Kill Ten Rats

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The $10 Level

In this November rain, at least some news is ripping through the MMO ‘sphere’s apathy. Mythic has decided on giving players the option to buy levels. At $10 a pop, all characters on an account get a War Tract, which when used will advance the character one full level. Players can only use this once per account. Players that really like Warhammer Online will likely then pay only a couple bucks per character’s level. Players with only one or two played characters will be paying $5 or $10 per character level, which is a tad steep. However, characters created in the future will also get the War Tract in the mail. They bring about a few other cash shop items too, which Arkenor breaks down.

Ardwulf thinks that if anybody really cared about Warhammer Online, this would be a scandal. It is a small one on Warhammer Online forums, where cries of MMO death are slightly amplified because of this. But, I think Spinks has the right of it. The “suck” was already there with the end-grind hell levels. Having the option to pay past this suck, while not the best option, is far better than if hell levels were designed so subscribers would want to fork more money in to get back to the fun.

Continue reading The $10 Level

Stop Agreeing With Me

The setting is usually a multi-player game with no subscription costs. Someone will log on and start chatting. Their immediate topic is how awful the game is and/or how it has gone downhill; games with built-in team-based voice chat are popular for this filibuster.

“You’re right. The game is awful. You should quit.” I just keep repeating it. Yes, since they put in that new item, awful, you should quit. Oh, and that cash shop, I know, awful, you should quit. That too, yes, awful, you should quit. I don’t think it works, but I have had someone switch teams on my TF2 server in less than 10 repetitions.

: Zubon

I rarely do that in games with paid subscriptions, since I do not want to deny the developers income if I think the game is worth paying for myself.

Old

In TF2, I have developed the practice of muting anyone whose voice has not changed if he complains about anything twice. There are good reasons to mute older demographics, but I have met too many whining 12-year-old boys to want to give the next kid much benefit of the doubt.

One of these recently reminded me of someone from my Asheron’s Call monarchy who was a bit of an annoying kid. He was earnest, enthusiastic about leveling, eager for attention, and very much attached to me after I went out of my way to help him one evening. Nothing wrong with him, I just did not have the energy to care for a puppy. I met another puppy in LotRO, and fending off the attentions of extroverted adolescents is much more important when they have access to built-in voice chat.

I say this not because I am shaking my cane at the kids on my lawn. I say this because I just realized that the “annoying kid” has probably graduated from college by now. He might have a kid or two of his own. The current batch of adolescents had not yet started school when I met him. I am old old old.

: Zubon

Where Exclusivity Roans

Turbine has two mounts on sale in the Lord of the Rings Online cash shop only until Thursday night. Mechanically speaking there is nothing special about the Blue Roan Steed or Springfest Steed. They act like every other normal mount in the game. What is special is their exclusivity, and not to the cash shop.

Continue reading Where Exclusivity Roans

Conflicting Goals

The Team Fortress 2 Halloween event (not quite over) is a new map, Mann Manor. There are three capture points, with healing candy sprinkled about. It is a lovely piece of work with great backgrounds and details. But the new gameplay, items, and achievements are probably what you care about.

The Horseless Headless Horsemann will occasionally spawn on the capture point. He one-shots anything he can reach, and one person is “it” (melee an enemy to tag off). Kill him for an achievement and a hat, melee him for another achievement and a crafting item. Gifts will occasionally spawn randomly around the map. The first person to touch it gets an achievement and a hat. There are nine hats, a paper bag mask for each class. Get the full set and craft them together for an achievement and a hat; this is the only holiday hat you can wear after the holiday. Last year’s achievements and items are also around, and there are a few cash shop items.

Continue reading Conflicting Goals

Uncaring Cruelty

While I am on this kick of complaining about randomness, it is rather frustrating to be in situations where the computer can just decide that you lose. If you are playing Elements or Magic, it can give you no mana sources or only mana sources; you cannot really play, just sit there and watch perverse randomization happen. If you are in a dungeon instance with variation in the number or placement of enemies, you cannot do anything when two elite trolls spawn on either side of your healer and both crit him/her, queuing up the wipe before their spawning animations have stopped. You have all had things spawn literally on top of you the instant you hit the “make me vulnerable so that I can recover quickly” button.

And, given enough trials, you will see that happen several times a night. The degree of frustration is largely a factor of how big the stakes are when the computer sends you to jail without passing Go or collecting $200.

What is really chafing lately is that the anthropomorphizing isn’t true. The computer does not want to win. It does not care if you lose. That is a category error; a computer is not the kind of thing that wants or cares. It is still metaphorical speaking to say “the computer can just decide that you lose.” The computer can be programmed to perform certain behaviors or maximize certain outcomes, but unless the AI revolution happened while I was on break, it is physically incapable of giving a fig what the outcome is. You are not being randomly and perversely struck down for any purpose, or so that anyone else can win. It just happens.

Kind of like in meatspace. And, given enough trials, you will see it happen to every living being.

: Zubon

Flash Games as Proof of Concept

You can have high-budget flash games, but I like that they are often a quick and inexpensive way to explore part of design-space. You can base an entire game around one simple idea or see what happens if you take that idea to its logical extreme. I have highlighted quite a few as they relate to my thought of the day.

This weekend, Kongregate had Ultimate Assassin 2 as a featured game. This is not a particularly good game. It instantiates something I have discussed a few times lately: randomness plus difficulty yields an unsatisfying experience. It can become completely impossible, although in this case it more often becomes tedious (you can wait for 10 impossible minutes to pass for your opportunity to come, although sometimes it really is impossible because three enemies will converge on you and wait). Other times, it is trivially easy, because the enemies’ random pathing works in your favor. You never know if you are doing well or if the game was randomly in your favor, if this level is more difficult than the last or the randomness is just being perverse.

As I said, the randomness is rarely so perverse as to make it completely impossible. If you wait long enough, it will eventually hit a trivially easy configuration. Sitting and waiting for that is not compelling gameplay, any more than repeatedly throwing yourself into the teeth of whatever randomly happens in case this one randomly works in your favor. Either way, you are waiting a fair while before the stars align and you can do anything. I like the concept and the outlines of the design, but the specifics are appalling. Not that non-random would be a lot more fun, since it would be an exercise in memorizing the guards’ pathing patterns, but at least the difficulty would be known and could be progressively increased, rather than leaping about chaotically with a fair amount of “not no way, not no how” mixed in.

: Zubon

If only the “ultimate assassin” thought to bring a gun, like all those guards did.

Of Sausage, Fandom, and Vision

Long ago, I saw an interview with one of the makers of Casablanca, in which he explained that had they known they were making one of the great classics, they would have done a better job of it. Production was messy and rushed; Ingrid Bergman displayed real ambivalence between the male leads because the film was only half-scripted when filming began. We now know what “if he could do it over again” looks like: the Star Wars prequels and Greedo shoots first.

Reading the recent rumor-mongering and the trolling, flaming wreck of its comments section, I was struck by how people seized on a SW:TOR aside in a WAR post and how emotionally vested some people are in (and, quite vocally, against) Star Wars. It is strangely circular to have competing religions of fandom and hatedom exist around a setting that is only important because so many people are emotionally invested in it. Continue reading Of Sausage, Fandom, and Vision

Strange Convergence

Since my promotion earlier this year, I have effectively been a producer for the live team in an online non-gaming environment. We have an existing application with customers and a rather large database. The backlog of bug fixes and new features has requests dating back to the day the current system went live. We have a small team of programmers and testers. We have development, test, and live servers. There is a development process, documentation that we seem to be keeping up to date, and programmers with varying degrees of “big picture” versus “get this off my desk as quickly as possible” views.

By headcount, most of my staff is the customer service team, ranging from answering phones to database maintenance (which is a higher level CSR function here). You find an exciting variety of problems when interacting with the customers. Customer service tools are very important; I wish we could spend more programmer time automating things CSRs do frequently, but we have crises and legal requirements ahead of wish list items. Based on the feedback of the customer service team, they are surprised that management is asking for feedback. My new division seems more divided and stratified than my previous one, but then it is five times larger.

All those things I have written over the years about process and organization and documentation and development cycles? I am now in charge of making sure those happen. My project for next week is changing our patch notes process to improve documentation and make sure the CSRs are fully informed about what is intended behavior and what calls for bug fixes. While I got the job because of my professional experience, my experience here may be just as useful.

: Zubon