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Do You Click on Mystery Threads?

My post titles are usually subject headings or literary references. You usually know what you are getting from the title and category, and if you do not care about Champions Online or crafting, you can skip those posts easily enough. I am fond of meta-data that helps us improve the noise:signal ratio.

I frequently see forum posts with titles like:

  • Just one question…
  • Devs, what are you thinking?!
  • ridle me this
  • A humble request

These are just bottles with “drink me” on the tag. There is no indication of what might be inside, and there is a very good chance that it is poison. But there are also some great gems and good discussions. (I just leapt off that metaphor.)

I guess this is a question of how you deal with sources with a middling signal:noise ratio. I like sources near 1:0 or 0:1, because I can track the former and ignore the latter. I am not sure where my cutoff is for willingness to dig through trash in search of gems.

: Zubon

Wow, that last sentence applies pretty broadly, doesn’t it?

Ignoring the Approaching Diku Gate

The foreboding Gygaxian DIKU gate is imminently approaching in Lord of the Rings Online.  We are given until December 1, 2009 for the Mines of Moria iteration.  Then, the Siege of Mirkwood power levels are deployed.  Following the usual formula, your hard earned gear is washed away as more powerful boars and spiders resist laugh at your feeble Morian might.  At least on my server, it seems, no one cares.

I just bought a new ring at the sizeable price of 4 gold.  I didn’t need the ring per se, but at a 33% discount from the usual market price it felt like I was making a good decision.  My stats were buffed the usual 2%, and I had another teal to adorn my indigo-hued Captain.  People are still buying my black dye, and my top tier morale potions seem to sell within the hour.  Shouldn’t we all know that within a month all of this will be for naught?

People are still working on radiance gear in the Moria instance cluster, the Watcher and Turtle are weekly runs for many, and generally the heroes fighting the denizens of the deep are unaware of the war-hippies’ plans to attack Southern Mirkwood.  Maybe all at once the cultural focus will shift from advancement to preparation.  Open beta perhaps?  Until then, ignorance is bliss.

–Ravious
a child said, what is grass

Power of 10 Achievements

One way to run achievements is to encourage breadth. Have achievements for doing everything once or a few times. Complete this dungeon, kill ten rats, cook every type of pie. I advocate this for Explorers, of which I am one. It encourages players to see all of your content, therefore extending the time until they get to the end and complain that there is nothing to do, while rewarding long-duration playthroughs. It can increase retention that way while serving as a checklist for players looking for something to do. It can also be expensive, because you need an entirely new thing every time you add achievements.

One way to run achievements is to encourage grinding. Have achievements for doing things repeatedly. Complete this dungeon 10 times, kill ten thousand rats, cook one hundred pies. I advocate this for Achievers, which I am secondarily. If you are going to track and display how many rats Bob has killed, as I think you should, you can then tack awards onto it. This is easy to develop, because you just add a name for each power of 10 for each enemy type. You get that Explorer award for the first kill of each enemy type, then add another tier for 10, 100, 1000, …, 100,000,000. You do not even need names for all of them at the start, because you will have lots of time between the time he becomes Bob the Super-Epic Ratslayer for 100,000,000 rats and Bob the [prefix] Ratslayer for 1,000,000,000 rats. Then add meta-achievements, for having killed 100 of everything. This means that there is always something more to do, more to Achieve, and it can increase retention with a never-ending checklist. Not everyone will pursue it, but if people will pay you to run on an achievement treadmill, set it up and take their credit card information.

The latter idea came to me first, and I find myself turning away from it. First, I would not want to do it myself. If I played a game for 10 years, it might be nice to know that I had killed 2,405,353 goblins, but then again I might see that (or my /played) and think of what else I could be doing with my life, and I certainly do not need the logarythmically extending bars ever before me. Also, I think it would encourage aberrant gameplay. If there is some reward, any reward, for killing ten million rats, someone will do it. You may not like what they do to optimize rat-killing time. Without the impetus to exploit them, certain holes and bugs could just sit there until you get that far down your priority list, instead of having the forums burning up with the implications. You can also burn out players that way, ones who start to see through the grind and wonder why they are killing that next million rats.

I suppose that is a financial decision. Which is the larger pool of subscriber dollars: retention of obsessives or loss of burnouts? Since I personally would not want to be racing that treadmill, I would fall on the “loss” side. But you will always make more money on the mass market betting against my preferences, so let the eternal achievements go forth for greater profits.

: Zubon

So, what am I missing?

I have to conclude I’m either missing things, or doing them terribly wrong. Just to give it a fairer shake (and to keep Psychochild from hitting me below the belt) I went ahead and grabbed a trial key for Fallen Earth. I didn’t think it twice when I saw them available because, one, that was one of my original semi-complaints -the lack of a trial- and two, it wouldn’t be the first time I had to eat crow about a game I originally disliked for whatever reason and ended up winning me over big time. I don’t mind being proven wrong if I end up with a good game.

Problem is, it’s not really clicking. In fact, something funny happened; my original complaints about the visuals, while not entirely invalidated after judging the game “the way it’s meant to be judged”(tm), have been lessened. While the rest of the stuff in the game, which I had no way of experiencing from mere screenshots and which I had assumed to be good because of comments from a lot people whose opinion I value, ended up being quite the disappointment.

Let’s go piece by piece, like Jack the Ripper:

Continue reading So, what am I missing?

Expectation of Balance

What follows is, a nitty gritty nerdy look at certain legacies on legendary items and class balance, so be warned.

Some time ago, I was trying to determine the value of different fire legacies on runekeeper items by determining their exact relation to the dps of runekeeper skills. There were two legacies which were causing me confusion. One of those legacies was called “Wrath of Flame Damage Over Time” and the other was called “Fire Skill Damage”. Because every single runekeeper fire skill does damage-over-time and every single runekeeper fire skill is considered a “Wrath of Flame” skill, I found this to be confusing. I thought that there must be a reason behind their separation. I thought that if one effected “Damage over time” specifically, the other must somehow… not do that.
Continue reading Expectation of Balance

The Tyranny of Habit

Looking at Borderlands, I was immediately drawn to the class that gets a turret. Ooh, and they can heal! I was secondarily drawn to the sniper/pet class. It took me a few minutes to realize that I had just picked exactly the same thing that I play in every game: support, ranged DPS, pets and tower defense.

Freakishly, playing World of Warcraft was something new for me. My Paladin melees. (It is my wife’s approach: “I have a sword. I hit things.”) I am still not one to tank, but I could.

: Zubon

Guild Wars Sealed Deck

Last night, ArenaNet launched a pretty hefty update for Guild Wars.  The update prepared for the annual Halloween bash, my favorite annual MMO event, with Costume Brawl, Mad King Thorn and new Halloween-only quests in the Underworld (where it’s rumored players become actual candy servants of the Mad King).  The weightiest heft in the update was by far the removal of Hero Battles and Team Arenas counterbalanced by the addition of the Codex Arena.

The Codex Arena is a 4-player sealed deck arena with 3-simple rules.  First, each profession will only get to use 20 randomly chosen skills each day, 5 of which will be elite.  These random skills will be the same for all players.  Second, players can only use elite skills from their primary profession (a welcome addition, in my opinion).  Finally, the team of four has to have four different primary professions.  No four Warrior/Monk teams allowed.

The Codex Arena I think will be a great addition to Guild Wars PvP.  My one holdback is the “activation energy” to play.  If the skills change every day how much time is going to be spent creating a team versus actually playing?  My hope is that the elite PvP’ers will create some sort of quick and dirty template (likely they already have) where a team makes one melee, one healer, one harasser, and then something else so jobs can be given out to individual teammates.  I still think that new sealed skills every day might be too high of a turnaround, but I am guessing the Guild Wars Live Team is going to keep a close eye on their new baby.  Things like the amount of skills each day and the skill turnover rate should be easy to adjust.  Either way, it looks like it is going to be a great addition to the Guild Wars PvP gametypes.

–Ravious
imperiled in every single battle

What’s Wrong With Borderlands?

The quick description seems to be “a FPS with Diablo-style loot and questing in the Weird West.” Every comment I have seen has been positive, along the lines of “it is pure, concentrated, liquid awesome, with a side order of flaming orgasm.” The most negative I have heard is “moar!” Heartless has been blogging it since he got his new URL, and I am particularly fond of this video. Steam will give me 10% off if I pre-order and buy-3-get-1-free so I can bring in all my friends for the coop mode.

Having played with Heartless and seen him go through a couple of other games, I expect that I will know what is wrong with Borderlands in about a month. Few people effectively express that anguished rage after initial enthusiasm that comes from a dream not quite fulfilled. It really is an art, and my version is just pissy analytic verbosity. Like that phrase right there. Anyway, maybe this is what we have all been waiting for, or maybe we will find that we did not miss Diablo-style loot after all. I’m thinking of picking it up, maybe getting the 4-pack so I can gift some friends, and I want to know if you know any landmines.

And if you haven’t heard of it, hey, crazy fun.

: Zubon