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[TT] Gamer Games

We pause in the festival of Dominion for a general reflection on the audience for a game. Like most people in my generation, my wife plays games at times but would not characterize herself as a gamer. She knows who Mario is but not Master Chief. She plays Dominion with me and enjoys it.

We have also played Android: Netrunner, which she did not enjoy. She gave it a few chances, she tried several options, but no. This is a gamer game, not something for a general audience. She would play again if I asked her to, but she would not have fun. It is a particular sort of fun for a particular sort of person.

A gamer friend noticed that I had Android: Netrunner and was quite keen to learn the game. He enjoyed it. His fiancée watched a bit of the game and concurred with my wife: she would not refuse to play, but it did not look like fun. My gamer friend also has the Game of Thrones card game, which is from the same publisher and has some similarities. The two of them had played that one, and the fiancée had the same reaction, hence the recognition that she would not enjoy Android: Netrunner. I presume I would enjoy the Game of Thrones card game and my wife would not.

I will refer to some things as bad games or not meaningfully games at all. Candyland and Craps are non-games: no choices, just randomization. Monopoly is a bad game, intentionally designed to be a bad experience, and I may come back around to its major design flaws. Other games are for particular audiences or purposes. They can be good, but not for everyone. We should celebrate games like Settlers of Catan, Apples to Apples, and Plants vs. Zombies for being accessible to non-gamers and still of great interest and enjoyment to gamers.

: Zubon

Magicite: A Good Walk Ruined

I’ve been on a roll with Steam early access games, but I still stick to my rule of thumb: read the discussion before buying. Magicite seemed good and fun. It is a rogue-like sidescroller with crafting and leveling aspects similar to Starbound or Terraria. It also has a bit of between-death progression I loved in Rogue Legacy. As a hint to the future, one achievement to unlock a race demands you beat the game in an hour. So far I am liking all the design on paper. So I buy it.

The game is in Early Access, but it is apparent right away that more love needs to go to crafting. It’s a nice system where you shift+click two things to combine them. Two sticks become an axe handle. Add another stick to an axe handle and it becomes a pick handle. The problem comes in two parts. The first is that this all occurs in the inventory, and it requires separate stacks of items. If I wanted to combine two sticks, I had to separate one stick from my stack of sticks. It is possible I was just doing it wrong. Continue reading Magicite: A Good Walk Ruined

[GW2],[DAoC] WvW v#1 or v#3?

One mechanic that Dark Age of Camelot worked out for Realm vs. Realm combat that Guild Wars 2 has yet to meaningfully attempt in World vs. World combat is providing a reason for the two #2 and #3 servers to both attack the winning team, rather than having the #1 and #2 servers attack the weakest team. Rarely, out-of-game efforts will lead to two Davids’ conspiring against Goliath, but this is rare because the reward structure incentivizes picking on the weak rather than challenging the strong.
Continue reading [GW2],[DAoC] WvW v#1 or v#3?

“Chicken From Hell”

In Plants vs. Zombies 2, my wife’s bane is the zombie chicken. The Wild West’s Chicken Wrangler Zombie (!!) leaks chickens when he is damaged. The chickens are archetypal fragile speedsters: they move and attack much faster than zombies but instantly die from any damage. (Spikeweeds are particularly funny, as huge waves of chicken wranglers become massive clouds of feathers.)

What kinds of chickens are these that can sprint faster than zombies on rockets and kill you just as effectively as the Gargantuar? Recent news stories explain: that kind of chicken. Time travel is dangerous!

: Zubon

Find the Exploiter on the Graph

Munchkin cheat with both hands My alliance was winning the current war in Game of Thrones Ascent, but it turns out that an estimated quarter of our victory points came from exploits. It was possible for players to instantly craft an expensive item using no resources, which could then be sold for silver — an infinite money exploit limited only by how fast one can click. And here I thought our camps were getting repaired quickly because we had allies sending us repair actions. The alliance was docked those points and four players were permabanned.

Folks on our team talked about whether the whole alliance should be penalized for the actions of a few, how much could it really have affected things, and weren’t people in other alliances using the same exploit? And then the developers posted this graph. phase_5_exploiters There is no scale on the left, but you can pretty easily pick out three of the four people using the exploit. One of them seemed to realize that keeping it on the down low was a good idea. The other three contributed about as much silver to the alliance war as the next 97 people combined. Once the developers knew what to look for, that kind of stuck out.

In a previous alliance war, our alliance was also severely docked points because some players were using a modded interface. It did not give anyone special abilities, it just let you perform actions quickly rather than clicking many times to launch 1 attack.

Because Hear Me Roar is one of the largest alliances in the game, we are still safely in second place, and the new first place alliance is allied with us (yes, the terminology there is unfortunate). I noted previously that my part in the team is sending help to our allies, who send us help in return. On the developers’ accounting of our victory points, it notes that our allies gave us enough aid to repair 234 camps from “destroyed” to “fully operational,” so the support squad feels pretty good despite the devastating setback.

: Zubon

Grind Intentional Losses

MPQ I previously used a bit of understatement to describe Marvel Puzzle Quest’s match-making algorithm as unfortunate. “Horrible” might still be an understatement. The game pushes towards asynchronous PvP, and the only way to face reasonable opponents is to intentionally, repeatedly lose. This is not a bug or emergent gameplay; this is how the game is actually designed. If you win, you face opponents who also won. If you are good, you will keep getting better opponents until the level-based numerics make it impossible to win against a squad of level 100+ enemies. You can boost your numbers further by buying boosts, and then get harder opponents, and so on until you run out of money and/or go back to intentionally losing.

Because the game is still live, I presume that a fair number of people went with “spend money.” Because the sheep fed into this system cannot stick around long.

This is an improvement over a period of time when the game did something similar in PvE. If you won a fight in a PvE event, all the PvE enemies leveled up. Repeat unto level 200+ in a game where your heroes mostly cap at level 40-85. Imagine that in your MMO: for every monster you kill since you last died, every monster attacking you gets a stacking buff to damage and resistance. Actually, that could be an interesting challenge for instanced content, except that MPQ left it on for all their PvE events for weeks.

: Zubon

[RR] Memorable Props

The best campaign I ever ran was using FATE, which is a system able to wrangle our group towards more roleplaying. One of the reasons it was so good, in my opinion as the GM of that show, was that each NPC was memorable. Okay, maybe not every single NPC that I threw under the bus (or that drove it), but I worked hard to make each situation memorable.

Coloring encounters will result in a stronger game as the table unifies in the vision of the encounter. Everybody is going to have some picture in their mind of what is going on, but it is so easy to gloss over the details and turn the encounter into a stark distillation. Players will also have different levels of imagination and stock in the game. It is part of the GM’s job to make sure encounters can be colorful.  Continue reading [RR] Memorable Props

[GW2] Season 1 Thoughts

As part of the GuildMag hosted blog carnival, I am writing about the end of Living World Season 1. The tl;dr even in my mind is… I think I had fun? It’s kind of a weird feeling. I know I am a Guild Wars 2 ”fanboi” in the best and worst senses. So we have that. But, then I think I am honestly critical of where I see flaws in my favorite MMO.

I feel with the end of Living World Season 1 like I did after each season or the finale of LOST. It was an awesome journey. There were horrible plot holes, silly episodes, and moments of TV-gold. At each “end” of LOST, it felt like the whole season was just swept away, and all that was left was a fine point. I have great memories I can dredge up about the journey, but the journey is over. Now, I just want to look ahead. I don’t know if I can write this post without trying to look behind. Continue reading [GW2] Season 1 Thoughts