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Vindicated

Vindictus officially launches October 27!  I am pretty excited. I put in one good long weekend for Vindictus Open Beta, and uninstalled it thereafter. It was fun, but I did not want to test it. I also didn’t want to put in my valuable time only to have it wiped away before launch with a server reset. I’ll be honest. I went in for a sneak preview.

First off, I have beta tested and am beta testing MMOs. I have no problem giving constructive feedback in return for the privilege of playing the game early.  For me that is solid consideration enough. Yet, in the case of Vindictus the means of feedback were horrific. That I found, there was one forum with one feedback area that was chock full of horse dung and contained everything from guild recruitment to an IRL photo thread to complaints about logging issues. This is not beta testing. Yet, I was under no illusion of a true beta test to begin with as I received one of thousands of keys from Massively. Each one allowed the player in to the test. There was no selection process or anything.

Secondly, even though the game was really fun there was not going to be any persistence to my actions. There is a big reason that I just cannot play single-player games anymore. I want desperately to finish Mass Effect, a really fun game, but I feel whatever small time I spend on my real-life friend’s Minecraft server is magnitudes more meaningful than going through some personal single-player game. The third strike, as always, is time. With all the other games that are finished or value my “beta” opinion, it just was not worth my while to take the full cook’s tour.

Thankfully, I felt Vindictus was a good game. I walked away a potential customer instead of fleeing from another WoW clone or poorly designed game. I had enough of a bite to realize that I would eagerly anticipate it’s launch, and I headed for more persistent pastures. Heck, I don’t even understand why it just didn’t soft launch out of the gates. Anyway, it was a sneak preview, but all “beta” tests are not sneak previews. It’s up to the developer to make it that way or find people willing to test and provide feedback to get a real “beta” test. See you on the gnoll killing fields (i.e., ruins) in a few weeks.

–Ravious
a vestige of the vox populi

Labels and Tooltips

A principle articulated in The Design of Everyday Things is that a label is a confession of failure. If you need to label the light switches in your house, they are arranged unintuitively, and this is especially a problem if the lights are off. The door could have a push bar/plate or a pull handle; if you need to write “push” or “pull,” you are compensating for a design that may look pretty but fails to make the use of a door obvious.

Sometimes labeling is required. There are rarely intuitive mental mappings between a bank of buttons and their functions. You label the button on the phone for hold or mute. Computer UIs are generally in this category. (Icons also count as labels.)

Within that, you can have better or worse. The arrangement of arbitrary buttons can be intuitive or meaningful. The icons can be suggestive. Aspects can be made more or less prominent as relevant. Remember to adhere to industry standards unless there is a good reason to try to re-route what people have been trained to find intuitive. Remember that you are mapping functions to the keyboard as well as the screen, and you rarely get to label the keys.

Tooltips are one of my favorite principles in UI design, one so common that I forget about it until the tooltips are not there. You have to hate a screen with forty buttons that expects you to memorize what all forty icons mean. If I mouse-over something, it should tell me what it is after a moment’s delay, ideally with even more information if I keep hovering. I should similarly be able to get information on how to interact with items and objects in the world, rather than trying to remember what key throws a grenade.

I look forward to augmented reality so that we can have tooltips in meatspace.

: Zubon

Works For Me

Every game, no matter how well designed and implemented, will have detractors. Almost every game, no matter how poorly conceived or coded, will have people who enjoy it. It is a matter of taste. If you do not like MMOs or FPSes or RTSes, the best example of its kind might rise to “decent” in your eyes. If you do like them, you might play a dozen games in the genre and appreciate their respective merits. If they play to your preferences, a marginal game could be your treasured classic.

There is some game out there for which you are exactly the target audience. It favors your tastes precisely. You enjoy its theme, its gameplay focus is exactly what you enjoy doing, and you do not really care about the areas where the developers skimped.

Not minding negatives may be more important to idiosyncratic preferences than enjoying positives. Almost every game has good aspects, and we get angriest when something stands between us and that nugget of joy. You would enjoy the game except that it is ruined by this subsystem, that color scheme, and those loading times. Meanwhile, Bob never cared about the subsystem, is colorblind, and is glad to have snippets of time for a book he really wants to read. My deal-breakers are your trivial inconveniences or positives.

While Game By Night inspired this post, I feel that Bhagpuss deserves special mention here.

: Zubon

The Vanishing Mini Market (Guild Wars)

It seems the Hall of Monuments craziness is affecting even people that did not really hit it off with Guild Wars. Somehow I made it to 35 points even though I am years of grind away from the ultimate Guild Wars title. I think I am going to try for 45 points, but it’s really all fun and games now. I like the 30 point title “Closer to the Stars” better than “Ghostly Hero” (35) and “Flameseeker” (40) anyway.

There are five prongs to the Hall of Monuments: gaming achievements, player armor, companion armor, weapons, and miniatures. The first four are all based on player activity. Need companion armor? Play some challenge missions. Need weapons? Grind out some precious stones or Krytan trophies. Need miniatures? Fill out the available character slots and wait a couple years.

Continue reading The Vanishing Mini Market (Guild Wars)

Bunny Flags

I recently had an unhealthily long binge of Bunny Flags. Bunny-themed tower defense? Score! The attacking enemies are fingers and hands (who start to acquire football helmets and suicide vests), so it feels like “Little Bunny Foo Foo goes to war.” Your towers are bunnies in teacups. You can also choose to specialize in towers or your hero units. The maps remind me of Desktop Tower Defense: the obstacles are things like calculators and tomatoes.

I recommend playing at the highest difficulty possible, because the bonus for barely surviving that is greater than the bonus for doing any lower difficulty perfectly.

: Zubon

“Unhealthily” passes spellcheck, score. But “spellcheck” doesn’t, huh.

Kind of Not a Big Deal (Guild Wars)

This last weekend, the Guild Wars servers had to be hopping with the Friday bomb of the Hall of Monuments information. People were filling holes in on their point sheet, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen the miniature pet market so lively (and expensive). Overall, the community has reacted pretty positively to the reward scheme. I have also opened my Help-An-Old-Blogger-Out Armbrace Donation Drive if anybody is interested.  One armbrace is all it takes to feed a Ravious until Guild Wars 2.

Before I get in to the meat of this post, I did want to comment on how, if any, speculations for a Guild Wars 2 release date have clarified. Before the Guild Wars 2 FAQ changed, the old FAQ said that Hall of Monuments information would “when we’re closer to the launch of [Guild Wars 2].” Now, in a recent mmorpg.com interview ArenaNet said “I think we felt the sooner we could get that information to the players, the better, so that they could know what to expect, and understand, and have a lot of time to play Guild Wars 1 before Guild Wars 2 comes out, to check all that stuff out, to try and fill up their Hall of Monuments.” Interesting to try and puzzle that one out, but it is irrelevant with regard to the Hall of Monuments rewards, as players can gain new Guild Wars Hall of Monument tiers well after Guild Wars 2 launches.

Continue reading Kind of Not a Big Deal (Guild Wars)

City of Heroes: Recent and Upcoming

City of Heroes: Going Rogue seems to be more of the same. The “same” is still as good as it ever was, but as a multi-year veteran, I have about gotten my fill. The familiar people are not in my familiar haunts, so it feels empty to me even if the servers seem more full than I was used to (welcome back weekend).

The new content is a new level 1-20 area, which is good considering how much altoholism there is in CoX. It also unified CoX by allowing heroic or villainous characters of all archetypes, from the beginning in Praetoria and with switching sides for existing characters. A unified Praetoria start is probably a good thing for an older game, because heroes and villains are not divided into separate areas, although now there are three possible divisions. There are two transitional “alignments” between hero and villain, and I don’t see the benefit of being a pure hero/villain versus a vigilante/rogue (alignment vendors somewhere? There is a vigilante mission called “Beat down Westin Phipps,” which any CoV player should appreciate). Going Rogue also brought a variety of quality of life enhancements for what is already the most convenient game around.

Issue 19 looks really promising. That really will be something new, plus more of the same and more convenience. CoX is getting an endgame, with alternate advancement and 50-only content. Six years later, they decided that was a good thing. The big change across the levels will be making the Fitness pool all inherent powers at level 2, which effectively adds several powers to almost every build out there. The big graphic change is letting you customize some power animations, in addition to the existing power color customization.

: Zubon

Plausibly One-Time

Whatever you do twice will be perceived as a permanent policy decision. If you do something once that others have adopted as a permanent policy decision, you will likely be perceived as having adopted the same.

That is, expectations matter and create second-order effects, and previous actions set future expectations. This becomes self-reinforcing once people start acting upon those expectations and your choice becomes fulfilling those expectations or dealing with the many who feel as though they have been cozened, even if you explicitly told them not to have the expectation.

The ad hoc becomes an institution. Continue reading Plausibly One-Time

Hall of Monumental Rewards Calculator

Amazingly enough, ArenaNet dropped one of the most sought after Guild Wars 2 bits on a Friday. The Hall of Monuments Reward Calculator is now available for Guild Wars players to peruse the goals and rewards. Simply head to the Calculator and put your character’s name in, and the Calculator will do the rest.

There are 50 available points, and each accomplishment will give various amounts of points. For example, putting any statue in to the Monument of Honor gives 2 points, 5 statues gives 3 points, but then 10, 15, 20, etc. statues only nets 1 point each tier. Therefore, the point curve is weighted towards easy to get started, but hard to complete.

Continue reading Hall of Monumental Rewards Calculator