Kill Ten Rats

He both ran around and deserted me. He said he would do neither, but that was a lie. It hurt. He made me cry. Way to let me down, Rick. I guess I’ll have to give you up. Time to say goodbye.

: Zubon

I just wanted to help draw attention to Gamers For A Cure. I consider Shawn “Kwip” and Becky “Kwipette” best-friends-I’ve-never-actually-met. Kwip runs N3 aka Neenerneener.net. It is probably the first gaming related blog I ever read. His wife Kwipette has MS and every year those crazy folks all get together for the MS Walk to raise money to fight MS. If you want to help out, they are having an auction for some Warhammer Online shirts (thanks to Sanya Weathers). You can also donate money directly if you wish.

Shawn and Becky, I wish I could join you guys – but I hope this little bit helps. Good luck with the walk and take care!

– Ethic

I have previously cited suggestions that internet folks are repeating very old trends in spelling and grammar. I would like to head a few decades before the Civil War citation to find an earlier root in a craze of the 1830s. People would intentionally misspell words, then turn phrases into acronyms and abbreviations based on those misspellings. The canonical example is “OK,” which stood for “all correct” (oll korrect). It was popularized when Martin Van Buren ran for president, because he had a nickname with the initials OK.

The roots of lolcattery lie in Martin Van Buren partisanship. Now you know.

: Zubon

Context:
Some games such as Asheron’s Call or EVE Online are (character) skill-based rather than class-based. This means that instead of selecting “Warrior” or “Wizard” at character creation, players can choose from a menu of powers and skills, possibly assigning points to specialize in them. Most such games will offer default suites of skills that replicate the standard warrior and wizard classes.

Problem:
The standard suites of skills are almost always suboptimal, and players can unintentionally select sets of skills that make characters unplayable or underpowered, particularly in later levels. This creates a large power gap between min-maxers and casual players.

Continue reading Design Document: Classes in a Skill-Based Game

My fondness for Warcraft 3 tower defense maps having long been established, I direct your attention to my latest obsession, DotA. It is more or less a new game, using Warcraft’s pieces. Waves of enemies appear automatically and crash against each other, while you are a hero who leads/supports your troops and fights your enemy counterparts. It is kind of like being Captain America in the World War II comic days.

It is a great LAN game, seating up to ten players (and not really coming into its own unless you have at least six). Each game takes about an hour, so you can try a few different teams, heroes, or strategies in a normal gaming binge. You can also download bots for solo play (or to fill empty seats), which feels preferable to braving the wilds of Battle.net. I am mostly interested in playing with friends, and I am using the bots map to help me see which heroes I enjoy.

There are about 80 heroes, so you could play for a long time just trying them out. If it takes a game to get the swing of a hero, another to see if you like it now that you understand it, and maybe a third if you liked that one, you could play for months just doing that. Your heroes include swordsmen and mages, a giant scorpion, Zeus, a druid who awakens trees to fight for him, suicidal goblins, invisible assassins, the skeleton of an elvish archer, a two-headed dragon, and Pudge the Butcher.

The game rewards an odd playstyle called “last-hitting and denying.” You get gold only for deathblows, so the ideal is to follow your NPC troops and killsteal. If it looks like an opponent is going to get a deathblow on your NPC, kill your own troops. Early success is dangerous, because it brings you in range of enemy towers, so your early “lead and support” campaign involves delaying and murdering your NPC allies so that the fight happens closer to your own defenses. Perhaps not so much Captain America.

: Zubon

Hardcore MMO players are a niche audience. There, I said it. You, as someone who is taking the time to read an obscure MMO gaming blog, are in the far tail of the statistical distribution. And I’m writing it, so I’m even further out there.

Attempting to appeal to players like us is intentionally gutting your potential audience. At IMGDC, Gordon Walton of Bioware compared you to a connoisseur of fine wine. You have discriminating tastes and an attention to detail, and you will go through great effort to wrest a nugget of fun from your entertainment. For most others, he explained, “ripple works.” Fine details are lost on them, and simple is easy.

Sure, you say, children like sweet, bland, and greasy food, but they eventually move beyond McDonald’s. We can lure them in with casual semi-MMOs and then let them graduate to the big leagues. These WoW players are going to want something meatier soon. Great, show me anywhere it has happened. Has your favorite book outsold The Davinci Code? Which of your favorite band’s albums has outsold Britney Spears? Is the main character of your favorite movie better known than Jar-Jar Binks? There are lots of great things that appeal to refined tastes, and few of them are market leaders. Popularity does not determine quality, but it does determine who gets rich and where resources get invested.

Don’t worry. It’s a big market. Your niche can survive a long time. The same market that mass-produces pap (some of it really enjoyable, if we can see past our elitism) makes it worthwhile to cater to lots of smaller markets along the way. The center of mass may be even less hardcore-MMOy than WoW’s pre-70 game, but that will subsidize your less lucrative refined tastes. That should be a liberating thought for the ~5% of WoW players who beat the Black Temple before 2.4: millions of people paid for the creation of content that you completed and they never saw.

: Zubon

I must confess that I’ve been feeling underwhelmed by new sites like Metaplace and Whirled.

I get it intellectually — these sorts of services can do for gaming and virtual worlds what YouTube has done for video. But I just haven’t found myself feeling excited. I don’t even have enough time to run all the WoW dailies I want to run, much less putz around through a dozen new MMO’s every month. Give me my WoW expansions and give me Warhammer Online, but Metaplace? Yawn.

And I was trying to like them, I really was. I’m a big admirer of Raph (who’s responsible for Metaplace), and I spent an hour or two poking around the Whirled beta last week. The concept seemed neat, but I found the experience underwhelming. Boring.

‘Till this afternoon.

Continue reading Getting Whirled

Richard Bartle has put up a pdf of his keynote presentation from the 2008 IMGDC for everyone’s enjoyment.

Go check it out.

His 2007 Keynote is up as well in case you haven’t seen it.

– Ethic