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Golden Snitch Caught

I am planning on attending an Ingress Interitus anomaly (gathering/event) this weekend, but I am no longer sure why. It is kind of like playing out the games of a “best of seven” series when one team has already won four. You can still play for the battle, but the war has already been won.

I don’t know if it was true in previous event series, but the event details include the note, “Research suggests the the [sic] outcome of the Interitus Anomalies will be dependent on total Values accrued by the Factions across the entire Interitus series of Anomalies.” One of the cities in the previous anomaly, Kansas City, was so lopsided that the blue team won by 1500 points. Outside Kansas City, the score for the entire anomaly was about 1500 for each side. That metaphor about running up points on an empty field? At least in “best of seven” that would count as just one game.

Funny thing is, Kansas City was an outlier but only as a matter of degree. Most of the anomaly events seem to be blowouts for one team or the other, with 5:1 scores not uncommon. If the game is not intentionally designed for this to happen, balance went astray a long time ago and has not been seen often since.

: Zubon

Internecine Tourism

Today has been “Be A Tourist In Your Own Town” day. The passport includes admittance to the local zoo. The local zoo has about a dozen Ingress portals. While you might not pay the normal zoo fee just to capture some imaginary portals (although it looks like some local players have annual passes), for part of a package that costs $1, you might go.

The local Ingress communications channel has been filled with players capturing zoo portals, linking them up, re-taking them from the other team, and generally making an imaginary warzone of the place. The only thing the normal zoo visitors would notice is that a few people are staring at their phones instead of the animals (more than usual) and may be very particular about where they are standing.

: Zubon

Try visiting something like the Ingress intel map and looking at Lake Buena Vista, FL (Disneyworld): theme parks all over Orlando and the surrounding area, with every ride, attraction, and statue marked. Some people are having a very different experience in the Magic Kingdom.

Risk Calculations

The meatspace risks of online gaming are minimal. It is so rare as to be newsworthy when an online gaming confrontation leads to physical violence. The few incidents I recall were all in east Asia, so I estimate my own risk even lower.

In Ingress, face-to-face encounters with the opposing team are common, although few I would describe as “confrontations.” (Is it a bad sign that it is already “few” in less than two months?) Interfacing through our phones, the character of interactions is somewhere between online gaming and what you might reasonably expect from face-to-face encounters, modified by differing norms in assorted virtual and meatspace communities, particularly as people travel and those interact.

Online, you get a very low number when you multiply the odds that someone would want to do you harm times the odds that they could find you times the odds they would find it worthwhile to travel, risk prosecution, risk harm to themselves, etc. Unless you are in the same gaming cafe, your aggressor faces greater safety risks in traveling than you would from even the most blatant trolling.

If you are actively playing Ingress, your location can be pinpointed within 100 meters, along with a timestamp and a predictable direction of travel based on recent activity. The players may not be marked on the map, but you don’t need to be a genius to follow a line or approximate the center of a circle. And if you are blowing up portals, there is a very good chance someone within reasonable driving distance set them up. And as I have mentioned, some people take the game very seriously, have quick reaction times, and and will bring friends and/or cars. While the vast majority of people are decent and/or scared of repercussions (I am not aware of any Ingress-related violence), your odds on “can find you” and “reasonably close” are vastly higher in an augmented reality game than online.

Recently, any time I have been out playing (attacking, linking, etc.) rather than just hacking as I go for a walk, someone has driven up. Yesterday, I took a low-level player out to gain some levels, and the counterattack SUV was on-scene before we had walked 100 meters. That put her personal risk calculation too high (versus the value of capturing imaginary portals), and she decided to do something else with her day. And given the unhappy reaction from the man who immediately knew that cheating was going on when the lower-level account conveniently disappeared as he arrived, I must say her calculations were probably better than mine.

: Zubon

Update edit: I was wrong, I am aware of one story of Ingress-related battery and a few of minor defacement of property, but I don’t know how well sourced those are. One player says an opposing team member smashed someone’s phone, which is apparently a story well known in the area but doubted by the accused’s teammates. And then folks who put bumper stickers for Team A on Team B’s cars. I recall seeing online discussion mentions of assorted minor criminal activity between Ingress players, but again, I do not know how well sourced those are versus “my friend said his friend said…”

Shifting Priorities

I have written previously about storyline paths differing between development and live teams in MMOs. I find myself looking at recent Guild Wars 2 updates and wondering whether there was a change in development teams or the same team deciding to shift directions. One could easily look at the first year of GW2 and say, “Wow, we made that way too zergy. Let’s dial that back.” But recent content has been not just dialed back but punishing of zergs, which means either they wanted a hard break with the past or someone different took over the reins of design.

On the one hand, some content encourages zergs, other content discourages it. Yes, not everything calls for the same strategy; that’s good design. On the other hand, almost everything did, for the better part of a year, call for the same strategy, so current players feel punished for doing what they’ve been taught to do, and it is not as if a huge wave of players loving non-zerg content will sweep into GW2 because a few updates were not pure zerg. You need to upset the apple cart atop your current playerbase for a long time and hope they stick around while you right it and turn it in a new direction. On the gripping hand, as I said of “punishing,” quite a bit of content did not encourage zergs so much as require on the order of 100 people to have a reasonable chance of success. The content being rebelled against still requires dozens of people but now requires you to herd those cats in multiple groups before the tools to manage that have come into existence. To say nothing of the switch from the original “show up and do what you want” approach of GW2, where content requiring synchronized dancing was hidden in a few instances.

Also, the boss blitz is just bad.

You have certainly seen that changeover in design philosophy, usually coupled with a changeover in design teams. The original GW1 was very different from the final game after the expansions. City of Heroes under Statesman was very different from City of Heroes under Positron, and I am not sure who was helming the switch to Incarnate content around the time I stopped playing. “Trammel” and “NGE” are famous design shifts that veteran MMO players will still debate in some forums given half a chance. A Tale in the Desert saw quite a few design shifts under the same management, but Teppy was always an experimenter; I have no idea where the game is headed under its new management.

Ingress has had a shift in emphasis over time from a geocaching-like game that focused on walking to rewarding car-based play. If you can’t see why that transition could be rocky, remember that my job was analyzing traffic deaths when I started blogging.

: Zubon

Wow, we don’t even have a post category/tag for Ultima Online. Then again, we don’t bring it up enough for me to want to create it.

[RR] Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine Review

This review is based on the ePub version (i.e., Kindle), which is currently available for $10 at DriveThruRPG. A PDF version with art and print layout will be out later this year.

This is a roleplaying game. It is possibly the roleplaying game. It is genius. It is horrifying. It is a beautiful balance of everything that would drive a story forward. It is diceless. It is filled with meta-game moments. It is quite a task to understand. If you are on a path to better understanding how to grow as a gamemaster (GM) or as a player with a player character(PC) in tabletop RPG’s, I’d tell you to buy it. If you are on Pathfinder this RPG might as well be in ancient Martian.

This game was to play Studio Ghibli films. Perhaps not as adventurous as Princess Mononoke, which would easily fall under a standard RPG system. This system was designed to play Ponyo or Spirited Away. There’s one scene in Ponyo, where the boy takes Ponyo out in a boat to explore the submerged world. It’s such an interesting slice of adventure, but without much purpose. How would you create a game like that where the player is involved? Continue reading [RR] Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine Review

[GW2] The Four Winds Carnival

Guild Wars 2 has updated with a content patch – Festival of the Four Winds – after the last, big feature patch. The content is mostly a rehash combining the Queen’s Pavilion with the Labyrinthine Cliffs. The combination creates an eerie yin and yang effect. It’s uncanny how stark the two places are with Guild Wars 2 players. Continue reading [GW2] The Four Winds Carnival

[TT] Origins Bleg

As part of turning my attention from MMOs, I will be attending Origins and Gen Con this year. This will be my first time at either, and I am working through the Origins business model. It seems a bit like what we’ve called the “carnival” model in MMOs: you buy a badge (box), which gets you in the door, but many/most events require one or more tickets (usually $2 for a game), and you can buy bundles with ribbons, after which you do not need tickets for events/games covered by those ribbons. That sound about right?

With more than 4000 events listed, time is probably a greater constraint than cost, but so is just figuring out what is of interest from a pool that big. And I’m told that Gen Con events registration is also going on, so I should probably start sorting through that, which is likely to be a larger list.

Any tips or recommendations?

: Zubon

[Windborne] World Traveler Update

Last night after a full day’s ride of the devs chugging energy drinks and sacrificing woolies to the gods of a bug-free launch, the first major update appeared for Windborne. Unfortunately the gods do not want woolies being sacrificed and the update is not without bugs. Things will get fixed, but the crux of the update is live.

The first thing that everybody should notice is the new lighting model (now with sun). I did not expect this change, but I know the past week where I’ve been working on my subterranean desert temple (screenshot has old lighting), I’ve been thinking the darks aren’t dark enough. There are no need for torches (ala Minecraft) beneath the surface since the ambient cares for all. Now, things are bit darker. There is more contrast (screenshot has new lighting). A good change.

The other functionality changes of note are that the first-person hands give way when players walk around the world. I feel like the devs directly responded to some of my feedback regarding trying to get the large material orbs out of the way while I explored. There’s a third person mode, which is nice with the new character generation. So good stuff, but let’s get on to the meat. Continue reading [Windborne] World Traveler Update

Spam Update

The flood continues. I was gratified to see spam comment from a gold-selling site, which is at least on-topic. If you post a comment that does not appear for a while, feel free to shoot me an e-mail, because we may be getting trigger-happy on the “yes, that’s spam” button.

This week, one of the spammers must have noticed that none of the comments were making it through, so they tried to brute force through the login link until I was locked out. And if the default for suspected spam were not “wait for approval,” that might have even let some spam links get through.

It annoys me at times that links from posts on this site to other posts on this site require approval as possible trackback spam, but given the ratio of real comments to spam seeking moderation, I am becoming tempted just to have all comments require moderation before appearing.

: Zubon

I cleared out the “potential spam” folder before writing this post, and more arrived before I was done with the first paragraph.