.

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.

.

Evendim and Hengstacer

Last night was a good night in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢. We have a Casualties of War static group on Tuesday nights, which is pretty much my only MMO time for the past month. When you’re not really excited about playing, it can be hard to log on at all, even to see the guys. I’m glad I played last night.

In 100 minutes, we ran about a dozen quests in eastern Evendim. If you know the area, we hit the desert, all the wanted posters, and the assorted relics, robbers, bears, wargs, etc. around the named tomb robbers, along with the first three steps of the “riddle” chain. Almost all of this is trivially easy in a group of four. We over-pulled, were reckless, and generally stomped a bunch of even-level enemies with a few signature foes mixed in. It was kind of like playing City of Heroes, although a non-CoH “massive over-pull” is five to eight enemies.

Note: not a single bugged-out enemy the entire time, including a rampage through Rantost and along the beach. Fixed!

We all leveled, with all but one of us now level 35 or higher, time for mounts. Mounts are 4.2 gold each (Casualties, if anyone else needs mount cash, we have not emptied my level 60 of her gold yet. Post on our boards), so cue the whining about the quests to get the riding skill.

I originally had the full narration of how long it takes to run these quests, which I timed at 35 minutes of story-free, challenge-free, alt-tabbed horse riding. If even a description of the quests is TL;DR, you can imagine how much fun running them on a fourth character is. Bree-land is next on the zone revamp list, so I hope this ridiculous waste is removed. I can see how the timed obstacle course at the end if challenging, with the traps that make you fail if you trust the path, but has anyone, anyone enjoyed riding across three zones to build up anticipation of getting your own horse? The failure is only reinforced by the fact that the horse farm does not have a stable. If there is one place in the world that should absolutely have a stable, it is the one where you can see several stables full of horses.

: Zubon

The Agency E3 Glimpses

I am liking what I see:

*Good use of instancing.  The demo goes from instanced to public to instanced in a flowing manner.

*Reinforces player creativity, instead of shoehorning.  The speaker talks about how using all sorts of skills, costumes (like FreeRealms classes), and allies can change up the whole mission… and they are all about that.

*Smooth, fast combat.  I am sure between now and 2010 there will only be more polish and AI tactics, but it looks pretty good right now. 

All in all, I think this MMO is going to take people by surprise.  What I really want to know, though, is what is the business model going to be?  Lots of rumors on that one.

–Ravious
if it comes down to you or them… send flowers

Trailers

Good: The Old Republic.
Bad: Book 8.

I think I have scorned every piece of marketing for The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ that I have seen, dating back at least to citing the number of characters created. That teaser trailer has approximately five seconds of video of new content, showing one boss doing one animation. I mean, if that one animation makes you want to put down your $15, I guess it worked, but I would hold out for at least five animations and maybe a tile set.

On the other hand, I have liked every piece of marketing that Bioware has done for Star Wars: The Old Republic. Syp keeps linking their stuff, like this Republic Trooper video. It is just graphics and concept, and I am the least visual person you know, but I found that really compelling. Everything that Bioware is releasing is high quality, and they are releasing it at a stately pace that does not imply a cry for attention or too early of hype. (And that trailer is showing some serious conservation of The Force.)

I also like the early media strategy from 38 Studios. What do you know about code name Copernicus? Almost nothing. That’s great! If a game is more than a year from release, I don’t even need to know its name. Call me when you have something to show me.

: Zubon

Storytelling

I just got back from a four day camping trip with my folks, my brother, my sister, and my husband.  The day before I left, my husband and I stayed up all night questing and burning off the blue ‘bonus xp’ from our alts.  Sleep-deprived, we hit the road.  As soon as we were rolling, my sister suggested we play a pen-and-paper RPG on the way. What a refreshing experience this turned out to be!

We didn’t take any RPG books or character sheets.  We ended up just making up various character bio’s and linking them all together by saying each person’s character was sucked through a dimensional rift to the same place in Rifts Earth where they had to team up to fight the various demons that also came through the rift.

We didn’t have any dice, so I made up a coin based combat system based on the change I had in my pocket.  On a combat roll, I might toss a nickle, dime and penny into the cup-holder next to me.  A heads meant damage was dealt (in the amount of the coin’s worth) while a tails meant a miss.  To keep track of hit-points, I just wrote down everybody’s name with “100 hp” next to their name.  As combat went on, I’d scratch out or erase and re-write their health amounts.  Combat was surprisingly both challenging and satisfying for everyone.

What kept us laughing our asses off and screaming wildly was the story we created.  I let the players do whatever they wanted, and they did some crazy things.  Whenever they went someplace new, I made up something new for them to encounter there.  They fought terminators and kid-napped psychics.  They time traveled and killed a flying spaghetti monster.  At one point, one of the characters became a triple amputee with machine guns grafted onto her stubs.  At another point, the entire party of adventurers were bit by vampires and forced to serve their glorious vampire lord for a hundred years.

We may have spent more time talking about what happened to our characters than we did actually playing our characters.  At times we laughed so hard that our sides hurt and we had to try thinking unfunny thoughts just to breathe.  In short, it was awesome.

Once you get away from the dice and the rulesets, pen and paper RPGs are story-telling games.  I have a hard time recreating that feeling in an MMO.  Sure, I may talk about ‘The time the tank died’ and my medic had to finish tanking until the end of the battle, but it’s not quite the same.  If a developer was so inclined to make an MMO be heavy on storytelling, would it even be possible?

/afk

I won’t be posting much at all in the next following days for a very powerful reason: We’re moving to a new house. That includes of course packing all the stuff, transporting it, unpacking it, arranging it nicely and falling over from exhaustion.

This also includes having to deal with changing our internet provider. Unfortunately I could only choose between Comcast or AT&T for my cable/dsl needs, which is the same as saying “Would you rather be stabbed in the back or in the chest?”. Marginally, I decided to go with AT&T, but I have no idea when I’ll have internet at the new place.

The good news is I’ll finally be able to rejoin the ranks of those having decent internet. 6 meg pipe and better latency, hopefully. There’s just that matter of… yeah… when, you know, it will be installed and all.

At any rate, we’re very, very happy with our new home (it will be our first time as homeowners). I’m just dreading the actual “move your stuff” phase.

See you all soon. Fair winds, good pings, nice drops, great times.

Needless Buttons, or On Skill Wrongdoings

We become attached to skills, especially the ones that are used less.  We become masters of knowing when to pull at that situational godsend.  Then the developers take it away, or muddle it to the point where our mastery becomes nothing.  Skill balances like this happen all the time, but there are things far worse… and they just happened, again.

ArenaNet made the genius move of splitting skills in PvE and PvP.  Before they did that it was a complete mess.  They would balance the skill, and it would get abused in Guild vs. Guild.  Then they would nerf it to stop the spamming in PvP only to find that they ruined a few PvE builds.  Consequently, boss X became impossible.  It was a balance-puzzle they could never win, especially when nearly each year players got a massive glut of more skills from the new campaigns and expansions.  So great, skills are split.  Now something closer to balance is achieved in both PvE and PvP more easily.  A greater problem occurs when balance cannot be achieved, even with the split, with how the skill can maintain functionality.

Continue reading Needless Buttons, or On Skill Wrongdoings

Matrix Goes Offline

Word has dropped on The Matrix Online forums that the end is near: July 31, 2009.

In May 2004, I embarked upon a journey. I decided to take the red pill in a big way—I became the online community lead for The Matrix Online. Later that year, many of you joined me as you jacked in for the first time. It was a brand new world—a vision of online games that didn’t involve elves, spaceships, or dragons. We became part of the Matrix storyline; living our own adventures in the world painted by the movies.

It seems not so long ago I was jumping into Mara Central and going toe-to-toe with other devs at E3 2004. I had no idea this journey would take me to a whole different company, managing a major revision of the game, and my first producing gig. “Long, strange trip” doesn’t describe the half of it.

Now we’ve seen how far the rabbit hole goes and it’s time to wake up from that dream (or go back to sleep, depending how you look at it). On July 31, 2009, we will be jacking out for the last time. It’s a bittersweet moment for everyone involved with the game; as a player or as a developer.

It has been a good run. Where many games have fizzled out before or shortly after launch, by August we will have lived on in our home at SOE for more than 4 years. To this day, I have never worked with a community as dedicated as The Matrix Online community.

I’ll be at Fan Faire this year showing The Agency and hanging out with any redpills making the trip. The past couple years have been a blast, so I hope to see some of you there again..

The team will also be whipping up an end-of-the-world event. It won’t be quite the same as having over 100 developers in the game as Agents like when we ended beta, but we have 4 years of tricks up our sleeve. It’ll be a chance to revisit all the things that make MxO the memorable experience it is. And how could we pull the plug without crushing everyone’s RSI just one more time?

I have a lot of fond memories from my years working on MxO. We’ve had a good time in the Machines’ little playground and will be sad to see it end. I hope everyone enjoys the last few months of playing The Matrix Online.

See you on the other side.

Daniel “Walrus” Myers

– Ethic

Passive-Aggressive Help

Thanks to Jong for the link: Let me Google that for you. This is a more polite and useful version of Just F’ing Google It, which spells out F’ing if your workplace or parents are very sensitive about that kind of thing.

Lifehacker provides my title, along with some relevant commentary about being a jerk when answering questions this way. It also provides the critically useful Let me Rickroll that for you. As commenters there point out, good keyword and searching skills really are skills, which is why librarians will rock you. But it takes less time to Google something than to type the question.

: Zubon