Jeff Strain over at the brand, new Undead Labs game studio took time out of his busy plane-hopping, zombie-stomping schedule to answer a few questions on the studio’s newly announced zombie console MMO. (My real name is Zach so don’t be confused, but also don’t go spreading it around in case nasty lawyerssess finds me.) Read on after the break to hear everything from velociraptors, the “MMO” term, and a debatably good place to hole up against a horde of zombies.
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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.
.4 Months, 5 Dungeons, 13 Bosses
I have leveled to 65 in no particular hurry, and I am almost done with the new quests in Mirkwood. Lots of solo content, lots of little stories, and I have toured the zone. “Now what?” as the players always ask.
The current end-game for The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ is three three-person dungeons, one six-person dungeon, and one twelve-person raid. The three-person dungeons have one, two, and three bosses, and the three-boss dungeon lets you summon them all at once for a big fight. The six-person dungeon has three boss fights plus a bonus boss if you complete hard mode. The raid again has three boss fights.
Not to seem ungrateful for the new content, but that is 13 fights to learn in the four-ish months until the next content patch. Continue reading 4 Months, 5 Dungeons, 13 Bosses
Pre-Buff Nerf
Your game is balanced at the cap. Your new expansion pack raises the cap. How can you let players rise further without completely disrupting things? Nerf everything, then let the players work to get back to where they were. Then launch the next expansion pack.
Do I need a developer quote for something we have seen on so many major expansions? The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ is the one nearest to my vision. At the end of Shadows of Angmarâ„¢, players had quite respectable Block/Parry/Evasion percentages, some avoiding the majority of attacks. Percentages are dangerous things: they automatically scale, and once you’ve reached a certain point, you cannot give more without giving the enemies an ability like “evasion penetration” that feels like a Burglar nerf. When Mines of Moriaâ„¢ launched, those percentages were all changed to BPE ratings, which were much larger numbers that translated to much smaller BPE percentages. It was an across-the-board nerf to defenses. This, in player relations speak, was done to create the opportunity for future character increases (i.e., work your way back to where you were).
For Siege of Mirkwoodâ„¢, several other percentages and numbers were changed to ratings. Who would like to guess whether the rating translates to a smaller percentage than it used to be? Continue reading Pre-Buff Nerf
Autumnal Hits
Zubon hasn’t done this in awhile, and I decided it makes for a fun quick post. On to the October-December analytics!
Clearings in the Lonely Woods
There is a stark contrast between playstyles of many an MMO waiting on an expansion and just receiving the expansion. The new expansion brings a new journey through many zones and quest chains, and as unfortunate as it is, many people experience the journey at a hugely varied pace. Real life, and other games, have limited my game time Lord of the Rings Online with experiencing the new expanded content in Siege of Mirkwood. As it is, almost everybody in my kinship is well ahead of me. The woods can be much gloomier when only strange creatures and strangers abound.
Yet, Turbine has done a great job (as far as I’ve experienced) with the content concentration. In the Mirk-Eaves, the quests send players at about three quests per chunk to specific geographical locations. At the locations, I’ve found there is about 10-20 minutes of gameplay from doing everything from destroying orc weapon stashes, staking out bosses, and everyone’s favorite: killing boars for boar meat. If a player does it right by picking up all three or so quests at once, then everybody at the geographical location will be doing approximately the same thing.Â
Re-Envisioning Book Instances
One bit of Siege of Mirkwoodâ„¢ that I have not seen discussed anywhere is how Volume II, Book 9 uses skirmishes where other books in the epic chain use instances. That they are using the new book to show off the new toy is obvious; that it has skirmishes has been discussed. No, the bit that struck me is that it does not have the group instances that all the other books have. There are solo instances to tell story bits, but it uses skirmishes instead of the old system for instanced group content.
Why does this matter? A recurring problem is how to deal with the older content for new people as the mass of the playerbase has moved past it. Most games go back a few years later and nerf content so that it solo-able, or add different grouping options, or otherwise experiment. The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ has weakened some content; before that it added rewards for repeating the 6-person instances so that veterans would have an incentive to help new players; and the latest talk has been of adding a “solo mode,” a mega-buff so that one player could solo what was built as a group instance.
Skirmishes get past that by building in scalability. Playing in off-hours or three years down the line? No problem: the attack on the castle has a solo difficulty built in. Small guild, or want to make it a guild event? Set it for 3, 6, or 12, or make it a higher tier. Never got into skirmishes, so your soldier is weak? You can turn down the level on many.
What impresses me is that the content has been built now so that it will be playable years from now. There will not be a need to fix it three years from now, and the grognards will have no fuel for, “Kids these days all need easy mode, while in my day we ground out ten thousand rats and liked it!” Maybe it is easier to add a super buff, but if I were the one retrofitting old instances to be solo-able, I would strongly consider turning some into skirmishes that you unlock during the epic books. This would also vastly increase the use of the content. Most people play the epic book instances once and then never look back, while people are repeating skirmishes everyday. (Making the boss fights interesting for different group sizes would be a design challenge.)
: Zubon
Token Economy
A typical looting session of the Watcher for my kin will look like this:
“OK we have a Platinum Coin of Spirit.”
“Is that shoulders or helm?”
“One sec… googling it”
“I think it can be bartered for either one can’t it?”
“No that’s the American servers. We have to wait until Mirkwood comes out in the UK for it to barter for either.”
“Spirit sounds more like it’s in your head than your shoulders. I think spirit is shoulders”
“Back. I just checked google and it’s helm.”
“So, if I need shoulders I could use my DKP on it now, and then get the shoulders for it later right?”
“Uhhhh…. need to check google. BRB”
Sometimes when it comes to exchanging tokens for things in games, its just a headache.
Gender Differences at Terra Nova
Dmitri Williams at Terra Nova links to their latest paper exploring the EQ2 data. The highlights are not terribly surprising. One notable is that men play more on average, but the hardcore women are more hardcore. This will not surprise anyone with a female guild leader.
Dmitri’s highlights note the higher percentage of females reporting bisexuality, although not the higher percentage of men reporting homosexuality; the total not-straight percentages are about the same. That is consistent with the demographics I recall, although he notes the female reporting rate as higher than the general population. I wonder the extent to which these are factors of reporting or of the underlying population. In every online community I know, women discussing bisexuality receive quite a bit of positive attention; men, not so much. There could also be an age factor there.
: Zubon
Instance Quests
Unheralded, Turbine solved a technical issue very neatly. (I may need some sort of conditional tense there, because some things break under pressure, but let’s assume it keeps working.) When you enter an instance, one or more quests pop up on the quest tracker, without your having talked to an NPC. Nothing fancy there, but let me explain the problems solved.
First, this is how you see hard mode in dungeons. Continue reading Instance Quests
Feature is a Word, Like Love
When I started reading about the new grouping feature in World of Warcraft, I was blown away. Here, I thought that Turbine had triumphed in the slaying of “activation energy” to play the vanilla MMO with skirmishes, and Blizzard possibly one-ups them. It’s a tough call to actually announce a winner. While the goal of both skirmishes and the random grouping feature in World of Warcraft is to decrease the time spent not playing. They attack it in very separate ways. Skirmishes are content. Random grouping is a feature.