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[GW] In the Eddies of the Wind

While I have been thoroughly enjoying Zubon’s adventures through Guild Wars, I had hung up my spurs some time ago. I had vowed to return to the game when the Winds of Change portion of Guild Wars: Beyond was completed. Today marks that day. I wrote yesterday about the long journey to Guild Wars 2, where I suggested we all glance up to the horizon one more time. In that moment there is a peace as the sun and the wind meet at the top of the mountain. The sun warms the soul, but the wind is different. The brings smells and touch. It brings memories.

I have not played any of the Winds of Change except for the small bit I saw at Fan Day, but I am excited to do so. The Live Team seriously makes blood from stones. The love and energy they have for Guild Wars is simply amazing when the rest of the studio is so embedded in the upcoming Guild Wars 2. I hope, too, that they have helped teach ArenaNet how to run a Live Team so that the one for Guild Wars 2 will set off to a furious pace. John Stumme, head of the Live Team, writes a memoir of the main protagonist of Winds of Change, Miku, at the official blog. Continue reading [GW] In the Eddies of the Wind

Newb Boon

You do not need a comparative advantage to be the best at something [FTFY] to enjoy the benefits of trade, nor does your trading partner. Even if you can do absolutely everything better and more efficiently than I can, it will still benefit you to trade with me because you do not have the option of doing everything at once. I may shovel well, but if I am also a pretty good obstetrician, it will probably be more productive for me to pay someone with fewer high-value options to dig.

If you were to start playing World of Warcraft right now, you could make decent money farming copper. The enemies are not gray to you, so you would not be the most efficient farmer, but people who earn lots of gold per hour are happy to give you a bit of it on the auction house. On a non-trade example, when I went back to Asheron’s Call with a fresh account, I financed several dozen levels by hopping a portal to a high-level hunting zone and scavenging a pack of trash loot that players left in their wake. If I had thought of it, I could have made a service of being the town-visiting pet from Torchlight, if anyone would trust a new character with their stuff/money.

The past weekend was Canthan New Year in Guild Wars. This is an amazing source of money for a new player. Offering to sell Lunar Tokens for 200g and Fortunes for 600g, I was deluged with buyers. There were quests that rewarded 25 Tokens, and the established players had run them in previous years; they were effectively level 5 quests that awarded 5 platinum. I financed my first set of prestige armor off those. If you could get your newb to Lion’s Arch, you could convert Tokens to Fortunes profitably (if slowly) playing Rock-Paper-Scissors.

An economy that is orders of magnitude above where you are can be daunting, but if you can get involved in it at all, the profits to be reaped are huge.

: Zubon

[GW2] With Beta’d Breath

A more open beta weekend is coming. Of course it appears that this is not the first beta event, but it appears to be the first one that can be discussed by the players. Or rather press, only select press are “in general” being let talk about their beta experience. While Martin Kerstein did say that invitations were only getting started late last week, I have not [yet] received a “press beta pass.” I have, graciously, received one in the past from NC Soft, so you never know.

Regardless, the more I think about this, the more excited I get. Yet I feel like I am walking down a path of no return. It is becoming clearer to me that playing the game in my head is no longer an option. I love all the developer interviews, like the latest PvP roundtable because the passion of the developers is still overwhelming. Yet, I feel that there are relatively no more slots to fill in my brain. Continue reading [GW2] With Beta’d Breath

Shedding the Illusion

I picked up a somewhat recent DC comics collection from the library recently. Reading it, I realized I was not sure which apocalypse it came after. For most of my life, DC Comics has been resetting its world frequently. They do a multi-year story counting down to the apocalypse, a year-long apocalypse, and then a few years of a fresh new universe before starting the next countdown. Someone once said that there were three essential stories about a hero: the origin, the death, and everything else. DC has refined that into a business model. Every cycle, you get a new origin, a new death, and a chance to play with all the best stories and villains that have come before. As with the Silver Age, where stories were repeated because readership was expected to turnover every few years, few readers will be sticking around for enough cycles to get annoyed with it. If you do? Congratulations, you are the sort of fan who will keep reading anyway, so your money is already guaranteed.

I got over this annoyance all at once. Suddenly, it did not matter, so the story could live in the moment. Whatever continuity baggage it may have acquired, your favorite version of Blue Beetle or Supergirl, whatever — you have the story in front of you, and it stands or falls on its own. Every character is now an alternate character interpretation. Everything you like or hate will be reset in a few years anyway, so it does not matter which DC universe this is. The characters may be sixty years old, but they only “exist” in the present.

This is our gaming world. Games start and they end. There is a meta-game about which League of Legends champion is overpowered or how your favorite sports team will do in the next draft, but the game and the season in front of you are what matter. You have one hour to build from nothing to a satisfying conclusion.

And, behind the veil, this is our MMO gaming world. You will come and go, and nothing you do will have mattered except to the people who experienced it. We have the illusion of persistence, but you will quit playing, just like any other game; servers will shut down and everything will be erased, just like any other game. Within your lifetime, the computer environment that ran these games will need to be emulated, because no existing computer will run your MMO without more effort than goes into playing a game off a 5.25″ floppy on your laptop. Someone will have an EQ progression server set up, and others will view them like Civil War re-enactors.

Of course what you lose in this iteration is the ability to tell several categories of meaningful or significant stories. DC’s “Cry For Justice” series, for example, was driven by the death of a major character. The person leading the “Cry” had come just back from the dead, and pretty much everyone else in the room had as well, some of them in the last year. When the Flash ran himself out of existence fighting the original Crisis on Infinite Earths, that was a powerful moment; you cannot repeat it with a half-dozen other Flashes, and it retroactively cheapens it when you resurrect the sacrificed. GW Eye of the North has a story arc that ends with a death that would be much more compelling if the son giving the eulogy had not died five times in the mission leading up to that cinematic.

: Zubon

Lost in the Sandbox

In a relatively rare bit of Skyrim criticism, Chris Sims talks about how the open-ended nature of Skyrim, combined with the mutability of its many choices, led him to lose interest in the game. I think this is a good critique of many of the things I say arguing for open worlds, options, player choices, etc. Some of it is specific to the game, other bits apply more broadly. Most people seemed to take to Skyrim as their own little world, but I suspect we have heard less from those who found the setup less compelling.

: Zubon

I’ll pick up the PC version at some point.

The Illusion of Persistence

I have played a bit of Agricola recently. It drives home the appeal of virtual worlds and persistent online games in that it very much is neither. You do not always want that persistence, but Agricola is an economic game that ends potentially open-ended and just as everything is coming together. You set up your farmyard, you upgrade it, you learn an occupation or three, and you’re done — score your farmyard. You want that Civilization “just one more turn” button sometimes. Of course, you are free to extend the rules and do that, or just play freeform, but that’s not really the game.

The single-player version adds a little persistence: keep one occupation per game (and try to beat a higher score), so you become quite the renaissance person although your minor improvements go away.

Or maybe that’s just my having spent too much time with trade skills in-game. There is something satisfying about the stately simplicity of virtual farming, which I suppose explains part of the success of Zynga.

: Zubon

Useful Agricola resource: common mistakes. I am gratified to see that I was making only one, and minor at that.

Chat Windows

A Tale in the Desert was the first game I played that used multiple chat tabs. It worked differently than most games: non-customizable, and each saved recent message history so that it effectively included the game’s whisper and mail systems. A Tale in the Desert also allowed multiple guilds, and each guild got its own tab.

CoX and LotRO have good implementations: send whatever chat you want to whichever tabs you want. I can have a “guild, alliance, and whisper” tab to make sure I did not miss anything during a fight, then another for narrowing information during raids or dungeons.

Guild Wars has the interesting addition that it uses !@#$% as a first character to let you indicate which channel you’re speaking in. It also uses what looks like tabs (but are really chat type/channel indicators) for that purpose. They combine to a suitable way of maintaining the last channel you talked in and indicating it visually.

Guild Wars also ties its party search and chat systems. Adding yourself to LFG (or for trade) sends a message to the chat window. It facilitates trade spam, which is unfortunate, but it neatly solves the problem of how invisible LFG is in most games.

: Zubon

[GW] The Accumulation of Cloth

One positive change between campaigns is that women eventually got more armor in their armor. At least, it did for Rangers, the class I have been focused on; I flipped through the casters, and they might be cold in the North. You can see in the gallery that men still tend to be more covered, but you will note the big increase from Prophecies to Eye of the North. While the “Elite Studded Leather” armor is a miniskirt and halter (plus the inevitable shoulder pad), the Norn armor defies the Norns by looking downright warm and cozy. It would be good for a snowball fight. The “Elite Druid” armor was the worst offender in Prophecies, with less coverage than the “naked” undergarments.

Viva los pantalones!

: Zubon

[GW] Tickets

Canthan New Year has introduced me to one of the weirdest pieces of game design I have ever seen. You can buy tickets for minigames on the boardwalk. There are three games, and there is no other use for tickets. One of the games is an unexciting whack-a-mole, and it costs 1 ticket to play for several minutes.

The other games are squares of 9 and 16 rings. You stand in them, and there is a random distribution of winners and losers. It costs tickets to play, and you can win more tickets. The end. You can go AFK and stay in your ring, thereby winning or losing in each round until you run out of tickets.

You will run out of tickets, because both ring games are net losers. You can profit in the short term, but if you stand in the ring long enough, you will run out of tickets. If you quit during a positive-sum short run, you can sell your tickets back or play more whack-a-mole.

You can pick up some tokens and Gamer points with whack-a-mole, but otherwise the game tickets are a pure way of converting time and money to points towards the Lucky and Unlucky titles. You otherwise increase them by picking locks (or failing to).

Capping either title in the most efficient way possible will cost you millions of gold and thousands of hours. It is as if they anticipated Cow Clicker, minus the clicking.

: Zubon

[GW] Henchling Variety

It was pretty exciting to realize that you are not limited to human henchmen. You can pick up a Tengu or even a couple of rot wallows. I don’t know why I’d take them over my heroes, but they seem like a decorative touch for players in hero-less campaigns.

It was disappointing to see that Argo does not get Argo’s cry as a henchman. Nothing quite like a AE spell that does 240 DPS for 9 seconds in a game where most things have 500 hp or less.

: Zubon

Less or fewer? I want to say “fewer,” because hp are countable, but I think of it as a pool, like a pool of water, and you use “less” on collective quantities like that.