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Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

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Learning Curves on the Shooting Range

My wife hesitates to try cooperative multi-player games because she does want groups depending on her to do something she does not know how to do. If your tank does not know her job, you wipe. If this is your crowd controller’s first time in a complicated fight, you may be in serious trouble. This worked fine in City of Heroes: not only could she solo for almost everything, but when she did group, she was a Scrapper who did not care about dying. There are very few cases in CoH where anyone cares if the Scrapper dies or has less than the perfect DPS setup.

As I am learning Team Fortress 2, I see that, but there is another factor: many of the people shooting me already know what to do. There are nine classes to learn, most with some special feature, six of whom have three additional options for their equipment; there are also all the maps to learn, some with multiple stages, all with their scattered refills, control points, backdoors, ambush spots, ramps, etc. While you are trying to get the swing of all this, one guy is lobbing pipe bombs at you, and you will be shot in the head in you pause in a sniper’s field of vision.

Some things are more intuitive than others. Protect this point, check. Move the cart along that line, check. And then you find that the map has multiple vertical levels, a little room with ammo and health, back stairs that everyone else on your team seems to know, and windows that you may or may not be able to shoot through. While someone with a flamethrower is leaping around the corner at you.

One of the great barriers for PvP games is that they are not newbie friendly. If veteran players are alongside green recruits, that is great for training the new guys and integrating them, and horrible for having their first night of play involve being shot in the head twenty times by guys they never saw. TF2 is kind enough to give you a picture of your killer, so you can see where those snipers are after someone kills you.

: Zubon

Like WoW

Describing Aion as “WoW with wings” caused one commenter to conduct a whole review and ranking system comparing, in his opinion, which MMO was most similar to Aion.  As was to be expected, it was differentiated from World of Warcraft at every possible instance.  Comparing an new MMO to World of Warcraft is a pretty common occurrence throughout the MMO blogosphere and game forums.  It is damn near the MMO locus.  Yet, there is much to differentiate even Runes of Magic ffrom World of Warcraft.  So what does WoW-like mean? Continue reading Like WoW

Happy 6th, Star Wars: Galaxies

Grab a pint of blue milk and raise your glass to the sky as we celebrate the 6-Year Anniversary of Star Wars Galaxiesâ„¢!

The Annual Empire Day celebration is back, and this year it is bigger and better than ever. Join Princess Leia and Lord Vader along with your favorite Star Wars® characters for awards, rewards, fireworks, events and elaborate ceremonies!

Join with our community and the Star Wars Galaxies Development Team in sharing your Star Wars Galaxies 6-Year Anniversary wishes by having your character sign the 6-Year Anniversary DataPad!

Gather your friends and join the celebration in-game between June 23rd and July 21st, 2009:

Empire Day Ceremony: Participate in an elaborate Imperial or Rebel ceremony featuring Lord Vader or Princess Leia in which you could be hand picked to receive a special badge.

Special Events: Locate all of the Imperial Recruitment and Anti-Propaganda kiosks and the Rebel Alliance Resistance and Vandalism Kiosks spread throughout Theed and Coronet to earn points and tokens redeemable for prizes.

Profession Quests: Traders, Entertainers and Combat professions will be able to participate in special Empire Day themed quests sure to deliver action and adventure.

Collections Complete special collections tied to the events and quests and earn tokens, GCW points, and in some cases, new titles for your diligence!

Special Items Use your hard earned tokens at special vendors to purchase Empire Day specific items such as a Tantive-IV Landspeeder, house decorations, and other Empire Day items.

Don’t miss out on this special occasion, it’s not everyday that Star Wars Galaxies celebrates 6 years of online adventure, intrigue, and excitement.

– Ethic

Enjoy the Maze

A behavioral scientist is a type of psychologist who spends a lot of time putting rats through mazes. Sometimes it’s a big maze, sometimes it’s a very small and simple maze. The one thing they all have in common is the cheese at the end.

The rats behave consistently. They move through the maze as fast as they can to get to the cheese. That’s just natural reward seeking behavior. Every rat we test is always going to get to the cheese as fast as they can. At no point do the rats ever slow down and just enjoy the maze.

Yet, our MMOs keep asking us to enjoy our maze. In the case of Lotro’s summer-festival maze, they mean it literally. But I wouldn’t be going through that maze were it not for the reward. I could get a new wall-paper for my house or a new fish-slap emote!

Our video game masters don’t want us reaching the end of the maze and getting full too quickly… so they ask us to slow down. We don’t. So they make the maze longer. They tilt the maze so that we’re struggling to go uphill to get to our cheese. Bastards! Why couldn’t they just make our maze more complicated and puzzle-driven? Then at least I’d feel smart when I beat the other rats there. Feeling smart is an especially nice little piece of cheese.

Really, if they wanted me to slow down, all they have to do is drop little bits of cheese all throughout the maze. Then I’d actually have something to stop and enjoy.

W101 Brew

An MMO for what ails me.

I have been quiet lately, partly because MMOs were on the downside of the cycle and partly because I am holding a baby during my “free time.”  Games like Peggle and Nitrome’s Ice Breaker held reign.  Until, I decided to re-try Wizard 101.

My initial foray in to Wizard 101 was as a tourist.  I was already having a blast in Lord of the Rings Online and Guild Wars, and Wizard 101 was, at the time, just a weekend getaway.  I liked what I saw, and I really wanted to support their “crowns” business model, which lets players buy zones of content for $1-3/each forever.  However, it was not up to par with gameplay with the more complex MMOs I was already playing.

Now, it is the MMO I play.  All the little things that Kings Isle has done to make it casual are all things that I need for MMOs right now.  Continue reading W101 Brew

Player Respawn Timers

Most death penalties come down to lost time, in its various incarnations of lost experience points, item repairs, corpse runs, and debuffs. As death penalties become increasingly light, one type almost invariably remains: you wasted the time you spent failing, and now you need to run back to continue. (If you die in a group, you may just sit out a while until rezzed, hoping your group does not wipe at -1 member, or a shorter time with -2 members during the rez.)

This time-to-return can be very important. If it is very short, and the death penalty is otherwise small, you zerg things: just keep dying and coming back until you get through it. It is a measure of how far we have gotten past meatspace that we can now intuitively see solutions that include “die and come back” as part of viable plans. To take the first few examples that come to mind: our LotRO static group wiped on an overpull with adds last week, but ran back to clear it easily since we had taken out 75% of the enemies on the first try; LotRO three-man instances are short enough for people to die and come back while someone keeps the boss from resetting, and some turtle-raiding strategies involve planned deaths to reset the stacking DoTs; fights against CoX archvillains and giant monsters often involve multiple resurrections and hospital runs/teleports, and the Hamidon raid usually involves planned near-wipes.

This is usually not a good thing for the game. Continue reading Player Respawn Timers

Good Change: Event Introduction

Book 8 is live. When you log in, the Summer Festival will have started. But how do you know what and where everything is, especially if you are not a forum-reader? When you log in, you will have mail waiting. You get “Invitation to the Summer Festival.” It starts the quest “Invitation to the Summer Festival.” This tells you what city to visit to start, and the quest guide will take you straight to the spot. The quest awards the Summer Festival Guide, the fishing intro letter (in case you forgot how to fish), and a free festival token.

This is a good way to introduce people to the event. *clap*

: Zubon

(Known Issues with the new patch.)

The Rough Road Back To WoW

My wife has been talking about starting a new character in World of Warcraft and I decided it would be fun to join her. Our past duo was fun, until she left me in the dust around level 40. She kept on going to 80, and I switched over to LotRO. The first question in my mind was, should we take advantage of the Refer-A-Friend deal which would give us triple XP or should we do the Scroll of Resurrection deal which would give her a free month? Or, should I just reactivate and go? Well let’s think about that some.

I have 2 accounts available to me, one has Burning Crusade expansion and one has Wrath of the Lich King on it. The BC account is pretty old, and would meet the “90 day inactive” Scroll of Resurrection requirement. The Wrath account has not been inactive long enough. Looking at the Refer-A-Friend deal, we decided that paying $80 for the game and both expansions was too much so we ruled it out.

Continue reading The Rough Road Back To WoW

The Old Republic: Space and Voice

In a recent interview, the developers over at Bioware mentioned that any good star wars mmo would have a “space experience”.

Threads on the SWTOR boards declared, “Spare confirmed!” and people there are discussing possible ship-types and asking each other whether characters should have abilities that affect their ship or whether space-combat should be fully twitch-based. Of course… those questions assume that space combat will be mainly twitch-based and that there will be combat in space to begin with.

In their single player KOTOR games, the “space experience” amounted to having all your companions stored on a space and the occasional turret-based minigame. The closest you came to piloting your ship was when you selected a destination from a menu. Is there any reason to believe this isn’t the kind of space experience the developers are talking about?

The same interview promises that every line of NPC dialog will be voice acted. This is great news, but there’s no reason to believe they will implement it differently than they did in KOTOR. In Kotor, much the dialog was spoken by species other than humans. Most of the time, this amounted to a Wookie npc speaking in the same recycled track of “rarr, Rarr, rarr” over and over with subtitles. The gibberish sounds were so familiar that when you saw a Twi’lek speak something other than Twi’lek, you sat up and said, “This quest must be important!”

Is there any reason to believe we’ll meet a Hutt in SWTOR who speaks something other than Huttese? I imagine the important NPCs are likley to speak in common, and all the rest will speak the same gibberish lines. It’s just too much of a financial investment for them to make all voice dialog unique.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited for SWTOR. Like everyone else on the SWTOR boards, I can be caught day-dreaming about the possibilities of what the perfect MMO might be. But at a certain point, we have to stop asking whether it will just be “be Everquest in space”, and start asking “Will it be KOTOR with friends?”