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Daily Quests

Quests available:

  • Workplace Outfitting
  • Afternoon Nap
  • Dinner Preparations

*click*

Workplace Outfitting
Off to work again, are ye? Not just yet yer not! The guards’ll stop ye at the gates if ye try to get by in that get-up. No, this is an infiltration job of the most dangerous sort, and you’ll need to blend with the natives, or end up skewered on a pike!
Objectives:

  1. Subquest: No Two Alike
  2. Subquest: After Nap Time
  3. Subquest: Tie Tie
  4. Subquest: If You Start Me Up

Rewards:

  • Workplace Reputation (200)
  • Effect: Basic Warmth (duration: 12 hours)

Accept — Decline

*click* Continue reading Daily Quests

Gamers don’t want Hardcore

Oh… gamers think they want hardcore.  They even say they want hardcore. But no, they do not want hardcore, or at least not the kind of hardcore that mmo developers usually dole out to appease their requests.

When a gamer says they want something to be hardcore, they mean to say they would like to achieve something and then stand triumphant while those who have not achieved that thing are impressed beyond measure.  It has to be something that they can achieve where others fail. This is where the vision stops.  Players don’t stop to think WHY those who are impressed have failed to achieve.

In SWG, getting a gunship is considered a somewhat “hardcore” space goal.  In order to get one, you have to kill hundreds of fighters of every kind, of every level.  The barrier that keeps most people from getting a gunship isn’t some boss, but rather a huge boring grind. Many of the ships you have to destroy to get a gunship die after a couple hits, but are so weak you could bring your engines to a full stop and safely go to the bathroom during a dogfight.

It should be the other way around.  Hardcore should mean that you have to face very difficult fights where you could easily die against a dangerous opponent.  Instead, your chief enemy in most “hardcore” games is boredom.  * Cough *  Darkfall  * Cough *

When players ask for hardcore, they may expect some twitch-based challenge or near-impossible boss, but they’re really asking for a huge grind.  Hardcore doesn’t = Challenging.

The Yapper

Why do we play MMOs?  For a lot of us it’s a game wrapped up with communication.  Humans are highly communicative creatures, and our (MMO players, especially ones that read blogs about MMOs) minds usually love games and game mechanics.  There are reasons that so many things in the 21st century revolve around communication.  In a lot of online games we have or add voice chat.  Lord of the Rings Online has built in voice chat for when you need to party.  In Warhammer Online my guild used a huge Ventrilo server.  X-Box Live uses a lot of voice communication.  Team Fortress 2 has it built in.  Etc. Etc. Etc.  For myself, I am pretty quiet… even when I shouldn’t be.  Even though I am alright at leading groups, I hate to describe how we are going to fight Igash, Lord of the Grand Stairs, with this new group makeup.  It’s not because I am shy (I assure you, I am not), it’s just I’d prefer to let someone else do it.  I just don’t like communicating via voice.  I’d rather type the entire strategy out.  Enter the Yapper…

If you have ever played any online game for a prolonged period of time where voice chat is involved, you must have come across a Yapper.  These people talk in the group like they have not spoken to another human being all day.  Some talk about real life happenings, some talk about world news, and some talk about how much the devs suck.  The thing they all share, I think, is that a Yapper receives some affirmation of life by allowing very little silence.  And, they are crucial to our games.

Continue reading The Yapper

Sets of Sets

The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ Volume Two: Mines of Moriaâ„¢ introduced many quests and deeds that are sets and sets of sets. What does Zubon mean by that, and why does he like it more for deeds than quests?

Take 2.5.5, in which you defend three places in Moria. You get one quest, and the goal of that quest is to complete three sub-quests. You now have four quests in your quest log, and as you complete the first three, it checks off the objectives on the frame quest.

Deeds work similarly but invisibly. When you finish all the deeds in a Moria instance, you are awarded a hidden deed and title for doing so. Hurray, you are a Curator of the Forgotten Treasury! There is a hidden deed for exploring all of Moria; you complete this by completing all the exploration deeds in Moria; you complete these by reaching all the exploration spots listed on those deeds. These are neat little bonuses, and I would like to see previous zones and instances retrofitted with them. But then, I like deeds, and getting deeds for getting deeds is meta-joy. (Was Annuminas the first of these hidden set deeds?)

Why are quests less successful? You can have as many deeds in progress as you like. Quests are more limited. Consider the quests for the six radiance instances. The Twenty-First Hall has two quests to go help people in those instances. Each of those quests is to go help several people with quests in those instances. Some of those quests are to help the person in multiple ways. The Grand Stair is the big one here: if you complete all the quests, you will receive more than half a gold piece in quest rewards because: Alice tells you to help Alice, Bob, Carl, and Dan; Alice wants you to fight fire orcs and their boss; Bob wants you to fight goblins and their bosses; Carl wants you to fight shadow orcs and their boss; Dan wants you to fight orcs and trolls, each of which is a pair of quests to fight them and their boss. All of that is one checkbox on the top-level quest to go help in the radiance instances. In a way, this is neat. In another way, good golly I need more quest space. I decided against seeing if I could cancel the top-level quests and pick them back up for insta-credit after completing the sub-quests.

But back to deeds, you get another quest slot for every 40 deeds you complete. More deed-hunting!

: Zubon

Blast from the past

Bored out of my mind, decided to resuscitate mIRC and open a chat channel for all rat slayers. Yeah, yeah, I know it’s the age of Vent, IM, Skype or whatever it is you whippersnappers use nowadays. There’s something to be said for the old school, and you know I’m all about the old school. So there it is.

You can still get mIRC here.
Log in to any AfterNET server (should be in your mIRC server list). Channel is, of course, #KTR.

So drop by if you’re “staff” or a friend of this glorious blog. Have a little chat, say hi, or just lurk, making everyone else wonder what you’re up to.

We don’t get together very often.

Introducing Suzina, The MMO player

I’m a 27 year old married woman. I’m sure that gives you one impression of who I am. I’ll be finishing my degree in psychology next month, which probably only shifts your vision of me slighly. But here’s the rub: I’m an MMO player. I don’t have a lot of identity wrapped up in that. I don’t introduce myself to strangers as an MMO player, and rightfully so. Telling someone in the “real world” that you spend more than 40 hours per week in a virtual world isn’t going to win you any reputation points. I’ve sunk my time into Lotro, Star Wars Galaxies, Everquest 2, Final Fantasy XI, and Ultima Online. Three of those I helped beta-test. Oh… who am I kidding. I just played them early and called myself a “beta tester”.

Before graphical MMOs existed, I played text-based muds. Some summers in high-school I would play my favorite Mud so much that I had dreams in pure-text. When I was in elementary school, I used to play Dungeons & Dragons with my older brother and his friends. Maybe I’m just addicted to online grinding, but maybe there’s something all these games have in common. In any event, I find myself thinking about my virtual worlds enough to make we want to write about them too. That’s what brings me to Kill Ten Rats.

Individual Expression or Group Coherence?

I thought that limited class options helped pick-up groups in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ while making City of Heroes PUGs sometimes vulnerable to ineffective “concept” builds. Ravious commented that Guild Wars PUGs were improved by being able to see what skills other people were using, with the implication that you could educate the newbs or avoid people who look useless. (For the unfamiliar: you equip one bar of abilities in Guild Wars, and that is all you can use until you go back to town and change your bar. Many options, few available at once.) These experiences suggest to me that putting characters in small boxes lets you build things more easily.

Is this trade-off I am proposing between ease of grouping and narrowness of class roles a false dilemma? Can you have highly flexible character roles and still have the ability to assemble groups quickly? DC and Champions Online have both planned to bridge this divide by having roles that change on the fly instead of classes. That is, you build your character with “fire hammer,” “healing flames,” “fire shield,” and “blinding smoke,” and have a dial that makes you a DPS, tank, or support class. If you turn it to DPS, you deal more damage, but take a defensive penalty (alternately: set the dial to give only bonuses and not mention that the penalty is built in).

If the trade-off exists, which direction should your game take? I am a fan of individual expression, but as a game designer I would be more interested in seeing people play together frequently and smoothly. Bind people to each other, make cooperative play in your game a good thing, and let social factors help you retain players. This is why you add bottlenecks, downtime, and forced grouping: bring people together for interaction and bonding. Or maybe this is all crap, because WoW made its billions as an extremely solo-friendly game, but then the end-game is entirely raid-centric, forcing people into class roles.

Do you like being able to over-specialize? Planned supergroups in City of Heroes are awesome. Brutal Speed was a simple City of Villains idea: Corruptors with Kinetics, Brutes with AE attacks, everyone with Leadership, no one with knockback. A standard group was any 5 Brutes and any 3 Corruptors, with no further thought needed. No one needed to take Hasten or Stamina, because you always had 3 Speed Boosts available. And the little Leadership toggle bonuses stacked nicely when everyone had them. In The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢, our Casualties of War group has low DPS because we all went with tanks and support classes. Why go for that soloing build if you will always have a group available?

: Zubon

Funcom’s World of Darkness

I can’t help but feel a little disappointed in CCP/White Wolf if Funcom comes out with an onion-layered dark world MMO before the makers of EVE do.  Massively gives a peek at Funcom’s upcoming game The Secret World, which honestly seems pretty cool.  It is a story-driven, time traveling, action-oriented, classless MMO in the vein of Call of Cthulhu or The King in Yellow, from what I surmise.  And, the producer is Ragnar Tørnquist who brought us the excellent The Longest Journey games.  It sounds very intriguing, but still I have that little pang of fanboism hurting.

CCP/White Wolf announced the World of Darkness MMO sometime in 2007, shortly after the two companies’ “merger” (read:acquisition).  Since then we have heard nothing.  According to Massively, on the other hand, The Secret World started concepting in 2002.  I have not seen when official production began, but I do not think we will get The Secret World until 2011.  On the other hand, World of Darkness has been running like a submarine, and one can only guess if and when that game will come about.

I guess I should be a little thankful that this game genre is finally coming to an MMO.  I think that The Secret World is going to take a lot more from Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (one of my top ten games of all time) rather than having vampire and werewolves, especially as protagonists.  Still, the two games would be like brothers, each in their own dark world.  If anything, maybe this will push CCP out of the deep to counteract any of Funcom’s marketing “firsts” and “onlys.”

–Ravious
lost carcosa

Yes, Get It Right

I keep hearing this in a LOTRO context, but it’s a general point: “It’s a no-win situation. Release now and people will complain because about bugs. Wait and fix the bugs, and people complain about a lack of updates.” Man, it’s just like your boss down at the Pizza Pit. He always wants it “done right” and “on time.” What a drag.

This is why we cannot have nice things. Too many gamers do not care or have given up hope of anything better. Zones were crashing last night, and I was listening to people in the global channel chorusing, “It’s an MMO. Get used to it.” They shout down people who want to be able to play the game they paid for.

When players complain, why do so many responses end with “or go play WoW”? Our commenters have “WoW has/had problems too!” hotkeyed. That’s right, WoW swept and vastly expanded the market by making an MMO only as buggy as a regular PC release. That’s what “polish” means at this point.

You will keep getting broken games because you are willing to pay for them. You are willing to reconfigure your system, learn the work-arounds for bugs and incoherent “working as intended,” and crawl through barbed wire to get your nugget of fun. Meanwhile, the mass-market will not put up with that crap, so they get a well-done, profitable MMO-lite, while you hide in your irrelevant niche with the broken shell of your dream game, complaining about the Big Mac-eating, Usher-listening mainstream. Because everyone ships late with bugs and missing features, so STFU and accept it.

: Zubon

srsly? You went with Usher there?