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A tale of two groups

A few days ago, I was in the 16th Hall.  We were trying to do it in Hard-Mode.  This meant that after a couple of hours of making our way to the last boss in this area, we were going to have to kill the last boss without killing any of the tiny weak little bugs.

Along the way, I accidentally rolled on (and won) a coin for some armor that wasn’t for my class.  I felt like crap about that.  I also accidentally sent my pet to attack an orc I didn’t mean to.  It dragged a whole bunch of orcs back towards us and killed the entire group.  I lied and said my pet had some path-finding issues.  I feel bad about lying, but I felt really emberrassed about killing the group too.

In the final room, we died to the boss the first two times without doing much damage on the boss.  We weren’t doing so well.  On the third time, I set my pet to attack my target instead of passive.  I figured “I’m not going to be attacking any bugs, so this way it’ll attack the boss when I attack it and the mushrooms when I attack those”.  During the fight, our tank was being chased by the bugs.  I threw an AOE debuff on the bugs to keep them from hurting the tank so much.  It was a non-damaging de-buff, but my pet took this to mean I was attacking the bugs.  It flew over to the bug and killed one in a single hit.

We failed hard-mode.  Everyone saw in chat that it was my fault.  The group broke up with a lot of angry people.  I felt like quitting Lotro.  It was awful.  That night, I kept thinking about how good I was in SWG at leading groups through the instances, and how awful a player I am in Lotro.   I found it hard to sleep after that.

That was one group.  Last night I joined another pick-up group.  This pick-up group was for the Turtle raid.  They wanted a loremaster for the power-regen abilities.  I changed my traits and equipment in preperation for the raid.  I had the best food, the best scrolls, and I even used destiny points to purchase temporary buffs.

We fought it and everyone started dying towards the end.  I was the last person standing.  This was mainly because when I died, my eagle brought be back to life.  When this happened, the DOT started over on its timer, and I could survive fairly well.  There was me and a hunter alive when it was at 10k.  I was healing the hunter and giving him power, but the hunter got too close and died when the turtle was at 3k.

It was just me and the turtle.  I was running from it and dotting it.  I typed while I was running around that I was going to solo the turtle.  My health was near empty.  My pots were on cooldown.  The acid damage was ticking away and I was slowly dying.

Everyone was talking in raid chat.  “Kill it!  Kill it!” and “Why are you runing?!?”

Of course, no one questioned my tactics when the turtle finally died to my hand.  I stood triumphant.  Eleven players could only lay on the ground and watch me fight.  I rez’d their minstrels and soon they were all on their feet and celebrating.  The raid leader was even clapping for me and /cheering me.  It didn’t matter to me that there wasn’t anything for a loremaster in the chest at the end.  I had saved the entire raid.

I couldn’t sleep after that.  I’ve been replaying that moment in my head all night and into the morning.  It’s 6:00am now and I still haven’t been to bed.  God… that felt good.  No… it feels good.  For the rest of my character’s life, I’ll remember when she got the killing blow on that turtle.

City of Heroes vs. Farming

After adding more than 100 Architect badges in Issue 14, Paragon Studios has decided that 80% of them were bad ideas. There is good and bad in that.

Good: “So, going forward—beginning with the Mission Architect badges—we’ve decided to move away from ‘count’ badges that might encourage farming and/or aberrant game play. Instead, we’d like to encourage players to try all of our content by offering badges for completing 1 time accomplishments and achievements.” Existing “kill 100 rats” badges will remain, although I guess we’ll see if they tone down the count requirements in the future.

Bad: “We really didn’t want the Mission Architect to be an environment that encourages farming for XP, Rewards or Badges…” Not bad as such, but again, they seem not to have thought that through. Seriously, you did not see how it might encourage those? Let’s take the last part: you did not want Architect missions farmed for badges? There is a badge for defeating 5,000 custom enemies in Architect missions and 50,000 enemies in test mode. Let me say that one again: 50,000 enemies, in the “no xp” test mode, and they did not want to encourage farming. There is one for earning 25,000 tickets and another for going 1,000 over your ticket cap, one for 10,000 in test mode, then another for 1,000 inspirations. Or more simply: 100 player-made arcs, 100 heroic arcs, 100 villainous arcs, 100 Developer’s Choice arcs, 250 Hall of Fame arcs, and 100 arcs in test mode. No farming intended, just hundreds of story arcs?

When your new release is more than half a year in the making, because remember it was originally intended for Issue 13, you need to at some point resolve diverging views like “reduce farming,” “require 50,000 kills,” and “give players easy ways to make lots of experience.”

: Zubon

Lotro’s Book 8 Details

Turbine released the notes for their next update today.  Here’s some interesting bits:

1. The over-powered black arrow DoT I mentioned recently is going to be curable.  Yes!

2. The RK isn’t the only one getting nerfed.  Minstrels (who can currently out dps a hunter if they trait for dps) are going to be getting a DPS nerf.  Champs will see a decrease in tanking ability while in fervor.

3. The legendary item drops will be changing to a barter system.  Currently, the big ol’ Mr. Turtle raid drops a lot of first-age spears, and sometimes other first-age weapons too.  He’s now going to drop coins that you have to collect to trade in for the first-age of your choice.    This means everyone will always roll on the first-age coin (because hey, I could always use another first-age with better legacies right?).

4. Many patch notes which are ambiguous.  I mean, what does “Changes to The Lost One in the 16th Hall.” really mean?

For the full notes click Here

What Gets Measured Gets Done

if you display each user’s post count under their username, then people are going to start posting a lot. If you implement a karma score, then people will try and do things that maximize karma. Not only [is] exposing information about valued work important, not exposing information can also be an important design strategy.
– Xianhang Zhang

If players have achievements they can see, many will go out of their way to get them, and a subset has gotta catch them all. If you let other players see what achievements they have finished, you will see more achievement-seeking. If you only (or more easily) show how many achievements people have completed, they will tend to get the easy ones to drive up that count. If you add varying points for each achievement, you will see min-maxing based on the difficulty-reward of achievements, with forum posts on how achievement x is too easy/difficult for its reward.

In The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢, you cannot see how many deeds someone has finished, only their equipped traits. You should expect to see people polishing the virtues they equip and ignoring the ones they do not, because both function and style reinforce that. You cannot see someone’s crafting ranks, but when they added auto-generated forum signatures, crafting ranks were listed on there. I don’t suppose that anyone has the data, but I would expect to see a bit more crafting done after that point, particularly for people more active on the forums (and using the character signatures).

We will also expect some counter-culture blowback: people who do no crafting or avoid achievements specifically so that they have 0s. They just need some way to signal “I am a conscientious objector” rather than “I am a scrub.”

: Zubon

Runekeeper Nerf Details

The Devs over at LOTRO took time to talk about the widely anticipated Runekeeper nerf.  Posters on the boards have been crying for a RK nerf ever since Book 7 went live.  Even posters who are not actually calling for a nerf are effectively asking for one when they brag about feats such as 12 runekeepers finishing the turtle raid in a exactly 64 seconds.

So is Turbine going to nerf runekeeper healing or runekeeper DPS?

When turbine discussed the details of the nerf, it appears the healing will remain strong.  DPS and power-consumption will see changes however.  Some specific RK skills will have their damage reduced, or effectiveness limited in Book 8, and all RK damage skills past level 30 will see an increase in power cost.

It’s too early to tell how this will actually play out.  If Turbine implements a nerf to tactical damage at the same time as nerfing RK, the net effect could be a massive nerf to DPS.  Yet if Turbine doens’t go far enough, we could still have the same old complaints.

Friday Feature

SWG used to have something called a “Friday Feature”.  They would show a tiny piece of something from a future update, or highlight some aspect of the game.  The Friday Feature was sometimes just a list of statistics, and sometimes it was just a rehashing of information already on the forums, but it was always there, and it always kept me thinking about SWG on Fridays.  Even though I’ve stopped playing SWG, I still keep checking the web page each Friday to see if anything new has been added to the game.

The Friday Feature was really a great way of getting a share of my head-space.  The more I think of a game, the more likely I am to go back and play it, or try it for the first time.  All the controversy with Darkfall actually had me in their store on multiple occassions to try and buy the game.  News stories about an EVE corporation leader scamming his friends actually contributed to my husband downloading the trial.  He even went on to purchase EVE.

By contrast, Final Fantasy XI was terrible about letting American players know what to be thinking about.  I can’t speak for their Japanese players, but Americans had no clue what was new in the game until it was already out.  Blogs and forums help fill the void, but there’s nothing like hearing from the horse’s mouth tid-bits about what’s coming next.

Happy 1st Birthday, Age of Conan

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the full launch (in the US) of Age of Conan. It did technically launch a few days earlier for some but let’s not pick nits.

They are giving things away in game, like fireworks and extra character slots. Congratulations, Funcom!

It’s definitely been an interesting year, full of challenges and adventure, and we are really looking forward to the coming year as well. So the toast at the King’s Table is to the year that has passed and in anticipation of the year that is to come!

– Ethic

Moria zones

I want to talk about the Moria zones in Lotro.  I don’t want to get into all the things the expansion changed, but just the zones themselves.  Personally, I think Moria is too safe.  When the fellowship ran through the place in the book and movie, it was filled with armies of goblins.  When my character first entered Moria, I immediately talked to the stable master inside and saw I could ride a goat to the next “town” of Dolvien View.

I understand why they want towns inside Moria.  The outside world is built with quest-hubs in mind, but it doesn’t work in Moria.  Instead, they should have styled Moria after Goblin Town.  Goblin Town requires you to pull and kill goblins each step of the way to get anywhere.  There are some quest-giving NPCs in the prison, but it never feels like the prision is a “town” where you’re safe.  You fight your way in, talk to them, and fight your way out.  Goblin Town feels like a goblin-infested adventure behind enemy lines.  Moria doesn’t.

Bertrand Russell on Miracle Patches

Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would not argue, ‘The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress the balance’; You would say, ‘Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment’

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be pleasantly surprised by the next update that promises to solve all the problems, but you must be surprised. Can you flip a fair coin and get heads 10 times in a row? Sure, that is only a 1-in-1024 chance, it must happen all the time in a world with many coin flips. But if someone is taking your money based on that coin, after 10 flips, you should be looking for a two-headed coin.

“They have learned their lesson” is rarely a safe assumption. If someone did a lousy job last time, you must raise your probability that he will do a lousy job next time. Otherwise, you are taking bad work as evidence that good work must be coming. Do you take good work as evidence that bad work must be coming? If you take both good and bad work as reasons to believe that good things are coming, you are shaky on concepts like “evidence” and “reason.”

To end on a concrete example, before turning it back to Mr. Russell, Age of Conan had what was by all accounts a miracle patch at the end of beta, and perhaps several post-launch. At it still had that quality we have come to expect from Funcom.

I wish to propose for the reader’s favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

: Zubon