Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.
.An online distribution network recently announced that release of a new game was only days away, so this was my last chance to pre-order. They were not offering a pre-order discount. It was just my last chance to pay for the game before it came out.
: Zubon
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.
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 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:
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
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 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
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)
It has been a couple of years, and this computer has seen more abuse than most of my PCs, including physical damage to the motherboard. It still runs mostly fine, but the loading times are getting to me, so I am moving to 64-bit and gorging myself on RAM this time.
I would like to get a new system sometime in the next five months. Sadly, I know jack about current hardware and price points, since I need that information once every few years. Conveniently, some of you know a lot about hardware and good deals on it. So I turn to you. Any recommendations? (“Let’s see what’s available on Black Friday” is a fair recommendation.)
My goal is a system that will be able to play the next holiday season’s games on high (not necessarily ultra-high) without issues, although the most demanding games on my list right now are StarCraft 2 and Guild wars 2. I suppose that is mostly a graphics card question, an area where I know even less than usual, since meeting their recommended specs is not too hard. I do not take my PC on the road enough to justify the higher costs of moving to a laptop, although maybe I would start doing so if I could (plus a docking station for full monitor and keyboard at home).
My previous rig came from CyberPowerPC, which was a good mid-high end PC at a sane price. The only downsides were the huge Coolermaster case and problems resulting from the failure of the liquid cooling system; I am pretty sure that I caused most of the damage troubleshooting it and poking around afterwards. That is a separate story.
: Zubon
The November issue of the UK PC Gamer came with a handful of pages on Guild Wars 2. One of the posters at Guru went above and beyond in tracking down a copy of the newly released magazine to disseminate any exclusive info to the masses. Big thanks to Lyssa for taking that time, and then taking the time to do a “live”-posting of info as he read. I would expect a couple official dungeon articles from ArenaNet in October, but in the meantime, let’s look at this new information.
Dungeons are instanced content nodes in Guild Wars 2 that tie heavily in to a player’s personal story and then branch out into repeatable content. It seems that to attune to the dungeon, the player has to get to that point in their personal story. The dungeon’s first phase overlaps with the personal story, and the player is joined by a NPC’s (and any supporting players) to finish this phase. Once the personal story phase is completed, the dungeon opens up into an explorable mode with follow-up adventures that are designed to be repeatable. It is unclear now, but I would expect the explorable areas to mostly be group oriented and not part of the personal story.
The hoarding and collecting impulse is deep in the gamer heart, driving us to get that last achievement or finish out a dungeon, character, or game after it has stopped being fun. One tool I like for reducing my meatspace clutter is having an online distribution channel. As long as I can trust them to stay in business and available, an archive somewhere will hold my stuff. All the things that can happen to your physical copies no longer matter, from losing them in the move or house to soda and pet messes to figuring out how to read 3.5″ floppies these days. Someone out there, with better backup practices than me, will let me download a copy if I ever need them again.
The same applies to the Steam Cloud and my saved games. Horrible things happen to my computer more often than they happen to my Steam access.
I had not explored Battle.net before StarCraft II. They have a place to input your keys for Blizzard games. Conveniently, I still have every CD and every key; I am best situated to use the service because I do not need it (irony). But I do not need to bring my CDs to LAN parties “just in case.” I need this service for all my old games, so I can input a code and stop hoarding physical media, although I am likely to keep and protect my Master of Orion CD and manual forever.
: Zubon