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Brilliant Cash Shop Scheme

The one social networking game still clinging to my Facebook account is Restaurant City. EA bought Playfish, so I do not exactly promote the game, but I am still sufficiently amused to visit a few times a day to keep my imaginary staff running. Playfish has recently made some simple adjustments that I expect to produce increases in their cash shop revenue.

Another of their games, Pet Society, has long had mystery boxes (and eggs, etc.). They are bought with in-game currency, although they have added some cash-only boxes. Mystery boxes have random items from an appropriately themed pool, although the initial boxes were just “pay for something random!” These must have been sufficiently popular (slot machines tend to be) because they added cash shop mystery boxes to their other games. That is step zero the revenue enhancement.

Continue reading Brilliant Cash Shop Scheme

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

Persistence of This One

A couple weeks ago, Andrew, a blogger compatriot at Systemic Babble, responded to a problem I was having with single-player games. Namely, I was not playing them because of their lack of persistence. It was an off-handed comment to emphasize my uninformed thoughts about the Vindictus beta, where I thought that the beta characters would be wiped on a live launch.

There are two points I want to discuss. The first is in response to Andrew’s last paragraph:

On the surface it’s tempting to say, like Ravious does,  that this online gaming is more meaningful than single player gaming, but it isn’t.  The persistence in an MMO is exactly as ethereal as that found in more traditional single player or online games:  your contribution only lasts so long as your interest in the title holds.

At the outset, I want to clarify that I did not say online gaming is more meaningful than single-player gaming. It is for me, sure, but there are plenty of activities that others do that are meaningless for me and vice versa. It’s not up to me or anybody to tell you what should be meaningful in your luxury gaming time.

Continue reading Persistence of This One

Most Typical Member

Prototype theory holds that we conceptualize through categories in which some members are more central than others. If I ask you to name a piece of furniture, you are quite likely to come back with “chair,” “table,” or “sofa”; if you immediately thought “armoire” or “ottoman,” you are weird; if you went with “Charles, or Susan if it’s a girl,” you are very weird. If you asked an American for the best example of a bird, the most bird-like bird around, you will get far more robins than penguins and almost no emus.

The usual concept of a western MMO seems clearly descended from DikuMUD, through EQ and terminating in WoW. I would tend to insert DAoC in there, sometimes described as “EQ without the parts that suck,” but I may be atypical. Perhaps I am uncreative, but I do not see much more room for the Diku model to evolve. It has reached its full flower in WoW. You can have refinements and variations (-raids, +PvP, +story, -classes, +Tolkien, -fantasy, +F2P), to say nothing of lousy clones, but it will take something massive to change the view of the most typical member. There is a lot of room (and money) in WoW’s orbit, but if you do not want to be (seen as) conceptually subordinate, you need to head a good distance away.

We have some less typical members, most notably EVE Online. You all know how I love to pull out “here is how City of Heroes solved that problem,” or how I mix a dozen niche games into my bloviations. These can be annoying in the MMO blogosphere when commenters contribute them independently, not in the sense of “here is an alternate way of implementing that” but rather “your entire argument is invalid because it does not apply to my game (or playstyle).” It is as if you were complaining about birds pooing on your car, only to have a passerby disdainfully remark that there are not any penguins in the area and they could not have flown over your car anyway. Well, no, that is not what I meant by “birds,” but thank you for contributing.

Continue reading Most Typical Member

The First Vindictus Boss

The battles in Vindictus are quests or missions of MMO norm except they define the instance with parameters specific to that battle. The program then creates a map from a defined set of map pieces, populates the map with enemies specific to the battle, and sends the party forward to conquest. There are some strictly defined parameters to each battle, and the boss for each battle is probably the one that characterizes the whole battle. (This is especially true for people needing specific items only available from specific battle bosses.)

While there are bosses for each battle, the first battle with something that feels like a powerful, armor-breaking boss is in the Decisive Battle.  Decisive Battle leads in like the many prior battles, but when players get to the end it is clear that the giant red gnoll holding a two-handed mace weighing as much as a truck who has is back turned and is ignoring the heroes is a boss. This is the Gnoll Chieftain.

Continue reading The First Vindictus Boss