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The Mayans Invaded and All I Got Was This Lousy Bug

I had a long post written as an intro to The Secret World, which I picked up as a gaming present for myself this past December (and because Amazon had it marked down to $15), but since that was covered already, I figured I’d write about the recent event TSW had. Considering the impact on the game, it’s well worth a post.

As you may be aware, assuming you have spoken to at least other upright mammal in the past month, the Mayan calendar recently finished a cycle. This cycle lasted nearly 6000 years. Of course, any logical person would point out that due to the many changes to both calendar and timekeeping methods over the years, pinning an exact date out on a 6000 year old calendar would be inaccurate, as well as pointing out that every other cycle on the Mayan calendar repeats, but why get in the way of a good panic? In any case, a rather poor movie and any number of disaster speculations have been made about the end of the world that was supposed to happen in December of 2012. If you’re still reading this, it didn’t happen. However, TSW is a game allegedly set in the shadows of our own world – almost a “what went wrong” version, if you will. If any game out currently had a perfect real-world setup for an in-game event, this is it. And the folks at Funcom knew it. Unfortunately, Casey was at the bat.
Continue reading The Mayans Invaded and All I Got Was This Lousy Bug

Guild Wars 2: Through A Child’s Eyes

When a Reddit poster detailed his 5 year old son’s guide on how to play Guild Wars 2, I knew I had to share the way my two daughters (3 and 6) play the game. These are two gamer girls in training, and I want to share their “correct” way of playing Guild Wars 2. Without further ado…

It’s coming right for us!

It is impossible not to kill the little grey bunnies. We’ve tried, but our instincts tell us they were put there to die. Mommy does not like us killing defenseless little bunnies. We tell her they go red and attack us. We still make sure that Mommy knows when Daddy kills the bunnies though, even if he pretends to say it’s for life force.

Continue reading Guild Wars 2: Through A Child’s Eyes

Managing Expectations

Hunter links to a developer interview:

These two months combined are basically an expansion’s worth of content for free.

and goes on to explain:

I think people are getting the wrong idea. It’s fine as long as people keep their expectations reasonable but we will not be getting an expansion worth of content

Commenters proclaim it dishonest to promise an expansion’s worth of content without delivering an expansion’s worth of content. Hunter explains that it is unreasonable to expect an expansion’s worth of content just because a developer said there would be an expansion’s worth of content.

I can’t disagree with either response. I just love this example because it encapsulates so much.

: Zubon

Heirs to Progress Quest

Progress Quest is the original 0-player MMORPG. It was designed in 2002 as a parody of the gameplay you know and love, with “fire and forget” convenience that went beyond auto-attack to auto-everything. Turn it on, create a character, and the game takes it from there. There is not gameplay as such, but it is a brilliant piece of work and strangely hypnotic.

As with most things, there is actually a genre of these by now. Kongregate has an idle game category. Epic Combo is notionally amusing, and Farm of Souls is more of an idle RTS game (with just peons). I’m tempted to fiddle with a few of these, but Kongregate is currently promoting Anti-Idle, which has enough little things going on at once to actually make it a game. It has its version of Progress Quest that you can play interactively instead of idling. It has a mini-FarmVille, a lousy Mario Kart, a collectible card game that doesn’t look very good but probably is not the worst on the site, a variety of mini-games, fishing, and some other things I have yet to sift through. It also has its own quests and achievements built in.

At worst, the gameplay is no worse than things you have paid to do (mine in EVE, farm almost anything). At best, well, it’s not a lot better than that anyway. When social media games were having their heyday, I found some of them interesting if I played 5 or 6 at once. The aggregate can involve interesting resource and attention allocation. Most of that seems built in here, plus your equivalent of offline skill training.

: Zubon

[GW2] The Final PoI

Like Elisabeth at Massively I am working towards a legendary, and my pace is going to match hers. I am just going to play, bank, and see what happens. Some of the portions of a legendary do require more focus, such as the Gift of Exploration. I am dreading the Gift of Zhaitan I will need, but for now the Gift of Exploration can be done mostly during the leveling process. Who wouldn’t want to complete each map, cries my completionist self.

I hate that I swapped to Blackgate. I wanted to stay in WvW Tier 2 because I felt I could learn a bit how the enemy operated, and for Exploration it needed to be done. To my defense I did not kill any Sanctum of Rall comrades during that time. However, Tarnished Coast chumps were fair game. My goal was only to snag the handful of points of interest (PoI) I needed in the Eternal Battlegrounds. Tier 2 is interesting because I feel Sanctum of Rall holds its own consistently in second place. I think Blackgate constantly wins because they do a better job beating up on Tarnished Coast. In other words, Blackgate wins because they capitalize offense far better than Sanctum of Rall does. Continue reading [GW2] The Final PoI

[TSW] First Impressions

The Secret World is my first MMO I bought intending to play the game as a “play to finish” MMO. Unlike even Wizard 101, which I did intend in the beginning to lightly play forever, The Secret World is the first MMO I’ve bought fully intending to be a tourist. And, I feel elated. The game might even be better, in my view, for it.

There are two parts to my impressions: content and systems. They are like twin serpents winding up a staff in The Secret World. Sometimes they intertwine perfectly. In other places they wreathe and gnash at one another. Either way I have found the game to be very entertaining. Buying The Secret World was totally worth it. Continue reading [TSW] First Impressions

[GW2] Jump in dee Line

Most players want to rock that monthly on time. With the New Year came January’s Monthly Achievements in Guild Wars 2. The evergreen monthly WvW player kills achievement remains evergreen, and the fractal completion has continued from last month. Monthly event participation has returned from the early days too. The new monthly achievement is Intrepid Explorer – find the locations of Tyria’s jumping puzzles.

Monthly achievements, in my mind, are one of the developer’s ways of herding players towards the better parts of Guild Wars 2. WvW kills has remained because WvW is a really good, active part of the MMO. The Fractals of the Mists dungeon is the best instanced group content in my mind. The monthly achievements have also heavily highlighted the holiday events where high concurrency is desired. Now the jumping puzzles, one of the heralded jewels of Guild Wars 2, get their turn in the monthly sun. Continue reading [GW2] Jump in dee Line

Playing to Win

I’m thinking of writing a series on rules and ethics (in games and elsewhere), but first it seems necessary to establish a simple point: some tactics work really well even if you do not like them. Many of us know what “should win” in our idealized concept of the game, and we think it is a design flaw that other things are better, but tactically, in direct PvP or comparative performance, some things just work better. There is no moral character to it.

This is frequently hate against things that win despite being simple or boring because things that are difficult or awesome should win instead of being inefficient or impractical. You’re right, games would be more fun with more “awesome but practical” over “boring but practical,” as “boring” is not an desirable trait for most forms of entertainment, but that does not make choosing the simple, efficient, effective option bad strategy or morality. It is also an aesthetic argument rather than a balance issue; at the mechanical level, the tactics and strategy can be interesting and complex even if you personally think it’s BS that paper beats rock.

To take a friend’s favorite article, you need to play to win to enjoy the depth of the game. Continue reading Playing to Win

Video Games, Real Life, and Goal-Seeking Strategies

Hello, player character, and welcome to the Mazes of Menace! Your goal is to get to the center and defeat the Big Bad. You know this is your goal because you received a message from a very authoritative source that said so. Alas, the maze is filled with guards and traps that make every step dangerous. You have reached an intersection, and there are two doors before you. Door A leads towards the center; it probably takes you to your destination. Door B leads away from the center; it could loop back, but it’s probably a dead end. Which door do you choose?

The correct answer, and the answer which every habitual video game player will instinctively choose, is door B: the probable dead end. Because your goal is not to reach the end quickly, but to search as much of the maze’s area as you can, and by RPG genre convention, dead ends come with treasure. Similarly, if you’re on a quest to save the world, you do side-quests to put it off as long as possible, because you’re optimizing for fraction-of-content-seen, rather than probability-world-is-saved, which is 1.0 from the very beginning.
…
Permanent choices can be chosen arbitrarily on a whim, or based solely on what you think best matches your style, and you don’t need to research which is better. …
You shouldn’t save gold pieces, because they lose their value quickly to inflation as you level. …
— jimrandomh, Memetic Hazards in Videogames

You may also be interested in the paragraph contrasting cheat books with real life skill manuals.

: Zubon

False Scarcity

Steam sales are brilliant experiments in applied economics.

During these holiday sales, Steam runs sales of several durations at once. There are daily sales, flash sales, and community-selected discounts. If you watch, these are all the same games. There may be a bit of plus or minus to it, but the same game will appear in all three spots. Voting for a game in the sidebar just gives you another few hours in which the sale is available (and makes you feel more invested, a more likely buyer). Time is (always) running out, this is (always) your last chance, buy now!

Steam seems to have stumbled on the model used by that one store down the street that seems to be having a clearance or holiday sale 48+ weeks of the year. They also seem to be experimenting less and settling on that model of having continuous sales that are always just about to end.

My favorite ad is still “last chance to pre-order!” That usually comes with a discount or bonus, or at least a chance to pre-load, but not always. Sometimes it is just your last chance to pay full price earlier than necessary. Yesterday, a few colleges and charities e-mailed me with a “courtesy reminder” that I had just four days left to give them money this year. Which is technically true and may have some tax benefits associated, but…

: Zubon

You too, dear Kill Ten Rats reader, have just three days left this year to send your favorite Kill Ten Rats writers games, money, and in-game money.