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Using Game Reviews

I have previously recommended trusting others’ experiences over your own expectations because the preponderance of the data suggests that your expectations are about as high quality as you would expect from a social primate born into an information age. I have recently been going through the many games that have come with Humble Bundles and Steam packs, and I am finding Metacritic really valuable.

Example: Guardians of Middle-earth. “I like Tolkien, that sounds interesting. I missed the LotR games that came out when the movies did.” Click from Library to Store page to see what it’s all about. “Hmm, a MOBA. I don’t know if I need another of those, but LotR DotA could be…” Metacritic: 56%. “Holy crap.”

A useful application of Bayes’ theorem is that sometimes an indicator in one direction means a lot more than an indicator in the other direction. There are classic examples, but gaming journalism provides another: negative reviews mean a lot more than positive reviews, particularly for major studio releases. High scores are the default and low scores on advertisers tend to be rare and dangerous. Games with bugs that would format your hard drive have gotten scores on the standard 7-9 scale. So a 56%? Holy crap. Okay, next game…

: Zubon

Update: commenters mention going beyond scores. Agreed.

[GW2] Bugged Ending

After having a WvW Season One that was so bad I got two months’ worth of “this is really horrible design” posts out of it, the Living World Season One has also ended badly. It’s as if NC Soft is looking ahead to WildStar’s release and preparing people to switch MMOs.

A year and a half in, GW2 has two reputations: zergfest and buggy as hell.
— Bhagpuss

I have needed to update Guild Wars 2 literally every single time I have played since the new content was released. The difficulty has ranged from trivial to impossible, the rewards from luxurious to absolutely nothing, and I really have no idea what to expect when next I log into Guild Wars 2. Commenters on Ravious’s post noted the toxicity of chat during the events, and I think it is strongly fueled by frustration with “No really, I did this exact same thing yesterday and it worked fine, so you must be doing it wrong.” Surprise! The rules changed since the last time you played, and it might be documented if you look in the right place on the forums. Map chat is effectively a series of urban legends about what the rules and scaling might be today. Today someone said that there is now a cap of 50 people dealing damage to an assault knight at one time. Is it true? If so, was it true yesterday, and will it still be true by the time you post your comment?

Some days, the new content has catered to a zergfest. Other days, it has tried to train players not to zerg. Good luck organizing 150 random people in your instance of Lion’s Arch to react to how the rules work today.

The design of the season-ending content could be brilliant. I really don’t know. The execution is so poor and bug-ridden that I don’t know whether it is well-designed or -balanced. It involves many moving parts that may or may not interact properly when you log in. It is a bad sign when you need to include a “just skip to the finish” portal.

Maybe you had a different experience. Maybe it worked a way you liked when you played through. Surprise! There was another update, so maybe you can replicate that experience, maybe not.

: Zubon

Update: is “bug” the right term for “not working as intended and needs to be re-balanced immediately”? Because the content works mechanically, usually. As in, actions happen and numbers fly up. But there have been many updates to change those numbers, to add new mechanics to get balance where it was intended to be, to fix actual bugs, to…

On the Benefits of Coasting

I have trouble letting go. For long periods of time, I have games that I am not interested in playing but for which I expect to regain interest later. For single-player games, that means shelving them, and I can play Civilization again when I have the free hours. These days, most of my games are online multiplayer games with incentives for frequent play over binging, so I spend a fair amount of time “coasting.”

Efficient use of dailies is a core example. Most MMOs have dailies now, and many have rested bonuses, once per day rewards, etc. You can cash in several of those quickly and call it a day. Most social media games have a daily login bonus, a process you can productively reset every 24 hours, etc. You can bounce off a half-dozen of those while reading your RSS feed. Games with updates frequently have festivals and events, and you can get 50% of the reward in 5% of the time if you just log in, pick the low-hanging fruit, and accept that you are not going to grind enough to get the top tier reward.

This is a reason why I have never run out of karma, money, laurels, etc, in Guild Wars 2 and why I have 600 levels of characters despite having been “on break” for about half the game’s lifespan. In less than 30 minutes, I can get a small stack of rewards. I don’t need to do that every day to have a huge stockpile when I get seriously interested in playing 3 months later. I have a routine of visiting a half-dozen games, seeing if there is anything new, getting double rewards for whatever strikes my fancy, and wandering off.

Because I am exactly the sort of player who likes to play in binges, and nothing fuels that like coming back to a stack of gold pieces, 20 points to assign to abilities, an entire screen of unlocked rewards, a new festival…

: Zubon

[GW2] Harmony and Discord in the Season 1 Finale

Lion’s Arch is now open for battle. Instead of being forced out due to miasma for a 15-20 minute break, the ruined city is now a constant battleground between the players and Scarlet’s armies. On the hour, Scarlet’s three legendary assault knights descend from the Breachmaker UFO to smash some players good. The chink in Scarlet’s armor is that if players can kill all three to attune themselves to the Breachmaker’s energy, they can warp up.

Another very intense raid-like battle occurs with Scarlet’s holograms, which seem directly tied to her, and beating those gets in to a personal instance to stomp Scarlet flat. This personal instance is also available through a purple portal on the west side of Lion’s Arch if a player doesn’t want the hassle of open-zerg gated content. The key to the purple portal is the Spinal Blade back item.

Weight of a Bug

Let’s get the bad out of the way because unfortunately there is bad. It mostly surrounds the assault knight event, but it compounds itself in a way.

First, bugs. They are just bad this time around, and it feels like they’ve been getting worse since the patches. The two biggest bugs (or design issues?) seem to be the assault knight’s attendance prize and the event scaling. After 4 hot fix bug patches, I fought and killed the red assault knight this morning for no loot. According to the attunement we had about 30 players most of the time that then ramped up to 40+ at the end. We beat her with seconds to spare (out of 15 minutes). Continue reading [GW2] Harmony and Discord in the Season 1 Finale

[RR] The 13th Age

Good start last week. Let’s move on to why I love the 13th Age RPG, which is on the edge of Dungeons and Dragons family. To be certain 13th Age is D&D, but it changes the feel of the game. 13th Age simplifies it and condenses it. On the back of the book Jeff Grubb, of much D&D fame, says 13th Age “was the type of game that OGL was supposed to create”. It’s not just a Pathfinding polish to D&D. It is its own creature.

Character History

In a more general sense, 13th Age seeks to bring a lot more narration to the tabletop. It starts with the character. Instead of an entire character history that usually nobody cares about, 13 Age has the One Unique Thing. This is a short phrase to define why your character is special. I am the only human child of a zombie mother. I have a clockwork heart made by the dwarves. I have a celestial soul trapped in a mortal body. Whatever the case it should be special, and with a good GM (gamemaster) it will drive stories. Continue reading [RR] The 13th Age

[GW2] Scarlet Letter Sendoff

It’s interesting how we want to be brief. The end of Season 1 has occurred, and it’s a time for reflection. The story of Scarlet is mostly finished, but far from complete. I have my theories, even in the face of the amazing final cut scene.

What I feel like most is at the end of a LOST season. I am not sure what to think or where we are going. I just know I want more. I think more will come tomorrow, but I am still digesting it all.

–Ravious

[TT] Dominion: The Village Trap

The Village trap is the opposite of Big Money. It is the tendency to buy too many actions, to hope for big but unlikely combos, and to look for the awesome instead of the effective.

Did you know that there is a five-card combo that will win the game in one turn? Do you want to guess the odds of buying, drawing, and playing that combo before someone else wins the game?
Continue reading [TT] Dominion: The Village Trap

Remarkably Honest

The latest update to Dawn of the Dragons is the sort of straight-up slot machine that one expects from F2P games of its like, surprising only in the relative rarity of that sort of thing in this particular game. I mean, they advertise the “expedition” packs with random loot tables for real money currency, but the festival “vortex” is a blind draw from an unknown table, the “fortune teller” is the same for buffs, and the “gambit” is a literal raffle. Adding a “Winner’s Board” to show off the better prizes is a nice touch.

loot pinata
And then there’s this guy. The new Event Raid is a literal loot piñata. For some reason, that just tickles me.

: Zubon

Welcome to RPG Ravings [RR]

While not as catchy as Zubon’s Tabletop Tuesday, I will admit it took me half a cup of coffee to forsake Tabletop [RPG] Thursday and get another mildly catchy title. I’ve noticed that a lot of MMO players, especially bloggers, at least understand the concept of pen-and-paper role-playing games (RPGs). I know a lot of us also frequent the fabled rpg.net, which is the hub for that niche of geek. So to get more posts on KTR, I’m going to branch out on Thursdays to write about pen-and-paper or tabletop RPGs.

Let’s start with the granddaddy of RPGs, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). Or rather, let’s not. Tobold has been talking about D&D Next for awhile, and I’d rather talk about something we have. Let’s talk about the children of D&D 3.5. Continue reading Welcome to RPG Ravings [RR]

Dodging Bullets

Unless challenged to think otherwise, people quickly move from “Phew! Dodged a bullet on that one!” to “I’m a great bullet-dodger.”
— Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman

This is not restricted to gaming, but I notice a lot of gamers are unaware when they are fortunate and instead believe that they are highly skilled. Wait, no, these are gamers, so they instead believe that other people suck because they got a worse roll of the dice. Consider the question of how difficult content is.
Continue reading Dodging Bullets