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Obfuscation

The opposite of Pixel Click Bosses appears in games that are too eager to give the player data. They want the indication to be clear and highly visible. Unfortunately, the game is still going on underneath those indicators. The game is not hiding the new factors by using too few pixels; it is hiding the existing factors by using too many.

I cited this with Arkham City. Chuck the Sheep is a recent flash game with the same problem whenever you reach a new section of the map. “Congratulations! Welcome to the next area! We’re using font size 72! Oh, and there is a duck flying at you underneath this text!” Guild Wars does the same thing in Tahnnakai Temple. Like all the Factions missions, it is timed, but it has a visible timer because you can lose by taking too long at each stage. That timer occupies the exact same real estate as the NPC pop-up text explaining what is going on.

: Zubon

Oh, and do you want to read what is going on? Every minute you spend reading the quest text is one less that you have to reach the Master’s reward.

Forward Progress

The Guild Wars death penalty is wiped when you head back to town, so there are no permanent setbacks. At worst, you can fail to gain. You will usually come out at least marginally ahead: a little gold in your pocket and experience toward a skill point. After an evening of utter failure, you still gained a bit of rep, added 0.3% towards Cartographer, and banked some change.

Item wear is a minor death penalty and gold sink, but it can lead to your losing progress in a night of play. However many hundred times you are supposed to fail a raid, you are losing each time you do unless the raid comes with enough trash to pay for your repair bills (and that is just wrapping in the farming you could do outside the raid). You have heard of people hitting their heads against a wall so hard that all their armor broke and they could not afford to fix it. Then there are the expected consumables of potions, food, scrolls, etc. that get burned for each attempt. Those are dispiriting evenings, when you leave with less than you started with, and that experience cannot be wholly beneficial for player retention (which is funny when the game that avoids it does not have subscribers).

EVE Online is a game where you can lose everything you own but keep making progress because skill training is time-based. You are supposed to lose ships over time. Don’t get attached. Even if you are down some ISK, your skill points keep increasing.

There is something to be said for a lack of consequences. It’s a game.

: 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

[GW2] Unicorn Costumes

I am pretty much done working on the my Guild Wars Hall of Monuments. I am at 35 points, and while I would love 40, I just don’t have the will to grind those last few. Recently, I’ve been going through archives of this and interviews of that. I had the sad task of cleaning out my burgeoning RSS feeds of some of ye ol’ dead blogs. So I’ve been re-thinking much of what has been promised or mentioned in Guild Wars 2 that is far from being the topic du jour. The link that ArenaNet created for players between its two games is one of them.

I love my time in Guild Wars, and I love that ArenaNet thought to honor the players in the sequel. I don’t believe we will be getting any “pay-2-win”-type rewards, but it will be neat stuff. Everybody must want an Orrian baby chicken, right? Yet, the chicken is part of the new hotness. The few items that strongly remind me of the original Guild Wars are the Fellblade, Fiery Dragon Sword, Black Moa, and Black Widow Spider, and a scattering of others are reminiscent of my time there. I know that the Wayward Wand and Ice Breaker are in the original game, but they just don’t hold that this-is-Guild-Wars tone. Continue reading [GW2] Unicorn Costumes

[GW] In Medias Res?

Flipping to the Factions campaign with a Nightfall character, it feels like some important story elements were left out. No no, don’t tell me, I can work it out from inference and wiki, but again pretending that you had not already run through Factions, imagine the new player.

There is a plague in Cantha. That sounds bad, and I’m objectively anti-plague (outside the Epidemic skill), so off I go. I meet up with Brother Mhenlo who is an old friend of my character that I’ve never met before. I’m from Istan, who’s this white guy? Oh, he’s someone from Tyria who I meet when I start a Prophecies character. Who apparently trained under Master Togo and, what, did a tour of duty as a healer with the Sunspears? Is that where I met this guy? This NPC is far better traveled than I am.

I was called into Cantha to deal with a plague. Afflicted monsters, check, I’m on this. The plague rots the soul as well, check. First mission, lots of Afflicted, big fights and it ends with Shiro. Shiro is the guy behind the plague, and he is some sort of death god or spirit guide who is breaking the death god rules to take over the mortal world? But he was just in a cinematic, alive and talking to a fortune teller? Vizunah Square is only the third mission in this campaign, but there seems to have been a lot of exposition in that prologue, unless the Factions players are also just along for the ride until things get explained later.

I’m apparently saving these people from a plague and a death god, and I’m off to become some form of ascended being to facilitate that. I haven’t gotten a chance to care about the people I’m supposed to be saving. Most of them seem to be named “Canthan Peasant,” and they live in what appears to be a ramshackle slum that covers a third of the map (big town, desperately in need of some zoning laws). Folks referred to Factions as the quick campaign, and things are indeed moving very quickly. Plague, death god, run across an entire zone, assassins, NPCs on your side who seem to hate you, different assassins, plagued assassins, keep running across zones, more scornful NPCs, take a different winding path across that zone, escort missions with suicidal NPCs, and they’re all timed missions. Go!

: Zubon

[GW] Your Thanks Are Enough

Today I found the quest Too High a Price. There is a loan shark involved, and “I tried to return the money, but he is demanding that I pay him a fee of 250 gold! We do not have that kind of money.” The quest reward is 175 gold. Maybe it takes NPCs a long time to make 75 gold. The player, of course, takes the money from someone who needed a loan shark to afford life-saving medicine, in a setting where a plague is transforming people into monsters and potentially devouring their souls.

One notion I like about GW2 karma is that the rewards make more sense and you should feel less like a jerk for taking things from the poor people you are supposed to be helping. The farmer has some spare vegetables, or will give you a good deal on buying sheep.

: Zubon

Nerdview

I drove to Chicago yesterday. I-90 splits to local and express lanes once you are in the city. Ideally, you stay in the express lanes until the next opening back to the local lanes is the one before your exit. For that to work, you need to know when the lanes re-merge. The signs helpfully explain that the next exit from the express lanes is at Pershing Road. Great. Is Pershing before or after my exit? What number is the Pershing exit? This sign is a helpful reminder for people who already know where they are going, but not if you are just coming into Chicago and do not know what order the roads are in.

Our friends at Language Log define “nerdview” as “writing in technical terms from the perspective of the technician or engineer rather than from a standpoint that would seem useful to the customer or reader.” This is probably their best example, while our friends at Popehat present this gem that looks incomprehensible, becomes clearer through the comments, and then becomes fully comprehensible but completely useless after an informed commenter explains that the somewhat-reasonable explanation is not the true one (assuming he did not make that up).

In gaming, we might call this newbie-(un)friendliness. This has been a theme in the recent Guild Wars posts, both about the game and the community: the explanations of what to do assume that you know what you are doing. The developer or experienced player may have great difficulty dialing his knowledge back to the newbie, and then there are tiers of newbie because some people are completely new to the genre and some have experience with similar games, and then the experienced players need to unlearn what they have learned elsewhere.

Some games and communities do this intentionally. Developers usually would prefer more customers, but some like to keep their community small. Some players just don’t like to bother with newbies and want to keep casuals, trolls, etc. out. It is a form of initiation or hazing: if you are not willing to put up with X, we do not want you here. The original A Tale in the Desert was an accidental example (great community, strongly self-selecting), and I don’t know if Dwarf Fortress is intentionally that hard to get started on. Rogue-likes tend to like to have a painful introduction. Or, as was said about D&D as it left 2nd Edition, “THAC0 kept the riff-raff out.”

: 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

[GW2] The Jotun, That Which Was Lost

There’s a nice new lore article detailing one of the non-player character (NPC) races that appeared in the Guild Wars expansion, The Eye of the North. The jotun are a giant-race, cousins to the ogres. It appears that the giant-races prefer mountains, the ogres getting the Blazeridge Mountains east of Ascalon, while the jotun once held court all throughout the Shiverpeaks. While the story of the ogres is still unknown, the jotun fell in power because of interracial conflict.

Behind the scenes, ArenaNet’s loresmith Ree Soesbee writes that the jotun lore was expanded to show something great that was taken because the jotun race cannibalized itself. They were legendary and possessed the magic and the ability to create huge monuments, possibly before the time of the gods and Bloodstones that brought magic to the races. This leads one to wonder whether the jotun had a hand in the Eye of the North superstructure. Regardless, all that’s left is a mongrel scrap of a race among massive stone monuments without meaning. Continue reading [GW2] The Jotun, That Which Was Lost

[GW] 100%

The first few titles I saw had just a couple of tiers: survivor, drunkard, party animal (I started during a festival, so I had booze and candy before I had a secondary profession). Then I met “Cartographer.” That is normal, an achievement for exploring the whole map. It starts at 60% and tiers up, makes sense.

I did not notice until this weekend that it goes all the way to 100%. This explains much that I have seen in the wiki. Zone descriptions talk about how the docks count as 0.1% of the map, or you can get an extra pixel by “scraping” the walls of a zone, or that 101% is possible. When I was thinking that you were done at 80% or 90%, that seemed super-Completist. Now I’m worried that I need to step foot on almost every square centimeter of the world if I want to add that to the Hall of Monuments.

I am saving that one for once I start trying hard mode vanquishing anyway. I just feel for folks who were stuck at 99.8% and spent weeks scouring maps for the dozen pixels that needed to be stepped on because they had an invisibly brief lag spike one day while pushing against a rock.

: Zubon