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Character Tao in Guild Wars 2

“Tao” is one of the most simple [religious] concepts ever to describe, and one of the hardest to fully comprehend.  Simply put it is “the way.”  In smaller personalized chunks it can represent the way of living, the way of living, or the way of self.  Every MMO, whether I like it or not, has a player Tao.  In so-called amusement park MMOs (e.g., World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online) the way to play is nearly set in stone.  Sure there are filthy roleplayers that clog up an inn or ancient, ruined megastructure now and then, but all they are doing is forcing sandbox play into the set of preordained rides.  It’s very hard to fight the collectively defined way to play.  It’s even harder for a player to feel like the way of playing is his or her own.

Even though ArenaNet kept away from this deep waters concept, their latest blog article basically presents their view of Tao through an MMO through their systems of “personality” and “karma.”  They are systems to help define a player path, but also to let the player personalize it.

Continue reading Character Tao in Guild Wars 2

Die Now

A mood improvement technique I have been trying is quitting on a high point. If things go really well, call it a night. If things are as good as they can reasonably get, don’t wait for them to get worse, just take your win and leave. The two things you remember most of your experiences are the most extreme case and the last thing that happened; if you make them both the same positive event, you double-win.

: Zubon

Title reference: in Margaret Weis’s Star of the Guardians trilogy is the claim that the Greeks used this phrase to express “this is the high point in your life.” That is a bit more extreme than logging off.

Waking With A Dawn Over Enedwaith

Things have been a little slow since Dungeons and Dragons Online killed my computer.  I kid, a little.  I mean it was the game I was playing when my HP “gaming” laptop’s video card was reduced to short-circuited rubble. The game was not at fault because a simple Google search revealed that my laptop series had huge video card problems, and I was very lucky to have mine last so long.  I attribute it to judicious use of a separate laptop fan.  In the meantime I am waiting for a desktop; the first I’ve had in six years.  Anyway…

The NDA for Lord of the Ring’s big update has dropped.  I was not in beta (mostly by choice), so I am learning everything with the public.  I was accidentally leaked the fact about adding Lua scripting to the UI, and I pray we have some sort of Scrolling Combat Text mod up on Book release.  Thank you, devs, for listening.  The API for the mods is very, very limited so don’t expect anything on the order of World of Warcraft or GearScore.  Still, it is nice to give some more moddable access to a fanbase, which has infinite dev time by comparison.

There is so much to learn, like exceptional Captain updates, new bank usage, the freeish-to-play (F2P) system, the new zone Enedwaith, and so much more.  I am so far behind in information that I will have to severely piece meal it over the week.  Any Legendary Item changes? What’s available to purchase in the cash shop?  And so on.  

I clearly burnt out on Lord of the Rings Online early this year during a very stressful time in my life.  Now, with a new computer and a new game update, I feel it is time to ride in to the Enedwaithian dawn…. drunk…. on a new keg-carrying Inn League horse… with permanent drunk effect.

–Ravious
in the middle of the street

Cultural Difference

In World of Warcraft, the shared world is where you complete the leveling game. It is organized by and dominated by quests. The goal of the leveling game is to earn experience points and to complete it as time-efficiently as possible. The end game is the real game, and it takes place in instances. The goal is to improve your gearscore. Completing achievements and collecting pets and mounts are shared mini-games between the two levels of play.

Or at least that is how I see the majority of hardcore players. If you disagree, the question is not whether it is true for you but whether you think I have mis-assessed the majority. You could also make the case that the real majority is casually making its way through the leveling game. Those people are less likely to be engaged in MMO blogs or the meta-game, so I don’t know if they are part of the conversation.

In City of Heroes and The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢, the leveling game is the game. There is a veneer of end game, but people who think that the game begins at the level cap are severely disappointed. There is some harder content at the cap, along with the chance to farm for best-in-slot gear, but the games are designed for the journey. If you power-level to get past the leveling game, you are just missing the game. The end game is pretty much more of the leveling game, without experience points. (Completing badges/deeds and collecting costumes/mounts are shared mini-games between the two levels of play.)

Going from the latter two to the former, I was constantly annoyed by “the game begins at 80.” Meanwhile, the population in the former is much larger and therefore is a constant source of complaints as visitors in the latter two. “I left WoW because I was bored, but this game sucks because it isn’t more like WoW. I need you to change it for me now, because I’m going back to WoW when the next expansion drops.”

: Zubon

Group Puzzle Content

Puzzles have a long and proud tradition in single-player computer games. Quality has varied dramatically, but then Sturgeon’s Law applies. (Feel free to commiserate in the comments about your favorite horrible guesswork “puzzles.”) Puzzle bosses are a classic implementation, although these are often a thin candy coating over the BIG RED GLOWING EYE that you shoot.

We seem to want to replicate this in MMOs, and I do not think it has gone well. Problems are both because you expect to fight the bosses multiple times and because you will not be bringing the same people.

Continue reading Group Puzzle Content

Varieties of Gold Spam

I recently received the usual e-mail asking me to help some African official move millions of dollars through my bank account. I was obviously selected carefully, because he had 30kb of names in the “to” field. The interesting twist on this scam was that it was supposed to be gold, not US currency, and the e-mail had links to several stories about commodities markets and the gold standard.

The gold-sellers who are trying to steal your account information through phishing e-mails are often insufficiently sophisticated. Some are very good, with copies of real companies’ sites and artful URL deceptions. Most seem to rely on bulk, making a token effort and sending it to as many people as possible. If you get a 0.01% hit rate when sending a million e-mails, that’s not bad money for the effort.

The 419 scammers are intentionally being unsophisticated. Many of them really do speak better English than that, or at least have access to someone who does. The ruse has two purposes in the scam. First, the kind of person they want to take advantage of is more likely to respond to an unsophisticated request. Either you are charitable, and therefore feel sorry for them, or you are predatory, and therefore think you can put one over on them. Either way, you are drawn in. Second, assuming you are drawn in, if they manage to get money from you once, they can plausibly claim a misunderstanding and try again on the same victim. He does not look bright, and his English certainly is poor, so he has a convenient excuse for whatever goes wrong; come on, give him another chance.

As ever, don’t click the links, don’t give out your info, yaddah yah.

: Zubon

Playing With and Against

My offline gaming has explained my online gaming history to me. I am a carebear because I want to play with friends, not against them.

I can be intensely competitive, but I prefer to be cooperative. We should all be on the same team. We should all win. I would rather have an allied victory than conquer the entire board; even in a single-player 4X, I have this unhealthy tendency to let others grow and prosper rather than playing aggressively. The joy of PvE is that we have two sides, and all the Ps are on one side of that divide.

I like my PvP in small, discrete units. FPS games are conveniently concentrated doses. Games with “duels,” “matches,” and “rounds” are usually the right length. If I need to log in more than once for a “campaign,” we are probably not in my element. I don’t want to spend days dwelling on how to destroy you. I can be rather good at that, but those are not thoughts I like having in my head.

I have had some pen-and-paper RPG time lately, and I like working as a party. If there is serious intra-party conflict, I would rather skip sessions when the problematic players/characters are present. I played Diplomacy this weekend, and eight hours of suspicion and war were incredibly engrossing but not how I want to regard my fellow players. I have also been playing some Eurogames lately, and I enjoy the common characteristic that, while the games are interactive and competitive, there are fewer instances of directly striking at each other, and players are rarely eliminated mid-game.

I do have a fondness for games where it is many-against-one, with a dungeonmaster-equivalent who is explicitly “against” and not a neutral arbiter. Those are hard to find and balance. Isn’t there a zombie FPS in which one player is effectively L4D’s Director, sort of a RTS versus his FPS friends? [Zombie Master — thanks, Mikeful.] I like that notion more than survivors versus infected.

: Zubon

Ghosts of Ascalon Follow-Up Interview

ArenaNet more than graciously gave Kill Ten Rats a chunk of Jeff Grubb’s very busy time to ask five follow-up questions stemming from Ghosts of Ascalon.  Who better to ask than one of the co-authors  of Ghosts of Ascalon himself? Read on to hear about hints at the developer’s cut of the shadow show, more on the Deep Sea Dragon, and most importantly, thoughts on perspective.

Continue reading Ghosts of Ascalon Follow-Up Interview