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Lego Universe: Commitment Challenge

This morning I logged in quick to see if the much awaited patch had dropped and was disappointed to see it hadn’t. Going to the main page, there’s an article about a new area that will be introduced in “a few weeks”. Even more disappointing is that it says that you will have to learn a new form of combat as what you know is not good enough.

So despite not even being completely finished releasing the first version of its combat/gear system, LU is revamping it. For some reason, I’m remembering Star Wars Online’s famous NGE event. Also, the fact that since launch (October) there has only been 3 very small content additions, one of which was created by fans, not Lego staff, and one was a revision of an existing zone. So besides a zone that you can walk across in under 30 seconds (the holiday Frostbluff zone), there’s nothing truly new from the company since launch. For a subscription-based game, one that promised weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly content updates, this has to be a big red flag.

Cost Disease

GM-run events in MMOs do not scale well, and their compromises mean they pretty much have to be lousy.

MMO PvE content is designed to scale well, in whatever way it scales in your game. If you make a good quest or instance, you can have it running on hundreds of servers at very little additional cost. Having 10,000,000 people play WoW takes far less developer time than having 100,000 people play each of 100 MMOs. This is mass-production, with increasing returns to scale. Computers are good at copying the same thing for more people.

Developer-piloted NPCs do not scale well. They can be in only one place. If you want that NPC to appear in more than one zone or on more than one server, you need multiple humans to pilot them. Programmed and scripted events can be copied, but the human interaction portion cannot. If you want to give every server an equal experience, you are going to need a script, reducing the human element; you are going to need either staggered starts or a large team; and if you have staggered starts, you need some way to cope with people from the fifth server knowing the script already. Sadly, the end point must always be the same, because you cannot support divergent servers. Any human interaction affects only the storytelling, not the plot.

If the developers of EVE Online, Darkfall, or A Tale in the Desert (all sandbox-y games in increasing order of PvP hardcore-ness) want an event, they can go do it. There is a server or two. They do not need to worry about divergence or repeat performances. Single-server architecture is a grand thing. Similarly, players can run their own events and affect the world. Even if most of the “events” are from people who want to watch the world burn, you have a much larger upside potential.

: Zubon

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Lego Universe: Teaching Camping, Grinding, Kill-Stealing, and Griefing to the Next Generation

Tonight a fairly high-expected patch to Lego Universe (LU) will be loaded, bringing with it the missing-at-launch class for all of the factions, along with a new area and a new racetrack. There’s also a great amount of hope that a bank or storage solution will be put in, as there has been a lot of official comments that “something” is coming for a while now. Some of these were promised, but not delivered, at launch, so seeing them come out relatively quickly is good. However, LU launching with such limited content is causing a lot of dissatisfaction among the user base. Nowhere is this more evident as in the zone called Gnarled Forest, in an area called Brig Rock. It is this area that really shows that the “MM” of “MMORPG” was not thought through completely.
Continue reading Lego Universe: Teaching Camping, Grinding, Kill-Stealing, and Griefing to the Next Generation

Shirky’s Call to Action

The choice we face is this: out of the mass of our shared cognitive surplus, we can create an Invisible University–many Invisible Colleges doing the hard work of creating many kinds of public and civic value–or we can settle for Invisible High School, where we get lolcats but no open source software, fan fiction but no improvement in medical research. The Invisible High School is already widespread, and our ability to participate in ways that reward personal or communal value is in no imminent danger.
— Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

: Zubon

Over-Saled

In the last round of Steam sales, I bought a game at 50% off. A few days later, it went to 75% off. My plan on Steam games is increasingly to wait until I want to play it right now, and then keep waiting until there is a 50+% sale. I have been trained to avoid good sales because of potential buyer’s remorse after great sales.

: Zubon

I Soloed Lego Universe And All I Got Was These Green Coveralls

For Christmas I was allowed to pick my own gifts. You’d think this would happen more often as a middle-aged man, but as a man married to a woman who does not share many of my interests, I tend to get clothes. I happen to wear clothes, so this does work out, but it’s not what I want of course. Need and want are two different things.

One of my 3 gifts was Lego Universe. I found it for 50% off on a Black Friday sale, and for that price it seemed worth it. I find it funny to note it appears that that’s the standard price around the web for the game now. Looks like no one else here (I think Ethic changed his mind on it) has given a review on it, so I figured I would do one for the community at large. I feel that it is important to point out this is a tween-targetted (8-12 years) game, so it’s a bit different from the games I play normally these days. However, I do have a lot of Toontown experience, and several months of Free Realms to compare it to. Both of these games target the same market. I’m guessing Wizard 101 and Club Penguin would also be comparable, but I’ve never given those a run. Enough with the terms and conditions; let’s get to the review.

And for those who don’t want to read the whole thing: For $20, it’s worth it for the Lego fun. If you’ve played another Lego game, on any platform, you will likely enjoy this. I’ve played a week, and feel that it has been a fun play.

Continue reading I Soloed Lego Universe And All I Got Was These Green Coveralls

Communities Managing Civic Value

Assumptions that people are selfish can become self-fulfilling prophecies, creating systems that provide lots of individual freedom to act but not a lot of public value or management of collective resources for the greater public good. … Conversely, systems that assume people will act in ways that create public goods, and that give them opportunities and rewards for doing so, often let them work together better than neoclassical economics would predict.
…
[I]n some cases the group using the resource can manage it better than either the market or the state. Such arrangements among the group often rely on repeated communications and interactions among the participants. [Elinor] Ostrum’s work noted that such shared management often relied on mutually visible action among the participants, credible commitment to the shared goals, and group members’ ability to punish infractions. When these conditions are met, people with the largest stake in the resources can do a better job both in managing the resource and in policing infractions than can markets or government systems designed to accomplish the same goals. [Zubon notes: see also Ronald Coase, both for Coase Theorem and theory of the firm.] … This internalization relies on the finding demonstrated by the Ultimatum Game; namely that people in social circumstances will moderate their behavior to be less selfish.
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[P]rior to the present historical generation, motivating unpaid actors to do anything for the civic good was left to governments and nonprofits, themselves institutional actors. Today we can take on some of those problems ourselves, but the more we want to do so at the civic end of the scale, the more we have to bind ourselves to one another to achieve (and celebrate) shared goals.
— Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

: Zubon

Rift Overrun

As I go in to this fourth open beta weekend for RIFT, I have a overbearring question in my head. So many people are upset with languished tutorial zone and the themepark feel of the plethora of kill ten rats quests. What if those didn’t exist? What if I was just playing for the dungeon content, which I’ve heard decent things about so far, and especially the dynamic open world content?

That’s how I intend to play this weekend. I am going to roll a Defiant mage because I can roll through that tutorial really quickly. Then I am going to try and level and play with as much focus on the dynamic content as possible.

This dynamic war comes so close to the MMO I have designed in my head, I just wish it was not so tarnished by the lackluster quest system set in place, and I wish it was a tad more scalable, especially in early areas where small rifts open and are vanquished in less than a minute.

–Ravious
the dance of angry feet

Becoming Hardcore: Dark Age of Camelot

My wife still bears a grudge against Dark Age of Camelot. That’s fair. I started playing around the time we moved in together, and I played it a lot.

After college, my group of friends spread across many time zones. At various times we had people in California, Texas, Arizona, Michigan, Japan, Australia, China, and the Philippines. We decided to schedule online gaming a few times a week, plus however often we could catch each other in-game. Our attempts at taking a pen-and-paper game online were not entirely enjoyable (software for that has come a ways, with voice chat these days if nothing else), and many of us were excited about Dark Age of Camelot, so we joined Albion.

Continue reading Becoming Hardcore: Dark Age of Camelot