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The Punditry Dark Side

Lewis B has some great impressions of the upcoming Stars Wars MMO over at Tap Repeatedly. I wouldn’t call them bad impressions per se; I would call them disappointed impressions. He gives praise where praise is due, mostly the script and voice acting. The art style is enjoyable, and then there’s everything else. For the sake of this post let’s just say it’s basically the gameplay millions have experienced in World of Warcraft, Rift, Lord of the Rings Online et al.

While I particularly trust Lewis B impressions, as subjective as many may be, this is approximately the feedback I have seen on this upcoming game for awhile. There are neat shiny bits apart from BioWare’s trademarked storytelling like the cover system or the use of personal mooks to do all the player’s crafting for sure. Yet it’s still a vanilla ice cream regardless of the sprinkles.

Unlike Rift, which in my opinion clearly tried to push the MMO genre with it’s dynamic events, the hundred-million dollar costing Bioware MMO doesn’t seem to push anything. With all the problems involved in stand-and-deliver combat, the holy trinity, kill stealing, boring quest design, etc. of vanilla MMOs, tacking on a shared single-player branching story feels flat. At least Rift tried to get people playing together in unique ways. Continue reading The Punditry Dark Side

It Must Be Me

I’m apparently pretty bad at League of Legends, including the basic requirement of being able to field a 5-player team. I had 4 games in a row that went 4-on-5 for at least half the game. The funny thing is, in my entire time playing LoL, I can remember only a few times when the leaving player was on the other team. That is probably attentional or confirmation bias, and I know that randomness is scheduled to balance out over the course of 400 hours, but you lose the enthusiasm for those 400 hours after repeatedly losing due to perverse randomization in team composition.

I’m not suggesting that there is anything odd going on with a random number generator or anything like that. We should expect to see streaks in coin flips. And, given coin flips, there is no reason to expect the next series to be anything other than distributed according to binomial probability. But players can hit gambler’s ruin, get frustrated, and quit, which is a problem for the developers if this drives away paying customers. This is why many games have anti-frustration features like CoX’s streakbreaker that will force a hit after a sufficiently long string of misses.

No, I have no idea how to make that work (fairly) in a team PvP game where the problem is defecting teammates.

: Zubon

House Entitlement

Tobold over at his blog is soapboxing on an issue he’s had with Facebook. It appears that Facebook doesn’t like his alias, and so banned him. Unfortunately for Tobold, he actually had invested in his identity on Facebook to the point where he had purchased virtual items from Facebook games. Now it appears the money is sunk. In other news, people are tearing apart the click-through legal agreements for EA’s Origin platform, which facetiously asks such things as a sacrificing your first born and selling away all rights to your genetic matter.

I find these issues interesting, but I find it more interesting the responses they evoke. There seem to be two generic responses. The intelligent response is “I won’t buy it,” or some form thereof, and the entitled response is “that’s not fair.” Continue reading House Entitlement

Comments of the Week: Guild Wars 2 in Summary

Responding to my gloom about MMO designs that make “Massively Multiplayer” mean “solo or be griefed (more),” Axiom comments:

You might want to check out Guild Wars 2, which is nearing the end of development and is slated for Closed Beta in November or December.

The game was designed from the ground up to eliminate a lot of the ways that typical MMOs fail to encourage cooperation and rather foster anti-social behavior.

Some of the ways they have addressed this are:

1. No mob tapping or kill stealing. Everyone, grouped or not, who does a minimal percent of damage to a mob (5% to 10%) gets full XP and their own individual loot, both at the same level as if they had defeated the mob alone.

2. Rather than traditional quests, the PVE content is mostly in the form of Dynamic Event chains that branch and cascade through out each game zone. Events scale up with more players, offering more challenge and reward. At the completion of the event, in addition to mob xp and loot, everyone gains a reward based on their level of participation vs. predetermined thresholds, adjusted for the number of participants. The rewards are issued whether players succeed or fail the event and you aren’t competing with others for a finite number of reward slots.

3. The game does away with the “holy trinity” of class roles; tank, dps, heals. Continue reading Comments of the Week: Guild Wars 2 in Summary

Avoiding the “Massively”

X is a problem with the community or structure of a game such that others can have a large negative effect on your gaming session. Usual recommendations: solo, bring your own friends/group, avoid potentially risky (i.e. anything involving gameplay) interactions with others.

I keep saying that if game Y is fun so long as you bring your own group of people, almost anything is fun if you are just using it as an excuse to hang out with your friends, so the game is contributing nothing. You could randomly pick any of dozens of options, and you will probably be better served by playing something other than an MMO. But most folks seem comfortable with this equilibrium in which we are contact with building gated communities within gated communities instead of pushing for pro-social game designs. This pushes me away from MMOs, because what’s the point without that first M, and into lobby-based games where we get up to 4 friends together, done.

On one hand, this is a natural consequence of the Hell that is other people. On the other, shouldn’t we expect better?

: Zubon

Flash Not-Really-MMOs

Over the past week, I have responded to quite a few requests, ads, etc. for F2P browser-based “MMOs,” CCGs, etc. They have been, to a one, poor. The winner, though, is Call of Gods, a game that applies the Evony/Civony/Travian economic model to what looks like a mostly PvE game. Combat plays out automatically with no player intervention. The developers recognized that this was really boring, so they added a button to skip it … which demands the RMT currency. Yes, it is a game that invites you to play and then offers to let you pay for the privilege of not doing so.

: Zubon

Grinding to the Real Game

In theory, I like League of Legends. In practice, you need ~200 hours of play to get to ranked games, then enough ranked wins to get out of Elo Hell, before you stop seeing so many people griefing, feeding, quitting, etc. As the wiki link suggests, any good player will get through random grief and rise about Elo Hell … over the course of another ~200 hours of play

I have seen less in LoL: Dominion, but I may have just had a good few days. I have also gone days almost every game a 4-on-5 for at least half of it. In Dominion, idiots and quitters are more prominently felt, because capping and defending 4-on-5 just does not work even if the 5 are pretty lousy. One game today featured a player tripling up on the bottom (you usually send 1 or 2), then running past the minions, suiciding into a tower and quitting; the game is decided 30 seconds into it, and now we just wait for the timer to officially forfeit.

It’s a general problem in F2P games: players with no investment have no loss if they’re just there to watch the world burn. Real grognards from games where you paid by the hour (with small communities and active admins) can likely regale us with how you behaved or else. I’m debating how impressed I am that folks will play a game for ~200 hours and then continue to grief/quit/whatever in low-Elo ranked games. I suppose you’ll get xp while being an idiot for those 200 hours, because you keep leveling up win or lose.

I have no idea how the community moderation tools are helping this. I dutifully click the report button after games where folks leave, smack talk, and such, but it’s not like we get a report back.

: Zubon

Like Guild Wars 2, For the Very First Time

I’ve played Guild Wars 2 on two separate occasions at PAX East and when I was invited to ArenaNet. I remember the first time I sat down and played the game, but so much of that feeling was muddled because as much as I wanted to play Guild Wars 2, I wanted to meet the makers of the game as much, if not moreso. I miss that feeling now of discovery, mystery, and imagination.

So, it was really nice to read comrade-in-arms, Lewis B’s first impressions post over at Tap Repeatedly. He gives a bunch of facts and feedbacks, but most importantly he writes with emotion. His excitement bleeds through the article. I feel that as more people see actual plays on YouTube and get to see the demo themselves, this excitement period will be lost. At least until launch. Then all bets are off.

–Ravious

A good Glitch

A few days ago, a fairly entertaining little F2P game launched, Glitch. This game has a dev team like one of those interesting dev teams that made me take a deeper look at Rift, so I of course had to check the game out. With a Flikr co-founder and the creator of the wildly fun Katamari on board, it was bound to be fun to look at, if nothing else, I thought.
Continue reading A good Glitch

Coin ‘n Carry

Long time reader and commentator, Muckbeast, who actually has a real name I suppose. Let’s call him “Michael Hartman.” Anyway, turns out he’s in charge of Frogdice, Inc., which has been around for nearly a score, and a Mid-West game developer on top of that! He asked if we could shed some light on their new social web game that “is NOT on Facebook.”

It’s called Coin ‘n Carry, and it seems pretty neat. There is a very thorough tutorial/overview on the game at YouTube, which tech-deficient parents might find useful if they don’t understand how to sign up for things. The basic premise is economy and mini-games. Working with the community is helpful, but Frogdice created the game with those implied Facebook games in mind. In other words, things that are wrong and annoying with Facebook games, like mega-spam, they developed away from.

The game is free-to-play, which is what Frogdice have been doing for their games since when I was a lad. Hartman says that:

“Unlike many other F2P companies, we target the long term with our customers. It is our philosophy that deep gameplay designed to entertain people for the long term will result in players eventually choosing to pay something towards the game. We feel that value proposition works best for all parties in the long run. As a result of this philosophy, a significant portion of our customers on Threshold RPG have been playing for over 10 years.”

Kind of refreshing, actually. And, they have years of evidence to prove it. Anyway, supporting developers on the ‘sphere is a good thing, in my humble opinion. Hence the plug. If you check it out, feedback here is most welcome.

–Ravious