.

Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

.

Lessons Unlearned

One of the resolutions I fail to keep is to stop answering questions.

“Does X do Y?”
Yes.
“I don’t think it does.”

Asking a question seeking confirmation is not useful if you are going to ignore dis-confirmation. This goes for matters of fact or opinion. (I still have a place in my heart for people asking what is the best looking armor. Yes, let’s establish that objectively, this will be productive.) I have, at least, stopped arguing with them, or really with much of anyone. Once I have said my piece, and you have contradicted it, my re-contradicting you will not add anything. You are free to think I’m an idiot for disagreeing with you, and I am free to think you’re an idiot for asking a question when you have already decided which answer to accept.

: Zubon

The last sentence does not apply to your professors.

[GW2] Lost Shores Tsunami

The Lost Shores update is here! I am a little bit surprised that it came well before the Lost Shores event starts (11/16, 1200 Pacific), but here it is. Lots of good improvements all around.

The biggest change, for me, is in the Items section. Now level 80 loot will drop for level 80 players as long as they are playing in level 55+ content. I feel this is fair, and it will stave off most of the issues of low level ‘EZ-mode’ farming. I am pretty sure that the calculated drop rate (i.e., gold/hour) is set according to the content level. Still PvE decompression from Orr is A Good Thing. The other advance is that killing champions and veterans (as well as dirty Sorrowsites in WvW) has a better loot table with a higher chance of getting a rare or exotic. I’ve never rolled an exotic from an open world mob, so I am hoping that now even with the RNG hate of me, I might. Continue reading [GW2] Lost Shores Tsunami

[BL2] Badass Rank

Borderlands 2 uses the usual achievements, but it has its own in-game achievement system in the form of challenges. Challenges award you 1-100 points of “badass rank.” Increasing your badass rank awards you badass tokens. Badass tokens can be redeemed for a diminishing bonus to a stat such as accuracy or gun damage. Badass rank and its bonuses are account-based, but challenges are character-based. If you play the game again, you may notice it to be marginally easier with +5% to everything, but then you thousands of badass rank to approach “+5% to everything.”

Pretty much everything you do contributes to several challenges, with the note that “everything you do” almost invariably involves shooting people in the face. One shot could potentially add a tick to getting criticals with submachine guns, killing enemies with submachine guns, killing enemies with criticals from submachine guns, getting a second wind with submachine guns, getting a second wind from killing badass enemies, killing midgets, dealing corrosive damage, and maybe a few more. That lucky bullet, of course, would need to be from a corrosive submachine gun, killing a badass midget while downed. There are also exploration, loot, and boss challenges, and the inevitable meta-challenge.

The math becomes interesting at times. Few enemies survive multiple headshots from a good sniper rifle, so you will probably complete kills with sniper rifle criticals before you complete sniper rifle criticals (which demands higher numbers), unlike other weapons. As Zer0, kills while using his special ability come slowly because you get one attack per special ability use, while the Mechromancer can hit F and go AFK while psychos die. Level does not matter, so you could round out your challenges by going back to a lower-level area and picking off enemies that cannot hurt you. Of course, that is putting in a lot of effort to get a few points that will eventually contribute to 0.5% bonus, but you are MMO players who grind fiercely for best-in-slot. Also, I accidentally earned quite a few points by putting on a spike shield (thorns aura) and walking through a spiderant nest (tiny enemies that pounce on you). It is enormously satisfying to watch the tiny, annoying enemies immolate themselves for having the audacity to threaten you.

Also, when you complete a challenge as the Mechromancer, she sometimes exclaims, “The completionist in me is like, ‘YEEAAAH!'”

: Zubon

[GW2] The Poetry of Wuv

A ranger watches as the bulk of the army runs back towards the keep. He pats the yak’s head trying to keep the animal’s focus on the road ahead instead of all the bodies of the enemy at the southwest supply camp. The ranger plods along with the yak. He sees and hears sounds of war coming from the western keep. Siege engines are tearing down walls, and the supply is critical to bolstering their thinning defenses. For now the yak will move at its own pace, and the ranger’s thoughts slow down to echo the patient ease of the animal.

The ranger notices now the way the grass sways in the wind. He looks out across the lake to see blue skies. There is no storm portending the doom of a keep today.  A small hill blocks the lake from view, and the ranger watches the local fauna holding court on that pinnacle of their kingdom. A few allies run by headed for war. They wave happily, and the ranger and the yak tramp along in a meditative rhythm.

An enemy appears from the hill. The asura thief drives with sole purpose to end the yak’s life. She succeeds amidst dozens of blows from the ranger and his allies and falls to the ground dead a few yards away from the yak’s body. The ranger and his allies stand above the asura’s corpse for a second in silent pause. Her death being little compensation.

The ranger falls to his knees, the certainty of the yak now gone.

–Ravious

 

[BL2] Morally Ambivalent

Moral ambiguity is a given in Borderlands 2. Vault Hunters come to Pandora to kill people and take their stuff while massacring the local wildlife. They will kill anyone for anyone with an exclamation point … which is pretty much every adventurer, even if they have good reason not to. This is acceptable because (1) you don’t care and (2) the people you’re shooting in the face are even worse, and Handsome Jack calls you constantly to remind you of this.

“Morally ambivalent” comes from characters occasionally stopping to wonder whether they are bad people and should they care about it. Claptrap gives you the first one of those for a few seconds early on. When [spoiler] has a cult in her honor, she spends the entire quest line vacillating about the acceptability of it, flipping between “flattered” and “creeped out,” and saying, “I am a bad person.”

The setting is insufficiently serious to have moral substance. Your archenemy calls you up to talk about Butt Stallion, the horse he named in your honor. It’s dead baby humor all the way down. Zer0 is taking this himself way too seriously. The Mechromancer, however, seems more in tune with the setting, shooting people in the face while shouting, “n00b!”

: Zubon

[GW2] Dev Posts on New Vision: WoW Loot Progression with LotRO Radiance

You can tell it’s not a grind or a treadmill because they say it’s not. Also this “add a new tier of gear” thing is totally not something they plan to do every three months. Only every time they add an expansion pack worth of content.

: Zubon

You’ll be facing WvW opponents who will get the top gear, so let’s add DAoC problems, too. Trifecta! If the horizontal endgame isn’t working as planned, why not pivot to a vertical endgame?

[GW2] Unrealized Aspirations

The horizontal endgame of Guild Wars 2 does not seem to be working as well as intended. Players are using all eight dungeons, but this is not working at all in the open world. The high-level loot is too concentrated in Orr to encourage level 80s to hang out in lower level zones, so non-bot 80s visit the dragons, the dungeons, and Orr. Lost Shores will add an option to that list but not encourage using the 0-70 content. You can find action in the newbie zones, and channeling players together still works pretty well, but most of the world seems very sparsely populated even in prime time (outside the holiday event). The dynamic event model has fewer problems with low density than Warhammer Online, but you group events can sit there for hours, and the same for events not labeled as group content but effectively unsoloable. I am amongst the many people who talked about how you could play in any zone at level 80, so all these good things will come of that, but the reward structure is not supporting that. There are some people who play the content they enjoy without thought of the rewards; they are mostly not MMO players.

You still run into dynamic events that are bugged from launch, and with the less frequent server resets, those can also sit there for a very long time. This lets a lot of players see them, which furthers negativity. If an event can reach a bugged state from which it cannot advance, it will eventually get there, so over time more areas reach bugged states that cannot be cleared. Logging on Sunday morning for my 5 daily events, 2 of the first 4 I found were bugged, along with a waypoint stuck in a bugged contested state from a previous event. This is an uncommon run of luck, but I was not exactly surprised. I am still judging games based on how long you can play until you see a bug, and GW2 is not doing enormously well there.

: Zubon

If they fix the problem from my first paragraph, come back here a month later to hear me complain about how level 80s are swarming newbie events because the problems with scaling let you kill much faster at lower levels.

[GW2] The Next Content

MMO news sites have been popping up this morning (post embargo) with sneak peeks at the content patch for Guild Wars 2 set to drop this weekend. The content patch is titled Lost Shores. MMORPG.com and GW2 Hub seem to have the most depth and commentary, respectively. Be sure to check them out. Thoughts follow.

Southsun Cove 

The new open world PvE map is Southsun Cove. It is a playground for level 80 characters fighting a new enemy, the karka. However, during the lead-in event everybody can be upleveled to play on the map. Afterwards it is losing that upleveling ability.

Besides all the usual goodies, there isn’t much to comment on yet. More content is good. Less emphasis on Orr is good. New enemy type is good. What I am most interested in is to see how ArenaNet responds to the current playstyle of level 80 content. It seems they’ve emphasized the karka’s armor to the point where there is a new shader in the game to show armor falling off. Will this armor mechanic shift the current “area of effect” spam meta?

Regardless, I think it will be a nice change of pace from Orr – bright sandy beaches with heavily-armored, four-legged Half Life 2 creatures. Continue reading [GW2] The Next Content

[BL2] Stupidity Is the Only Option

Borderlands 2 is very fond of sending you into obvious traps. I keep running into sidequests where you are clearly going to be betrayed, to the point where the quest text makes sarcastic comments about it. The main storyline requires you to take orders from someone while she is betraying you. It goes beyond stupid to suicidal.

Also under the heading of traps, playing a sniper character is increasingly unsatisfying as fewer and fewer areas spawn the enemies before you are in aggro range. Maybe this will reverse at some point, but all the bandits are in their huts, the skags are in the holes, and the rakk are over the horizon until red dots appear on your screen. Robots fly in from orbit and enemies burrow up literally beneath your feet. If I could blast those huts with my rocket launcher, that would change things, but the enemies just don’t exist until they are within pistol range. I need to play multiplayer and send someone else in as bait first. I’m sure the enemies will spawn into that obvious trap.

: Zubon