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Stuck on the Train

It seems that most cool things happen on the internet, when I am disconnected from it.  Yesterday, three things rocked Guild Wars’ small corner of the internet, most of which happened while I was on the train home.

The first was the USK’s certification of a Guild Wars 2 (gamescom – Trailer).  ArenaNet will have a good presence at the convention (Jeff Grubb would be my personal target to stalk), but they will not have a booth.  The certification has since publicly been taken down.  Although I would love to see any Guild Wars 2 trailer sooner, PAX would be a much better convention to present it because ArenaNet will have a booth and very strong presence there.  I am excited about the possibility of a CG trailer because the Guild Wars Factions trailer is one of my all time favorite video game trailers.

Then Jeff Strain, one of ArenaNet’s co-founders, amicablyleft NCSoft as President of Product Development.  The public is not really sure as to the reasons of the departure only about a month before the NA/EU launch of Aion Online.  Strain is an MMO giant, and I hope one day to be able to chat with him.  Hopefully someday, somehow he will be back in our little niche market.  Regardless, Mike O’Brien, one of the other ArenaNet co-founders and current executive producer of Guild Wars 2, has the best thoughts, especially with regard to Guild Wars 2:

Jeff is a personal friend of mine. We worked together very closely from the time he joined Blizzard in 1996, through our founding of ArenaNet in 2000, until he left ArenaNet to join NCsoft West in 2008. I’m sad to see him leaving NCsoft now. We remain good friends and I wish him great success in his next endeavor.

It’s important to understand that ArenaNet is a separate and self-contained development studio. Jeff hasn’t been involved in the day-to-day development of Guild Wars 2since he left ArenaNet more than a year ago, and I don’t expect his departure to have a direct impact on our studio or on Guild Wars 2. I continue to lead ArenaNet, and I’m not going anywhere.

The final bit of news is the application process for the Guild Wars Test Krewe is now almost open.  The application went up and down most of last night because there were backend issues that prevented actual submission of the application.  It seems like it is currently down, but should be re-opened sometime in the west coast morning.  The application asks for beta experience, age of your favorite Guild Wars character, and a very open-ended “what would you bring to the Test Krewe.”  If you want to help Guild Wars Live Team development, with a possible jump to get into Guild Wars 2 testing, check it out.  I highly recommend reading this wisdom before submitting an application.

I finally logged off last night, and XKCD, as usual, knew exactly how I felt.

–Ravious
sleep tight in your cot

Defensive Patch Notes

For the minority of players that read the patch notes, there is an even smaller minority.  Let’s call them nicely the Caretakers.  The Caretakers are players that love the game to a degree that emphasizes the definition of a love/hate relationship.  They read the patch notes for your favorite MMO, and whereas more casual players just nod that things are getting better, the Caretakers see holes.

The bear skill is still overpowered.  Those fire wizards are still overpowered.  The combo-class is still weak and still not wanted in parties.  The Cap of Pulcritude (sic) is still (sic).  And, what are all these needless things that the developers wasted their time on.  Who gives a rodent turd about the stuff they actually did?  Except for that one thing, that was pretty good.  A light salve for the godhanded slap in the Caretakers’ faces.

The Caretakers then unite in their public council for all casual forumgoers to see, and they pontificate on how the developers clearly do not understand the problems in their own game.  Which makes me wonder… Should developers put some defensive, non-patch notes in their patch notes?  I don’t just mean the “we understand the issues with [a most reviled feature], and are looking in to it” (which rarely makes it into the patch notes anyway).  I mean something that a game designer would query another game designer on.

At the end of the day the Caretakers truly care about the game.  Sane community managers and developers know this.  Caretakers are also some of the most expert of people on the game.  They know the game better than many of the developers.  Sane community managers and developers also know this.  So could the Caretakers be used manipulatively as an unknowing think tank? Continue reading Defensive Patch Notes

Guild Wars Market Speculation

We have been told multiple times that Guild Wars 2 news is coming by the end of the year.  One of the biggest questions and possible news releases by the end of the year is on the use of the Hall of Monuments – an eternal filing cabinet for achievements.  The Hall of Monuments was created, in part, to give Guild Wars 1 players some recognition when entering the world of Guild Wars 2 a quarter of a millennium later.  Linsey Murdock, Live Team Leader, has been pushing for fixed decisions on the Hall of Monuments because once the reward scheme is released maximizing one’s Hall of Monuments for Guild Wars 2 is going to be an extreme focal point of Guild Wars 1 players.  It’d be nice for the caretakers of Guild Wars 1 to have the heads up as to where rabid AKES will be frothing.

Continue reading Guild Wars Market Speculation

Autobalance

I commented last year about the multiple LOTRO PvMP battlefronts:

One interesting outcome is that most people win most of the time. The side with more bodies usually wins, or the winning side quickly becomes more numerous as fair weather friends join and leave their respective teams. There can be multiple fronts, so 75% of the freeps might be at the lumber camp beating 25% of the creeps, with the reverse happening at the mine: both sides had a win, and most of the players on each side were part of that win.

This weekend, I had the opposite experience playing Team Fortress 2. Two times in a row, playing Gold Rush, I was auto-balanced to the losing team within the last minute. With players joining and quitting the teams, you have the opposite effect of PvMP, where the majority of the players are losing most of the time. There is a cap on how many people can join the winning team, and if you are winning, you are less likely to quit. There is never a cap on how many people can quit, so a lot of the losing team leaves, which cycles in new people who also get crushed 5 seconds out of the spawn. Why did no one mention on chat that there are two Heavy-Medic pairs at the spawn? They all quit, and a quarter of your team just joined the map. A quarter of your team is loading in or out while the winning team makes more progress. If people are not joining for the losing team fast enough, they will be taken from the newer players on the winning team. Hit tab, and you will see one or two high-scoring players on the losing team (who have toughed it out), and no one else there above 50; on the winning team, if there is anyone below 50, he has scrolled off the scoreboard. There is no way to overcome this, because half your team will be dead or loading in as you join the losing team, and continuously from there on, so you cannot make any progress. A previous night on this server, I saw the blue team fail to ever move the cart. After a few minutes, no one survived as long as five seconds outside the base, and most never made it to the doors.

My new plan is always to check the scoreboard before joining a team. If one team is way ahead on points, there is no point in joining. Even if you can join the winning team, you will be auto-balanced away. You could try to stay long enough to reduce your chances of auto-balance, but you’ll probably get kicked for a reserved slot.

: Zubon

Why You Should Not Listen to Me About Champions Online

I have a shelf of Champions books from my youth. In my mind, the 3rd 4th edition Big Blue Book is one of the foundational PnP RPG books, a strong attempt at a system that strove for mechanical perfection while leaving the flavor entirely flexible. The standard example is the power Energy Blast. It covers all energy attacks, and whether that is fire, ice, or gamma beams is just a special effect. Give it an area of effect if you want a fireball or cone of cold. Take the cone, make it fire damage, and remove the range to make a flamethrower. Add “no normal defense” to make it poison gas or a monomolecular needle. Add “variable special effects” if you want the one power to be able to shoot fire, electricity, darkness, whatever.

If you ever used the Hero Games system, you know that it rewarded planning and math, two areas where I do well. It also was often painful to use in practice, with a lot of dice and math flying around for every turn of combat. As a superhero game, Champions made it even harder to track by going 3D, with flying, burrowing, and phasing characters that make your miniatures difficult to use. Long before there were MMOs, I thought that this was exactly the kind of problem that computers could solve, tracking locations and doing all the complicated math while letting the players play.

You can imagine how I reacted when Cryptic took the standard example, briefly explained the Champions PnP system, then said they were not going to use that. You probably saw similar reactions from Tolkien fans when The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ announced each of its fireball-chucking classes. “You took the game I have been waiting most of my life to play and did what?!” Maybe the marketing plan looked better with fifty different energy blasts, rather than one with ten damage types times five shapes.

In terms of whether it is a good game, never trust the views of the people who actually care about the setting. I am surprised to see people who play World of Warcraft without having played any of the Warcraft RTS games, but I also trust their view of WoW qua game not to be clouded with baggage about how Illidan was retconned. When a Champions review seems to take Foxbat personally, or objects that this is not the “real” Doctor Destroyer, stop reading there.

: Zubon

Unless they are mentioning that there are fake Doctor Destroyers, like how Dr. Doom has his Doombots. That’s okay.

SWTOR Devs won’t say a word

I was reading an article on IGN about an exclusive interview they had with the SWTOR people. Question after question was met with, “We can’t talk about that yet.” They could have used this opportunity to tell me about some pixel shader I’ve never heard of or a tid-bit about jet-pack based vehicle in their game. Such tiny tid-bit would have me drooling and talking to my friends about the article.

Instead, I’m left feeling like this game is ages away from release because there aren’t any details about even the simplest systems and I’m writing a blog about how upset I am with it.

-Ugh.

Shallow Thoughts by Ravious

PC gaming is just starting to pick up again.  The Ravious Conglomerate moved from a being-foreclosed-on apartment condo to a nice, shiny townhome in order to give Daughter #2 her own room.  I love that Daughter #1 can now dance, skip, and sing all she wants without a crabby, lonely lady banging on her ceiling below us.  I hated yelling at Daughter #1 to not do what a young kid should always be allowed to do.  With the move and ensuing chaos, the past few weeks have been gaming light, but forsooth, I say, there was gaming nonetheless!  It was all just in bite-size form.

Guild Wars: Oh how I love your little Dibs of enjoyment.  The small amounts of farming and bartering at the weekly Traveler’s Market to get the precious gifts are nice quick hits, and I am forever in love with Fort Aspenwood.  It lets me jump in to some fun, casual PvP instantly.  Deathmatch gets old for me, but objective based PvP seems to always be fun (95% of my TF2 time is payload maps).  I put up the build I always play in Fort Aspenwood here. 

Wizard 101: I hit a stopping point because the evil overlord in charge of the Conglomerate’s accounting (read: wife) says I can’t spend any more money because of the move, security deposit, and feeding/clothing children costs.  I am right at the end of Kroktopia too!  Don’t overlords understand gameplay flow?  The lightning cave in Karanahn Barracks was seriously breathtaking.  I stood upon rocky platforms while a silent lightning storm occurred below; I logged there in quiet contemplation.  Great artistic direction for that one.  Fortunately, a bonus check is headed my way so Mass Effect and a bajillion Wizard 101 crowns will soon be mine.

Lord of the Rings Online: I don’t know how I managed to sneak this one in given the higher activation energy to play, but I did.  Two kinnies and I started on Volume 2, Book 8.  We entered the Hall of Mirrors with nary a walkthrough, and had a blast figuring the puzzles out (even with a 600 silver repair bill each).  Hall of Mirrors is a three-man dungeon with a dungeon-long puzzle of repairing reflecting mirrors to send light to Moria below.  It is fantastically designed and just challenging enough.  Hall of Mirrors and developer blogs get me very excited about where Lord of the Rings Online is headed.  Unfortunately a serious bug at the Defiler/Mistress encounter wiped us to the point where a full, tactical retreat was required.  We are armed with better knowledge (of the instance and bug workaround), and are all excited to return.  Once I have time.

–Ravious
Repent, Harlequin!

Hard Core Brother: The Next Interview

Previously…

Ethic: Let’s start off with getting a feel for where you are in WoW right now. Tell us a little bit about the guild you’re in and what they are trying to do at the moment.

Grim: I’ve been with Juggernaut since July of 2006 (Immortalis on Hellscream/Dalvengyr prior to that). There is only one challenge left for us in the current tier of content, and that is known as Yogg+0. Yogg-Saron is the final boss in Ulduar, and you have the option of utilizing up to four NPC’s to aid you in the fight against him, each one providing a special set of buffs to make you stronger, faster, more resilient, etc. Needless to say, using all four NPC’s makes you quite strong, and the fight is quite easy. Most guilds at our level of raiding have successfully defeated Yogg-Saron with only one NPC’s aid (Yogg+1). Yogg-Saron without the aid of any NPC’s, however, makes the encounter extremely difficult. Currently, only five guilds in the world have accomplished this feat. Sadly, the strategy we’re employing involves two tanks (warrior + deathknight), so I get to cheer them on from the sidelines until patch 3.2 rolls around.

Continue reading Hard Core Brother: The Next Interview

Morrowind Singularity

I am reading Vernor Vinge’s Marooned in Realtime, the well-known book about people who missed The Singularity. Last night, a character explained how an intelligence explosion works. You find ways to improve intelligence; you use that enhanced intelligence to improve intelligence further; repeat as necessary. At some point, you figure out the fundamental principles of the universe and build your own using common household items.

Anarchy Online and Asheron’s Call players have their own recursive self-improvement. Cast your level 5 spells to buff your stats, which lets you wear better equipment, which lets you cast level 6 spells, which lets you wear better equipment… That process caps due to game design choices like diminishing returns and spell durations, as opposed to the intelligence explosion, which is self-accelerating.

Only this morning did I learn that Morrowind includes intelligence explosion as a mechanic. You can beat the game in less than fifteen minutes, starting with the step “Create and drink Fortify Intelligence in batches of 5.” It is like having a skill that grants you bonus experience every time you earn experience, where you improve that skill by earning experience.

And now I have the compulsion to re-read Godel, Escher, Bach.

: Zubon

A Case For Massively

James at MMOCrunch brought up the upcoming game, Borderlands, which he classifies as an MMO.  Borderlands is a self-proclaimed FPS with RPG elements.  (Zubon recently discussed the “RPG” misnomer.)  Borderlands is very similar to Diablo’s style of multiplayer where players can join others’ games and the first player’s game adjusts in difficulty.  Only up to four players can join one game, and there seems to be no true persistence (even in a player hub).  Yet, James insists that it is, in his opinion, an MMO.  Going through the acronym: (1) Borderlands is multiplayer, (2) Bordlands is online, and following whatever colloquialism “RPG” means now, (3) Borderlands has some RPG elements.  So the sticking point, as is usually the case when deciding what constitutes an MMO, is whether Borderlands is considered “massive.”

 The sage Nicodemeus wrote out a classification chart two years ago to describe the thin red line between a mere multiplayer online game and one that is “massive.”  Nicodemeus wrote: “[The term “massive”] should mean that thousands of players are interacting in the same world/environment simultaneously. People that are on different *web pages* at the same site, or a game that has thousands of multiplayer games going at the same time do NOT count as massively multiplayer.”  Borderlands clearly does not fall under Nicodemeus’ definition of a massively multiplayer online game. Continue reading A Case For Massively