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Time to Effectiveness

This is true. In any PvP game (or game with a significant PvP element), a major factor must be time to PvP effectiveness. From the time I start, how long until I can be worthwhile to have along and how long until I am at parity with long time players? This is mechanical, numerical parity; you may still be lousy because of having no strategy or practice, but how long until I can shoot a bullet that does as much damage as the next guy’s?

In most non-MMOs, that was the instant you log on. A rocket launcher is a rocket launcher, a zergling is a zergling. Now more games have character advancement, so even a FPS might make you level. The better ones use a model like Team Fortress 2: you need time/money to gain options, not power (at least in theory; the “options” might be better than what you start with, but there should be trade-offs).

MMOs are notoriously bad because you need to level. Guild Wars 2 sPvP avoids this by letting you play at full effectiveness on day one, but WvW does not because a level 1 scaled to 80 is significantly less powerful than a level 80. His bullets do not do the same damage, and they will not until after a level and equipment grind, but the scaling means you can at least contribute while taking care of that grind through WvW. In EVE, you can join your friends and meaningfully contribute on your first day. I have been playing Ingress lately, where you can start contributing around level 5 and reach full effectiveness at 8, which was spread over a month for me and is doable in 20 hours or less of (highly efficient, possibly assisted) play.

For MMOs, this is indicative of the larger problem that you need to grind to play with your friends. MMOs are bad for playing with your friends. Their character advancement systems make it difficult to find a span within which you can bring veterans, newbies, alts, etc. together, and it only gets worse over time as the power differential between day one and the level cap grows. I played a bit of World of Warcraft but it never really caught me because I spent almost my entire time in that vast, lonely wasteland between level 1 and the cap.

If I play these games to play with my friends, I want to play with my friends. If I play these games to compete with other people, I want to compete on a level playing field.

: Zubon

A Month in Ingress, by the Numbers

I have been playing for one month. Like with any new game, I binged at the start, but after witnessing the people who take Ingress really seriously, I had a powerful epiphany about what I did not want for my life. On the other hand, it is an amusing way to gamify going for a walk, and I am walking more.

After one month, my numbers are:

  • Level 8 with 1,243,694 AP
  • Hacked (visited) portals 1,992 times, covering 251 different portals
  • Captured 382 portals (126 unique), established 407 links and 215 fields worth 10,673 MU
  • Recharged 1,327,159 XM on resonators
  • Brought destruction to 1,040 resonators, 166 portals, 104 links, and 42 fields
  • Was followed by the enemy team 6 times
  • Was followed by groups of enemy players 4 times
  • Was followed by enemy players in cars 4 times
  • Was stopped by the police once
  • Walked 186 kilometers, the only number on here to have any impact on the physical world, but it is also the number I am least confident of. When the GPS is having trouble connecting, Ingress might show me jumping around a block or two at a time while I am standing still; when the app hiccoughs, it might not notice that I have been moving for several minutes and then catch up all at once. And who knows whether and what it is counting when I am in a moving vehicle.

: Zubon

[RR] Stories in Blood and Smoke

In a way this is a review, but not really. This is also a post about what roleplaying can be, at least, within the context of one RPG: Blood and Smoke: The Strix Chronicle (TSC). It is about what roleplaying can be when the constraints of character are large.

TSC is the latest supplement for the Vampire: the Requiem gameline, which is now being handled by Onyx Path Publishing. Unlike the original Vampire: the Requiem, TSC is a standalone book. It has all the rules necessary to play the RPG. It is also a further world revision of Vampire: the Requiem. It’s basically version 1.5, now with boogiemen. If you are familiar with Vampire: the Requiem, I cannot recommend TSC enough.

For all the rest whose eyes glazed over at the last paragraph. TSC is where you play a vampire. Not just any vampire though. You play a Kindred. This is a vampire that tries to maintain some semblance of what it means to be human. You aren’t a monster, least not fully. This isn’t a game about dungeons or solving mysteries. Well, I guess you can to both. Foremost, it is a game about being a vampire. Continue reading [RR] Stories in Blood and Smoke

Turn and Burn

One of the simplest lessons learned in my first month with an augmented reality game is the importance of sun protection on the back of your neck: long hair, sun screen, or cloth. This is because of the common pose of an Ingress player.

Outdoor, smartphone-based games are most popular on nice days. Rain makes both “outdoor” and “smartphone” problematic. It is a nice, sunny day, and you are trying to read your smartphone through glare. What do you do about it? You move your smartphone into shadow. What shadow is most ubiquitous on your journey? Your own. You turn away from the sun, possibly holding the phone quite close to you in the short mid-day shadows, and you bow your head over it. You aim the back of your neck directly at the sun. If you are walking through your own team’s farm, you burn less because interacting is a two-click process that requires minimal accuracy: tap portal, “hack,” next. If you are capturing territory, you are looking for the exact locations of enemy resonators, finding the right distance for deploying your own, checking portals and keys as you make links and fields, and generally spending a lot of time trying to see the exact location of small objects on your screen on sunny days.

Having done most of my gaming on computers for the past decade, it had not occurred to me that one defense in an augmented reality game is physically burning your enemies as they try to capture your territory.

: Zubon

“Gamer learns the sun exists. Story at 11.”

Individual and Group Rewards

Guild Wars 2 and Ingress both have PvP systems of territorial control with individual and team points, where what earns individual advancement is aligned with but not identical to what helps the team win, leading to a disconnect in incentives similar to agency costs under the principal-agent problem.

GW2 players have WvW levels, and they earn WvW xp by capturing or defending objectives and defeating opponents. There are also rewards of normal xp, loot, cash, and karma to be won, as well as achievements. Teams are rewarded for points per tick (PPT), which come mostly from holding objectives with a few supplemental points other than “per tick.” Player rewards are higher for offense than defense, and we have often discussed the incentive this creates to “karma train” capturing objectives while worrying less about keeping them, fighting the enemy, or winning the matchup. I have had another server let us capture Stonemist Castle while they waited upstairs, because they wanted another capture credit.

Ingress players level up through action points (APs), the best source of which comes from linking portals and creating fields. Creating fields grants the mind units (MUs) by which the teams are scored. The same APs are awarded for a field or link, no matter how big the field is, so players have an incentive to farm AP and level in portal-rich areas like downtowns and historical districts. This weekend, I captured and carefully linked several square blocks of dense portals and got around 120,000 AP, in a game where the (current) level cap is at 1,200,000 AP. This was worth about 200 MU, because it covered several square blocks. It would be worth far more MU to the team, and take far less time , were I to drive to portals a few kilometers from each other and link them up. For this reason, some players are rather unhappy that a geocaching-like game where you are theoretically walking around instead produces larger (team) rewards for people willing to drive around. And if you can get 10% of the level cap in one long walk, that team reward starts to matter a lot more than your AP for linking up. (One of the backbones of the local Resistance is a player who is willing to drive for hours per day, destroying and claiming and linking.)

There are, however, emergent effects that create positive team incentives. Since players hit that level cap relatively quickly, veterans often invite lower-level players to gain all the AP when they destroy enemy portals. The higher-level player blows enemy resonators up while the lower-level player follows behind and places their team’s resonators. This weakens the enemy while increasing the number of level-capped characters on your team. Also, those densely packed portals may not be worth much in terms of MU, but they are great places to farm equipment, because you get some equipment when you hack a portal, and you get more stuff at less cost when those portals are owned by your team. There are cities in my area known as well-leveled and protected farms for each team. (The main backbone of the local Resistance is a couple who is willing to head out and protect/reclaim their team’s farms on short notice.)

: Zubon

[TT] Betrayal at House on the Hill

Yes, that’s the real title.

Betrayal at House on the Hill is one of those games you want to like for its atmosphere and for what it does well, but I have yet to find myself able to because of two significant problems.

You the players are a group of people who have come to (the) house on the hill for reasons. In the first phase of the game, your group of up to six are exploring the house. You find interesting rooms, events, items, and hauntings. The house is subject to impossible architecture, because you draw the next room randomly, which is perfectly in tune with the haunted setting. Eventually, one of those haunt cards starts the second phase, the Haunt. One player becomes the traitor, and based on what triggered the Haunt when, you start one of fifty Haunt scenarios, which could be an actual haunting, alien abductors, cannibals, or pretty much anything on the big board in The Cabin in the Woods. When that happens, one of the players becomes the Traitor, and now you have different teams and rules and goals. That is a great idea for a game, with a lot of variety, atmosphere, and potential fun.

The first problem is that Haunt/Traitor transition. The Traitor goes into another room, and now everyone reads rules. You know that part at the start of a new board game when maybe one person knows the rules, and you spend a long time reading and/or explaining the mechanics, and maybe you need to work out some ambiguities in the rules and fumble through it for the first quarter of the game? That happens pretty much every single game of Betrayal, and it happens as the central event in the game. Continue reading [TT] Betrayal at House on the Hill

The Chosen Ones

While researching yesterday’s post, I discovered that an MMO trope is perfectly true in the Star Wars Expanded Universe: there is as endless supply of The One and Only Heroes. The NPCs in your MMO tell you that you are unique and special, that only you can save the day, and then they say it to the forty people lined up behind you to turn in the quest. Writers seem to feel much the same way about their protagonists, so unique and special things happen all the time even if another author in the same shared universe (or several) already used that unique and special slot. By now, there were hundreds if not thousands of Jedi and Sith running around during the time of the original Star Wars trilogy. If no one has yet written about a hidden Jedi academy or Sith cloning pool that moved that number up by some significant digits, it will happen sometime.

For example, Wookieepedia has a disambiguation page for Darth Vader’s apprentice. He apparently went through them on the order of one every two years, and you’d think he would have had at least one around for the original trilogy. Just yesterday, yet another Jedi who survived the death of all the Jedi joined the canon for a new series. And then we have the quote, “Palpatine established a number of organizations composed by Dark Jedi“; not just many of them, many organizations of them.

See also the many fantasy novels with the only good member of an evil race, because this author’s Drizzt clone is not a drow (although some of them are the only other good drow/whatever).

You and your group of friends are all The Chosen One? You’re in good company.

: Zubon

Choosing Sides

On this holiday, I was pondering the Empire’s relationship with aliens, robots, and cyborgs. Emperor Palpatine considered non-humans, err, less than human and ran an Empire dominated by humans. He did, however, have armies of droids (especially if you admit that the prequel series was made), and the best known symbol of the Empire was more machine than man. (I still love General Grievous from the cartoons.) The villains have lots of big, menacing machines and devices. The heroes have lots of friendly aliens.

Ingress features factions with differing visions of humanity’s future development, one leading towards man-machine hybrids while the other welcoming alien influence. The Resistance is the Empire and the Enlightened are the Rebellion. Which is also more or less the state of the balance of power in the game.

: Zubon

Pure Grind

Trying one of the recent games at Kongregate, I discovered a game (and accompanying achievement) for pure grinding, Mighty Knight. It has the usual more-or-less required upgrades, but some “quests” remove the “more-or-less” by removing all player input. Those quests are to have your NPC companions defeat all the enemies. You cannot command, control, or guide them in any way except for buying them better equipment. Your NPC companions also select targets at random and fight them to the death, no matter what else is going on around them.

As I type this, the game is rated 3.9/5. Either most folks operate on the 7-10 rating scale or the average gamer just utterly baffles me.

: Zubon

[LoL] Conditional Probability

Argument: in ARAM, if you are considering dodging, you almost certainly should, because no one on the other team has.

Assumptions: You can pick the winner of roughly 80% of ARAM games just by looking at team composition. Most people prefer being on the winning side of that than the losing side. The penalty for dodging is less than the penalty for playing a hopeless game, in the sense that you can waste 20 minutes in a game you cannot possibly win or spend a similar amount of time doing something else while waiting out your dodge penalty. And here is the critical assumption: you can tell if your team composition is bad, and you are likely to dodge if (before seeing the other team) you think your team is likely to be worse than the opposing team.

If you think your team composition is better than average, you are very unlikely to dodge. If you think your team is about average or slightly worse, you are not very likely to dodge. If your team is bad, you are somewhat likely to dodge. And if your team composition is horrible, you are very likely to dodge. But you already knew that, so what am I trying to add here?

The decision is symmetrical, with the other team facing the same decision. Given that no one on the other team has not dodged, you must find it very unlikely that their team composition is horrible and somewhat unlikely that their team composition is bad. (And remember, each of 5 people can dodge, so none of the 5 said “not worth it” and dodged.) Now re-assess your chances given that. If your team composition is bad, it is not only that your team is below average, but also that the opposing team has not signaled (by dodging) that their team is bad or worse. Five people on the opposing team think they have a good enough chance of winning with their team composition. Given that, how confident are you of your team composition?

Applying this recursively would leave us only playing with “above average” teams, because someone would dodge unless the team composition on both sides was at least “good.” (If all the horribly composed teams dodge, that means “bad” is as bad as it gets, so all the badly composed teams dodge, which means “average” is as bad as it gets…) But what is one to expect from a game mode where randomness dominates? But then, why are you playing ARAM if you are not comfortable with the “AR”?

: Zubon