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Comment Spotlight

Sometimes when you receive a comment, there are so many things you want to say that you cannot say any. You can do little but regard it with wonder. As with a poem or a koan, the discussion would be far longer than the original. Rather than leave the lantern beneath a bushel, in the spirit of Warrior Wisdom Fridays, we present the pronouncement of jon:

RMT proponents are so amusingly shallow emotionally (hence easily manipulated by game devs). You people deserve to be parted with your money.
The “directs your efforts away from the unemployed” quote illustrates the mindset of RMT proponents quite a bit. Continually frustrated by their own perceived inability to compete with fellow MMO players for virtual status, they champion a form of meta-gaming where money, instead of merit, can buy status within the community.
While they would have people believe their desire for RMT based games is simply about enabling them to enjoy the game in their own unique flowery way. it’s really about finally being able to show up the “unemployed” guy. Ironically the unemployed guy (who never really existed in the first place), bored by MoneyQuest™ goes and plays something where achievement is rewarded, leaving the RMTers high and dry with nobody to show off to.
This RMT fixation indicates self-esteem and confidence issues to me. Take a break from the XP potions and zombie pandas. Use the extra money for a session with a therapist.

Long live fiero.

: Zubon

Blame November Rain

This week has been really “blah” all around.  There have been some exciting things.  Like a possible new boss battle in Guild Wars.  The Volume 1, epic quests becoming soloable in Lord of the Rings Online.  And of course, the Evil Empire’s RMT sale of drunk panda pets.  It’s all great, I guess.  I would probably care more if it had not rained the past two weekends.

Mostly I have been plugging away at Borderlands.  I gave up on multiplayer.  Yes, I have tried every suggestion (GameRanger, Hamachi, port opening, etc.), and 90% of the time the system refuses.  What drives me absolutely batty is that 10% of the time it lets me co-op and nothing has changed!  Until I see a fix from Gearbox, I am just going to assume I bought and am playing a singleplayer FPS.  And, quite a good one at that.

Last night I decided to head off to bed after turning in a quest, and along the way I got a purple-named revolver that shoots AoE electrical bursts.  I stayed up for another half an hour just roaming around the main zone looking for bandits to electrocute with magnum bullets.

–Ravious
she sure got the boogie

Re-Quest

My buddy invites me to his Ventrilo server, so we can chat while we are in our respective games. He is running his five-man dailies in WoW, I am starting a second playthrough in Borderlands.

“So, what’s this ‘playthrough’ BS? Does anything change, or do you just do the same boring-ass quests over again? Who wants to do that?”

“Aren’t you playing WoW right now?”

: Zubon

We Are All RMTers

Many developers have recognized that “play as much as you like” is leaving money on the table, while “pay as much as you like” directs your efforts away from the unemployed and towards capturing as much consumer surplus as possible.

WoW quietly became a came with a cash shop, only the cash shop offered account/character services rather than the usual cosmetic items, bonus xp, and sometime uber loot. WoW has officially started its cash shop. The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ has started with the adventure pack, DDO is now a F2P (free to pay, free to play) game, but I don’t recall hearing any RMT for Asheron’s Call. Most of the recent releases have their cash shops built right in, and others are adding them. The more unfortunate games are adding core services and things that were supposed to be part of the basic package as cash add-ons. Wizard101 has been bulking up its shop.

Which games are left without ways for you to spend dollars beyond a monthly fee?

: Zubon

Custom Design

The following is a guest post by Moormur.

Greetings, readers! My name is Moormur. Some of you may know me from LOTROCast or the Galactic Holofeed, podcasts I co-host both with a very able crew. I am also an avid reader of all the stuff here at Kill Ten Rats. I refrain from posting commentary on my podcast websites for whatever reason, so I have asked Ethic here at Kill Ten Rats if he didn’t mind a guest column.

I’ve been thinking lately of a trend of sorts in the MMO developing community-player designed content. I’m not talking about sandbox MMOs those are really a topic for another time and place. I’m talking about when developers release a set of tools in a theme park style MMO that allows players to create missions. City of Heroes, as far as I know, was really the first to do this. Now, my former MMO Star Wars: Galaxies has put out their own set of tools with the Chronicle Master.

Continue reading Custom Design

Much ado about not a damn thing

So, as you might have heard, the almighty Blizz is selling cosmetic, non-combat, just fluff pets via their game store. Wow.com has the lowdown. I’m reading people up in arms about this already. I don’t see the problem. I actually think it’s a pretty good move. We talked about this a while back.

As usual, I wanna learn, so if you don’t support this move, I’m all ears. Tell me why. Just to provide some framework, here’s how I see it: I don’t care how much money Blizzard has, they’re still well within their rights to want more of it. There’s little debate there in my book. If they had put these stupid pets as .001% drop rate loot from $NASTYBOSS at the end of $LONGASSINSTANCE, people would have complained. If they had put it as acquirable rewards from a $KILOMETRICREPGRIND, people would’ve complained. It’s cosmetic. It doesn’t affect gameplay. It’s just a bunch of pixels next to the other bunch of pixels you call your avatar. Can’t offer it for free. Work must be compensated, so there you go.

Not even the fact that half of the proceeds from each sale of that despicable pandaren goes to a charity seems to quell the sentiment. Too expensive? Don’t buy it. Don’t like it? Don’t buy it. You think the pets are silly (I do)? Don’t buy them. Simple as that, folks.

There’s a ton of things to grill Blizzard for. This ain’t one of them. I applaud their move let the masses eat cake fluff.

Vendors

You may have expressed your sympathies for the NPCs in your favorite MMO. They never get to leave their shops, and their families miss them. Perhaps they do not even have shops, eternally standing in the sun and the rain in the hopes that someone will come by with frayed rat tails to sell. The lucky ones get to wander along a track, but most of them might as well be vending machines.

Borderlands takes that step. Shopkeepers? You can meet both of them, but mostly you deal with the vending machines they set up around the world. Drop your money in and grenades come out. Drop your sniper rifle in and money comes out.

How does that work? In a sci fi setting, you can have good computers in a box that huge. How do they empty/restock them, how did they get them in these forsaken corners of the world, and why don’t they get robbed? Look, this is a game where shotguns can fire electric rockets and pistols can generate their own ammunition. Being nitpicky about vending machines will not help you when you want to set fire to the acid-spitting dog-thing.

: Zubon

Veteran of the Wrathgate

One of the novellas in Dragonblight is 95% great. There is even an achievement, so the game is pushing you towards quality content (as opposed to the achievement requiring The Green Hills of Stranglethorn). This is the 20-mission chain ending in The Battle For The Undercity from the eastern Alliance Keep. It is one of the central storyline quests for the expansion, and its backbone provides strength and structure.

This is exactly what you should have expected coming into the expansion pack: war with the Lich King. Entering Northrend through the Borean Tundra, this is what I saw coming, with Nerubians attacking right at the beach. The Tundra turned out to be a long digression, but the main thread picks up. You have a castle on the edge of doom, you have slavering undead hordes. Clear the crypt! Blast the mines! Save the citizens! There are a few misses along the way, but it features great heroics, you fight the undead just like you signed up for, and the NPCs praise you at every step for being the epic hero who is making a difference. You can pretend that it matters, and phasing tech helps the illusion.

It leads to the excellent cinematic that Blizzard used to promote the expansion. It really is a great video. We played it several times at the LAN party just after it was released, and we wondered when Blizzard was going into film-making. They really do make great trailers, and having played through the zone, it makes sense why dragons appear and burn everything at the end (a bit of a WTF moment in the original release). Phasing even brings the effects in-game.

The very end of the arc is horrible, absolutely terrible, just like the end of the Death Knight intro. It is a deconstruction of god mode, showing you that the game can become even more pointless if you crank all the dials to 11 and have immortal characters. Get healed for 10,000hp per second with similar DPS! Accompany your 12+ million hit points worth of allies into battle! You can join in the fight, pretending that your tiny contribution matters and that the outcome is not pre-determined, or you can go AFK and let the NPCs play with each other in a long, repetitive fight. Watch your raid boss allies fight the raid boss enemy for several minutes of pointless animations! Rather than sit through fifteen minutes with no gameplay value, I recommend reading the text on the wiki and alt-tabbing. The voice acting is the only value added by having it in-game, and that could have been done with a much shorter cut scene. Even the animation is shoddy, because Varian Wrynn resets to his default stance for a moment between each talking emote, making his swords flicker in and out of existence as he talks. It fares poorly coming directly after some of the best quests and visuals in the game.

I fear for the future of the industry when some players consider this last quest one of the “most epic.” No, the numbers and gameplay are meaningless, and the storyline advances only by wiping out the storyline advancement that happened in the previous cut scene. Hey, let’s have several speeches about how the Alliance and Horde must unify against a greater foe, show them doing so, finally cash out the implications of the Forsaken, and then hit the reset button immediately? And do the players who have not done the Frozen Throne bonus campaign have any idea what Jaina is about?

: Zubon