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WoW Crafting

The production skills have almost no gameplay value. They can produce useful in-game things, and it is something to do as MMO players always need, but there is no fun in it. Recipe + ingredients + click + wait. It is convenient and dull, especially in volume. It encourages alt-tabbing, never a good sign for game design.

I find the gathering skills inappropriately engaging. The world is full of little boxes of candy, just for me! I was tempted to drop Blacksmithing, pick up Skinning or Herbalism, and gather my little heart out. At least you are out there doing something besides watching the little bar fill, and it progresses naturally as you play. Continue reading WoW Crafting

Weekend Deals on Steam

“Overlord: Complete Pack” with Overlord, Overlord II, and Overlord: Raising Hell is $8.75. I note that Overlord itself is just $1.50. I have heard mixed things about Overlord, notably that you spend too much time saving villages considering that you are the villain, and the Raising Hell levels sound like a lot of that. On the other hand, there are only so many good “be the bad guy” games out there, and there are good things too. If you want a review of a game from 2007, I might say some things after I play.

$1.50 for an old game, and it downloads and installs itself while I sleep? I should be looking through these digital distribution channels for classic games I never played. My list of books to read and movies to see also has a “games to play” section.

I did not enjoy Left 4 Dead much, but if you want the sequel, your pre-order time is almost up. Steam has the same deal there that Borderlands did: 10% off plus buy-3-get-1 free, which is just a brilliant offer for games with 4-player coop. Various places will also give you stuff for pre-ordering, like a Team Fortress 2 hat or a L4D2 bat.

: Zubon

Things To Do

Good version: the game has lots of content that remains meaningful at the level cap. Depending on your game, that could be a collection of dungeons, PvP, things to make or collect, areas to explore, or procedurally generated content that does not feel formulaic and repetitive.

Bad version: the game has lots of things to keep you busy and subscribed at the level cap. Depending on your game, that could be a variety of treadmills and grinds, or PvP and procedurally generated content that quickly becomes repetitive.

This is mostly an Explorer perspective, because I find it easier to think of what would make good post-cap Explorer content (new things to do) and bad post-cap Achiever content (do them each 5 times a day until you reach some new cap, to give us time to add more grinds to keep you busy until the next expansion pack). The distinction comes down to whether you would do X as an activity in and of itself, whether or not it produced some new numbers to add to your character sheet.

: Zubon

A difficult game to balance for PVP

Once per week, I podcast about Star Wars: The Old Republic. On the last episode, when the subject of “invisibility” style stealth for the recently revealed Imperial Agent class came up, I was adamant in my opposition to it. I hate when you are trying to PVP and thieves or burglers pop out of thin-air and do burst damage as if they had some kind of invisibility spell. I felt pretty sure they wouldn’t give invisibility stealth to Imperial Agents because, afterall, it wouldn’t be balanced for the Imperial Agent to have both cover and invisibility stealth when the counterpart, the Smuggler, does not. Well it seems I was wrong, because the folks at Darth Hater have seen video of an Imperial Agent go stealth with an non-timed toggle switch stealth.

How is this possible I wonder? One side of the fence has stealth, the other does not. It’s possible I think, because the game may not be designed around PVP balance.
Continue reading A difficult game to balance for PVP

On the Blogroll: Player Versus Developer

The hot topic these past couple of weeks has been MMO pricing models, and you will have trouble finding better discussion than at Player Versus Developer this month. Even if you do not agree with Green Armadillo on all the points, these are the critical points for discussion. Skip the distracting side issues and cut to the core. Here is a post on Facebook game scams, with an article I’ve been meaning to discuss. How about the conflicts of interest inherent in running a game with a cash store? You don’t need to fix balance issues if your players can buy their way around them. And there is the question of what is left to do if you are one of us not necessarily thrilled with the shift to RMT.

This last one reminds me of last week’s elections, because there is a sense of inevitability about the item shop. I cannot see the trend moving in the opposite direction. There will definitely be a place for subscription games, but the paradigm shift is already over if your position is reduced to “there will still be a place for it” or “we are still the majority.” Yes, for now, but winning 53-47 when it would have been 93-7 a little while ago means you are about to get steamrolled.

: Zubon

The House of Cards Return

So many of us are MMO tourists.  There might be a current base of operations, but even that will ebb and flow.  It’s just that most MMOs (perhaps, all) cannot create content faster than even the slow-playing majority of their players can take it down.  The mind wanders with all the times we were having fun, and soon enough we begin the inexorable internal debate of re-upping with an MMO that has accumulated some digital dust.  Syp portrays this gamer struggle in a delightful script form here, which amazingly enough happened to me with the exact same game this morning before he posted. 

The mind’s last argument is also its strongest.  One can’t argue the amorphous concept of fun very easily against rational points because rational points can always be irrationally hand-waved away.  The mind needs irrational reasons to bring down the house-of-cards that you will have fun where the grass might be greener.  Of course you can also spend $15 and hours of installing and patching and more hours figuring out why you left in the first place and rationally win.

–Ravious
on the homefront

Why Not Sell Epics?

Walk with me on a thought experiment. When the last Lich King dungeon opens and loot goes to tier 10, what if WoW adds an item shop selling tier 9?

As Blizzard PR, I would immediately describe this as a way of opening content. We want everyone to be able to experience everything in Wrath of the Lich King before Cataclysm goes live, and this is a way of bypassing gating. Of course, you can still earn everything in-game, so we’re not taking anything away from you, just providing more choices for our players.

I would assume that the game designers would immediately recoil, just because they are gamers. The kind of people who make WoW are the kind of people who play WoW, and it became a raiding game because they recruited raiders to design it. Achievers do not sell Achiever content to non- or lesser Achievers.

As a Blizzard business analyst, however, this sounds like win-win-win. First, some number of people will buy the items. That number is probably larger than most would like to admit. This is almost free money, as the content being sold was already in-game, and the item shop already there. Second, some smaller number of people will quit in protest. You lose their $15/month, but that is going to be less than the new revenue. You now have more revenue from fewer players. Furthermore, many of the people leaving are the ones who feel that their previous accomplishments were trivialized. That is, these are the hardcore raiders who are always pushing the bleeding edge of content. These people cost you money. They play 40+ hours a week (with all the costs associated), they place CSR calls that cost you more than $15/month, and they constantly complain that there is nothing to do because they burned through the content as fast as possible. So they now are complaining about something different; who cares? Third, that complaining is just more visibility, where people who disagree with the decision are out advertising it. I am increasingly accepting that there is no bad publicity, since everyone still seems happy to talk about EA games after #EAFail.

I do not like the idea as a player, but I cannot see how it fails to make business sense. Too extreme, too many people would quit? What if they sold tier 5? Would you quit over that? I can get a long way down the slippery slope before many are willing to step off.

: Zubon

Come Back to Age of Conan, Get Beta For The Secret World

I just got an email from Funcom making me a reasonably tempting offer:

Special subscription offers and double XP throughout November!

Today we launched a new campaign with some massive rewards on purchases of longer period subscriptions.

If you extend your subscription to Age of Conan in November, you will receive some amazing rewards:

  • Extend by 3 months and get a guaranteed access to the beta test for The Secret World *
  • Extend by 6 months and get an epic helmet for Age of Conan with a 10% XP boost + the reward above
  • Extend by 12 months and get the Age of Conan: Rise of the Godslayer expansion for free plus both rewards mentioned above **
  • If you just recently extended your subscription, don’t worry. Those who have committed to the 6 month or 12 month subscription after the 6th of October 2009 will automatically receive the corresponding reward too. Gametime purchased now will immediately give Veteran Points.

    • This offer is available until December 1st 2009, so don’t miss it!

    To properly celebrate this campaign we also activate double XP in Age of Conan for everyone all through the month of November! Use the /claim command to receive potions of double XP!

    * Access to later stages of the closed beta, date of access to be announced
    ** When launched in first half of 2010
    Each bonus item can only be received once per account. The helmet is made available to all characters on your account.

    This will require some quick contemplation. Most likely I’m going to pass.

    – Ethic

    Cheat

    I increasingly view my Achiever tendencies as a mental disease, a bit of neurological programming from our ancestral environment being over-stimulated by modern tools that provide all the signals without the underlying substance. Parts of our brains react to the bigger numbers and flashing lights in our Skinner boxes, but running on digital treadmills will not get us anywhere.

    Today, I encourage you to separate the reward from the activity, the pellet from the lever. If it really is the journey rather than the destination, you should still want to go on the journey without a prize at the end. Would you keep re-running that dungeon if there was no more loot to gain? Would you farm if you had unlimited gold? For some things, you would. Good. Do those, freed of any worries about winning a roll on a 2% drop.

    There is an easy way to test this: cheat. Grant yourself the reward at the end. This will not work in an MMO, but if the game saves to your hard drive, you can edit the save file. Are you really farming for experience or gold in some flash game? Are you running Diablo II or Borderlands bosses to try for better equipment? Backup your game, download a save game editor, and just give yourself the gun you want. There, now that you are no longer pulling the arm on a virtual slot machine, do you actually want to fight that boss multiple times per night?

    Because let me tell you, we may call them Achievements, but they just measure time spent, and if you do not enjoy what you are doing along the way, you could be spending your time elsewhere. If your game gates the fun content behind that kind of repetition, throw the game away and find something that will not make you crawl through barbed wire. If you find that it is the getting rather than the having, I hate to tell you this, but desire is the root of all suffering. There will always be more useless crap to want, and apparently it is useless crap to you if you no longer want it once you have it. If you are really willing to work long hours for a digital gold star, I need some wallpaper replaced in the guest room. I’ll e-mail you the imaginary star, gold piece, or sniper rifle.

    : Zubon