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[GW2] Tick Tock Assault

A whole zone upended on the hour, every hour. That is what the latest content patch in Guild Wars 2 brings in Clockwork Chaos. The mad genius Scarlet Briar is attacking Tyria, and at the beginning of the hour a zone becomes her violent playground. Any zone above level 25 except Orr (locked in time) and Southsun (locked in… karka?) is fair game for her madness.

Mechanically, it works like this. For 15 minutes there is calm in Tyria as many players are emptying their bags of loot from the last invasion. Right on the hourly dot, the Living World UI will say there’s a new invasion in a zone, let’s say Harathi Hinterlands. Interested players teleport to a random place in Harathi Hinterlands at that moment. Once there it will be apparent where the events are. There are 3 waves of twisted clockwork creatures and the latter 2 waves are supplemented by either a Molten Core invasion or an Aetherblade invasion, which also have to be dealt with. If all waves are defeated players can fight the boss, Scarlet. If the players can’t work down all the waves in 45 minutes, the meta-event still rewards players pretty well for progress made. Continue reading [GW2] Tick Tock Assault

[WS] Business Cred

I know I’m a day late, but I find that sleeping on touchier subjects usually results in a better post. When I read the news that WildStar was going to be a subscription-based MMO, I too had pursed lips. Like Syp, I pretty much expected a subscription option, but since it was hinted it would be hybrid, I was thinking more along the lines of The Secret World or Lord of the Rings Online.

WildStar’s “hybridization” isn’t really one at all. It is a subscription-based MMO with various ways to pay for the subscription, including CREDD, which is available for purchase via in-game gold. EVE Online does this with PLEX, and I’ve heard mention TERA does as well. A CREDD however costs $5 more to turn it in to a tradable month.

While I personally would have preferred a true hybrid business model, such as The Secret World’s, this decision by Carbine is not one made in default. MMORPG talked with head honcho Jeremy Gaffney (who is one of the most insightful, open devs I’ve ever met) on this very subject. Continue reading [WS] Business Cred

[GW2] Crafting Storage

The “collectibles” tab in the Guild Wars 2 bank seemed like a neat idea at launch, but it has become apparent that it is essential to the crafting design and that crafting as implemented would be completely untenable without the storage component. Alternately, one can take the lesson that storage problems are a feature, not a bug, and potentially see merits in competing designs.
Continue reading [GW2] Crafting Storage

Awareness of Individual Actions

A friend in college had an unusual day in dance class: “run slowly,” his instructor said. He realized that, while he could run, he knew it as a single activity and had great trouble analyzing it to a series of individual steps and motions. He did it unthinkingly. Programmers and industrial/organizational psychologists will be familiar with the epiphany that writing an explicit process or algorithm is really rather difficult.

I think of this every time I see a routine where someone has clearly learned the individual motions and trained him/herself to perform them forward and backwards or in unexpected combinations. Contrarily reference celebrity judges on TV talent shows, some of whom are exceedingly talented performers with almost no ability to articulate why or how, as opposed to say Ben Folds and his self-consciously technical analysis on The Sing Off.

Which brings me to the question of when games train you to do something and then punish you for doing it. Do we like that? On the one hand, it creates interesting content with unusual mechanics like killing by healing or requiring you not to DPS too quickly. On the other hand, it seems perverse and just plain mean to reward something throughout the game then punish you for following that training. On the gripping hand, that seems like taking the “game as learning” experience to its highest level, where you not only know the techniques but know when not to use them and when and why to swap parts in and out.

I want to go with that as the final answer, but not everyone wants to get that deeply into their gaming, and it is still the case that you can almost always look up when you need to change tactics rather than learning something. That does not make the advanced learning a bad idea for the intended audience, but it may make it mostly pointless given the actual audience. If I could get a fourth hand, I might note that many games already design a lot of content for the top 5%, and the rest of the playerbase can participate in the intended spirit if it feels up to it.

: Zubon

[GW2] 59-123% Completion

Just to make me look silly, between the time that I wrote about meta-achievements and the time that I posted, the new GW2 update went live and did something different with a Living Story meta-achievement. There are 13 achievements, and you need to complete 16 to get the meta-achievement.

Someone in guild chat wondered if they were hiding achievements for later parts of the story, rather than showing them all in advance like in earlier Living Story updates. This is possible, but the explicit answer is that there are now Living Story daily achievements that count towards the meta-achievement. If the event is live for two weeks, with a Living Story achievement each day, you now need 16 of 27, and some things you do will count for two or more achievements.

What does this do to players’ incentives? Continue reading [GW2] 59-123% Completion

[EQN] With a Procedural Eye

It takes a bit longer for me to mull MMO news over now. As exciting as some breaking developments can be, I guess there is so much now that the barrier-to-entry (to-blogging?) is higher. EverQuest Next is of course a very worthy subject, but I needed some time to step away from those that chugged that Kool-Aid without pause or dumped it out on the floor for no particular homey.

There’s plenty of things to get excited for. Putting Minecraft in an MMO was a hindsight-obvious move especially since that crumbling tower Mr. Hikikomori took 40 hours to perfect is about a magnitude higher than the time budgeted for an in-house artist. Destructible environments are an interesting, albeit concerning, prospect. And, action-oriented combat in this day and age is pretty much required.

What I really care about in MMOs is how content affects players and their communities. It’s why I was chugging Guild Wars 2 Kool-Aid from the start because I believed how they were designing content would make player interactions more organic. Continue reading [EQN] With a Procedural Eye

75%-90% Completion

There are two standard “complete” points for a single-player game: beat the final boss and 100% completion. Steam achievements and similar systems usually mark both of those endpoints. There is one achievement for each, along with at least a half-dozen achievements for each aspect of the game you might take to 100%. These collective 100% achievements are what we call meta-achievements: the achievement for gaining achievements, in this case all the other ones. MMOs are fond of having many achievements that build to meta-achievements for each dungeon, special event, etc.

Guild Wars 2 has moved to setting meta-achievements below 100% without a 100% completion achievement. As mentioned, I think that is a great idea, particularly when the achievements are scattered across different types of content. You encourage diverse play without making someone feel “forced” to do everything to get the shiny prize. This is especially true for events and new content, because sometimes the new content does not work as intended or is radically polarizing, and you should not encourage people to play your most painful content. Team Fortress 2 learned this lesson with its class updates, originally going with “complete all the achievements to get the meta-achievements” and tying new equipment to those meta-achievements, which led to radically aberrant gameplay; class meta-achievements are now done with about half the achievements.

I think I still want 100% completion for single-player games. Those are for completionists, not everyone, although I want no one-way doors on that path. For my MMOs, I like having a bar below “do everything” because I hate that night where you make 20 attempts in a row because the event is going away tomorrow (or worse: time-limited, attempt-limited, non-tradable, random drop collection achievements).

: Zubon

The Queen’s Jubilee does this somewhat differently, and I will address it in a separate post.

[GW2] The Core of Queen’s Jubilee

Each month in Guild Wars 2 the Living World seems to be a little different. Two months ago the Dragon Bash had a formulaic, festival feel, but was followed up by one of the best dungeons Guild Wars 2 has seen. Last month there was an amazing, playground of a mini-zone coupled with a swath of instanced activities (a couple of which are now in the daily rotation). This month was another festival, which raised the hackles of many. Anthony Ordon, who graces the Guild Wars 2 forums quite a bit (thankfully), did his best to curb too much speculation on what made a Guild Wars 2 festival.

He’s right. Queen’s Jubilee is not a festival in the relaxing click-about-town sense. It’s a blood-filled, armor-breaking gladiatorial arena. And, in my opinion it was the best opener for a month-long Living World update, but perhaps not for what you would think. Sure, the rewards are amazing. Everybody is watching gold fall from the sky. The Crown Pavilion is full of high energy. The permanent features, the currency wallet and daily activity rotation, are very welcome additions. But, those are not the main reasons I really like Queen’s Jubilee. The main reason is…

Queen’s Jubilee went back to its roots of playing core Guild Wars 2 to set the stage for August. Continue reading [GW2] The Core of Queen’s Jubilee

And now for something completely different…

Rumors of my demise are somewhat exaggerated. If my fellow ratters and our dear readership don’t mind too much, I’d like to do just a bit of shameless product placement here. If anyone is interested in doing some fiction reading, please check out my new book – “The Children Of Mars“.

Currently on sale over here, at the store named after the rainforest. Or perhaps if you have a Kindle and you prefer that format instead of dead tree, you can find it right here.

It’s not very toxic, so I hope you fancy giving it a shot and doubly hoping you end up liking it. Gaming and general slaying of rats may now resume in an orderly fashion.

Thanks!