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Shared Loot Table

I have seen quite a few debates about random drops versus tokenization. Should bosses have a 2% chance to drop the Ubersword of Epicness or should they drop 2 badges (and a vendor in town exchanges the Ubersword for 100 badges)? There are merits in each direction, although I tend to favor tokenization because random drops tend to encourage endless grinding of a single dungeon/boss.

Let me, as I often do, mention a third-way solution used in City of Heroes (and a fourth). City of Heroes has used both, but the most sought after items (purple crafting recipes) are random drops from a shared loot table. CoX applies it even to trash mobs, but you could restrict it to bosses and let all of them have a chance to drop all the rare items. That would be an even larger lottery, but you would not have only one boss in the game that dropped the one item you want. Of course, players might replicate “grind one dungeon endlessly” by optimizing for the most time-efficient dungeon, but I am not in the mood to ponder people who want to spend their $15/month doing something they do not consider fun (if you like grinding the efficient dungeon, hey, double-win for you). OTOH, I can understand why you might prefer fewer rolls with higher chances to many rolls with a lower chance of that specific item.

Several games use a menu as a middle-ground between drops and tokens. When you win, you pick one item from a short list. WAR chests are a good example. Another implementation is to give a token that can be redeemed for one of several items, rather than tokens you accumulate as currency. CoX combines menus with randomness by including “a random pick from pool D” as an option on the prize menu. Another middle ground is to have a fixed drop that is variable by class, usually done as a barter item that some or all classes can trade in for their equivalent of the item.

My thought is that players want both fixed and random elements in their game rewards. They want to know that they are going to get something, and little nuggets of achievement are encouraging, but they also want some chance to hit it big. Slot machines make a lot of money, and developers can embrace that without making everything random.

: Zubon

A Bit of Perspective

There is a reason Zubon’s seminal post “A Fable” is consistently the biggest draw to our humble little blog. It brings perspective. A perspective that a fellow gamer, significant other, or concerned friend might feel is missing. The big message underneath the three short paragraphs, for me at least, is to be mindful of my actions, especially with regard to time-consuming MMO games. Last week I received a huge dosage of perspective. My skinny, non-smoking 30-year old wife had a stroke.

Continue reading A Bit of Perspective

Monument of Many Valors (Guild Wars)

If you play Guild Wars, check out the Guild Wars War in Kryta survey. It seems that not only is ArenaNet listening to the over ten thousand responses, but they are already acting in response to the results. One question was “how happy were you with the rewards from the War in Kryta content.” Apparently the masses were not happy with the value of the Oppressor’s weapons, which take some considerable time to receive. In response, ArenaNet allowed the Oppressor’s weapon to be added to the Monument of Valor in the Hall of Monuments. This happened before fans received any Guild Wars 2 Hall of Monuments reward schemes, however ironically soon they may come.

Continue reading Monument of Many Valors (Guild Wars)

Achievement Nomenclature

Can we agree to call them “achievements”? I know we mostly do, but some games seem to re-name things in the interest of being special snowflakes. Now that the largest systems in the North American market are using the same term, let’s accept that as the proper English word for those gaming account celebratory decorations.

Giving your new game a different term for the sake of being different creates verbal confusion and is just asking for really annoying forum discussions in which simpering trolls rack up post counts by “correcting” everyone for not calling them “trophies” or whatever. Double points are deducted if you have multiple and similar terms, triple points if you use “achievement” as a subset of “trophy.” You get a pass if there is a good reason for using a different word. Games that pre-date this consensus can keep calling them badges, deeds, etc.

I do not think we have a similar consensus on “guild” yet, especially given the range of games in which “guild” feels inappropriate. It would be fine in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ (“kinship”), but not so much for City of Heroes (“supergroup”) or EVE Online (“corporation”). Maybe for some instances in each. “Group” seems pretty standard; CoX’s “supergroup” unfortunately leaves them with “team.” “Clan” seems a strong competitor between games but rarely within them. Let us not get into “character,” “avatar,” and “toon.”

: Zubon

Achievement Categories

Achievement screens need some way to indicate that some achievements you will get in normal play, some involve wacky circumstances, and some involve playing for a really long time. As it is, everything gets grouped together, and the fact that you get quite a few suggests the others may be nearly within reach.

This annoys teams in multi-player games in which one player is trying to take 5,000 damage in one life, another needs to kill eleven people with a fish, and everyone else is trying to win. This haunts completionists who see “39/40 achievements” when the last one is “have 1000 levels of characters.”

I like the common division of achievements into categories like “exploration,” “monster slayer,” “fishing,” or whatnot within games. I would just like to see them also classified according to the sanity of achieving them, so you might have:

  • 10 benchmark achievements, earned at various points in a normal playthrough
  • 10 difficult achievements, earned by doing some things well, quickly, etc.
  • 10 epic achievements, earned by doing things 100 times
  • 10 wacky achievements, earned by selling all 12 types of rare fish to the pelican; by dying from falling damage 1 higher than your hit points; by defeating the end boss using only paint and sandwiches; by winning a multi-player round without drawing your weapon; …

That way Alice can have her sense of closure from meeting all the benchmarks, Bob can showcase his mad skills from beating it all on hard mode, Cindy can demonstrate how hardcore she is with 6/10 achievements that each took 500 hours to earn, and David can find a server or group that supports wacky achievement-acquisition rather than causing strife with folks trying to play the game non-perversely.

: Zubon

TF2 Item Shop

Team Fortress 2 has decided to sell the random drops you can find, along with some new cosmetics (dye) and miscellany. They also added 17 new items, composing sets (with set bonuses) for 5 classes, conveniently available as one bulk package. And some new rare items (you may need to buy a key to get them; I have only seen the boxes drop) and item trading. There is some question about whether everything can really be found or crafted, but that will mostly be speculation given the few days the new toys have been around. I have found one of them so far.

So far, I have heard “Korean MMO” only twice, plus one guy shouting about kids who waste money on useless crap. Personally, I sympathize with their accountants in the blog post “who — after watching with tooth-grinding irritation as we shipped over 120 free updates to a three-year-old game — gently suggested that we ‘make some f$*&ing money already.'”

I am torn at times with respect to encouraging potentially negative revenue models with wanting to reward publishers whose content I enjoy at great length and low cost. I know people who have maintained (sometimes multiple) accounts to niche games mostly as developer charity. TF2 has been worth more to me than most purchases that did not include the rest of the Orange Box. So I do not mind the idea of passing them extra money, ostensibly for the new toys but really for several years of ongoing development and nigh-free fun. I just want the store to have a box where I can say, “I am not encouraging you to make this a cash cow, but I thought the game was worth far more than it cost, so I wanted you to get a share of that consumer surplus.”

The game can now have a de facto subscription fee, in that crates (with potentially rare items) drop but keys cost $2.49. Open one a week and you are paying $10/month.

: Zubon

Player Skill in WoW

Player skill is mostly irrelevant in a gear-centric game. SynCaine makes this point with respect to why players obsess about eking out the last percent of benefit from builds. I think we are mostly familiar with this argument, and it is 90+% true, but this comment from Sean Boocock is a well formulated statement of the counter-argument: some people are so ridiculously good that they break the curve, we dismiss them as aberrations, and forget that they are examples that demonstrate how sufficient skill can overcome most anything short of a hard gear check. (Most of the other comments are “WoW sucks,” “Darkfall sucks,” and “you suck,” so skip them; poor signal-noise ratio.)

: Zubon

Of Sticks, Carrots, and Wallets (Guild Wars 2)

Last night the ArenaNet blog updated with a post by John Hargrove, Guild Wars 2 game designer, presenting an overview of some of the reward and upgrade schemes in Guild Wars 2. There are five main design points followed by a look into how they incorporated that point. These are some pretty cool concepts incorporated in to the game. For example, a player’s loot roll is personalized. If there is a dungeon boss chest, the player gets her own roll on the loot table to find out what that she earned.

This one concept is resounding, and can be a dual-edged sword. The loot distribution at the end of a dungeon was almost a kind of bittersweet celebration. It was exciting to see what we as a group had won, but then often times others would get some of the loot I wanted. Instead they use a system similar to Dungeons and Dragons Online where the group after-event is gone in place of a personal moment with the chest. Hopefully they can find some way of taking back a little of that group reward by perhaps allowing a person to donate an item in-chest (before it gets bound) to another player.

The blog post then leans heavily in to the most iconic rewards in the MMO genre, gear. With gear players become walking trophy cases of accomplishment, and coming off of the excellent dye post, we know ArenaNet wants players to look exactly how they want to. However, this luxury is not without cost anymore.

Continue reading Of Sticks, Carrots, and Wallets (Guild Wars 2)