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Hostile Takeover

Another person from my SWG guild has joined us in Lotro. Although not all have actually continued playing, that’s the 6th person from our old guild to follow us over. Each of these people have been admitted to our current kinship. In the kinship’s teamspeak server, we often out-number the original crew. It’s beginning to feel like we are slowly taking over the guild we joined.

It’s not that any of us are officers… we don’t get to decide rules or anything. But the topics of conversation and the mood of the kinship is influenced by the conversations we have with each other. For the veteran players, the game is stale, old, and far too much of a grind. For us the game is complicated, new and exciting. We’ve actually contemplated creating our own separate kinship. In fact, we did. But we only put our alts in it for now. It’s something to fall back on if our current kinship doesn’t work out.

Even if we are not officially a separate kinship, we clearly act like one. We group with each other and help each other out. We talk to each other about old times and send each other crafted goods. We are all so close-knit. We started playing this game at the same time, and we started playing our last MMO together at roughly the same time. By contrast, most of the other people in the kinship started playing Lotro two years ago.

Will we ever feel this closeness to the veteran players of our kinship? I don’t know… but I honestly doubt it.

Time to Cap

Commenter Alucian states:

unlike other MMOs, Blizzard actually scales xp needed to level and gained from quests with the current number of levels to max. They ensure it takes the same amount of time to get from 1-endgame whatever the max level may be.

This is an interesting notion to me, one I have not considered because I have been through only one level cap increase (CoX does not count) in my ten MMO years (old old old). Every time you increase the level cap, you can change the rate of experience accumulation so that time to cap is unchanged.

Would you wait a few months after the new expansion to do so? On one hand, you don’t want existing players to feel like their “work” has been “cheapened.” On the other hand, the expansion will not be terribly helpful in recruiting new players if they see months between them and that shiny new expansion. There is also the scaling o, that. Many games seem to want the last ten levels to take as long as all the levels before them, or the expansion to take as long as the old “late levels.” You would need to halve the old late levels’ leveling time to make the new time-to-cap fit, with the new late levels taking as long as the old late levels did.

If you keep re-scaling experience, and your level cap keeps rising, you eventually will have players leveling by walking near the newbie zones. Alternately, your time to level through later expansions would be increasingly short, although that might not be an entirely bad thing. If you do not keep re-scaling experience, you start seeing a dizzying distance from level 1 to the cap, particularly if you obey that principle of how long the last 10 levels should take. You could keep that time constant, so 1-40 takes 120 hours, 40-50 takes 120 hours, 50-60 takes 120 hours, etc. I think it would quickly become insane with the “50-60 takes 240 hours, 60-70 takes 480 hours…” interpretation.

: Zubon

Of Alliances and Meaningful PvP

While I’m mostly between MMOs, I am trying Evony [Update], from one of the many ads you may have seen. It resembles Travian in many ways, including the faster pace once fighting starts. I was not sure if I wanted that, what with the whole “job” thing versus a server potentially filled with people who have nothing better to do on summer vacation. Thus came a simple plan: I joined the second-meanest alliance on a newly formed server. Attacking me now risks the wrath of about 400 other people who have nothing better to do than crush every red flag in the area.

This weekend showed an interesting example of that. Looking in around lunch time, there was a discussion of some fellow who had attacked an alliance member and been rude in mailed discussions. He had a strong defensive position with two large castles next to each other, each with thousands of troops and traps, along some friends nearby. “Bring it on” must have seemed like a reasonable thing for him to say, especially when some of us (like me) were over an hour’s travel away from the fight. And then he was attacked something like 100 times that afternoon, until there was nothing but a flat bit of ground.

This is a problem that has been noted for PvP games: once a customer has only a flat bit of ground, it is hard to get more money from him unless he has such a need for vengeance that he vows to RMT his way to victory. When winning means driving someone from the game, that cannot be good for the company, worse if a large alliance gives up and quits en masse.

On the other side, I played Team Fortress on some random servers this weekend. I had a good time, discovering that I really liked the Heavy, which is good since my two favorite classes do not have their achievement/item packs yet. Here, when someone dies, he comes back 11 seconds later with no penalties at all. After a pair of snipers trade deaths three or four times in a minute, I begin to wonder about the point of it all.

: Zubon

WoW will eat itself

With my time returning to World of Warcraft, I have come to the same conclusion, independently, that much of the blogosphere seems to already know: the thing that will kill World of Warcraft is World of Warcraft.  Their hubris will be their downfall.  This will be, unfortunately and as hopelessly optimistic as I was in starting this, my last degree of WoW.

My biggest worry when re-entering World of Warcraft after having not played it for three years was the feeling of playing catch up the entire time.  I am a very casual player.  I like to get in grind mode occasionally for loot or leveling, but I also like to explore both areas and quests.   I had plenty to explore in World of Warcraft.  However, I would be exploring mostly alone.  I saw people here and there on both my blood elf in the blood elf starting zone and death knight in the outlands, but it was almost awkward.  It was as if we did not really expect to see each other there, and secretly did not want to.  It felt kind of like meeting an old high school buddy at the mall.

On global chat and guild chat, I continually saw the nightly events for some raid (mostly max-level Ulduar), but I never saw anything for Outlands.  I tried to get a group for “ramps,” some early dungeon in the Outlands.  After 15 minutes on a Friday night, I managed to get one other death knight in my party.  I could not take this type of gameplay any longer.  It actually destroyed my will to play MMOs for a weekend.

This is how WoW will eat itself.  Players just starting or returning and 20 levels behind will hit a lonely cliff face.  At the top they will hear something of a party, but the climb is long.  This is not something a developer should want.  If anything a returning player should be surrounded with activity. Continue reading WoW will eat itself

Out-dated content

Today my husband and I joined a guild mate in an instance called Carn Dum. This used to be the place to go, before they raised the level cap. We joined a few hours after they started and stayed for two or three bosses over the course of two hours. Earlier in the week, we joined a kinship group of level 60’s who were going through the rift for the heck of it. Like Carn-Dum, it was once the thing to do… but now the glorious rift-armor is out-dated. A week before that, I went through Helegrod in a 24-person loremaster raid. Yes, it was a raid of pure loremasters just for the heck of it.

It’s mind boggling to think of how much content Lotro has which is now out-dated and pointless. I’m looking forward to them raising the level cap so that I can play something other than the same-old instances… but I also know that such an action will immediately make all the rare rewards I’m working towards a full 10 levels below the quest-rewards of the new content.

Why couldn’t the instances and their rewards level with me? I’d love to see the Rift and Carn-Dum balanced for level 60s. And it’d be nice if the rewards from the rift could be traded in for something more appropriate for level 60s. It doesn’t have to be the best armor in the game… go ahead and let the new content have that. But god, I get tired of the same old instances and I hate to think that new stuff will always out-date old stuff.

On the Blogroll: Psychochild

We have a great many sites on our blogroll. Why not take a little time to talk about some of them? Besides, it’s Friday, and you’re either looking to avoid work or need something to read over the weekend. Let’s trawl through our friends’ archives and see what’s interesting.

This week: Psychochild’s Blog, written by Brian Green. He is best known for running Meridian 59, but he has done other things.

Continue reading On the Blogroll: Psychochild

Problems with user content? Not new

One of the advantages of being old and decrepit, like I am, is that you remember old inconsequential stuff that may or may not matter (also that you forget important stuff that is necessary now but that’s not the point). There’s an anecdote from way back in the day that deals with the problem of user content. I don’t know if this anecdote is true, but from what little I’ve read around, some of the people involved do validate it.

Goes something like this…

Continue reading Problems with user content? Not new

Flash Variations on a Theme: Tower Defense

Consider as a case study three variations on the same type of game:

Each has that familiar gameplay that you know I love: building defenses that blow up armies of mindlessly marching monsters. Each has taken it in a rather different direction. (Each is far longer than the last batch of flash games.)

Continue reading Flash Variations on a Theme: Tower Defense

SWTOR – Guessing at release dates

I love guessing games, and that’s what keeps me thinking about SWTOR (Prounced Sweator according to Yivvits and Mr Bubble). This time I’m guessing at the targeted release date. Developers like to say a game will come out “when it’s done”. After all, that’s what Blizzard says and look how well it worked for them! But I’d be pretty surprised if they didn’t have a particular quarter or holiday season targeted at this point. So when is it? Their site updates hold the clues.

You know Bioware has it all planned out. Their online comic book, their revealing of classes, their revealing of planets, and their updates are all ticking down to release time.

Nal Hutta was announced the 2nd Friday in February. Bounty Hunter was announced the 3rd Friday in March. Ord Mantel was announced second Friday in April. Then Trooper was announced the second Friday in May. It alternates between a planet and a class each month.

This is why Smuggler hasn’t been announced officially even though it’s been unofficially announced as a class. We just had trooper announced last month, and they prefer to alternate between planets and class announcements. If anything, with such a fantastic E3 trailer, they could stand to skip this months’ announcement and let people continue to talk about it’s awesomeness till July.

So lets assume they continue to alternate between the remaining 6 classes in their announcement schedule… That gives them 12 months to reveal 6 classes and brings us to E3 2010. At this point, with all classes and planets revealed, it’s time for a playable demo and an announcement of a release date. At this point the team makes a decision, “Can we get this out in time for Christmas?” If things are going well, and the answer is yes, then the closed beta begins to prepare for it’s debut on shelves the day after Thanksgiving: the last Friday of November.