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Loot Bonuses: Bad Multiplayer Mechanic

Socializing costs and privatizing benefits is a lousy combination.

Many games allow you to increase your difficulty and your reward. This could be explicit in the form of a difficulty dial tied to rewards, but it is more often an opportunity cost. For example, you might equip an item that improves your loot, but doing so forgoes equipping an item that improves your damage. The fight is marginally harder and your rewards are marginally better. Kingdom of Loathing is an example of a game that does both: there are ways to increase monster level, and you can also equip items that have +monster level instead of (or in addition to) stat bonuses.

Kingdom of Loathing is also a single-player game. City of Heroes similarly gives you tools to adjust mission difficulty, and it gives the same difficulty increase and reward increase to everyone.

Multiplayer games that allow individuals to equip +loot items allow those individuals to increase their rewards at a cost of increased difficulty to everyone on the team. Alice is a tank using best-in-slot gear for damage resistance while Bob is a healer using best-in-slot gear for improved loot drops; Alice is working harder and incurring more repair costs for Bob’s benefits. Alice’s only way to avoid players like Bob is to stick with known companions or be That Guy and demand to see your equipment before letting you into the group. If everyone or no one is wearing +loot gear, the situation is fair and both risks and rewards are shared. Allowing individuals to unilaterally increase group difficulty for personal benefit is a solid example of anti-social design. Continue reading Loot Bonuses: Bad Multiplayer Mechanic

Small Thoughts, Small Complaints, Small Post

I am very surprised at the degree I continue to log in to Guild Wars 2. In a constant period unspoiled by content updates, expansions, etc., I usually flit around 2-3 MMOs. I don’t nibble as much as Syp, but I do enjoy small plates. Guild Wars 2 has continued to be my main MMO, and I am having a blast with alternate characters, which is something I rarely do in most MMOs. I will have to discuss my WvW-only character in a future post.

I am slightly frustrated having a necromancer main with the gear options. It seems there are a bunch of cool scepters and staves, but the artists seemed to have forgotten to colorize some for the necromancer. Are there any green-plague glow effects? Seems like fire and ice elementalists get a lot of love. I’ve decided that I love Memory of the Sky for my staff because of the dichotomy of light and dark with necromancer’s staff skills. I would kill for a green-tinted Wayward Wand as a scepter, but my choices now seem limited to ice, skulls, and eyeballs.

In Lord of the Rings Online I am finally hitting Rohan proper with the Norcrofts zone. Overall the Rohan expansion is really good for a quest-based MMO. The flow is exceptionally good. The stories are also nice with some decent gems scattered around. There is also some conventional silliness like a fell-beast cool with watching me burn down it’s roost or me having to constantly interrupt a funeral to advance a quest line. Still I am enjoying the expansion. I’ll have to discuss mounted combat, revisited, in a later post too.

I would play it a lot more if the client was not an inefficient woolly mammoth of a program. With my computer running Guild Wars 2 on max settings, I can be in the game in less than a minute. Lord of the Rings Online is at least a couple minutes. It is a shame too because the quests are so conducive to small bites of playing. I also hate that the client won’t run windowed unless it changes Windows 7 to basic view. I’m sure optimizing load times and compatibility with Windows 7 graphic mode is near the bottom of their engineer’s to-do list.

Guild Wars 2 Wintersday event is coming on December 14, and the Lord of the Rings Online Riders of Rohan 3-mans (Goblintown, Mirkwood, and Misty Mountains) have less than a month to be released. That is about where I am heading.

–Ravious

[PS2] Tutorial

I have criticized ArenaNet for explaining major game features with “go read the wiki.” PlanetSide 2’s entire tutorial is a link to YouTube videos on the launcher. Logging in, you are dropped directly into a warzone without an explanation of advanced features like “how to tell who is on your team.” You are told to go control the land for your faction without mention of how to do that.

This has a worse introduction than Dwarf Fortress. There are other games that start you without a tutorial or have a steep learning curve, but this one drops you directly into combat with experienced players rather than “start level one and figure it out as you go along.” On a scale of 1 to 10, the introduction gets a negative number for skipping both the tutorial and that entire space where the beginning would be. I was killed by teammates before seeing an enemy, then again before shooting one. The part of the game that every player will see seems designed to drive away new players.

MMOs strive to be a niche market by making the players work for it. If you want to play this game, you must go watch these videos and read these links on another site so you can know what is going on and how to play. It is a strange thing that almost every buy-the-box game gives you an introduction so that you can start off on the right foot, though they already have your money even if you never re-load the game, while this F2P+cash shop game is making it hard to get started, but they need new players to come back and spend money after their horrible first experience.

: Zubon

[BL2] Off-Screen Adventures

The Borderlands 2 end boss fight is long rather than difficult once you find the perfectly safe spot on the map. Your only risk is leaving it to grab more ammo. To help you rally in case of catastrophic misadventure, the boss fight includes an endless swarm of rakk. If you get knocked down, shoot one, and you’re back. Your main threat there is falling down so often that you do not have enough “fight for your life” time to shoot a rakk.

Playing as the Mechromancer, her pet robot contributes to the fight oddly. With the talent tree I was using, the robot could one-shot rakk to add 5 seconds to its battery life. It did so every 3-4 seconds. Instead of fighting the boss, it sat there farming, and it did so endlessly unless the boss accidentally AEed it out of existence. Free xp and money, scattered loot and ammo, auto-rez: everything you want except a meaningful contribution to the fight. That’s okay, I had it under control.

That endless rakk swarm does not stop spawning with the boss’s death. The rakk only occasionally hit the robot, so it just kept farming them as they flew by. I watched for a while, amused. I wandered around and picked up loot. I explored the area. Once it got around 200 kills, I activated the game’s ending. The robot was still farming rakk in the background of the cut scene. I watched the credits. When they ended, the robot was still farming rakk, and it had been doing so the entire time the credits were rolling. I leveled. I watched for a while, amused. I threw away less valuable loot and picked up better drops. I went to the bathroom, considered making a sandwich. The robot had 500 kills and was still at half health. I quit because I wanted my computer back, but I’m guessing you could get to the level cap just by leaving it running with a macro to hit F occasionally in case the robot dies.

: Zubon

Of course, at that point, just edit your save file.

[GW2] Boundless Dailies

Most MMOs have some form of “dailies”. Dailies are activities that have a time-limited activity cap. The most common type is a daily quest, which is only available to complete once per day. Dailies are used as a time gate towards progress, or they are used to let casual players maximize rewards for their time. Guild Wars 2 uses a daily PvE achievement based around four tasks to maximize experience points and karma. The main difference from most other MMOs is that the four tasks can be accomplished nearly anywhere.

For a look at a more conventional MMO, let’s take Lord of the Rings Online’s Hytbold content. Hytbold is a personally-phased town in Rohan that has been ravaged by war. It is up to players to reconstruct the village by doing dailies. Each day there are 16 quests split between 4 zones from the new Riders of Rohan expansion. I am not there yet, but knowledgeable guildies told me it would take 40+ days of 16-quest dailies to complete Hytbold. It’s easy to see the direction behind Hytbold. Dailies are centered around content where most players will be. Dailies correspond to a unique reward. And dailies will keep people coming back for quite a long time. While Hytbold is unique in many aspects, its use of dailies is the norm in most MMOs.

Guild Wars 2 turned dailies on its head, for better and worse. Continue reading [GW2] Boundless Dailies

Rally!

An exciting mechanic I do not see in enough games is a state between fully capable and dead. Some games weaken the player as injuries accumulate, but most follow the trope codifier in letting you (and your enemies) operate at full power with 1 hit point and instantly die to the next falling leaf. For this post, I am less interested in gradual weakening than a transitional dying state. This is variously known as dying, downed, unconscious, “fight for your life,” bleeding out, second wind, etc.

Continue reading Rally!