main story arc of the game came to a pause.

I think Nolani Academy is my favorite Rurik moment. He lives in a fort so well planned that a charr scout starts inside and you find the back door by following it out. The idea is to clear the front so that Rurik can come out and proceed safely. If you over-leveled normal mode and are going back, there is a convenient “just let them all come” lever to open the front gate. The problem is that, if Rurik sees you approaching, he will open the front gate to greet you, no matter that there are more than a dozen Charr between you and the gate. That is still the “just let them all come” lever, and Rurik will of course try to solo a dozen enemies that are all higher level than him. The image the game wants you to have is the sneaky skirmisher or assassin, taking out the charr in their encampments, but you are really hiding from the idiot prince.

Many guildmates can be drawn into helping others complete Prophecies just for the chance to kill Prince Rurik when he comes back. I don’t know if GW2 has escort NPCs; I hope not. I don’t know if Undead Rurik will be a dungeon or raid boss in GW2; I hope so. I also don’t know if the charr deserve Ascalon, but the humans certainly deserved to lose it.

: Zubon

On the Same Team

There were two feelings I really liked when trying the GW2 beta. The first is the playground between the sandbox and the theme park. The second, and I have not felt this for a long time in an MMO or even most team-based games, is that the players were all on the same team.

If the design is working as intended,* everyone on the same server is on the same team. If someone is fighting, you should help him. There is no kill-stealing. If someone is on the ground, you should rez him. You’ll get experience points and achievement progress, and then there’s someone else around to help you with the event.

Continue reading On the Same Team

A Stable Bass

This is one of the occasional music posts, so depart here if those annoy you. This one gets the WoW tag: we have a five-person group with three in the flashy front roles, but I’m focusing on the two in the less visible roles. Rather than one song, our music of the moment is Pentatonix in the third season of The Sing-Off. You can see all their performances in this compilation, but I encourage you to pursue the YouTube links for videos from “mrduckbear11,” who posts clips from the show, because the judges’ commentary is actually useful rather than just “the nice one, the mean one, and the overly excited one.”

The Sing-Off is essentially American Idol a cappella, skipping the part where you humiliate the lousy singers. The winners in the third season were a small, young group that was mostly noted for their interesting and risky arrangements. Five people, three lead singers, lots of interesting sounds. Listen to at least a few, and then listen to a recurring theme in the judges’ commentary: their percussion and beat box are great and tie everything together so that their lead performers can shine. Try starting at 4:30 on OMG or 6:08 on the Forget You/Since U Been Gone mix. Shawn Stockman’s phrase is “meat and potatoes”: they are strong on the fundamentals, not just the flair. Compare that to Delilah, another group from season three that started with one of the best performances in the series but was eliminated after a performance with a brilliant lead but a failure of support. The lead on that is actually better than The Band Perry, but the commentary is on-point: it becomes discordant without a base to stand on. Compare to Ben Folds’s discussion of their first performance, when the support worked well.

Do I need to unpack the analogy at this point? We even have the perfect analogue with a 5-person, 3-DPS group. You need those big, shiny numbers to win, but they don’t matter without your tank and healer. It got me thinking about the offensive line in (American) football: it is an unglamorous role with almost no statistics to support who is better or worse, and the camera is on the guy running the ball, but you can definitely tell when the offensive line fails and the quarterback is crushed before he can try to do anything interesting. If you know to watch, you can see the tank quietly being a superstar, but good support is usually invisible. (Grabbing another game, a friend loves to watch StarCraft replays at LAN parties and should about how the player trying to do something flashy or cheesy gets crushed on fundamentals. Grabbing a third, I still play League of Legends Dominion occasionally; people chase for kills, but capping the points wins the game.)

Do you have a favorite fight where the tanks and the healer really take front stage, rather than seeing people compare kill counts and damage meters? Flip back to the mix video and try 2:53, where the background gets center stage, the a cappella equivalent of a drum solo. Part of the appeal of City of Heroes was how support could be strong, essential, flashy, and featured, while a damage source is a damage source, and then there is the difference in LotRO DPS compared to WoW.

: Zubon

This comes on the eve of the Guild Wars 2 launch, a game eliminating healers and tanks, and I’m nearing the end of my time in Guild Wars playing a ranger as a support class.

Balanced For

A level of difficulty entails certain assumptions. Problems arise when those assumptions do not obtain. Most difficulty settings assume some level of experience, either in player skill or numerical balance.

Numerically, a new raid tier assumes a certain gearscore, probably that almost everyone on your team has a partial set from the last raid tier. You could shoot lower or have a DPS check that assumes full tier 12 before you have a reasonable chance at tier 13, but that will lead to easy/difficult raids. The new raid will also assume that you already know all your class abilities and how to use them to counter common situations. Hard mode for the new raid will assume that you have beaten normal mode and know all the mechanics.

Pixel click bosses assume that you already know everything the bosses can do. Well, no, they don’t assume that, but beating them is balanced around that. You are expected to research or fail the first few times until you know what that icon means. If you have the time and resources to spend on first-hand research, you can be a trailblazer. If not, the wiki and Youtube are there for you. If difficulty were tuned to give you a reasonable chance walking in blind, you would probably find the fights trivial when you did not need to spend two minutes reading abilities and thinking about how they interact. (LotRO’s “In Their Absence” update did many things very well, including hitting this balance of fair bosses.)

When I say that Guild wars expects you to have the wiki open, I mean that the difficulty of encounters is tuned around players’ already knowing what those encounters are. You can beat many/most of them going in blind, and the mastery reward almost certainly involves knowing the encounters once you are past the tutorial missions. Later missions are balanced around the assumption that you have capped your equipment and that you have taken time to farm elite skills. With the right skill setup, missions can go from a 5% chance of success to a 95% chance of mastery. Even the hardest missions are not balanced around the assumption of the perfect build, so the perfect build can make it trivial, but an all purpose build may not work for all purposes, and it certainly might not get you to the mission bonus needed for the titles.

Most of us come from a single-player game background, and the “gotcha” moments there are so common that it is actually shocking to have a one-phase final boss. Oh look, I needed to bring two entirely different weapons to the final fight, and I lost half my health for not leaping away from the boss the instant he died. Yawn. Okay, learn how phase two works, then re-load and re-do phase one. Let’s hope we didn’t waste too much time on phase one. Do I sound bored? I’m bored with it. It’s both obvious and nigh impossible to plan for, so the game is effectively taxing you X minutes by not having a save point between boss phases. You know it’s going to try to screw you over, just like you knew a big fight was coming when you found the stack of health and ammo.

That moment is far worse in multi-player games because it needs to be balanced around everyone knowing, so being the one guy who does not know means ruining it for everyone. That’s not fun design. You face lots of situations where there is a briefing before the fight and half the players are just following orders while trying to get some sense of what is going on here. That’s not a lot of fun as either the leader or the follower, and there is a narrow window for groups that already know each other to explore collectively without anyone feeling dragged along or held back … but you’ve already heard my rants about games that need you to bring all your own friends and fun to work (short version: so you might as well play anything because the game is not carrying its weight).

The numeric balancing is clearer. You can demonstrate that X DPS or Y gearscore is needed to reasonably beat a fight. The developers could even post that on the entry screen. Skill and knowledge balancing is much harder.

: Zubon

[LotRO] Premium Barter Wallet

LotRO launched in 2007. Since 2008, I have been saying that the game needs a barter wallet for all the tokens it keeps adding to the game every expansion. I enumerated these in 2009. At the end of 2010, they added a limited version that addressed two types of tokens. For 2012, they are implementing the full shebang, at a cost of $10 per account (or two months of subscribers’ TP).

I certainly have the TP, but something still galls about implementing a feature half-heartedly then charging for the full thing. I have never enjoyed crippleware as a design scheme. No, it’s a “premium” feature, see, it says it right in the name! There is precedent in charging for shared storage, and LotRO needs to monetize lifetime accounts; I expect that this will generate more revenue than it drives away.

: Zubon

Unrelatedly, the LotRO store free sample of the week is the 800 TP Scroll of Combination. Use coupon code 33CDC1.

[LotRO, GW] The Tyranny of Trash

The last instance cluster of LotRO’s previous expansion, “In Their Absence,” was rather good. It had interesting and fair puzzle bosses, a boss fight that involved slapping hobbits, and meaningful trash mobs. Fighting trash took you through a progression of enemies to let you get comfortable with your team, to introduce new mechanics gradually, and to explore variations on those mechanics. The first group might have a few normal spiders with a new poison ability, the second with one bigger spider, and so on until you get to the spider boss fight. Another wing has several types of poisonous goblins, introduced one at a time until the fight where you get to navigate all their abilities at once. And so son. The little of the raid that I saw had genuinely difficult trash fights, in which raids would work out how best to deal with this half-dozen enemies and their abilities given the group composition.

Guild Wars uses more of the standard copy-and-paste approach to trash. Continue reading [LotRO, GW] The Tyranny of Trash

Differing Dailies: Reliable, Rotating, and Random

In our world of quest-based PvE MMOs, repeatable content is a necessity for extending longevity. If there is nothing to do, players go elsewhere. The most popular approach to this is daily (or occasionally weekly, twice weekly, etc.) quests, and that is our compare-and-contrast essay of the day. (Do not steal it for high school English class unless you define many of the terms we are taking for granted.)

More specifically, the topic is how you structure those daily quests. I call some “reliable” in that they are unvarying. The same daily quests are available every day. “Random” dailies will have a pool from which some unknown ones are pulled each day. “Rotating” is the halfway point: a pool that moves in a consistent manner, so what is available is reliably known but not constant.

World of Warcraft is the trope codifier for dailies. When I played (late WotLK), they limited you to 25/day, and everything was always available. That is one of the great merits of reliable dailies: everything is available. There is no artificial scarcity. If you want it, it is there. If you like X, X will be there for you every day. You can set up a routine, and as a developer, you want to promote having your players log in consistently. Consistency is a kind of virtue. WoW also included some randomness, like the daily fishing and cooking quests. Didn’t they extend that with the Cataclysm solo endgame, with so many of the daily quests available per day?

I find randomness good for mixing it up, breaking up routines that lead to doldrums, but it is frustrating when you want something to come up and it does not. If you are randomly picking one of four quests, there is a 53% chance that one of them will not appear in a given week. When instant gratification takes too long, this can be bad. It forces on the player what is probably a good plan (not doing the same thing every day), but players resist being forced into anything.

The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ is another “always everything” game. Skirmishes extended this by giving a daily bonus to a menu of instances you could pull up. That content was usually available at all times, but the quest bonus was 1/day. (I say, “was,” but I presume this continues in Isengard.)

The daily or weekly bonus seems to be the easiest approach. You can get a bonus for doing each piece of content over each time period X. The numerically equivalent but less friendly-sounding version is to have diminishing returns for repeating content.

Guild Wars goes for pure “rotating.” The wiki has a list of when everything is coming up for the 7 dailies. This contains some of the merits of the other two approaches, in that what is available is known in advance and can be planned around but is not a constant each day. Embark Beach is a Schelling point; hundreds of options would spread the players everywhere, while a small set of daily options focuses grouping. Of course, as with random, if you do not like the daily option (any of the 7?), you are out of luck, and everyone with whom you might want to group is being channeled away from you. You do not even get the hope that your choice will randomly come up tomorrow; you can see on the calendar that it will be up in mid-March, that day you will be on a business trip. Guild Wars has the additional interesting bit that you can pick up but not complete the Zaishen missions and get to them tomorrow. I am a new player still going through the campaigns, so if the mission of the day is one I expect to get to later this week, I can store that bonus.

League of Legends has a generic “first win of the day” bonus. You get it for any map, PvE or PvP. That seems to be just a “come back every day!” incentive, as it cannot channel the players anywhere, although there are few enough options that channeling seems unnecessary.

Because I have not played every MMO, the door is wide open for reader commentary on how game X did it. The hard part on doing the comparison is that daily content is usually at the level cap, and how many MMOs have you played at the level cap for any meaningful length of time? Oh wait, you read MMO blogs.

I know which site I am writing for, but please resist the urge to say, “Guild Wars 2 events will solve this” unless you can tie it back to the daily-specific focus. You know how much it pains me to have skipped City of Heroes because their repeatable content has (had?) no time limits on repeatability, although there is a task force of the week bonus.

: Zubon

Closed Doors

This could just be the completist or Achiever in me talking, but players do not like to be told that they missed something and must start over if they want it. We MMO players are usually content that there are cosmetics available as one-time event rewards or such, but if something has gameplay value or is an ongoing part of the game, you can see people going through physical pain to reach it. It is bad enough that single-player games have Achievements that require you to do X before Y or else reload/restart, losing some hours, but how about an MMO where you might have that character for years? MMOs are virtually without consequences, so the one piddly consequence is a proud nail even if it only means you cannot have a title.

City of Heroes used to have the Isolator badge restricted to players who for some reason farmed 100 enemies in the tutorial. No point, no benefit except this, and nothing indicates its existence. You just need to know in advance that it is there and put in the time for it during the most boring part of the game. That is like design decisions duct taped together. That was compounded in Issue 7 with a change seemingly designed solely to taunt the players: one of those enemies would spawn every 45 minutes in the highest level PvP zone. Issue 11 added a mission that let players farm it post-tutorial, and the City of Villains equivalent was always available later via a mission on the tutorial map.

LotRO has “The Undying,” a title track for not dying until level 5/10/14/17/20. If you want to pursue that link, you can see some related unhappiness. Recommendations for getting the title were usually to solo (no PUG risk) and NOT to take the easiest content; you were in a race against the inevitable lag/bug/crash that would kill you, so you needed to get experience at a sane rate rather than trying to farm the weakest enemies. MMO designs that discourage grouping and trying challenging content are not good. The Guild Wars equivalent was even worse (earn more than 1,000,000xp with no deaths, go!), and it was mutually exclusive with another title. That changed in a 2011 update that made Survivor for earning X xp since your last death rather than without ever dying. This helped many slightly unbalanced people avoid going entirely off the deep end.

Feel free to toss in your favorite from other MMOs.

: Zubon

Sometimes I Need That Carrot

I’ve been in a gaming funk for about a year now. I may find something fun for a while, but within a few weeks I’ve tired of it. I don’t have any active MMO subscriptions either. All I have left is MMOs that are subscription free, or ones I’ve signed up for a lifetime account.

I’ve been almost forcing myself to keep playing Lord of the Rings Online because it is still the one game I feel “connected” to. Regardless, as I play less and less, I get more and more lost. I will often log in, pay for my house upkeep, see if anyone I know is playing, and log out. Continue reading Sometimes I Need That Carrot

[LOTRO] Enedwaith Half Time

I just finished Volume 3, Book 2 of the epic line in Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), which means I am over the content hump in the Enedwaith region. I have a few thoughts in no particular order:

I am really digging the really different quest hub designs in Enedwaith. Sure, the chore hub of Maur Tulhau was the low point, but I agree with Vantec that, for at least this hub, chore quests are working as intended.  Echad Dagoras is the first quest hub that branches outward as saved Rangers phase in to the quest hub, while the tribal town of Lhaunuch compresses inward to a culmination of the quest hub in a well-written showdown between the tribesman and Isengard with me as the unbalancer.

My favorite place was the sub-zone of the Mournshaws. It was an overbearing forest at night, but during the day it was relaxed. The dichotomy was pretty well designed. There is no central hub per se, but the Wild Hunt quest chain to seek out the Elder Spirit was pretty good. Turbine has some really good lore expansions sometimes. I quite enjoyed the otherworldliness of the Gloomglens followed with spirit world offerings of the Mournshaws. Continue reading [LOTRO] Enedwaith Half Time