Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.
.Did you know that Anarchy Online is still … online, 12 years later? Most current MMO players started after its launch, so they missed that debacle. It is polite of current developers to give us a nostalgic look back, acting like it is 2001 and wondering if enough players have dial-up modems to play their always-online games.
: Zubon
Hitherby, Spoilers!
The obvious route is never the one that ArenaNet seems to take in their storytelling. This can be both confusing and exciting. Much to the frustration of many lore delvers, whole threads are kept dangling while others are simply snipped, seemingly prematurely. Either way, some will likely never have their complete story told. Yet, ArenaNet keeps pressing forward.
In the current living story arc, Flame and Frost, the dredge are buddies with the Flame Legion. Who saw that coming? A xenophobic ex-slave race teamed up with an abrasive, slave-loving faction. Perhaps dredge found new owners, but that seems unlikely for an “allianceâ€. Either way, if someone had asked me in December what was the next story to be told it is unlikely I would have thought of either party, much less a combination of the two in a “Molten Allianceâ€.
Before Arkship started, I needed food. I walked until I found a restaurant we did not have back home, which happened to be Fatburger. We do have hamburgers in Michigan, but not that chain, and friends had gushed about the place. It was indeed a quality sandwich and my first time having a hamburger with relish on it. I have had hamburgers and relish before, but not together, and the combination of ingredients was unexpectedly good.
Relatively few restaurants offer anything new. They can offer something new to you, Continue reading Revolution, Evolution, Variation, Recombination
Ruminations aside, I did take part in a few Tier 1 Guild Bounty guild missions last weekend. My guild is actually composed of 5 rooms, which are actual Guild Wars 2 guilds. So we were working on making sure that every guild was able to complete a Guild Bounty.
At Tier 1, a Guild Bounty requires that two champions be found and beaten in 15 minutes. Once activated, the guild is given hints as to the locations of the champions they are supposed to find. There are 15 champions total, so it is helpful to be ready with a guide. It is not just that they are in some zone, but they could be anywhere in nearly the entire zone. With our 50+ people (many not being fully responsive) on the Guild Bounties, it took us about 1-2 minutes to find the champion. This was kind of the herd-zerg attack. A group of 10 will likely have to discuss zone search strategy before the hunt, or simply have 10 champions marked before the start of it. Continue reading [GW2] Bounty Hunter Hour
Some people will say that it isn’t reasonable to expect an online game to run on release day. I don’t agree with that. Just because incompetence is widespread, that doesn’t mean that customers have to put up with it. The game companies have no problem of charging me either in advance or the moment I buy the game, so unless they are willing to postpone taking my money, I don’t see why I should have to postpone my expectation to be able to play the game.
— Tobold
Tobold writes about incompetence. The first commenter hits the nail on the head for malice: it is not profitable to build enough infrastructure for Day One, so let the players suffer until it settles down, you already have their money anyway. My perspective on Origin has not been improved by this new data point, whatever the explanation.
: Zubon
ArenaNet has called guilds in to question. Not all guilds. The very active, very big guilds are having no issues plowing right ahead to unlocking all the mission types at the pace of a few months (or less!). It’s the small guilds that are having problems. It’s the small guilds that feel threatened. It’s the small guilds that are now forced to reflect on whether their community actually reflects ArenaNet’s mechanical definition of a guild.
So what is a guild? Well I would say Guild Wars 2 has two definitions. The first is the objective definition, where players can open the “Gâ€uild menu and click “Create Guildâ€. Voila, a new guild is born. Yet this is the lowest common denominator of a guild. The subjective definition is whether the guild contains activity to generate Influence, the guild resource, to reasonably progress along ArenaNet’s guild progression track. Continue reading [GW2] Guild Score
QA has an unconditional veto in our workplace. If it does not work, it does not ship. But we work in public safety, so delaying a new feature a week is less of a problem than potentially messing up your criminal record.
I read the Tales from the Trenches archive over the course of a weekend, and one recurring theme there is the non- or misuse or QA. There is not much benefit to doing QA if you are not going to act upon the resulting information. (Bonus points to the companies that fired testers when they found serious problems.) When we incredulously ask, “Did anyone test this?!” the answer is often: “yes, and we reported the problems, and they shipped anyway.” And then they sob.
Reading through Tales from the Trenches, you can decide who has the worse job: testers whose work is ignored or testers who are denied work but must sit in featureless boxes if they want their paychecks (presumably “and no goofing off on company time”).
: Zubon
Success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan.
— exactly the opposite of what we’re talking about here
We are reviewing contract bids at work, and we are having trouble convincing the official buyer that you can lose a quarter of the available points for each of a dozen or more problems. He thinks it is absurd that X could be worth 25% of the whole scoring total. I am at the opposite extreme: if you cut half a leg off a chair, it has only lost 1/8 of the leg content, but I’d say the entire chair just failed even if the seat and back are really good. A system can have many single points of failure, and doing badly at any of them means the entire thing fails. If your MMO does not have a network connection, it is worthless, even if the content is really good.
So I am not entirely in disagreement when you say that Game X failed because it did not have your particular hobbyhorse. It had PvP/no PvP/wrong PvP; it was/was not F2P; it’s combat or guilds or crafting or achievements were this, that or the other — all fine. It is entirely possible for a game to fail on many points, each of which could be worth unsubscribing, or perhaps any one of several combinations of them. We, the online ramblers, tend to ascribe it to the world’s agreeing with our personal preferences, so every other game that comes out should cater to my whims or you’ll be the next Dawn, but we are not even necessarily disagreeing when we say that Game X failed because of ten different reasons. Yes, any or all of them, shame on Game X.
Should we also stop calling games failed when they are still online, running, and profitable? NC Soft has certainly had (enforceable) opinions on what characterizes sufficient return on investment.
: Zubon
Felix Salmon blogging at Reuters has some things to say about monetizing online magazines that has applications to gaming:
Which brings up a fundamental rule of online subscriptions: there is zero correlation between value and price. There are lots of incredibly expensive stock-tipping newsletters which have a negative value… And of course there’s an almost infinite amount of wonderfully valuable content available online for free…
Or look what happened when Newsweek and Sullivan parted ways: both of them started subscription products, at almost identical prices… That doesn’t mean the two products have almost-equal value; it just means that both…came to the conclusion that the $20-a-year range was more or less the point on the supply-and-demand curve where they would maximize their income…
But there’s another consideration, too: the more formidable the paywall, the more money you might generate in the short term, but the less likely it is that new readers are going to discover your content and want to subscribe to you in the future…
…on the internet, people prefer carrots to sticks. That’s one of the lessons of Kickstarter, too. To put it in Palmer’s terms: if you want to give money, you’re likely to give more, and to give more happily, than if you feel that you’re being forced to spend money.
I saw this last note most richly in Kingdom of Loathing, where players would buy the item/familiar of the month as a de facto subscription fee just to give Jick $10. I have donated to quite a few online games, some of which called it “donating,” but I find myself strongly averse to paying for flash games that added a grind you can pay to skip. Games with limited, optional, non-pushy cash shops probably see more purchases that the players think of as donations, and some shops’ opening saw pent-up demand to donate to the game (probably an influence on sparklepony’s revenue).
The third paragraph is most of interest to me. Aggressively monetizing can yield great short term revenue while harming your long term prospects. Without having revenue numbers, I suspect Turbine is seeing this: excellent initial numbers, followed by decline and aggressive monetization of dedicated players, and flirting with blatant absurdity. You can get a feedback loop if players start feeling like the game is being milked before it shuts down.
: Zubon
Hat tip: Marginal Revolution