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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.

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Guild Wars – Battle for Lion’s Arch

The final-ish part of the War in Kryta chapter of Guild Wars Beyond dropped awhile go, but I didn’t have the time or sheer will to complete it until last night.  The Battle for Lion’s Arch might be one of the most intense instances in Guild Wars.  The road to this mini-mission (a quest with its own instance) can be long and frustrating, but the end result is very much worth it.  Even the rewards along the way are pretty nice.

Continue reading Guild Wars – Battle for Lion’s Arch

Dopamine

I am reading How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. I need to read further to decide whether it will be worth recommending, but chapter 3 has some great insights for reward systems and game design. Chapter 3 is about errors, how our simian brains will vainly search for patterns in randomness and provide excessive neurochemicals to keep us focused on what is actually unpredictable.

We are a pattern-seeking species, with self-programming neurons that seek to predict risks and rewards. We are very good at developing intuitive understandings of situations in which we do not have enough time for a rational analysis, kind of like how your dog can catch a frisbee even if he cannot do the math of plotting three-dimensional vectors in real time. Unfortunately, we apply the same mental programming to completely random sequences, seeing patterns that do not exist and feeling bigger highs from wins strictly because they are unpredictable.

I say that again: unpredictable wins produce greater emotional reactions. Your brain is programmed to look for surprises, and if it really is a random system, success will always be surprising to some degree. Continue reading Dopamine

Engineer Achievements

Team Fortress 2 has been an interesting mess since the Engineer update. You can trade your sentry gun’s ability to upgrade for ridiculous building speed or its self-targeting for a remote control, but the greater change is letting all Engineers pack up their buildings and move them. Fully upgraded sentries are popping up all over the place, fast, while they are also being shot down faster than they can be reassembled. Two weeks ago, you might plead for a second Engineer, and now you’re considering moving to a server that caps them. You can be annoyed at the insanity or embrace it, being your team’s seventh Engineer or picking a class to counter them.

The attached achievements are actually healthy. I am used to seeing achievements for aberrant gameplay or freakish occurrences, like getting mid-air melee kills while rocket-jumping or encouraging medics to attack instead of using an uber-charge. The Engineer achievements are largely for things you should be doing anyway, and most of them encourage teamwork, particularly between Engineers. There are achievements for helping someone else build, for upgrading their buildings, for healing their buildings, for saving them from Spies, and from getting Engi-Engi kill assists. There are achievements demanding dispensers and teleporters. The Wrangler (remote control) gives an Engineer the Sniper’s narrowed focus, but the rest rewards a utility class for being team-focused. Excellent!

: Zubon

14

Syp is starting Book 14 in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢, and I hate to warn him, but it mostly gets worse as you progress. That epic chain does have a few good fights in instances, but the whole is a train wreck of fetch quests, travel, and reminders that you are a little nothing in the storyline.

When your epic quest starts with a trip to buy honey, that should be a warning sign. It is not a battle or all about the journey; he wants expensive honey for the trip, from one of the starter towns. He wants you to visit another town for cutlery moulds. Yeah. This chain will send you to all the starter towns and across the trackless tundra. Epicness includes running across town to talk to a stablehand and walking across a building to tell someone what you just clicked on. It also mixes forced group and forced solo (instanced) content, so that you are likely to need multiple groups to get through it, even if your group held together through all the travel.

The big fight scenes are good. They can be challenging. There is a solo instance that is really great content, where you play the Ranger than every Hunter wants to be but never will (nyah nyah). It also includes one of the worst instances in the game, a repeat of a earlier map from an enemy perspective in which you kill slugs (slowly) and kick orcs awake (slowly) while running from end to beginning to end to beginning. It is a speed bump that will make you long for the hour you might spend on horses riding between towns.

If you miss that, you have Book 15 to look forward to. Epic travel while AFK on a horse!

: Zubon

Guild Wars 2 – Ranger

Today the third seminal class for Guild Wars 2 was officially released. The ranger profession joins with the elementalist and warrior to round out the icons of the adventurer, scholar, and soldier groups. I was kind of hoping for one of the fringe classes to be released, like the necromancer, but it makes sense to have the three (out of eight) professions released now that will likely be the most popular to new Guild Wars players.

The ranger seems to stay most true out of the three to the original Guild Wars profession concept. They are masters of the bow, utilize traps, and retain their spirit calling abilities. The official site’s article mostly discusses the ranger’s emphasis on pets. In Guild Wars, except for a few specific builds the ranger’s pet mostly takes a back seat to all the other skills available. There was even less importance on the type of pet that a player chose if they had to bring a pet along.  In Guild Wars 2, though, it seems that the ranger will be an honest-to-jah pet class.  In the IGN interview ArenaNet even bluntly states “players who want range without a pet are better off playing another profession.”

Continue reading Guild Wars 2 – Ranger