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Defining “Nerf”

I had asked whether some scale of ability/character reduction was required before you called something a “nerf.” I think this qualifies:

Balancing Changes:

  • Nerfed Spooktacular “Van Wolfstein” weapon about 40%, and Huntress Ability ‘Piercing Shot’ about 30%
  • Nerfed Bowling Ball & Harpoon Turrets a bit more: bowling ball & harpoon damages reduced by about 33%, attack rate reduced by about 25%, bowling ball projectiles now limited to 6 hits before breaking, harpoon projectiles now limited to 12 hits before breaking.

Crap, and my level 70 is a Squire who focuses on Bowling Ball Turrets. Let’s see 2/3*3/4=1/2, so Squires just took a 50% hit to ranged damage, plus a reduction in the number of targets (meaningless at low difficulties and on early waves, huge in the endgame). Ouch.

: Zubon

Update: there is a partial rollback planned/in-progress. I’m still feeling a palpable lack of trust and “why bother logging on?” After someone trips you, even if you had it coming, you hesitate when he offers to help you up.

Pure-ish Exploration

My go to game right now is The Binding of Isaac. Most games seem to take around 1/2 hour or a little more, but each game is a pure treat. The crux of my delight is that each game will be explored and played differently because the engine procedurally creates the dungeon, bosses, and loot each time. X-ray goggles for example let me pass through the secret doors, which normally need to be found by placing a bomb next to a wall and praying it is the correct wall. Now I have more bombs available for other things. Anybody that has played a roguelike, especiallyNetHack, will be comfortably familiar with this type of exploration.

For me, this is one of the most pure exploration scenarios available in any game. Unlocking a map or reading quest text in an MMO seems to pale by comparison. The developers made the chunk of game to be explored, and others have already explored it. I would go so far as to say that in an MMO the only explorers getting pure-ish exploration are the achievers working on a world first for a raid. Everything else evokes as much exploration as me going to a museum.

I want to be the scientist finding new discoveries. I want to see emergence that the developer could have only dreamed of. For me that is a purer exploration. Continue reading Pure-ish Exploration

[GW2] Nose to the Asura Gybrasion Device

After the mega-cons, things have seemed slow from the Guild Wars 2 standpoint. There are a few interviews coming out of the smaller conventions, and a few blog posts showing off environmental concept art or the audio’s team trip to a never-used nuclear reactor have been posted. Perhaps the biggest drop in October was the grawl race’s lore posting. So, it’s been kind of slow on the news front.

I can’t help but feel that the ArenaNet team has shown the demo of their game, and now it’s time to get it done. The only mode of play that’s not been seen in action is World v. World (WvW), which I imagine to be similar in spirit to Dark Age of Camelot or Warhammer Online‘s RvR fronts. Things like WvW, other PvP maps, more dungeons, more events, and of course the elusive eighth profession have all been mentioned as being designed or refined in the Fall interviews. Continue reading [GW2] Nose to the Asura Gybrasion Device

Bonus Quote for the Weekend

Richard Bartle on EVE’s pivot:

“we look at what our players do and less of what they say” works only if your players aren’t the hardest-of-the-hard-core who do exactly what they say they’ll do

The post also includes a lovely, expandable economic model for game servers and customization, although MOBAs and modded games are covering a fair amount of that territory in the non-persistent world.

: Zubon

Quotes of the Week

Heartless. on Star Wars: The Old Republic:

All you need to know is that the game is under tight NDA wraps with less than two months until launch.

Melmoth on Mists of Pandaria:

Werewolves in top hats, gnomes performing the dance moves from Bloodhound Gang’s Bad Touch, … ridiculous sexual dimorphism in PC races, non-combat pets, Haris Pilton, giant cow-men riding on chocobos, … shoulder pads you could hide a small village under, remote-controlled fighting robots, … escorting mechanical chickens, ludicrous retcons, kobold candles, Forsaken Death Knights, teleporters, steam car vs rocket car racetrack, … dressing up in a murloc suit, orbital death satellites, pink elekks…

And you’re worried about pandas?

Anjin on arguing about Mists of Pandaria:

When people argue that World of Warcraft is a silly game, they are talking about the world. When people argue that it is a serious game, they are talking about the systems.

On second thought, let’s not go to Azeroth. It is a silly place.

: Zubon

[Rift] Defeating the Defeatist

Jaradcel writes up another in-depth guest post on Rift PvP. Enjoy! –Ravious

Lately with the amount of PvP I have been doing, it feels like my brain is beginning to bleed “learn2play” attitudes. I have caught myself replying to obvious troll bait yells or even doing so myself.

Upon consideration, I feel like one of the root causes of this, which is far less prevalent in a PvE aspect, is because of the way developers tend to design for PvP. There are several reasons, but to start the ball rolling: Developers tend to cater to the defeatist.

Continue reading [Rift] Defeating the Defeatist

Powers of Two

This is a fundamentals post. You need those sometimes. Today’s goal is to know your powers of two.

For any readers who have not reached exponents in their math classes yet, this just means 2×2=4, 2x2x2=8, 2x2x2x2=16, 2x2x2x2x2=32, and so on. Even if you are completely innumerate, you have surely noticed that the numbers 128, 256, and 512 proliferate around computers. These are higher powers of two. Computers are binary (two-based), so everything tends to be in powers of two. We talk about gaming here, and lots of things in games are 50% chances, coin-flips, however they phrase it: it is all 2s, and if you know the basic math behind what is going on, you will better prosper and be emotionally and intellectually prepared for the likely outcomes. There are two that I want to focus on today.

2^5=32. 1 in 32 series of 5 coin flips will be all heads, another 1/32 all tails. If there is a 50-50 chance of something happening, there is a 1/32 chance of its happening (or not) 5 times in a row. That’s roughly a 3% chance: unlikely, but not exactly a rare event when you are doing something hundreds of times, so be ready for it. As a concrete example, if you are playing Tyrant and a Xeno Forcefield comes out, you can probably take it out in one attack. On average, it regenerates (refills its hit points) once, but about 3% of the time, you will need to knock that wall down 6 times before it stays down. Given how much you play whatever game it is, you may hit the 1 in 32 chance every day. Watch for it, plan for it.

2^10=1024. Ten doublings gives you a thousand. This is a convenient bit of quick arithmetic to keep in your head, mostly because it stacks. If ten doublings is one thousand, twenty is one million, and thirty is one billion (American billion or British milliard). Doubling adds up quickly. There is the old story about asking for a reward of a single grain of rice/wheat on the first square of a chessboard, 2 on the second, 4 on the third, 8 on the fourth, and so on. A chessboard has 64 squares, so it will still be a few from the end when we clear 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. Doubling is powerful, and most people lose track of how the exponents work. The easy math to remember is that 10 doublings gives you another set of ,000 on the end of a number. Use this to estimate large quantities.

: Zubon

Skipping the Low Levels

Dungeon Defenders has many account-wide features rather than character-specific ones. Your characters share a single bank for money and items, and you can pass upgraded items to the next generation. Your tavern o’ achievements is the same for all characters, rather than suggesting that you repeat all the achievements on every character. You unlock levels for your account rather than your characters, so beat the game once to make everything available for all future characters. You probably cannot beat the end boss with your level 1, but the map is there.

One unusual feature is that you can swap characters during the Build Phase of each wave. The tip screen encourages you to combine towers from different heroes, which is a nice synergy bonus for having multiple characters. You can also have a tower-focused character build then a combat-focused character fight through the round. It’s a bit of micro-management, but what are optimizers if not micro-managers? (There are limits here. You cannot have unlimited build time on the highest difficulty, so you are limited by how quickly you can swap characters, run around the map, build, repeat.)

This lets you skip the low levels at which map difficulty scales poorly. My Squire is 40-ish and can clear the first level on Insane difficulty with a half-dozen towers. Start the map, clear the first wave (6 enemies), you now have enough mana to build the first round of defenses. Swap to your new, level 0 character. Watch the defenses clear a couple of waves, bring back the Squire to build the upper-level defenses. Swap back, watch the rest of the round happen. Congratulations, your new character is now level 13 with 40,000 experience points. It feels like an exploit, and the character has no useful equipment, but it does have all its basic tools to play for real rather than fumbling about with minimal mana and one tower.

: Zubon