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More Issues

Tech-wise, Book 14 has been a bit of a debacle. It is quite common for a patch to break things, but it just keeps happening.

I posted about server issues a week ago. They seem to have mostly cleared up. The third or fourth patch did it. I am still crashing on zoning daily, which had never happened under Book 13, but maybe that’s just me. I also mentioned the new zone in that patch. It is still not available. Two weeks into Book 14, we are looking at another two weeks to having the zone after which the book is named. It is not bugged; we just need to open AQ. As a populous server, we are in 3rd place, more than half-way there. Other servers may be waiting an extra week or two.

Continue reading More Issues

Collector’s Edition

I decided to cancel my Warhammer Online Collector’s Edition pre-order today. It has nothing to do with my feelings about the game. It has everything to do with thinking about my past CE purchases. Did I get value from them or was it just excitement about the game? I decided, even in the case of World of Warcraft, that is was just about getting something that makes my character a little special or unique. Yes, the lovely in-game items.

All in all, I do not feel it was money well-spent for me. Sure, the art books are cool and the soundtrack is nice, but I have not looked at the art book more than once or twice. The big giant boxes also need to be displayed somewhere, I can’t bring myself to toss them out. So, I ask you: Are Collector’s Editions worth the extra money to you? Why or why not?

– Ethic

Endgame Guilds

I am beginning to see the appeal. It would be nice to run instances and raids where the majority of the people knew what they were doing. I would like to do anything without needing to explain it, rather than its always being someone’s first time. I would like everyone to have voice chat on, and for those with voice chat on, I would like them to be using it; I see six people with voice chat enabled, but only two can hear me; and as a side note, if everyone except you can hear me, the problem is probably on your end. I would like to spend less than thirty minutes waiting on people. I would like there to be no wipes on the way there. I would like people to be familiar with the game mechanics.

While I’m at it, I would like a pony.

: Zubon

Epic and Tedious Are Not Synonyms

I am on Book XIII in the epic quest chain, and since I have not complained about travel times in a little while, I thought this would be a good example.

Keep running Forochel was the new zone for Book XIII. It is a nicely crafted zone of snow and ice with some interesting gameplay features. Geographically, it is dominated by the bay in the center. Stay out of the bay. While you can swim anywhere else in the game, the water there will kill you in a few ticks. The capital is in the north, Suri-Kyla. There are towns in the center and southeast, a dwarf town in the southwest, and a little camp in the northwest. (Unless something was added in Book XIV, none of these towns have a Provisioner who sells the Traveling Rations one needs for the game’s teleportation abilities.)

The horses indicate horse routes (not surprising). A horse route usually goes to the nearest towns, sometimes with a fast travel (teleport) to a further town. So the center town connects to the other places on the road. The northwest outpost connects only to the northern city, via fast travel, and only if you unlock it. I forget whether that unlock is reputation-based, requires completing a quest that involves running around the bay a few times, or both (to get both directions). Suri-Kyla, being closely tied to the reputation system, demands reputation for its horse routes. Unlock the routes to other major cities by reaching Ally (next-to-best) standing with that city. Oh, and you must have visited both ends of the route to unlock it.

Do you see the red numbers I added to the map? That is the chain of locations for Book XIII, Chapters V and VI. This is not that bad, assuming you have unlocked the horse route around the bay. It is 25 silver each way, which is about a quest reward in this game. With animation and zoning, it is only about a minute between those two spots, plus another couple minutes to get to where the contact is, either at the furthest point in the city or in a cave northwest of the northwest outpost. So the route is: contact in capital city (1), run to horse, ride to outpost, run to cave (2), run to boat, fight to contact (3), run to dwarf cave, fight to quest objective (4), run to boat, fight to contact (5), run to outpost, ride to city, run to contact (6), run to horse, ride to outpost, run to cave (7), run to outpost, ride to city, run to contact (8). If the blue team has the boat, you can skip most of the fighting there. So the gameplay of these quests is fighting through one cave of dwarves, surrounded by about forty minutes of travel, probably closer to an hour since I always under-estimate how long things will take (ask my wife on that one: how much longer will it take me to get back to town and log off?), at a cost of 75 silver. You can cut a little time by locking your “map home” to one of the sites, and your time will be much longer if you have not done enough quests in the zone.

Getting there is half the fun. Getting back there twenty times is not ten times the fun.

: Zubon

I have hallucinated part of 13.7 into that. 13.8 involves two laps between the city and the cave, so they are starting to blend. And while we’re on 13.8, can we talk about bugs in the ice giants’ knockback code?

Virtue Caps

Virtues are a category of trait. You can have any five virtues active at once (at higher levels). Each virtue has up to ten ranks, providing three bonuses that scale based on how many ranks you have in that virtue. You gain ranks by completing deeds, such as exploring the farms of the The Shire, finding the lost lore of the Cardolan princes, or slaying wargs in Angmar or the Lone Lands.

Only one deed currently goes all the way to ten, and only since Book 14 went live. More may hit it when the new zone opens up. It is unclear whether they will still stop at 10 with the expansion pack or whether they will scale higher with the higher level cap; otherwise, they become worth relatively less, as 30 Agility is more meaningful at 50 than 60; or not, if the stat cap stays at 500.

If the cap does not rise, we will very soon have more ranks available than necessary. There will be options. This is a neat notion to me. Currently, you have quite a bit ahead of you if you want to cap anything. There is a more or less continuous group going in Sarnur for people farming trolls. You will likely hit the experience cap long long before you run out of quests, and there are always several ways to go about seeking experience. It might be nice to provide similar trait options.

I cannot see anyone killing 360 worms in Ram Duath if there are other options. It might be meaningful to developers to see which deeds fall in the category of “only if I need it, only if there is no other way.” That data is probably spoiled by incorrigible completists like me. Like me and half the other gamers in the world.

: Zubon

Translations and Mistranslations

So, WoW finally opened up its Latin American servers this past 25th, and made available a localization and language pack to go with it (optional, though. you can play just fine on Latin American servers with the good ol’ vanilla English client and launcher). Being the native Spanish speaker that I am, I decided to give it a whirl. See if I could get in touch with a few friends from really down south and get together in-game.

But nothing could prepare me for the translation to Spanish. How do I want to put it? Okay, let’s try this: It’s repugnant. How about that? Need more qualifiers? Happy to oblige: Obscure, Nonsensical, halfway between machine translation and surrealism.

I won’t make a laundry list of all its sins. But having done a lot of translation work in the past myself, I had to switch back to English before my liver gave up the ghost. I can mention a few things, though:

Continue reading Translations and Mistranslations

Improving Auction Houses

There are few improvements to be made on EVE Online’s economic tools. The more your system resembles that, the better.

Buy orders are a key feature. Most systems lack this, but it is the “Buy It Now” equivalent for the seller. It would improve economic efficiency enormously. Creating a market is hard, and letting either buyers or sellers make the first offer will encourage more use.

Continue reading Improving Auction Houses

Appearance: Achievement or Individualism?

Can you identify the hardest-to-get weapons in your game? How about the tiers of armor for your class? Can you tell how far someone is into the endgame based on what s/he is wearing? This is the standard item-based model of character (appearance) customization. There may be options to make your orc 5% bulkier or give your elf fourteen shades of blue or green eyes, but it will be covered by equipment anyway. Making yourself look interesting is almost always a result of making yourself powerful, and your appearance suggests your capabilities. The guys in those robes heal, and the guys in those robes blow things up, and the guy in that hat is obviously very experienced. Looking good is a reward worth working for, and it immediately commands the appropriate respect from the knowledgeable (and often wonder from the ignorant).

Or is form radically separate from function? City of Heroes gives you almost all the costume items up front. Norrath and Middle Earth have cosmetic tabs for equipment to cover your mismatched raid gear (a half-measure to let you lock in your favorite achievement-based appearance). In a world where the same gesture might be a sword-slash or a fireball-toss, there is no need to connect how something looks to what it does. This allows the maximum of customization and individualization, and it can come as early as you like. I have seen swordfights somewhere between a feline hominid and a lightsaber-wielding lesbian mermaid slave; spectators included several librarians, someone in an oversized cowboy hat, and a robot-thing with a cow levitating over it. None of these had special abilities.

You can cross the two a bit. Item-based systems have dyes for customization, although the colors can still signify wealth levels. Function-free systems can have unlockable pieces or categories, like City of Heroes auras that are available after level 30, costume sets reserved for long-time subscribers, or weapons that require certain badges (and you can bet I show off my Rikti Axe).

Is one better, or is it a matter of taste? I often enjoy a connection between form and function, such as making the meaner monsters bigger. You can even reverse the two standards: have item-based play that does not affect appearance (like Diablo II sockets or City of Heroes enhancements) or non-item play that ties appearance options to accomplishments.

: Zubon

Yeah, I keep citing City of Heroes here. I have played a few years of it, and its costume designer is still the industry benchmark.