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Guildcast’d

Our friends over at Massively, Shawn and Rubi, run yet another MMO podcast in their free time.  Unlike Massively Speaking which has discussion across the MMO genre, GuildCast is dedicated to Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2.  I guested in Episode 3 where we cover quite a few topics in our short time (well it feels short when we three fanatics could have easily done a 5-hour episode).  We discuss recent interviews, updates to the War in Kryta, and the first public demo of Guild Wars 2.  Check it out!

–Ravious
were I as tedious as a king

Brash Thoughts from a LOTRO Lifer

So seems we here at KTR barely got the prophetic drop (thanks to the precognitive post by Mordor or Bust).  Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) is indeed going F2P, and with many players having a lifetime subscription this presents an interesting conundrum.  For I have been pretty much a F2P player for some time because after about 13-20 months the lifetime subscription pays off.  So now everybody gets a F2P status.  Oh noes, how unfairs!!!

Continue reading Brash Thoughts from a LOTRO Lifer

Insta-Balancing – Guild Wars 2 and Beyond

With two of the five crown jewels* in Guild Wars 2 presented thus far it seems that the community is having differing reactions to the two.  On one hand people seem pretty satisfied by the overview of the personal story because ArenaNet seemed to preemptively attack many of the possibly questions fans would have.  The follow up to the overview seemed to really round the whole thing off.  The event system, on the other hand, has been constantly been a topic of hard discussion around the Guild Wars 2 fanbase.  Of the event system, balancing the events for active players on the fly seems to get the most hits.

Over at the Guild Wars 2 Slovenija fansite, Tr0n managed to snag an interview with ArenaNet mostly covering what fans were already squabbling about, events.  ArenaNet quite bluntly disclosed the multiple routes that an event could be balanced.  New waves of enemies could have an increased number of mobs per wave or the mobs could have increased levels. 

Continue reading Insta-Balancing – Guild Wars 2 and Beyond

Guild Projects

Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) is coming out with a pretty cool update at the end of this month.  It has a new adventure pack, some new skills and what not, but the biggest feature, in my opinion, are the guild airships.  The guild airships effectively take the place of guild halls and guild banks that appear in other MMOs.  The guild airships feature coincides with a guild leveling mechanic that will also launch with Update 5.  I think that in many MMOs guilds are one of the most overlooked features, and having a guild project will be a great addition to DDO.

Continue reading Guild Projects

Guild Wars 2 – Managing Expectations

In case you haven’t heard, Guild Wars 2 will be available to play this August if you are going to Gamescom in Germany or PAX in a September Seattle.  A lot could be theorized about what that means for launch or beta, and one has to take in to account the convention season and the demos available for other games (like The Old Republic).  What is more important, for now, is how ArenaNet has been handling expectations of their upcoming game. Continue reading Guild Wars 2 – Managing Expectations

Guild Wars 2 Event Pitfalls

There is a thread on Guild Wars 2 Guru forums titled “Go away! You are upscaling my event!”  It is rife with a deconstruction, from the available knowledge, of the Guild Wars 2 event system.  It’s a pretty good thread detailing possible pitfalls of the event system, but most importantly it shows with all the dangers just how big of a risk ArenaNet is taking in stepping away from the standard MMO quest (!) system.  It is a less tested mechanic in the MMO genre, but Warhammer Online’s public quests provide a very good Petri dish to show what ArenaNet devs will have to consider for Guild Wars 2. Continue reading Guild Wars 2 Event Pitfalls

Moving the Cheese

With any luck, Bioware will tell the lot of us off and take The Old Republic in a direction that current MMO players will find inconceivable. In the best of all possible worlds, you will recognize its connection to the original EverQuest the way you recognize the connection between Pac-Man and Quake. Because we have ruined these games by defining the RPG out and setting for killing 10,000 rats because it will improve our gearscore.

Darren senses that Bioware is missing the point of MMOs. Good for them. Our niche market is a horror of trying to stretch out the fun instead of making it more fun. Portal did not become a huge hit because it made you execute the same maneuver 50 times before moving to the next level.

World of Warcraft did not become a huge hit by catering to then-current MMO players. It so vastly expanded the market that it effectively created the whole thing; which has had more players, World of Warcraft or every earlier western MMO combined? Bioware is looking for that kind of success, and they are going to succeed or fail big. They are not going to settle for a few hundred thousand players. While there are a lot of developers that could live quite nicely with that playerbase, as a corporation they are not devoting resources to niches. They can try to poach a few million current MMO players, or they can take the market in a different direction.

I have no idea if the game will be good, successful, or even something that I want to play. But I will be disappointed if it ends up appealing to the current MMO market instead of trying to reach different players.

: Zubon

House of Leaves has the best dedication page ever.

Grinding as Achievement and Extender

Should I blame CRPGs for grinding, or do we want to go back further? I remember long ago in the original Final Fantasy, seeking out wandering encounters so that I could get that bit more experience or treasure for taking on the next boss. I suppose I should not be surprised to find it in online multiplayer flash games. You see it everywhere once you start to look for it. But why, because people feel like there is more game if they spend longer squeezing the enjoyment or accomplishment from it? Time spent is a cost, not a benefit!

Continue reading Grinding as Achievement and Extender

Perverse Randomization

One night last week, I was in very poor spirits while playing Elements because of losing two games in a row after a 2/15 chance failed to come up in 30 tries. (Even worse than that 1.4% chance, really, because it was two 15-set trials of sampling without replacement with a 4/30 chance. The odds were around 4/15 by the end of each.) The night before I hit the computer’s perfect counter-deck to mine three times in a row, and I’m still vaguely bitter about that game where a 1/3 chance happened 8/13 times. The next night a 6/30 chance did not appear in two 15-turn games. In games that are completely random like craps or roulette, you just roll with streaks, but it is frustrating in a deck-building game like Elements or Dominion where managing probability is the whole point. Every plan breaks at a certain degree of perverse unlikelihood.

The next day I was reading Battle Royale, which is a different sort of game. If you do not know the premise of the novel/movie/manga, imagine Lord of the Flies, but the students are put on the island intentionally, armed, and told to fight it out until there is only one survivor. They are armed at random, based on which pack they pick up as they leave the briefing. Knives seem common, in varying lengths, but I just met the guys who lucked into a machine pistol and a sawed-off shotgun. And then there is Noriko, who got a boomerang.

The universe holds more perversity than you can survive. You think you have planned for every possibility, and then a meteor hits your house. All of life is an example of gambler’s ruin. You cannot live forever because, given an infinite amount of time, not only will everything go wrong that can go wrong, but also it will all go wrong at the same time. And, just in case you can survive that a few times, since we are talking about forever, it will happen an infinite number of times.

Which puts that card game issue in perspective.

: Zubon