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Refuge in Audacity

Don’t get petty with me. Trying to see what you can slip past the radar is just annoying. You’re trying to see how far you can go before you get smacked down? How about this: don’t slip past the radar, rampage past it in your Bagger 288 that’s painted with flaming, hot pink skulls, where the flames are painted on and then really set on fire.

Sociopathic serial killer works as police detective? That’s good television. Supposedly humorous situations based on mis-communication and unfair treatment of some poor sod? Cringe-worthy. Spock cuts open skulls to see how super-powers work? Stellar. Annoying people in an office? Dang it, I work in an office, I don’t need to see that on TV. If you’re doing that last one, it needs to go as far as Dilbert, where you co-workers really are trying to kill you, not hatching Machiavellian plots about whose turn it is to make coffee.

Wednesday, a common reaction was looking down on the notion of Crimecraft. Many of us happily play orcs that plan kill the villagers, steal the cattle, and burn down the houses. Demonology and genocide? We call those hobbies. Petty street crime? Dang it, that’s the guy who stole my CDs!

Entertainment needs enough distance to shed some recognizability, or else you start sympathizing with the poor sod. I had to pause Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle at least ten times to bear the suffering of the petty humiliations of Harold’s life. And then I watched a horror movie straight through, noting the poor camera work on the disemboweling.

: Zubon

Another Casual Player Definition

I’ve been following Lord of the Rings Online developer Orion’s blog pretty closely where every day he updates the masses as to his redesign of the Red Maid dungeon, Garth Agarwen.  It is really interesting, and reading some of his mundane tasks really gives a good showing as to why design is slow.

One of his latest posts remarks on how Garth Agarwen is going to be re-released in bite-size form aimed at casual players, which is a hard “niche” of players to define:

It’s difficult to define the casual player, so I’m just going to go with the tried and true generalizations that may or may not be true of any given part of the player base: Casual players are those that value play time at a premium rather than a given; their time is precious and spent in many areas and as a result is parcelled in ways that make sense for their lifestyle, play style and life commitments. Casual players would prefer to have a fun bite-sized experience that is entertaining and challenging, but fits within schedule demands that other persons may not necessarily be beholden too. Casual players are not looking for the easiest path to fun, they just want a path to fun.

I have never nodded so much in reading a paragraph written by a game developer.  Like I have noted before, casual vs. hardcore does not really denote the amount of time played anymore.  I think, in line with Turbine’s devs (and hopefully many others), that casual vs. hardcore is based on the unquantifiable amount of fun per time played.

“Casual” like so many terms is becoming a misnomer for a way to define gamers, but the concept is simple.  Does the game let the player actually play without significant hurdles to overcome?  MMOs are a niche market partly because they are one of the few video gaming genres that requires hardcore play in the majority of gameplay.  Console gamers and non-MMO PC gamers probably scratch their heads in wonder.  After all, the point of playing video games it to actually play, right?

–Ravious
the majesty of my tower of hats

Elite status

I was reading a post on the US LOTRO boards about a person who wanted legendary weapons to be much more rare. This poster also called for there to be deeds to do things like kill 10,000 orcs to achieve “signature” or “elite” status. Players who completed this deed would have rare and powerful characters.

Somehow, this person actually thinks that putting in a massive grind and tying it to a massive reward is a good idea.

Continue reading Elite status

Consumer Expectations

Bryan Caplan writes an argument about insurer reputation that starts with bad drivers and passes very close to our subject area:

[Many dissatisfied people] have unreasonably high expectations about the kind of treatment other people owe them. The clash between their inflated expectations and reality is the cause of their bitterness.

When people scoff at the power of reputation to constrain business behavior, they’re basically making the same mistake. If you think that paying the standard market rate entitles you to top-of-the-line quality, businesses will constantly disappoint you. I call this the Law of Inflated Expectations: The main cause of cynicism about business is consumer narcissism.

50 cents a day, and that’s without the discount plans. Maybe I can argue that the world owes me something for my $50 up front. Maybe I can see that premium game someday, charging $30+ a month and having high quality for a small population. Maybe I can keep whining.

On another note, if you require 1 hour of CSR time per month, that wipes out the profits from having you as a customer.

: Zubon

Dreams Undreamt

A Casualties member mentioned Crimecraft last night. Ah, a gang-based online thing. “I’ve never dreamed of being in a gang, so not really interested.” Then I thought back through some previous games. I never dreamed of being a dwarf that set people on fire by writing on a rock, of making charcoal and growing flax, of summoning headless ice monsters that rained frosty death upon my foes, of being a buffing psychic cyborg, of…

: Zubon

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.