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Quote of the Week: Togetherness

When you play with a set group, much of the ‘content’ is experiencing the stuff together, so even bugs or grind can become a source of amusement because you have 10 people in vent bitching about it and laughing rather than just you smashing your head into it solo.
— SynCaine

This is something I address frequently, but from another direction. If you the player are supplying most of the ‘content,’ it does not matter what the game is. We just need something as an excuse to do it together. I, as the customer, tend to demand that the game keep up its end of this transaction by contributing something, sometimes anything to the process. It is dumb to pay a monthly fee to a company that is not comparing favorably with playing Hearts. Many games contribute negatively, making it harder to play with your friends. Don’t pay for that.

Just because you had a good time does not mean that it was good. “So bad it’s good” is still bad. The items SynCaine cites are still bugs and bad grind, even if you can find a way to enjoy them. It would be objectively better to have good content to share and discuss, rather than simply “misery loves company.”

Our guild has a lovely time gathering for the 30-second cut scene reveal, but the event did not add much beyond creating a Schelling point. We created the content by being there, but we can/have done that nightly be declaring guild events. We had a guild event the night before: the Mad King’s Clock Tower. Many of us had a good time talking, groaning, sharing advice, shouting about norn and charr, adjusting graphics settings, etc. We all got the achievement. We appreciated the art, and we recognized which aspects were not conducive to a good experience.

I am not looking for products and experiences where I get out of it what I put into it. I can get that anywhere. The things I really value give me back more than I put it. Demand more.

: Zubon

Comment of the Week: Mouse Stampede

Next year we hope that the Mad King turns them all into skritt.
— Jonathan

Beyond eliminating the primary problem with the Clock Tower, this also creates justification for implementing strange and pro-social mechanics. The skritt are a hive-mind species, so skritt content should be nigh-impossible solo and potentially trivial in a zerg.

Imagine a path with occasional shinies. They draw skritt or their attention, turning the camera or attracting the character like gravity. Reduce that effect based on the number of nearby skritt, so that one skritt would be be forced to look at the shiny (and maybe zooming in) while a group would be mildly distracted. Imagine if having other skritt around made platforming easier, with platforms treated as wider and inclines less steep on the basis that the skritt are clambering over each other like fire ant rafts. How about “as long as another skritt within a meter of you is within a meter of … a skritt within a meter of a surface, none of the skritt involved can fall”? I don’t know how well any of these would play out in practice, but as opposed to the content where you want everyone else to fail within the first 30 seconds, the skritt are the perfect race for developing mechanics that encourage or require helping your friends to the finish line.

: Zubon

[GW2] On the Sleeve, On the Mad King’s Tower

I had a blast for Halloween in Guild Wars 2! It was one of the best holiday events I can remember. I sadly did not get to participate in the new meta-events in Kessex Hills, Queensdale, and Gendarran Fields, but I made sure to try every other new thing at least once. One whole night was dedicated to the Mad King’s Tower, which was the most  controversial addition to the Shadow of the Mad King.

The lead designer for the Mad King’s Tower, Josh Foreman, has taken the brunt of feedback head on. This amazes me. Not only is ArenaNet’s policy to let their employees have a voice, but Josh is stepping directly in to the line of fire. I believe that this humanizes the relationship between player and game. It reinforces Guild Wars 2 as a service for a community. Continue reading [GW2] On the Sleeve, On the Mad King’s Tower

[GW2] Cooking Tips (Not Spoilers)

Cooking is the only GW2 crafting skill with legitimate discovery rather than following obvious formulas (although Artificing potions can be non-obvious). On many puzzles, people are looking for tips rather than spoilers, so let me give you a few pointers on the skill advancement side.

  • You can use the skill advancement spoilers without spoiling the fun. An optimized list of cooking recipes will use the discovery window perhaps a dozen times. At 400 skill, you still have almost all the discovery fun available to you, and all of it is unlocked instead of having red ingredients you cannot use yet. Your Explorer tendencies will help your Achiever reward, but getting the full Achiever reward will not undermine your Explorer discovery. If you want to play an improved version of Doodle God, it is even better at 400 skill.
  • You will not have access to everything without leveling. Some ingredients are available only after completing hearts. If your main character is not your cook, however, s/he can buy 10 bags of ingredients from any heart vendor, and now you have a full stack in your storage for your cook.
  • In most skills, you advance through discovery instead of grinding. In cooking, you advance quickly and cheaply by discovering a cheap recipe and grinding until it is no longer orange. Bake a dozen cookies, not just one. Consumables stack, so this is also how you avoid filling your inventory. (This also helps for some portion of the weapon-crafting skills, since you can make a stacks of maintenance oils, sharpening stones, and ogre-slaying potions.)
  • Dessert is good. Desserts do follow a pattern, so you can learn quickly through pies, tarts, and cookies. Pies are especially rewarding because you make the filling and the pie in separate steps. Sugar, flour, and water are cheap and endlessly available, butter and chocolate are the same at the trading post, and many karma merchants will sell you fruit in bulk.
  • There is a farm just north of Lion’s Arch. Finish that heart for cheap, readily available produce.
  • Peaches are available in bulk in west Fireheart Rise. Peach recipes give you the difficult points cheaply, and you get the second-best +Magic Find foods in the process.

The discovery aspect of cooking also makes it very different from other crafts in that learning makes it easier and cheaper. The learning curve for the other seven skills is exactly the same curve, so one you know the basic discovery pattern, you know all the recipes for all the skills (+/- 2%). But you still need to farm all those materials, and knowing more does not help that. For cooking, now that you have found hundreds of recipes on your main cook, you can train anyone else 1-400 at a quarter of the cost in 5% of the time. You can get better.

: Zubon

Estimating Difficulty

When A Tale in the Desert introduced barley as a growable crop, they also added a technology that could be unlocked by donating 100,000 barley to a university. How did they get the number 100,000? Nekhmet (one of the developers) grew a bunch of barley, they figured that the players would learn more efficient techniques (ATitD uses player skill-based crafting), and then they multiplied to get a large but not ridiculous number of hours of work. It turned out that Nekhmet was a prodigy at growing barley, at that technology was unavailable for months until ad hoc additions to the game allowed barley output to double and triple.

When Guild Wars 2 introduced pumpkin carving, a few hundred pumpkins were hidden around the world. It was an exploration achievement: find 150 to unlock the title. A technological problem let the same pumpkins respawn after carving, and they spawned on a per-character basis for a per-account achievement, so you could get the title without leaving Lion’s Arch.

When The Lord of the Rings Online introduced Mines of Moria, the dungeon fights that were its endgame were a mass of bugs and exploits, some of which were obviously unintended (stand in a doorway while a door closes: your weapons are on one side, your body is on the other, and the boss cannot hit you) while others surprised the players when they were declared “unintended” (kite the boss around his throne so that it is between the two of you when he uses his devastating area effect attack).

When City of Heroes introduced the Hamidon raid, players found a variety of ways to beat it, ranging from sniping it from beyond its range to capitalizing on teleportation and invulnerability to avoid damage. For months, every technique used was patched away as an unintended exploit. Some developers claimed that there was an intended way to beat Hamidon, but the players never seemed to find the “intended” one, and it is not clear whether it would have actually worked. Hamidon was later reconfigured into a fight with a more obvious “intended” approach.

Guild Wars 2 has a pop-up warning when you start the cooking crafting skill, telling you that it is more expensive in terms of time, silver, and karma than the other trade skills. Cooking is the fastest, cheapest, easiest craft to take to 400 skill, notably having the last points available for a few hundred karma worth of peaches where other skills require dozens of drops or even globs of ectoplasm.

Can you cite a dozen examples from your gaming history where “hard” content was trivial while “easy” content was literally impossible at release? Can you see why I am suspicious of any player claims about how hard something is supposed to be, what the developers’ intent was, or who this is for?

: Zubon

[LOTRO] Horse Vectors

I am at least halfway through The Wold in Lord of the Rings Online (“LOTRO”). The Wold is one of the subzones for Eastern Rohan, and it is intended for characters between levels 75-77. So it is still early in the expansion for me. I do however have my warhorse.

Mounts are a pretty key feature in LOTRO. Before the Riders of Rohan expansions there were two types. A personal mount, horse or goat, could be called nearly anywhere. Its movement controls were basically the same to a dismounted character. The only differences were a significant speed boost and a small health pool for the mount before characters would get knocked off by attackers. The other type was a fast travel mount which followed a set path between towns like a railway car. The only control available was dismounting along the way. Continue reading [LOTRO] Horse Vectors

#tylertweets [GW2] Edition

  • In the twilight of the WoW era (is it?), we must ask again whether mailboxes are essential to the online social dancing experience.
  • The deeper message of the bots is that the game really is that shallow.
  • Vendor+1c: the ultimate expression of ZMP workers?
  • A human plays a charr. The charr wears a Halloween costume. We reveal our selves by the ways we disguise ourselves.

: Zubon

Incomplete explanation, but it’s really just a bit of inter-blog silliness.

[GW2] …Because he was hung over!

I made sure to be in Lion’s Arch at noon, server time, on Sunday. I was not disappointed. The animation and eruption of the Mad King out of the lion fountain was just breathtaking. I was on the edge of my seat. Then it was over. I saw a lot of fuss over the fact that there would be such an event, and ArenaNet made sure that it was a non-essential, momentous experience. For those that missed it, YouTube provides.

There is an inverse relationship between commonness and That Special Feeling. If the cinematic was present at the beginning of each entrance to the Mad King boss battle, it would be less special. If people entering Lion’s Arch for the first time on Sunday saw the cinematic, it would be less special. That people were coming together for a single shared experience that could not be spoiled… that was special. Continue reading [GW2] …Because he was hung over!