Word of Shadow

Coming Late to Early Guild Wars

2012-01-02T10:44:00.003+11:00

Zubon is currently playing through Guild Wars for the first time - a move composed of much win. I wanted to re-post a reply I made to one of the commenters.

“That is a common misconception about GW. In it’s first months, the devs intended PvP to be the endgame content, but since most of the players didn’t care about their intentions and stayed in PvE, the game got more and more PvE-heavy.”

I disagree with this quite a bit. In the first few years of the game’s life, PvP was extremely popular and a massive focus, both for the casual and hardcore players. Random Arenas and then Alliance Battles were extremely popular with the former, while Guild vs Guild and Hall of Heroes offered a more competitive slant for the latter.

The pioneering ideas they had gave the game very strong appeal in the “super hardcore” competitive e-sports scene, eg
- mechanics that require active use of skills to prevent damage
- co-ordination of the team to “spike” down a target
- observer mode for all high-level games
- no reliance on grinding to achieve power
More prize money was up for grabs at the high point of this than had previously been offered in any competitive game.

But you are right that PvP is not as big of a focus now. Interest died off with each expansion because more and more skills and classes that did not fit with the fantastic balance of the original campaign devolved the metagame into “Build Wars”. Eventually all the high profile players moved on.

Hopefully they can get back to the core principles in GW2 and create another fantastic PvP experience.

Customer service 101

2011-09-22T16:24:00.002+10:00

For those unfamiliar with the game's pricing system, the points I was refunded would usually take a few nights worth of playing to earn . They can be used to buy new champions or runes (which allow you to customize your loadout). Since I can spend these points in lieu of paying money to buy things, Riot are trading a little bit of cash in the immediate future for my long term goodwill. They also really made an effort to do this by searching their sales logs, because I purchased this champion at least a couple of months ago.

This kind of thing is ALWAYS a good investment in my book (see: Valve).

Diablo III skill calculator out

2011-09-15T17:36:00.002+10:00

This is not usually a headline that would grab my attention. However this is not one of those pansy-arsed skill systems where you toss up between a +0.5% critical strike chance or a +2.3 damage increase. The skills, and especially the runes that you can customize them with, all sound massive and nutballs enough for me to be enjoying playing with this at least as much as I will the actual game itself:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/monk

Diablo 3 to be quite similar to Diablo 2

2011-08-02T15:41:00.002+10:00

Probably about 50% of my unread posts today were about the latest Diablo 3 announcnements.

First, you must always be online to play, even in single player. This is of course absolute fail-train, because inevitably there will be server issues and at-home internet issues. I had several relatively high level single player characters in Diablo II that I used to play when the servers were down. Also, sometimes you just want to use cheats and run around wtf-pwning everything. But no longer.

Second, the in-game auction house will allow you to earn/spend real life cash. I actually APPLAUD this decision, because it will keep the dirty gold seller spam out of the game (if you own a copy of Diablo 2, make a public game for the lols. At least one bot will enter within about 10 seconds).

Third, mods will be super frowned upon. They were super frowned upon in Diablo II as well, and for multiplayer, that's fine (of course, people will still come up with a MapHack mod, and people will use it. I will personally risk the account ban when I get sufficiently tired enough of losing hardcore characters to ridiculous random extra fast boss spawns). It's annoying that people won't be able to use the engine to create neat-o new single player stuff, but I never bothered much with that stuff in the other Diablo games.

Verdict? Yes, heartless, we will still buy it. The fact that it's looking like an awesomely fun game dampens my outrage when they make announcements like this. Compared with the announcements for oh, say, SW:TOR, which just give me the lols because it looks awful (and no, I will NOT still buy that).

Sweatshop work

2011-08-01T11:45:00.002+10:00

PBS via RPS: "The fact is that you can't really convey the extent of the hardships faced during a long, underpaying shift on a factory line in any medium. (You could craft a time-accurate simulation, but it would be difficult to rope many into playing it.)"

I lol'd.

Security 101

2011-06-28T20:57:00.004+10:00

With the recent spate of hacking sweeping everything from government agencies to online gaming services, security is very topical right now. Many are shaking their heads at the compromised companies and saying ‘Lol, noobs. Need moar firewallz’. Even companies whose defenses remain intact are vulnerable to Distributed Denial of Service attacks carried out by millions of ‘zombie’ computers scattered across the globe.

The root of both problems is the same: innocent users clicking things they shouldn’t. Whether you’re a CEO with admin access to your company’s network or some random Joe surfing the web, trying to view those naked pictures of Justin Bieber is going to compromise your computer and everything connected to it, unless you have the right protection in place.

I’ve done a bit (a lot) of research into this in recent times due to a ridiculous virus that took over my system, offering to clean the multitude of infections it ‘found’ if I would wire money to some smug bastard in Russia. This research has involved trawling forums and collating disparate information from individuals of a wide range of technical knowledge and experience, and distilling it into a refined depiction of the truth. In other words, exactly what you or I would go through every time we get stuck into a new RPG. However if you are not inclined to go through all this research yourself, allow me to share some things with you:

Here’s a reasonably up to date list of all manner of free security software.

Most forums are shit: Wilder’s security is a big exception, and where I obtain most of my info.

Anti-virus is shit: Anti-virus uses signature-based technology to compare processes that want to run on your computer to a database. The problem with this is that querying massive databases introduces lag to everything that you do, and that new threats require time to become incorporated to the database. Having said that, having one on hand to scan particularly suspect files can be a useful back-up. PrevX and Avast! are two examples that I’ve tried and found to be neat (the former uses cloud technology, minimizing system resources and ensuring the most up-to-date database).

Anti-virus vs anti-malware vs anti-spyware: Sometimes the distinctions between these are meaningful, but often they are pure marketing hype. Having said that, an example of non-hype is the free Malware Bytes Anti-Malware (the paid version offers real-time protection – not necessary as discussed above). MBAM also relies on signature-based detection, but the focus is apparently on finding infections missed by other anti-viruses. In other words, the infections that are actually going to make it through to most people’s computers.

Admin mode is shit, but you will probably use it anyway: In admin mode, malware can do whatever it wants to your computer. If you run as a limited user on the other hand, you will greatly limit the impact that malware can have. The problem is that if something tries to run that needs admin privileges, you will receive a vague prompt that authorizes it do all the high-privilege things that it wants to. It can be difficult to know whether you have a legitimate program or not here.

Windows 7 is more secure, but less secure: Compared to Windows XP (let’s not discuss Vista), Windows 7 has some improved security measures, such as Adress Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) which prevents buffer overflow attacks. In Windows 7 Microsoft have also beefed up protection of any attempted patching of the core Windows goodies (the kernel), with their technology known as Patch Guard. This makes it harder for malware to do nasty things, but also makes it harder for security vendors to ensure that their software has sufficient privileges to completely stop malware. So if you are running the latest and greatest operating system together with some of the security software discussed below, you may be more at risk than if you were operating under XP.

Chrome is the most secure browser: Firefox can come close if you install the ‘NoScript’ extension (and is woefully inadequate if you don’t). But it says something that at the yearly Pwn2Own hacker contest, the hackers have been unable to break Chrome (in fact, they don’t even bother trying).

Answering an endless series of questions is shit: HIPS programs (no, not that HIPS) establish a set of actions that each process is allowed to take. Can it alter the registry? Can it add itself to Windows start-up? Can it inject itself into Windows processes? Etc. This does not require an up-to-date database, nor does it need to be particularly taxing to the system. And they are extremely powerful. The problem is that the many questions can be difficult to answer for novice users, and a pain in the ass for all users.

Firewalls are good: If you are not behind a router, i.e. connected directly to the net, most experts estimate that without an inbound firewall you’ll become infected in ~10-15 minutes (!). Hackers have automated routines constantly scanning random IP addresses for vulnerabilities. Preferably get behind a router (which will reject unsolicited incoming connections for you), or get some software-based inbound protection.

The default Windows firewall offers completely fine inbound protection for this purpose. However what if our system becomes infected by a process actually initiated by us with an unwitting click? For this we need outbound protection. Most free and paid software firewall packages these days come with both this technology and with HIPS functionality as described above.

Decent free examples, bearing in mind the drawbacks of HIPS software, include Online Armor, Comodo, and Private Firewall.

Alternatives to classical HIPS - if you’re like me and don’t want to answer an endless stream of chat from your security software, there are actually not that many options available:

Policy-based HIPS: The idea here is to maintain a set of ‘Trusted’ and ‘Untrusted’ applications. Anything coming from a ‘threat gate’ – i.e. your browser, peer to peer programs, a USB stick, etc – are automatically untrusted. These processes run with reduced rights, i.e. are denied the ability to make any nasty changes to the registry, add themselves to start-up, capture the keyboard, etc. In this way we avoid answering a bunch of irritating questions. The drawback is that when we have something legitimate that does need to do these special activities to work properly, we have to remember to run it as ‘Trusted’ or it will not work properly. This is a small drawback for me given how powerful, light and unobtrusive these programs are.

The only options that I’m currently aware of with this type of functionality are DefenseWall, GesWall, and AppGuard. The latter is still in development but seems the most far along in terms of overcoming the Patch Guard protection of Windows 7 discussed above.

I’m still on Windows XP 32-bit and am happily using DefenseWall, which comes highly recommended from many independent, expert sources. It also passes every security test I’ve thrown at it with flying colours, operates very smoothly with no hitch to system resources as far as I can tell, and requires no set-up to do all this (this is good, because the UI is not user-friendly at all – it’s a good thing I never have to use it). DefenseWall is also not free, but does come with a lifetime license for ~$30 and you can evaluate it for 30 days before buying.

Sandboxing: Let programs do whatever they want to do – just run all threat sources in a virtual environment that does not get to make changes to the real system. When your session is finished, flush the sandbox and ‘poof’, any changes made by malware are gone. Of course, sometimes you’ll want to promote things from the virtual sandbox to become ‘real’ – it’s up to the user to decide when this is appropriate.

The best application to recommend here is SandboxIE. It’s free for a single sandbox (adequate for most users), but for more convenient functionality you can get the paid version and maintain multiple sandboxes.

Behaviour-blockers: These programs analyze collectively what each process is trying to do, assigning it some internal threat score. Do too many suspect actions, and you will automatically be flagged as malware. The good thing about this is that the user rarely hears from the application unless there’s a problem. The disadvantage is the slightly greater lag introduced (not as bad as for anti-viruses) and that the protection offered is theoretically not quite as high as for the above options.

If you go this route, Mamutu and ThreatFire come highly recommended.

Nothing’s 100%. What happens when I get an infection? There is only one known cure for this. You can’t rely on booting into Windows – once you’ve got malware, you have to assume that it’s the very worst kind, a rootkit. This is something that, in essence, becomes part of your Windows. The only way you can remove it is booting into a different operating system using trusted removable media. A good way to achieve this is using a BartPE disc such as UBCD4WIN, which draws from your own Windows files to create a ‘Windows lite’ that you can boot into and cleanse the little bastard out. Obviously, you need to have this disc prepared on a trusted computer.

From here you can run as many anti-virus scanners as you like until you find the culprit. (Most commonly recommended: MBAM, SAS). Alternately, you can use imaging software to restore a last known safe backup. The free version of Macrium comes highly recommended for this (as does the paid version – other recommended paid software includes Image for Windows and Drive Snapshot). These imaging suites typically allow you to create a rescue disc, which follows the same philosophy above of booting using a clean operating system. I like the sound of Macrium because it uses a BartPE environment, meaning that I can include all other manner of useful Windows security applications to run there as well, and because it comes highly recommended.

But I might not know if I have an infection. How can I tell that I don’t have some key-logger sending my banking info to Russia, without booting from a rescue CD and scanning periodically: Ok, we’re starting to get into paranoia DefCon level 5 here. But for this purpose you should look into anti-keylogger software such as Zemana or SpyShelter. Both have some decent HIPS functionality as well. DefenseWall provides good key-logger protection, but if I’ve unwittingly ‘Trusted’ some malware that logs key-strokes, I wouldn’t know about it. Zemana and SpyShelter have nice logging features that make sure you can discover things that have gotten past the net.

So, um, TLDR. Wtf are you running again? I’m running DefenseWall on Windows XP 32-bit. It comes with a firewall as well, neat. I use Chrome. That’s all.

With DefenseWall, malware can’t do anything to my system. But it could sit dormant on my system and infect somebody else if I were to email it to them. For this purpose and for any suspect files that I am considering running as ‘Trusted’, I keep MBAM on hand.

If I needed a firewall alternative I’d probably go for something like Privatefirewall. If I was to switch to Windows 7 64-bit, I would switch to SandboxIE because the developer has managed to ‘crack’ the Microsoft Patch Guard feature and so retain maximum protection. AppGuard looks to be developing in a promising manner here too.

So, that’s about it. If you take on even 10% of the above advice, you too can avoid becoming a member of the zombie bot-net horde (or, if you’ve been running with no protection, extricate yourself from the horde).

Who spends wins

2011-06-25T12:03:00.003+10:00

Tobold wants to be able to purchase 'performance enhancing' items from in-game stores. The easy argument against this is that it turns an otherwise competitive game into 'who spends wins'. Tobold counters this argument by saying that these people don't actually want to buy ANYthing. Therefore their vote shouldn't count with the developers

Tobold is right in a sense. I certainly would't buy any items in such a game. Of course, I would just leave and go and play some better designed game.

I understand Tobold's mindset. He works hard and has money to spare. He wants to come home, sit down, and have a game tell him that he is super powerful and important. This is understandable. It's also what single player is for.

This applies to just about every conversation on the internet

2011-06-24T10:15:00.001+10:00

Clicky.

New WoW expansion announced

2011-06-13T10:10:00.001+10:00

Please, just make it stop.

Lol no ty kthxbai

2011-06-07T15:57:00.003+10:00

Apparently The Old Republic is going to only be available through EA's equivalent of Steam:

"We still don’t know exactly when SWTOR will launch or what the payment model will be, but we do now know that it will be exclusive to EA’s newly-revealed Steam/GoG rival Origin."

Steam is practically a part of my operating system. It is always on. It's earnt its place by being

a) Timely
b) Offering (mostly) much cheaper prices than retail
c) Coming from a popular, do-no evil company

GoG is not the same, but there is zero DRM on the games I buy. So I don't have to run an extra program. That's fine.

EA's new Steam clone is the opposite of these things to me. It is several years late, offers prices equivalent to what you'd pay in the store even though they didn't have to pay for any boxing/shipping etc, and EA are evil. On top of that, if I start pandering to this, I'm going to end up needing a clone client from every single publisher that wants to get in on the action.

Fair enough if they want to try and promote their new client, but to not make it available through the competition? Lol. There is no way I'm going to install that shite on my hard drive. I was on the fence about The Old Republic. I mean on the one hand it's a new Star Wars game, and therefore I consider it my nerd duty to play it. But on the other hand, everything I've seen and read about the game (CG trailers aside) looks awful. I was going to suck it up and try it out anyway, but now I won't need to put myself through the pain - thanks EA!

Oh and as a bonus, Keen has the opposite opinion, which means that I must be right.

WoW has PvP only chars now?

2011-05-27T17:57:00.004+10:00

I nearly fell off my chair backwards when I saw this:

World of Warcraft 2011 Arena Pass

Blizzard have created a PvP environment where items are 'negated' and you win matches through skill? Is it possible they are finally getting it?

I'd like to know which one of their game designers decided to play Guild Wars :P

The ultimate torture

2011-05-26T18:43:00.001+10:00

And some of you are paying for this.

The Name of the Wind

2011-04-15T16:24:00.003+10:00

Fantasy books are typically designed to be a kind of literary nerd porn, throwing around goblins, dragons and dual-wielding dark elves with nary a care for the reader's intellect. Either that or they are interminably, unnecessarily long. With fantasy we're resigned to getting either the dragon or the drag on.

A couple of years ago, some unknown, struggling teacher wrote one of the greatest books that I have ever read. Not one of the greatest fantasy stories - one of the greatest of any story. Honestly a literary masterpiece. Beautiful turns of phrase, deep characters, fantastic twists and bends in the narrative all told from a refreshing perspective. As soon as I finished it I rushed out (ok, to Google) to see what else the author had written.

It was the fellow's first book. I wailed, gnashed my teeth, and went back to reading the usual pointless drivel.

Until now. I just discovered that the second book, The Wise Man's Fear, came out in March. I literally dropped what I was doing at work and marched straight down to the local book shop. They charge ridiculous prices to the point where I usually just torrent books that I want to read and put them on my e-reader.

But not this one. Some things just deserve the hard copy. And I wasn't alone - the cashier had sold two copies in the last half an hour. I'll be gobbling this up over the next few days - if you haven't read the first book, I highly recommend that you go and pick yourself up a copy, and treat your mind to something special. You can go back to the nerd porn afterwards, but you might not look at it the same way.

League of Legends 101 - part 1

2011-04-10T08:52:00.009+10:00

League of Legends is a free to play PvP arena game in the style of DotA, otherwise known as a 'MOBA' if you're keeping up with the acronyms the kids are using nowadays. Being free to play, the major barrier to entry is the crippling fear of entering a game and having no idea what to do, resulting in some 12 year old kid hurling various expletives in your direction and causing your e-peen to shrivel up into a ball and cry.

Luckily though, I am here to tell you how to not make a complete embarrassment of yourself.

Character selection: When you play solo queue (unranked matches - you will not earn the privilege to play ranked matches until you've got a couple of hundred games under your belt) you will find that most people instantly lock in whichever character they feel like playing with no regard for what may help the team towards victory. So, you can dramatically increase your odds of winning by plugging up holes in the lineup.

The most important thing is to make sure your team has a "tank". I use quotes because this is just a label - the other team is not going to actually be beating on the "tank" unless they are stupid. Rather, the tank has enough survivability to deter being beaten on, allowing him to get up close and use skills that soften up or disable key characters on the other team.

An easy tank to play that is considered very effective even in top ranked PvP is Rammus, the armordillo (has naturally high armor as you can imagine). For a dirt-cheap option you can try Nunu the Yeti. My personal favourite is Cho'Gath, who can eat things to grow ginormous (including other players).

The next most important thing that I see commonly left out of team lineups is a ranged physical character. This character's main job is to let the team push down turrets, the automated defense towers that regularly dot the path towards the enemy's base. Without a ranged physical character, your team will end up milling around just outside tower range, scratching their heads and wondering why they can't push anything down, until the enemy gets their act together and wipes them. Your secondary job playing this character is to farm up an enormous amount of minions, getting you enough gold so that if the game goes long you will become an unstoppable DPS machine.

The best ranged physical character to recommend is Ashe. She's considered 'top tier', is cheap, you get to try her in the tutorial, she has one of the best initiating skills in the game, and she's pretty easy to play.

Next, the team will need to have a magical caster. These have high burst damage and are important for drilling down squishy types on the other team. These seem not to be in short supply in the general population. A popular past-time for the common or garden variety noobs is to lock in as many of these squishy characters as possible within the first two seconds of loading into the lobby screen. But if by chance nobody locks one in, you should go right ahead.

Laning vs jungling: The characters mentioned above will often be 'laning'. The most commonly played map is a 5v5 setting, with 3 lanes. An endless army of minions spawn from each base and stroll down one of these 3 lanes, striving to reach the enemy base, but inevitably being converted into gold/XP by hungrily waiting players on the other team. But the maths doesn't quite add up - with only 3 lanes, we will have one person soloing and two people in each of the other lanes.

The solo player levels up a lot faster because they don't have to share XP. So it's desirable to maximize the number of people soloing. To gain an additional solo spot, one player often levels up instead in the 'jungle'. This is imaginatively referred to as 'jungling'. This player moves around farming a gradually respawning series of neutral mobs that stand around in between the 3 lanes. You will note the positions of these mobs by little skull and crossbones symbols on the minimap. This player will periodically emerge from the jungle to gank unsuspecting players.

I don't recommend jungling in your first few games because it's quite easy to die and thus defeat the purpose of this post, which is to prevent you from embarrassing yourself. So wait until you've seen somebody else do it. When starting out I'd recommend that the easiest/fastest character to jungle with is Warwick, the werewolf, because of his combination of damage, healing, and gank-oriented skills. Whoever you jungle with, bring Smite from the collection of summoner skills to ensure that you remain high enough in level to succeed in ganks. Typical starting items are Cloth armor and 5 health potions.

If your team composition has one of each of the above when in solo queue, it will be a small miracle and you will be well on your way to a cruisy win.

Carrys: The players who are given solo lanes will level up faster and get more gold from minions. These players then become your most valuable assets - help them, protect them, and they will "carry" the team to victory.

Summoner skills: Every player chooses 2 from a pool of common skills regardless of your character. For mana-hungry characters I often take Ghost (run buff) and Clarity (mana recharge). Ignite or Exhaust are good on offensive characters. Flash is a nice escape skill on any character. Teleport is useful if you have a solo lane and can't afford to return to base to heal and then run all the way back (since you'll probably lose your tower if you do).

Communication: When you are fighting against the enemy and they disappear from your view, they might be running off to go and surprise your unsuspecting team mates in another lane. If you type 'mia' (Missing In Action) into the chat when they disappear, you will absolve yourself of your minimal obligations, preventing people from raging at you when they die (actually they will still rage at you, but at least you'll know it's not your fault). You can give additional warning by clicking on the minimap ('pinging'). When the player you thought was missing in action returns, type 're'.

Items: There are recommended items for each champion which will get you by in your first couple of games. If you want to stray from these, take note of items that particularly effective players on either team seem to dominate with. You can view items on members of both teams by pressing TAB (this only updates for enemies when someone on your team has seen their character since their last purchase). You'll pretty soon build up a good idea of which sorts of items are good for which sorts of characters.

Brush: Maps are dotted with brush that you can hide in. When in the brush, players outside the brush can not see you. This can lead to comical ambushes where the entire enemy team comes charging out of the brush like clowns from a tiny car. Some skills are able to be aimed at brush and will make an audible sound if they connect with another player. If you don't have a brush-checking skill such as this and you are not sure where the players in your lane have gotten to, they are probably hiding in the brush.

Important neutral monsters: Several monsters around the map give very useful benefits when you kill them. These monsters always spawn in the same location. 'Blue' or 'Golem' refers to a buff that gives huge mana regeneration and cooldown duration. 'Red' or 'Lizard' adds damage and slowdown to attacks. The Dragon gives a nice bonus in gold to the entire team. The Baron is the most difficult and is generally not attempted until your team is level 15+ - it gives a massive bonus to damage and stats, and is usually taken by the winning team to allow them to steamroll and win the game.

Wards: Wards are cheap and ridiculously effective. New players never buy them because they don't know where to place them. Useful places include the Dragon and Baron mentioned above. Generally if you want to push a tower, placing a ward in the most likely place that a gank will come from is a good idea too. Pink wards can see other wards, and they can see invisible players.

Alright, that oughta do for now. Off with ye, go forth and perhaps now avoid complete and utter failure :D

Sad panda

2011-02-01T22:48:00.002+11:00

Courtesy of Ravious I see that there are no ally targeted skills in GW2.

Ergh.

Remember how we've talked about the revolutionary things that Guild Wars brought to the MMO combat table? I shall quote myself:

"Guild Wars introduced the concept of "Protection" skills, which are cast on allies before damage is inflicted on them, with the goal of avoiding said damage. These types of skills are much more efficient than healing skills, and are really good for the game because they add an extra layer of depth and skill in terms of reading the play of the other team."

On the plus side my rapidly plummeting hopes will minimize my disappointment on release.

Stopped playing, now playing

2011-01-08T12:02:00.004+11:00

It's been about 2 months since my last post. Have I been too busy with work, family and friends? Did real life get in the way? Pfff, hell no! Crimson and I have been gaming it up as per usual.

StarCraft II has been put on the backburner for the moment. As much as my inner Achiever wanted to reach diamond ranking across all categories (1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 4v4), it was starting to get a little stressful. I prefer team settings, where the multitude of failures I make have less of an impact on the game :) I will come back to it in a couple of months as it's still great fun, but a break was in order. With the equivalent of "rest XP" in the ranking system, I know that I'll be able to fly up the ranks fairly quickly when I do (after sucking horribly for my first 10 games or so, I'm sure).

Next was Minecraft. I haven't written anything about Minecraft yet because I didn't want to jump on the "me too" bandwagon. But Minecraft, in all its blocky, low-res glory, is probably the best game that I saw in 2010. Even a cold-hearted PvP addict such as I was able to revel in the sheer beauty of exploration, the desperation of survival (and claustrophobia), and the opportunity to realize anything that my feeble imagination could concoct (somebody made a COMPUTER in the game, for crying out loud. A freaking computer!). Some of you may have tried the multiplayer and seen that it was a buggy mess (for example, you couldn't die). The major bugs there seem to have been fixed as of around the end of November, and together with Crimson and the Melfette the three of us have whiled away some merry hours in our own private sandbox.

At the moment though, the game du jour is League of Legends, one of the ever growing number of Defense of the Ancients clones out there. I had tried to play the oh-so-wittily acronymed "LoL" a few months ago, but an atrocious account registration process that kept forgetting my details drove me away. Crimson, ever the glutton for punishment, picked it up again a month ago and insisted that it was good fun, and so I gave it one more shot.

League of Legends is absolutely nutty fun thanks to the ridiculous freedom that the artists seem to have been given with the character design. There are ~70 different characters currently in the game. Despite a lot of overlap in function they each have a really unique personality or "feel" to them... from the little boy riding a giant yeti, to little orphan Annie and her ferocious teddy bear come to life named Tibbers, to the giant demon that eats other players and grows ridiculously huge, to the psychotic homicidal maniacally giggling clown, to the freaky fricking scarecrow, there is really something to tickle everybody's fancy.

I'll write some more about LoL in coming posts, but for now suffice it to say that if you enjoy DotA style games or are curious about them, this is a good starting point. There are a lot of gameplay design features that I preferred about Demigod, but at the end of the day League of Legends has two important advantages over Demigod:
1) There are actually people playing it because they did not botch their launch
2) There is a match-making system, meaning that you are actually allowed to learn how to play the game without people raging at you (any more than they do in any other PvP game, anyway :D)

The game itself is free so really is worth checking out. The characters are unlockable through either money or a form of in-game experience points that you receive for playing games (bonuses for winning). You will be given enough points to unlock one of the cheaper (and easier to use) characters right from the get-go, but most importantly there are 10 free champions that get rotated each week so that you can try always be trying somebody new. You'll develop your favourites though, and I'm not ashamed to say that I've now plonked down about $70 on the thing, and consider them pennies well spent.

We're #1, We're #1!!

2010-11-06T18:08:00.006+11:00

So what have Crimson and I been playing these last few weeks, with nary a posting between us? Two things:

1) MineCraft for a while - we're waiting on the multiplayer to becomes patched so that you aren't invulnerable to being poked at by zombies (much less atmospheric than the single player to me).

2) StarCraft II:

As you can see, we have climbed our way up through the ranks and made it to #1 of some Diamond league. There are many Diamond leagues so it's not like we're #1 in the world. It would be disappointing if we were, because we have gotten here through the use of the following build:

Yes, cheese. We have tried many flavors of cheese in our ruthless quest for the top. Such cheap tactics will only get you so far as silver-gold league if you're playing in 1v1, but in 2v2 it seems that the combined might of focused cheese is nigh on unstoppable.

So what is our favourite flavour of cheese? It's not very complicated. Crimson is a Protoss, and very sneakily lays a pylon near an enemy. He then lays down Gateways and starts pumping out Zealots. I am a Zerg and follow a "9 pool" Zergling pump with a Queen and Zergling speed boost as soon as possible.

Frequently, our early aggression is scouted by the enemy. Usually, this makes little difference, as we proceed to focus fire one of them down and then the other.

Fear the might of our 30 APM (actions per minute - a common metric of measuring how Korean somebody is.... pro 1v1 players have somewhere in the vicinity of 200 APM)... fear our hotkeyed production buildings, and our pushing of 1-A-click. Rawr.

Langdell's comeuppance

2010-10-05T19:51:00.002+11:00

Courtesy of Chaos Edge, this little gem should please anybody following the professional patent troll saga that is "Dr" Tim Langdell.

Quoth the judge:

"...given the suspect nature of Dr. Langdell’s representations to both the USPTO and the Court concerning plaintiff’s current and future sales and business activities, it is an open question whether plaintiff’s business activities legitimately extend beyond trolling various gaming-related industries for licensing opportunities."

First use of the word 'trolling' in a legal document? Fantastic.

It's a shame that it took the bottomless coffers of EA's legal team to shut this fool up, and that an innocent and talented indie was powerless to fight it. I'm not sure how "Dr." Langdell could have been so stupid as to take on EA, but I'm glad that the bigger bully in the playground ROTFL-stomped him.

Hopefully now somebody will follow up all the fraud allegations and put this gentleman out of commission permanently.

Commitment issues

2010-09-14T13:40:00.003+10:00

I used to worry about whether XXX MMO would offer "enough" "endgame" "content" (whatever those words mean).

These days I mostly... don't care. I don't feel anymore that I need to assess a new MMO the way I would a potential mate, and make sure that we have a '5 year plan' together. The relationships that I pursue have become of a more casual nature and I seem to have much more fun this way. Maybe once a year I find a new one that adds itself to the permanent roster, but such relationships are not exclusive - the lass in question finds herself instead part of a gaming harem, a bevy of beauties that are at my beck and call. On the other hand if she shows herself to be the "high maintenance" variety that demands my attention to the exclusion of all others, she will find herself discarded by the roadside rather quickly.

StarCraft 2 Update

2010-09-05T22:20:00.000+10:00

I've been casually playing SC2 for around 7 weeks and I dare say that I've become quite addicted to it's PvP. I've mainly been playing Protoss, but I've also given the other races a fair go.

I'm still only in Bronze League with 1v1 and 3v3, but I'm happy to say that Melf and I managed to get to Silver League with 2v2. We also made it to the top of our division. The matching system in SC2 is very impressive. It's rare that we will go for more than 3 wins without being matched up against a superior opponent. Some of the games are so close that it literally comes down to the probes/SCVs/drones.

StarCraft 2 is all about the rush tactics. Most of the games I win, are because I've rushed an opponent at the start crippling them in some way so that I can destroy them on the next wave (if not the initial rush). I've learnt to use quite a few different rush tactics, but my favourite is still the cannon rush. It's not really that hard to beat, but if you execute it correctly it can be an instant match winner. I like to consider executing a perfect cannon rush as a form of art. In the first 4 minutes of the game, you have to sneak a probe into their base and then warp in a Pylon unnoticed. Then you get one Photon Cannon operational and slowly creep into range of their base. At such an early stage in the game, there are no units that can destroy the cannons before they destroy their main building. Once the main building is down, they can no longer collect resources and it's GG.

Melf and have been employing a dual cannon rush for our 2v2 games with high success. The only downside, is that if your foe beats your cannon rush, it can take a while to build up a second offense. It's pretty much GG if you can't get a base going before they rush you with their first wave of units. Still fun though.

The key to winning in SC2 is being able to adapt to your opponents tactics. If you're good enough you can greatly influence their tactics and thus counter them. For example: A game I played recently was against someone playing Terran. Right from the start I devoted all my resources to building Void Rays (an air unit). They absolutely decimated his tanks and Marauders, which prevented him from getting the upper hand in the match. I knew that he/she would build Vikings (mostly air-to-air) to combat my Void Rays, so I stopped building them and began pumping out Stalkers (ranged unit). I won because his Vikings couldn't easily attack my Stalkers. The point here is that by building certain units, I was able to anticipate what units my opponent would build to counter and thus counter that. Confused? It's the fast decision making and micro management skills that makes SC2 so challenging and thus rewarding.

The other cool thing is that the game replay system allows you to view your previous games and thus learn from your mistakes. It's like a virtual level up. In fact the replay system is so awesome, that Melf and I have been emailing each other replays of our 1v1 games and analyzing them later. I find it really interesting to watch how people think.

In summary, I'd like to say that SC2 is the TF2 of RTS. If you are serious about PvP and haven't tried SC2 yet, then what are you waiting for? You don't need to be scared about getting into the PvP, since the matching system will always make sure you only play against opponents of relatively equal skill. In my opinion, SC2 is a bottle of adrenaline waiting to be opened.

And now for something completely different

2010-08-31T18:49:00.002+10:00

Thanks to Rock, Paper, Shogtun for dredging up memories of the Fighting Fantasy genre of games. I wiled away many an afternoon when I was about 13 playing through these kinds of books.

Lone Wolf was a big favourite. I can see how it might have scared some people away due to the seemingly random, endless potential for unbelievably brutal death lurking around every page. For me this created a splendidly compelling atmosphere. I'm not the type to feel "immersed" in games or books much at all, but after playing through these I think the closest I can come to immersion is when I genuinely care about every action and decision that I make, because I know it could be the last. This forces me to actually "play a role", but it's not what you'd usually think when we talk about role-playing games. The desire to play some stereotype like a Male Elf or a powerful wizard or a plate-wearing do-gooder is over-ridden by the simple desire to *live* to the next page. I find myself playing the role of *me*, making the decisions that I would actually make were I in the story. That's a pretty powerful thing.

The series also gives a great long-term "achievement" feeling with the powerful items and abilities that are progressively unlocked and carry over with you to the next adventure.

I've fired up the game referred to in the link above and it is fantastically well done, featuring the (fully licensed) complete text and illustrations on a worn parchment background and managing all the fiddly parts of the game mechanics while still letting you observe what's going on beneath the hood. I definitely recommend it to anybody who has played these kinds of books or thinks that they sound interesting.

Game designer lineage

2010-08-24T18:40:00.002+10:00

Brand names are a great way for companies to build up trust and repeat business from their customers, and games are no exception. It's a pretty sure thing that anything new from Valve, BioWare, Blizzard, or ArenaNet will be at the top of my "must try" list thanks to some stellar games that they have produced. As gamers we learn to distinguish these development houses from the parent companies and publishers such as Activision, EA, or NCSoft for the above. They are little more than suits; we know where the actual talent lies.

Or do we? After whining recently about some odd design decisions that ArenaNet are making for Guild Wars 2, I decided to dig into the Guild Wars 1 credits and see which people were responsible for making the bits that I was most interested in keeping. I was not concerned so much with the visual style or with the story, but with the core mechanics. Here is what I found.

Once upon a time, there was a young game designer named James Phinney. After proving himself with some minor roles at Blizzard he managed to find himself on the "Strike Team" (I gather that this is a Blizzard term for the "main dudes" overseeing the general design of the game) for the first Diablo. Proving his mettle on this classic he went on to be the Lead Designer of the original StarCraft. This is a game renowned for the beauty of its mechanics - the units, their skills, the upgrades, all tremendously fun to use but at the same time wonderfully balanced for 3 different races. What an all-star guy, right? In 2000 his buddies Mike O'Brien, Patrick Wyatt and Jeff Strain splintered off from Blizzard to found ArenaNet, and some time not too long after this Phinney joined them and became Design Team Lead for the original Guild Wars.

In short, Lead Design on StarCraft + Guild Wars = this man is my new god.

However a couple of weeks ago, unbeknownst to me, it was announced that Phinney was leaving to go and join Undead Labs, the new start-up from ArenaNet co-founder Jeff Strain who are working on making a console-focused Zombie MMO. Great move by Strain. Bad move by ArenaNet for letting him go. We can only speculate as to the reasons involved for his departure - surely ArenaNet have deep enough pockets to keep him interested. Let's hope it was something simple like personal problems, or him being sick of working on a fantasy game. However the worry is that he butted heads with corporate fat-cat types who wear suits, smoke cigars, have little dollar signs light up in their eyes every time someone mentions the word "MMO", and generally try to WoW-ify everything. Did this game design guru leave ArenaNet because Guild Wars 2 was turning into an un-salvagable mess? It seems frankly bizarre otherwise to leave a game that is so close to release and that is receiving so much hype.

But surely there are other talented designers working at ArenaNet, right? Well... tracing such an impressive pedigree in terms of design credentials for ArenaNet's other employees does not seem to bear fruit. The new Design Lead is Eric Flannum, who does have an impressive resume but mainly in relation to things like art and level design. He has been design lead on Sacrifice and The Bard's Tale, but I found both of these games fairly cruddy (especially Sacrifice). My main man Phinney was involved with Sacrifice too, but it was in terms of writing the story so I do not consider his record sullied. Anyway, next we have the 3 founders linked above who are all extremely talented programmers, between them having been lead/senior programmers on Diablo, the WarCraft series, StarCraft, and Battle.Net. But design magic is nowhere in their ancestry either.

Most of the other employees on ArenaNet's design team are either involved in art or level design like Eric, or are fairly new college graduates who do not have any specific role listed. Some of these could turn out to be budding design wizards, but it does not inspire much confidence. The one name that is listed as being involved with combat mechanics, and one that will be familiar to anybody that has spent some time reading a Guild Wars forum, is Isaiah "Izzy" Cartwright. "Izzy" joined ArenaNet 12 months before Guild Wars was released and was in charge (with input from his boss - Phinney - and a few others) of balancing the skills for several years after the release of the original Guild Wars, and as such was often the subject of much player ire. From my observations of the years I would say that he did not do a perfect job, but his hands were tied quite a bit by the addition of 4 new classes and a couple of hundred new skills when the Guild Wars expansions were released.

Apparently as of February last year Izzy has now moved on to be "involved in the development of combat, economy, and other unspecified "big systems" for Guild Wars 2". Here is me officially crossing my fingers and hoping that Izzy has learned some lessons from the first game and can steer this one away from the precipice it seems to be teetering on.

World of Guildcraft 2

2010-08-20T20:20:00.003+10:00

I don't know what to make of the facts that are dripping out of the gamescom footage from Guild Wars 2. First there was the "damage in the thousands" silliness. Then today I learn via Ravious of some more bizarre design decisions.

Example the first: "using a skill will no longer automatically put the character in range of the enemy. Instead the spell will cast as normal, fly towards the enemy as normal, and then fall short. As it falls short it then tells the player “out of range.”

I don't know what the rationale for this is. Yes it's more "realistic". It also sounds like a pain in the arse and a good way to completely waste mana/cooldowns.

Speaking of which: Elite skills apparently have a recharge time of 720 seconds. You may recall me harping on about how revolutionary the short cooldowns of Guild Wars are a while ago. Now they're doing a 180 on this as though their initial success was just a coincidence.

Could it be that ArenaNet are not the game design prodigees I've been talking them up to be? Or maybe the people who made the smart decisions on the first game aren't with the company anymore? Or has ArenaNet been infiltrated by the Zerg mastermind that rules over Blizzard? Tune in next time for answers to these and other questions readers, same fail time, same fail channel...

Critical! 2000 damage! Huzzah!

2010-08-19T17:51:00.003+10:00

It's a well established fact that the larger you make a completely arbitrary number, the more WoW-like and hence the more awesome the game is.

Melf is displeased.

The Zerg Rush : A Case Report

2010-08-10T08:43:00.006+10:00

My experience with the 1v1 aspect of the first StarCraft didn't last long. I was happily mining minerals in my base and contemplating how lovely it would be to cultivate my ultimate fleet of 10+ Carriers to demolish the enemy, when half a dozen Zerglings ran into my base. I had not yet even created my first military unit and was promptly crushed, despite a valiant effort from my army of workers. The game lasted about 3 minutes.

How could I be crushed so mercilessly? I, Melf, Slayer of Noobs? Possibly this mysterious gentleman was some kind of Korean with "crazy micro" living in a net cafe. I knew that I could never pull off such a feat of human dexterity. The entire reason that I had selected the Protoss race was for their smaller (but higher value) number of units, to reduce the amount of clicking that my feeble non-Korean brain could accomplish.

Enter StarCraft II. A little older and wiser now, I knew that I would face the same "dirty" tactics again. There was only one way to prepare myself, to truly know my enemy. I would have to play Zerg and get this rush thing down pat so that I could defend against it.

Of course there was no way I would just jump into 1v1 battles to try this. Instead I practiced against the AI. StarCraft II is a huge step above its predecessor in terms of skirmishing vs AI. There are 6 difficulty levels, and the AI does not "cheat". It does not receive extra units or resources. It is simply smarter in terms of the order it builds units in, makes smarter decisions in battle (e.g. sometimes the enemy will run when they see that your army is larger, before the first drop of blood is shed), and of course micro-manages like a Korean on speed. After floundering around on Medium difficulty for a while, I moved up the ranks, trying different combinations of build orders until I was able to beat the AI on Insane difficulty. This shocked me - I had never managed to beat Insane difficulty with my beloved Protoss, and in fact I did it here in under 5 minutes.

There was something exciting I realized from all of this. I realized that this did not require "cracy micro uber hax" after all. In fact, it requires a lot less clicking and multi-attention-splitting craziness. Why let my games proceed to be longer than I need to? The longer the game proceeds the more units, more upgrades, more expansions, and more backdoor tactics there are to deal with. I get worse at the game by the minute!

Now I was ready to unearth my strategy on the unsuspecting n00bs of BattleNet. First, let's see what we're dealing with here:

This is the post-match "build order" of both players in one of the games I played. You can see that I make just one worker unit (Drone) in the beginning, before saving all my pennies for a Spawning Pool. This will allow me to make my little precious Zerglings. While I'm waiting for the Pool to finish building I make another Drone, and an Overlord to nourish my army. When the Pool finishes building I have exactly enough minerals to convert my 3 larvae into 6 Zerglings. With a waypoint set into the enemy's base, in no time at all these hatch and scurry off. With my base hot-keyed it's a simple matter of hitting 0 (select base), S (select larvae), Z (make zerglings) every time I see that I have another 50 minerals gathered. This brings a steady stream of reinforcements in and lets me focus on micro-managing the fragile Zerglings to make sure they don't do silly things like get slaughtered by an army of workers.

The fellow on the right was playing smartly. He starts off with a few probes to boost his economy, lays down a supply source (pylon) to keep them coming, and saves up enough for a couple of Gateways. This allows him to start creating Zealots, a strong melee unit that is the only early defense the Protoss has time to muster against my Zerg rush.

What you can't see from this is that he is also placing these buildings to try and prevent early rush tactics. Each base has a narrow choke point leading to it - he has actually placed both gateways and a pylon such that my poor little pets can not make it up the ramp without first chomping through his buildings. This theoretically buys him enough time to make enough units to stop me, and then trump me with his superior economy. However, using a pylon to make this wall was a bad idea because it powers his buildings. Chomp, chomp, chomp (eventually). There is a Zealot waiting for me on the other side but my 'Lings stream on past so that they can surround him, and once he is down go and begin munching his other pylon. This fellow does not make it easy for me - he sends his entire army of workers to come and harrass me. Fortunately my steady stream of reinforcements allows me to ignore them and get that pylon down. Once this happens his Gateways have no power and can not create units; there are no more Zealots to deal with and I slaughter the rest of the worker army at my leisure. A bare 3 minutes after the game started:

Now, I do feel a little bad. But this is all in the name of research, you understand. We must learn to fight the Zerg menace from the inside if we are to have any chance of prevailing in this war against the cheap, dirty tactics employed by the BattleNet hordes.

*gurgle*
*rasp*

StarCrafting...

2010-08-08T22:34:00.004+10:00

I've been playing StarCraft 2 now for for about a week and a half. Most of this time was spent doing the campaign or learning strategies for each of the races in co-op or custom games. It's all been fun, but my PvP heart was yearning for more...

So this weekend, Melf and I decided it was time to hit the big leagues. We skipped the rest of the practice league and jumped straight into some 2v2 team quick matches... oh boy...

For our first game, Melf and I both played Protoss. We'd been practicing a joint Warp Gate maneuver against 2 very hard AI with success, so we thought we'd use it as our starting tactic. Our opponents were playing Protoss and Terran. The game started beautifully. Not a single mistake from Melf or myself. The nerves were racing and the adrenaline was pumping. Every second of the initial base building was crucial for success. I was so focused, a passer by could have sworn I was having a staring competition with my computer. By about the 4 minute mark we both had a Probe scout close to their bases (hidden of course) and deployed a Pylon each. We both had 3 Gateways ready for when our Cybernetics Core finished the 'Warp Gate Upgrade' research (Crono Boosted of course). When your entire strategy relies on a single piece of research being complete, you watch that progress bar like a hawk. The second it finished, we converted our Gateways into Warp Gates and Melf and I warped in 3 Stalkers each to our hidden Pylons. We each warped in a second wave of 3 Stalkers before unleashing hell on our unsuspecting opponents. They both put up a good fight, but it was no match for a dozen Stalkers and another dozen on the way. When the 'You are Victorious' message box appeared, I sat back in my chair and smiled. This game is seriously awesome.

"Another game?", I asked Melf on vent.

"Of course", he replied.

We went on to play another 7 or so games with varying success. We managed to win 3 in a row at one stage, netting us both the 'Team Hot Streak: 3' achievement.

As the evening set in, Melf's girlfriend Lillsy joined us, and our 2v2 turned into 3v3. We played through to about 3am. Probably the most memorable game was the one where my base got destroyed in the first 4 minutes of the game and it was left to Lillsy and Melf and hold the team. I managed to save a probe and Melf patched me some minerals to get another based started. Unfortunately that got destroyed as well within the next few minutes. I was almost ready to surrender, but I thought I'd hang around and see what happened. I still had 1 Probe to my name which I hid in Lillsy's base. Melf and Lillsy somehow managed to hold their own against 3 opponents while I started a new base inside of one of Lillsy's expansions. Progress was slow, but I managed to get back on my feet. I amassed an army of Zealots and sent them out of Lillsy's base ready for action. To my absolute amazement, there was nothing left to kill. Melf and Lillsy had won the day without my help. Hat's off to their ninja skillz. My Zealot army was cool though ;)

Here's a screen shot of this weekend's results:

Good times...

StarCraft 2 first impressions

2010-08-02T12:30:00.001+10:00

After reading a few reviews prior to purchasing the game, I was expecting to play SC1 but with better graphics and higher resolutions. Well, yeah.. it pretty much is. I don't want to repeat what you could read in other professional reviews, so I'll keep it short. Is SC2 worth buying?

If you are like me and enjoy hardcore PvP on casual terms, then yes SC2 is definitely worth buying. They've made PvP convenient and awesome! There is a 'Quick Game' button that launches you into a PvP 1v1 match against someone of 'equal' skill. I honestly couldn't design a casual PvP game better than that. Click, boom your in! Pow, pow! Awesome!

At my level (very noob), your average game goes for about 35 minutes, which is perfect for slotting into those free time gaps. I can see this becoming the TF2 of RTS.

As another positive, it's very easy to play with friends and there are achievements and unlocks that you can showcase for your e-peen. The single player campaign is pretty good too. They also have challenge missions that are like playing mods from SC1. For example: Defeat 3 waves of enemies with limited units. You buy the most awesome RTS ever made and get a bunch of free mini games... can't complain.

I spent the entire weekend playing it and I want to keep playing it. Starcraft 2 was definitely worth the money I paid, and then some. Love it!

What does a GW2 level actually mean?

2010-07-30T13:59:00.003+10:00

I've just finished reading a blog post by Scott from Pumping Irony on the Guild Wars 2 leveling info released by Arena.net earlier today. For those that haven't read it yet, Arena.net have announced the level cap for Guild Wars 2 will be 80. As Scott pointed out, this seems like an awfully diku WoW inspired move by Arena.net. I'm not entirely inclined to agree. What I'd like to point out is that we still don't know what gaining a level in GW2 will actually means. For example, do we gain attribute points per level? I still haven't read any info released from Arena.net that suggests there are even going to be attribute points. What restrictions does the level of your character put on game play? Again, we still don't know yet. How long does it take to reach the max level? Until we get more information, the level cap might as well be 5000. It makes no difference.

What we do know, is that level progression will be linear and not exponential like most MMOs. That gets my tick of approval. Did we learn any other new information from the latest post aside from the cap being 80? Nope, not really. So the only thing I'm upset about with the latest blog post from Arena.net, is that there really wasn't much information in the post.

It would seem odd to me that Arena.net would move away from the winning leveling formula they had with GW1. If I had to guess, I would say that your level will only restrict the XP you get from kills. Same as in GW1. This forces players to move through the story/game if they want to progress the level of their character. Given the amount of design changes so far with GW2, it's best not to assume to much. So in conclusion, I only have to say this:

"Arena.net more info please!"

Crimson is back!

2010-07-24T17:42:00.001+10:00

It's been well over 6 months since I last posted here on the blog. I will explain why, but the short answer is that time constraints caused me to have a lifestyle change.

Just after Christmas (now 6 months ago) my girlfriend and I moved in with her parents to save money for a our own house. This threw a bit of a spanner into the works of my daily gaming routine. My gf's parents house is located 1.5 hrs travel time away from both mine and my gf's work. Essentially my gf and I were getting up at 5:30am for work and getting home around 7:30pm. Once dinner was cooked I'd get about an hour and a half of gaming in before I needed to be asleep ready for the next day. Shortly after starting this routine, my gf decided that she wanted to start doing a TV writing course after work. The downside to this, is that we catch the train home. Her classes wouldn't finish until 9pm at night, which meant she would have to catch the late train home. Unfortunately our train line has some shady characters around and it gets even worse the later you catch it. So of course I had to wait around and catch the train with her to ensure her safety. This meant that I had a gap between 5:30pm and 9pm after work where I would do nothing. I couldn't play games because my gaming rig was 1.5 hrs away. What was I to do? On our second late train home of this routine, we encountered a rather aggressive young fellow who was insistent on smoking a joint on the train while punching windows randomly (seriously wtf?). Anyway it scared the crap out of both of us and I decided that if we would continue this routine, I would need to learn some self defense. So I signed up to a Karate class after work which filled the void nicely. So for the last 6 months or so I've been training Kyokushin Karate four days of the week, as well as going to the gym. You can imagine the change in fitness/body shape going from a regular gaming geek who does very little exercise to a full fledged killing machine...

Let's just say, I don't worry about the crazy people on our train line any more.

With all this going on, I started to lose touch with gaming and the blog-o-sphere in general. Oddly I didn't actually tell anyone about it either. Poor Melf was probably wondering where the hell I disappeared to. Cheers Melf for keeping the blog going btw.

Unfortunately there is a downside to doing anything excessively, and that's 'burnout' (yes it happens in the real world too!). All the exercise was becoming physically taxing and it lead to some minor injuries. Mostly neck and back problems. I knew there would need to be another change in my lifestyle or else I would hammer myself into a wall. So a middle ground was found. I now do karate two nights of the week and gaming on the other nights. My gf has also adjusted her night classes to fit this schedule. She's so awesome :)

So what game did I start playing again once I started getting back into gaming? Guild Wars. All this talk about GW2 has me excited about MMO gaming again. Plus I still think Guild Wars is the best MMO available at the moment. It was weird firing it back up after over a year of inactivity. A couple of weeks back into it, I organized a 3 day LAN with Melf, his gf and the brother of my gf. I started a Mesmer and relived the good times of starting a character from scratch. GW is so awesome, and it's great fun gaming with friends! You can expect some more posting on Guild Wars to come, but for now, lets just say:

It's good to be back!

No kidding

2010-07-22T20:28:00.001+10:00

LoL by name and by nature

2010-07-20T18:46:00.006+10:00

A few months ago I attempted to play League of Legends (LoL). I am quite a fan of the Defense of the Ancients (DotA) style of arena-based RPG formula. However at the time I could not manage to actually get past the LoL game launcher due to some apparent retardicity in said launcher. After about half an hour attempting to make the game work I gave up thinking, "fine, it's a free game made by some amateurs turned pro, they need some time to iron out the kinks. I'll try again some time in the future."

Fast forward to ten minutes ago, where I saw an advert that their first proper competitive season is about to start up and that now is the time to jump on the bandwagon. Splendid! I attempt to log on to the website:

Right. Clearly I must have got this far last time. Seeing as how I used my generic gamer name, I'm sure I used my generic gamer password too:

Hmmm. No, I haven't forgotten, but oh well. Let's just reset the password so we can get on with playing this reportedly fantastic game:

Ahh, the unknown problem. That wonderful catch-all error message that turns your coding ineptitude into a summer breeze.

If you can't even make a basic website that will let me download the game, I'm not going to entrust you with any more of my time. My game time is already quite limited, as evidenced by the solidly put together couple of dozen or so games just sitting not even installed in my Steam catalogue because of the veritable gaming smorgasbord that we are provided with these days. LoL? Yes, I think I will LoL in your general direction now.

As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced

2010-07-05T21:29:00.002+10:00

Ergh.

From the words "this is the trooper.... he'll be our main tank" there was a sinking feeling in my gut. It was all downhill from there. I'm trying to decide whether the Jedi "holding aggro" is more of a slap in the face to the Star Wars legacy, or whether the honour goes to the smuggler throwing "light heals" around.

Luke: I'm excited for that new Bioware game.
Obi-Wan: That's no Bioware game. It's a space WoW.
Han: Bioware are too awesome to make a space WoW.
Luke: I have a very bad feeling about this.
Chewie: Unnggggghhh.

I'm turning Chinese, I think I'm turning Chinese, I really think so...

2010-06-13T11:45:00.002+10:00

Another milestone met in Australia's long term strategic goal of turning into a communist dictatorship.

Irony

2010-06-11T18:39:00.002+10:00

Ravious rightly points out that with all the free to play options open to MMO players these days, if you want to hang on to your subscribers you need to be giving them a steady stream of content. Give them a lump expansion and they'll burn through it all in a week and won't be paying you next month.

This is frankly what I assumed my subscription dollars would be buying when I first started playing MMO's. I see a steady stream of content becoming the standard way of operating for the MMO 2.0's of the near future.

It's amusing that the plethora of free to play games is going to force the improvement of subscription MMO's. I get the feeling that the "best of both worlds" (a steady stream of content without a subscription) is going to be Guild Wars 2, with the Guild Wars 1 War in Kryta event system acting as a test-bed.

Just release it already.

2010-06-10T18:51:00.001+10:00

*Shooooom* feel the speed of the incremental hype train.

Bioware MMO may contain insufficient WoW

2010-06-01T12:33:00.003+10:00

Disturbing news - Bioware appear not to be copying World of Warcraft for their upcoming Star Wars MMO.

The horror!

(...)

Seriously?

There are two types of people that still play WoW. There are those who love WoW and the only possible game they will ever play is WoW 2.0 when Blizzard releases it. Then there are the ones that play WoW but truly do yearn for something more.

I just have to reply to some of what Darren said in his post:

"Their expectations for what an MMO should be looks to be waaaaay off from what gamers expects an MMO to be"

Gamers, if we're speaking generally, expect MMOs to be steaming piles of doggy doo-doo. Therefore we can expect that SW:TOR will be waaaaaay off from that. Excellent.

"Bioware intends to re-train an entire generation of MMO gamers who’ve been suckling at WoW’s tit for the last 6 years"

It sounds to me like Bioware are targeting a much larger audience - gamers in general. To the majority of these, the prospect of another epic grindfest doesn't exactly appeal. I imagine they'd be quite content not to disrupt Blizzard's current teeting arrangements, as it will allow them to pull in a much larger pool of people. Not to mention that their forums will be relatively free of "be more like WoW" vs "go back to WoW" comment threads.

Not that I'm saying SW:TOR will break WoW's subscriber numbers. Bioware have a tough hill to climb because MMOs have such a bad name amongst the general gamer population. But to me it sounds like what they're offering is a lot more entertaining then:

"click through the text in these games and don’t read. Click-click-click…look at quest log….go kill 10 froogles"

And a quote from the interview that I think shows that Bioware may actually have considered all Darren's points:

"...people tried to convince us these limitations were canon... you could not, in fact, put interesting bits in an MMO because that was now sacrilege."

Somehow I trust Bioware's judgement in producing a fun game for me to play.

Official ArenaNet Guild Wars 2 blog is up

2010-04-29T09:14:00.002+10:00

I started writing about MMORPG's a couple of years ago (on another website, hopefully now buried in the mists of time). Like a lot of people I went through an exciting brainstorming phase where I proposed all sorts of crazy ideas to try and improve the MMO genre. Looking back now, some of it was good. Some of it was ok. A lot of it was short-sighted drivel.

While I have come to accept that I may not, in fact, be about to sigle-handedly revolutionize the entire genre, there's one thing that I can tell from this experience. ArenaNet is a lot better at it than anybody else has ever been.

The revolution is here my friends. Game on, Blizzard. Game on.

Demigod 75% off

2010-03-28T13:16:00.002+11:00

... Through their refer-a-friend promotion. Are you my friend? I thought so! Here's a coupon code:

DGFRIEND-4443391

Expires 8th April 2010

Brilliant 10 minute indie game - Specter Spelunker Shrinks

2010-03-27T18:24:00.003+11:00

Fascinating concept with a central mechanic reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. Give it a play.

The world is ending in a week

2010-03-24T14:16:00.002+11:00

The Large Hadron Collider is going to triple its previous record for high-energy proton beam collisions in about a week. Depending on who you ask we may all be swallowed up by a black hole, or possibly converted into some kind of soup composed of strange matter. Hold on to your hats.

Downloadable "content"

2010-03-16T15:46:00.002+11:00

Apparently the new Bioshock "DLC" is a whopping 24 kB in size. This means that customers are not actually downloading any content because the content was all already there when they installed it.

Perhaps they should quit with the blatant false advertising and re-label it DLP? (DownLoadable Permission). Might take the wind out of the marketing propaganda sails.

Ad karma

2010-03-14T22:55:00.003+11:00

Sounds like somebody should design a browser ad-blocker that downloads the ads but does not display them to the user. That way, everyone (that matters) would win.

Achievement unlocked

2010-03-13T20:21:00.002+11:00

Paraphrasing part of Sirlin's recent GDC write-up:

If achievements are removed from a game, the decrease in desire to play is proportional to how shit the underlying gameplay is.

Makes sense to me. Reading stuff like this makes it much easier to resist the temptations of the XP/GP overlord lurking inside my router.

Hats off for Valve, again

2010-03-03T22:17:00.002+11:00

Following the recent furore over Ubisoft's Nazi-style DRM scheme in which you must always be online or they will dispatch their killer dogs who bark killer bees at you and shoot lasers from their eyes and stuff, we receive news of this from Valve.

It's almost as though a group of people at Valve periodically sit down and say, hey, how can we do stuff to make our products things that people would want to actually have on their computer? I don't know what they teach the business grads who run a lot of the major gaming companies these days, but Valve are going to be laughing all the way to the bank while the rest of them fade gently into the company-churning mill that is the global recession.

The only problem is, I can't see any possible way that Steam won't have a >90% market share of games sales across the world within the next 10 years (this includes all physical retail outlets, which will die a slow death).

Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and all that.

Greatest gaming moments

2010-01-25T17:00:00.003+11:00

Team Fortress 2 is one of my all-time favourite games. It's casual, goofy fun while at the same time being tactical and competitive if you feel like it. I've had a lot of great moments playing this game, but the other day stands out as one of the most fun moments I've ever had in any game.

You see one evening I had decided to log into an instanst respawn, 100% critical hits server. This produced some initial jubilation due to a crazy amount of deaths raining from the sky. But the initial good feelings were not to last, as it was horribly unbalanced.

Just when I was thinking of changing servers, something magical happened. A vote was cast, asking people what they'd like the new gravity for the server to be. How unusual, I thought. Would I like to set the gravity to be as low as physically possible? Why, yes, yes I would. And so did everybody else on the server (hurrah for democracy!). This was the result:

If you're not familiar with TF2 or this map, suffice it to say, I am quite high up in the air. The other fellow is up even higher. We are scouts, who are able to double jump (jump again while in the air). Except when there's no gravity, it's not so much of a double jump as it is a quadruple jump. With lengthy amounts of floating on light, fluffy clouds in between jumps. Light fluffy clouds of hilarious death.

It's not just the pseudo-flying that was fun, it was doing it with limited / unpredictable control. Difficult steering, automatic critical hits, hilarious physics when you get shot in mid-air, and the fact that I had to come back down from my skywards jaunts every 10 seconds or so, all just added to the hilarity. I can not remember a funnier, more exhilariting game experience.

What are some of your favourite gaming moments?

Guild Wars Holy Trinity

2010-01-25T08:05:00.002+11:00

Guild Wars is one of my favourite MMO-style games for many great reasons. One of these is that the class system does not resemble the cliche "Holy Trinity" of tank, healer and damage classes.

Ravious over at Kill Ten Rats also likes that Guild Wars lacks the Holy Trinity. He'd like to see them get rid of the monk class to further distance themselves from the healing of the Trinity. This would be replaced by the ability for more characters to be self-sufficient, healing themselves.

I agree with this for the most part because, as Ravious points out, any system where you have to spam the chat for a long time looking for one particular class is flawed. However, we can't shaft the monk completely. See, monks feature not only healing skills, but these skills that are dubbed 'Protection'.

Protection skills are cast on players before damage lands, making them a lot more interesting to use than watching 'red bars go up'. Protection skills also often scale in efficiency the more players are attacking the target, making it a direct counter to the mindless PvP tactic of hitting the same fellow over and over until he dies. Suddenly a whole new dynamic is introduced to the game, where players have to judge when the other team is just building towards an alpha strike, or merely applying some pressure. This subtle dance of figuring out what your opponent intends to do is the cornerstone of every decent competitive game.

Other MMO-style games just don't feature these kinds of skills (or if they do, they are on some ridiculous cooldown), and this is why their PvP is regarded as a joke. Protection skills are the pièce de résistance of Guild Wars, they are unique to it and are a massive evolution in competitive gameplay.

There have to be different solutions to the "always need a monk" problem - maybe allow the dual class system to better pick up the slack, or give the other classes a smattering of class-appropriate Protection skills (e.g. Warriors offer protection from attacks). Whatever we do we can get rid of Healing, but Protection has to stay.

RTFFAQ

2010-01-15T18:19:00.003+11:00

In this latest episode of Keenwatch, Keen is disappointed because Global Agenda is not a traditional MMO with large, open-world areas. Allow me to quote directly from the Global Agenda FAQ:

"Elements of a typical MMO that are NOT in Global Agenda:

a large, seamless world to explore
quest givers
open world PvP or PvE
elves
If you consider any of these items to be must-haves within your MMO, we may not be the game for you."

"Overall, we consider the game to be an Action-based Shooter MMO. The game offers the fluid gameplay mechanics of a multi-player shooter, with elements of character progression, territory control and economy drawn from the MMO genre. The gameplay includes both player-vs-evironment and player-vs-player content, but all of it is fast-paced and highly engaging and designed to get you into the action quickly"

And this, from "The Game" linked to on the main page of the Global Agenda website:

"Co-Op with friends online - Four players share the same online mission experience - working as a team,communicating via built-in text and voice chat, infiltrating facilities, defeating end bosses, and earning technology upgrades.

Compete in fast-paced, multiplayer matches - Teamwork and tactics are paramount within objective-based game types designed from the ground up to support intense and balanced player vs. player combat."

What part of the description of this game implies your generic, open-world MMO? Gee, if I didn't know better I'd say that Keen tries to shoehorn every single game he plays into some UO/Darkfall/WoW extravaganza of failure.

Oh, also, he seems to be QQing about instancing a lot lately. If you want your generic mash-all-buttons-in-boring-non-interactive-carebear combat, by all means play a game in which every single person that is playing can all be crammed into one giant area.

If you want a game that the client and server can actually handle and possibly at the same time depict some semi-fun semblance of gameplay, you need instancing, because the technology just can't handle it otherwise.

There's.... too many of them!

2010-01-05T20:02:00.003+11:00

Useful tactic for posting something ridiculous on the internet to minimize ridicule aimed at yourself:

String together such a multitude of irrational, delusional statements that nobody knows where to start.

I am therefore motivated only to summarize and say that the so-called glory games of yesteryear that Keen discusses are all niche games, which do not appeal to the majority of people because they do not like getting ganked.

Crimson's 2009 top games

2010-01-01T11:30:00.002+11:00

Favourite game for 2009:
DEMIGOD

I didn't jump on this game when it was initially released, because it had an incredibly shaky start. To be truthful, it didn't sound the kind of game I would want to play. The screen shots looked a bit boring and I didn't want another RTS on the pile...

Around about July, Melf started telling me on vent that he had downloaded the Demigod demo. He said the game play wasn't what he thought and that the game had some good PvP elements to it. Well, the sweet talk payed off. I downloaded the demo and gave it a go. So glad I did! Demigod is an awesome little PvP game. Each game is incredibly tactical and requires a lot of teamwork and skill to win. It's exactly what PvP junkies need to survive ;) The game cost me around $40 US to buy, but it's been on special so many times that you should be able to pick it up for under $20 US now. Stardock and Gas Powered Games still seem to be releasing new content for it, so it's definitely worth buying in my opinion.

Next up:
TEAM FORTRESS 2

With all the updates Valve have been releasing, how can you not play this game? What I love about TF2 is that you can jump into a game and get a high speed action PvP fix within seconds. You can also leave without making too much of an impact on your team mates, which makes this the perfect casual PvP game.

CITY OF HEORES/VILLAINS

Oddly I didn't really play a lot of MMOs this year, however I did play City of Heroes/Villains for 4 months. I really enjoyed this game initially because, well it feels good to be a super hero. My girlfriend even played it for a couple of months, which says a lot (she doesn't play games usually). I stopped playing for two reasons; The PvP was crap and the Mission Architect patch took the fun out of the game.

Other games of note that I felt I got my money's well worth:

Left 4 Dead
Plants vs Zombies
Defense Grid: The Awakening

I'm reluctant to put Dragon Age on this list because I still haven't completed it yet and have no motivation to do so. In my opinion Baldurs Gate 2 is better.

What game sucked the most? AION

I was severely let down by Aion. At some point when building an MMO, you need to stop and ask yourself, is this game fun? If the answer is no, then please take it back to the drawing board until it is. In short, Aion was not fun to play.

So in summary 2009 sucked for MMOs, but it wasn't all bad. Demigod was a surprise and TF2 held strong. Fingers crossed that Guild Wars 2 will release this year. I feel like I've been waiting for that game forever.

History lesson

2009-12-24T14:17:00.009+11:00

Every so often the issue of the so-called "holy trinity" of MMORPG design makes its way around the place. Everyone's got some idea that if only everybody else would realise the wisdom of, the world would be a better place.

A couple of months ago I had an argument with a random chat person in Aion about the Holy Trinity system. His stance was that it is the simplest way to approach an RPG combat system, including actual design and also programming of the AI. This was apparently evidenced by [insert slew of MMO titles]. I said, no, it's not the simplest, and it's not intuitive. It's also not particularly fun. His retort was something along the lines of "Oh yeah? Name one game that doesn't use that system".

After climbing back onto my seat, I realised that this fellow had fairly much only ever played MMO's. Those of us who like to write about these things we call games are often armchair game designers. But it's pretty difficult to have any meaningful input on game design if you haven't played the important games in the genre.

It seems to me that there were two main parallels of evolution in the online RPG genre. People in the first stream played games like EverQuest, got hooked on WoW, and try the big budget MMO's that come out. These people write articles about how we can tweak the Holy Trinity to be more fun, and/or argue with people in general chat about how awesome it is.

The rest of us played Diablo 2.

Now, I realise that for those of you who never played Diablo 2 on Battle Net (important), it may be a bit late to get into. The thing looks a bit dated, doesn't have as many people playing it anymore, etc. Here is a little refresher course then so that you can see how the other side lived:

1) Enemy AI pretty much just goes for whoever it sees first. Only thing is, the shit is going to be flying from every which way so pretty much everyone has to be able to look after themselves. This is easy to design, easy to program, easy for players to understand, and is quite fun.

2) There are no healers. Everyone heals themselves with potions, but these don't help when you get hit too fast all at once.

3) Except when they do help. You even get potions that instantly restore all your health and mana. These are your get out of jail free cards. But they are hard to come by and you only hold so many. You do need them from time to time because that shit, that flies in so fast? It hits hard.

4) The game consists of 7 different classes, each one of which is useful to have in any group. Each one feels radically different to play. Many of them synergise quite well with each other. You would never sit around in a game waiting for any one class to show up.

However, at the same time, some do better at tanking. Some do better at damage. Some are a compromise between the two. But they are never extremes.

5) Did I mention the shit flying in fast? This isn't a game where you spend a minute grinding down a monster that's 2 levels above you. Your longest spell cooldown is about 1 second, and is often limited by how fast you can get your little sucker to animate each one. As fast as that shit be flyin' in, you are reigning all kinds of death down to take it out.

6) Most games are public games. Anyone can join a public game. Once they do, the enemies in the world get harder to kill. This makes it pretty much beneficial for you to take whoever just joined the game along with you, as it soon becomes quite tough to solo.

7) Unless you're playing in "hardcore" (one life only) mode, making mistakes isn't that big a deal. You don't have to restart the "raid" for mis-clicking a button. If somebody dies, it's usually not going to mess the whole team up.

----

Diablo 2 has sold millions of copies as a result of its fun, addictive gameplay and easily accessible multiplayer. Clearly the traditional Holy Trinity is not the only way to do things. But WoW was en even bigger hit for Blizzard, surely its gameplay is even more fun?

Well, no. There are many other reasons why WoW is the most financially successful game to date. The extra time and money spent to progress make it harder to stop playing. There are massive social elements available. There's the more immersive, open world to explore. The graphics are better, including the shift to 3D. There were a lot more people with the internet in 2004 than there were in 2000.

But gameplay? Before 'thinking outside the box' to dissect and reassemble the Holy Trinity, it's worth just taking a little history lesson (ironically, it's still a lesson brought to the masses by Blizzard, which should at least make it palatable to those that need it most).

Moving in with the gf's parents

2009-12-23T18:01:00.001+11:00

Ha ha, yeah... My girlfriend and I are getting old (28) and want to buy a house sometime soon. It ain't going to happen unless we save a deposit, so long story short, we are going to be moving back to her parents place (in the outer rim) to save money for a year. Ordinarily I would have been against the idea, but there was potential for something that pushed me over the line:

LANange!!!

My girlfriend has a younger brother (21) who still lives at home and he loves video games and so does his girlfriend. He's never actually had a computer powerful enough to play anything other than Farmville, but luckily I have two. I've been buying up a bunch of Steam specials (and then some) in preparation for the LANage. Dawn of War and Company of Heroes could be good. I might even dig up Diablo 2 (love that game).

I also want to introduce him to the MMO world, but I'm not sure which one to show him first. He's still studying for his diploma, so I don't want to corrupt his free time too much. WoW is definitely out of the question. There is also the problem that my second computer is 5 years old and can't run much above Guild Wars, CoH or WoW. I was thinking Guild Wars because I love that game, but it seems to be slowly dying at the moment. I also have 1800+ hours on it and have played through all it's content a few times over. It would be fun for him, but not so much for me. My other thought was Wizard 101. He plays Magic the Gathering with his mates and Pokemon on his DS. Wizard 101 seems like a good combination of the two and should run on my old computer. It's also cheap in comparison to most MMOs. I reviewed Wizard 101 when it was first released and thought it was an excellently designed game. My only issues were the slow battles and repetitive card animations. These aren't exactly horribly bad points, so I'll most likely be firing it back up again just after Christmas (when the move happens).

In the mean time, I'll keep enjoying Torchlight and the other 10 Steam specials I've purchased over the last week. I swear, I have a weakness for game specials...

Syncaine post of the week

2009-12-19T10:27:00.002+11:00

WoW has recently added a feature that allows people to be randomly paired to go and do instances, regardless of where they are on the map or even what server they are on. This removes the ridiculous several-hour wait to get a group together so that people can actually go and have fun. Coming from someone who would usually take any opportunity to slam WoW for its evil design decisions, I can tell you, this is one of the most wonderful features that has ever been added to an MMO. And the mast majority of people are loving it.

Syncaine is upset by this. I'm not really sure why I'm surprised.

Fortunately I don't have to construct a response - here's one I prepared earlier.

Oh, he also managed to make the following ridiculous assertion:

"a sharp reminder that the WoW crowd is very different from the MMO crowd"

Riiiight. Have fun back in Darkfall with the 'real' MMO players then. Tell them both I said hello.

Keen post of the week

2009-12-19T09:58:00.002+11:00

Keen's QQ of the week is brought to you by Star Trek Online.

Keen is upset because the recently announced Klingon faction is not a separate playable faction, but is more akin to Monster Play from LotRO. As you know, I am bound by my sacred duty to rebutt ridiculous blog posts to make comment.

"Why isn’t it just another faction? Why does it have to be a gimmicky “additional advancement path” or whatever they’re calling it? Why can’t we have two sides struggling in a war that are balanced and able to play and progress the same? I envisioned two fully fleshed out sides interacting with each other in battles, economics, and more."

1) Because that would make the game take twice as long to make?
2) There has been no open world faction-based PvP game yet released that actually meets those criteria - it is kind of difficult to pull off, if you've been paying much attention.
3) Assuming that they decided against a full extra faction at launch for the above 2 reasons, isn't it actually quite nice of them to implement Klingons anyway? Must all gift horses be looked in the mouth? (Answer if you're a whiny MMO blogger - yes).
3) No Klingon worth his forehead furrows is going to progress by killing a bunch of lame rats. Klingons progressing through PvP sounds like it fits right in with the lore to me. +50 XP every time you teabag an opponent.

"The PvP is going to be pushed off into tiny little corners of the map"

1) Have you ever actually watched an episode of Star Trek?

"So much talk about the scenarios and “maps” and I have yet to hear about flying around in space in any open-world sort of way. Is it all just instanced areas/missions without any ability to randomly come across another ship and do battle?.... you’ll just “warp speed” to the PvP areas and “warp speed” out when you’re done"

1) People don't like being ganked
2) Only 15 year olds with an inferiority complex enjoy ganking unprepared, underlevelled, undergeared targets
3) Scenarios where you can just jump in and jump out whenever you like are great fun, and the vast majority of the people appreciate the convenience.
4) Warping in and out of missions fits right in with the lore.

"Lots of preorder rewards being talked about from various places, but until these little (not so little) details get cleared up I’m not paying a dime."

Lies - after Keen decides that Allod's online fails for whatever reason, he'll play it, fall in love with it, slam everyone who's not playing it, start to identify some problems with it, rage at it, quit it, and then slam everyone who's still playing it. Within the space of about 2 months. The circle of life continues.

Allods beta-key fail

2009-12-08T19:34:00.007+11:00

I got an email a few days ago saying I had been accepted into the Allods beta:

I have to admit, I was a little interested after reading this post from Tesh and seeing this video from Chappo. So I logged into the site and attached the beta key to my login:

Now all that was left was to download the game and play..

3 hours later, install game...

Login..

Fail!

I'm not really sure why, but it doesn't let me log in using the account I signed up for. It's not the login or password, because I can log into the Allods website with them. I tried creating a new account and attaching the beta key to that, but it just says the beta key is already in use (obviously). Anyone else having the same problem?

I'm happy to put this down to user error if someone tells me what I did wrong, but I swear I took the logical path?!?...

5,000 hours

2009-12-06T09:05:00.002+11:00

Only Tobold can say whether spending 5,000 hours playing WoW was the most cost efficient way to have fun during his leisure time over the last 5 years. We will have to take him at his word when he tells us that such a length of time has not had long term ramifications on his social relationships and his health.

But I don't think that this is good advice for the majority of people. The majority who have clocked up that amount of time on a single game have moved long past the point where they are having real 'fun' and are simply addicted.

Further, I am amused by Tobold's comparison of WoW and Dragon Age. His thesis seems to be that:

time taken = fun had

I would think it would be more valid to say:

time taken - time spent on repetitive seeming tasks = fun had

Of course, this depends on what seems overly repetitive to the individual. For me, the "fun had" side of the equation for a game like WoW is well into the negative. For Tobold, it's well into the positive.

I've never seen a picture of Tobold, but I am struck by the image of him running ceaselessly in a giant hamster wheel, tongue gleefully hanging out to one side. A big red button may be pressed that sometimes dispenses cheese. The frequency of cheese dispensation is inversely proportional to the number of cheese morsels that have been dolled out to date. Bemused scientists look on from the sidelines making notes in their clipboards, wondering whether this beast of epic endurance will ever tire of their test.

Gaming Dictatorships

2009-12-05T08:55:00.002+11:00

You must play the way I want you to play, even if it has little to no impact on the way I play. You are not playing the real game; only I am playing the real game. Therefore you can not possibly be having fun; only I am having fun. The developers have blessed me with divine insight into their development intentions which, by the way, were not to maximize their profits by appealing to a wider audience, but rather to create an environment that appeals to a minority of the gaming population. Trust in my wisdom, for I change MMO's more often than I change my socks and thus have accumulated vast experience in these matters.

Demigod style PvP in Diku MMOs?

2009-11-28T12:41:00.003+11:00

I've been playing a lot of Demigod lately, especially since the Demon Assassin update, and I had a thought: Why not put Demigod style PvP arenas in games like Aion, WoW, WAR etc? It would put everyone on the same starting level regardless of weapons/armour/items. It would be challenging and fun, but most of all fair.

For those that haven't played Demigod, you basically choose a god (each have diff skills/abilities), join a team and then fight against another team of demigods. Everyone starts at level one with no weapons or armour and you gain XP and gold by killing waves of enemy NPC grunts that come from gates (in the bases), capturing flags or killing other demigods. Each time you level up, you can spend one skill point. You can also buy weapons and armour with your hard earned gold. Each flag you capture has a different bonus, i.e. +15% Health/Mana, +20% Skill Cool Downs etc. Flags can be recaptured at any time provided they aren't being defended. The ultimate goal is to destroy the other team's citadel, which is defended by destructible guard towers.

Now lets apply this PvP game style to something like WoW. Each class would be the different demigods. There could be 16 levels, with 5 skill points given per level. Everyone has a very basic starting weapon and no armour. You can buy/upgrade these in the game as you earn gold from killing NPC grunts, capturing flags or killing other players. The grunts could start as Murlocs or something and slowly level up as the game progresses. They would spawn from each other's bases and meet in the middle.

I definitely think it would work and it would mean you wouldn't have to grind endless hours for levels and items just to enjoy PvP. May cause a few care-bears with epic loot to cry though ;P

Aion review part 2

2009-11-20T09:50:00.006+11:00

The last you heard from me I had embarked upon my great journey to the unknown. Many moons later now I return unto you, broken and scarred from my travels, to delight you with tales from the fabled Abyss itself. (Ok, only one moon later... I've been listening to a lot of Dragon Age cut-scenes lately and accidentally break into melodramatic fantasy monologue from time to time).

In the earlier review I told you that Aion is a game of much polish, much prettiness, and much grinding. I was willing to bear the grind so that I could see the Abyss - that ginormous PvEvP area of theoretical MMO perfection. My thoughts:

The Abyss is the coolest looking area in the game, by far. It's a bizarre, abstract, twisted area that almost feels like you're in space. A giant red sun, asteroids hurtling randomly at you from nowhere, jagged platforms drifting aimlessly around, and stargate-esque devices that recharge your flight timer. When I arrived I felt that it had all been worth it.

This feeling was enhanced when I got my first sniff of RvR. Running around with a giant group of people and being part of a mindless zerg is undeniably fun sheerly for the epic nature of it all.

Unfortunately these feelings of epic grandeur did not last. Being in a massive zerg was a performance nightmare, with framerate dropping to something like 2 fps. I had to turn all my graphics settings to minimum to avoid the frequent crashes that otherwise plague all who would attempt a fortress raid. Bear in mind, my computer is moderately beastly and handles other newly released games on maximum settings just fine. This is the only area where the game does not feel "polished". I'm beginning to wonder if anyone will ever release an MMO that can support a large number of players all doing things at once.

The performance issues were probably exacerbated by my ~700 ping to the American servers, playing from Australia. When I played Guild Wars on American servers my pings were less than half this - I'm not sure exactly what is up with their net code, but it does not seem optimal for overseas types.

Performance aside, fortress raids are relatively few and far between. It is actually advantageous to NOT capture fortresses since one of the best sources for XP and higher levels is to kill the repeatedly respawning fortress guards of the opposing faction. Capture the fortress and you lose that ability.

When I actually did get to go to fortress raids and manage not to crash, I discovered that my contribution to the attack on the NPC's was laughably pathetic. Even at level 32 my auto attacks did literally 1 damage at a time to the elite fortress NPC's. It made me feel so pathetically worthless - the whole point of an RPG is to create the illusion that you're a superstar ("wow, you reached level 12, you can now cast mega fireball of raining death, congratulations!") as opposed to making you feel like an insiginificant gnat. The level disparity is just as bad when fighting other players - when you see one fellow effortlessly slice through a dozen "lesser" players, you just have to shake your head and wonder what the designers were thinking.

I'm sure things would feel better at high levels. But the grind... oh, the grind. If I thought it was bad at the lower levels, that is nothing compared to the situation now that I'm over level 30. Do I want to punish myself that much to get to the maximum level? Is it really that important to me to then be the one that can one-shot a bunch of "n00bs" and feel like I'm so amazingly talented at the game, when in reality I am pushing the same 1-2-3 buttons as all the other players?

The answer is no. If the levelling was faster, if the level disparity was not so important, if RvR happened more often and without crashing my computer, then I would probably be all over it.

Game over!

MMO commitment issues

2009-11-19T19:19:00.004+11:00

It's not you, it's me... I think...

Problem no 1: MMOs require a considerable time commitment in order to get to the higher echelons of the game. If you're not 100% happy with an MMO when you first buy it, it seems like a smart move to pull out early before you commit too much time to the grind.

This happened with me and Warhammer Online. There were some issues with the game I wasn't happy with, so I quit at the one month mark. The same happened with Aion. Issues, quit. Both games were not horribly bad, but because they used subscription models, I didn't feel like I should keep paying when I wasn't 100% happy. Why waste $90 US and 6 months of time, when you can be playing something else more enjoyable.

Some people like to refer to this type of behavior as MMO tourism. Well, I honestly don't like to tour anything, I just want to be certain that I'm getting a good source of entertainment for my time and money investment. You could think of it as an MMO shareholder really. If the entertainment value is potentially high, then I'm happy to invest.

Problem no 2: All the 'good' content in an MMO these days is at the endgame. When a new MMO is released, nobody knows what the end game is like. Should I take a risk and invest my time/money or should I move to something with a proven entertaining endgame (i.e an older MMO)?

To me it seems smarter to hang back and wait for the MMO to prove itself before making a commitment. This can be a little difficult when you see shiny new graphics and your friends are telling you how cool the battle animations are etc. There is also the fact that you don't want your character to be 6 months behind everyone else's.

Problem no 3: MMOs always release full of bugs and design issues. This does nothing to bolster confidence when determining whether to make a commitment.

Problem no 4: MMO companies love to slap you with that $15 US credit card fee right off the bat, before you've barely tested the water.

This always pisses me off, especially when I've just paid $50+ US for the game. A reward would be nice, since I just choose to buy their game over many others out there... but nope... more money please.

Problem no 5: When the meter is ticking, it feels like you need to get your money's worth. This sux if you're a casual gamer or even if you want to play multiple MMOs at the same time.

What happens if I want to play a new MMO casually? Is such a thing sacrilege these days? I don't like the feeling that my money is draining away when I'm not playing...

Solution no 1: Don't charge a subscription fee.

Solution no 2: If you are going to charge a subscription fee, don't start doing it until players have made a considerable time commitment to the game, or at least felt like they've had their initial money's worth (like 3 months). It's harder to leave when you've invested more...

In summary, the MMO companies need to lose the subscription fee or their MMO will struggle greatly to get off the ground. I'm sure I'm not the only one having commitment issues.

Guild Wars 2 Art Book

2009-11-13T18:52:00.005+11:00

After I got back from my Europe trip, the Guild Wars 2 RSS news feed was the first one I looked at when firing up my google reader for the first time 2 months. Apologies to other bloggers (you come second). Unfortunately there was no mention of a beta or possible release date, which was little disappointing, but all was not lost. There was news of a book containing the artwork of Guild Wars 2. I'm a big fan of fantasy art and an even bigger fan of Guild Wars, so I jumped onto the NCSoft store and ordered me up a copy. The book itself cost $30 US, and the postage to Australia was about $18 US. Still sounded like a bargin to me.

Fifteen days later the package arrived. I hastedly opened it and began scimming through...

Well, impressed would be an understatement. The book is 128 pages of pure unadulterated GW fantasy concept art goodness. As an added bonus, the book includes artist notes and considerable lore about Guild Wars 2. Drool..

All I can say is that if you love GW, this book is a must. Knowing now what the book contains, I would have payed twice that price (probably 3 times). If your not a die hard fan however, you can still view some of the concept artwork for GW2 on the official site. You can also get your hands on some GW2 info over at the wiki or FAQ. Now back to the waiting game...

Aion out, Dragon Age in

2009-11-09T20:01:00.006+11:00

Yup, like what the title says. Aion wasn't fun, so I stopped playing. Dragon Age is RPG heaven! Every time my Rogue performs a backstab, an angel gets it's wings!

If for some reason I ever decide to play a Diku style MMO again, it will be WoW. Although I despise it for it's business model and grind-o-time-sink type leveling, it still does it better than any other Diku style MMO out there.

You don't need me to tell you about Dragon Age, because if you were serious about RPGs you would already be playing it. Love that backstab!

Aion: Bad Quest Design

2009-11-05T19:09:00.004+11:00

Well... just about all quests in Aion are badly designed, but there is one that stood out more than the others. I received it when my Cleric reached level 17:

Yup, that's right, I have to resurrect 100 fallen allies. If you are wondering what the problem with this quest is, then hang your head in shame!

What's the fastest way for a Cleric (healer), who is responsible for keeping the entire group alive, to get 100 resurrections?

"Oh jeez, sorry buddy... went afk for a sec... here let me rez you.."

"Sorry phone rang, don't worry I've got rez"

You get the idea...

A good cleric would never let a team mate die (on purpose). So in actual fact, the quest is punishing the player for being a skillful healer. Furthermore the reward of 20,000 kinah is only really a large sum to a low level char. Once you pass 25 or so, you are making 20k or so off every quest run (drops alone). By the time I credibly resurrected 100 team mates, my character is likely to be level 40+. At which point the reward is useless.

Like I said, bad quest design.

Very, very jealous...

2009-11-02T16:03:00.004+11:00

Emily got to play Guild Wars 2 for a day.

She's my hero!

I honestly couldn't think of a better wish. Nice work Emily!

Hat's off to ArenaNet for being so awesome as well.

Torchlight demo thoughts

2009-10-31T10:15:00.002+11:00

Yes, I'm on a demo rampage this weekend!

Good thoughts:

1) Dungeon crawling feels fun, slick, and streamlined. There is lots of loot, but the mechanics are transparent enough that it's not too difficult to decide which to junk and which to keep. The skill system is easy to use and the skills themselves are quite fun. A range attack that pierces through enemies *and* rebounds off walls? Yes please.

Between this and Kivi's Underworld there are a lot of good ideas for maximizing the fun in these kinds of games, and I'd recommend playing both for anyone looking to design their own.

2) You get a pet that semi-tanks for you. It has an inventory which you can fill with crap, then send it on its way back to town to sell. Much win.

3) You can duel-wield a ranged and melee weapon, and you will fire/swing with the most appropriate one depending on the range of your target. I had a blast (pun intended) with my hammer in one hand and a pistol in the other.

4) I'm fairly sure the levels are at least semi-randomly generated, which keeps things fresh (that or I have a really bad memory)

Bad thoughts:

1) The cartoony graphics don't do it for me. They are cute if you like that sort of thing though, so WoW players won't see any disadvantage there. For me though it's a waste of an opportunity to create any sort of tension with the atmosphere.

2) There is no multiplayer. They are apparently working right now on making an MMO out of the game and I assume using the single player proceeds to fund this. But, some simple direct connection support circa 1992 would have been much appreciated.

3) The story feels like a direct rip-off of Diablo 1. I mean, they are quick to point out in interviews that "we are the dudes who made Diablo so we are awesome", but you can't just ctrl-c -> ctrl-v the whole thing.

4) One thing that was also plagiarized, which was always quite lame about the Diablo games, was the need to dump multiple skill points in a particular skill, usually for little tangible benefit. Ooh, fear the wrath of my increased 6% weapon DPS! (That's right, they actually use the terminology "DPS" in the tool-tips... that needs to die, stat). I much prefer the other approach where once you have something, that's it, it's yours... a la Dungeons and Dragons, Guild Wars, even Aion.

So in summary, they've got the core dungeon crawling mechanics done very, very solidly. But with no multiplayer and that cartoony look, I just don't find myself wanting to spend much more time with this one.

Left 4 Dead 2 Demo thoughts

2009-10-31T09:41:00.002+11:00

The demo has gone live for those that pre-ordered the game. I am... almost never one to pre-order games, but when it comes to Valve I just have to slap the money down.

Good thoughts:

a) The melee weapons are both hilarious and awesome. There is a guitar, a machete and a frying pan in the demo. The machete is close enough to being a katana if you squint a little.

b) I was worried that I would miss the old characters, but the new ones seem just as endearing. I like running around with a southern USA accent.

c) The new special infected are cool. There's a 'jockey' that jumps on your back, a 'charger' who is like a mini tank, and a 'spitter' who coats the ground in acid (this last will be especially appreciated against teams that camp a corner in versus matches).

Bad thoughts:

a) Day time is not as scary as night time

b) Some graphics-related performance issues. The game regularly freezes up for 5-10 seconds using the same settings I play Left 4 Dead 1 with. I'm sure these will be patched.

c) The censored Australian version is laughably light on the gore. When the corpses hit the floor they just fade from sight. This makes me a sad panda.

So overall I am pleased, but I hope there are more dark areas in the full version and I hope there is some dodgy way to obtain un-neutered carnage (anybody heard of one?).

Hmmmm....

2009-10-30T18:34:00.002+11:00

And in a nice counterpoint to Crimson's last post....

Think I'll take a break from Aion this weekend!

Making peace with the Diku

2009-10-29T19:08:00.003+11:00

Paying $15 US a month to grind endless hours away on repetitive tasks to gain minor virtual advancement, sound tempting to you?

After playing WoW for 6 months, I swore I would never go back to a Diku MMO. Oddly I played WAR for a month and am now playing Aion. What the hell dude??

The answer is simple:

I knew there would be boring grind
I knew that it would take a good 2-4 months to get anywhere in the game
I knew it would cost me an ongoing subscription fee

.. and I didn't care.

All I wanted was to submerge my mind in a fantasy universe and brain out for a couple of hours a night. Maybe even get a dopamine fix here and there.

My expectations for Aion were low. For a Diku MMO that has only just been released, I was pleasantly surprised. The game has very few bugs, looks gorgeous and has relatively smooth combat. My only complaints are that the servers are based somewhere light years from Australia providing me with a 700+ ping. When they say 'Oceanic server', it would be nice if they actually put the server in Australia!

Anywayz, my point is that the world is going to keep serving up diku MMO type WoW clones. You can spend your gaming life slagging them for bad design, or you can enjoy them for the masterpieces of art that they actually are. So it's time to suck it up and make peace with the Diku. For now...

...grumble... subscription fee... grumble...

...grumble, when is GW2 out? grumble...

AFK Over!

2009-10-23T23:01:00.000+11:00

Would you believe that I haven't posted in over 3 months! If you were wondering why (or you never noticed until now, but still want to know why), I've been traveling around Europe with a few of my mates for a few months. It's been a hell of a trip and for the most of it I didn't have access to a computer, nor did I want it. Hence the no posting or game playing. I saw many great cities and land marks in my travels, and had a tonne of fun doing it. My itinerary looked something like this:

London -> Madrid -> Barcelona -> Paris -> Bruges -> Amsterdam -> Berlin -> Prague -> Vienna -> Munich -> Venice -> Rome.

I really wanted to cover Ireland, Scotland and Northern Europe (Denmark, Sweeden, Finland etc), but there just wasn't time.

The highlight of the trip was definitely Oktoberfest in Munich. I was there for 5 days, with a best effort of 8 steins in one day. I still can't believe how many people there were in one place drinking beer. If you haven't been, then I suggest you make plans to go (assuming you like beer, and even if you don't).

My favourite city was a tie between Amsterdam and Berlin. Amsterdam had a few things to offer that would normally be considered illegal (++), but the beer was expensive (-). Berlin had the best pubs/clubs and party atmosphere (although I'm sure Dublin would have been a winner had I of made it there). The best beer I had was in Belgium and was called 'Strasse Hendrik', although Germany definitely had some close seconds. Best land mark went to Rome for the Colosseum. You have to see it to believe it.

All in all, I've had a wonderful time and was glad to completely put computers out of my life for 2.5 months, but now that I'm back, it's back to business! :) Melf has informed me that Aion is worth a look, but he hasn't made up his mind on the PvP yet. I downloaded it last Sunday and have a level 13 Cleric. My early thoughts are that Aion is blatant diku based MMO that makes no attempt to conceal the kill ten rats side of things. Unless the PvP is good, I can't see myself sticking around for any more than a month. Graphics are gorgeous though (I'm sure you've heard the same thing from 50+ sources). Moving on..

In other news Guild Wars released an update today that has my attention. A new type of PvP mode called Codex Arena, which sounds like the game designers from ArenaNet have their heads screwed on right (as usual). I'll post some thoughts once I give it run.

P.S.
Good to be back ;)

Aion review

2009-10-08T19:21:00.005+11:00

So, I'm playing Aion at the moment. I was going to give a little synopsis and then proceeed into a piece-by-piece breakdown of the game, but I realised that for Aion (and perhaps for most MMOs) this is not appropriate. Aion is a game of fantastical highs but also drudgerous lows; you will either grind and bear it because you think the highs are worth it, or you will leave it by the wayside after being exposed to the horror of the grind. An overview would be of little use...

... Although "like WoW but with wings" would be a fairly good one.

I shall break things up into the most relevant areas that I think any MMO should be critiqued on. I'll start with the ones that Aion does well:

1) Wonder 5/5

This is what the Bartle "explorer" feeling is all about - that general sense of wonder when you experience new facets of a game. Aion is literally a wonderous experience. The zones are incredibly laid out and pretty to look at. Here is the 6th screenshot from my screenshots folder (in keeping with a recent meme):

As you can see, I'm flying, there are some giant elephant/dinosaur/kind of messed up animals, the water is quite lovely looking, etc. I'm really not a graphics whore by any means but this aspect of the game is very impressive. Note that the graphics themselves are not always great - some of the textures, and especially the flowing water effects in the game, can look quite low-tech. But the vistas themselves are always something to behold.

The flying adds to that feeling a lot. You may have heard that you can not fly in all the zones - this is true. However, you can always "glide", which basically means that if you find even a slightly raised hill, you can coast your way along for quite some amount of time. There is some level of skill involved (I dare say, more than in the actual combat system; more on this below) and this actually makes it quite fun traveling to various locations. The wings are obtained at level 10 which felt like it took a couple of hours to get to (i.e. not too long).

2) Polish 5/5

People always talk about the famous Blizzard polish, which I'm sure we're all quite sick of hearing about. Aion is really, really well polished, so get ready to hear more of that term. Performance is great even for me connecting all the way from Australia. The translation from the original Korean is in flawless, flawless English - even the jokes are well localized. There are a couple of typos here and there but it's actually better than any other Western game I've played. There are voice-overed tutorials for key game aspects. There's hyper-linking of items and map locations and quests into the chat. You can even save map locations from other people - for example I've downloaded a location text file from the forums containing the locations of all the PvP rifts that open from time to time (joining the two separate worlds). There is a "locate" function for finding the next mob you're looking for or difficult to find NPC's.

The list goes on - the game is just smooth.

3) Character appearance customization 4.5/5

The character generator does not have the same flexibility of City of Heroes, but this is purely because Aion is not a superhero game. In terms of non-over-the-top customization, Aion knocks the competition into the water. In other words, yes, you can make a ridiculously hot female character to ogle if you're a man (I'm not so sure about the sexual attractiveness of the male characters; sorry ladies).

4) Achievements 4/5

I class Achievement features as pretty much anything that goes "ding". Between leveling up your character, your items, your crafting skill, your PvP rank, getting rich, completing quests and obtaining titles, there seems to be a lot to do to keep all the achievers occupied. There is really nothing new over what WoW brought to the table hence why it can't be given a 5 (disclaimer; I'm not really the biggest "achiever" type, so I'm basing this somewhat on what others say in-game and how similar to WoW it is).

5) Travel 4/5

As said above, you can fly, which gives automatic bonus points in my book. A flying mount is just not as cool. There are also fast flight and/or teleportation NPC's in most places that you need to go to. Some places don't have these, but are conveniently often located a long way away down gently descending land, meaning that you can glide there to your heart's content.

6) Zoning 4/5

The game is not instanced for the most part and there are no loading screens except on teleportation, so I know that will appeal to the "open world" fans out there. Again the game definitely plays up to the explorers.

However the game actually features multiple channels in the more crowded areas, which can be freely switched between every 3 minutes. This is actually a similar approach to what I've heard Age of Conan does, but where AoC was ridiculed Aion seems to be being praised. I think the difference is that it's quite out of the way so as not to break immersion (I didn't even realise about it until digging around in the settings), yet it still offers the massive convenience of getting around queuing up for spawns and general overcrowding.

So, that was the good, and there's been a decent enough amount of it to keep me playing. But you didn't think I'd go on extolling the virtues of a WoW clone for the entire review did you? Here is where Aion is really quite dismal:

1) Gameplay 1/5

Gameplay in Aion is non-existent. In this sense it really is WoW with wings. You have a bunch of skills that you mash in order, on cool-down. Changing the order is rarely if ever indicated as it will have little impact on the fight. There is a little more skill required in groups to prevent aggroing too much etc, just as in WoW. This is not a "gamey" game in other words.

One thing that really bugs me about games like this is the "one monster at a time" rule. The monsters are just too tough for you to be able to take on very many of them at once. Sure, if you want to provide me with no challenge then go ahead and do it - but could you at least make me feel powerful by letting me slaughter a horde of enemies at once instead of one at a time? Give me Diablo 2 any day of the week.

There are hardly even any AoE skills in the game, so it's not even possible to get a good group together and AoE a bunch of mobs down. Stuff like that could make the grind (discussed next) quite a bit more tolerable.

2) Grinding 2/5

There are some racist people who claim that Koreans love their grind games. At least, that's what I thought until I played Aion. The game is a massively soul sucking grind fest (hmmm MMOSG??). I felt this way about WoW, but Aion is noticeably worse. I am only rating it a 2/5 because I have heard that Everquest was worse again.

3) Grouping 1/5

Grouping is dismal, for only one reason - there is no bonus XP when in a group. This means that DPS characters are much, much better off leveling up solo. Even the healers are better off due to down-time in between pulls etc. I'm actually playing side-by-side with my girlfriend and we decided to split up and farm mobs separately so that we could level faster. That is a massive, massive design flaw for a "massively" multiplayer game (I can't remember what WoW does there).

4) Build customization 2/5

There are 8 classes currently in Aion. You begin as one of 4 archetypes (Warrior, Scout, Mage, Priest) and then each of these has 2 classes available to it, which you select one of (permanently) at level 10. So far so good.

However, up until level 20 you will have the exact same skills and stats as every other player of your class. There is no talent tree, no opportunity cost, none of that good old sit-down-and-knuckle-out-your-own-build kind of fun. Your stats can be modified somewhat by your gear, but generally the way to go there is just "focus on stat XX" - it's not very complicated. I'm not a big fan of needlessly complicated RPG mechanics (in fact I hate it), but this is too bare bones for me.

After level 20 things get better, as you gain access to "stigma" skills. These are basically extra skills that you can equip, however there are only a limited number able to be equipped at once so there should be some sort of opportunity cost involved. I am only level 21 at the moment so I don't have much more experience than that. It will be a long time before I get to tinker because the best stigma are highly sought after and expensive, so at the moment I have to rate build customization quite low. It's possible that I'll feel differently at a higher level, but really, every other RPG gives you character build customization at level 1 (or before!). That's supposed to be a staple.

5) Crafting 2/5

Crafting in this game is an even more epic grind than the actual game itself. Just like leveling your character level, leveling your crafting is even more painful than in WoW. The saving grace that prevents this from being a 1/5 is that there are "work orders", where the crafting NPC gets you to make something useless, but he gives you most of the materials. This is designed purely to allow you to level your crafting without paying too much money. This is very considerate of them; however, it is possibly the most boring thing I could imagine doing with my time.

On the other hand, it does allow me to read the forums and what-not. I am actually writing this entire review while my character busily works away at the crafting bench, which should give you an idea of how long it takes. You actually can level from crafting, but I wouldn't reccommend it. I spoke to a fellow yesterday who went from level 24 to 25 entirely from crafting. It cost him 400 k (about twice as much money as I have managed to save by level 21), and it took him 9 hours. Yes, the correct response is "lol" - however at least he was able to queue it all up and then go to sleep.

6) Enemies 2/5

The monsters in the game are for the most part quite ridiculous looking. On the one hand it's good because it's not the same tired old elves-and-dwarves fantasy fare. On the other hand, the enemies are so round, fat and squat looking that I want to poke them with a stick in the name of science rather than slaughter them. I don't think it's too much to ask for monsters that look a little more bad-ass. I am hoping that once I get to the abyss, the Balaur (the NPC faction) will look more intimidating. I know that the enemy players will look cool, so at least that's something.

7) Quests 2.5/5

Kill 10 rats. Good, now go and kill 10 slightly different rats. Nice job. Now kill 8 of these rats and 7 of those rats (some kind of psychological trick to hide the fact that the number of rats I'm being asked to kill is increasing, I'm sure). While you're there, could you collect X of this and Y of that - cheers.

In other words, standard MMO quests. However they do tend to make pretty much everything in any given area be something that you need to do for some quest or other. Kill a mob to satisfy one quest, collect the berries sitting next to it, kill the mob on the other side for some other quest, etc. It gives you kind of a "Ok, you're here, and you're going to be grinding for quite some time, but at least you're multitasking" feeling.

The quest text is extremely well written, but there's a lot of it, and as usual I don't read it. I have to say, if the game wasn't grindy, I probably would read it (I did for the first couple of levels).

There are a few quests that stand out from the dreary fare which I'd give 5/5 for general awesomeness (being teleported "accidentally" into enemy territory and being told to find my own way back was particularly awesome), but the dreary majority of quests has to lower the score.

The one thing that has been surprisingly left out of my review so far is of course PvP. The wonderousness of the game only gets me so far - the real reason that I'm putting up with the grind is because I want to get to level 25, which is the level that you can enter the abyss, which is the free-for-all PvP area. Call me old fashoined, but mention the words "fortress siege" to me and I just get all giddy. I'm quite excited to see how the PvP pans out after reading the hectic-sounding accounts in general chat. The "hostile to all" third NPC faction may be just what large-scale MMO RvR action needs.

It's a big let-down that I haven't been able to try PvP earlier than this. I went into the arena and fought a little against my girlfriend (who schooled me quite hard by the way), but it was devoid of other people. I miss WAR in this respect, where I could PvP all the way through the game if I wanted to, even from level 1. Scenarios were a great "jump in and have fun" feature as well and I definitely miss that aspect.

In summary, I'm still playing the game. I'm enjoying the scenery, and uncovering new aspects of the game and I'm very much looking forward to the PvP, and these things are allowing me to push through the interminable grind to the light of day at the end of the tunnel. If you're not much bothered by grind and are an achiever/explorer, I'd definitely recommend trying Aion. If you are looking for an MMO with engaging combat or great social aspects (grouping) then look elsewhere.

Stay tuned for further opinions, especially on PvP, as I get a bit higher in level!

Left 4 Dead DLC and sale

2009-09-30T20:36:00.002+10:00

Left 4 Dead is available for half price right now, and the new free campaign has just been released to boot. Get it now if you don't have it, or get back into it if you do! Either way, the more faces for me to eat, the better.

Epic fail: Australian dictatorship

2009-09-20T18:00:00.001+10:00

Urge to kill.... rising.

It's funny how censorship makes me feel much more like taking a gun and massacring a bunch of people than playing Left 4 Dead does.

Demigod half price

2009-09-06T09:56:00.002+10:00

.... So go get it.

My review here (short version: it was definitely worth the full price, letalone half).

Playing Demigod

2009-09-01T20:21:00.002+10:00

It's been hard to post lately. I have lots of good game design ideas, but writing about them often gets shelved due to the plethora of game demos sitting on my desktop to try. Then, these inevitably get shelved so that I can go and pwn it up in TF2.

But then, sometimes, a new game comes along that is actually interesting enough that I don't feel like playing TF2 whenever I log on. At the moment, that game is Demigod, and I am pleasantly surprised to say that it will probably keep me amused for some good amount of time yet.

I actually wish that I was off playing it right now, but I don't want to be selfish. I want you to experience the joy of it also. Ok, ok, that's not true. I am selfish. I care little for your joy. However this is a game whose online appeal is marred by quite a lack of player numbers, and in my poor isolated Australia (land of the high pings) we are below critical mass to be able to easily get a game going sometimes. Thus, I write.

Let's save some time and do this in bullet form:

- Demigod is the first of the DotA clones (Defense of the Ancients, a Warcraft III mod). There are 2 other clones whose release is in the near future; Heroes of Newerth and League of Legends).
- I never played DotA. I tried once and found it completely impossible to learn, and therefore shite. Demigod has no tutorial, but it does offer several difficulties of enemy AI players. The game is well designed so it is intuitive to pick most things up.
- Players control one of eight demigods. Yes, this is much less than the apparently 80-ish that DotA has. No, I don't believe that all of DotA's 80 classes played radically different from each other. Yes, Demigod's classes do. In addition there are a lot more different skills to choose from as you level, meaning many different "builds" to end up with.
- There is a full underlying RPG-esque combat system, but it is much abridged and all the various numbers are a lot more transparent. The upshot of all this means that you don't have to become a forum lurker to figure out how to play the game, but at the same time there is still a lot of diversity to toy with. I think it's struck a good balance there.
- Most games that people make are 3v3, but you can have any combination of 1-5 players per team (you can do 1v5 if you really want to). Games take around 30 minutes usually.
- The goal of the game is to conquer the enemy's base. This is best done by two separate yet equally important routes:

1) Kit yourself out with lots of shiny items and level up to obtain lots of shiny skills. This in turn comes about by killing wave after wave of enemy computer-controlled monsters. This is most fun due to the rapid leveling speed, and just what I need after too many hours grinding it out in MMO's. You get a hefty bonus for killing enemy demigods as well, and even if you can't kill them you will want to at least harass them to stop them from leveling up as fast as you.
2) Upgrade your team's war effort. This includes upgrading the turrets that defend your base, increasing your team's gold acquisition, etc, but the most important upgrade is to improve the fodder spawning from your portals so that it is less fodder-like and more base-smashing-zergfest like. The better upgrades are unlocked when you reach certain levels of "War Score", which are points that you get for controlling more of the various flags around the map than the enemy does (which each offer various bonuses of their own).

So there's some nice tactical considerations there. Do you focus on AoE skills to level up faster, or more damage/stuns/snares etc to harrass enemy players better? Do you upgrade yourself so that you can perform better, or do you upgrade your team's war effort? Do you concentrate your demigods in one area of the map to try to get some kills, or do you spread out and attempt to control a lot of flags?

Apart from these interesting design considerations, the game just works. It's a blast to play. The production values are high - everything looks top notch, the character's dialogue is amusing, the music is catchy. Each demigod is fun to play in a different way - from the giant castle that can sprout mini turrets from the ground and feed upon enemy turrets, to the "Unclean Beast" who is a force of unstoppable melee destruction, to the teleporting vampire lord who converts enemy monsters to become his minions, to the Angelic archer type that can snipe enemies from half way across the map.

Now, some people among my many legions of followers are not entirely enamored by competitive PvP games. However, note that you can easily play co-op with friends against teams fielded entirely by AI controlled demigods, at 4 different difficulties. There is also single player mode (yes, you can pause this whenever you want) so that you can go it completely alone, and I've found that I've got a lot of hours out of this. Single player also features a "tournament" mode in which you are paired with various combinations of the other demigods, across a variety of maps and game types, to see who can achieve the highest overall score. This becomes quite tough on the hardest difficulty, so provides a lasting challenge and incentive for the achiever within.

There were, of course, awful connectivity issues at launch. However I believe them when they say it's all fixed now, as I have not had a single connection problem while I've been playing. However, if I attempt to play a game with players on the other side of the world (300 ping is probably the limit that feels tolerable), the game will be a total lagfest. This is because the game uses peer-to-peer connections and so must (fairly) run at the speed of the slowest connection. The moral of the story is: play with people close-ish to you and you will never have any problems.

To make up for the rough launch, Stardock have provided a very generous demo. It is generous because it allows you to play the most common map and game type, choosing from 4 of the 8 demigods, for as long as you damned well please. At first this seemed like a bad business choice - why buy the cow when I can get the milk for free?

But after a week of playing the demo, I found myself happily forking the dough over to try out the other maps and characters. The thing is just a blast to play, catering nicely to my inner competitive PvP player, casual achiever, and of course the loot whore within.

Weekly column: Nub of the Week

2009-08-22T13:43:00.004+10:00

Every week I have decided to honor the hard work and dedication that some bloggers put into making the most retarded posts that anyone could possibly write.

This week's Nub of the Week is Keen of Keen and Graev's gaming blog. Note that Graev is not included because he does not appear to exhibit any tard-like qualities.

Keen has really made a clean sweep across the board in the last week, beating out a lot of bloggers in a number of categories:

1) Talking about going back to play WoW.

2) Claiming that having 150 players or less in a zone is not "massively" multiplayer enough. I'd accuse him of being some kind of mindless zerg player, but the funny thing is that even with 10,000 players in a zone, you'll be interacting with no more than a couple of them at any particular time because

a) They don't know you
b) You're all on different levels and have different quests and you're the wrong class and your armor really doesn't look quite spiky enough and wtf skills are those anyway /kick.

How about a new definition of a "massively" multiplayer game: Thousands of people available available that I can actually play with at a time. Whoops, games like WoW are not massively multiplayer. Diablo is though. TF2 is. Guild Wars is. Ooh, speaking of which:

3) Insulting Guild Wars 2 for being too instanced and then realizing that it's actually going to be much more 'open world' this time around. His blind hating on games that he has already decided he doesn't like, and his ability to make up silly nonsense about them, really cements his place as this week's Nub of the Week.

Redeeming qualities
--------------------

So, why is Keen in my Google reader? Well, he does have his benefits. For instance, he plays a lot of upcoming new games that I am sometimes interested in (eg Aion), and if he says he doesn't like them, I know that I have to rush out and try them immediately.

Don't call your new game an MMO

2009-07-19T10:36:00.003+10:00

If you promote a game as being an MMO, there are certain expectations from a certain highly vocal group on the internet. I think of this group as "MMO trolls", but they have also been referred to as "WoW tourists" (ironically by one of the most outspoke WoW tourists around).

The expectations that this group has of your game are simple to predict:

All features will be the same as in World of Warcraft

If deviations from this expectation are found, they will be frowned upon. It doesn't matter if you're hyping a particular feature as your greatest gift to the MMO genre, if the MMO trolls feel that the particular feature would make the game less like WoW, they will say that it's not a *real* MMO, and you should possibly expect the sky to come crashing down because the end may well be nigh.

So, don't hype your game as a *real* MMO. Don't hype it as an MMO at all. It only serves to attract people who have some bizarre set of anti-game-design rules that they seem to think anything with that moniker should adhere to.

Secret bonus comment: If you reply saying "How else can the company obtain $15/month from the players??" then you are a WoW tourist, I don't expect you to understand.

The logging off problem

2009-07-15T19:45:00.003+10:00

In the real world, people don't just suddenly disappear because some divine being on a higher plane decides to log off!? So how can we replicate the real world in games when users can log off at any time, or worse have their connection drop? The ability to leave the game at any time isn't just a problem with game realism, it can also cause many issues with group centric activities like raiding and PvP. How much does it suck when your healer or tank drops?

One thing that I have yet to see done in an MMORPG, is the ability to include other players as the objectives to your quest. For example, you receive this quest:

"Find 'Melf Himself' and give him this package."

or better yet:

"Assassinate 'Melf Himself'"

On a side note, it would be funny if your assassination target also had you as their target. It would be pre-ordained PvP with a PvE quest like twist. Something for everyone :P

Upon accepting the quest, you are blocked from talking to the person who is your quest objective. You are also blocked from using the their name in chat. The only way you can find the other person is to talk to NPCs and ask if they saw them recently:

"Yes I saw 'Melf Himself' pass through here only 2 minutes ago. If you hurry, you might catch him at the Blacksmith."

How cool would that be? Oh yeah... logging off problem... What happens if the other person logs off?

Now we discuss a possible solution. Why not have your character become an NPC when you log off? It could wander around and become one of the town folk, or even a henchmen (if you were in a raid or something). No matter what happened to your character while you were logged off, its status would always be the same the next time you logged in. The only thing that would potentially change, is the location of where you last left it. I think it would actually be kinda cool, as you would be surprised every time you logged in.

This would also open up the possibility of 'day jobs', like in city of heroes, except your character actually performs the job as an NPC. Player housing would also become more important, because your NPC character would actually have to live there.

In summary, we need some way to handle the logging off problem, especially with moving toward a dynamic type world. Having having a connection drop or a player rage quit during a group centric activity can really inconvenience other people. It also steals away from the realism of the world a bit. Solve the problem and our online lives become just that little bit easier. ;)

What's blocking MMORPG 2.0?

2009-07-07T21:54:00.006+10:00

Well the simple answer to this question is time and money, but I thought I'd analyze it a tad more than that. What are the major problems with the MMORPGs of today?

Problems:

Static worlds: Player actions have very little impact on the world. Kill something and it respawns moments later.
Everyone is a hero: Everyone follows the same quests and story lines.
NPC and monster AI: It's laughable at best. Aggro bubbles? Seriously...
Balance: How do you make completely different classes equal in strength?
Grind: These will always exist but the disguises need some work.
Economy: When you get 10 silver for killing the same rat that respawns every 20 seconds, you know the economy will have issues.

I'm sure there a more, but that's a good enough start. So how do we solve these problems? Can they be solved? These issues aren't new, they just keep getting swept under the design rug for some reason...

Solutions:

Static worlds: Simple, make the world dynamic... case closed! Lol, I wish it were that easy. As soon as '13 year old brat' learns how to impact the world in such a way that it ruins the gaming experience of thousands of others, game over. There are many ideas floating around on how a dynamic world should work, but as yet I don't think there is a right one. Essentially the world needs to react to player actions and handle them accordingly. For every player action there needs to be an equal and opposite server reaction in order to maintain a dynamic equilibrium. This brings me to the 'world without a player' scenario, where the world is ever changing on its own. Players should only ever speed up or slow down this process. The AI technology required to do this is available today. The problem lies with cost effectively developing the AI required for a living world into a game. You need an AI eco-system, that balances its self out based on player interaction. Slowly software frameworks will emerge, but I can't see it become mainstream for 10-15 years+.

Everyone is a hero: In MMORPG 2.0, this simply isn't going to happen. You will have a few legendary game changing heroes, a lot of champions and a tonne of community heroes. It's not a bad thing, as motstandet excellently points out:

"Give players the tools to influence the world and some place where they can show off. But make sure there are small pockets of communities. A hero doesn't have to be the one to throw the Ring into the fires of Mount Doom or the one to free everyone from the Matrix. He just has to be the one people tell stories about."

So the only thing blocking this from happening is problem number 1: static worlds. Fix that and everyone can follow their own story to heroism.

NPC and Monster AI: I've seen CS college graduates build NPCs with better AI than you see in MMOs. I have no idea why this is the case. If I had to guess, I would say that developing AI is hard thus costs money. If they can get away with adding an aggro bubble to a monster with a trigger to attack, then they will. There is nothing stopping NPC and monster AI from improving except the game budget.

Balance: This unfortunately is a problem that will only slightly improve with time. Balancing a game requires constant analysis of in-game activity via logging. The balancing process can be sped up with better tools and analyzing techniques, but essentially it will always be a problem.

Grind: Grind is a product of repetitively executing the same activity over and over. The solution to reducing grind also lies in having a dynamic world. If you give the player a different experience each time, the grind with be less prevalent. There will always be a grind, the trick is to disguise it through variety.

Economy: How can a virtual world get the economy right, when the real world can't? The solution lies with getting a balance of currency generated with currency destroyed. It's hard but not impossible. I often get the feeling that this area doesn't receive the attention it deserves. There is nothing stopping games from having better economies now except neglect.

Summarizing, the only thing stopping MMORPG 2.0 is time and money (told ya). The big stepping stone is developing a truly dynamic world and that won't happen for a while. MMO companies also need to recognize that there are other areas of their game (like AI and economy) that need more attention.

Important MMO elements to me

2009-07-04T13:35:00.007+10:00

I recently got asked a question by evizaer about what elements would make a good MMO for me. Unfortunately I couldn't fit that answer into anything less than a thesis, so I took a look at the excellent example provided by evizaer and decided to follow suit:

Ten points:

Emphasis on horizontal progression
Some vertical progression is fine, but the game should be based on your ability to use your skills at the right time, rather than being significantly more powerful because of level and/or items.

World without a player
The virtual world and all it's NPCs/Monster should exist and interact with one another as if the player wasn't even there. The player's impact on the world should always be minimal. Events should be occurring all the time which are optional but reward the player for participation.

Minimal static questing
NPCs can still provide quests, but they should lead to events. If two teams have the same quest, the team that gets there first and completes it gets the reward.

Carrot and stick society
Want to kill a peasant? The villages will attack and arrest you. If you break down a door to a house, expect to pay or suffer the consequences. If no one sees or hears you do it, expect to get away with it.

Destructive and constructive environments
Want to burn a house? Can do. The villages will rebuild it. Want to cut down a tree? No probs, but some dyad will regrow it. Just be careful not to set the forest on fire on your first day ;)

Death is bad
You don't necessary have to lose your character completely upon death, but the consequence should be enough to piss you off for the next ten minutes.

Difficulty through strategy
The goblins aren't hard to kill because of their level, they are hard because the sneak up behind you an attack in numbers. Each enemy should have different attack strategies. It's good to feel 'hunted' sometimes.

Spawning and movement
You should never see someone appear out of no-where. Spawning should happen out of sight of players. Enemies should not be glued to areas, they should move around and perform believable tasks.

Aggro
Forget aggro bubbles. If something hears or see you, then it reacts accordingly. They might ignore, observe, flee, hide, attack or call for re-enforcements. Also if an enemy is losing the battle, surrender and fleeing is an option.

Players must be able to feel safe
PvP should be kept to certain areas. This may be an arena or the 'borderlands' etc.

Some more general points:

Convenience vs Immersion
MMOs should appeal to both the casual and hardcore audience, with minimum sacrifice to immersion. Its great to be able to teleport everywhere, but unless 'teleportation' is apart of the story somehow, the game loses a bit of it's immersion. Same goes for bears dropping gold and bastard swords. It's nice to get such drops off wild animals, but it makes no sense what so ever. There needs to be a balance between player convenience and game immersion.

Realism vs Fun
A truly realistic virtual world, would be no fun. The game need to be a game, but with elements of realism. A good game will have found a balance.

Solo vs Grouping
The game must cater for both. Grouping should be rewarded to encourage community involvement, but solo players should not be penalized.

I realise that a lot of the elements listed hear are wishful thinking with today's technology, but lets not forget that MMOs in general were once a wishful thought ;)

The real hardcore!

2009-06-29T20:21:00.004+10:00

I fired up my computer first thing Saturday morning in the same tradition that I had been doing every Saturday for the last ten years, except this time it felt a little different. I didn't have an MMO to play. Saturday mornings are my only chance to get some quality gaming time in, and I had nothing to play... I checked my Steam friends list and Melf still hadn't come online, so that meant a single player game was in order. I checked The Steam sales, and to my luck 'Plants vs Zombies' was on sale 50% off. Easy sale.

What an awesome little game! I won't do a review as there are already hundreds, but I can tell you that I was impressed for the price I payed. About an hour into PvZ, a Steam message popped up in the bottom right of my monitor:

"Melf is now playing Diablo 2"

WTF? I love that game! I hadn't played it in ages. I got Melf on Vent and jumped in myself. Melf asked if I wanted to join him in creating a 'harcore' character on Battle.net. The catch was that we needed to first complete the game online in 'normal' mode to unlock 'hardcore' mode. The goal was set! I rolled an Amazon, Melf a Sorceress. The character choice was irrelevant because they would be thrown away after hardcore mode was unlocked. We rushed through normal mode in a little under 5 hours. It would have taken longer if not for Melf's ancient D2 knowledge and the help of a few higher level good samaritans.

It was hardcore time! I chose the Sorceress, entered a name and clicked to continue. The usual message appeared warning me that if I died, it was 100% game over. If Blizzard wanted to deter me, they were going about it the wrong way. Melf created a game, and both our characters appeared in the Rogue Encampment. Melf had rolled a Paladin.

The one thing about D2 that's strangely never bored me, is progressing through the first 5 or so levels. Its fun to find a useful weapon and get enough money to buy those essential items. I think the 7th or so Zombie to fall to my firebolt dropped some hard leather armour with +6 to life. Awesome! I scored a pair of boots with 10% faster hit recovery off a shaman. Leet! I love it!

Level progression in hardcore mode is a little slower than normal. You can't take as many risks, and you need to fight with one finger on the 'drink rejuvenation potion' button. Memories of my old school gaming days were flooding back to me and I was having a ball. The thrill, the risk, the challenge! This was the real hardcore and it felt good to be back!

We finished up Sunday night at level 12 and both still alive in Act 2. We have the Horadric scroll, but need the cube... Will we make it to the end? Hell knows, but we intend to try ;)

Mixing PvE and PvP

2009-06-21T00:04:00.005+10:00

Tobold has asked recently why developers should bother mixing PvE and PvP into the same MMO, because he feels that the design of each conflicts with the other too much, leading to a reduced experience for both.

The simplest answer to this question is because people like to do both.

The next simplest is because making a whole new game would cost much more money. A game that includes PvE with no PvP is a massive waste of resources for a developer. Contrary to the opinions offered by some people, the vast majority of players enjoy PvP in some way - simply not PvP in an MMO. The negative connotations related to PvP in an MMO can be attributed to experiences of being "ganked", i.e. steam-rolled in a fight that you had no chance of winning or may not have even wanted at the time, because

a) the other player(s) was a higher level than you; and/or
b) you were outnumbered; and/or
c) the other player was able to attack you where/when you did not wish to be attacked.

For a), the solution in an MMO is obvious - make the achievement of maximum power something that is within the reach of all players, i.e., make any time investment required moderate (say, the same amount of time it would take in a single player RPG). This has the pleasant by-product of also fixing the retarded soul-sucking grind progression system that is PvE in many modern MMO's.

For an example of how to do this, as in many things, the answer is to look to Guild Wars. In Guild Wars it takes an easily achievable amount of time to reach maximum level. Most of the game happens at maximum level. Instead of arbitrarily increasing your power so that you end up fighting level 40 rats in between every town, you instead unlock new builds to try. Instead of forcing you to grind mobs/quests to obtain powerful enough gear to proceed through the game, you can easily achieve the most powerful gear and it's the good *looking* gear that you can grind for if you choose to. There is still all the e-peen stroking you can shake a stick at as a result, and all the other standard MMO stuff such as exploration, socializing, achievements (titles/emotes), super challenging areas with enhanced rewards (i.e. raids), etc.

Problem b) is another raised by Tobold. This applies to the 'open world' type of PvP, which often is and absolutely should be full of n00bs running around in big groups zerging each other. It is absolutely ok for the war as a whole to be asymmetric, dependent on who has put in the most time, etc, as this is the way that real wars are and let's face it, it's impossible to balance open world PvP any other way.

Two concessions must be made however. The first is that there must be more than 2 sides, as WAR's bleh PvP has shown.

The second is that there should always be tactical options available to players to counteract the movements of the other side. Games are no fun when no action that you could possibly take will effect the outcome. If your side has fewer players, it should be possible to accomplish various tasks to recruit more NPC's into the army (there should also be solid social networking tools, to organise the actual players that you do have more easily). If the other side chooses to zerg, tactics should be possible so that the enemy is forced to either

i) divide; or
ii) deal with the tactic somehow to avoid having to divide; or
iii) lose the battle/war

WAR has none of these factors and so can not possibly be a satisfying PvP experience (other than the thrill of running around with a large group, sieging a castle, etc, which I admit is quite fun the first few times). But these factors really don't get in the way at all of a solid PvE experience, so the good news is that future MMO's can easily adopt them.

Finally, problem c) above. There are many ways around this. The RvR 'lakes' in WAR were actually a good way to do this, and I hope future games adopt a similar solution.

Bear in mind that none of these problems are present in the more 'arena-based', e-sports style of PvP such as is found in Guild Wars. However for a long time, there were still balance issues where a skill that needed to be nerfed in PvP ruined popular use of PvE skills, or vice versa, making both camps generally unhappy whenever nerfs rolled around. This is another potential area of conflict between PvE and PvP game design.

However, again, Guild Wars eventually got around this - there are now simply skills that have an altered function when engaging in PvP. There are also skills that can only be used in PvE. This allows for fun gameplay in both areas, and for balance changes for one not to affect the other. Of course this has the down side of making the game more complex than necessary (and preventing people from smoothly transitioning to try out their less-preferred game type), but has the up-side of keeping a lot of people happy.

So in summary - PvE and PvP can and should be mixed into the same game, to provide a better experience for players and an efficient way to ensure game longevity and broader appeal. A little bit of common sense drawing from what's worked and what hasn't in previous titles is all that is necessary.

MMOs have made me bitter

2009-06-10T20:23:00.005+10:00

I look forward to reading posts that are a little off topic these days, because the usual MMO stuff is starting to sound like a broken record. I'd like to think that I'm experiencing another MMO burnout, but this feels different. I'm not burnt out, I'm angry at the industry for being so arrogant and stupid. They always claim to have a 'new experience', or some buzz feature, but it always turns out to be the same old shit with a different stink. I get the feeling as though no one with any influence in the industry is actually listening or even cares. MMO games are now all about how much grind they can squeeze in for the least amount of development cost.

Gamers aren't treated like loyal paying customers. These days your account can be banned for 'suspicious activity' with no warning or care from the company you had been giving money to for the last 4 years. It's also rare that any MMO games company will take responsibility for an exploit or a bug in their game. Instead they just swing the banhammer around and around and around. It seems to always be the paying customer's fault...

Gamers are made to chew the addictive paddocks of grindville, while the fat cats work out how to make the grass taste better so they can get a little fatter. I am yet to see a single MMO games company actually care about the health or life of the batteries powering their organisations...

MMO companies need to learn to divorce their business model from their game design so that the design is driven by user experience rather than by money. When I play an MMO these days, I don't see a land of fantasy or sci-fi. I see clever design strategies to keep players addicted. I see grind in all it's disguises. Worst of all; I have some idea in my head of what makes a good MMO, and all I see are dribbling excuses that feel more like cloned cash grabs than games. It's like my own analytical brain has doomed me to never again enjoy an MMO world...

Why is that MMO designers make the same mistakes over and over and over? When a new game comes out, it often follows the same flawed path as it's predecessors. Full of bugs, game plays the same as something else but with a buzz feature. The design barely works because it was put together like a picture puzzle with pieces from 10+ other puzzles. Is it because of the size and complexity of the project? Is it because of the financial risk? I'm sick of playing with mangled puzzles, I want a complete picture, and one that I haven't seen before. Is it too much to ask?

So what now? I still enjoy playing video games. I'd much rather play video games than watch TV. I'm going to be steering away from the MMOs for a while and instead target indie type games, where success or failure rests on quality design and clever game play. I want to be able to play a game and respect it's designers for being intuitive and creative rather than loath them for unorginality and repetitive blunders.

There are still some MMOs that I want to take a look at though: Jumpgate, Aion, SW:TOR and Guild Wars 2. I know that they will probably just increase my bitterness, but I haven't given up on the genre just yet. I'd be impressed now if any MMO could hold my attention for more than 3 months. If it did, you'd know about it.

So all in all, apologies if you catch me ranting about fail MMO design decisions in the comments of your blog. It will take a while and some quality gaming to wash the bitterness away. I'm playing Team Fortress 2 at the moment which seems to be helping. I love my RPGs, but it seems that MMORPGs are still a long way off winning me back.

Would you care about that in a non-MMO game?

2009-06-06T10:06:00.005+10:00

It seems like everywhere I look these days there is somebody spewing out some nonsense about how nobody will do anything in a game if it is not allotted a sufficient "reward", where reward is some shiny trinket that your character can keep.

In one form or another, the human race has been playing games for thousands of years. Despite the astronomical salaries attached to some pro sports stars, most people are perfectly content to play games completely for the fun of the game itself. When you checkmate the king in chess you don't look around expectantly waiting for his treasure chest to materialize in front of you, you set up another game and set to thinking about how you're going to take down your opponent this time.

This new bribery of sorts is a thing pertaining specifically to MMO's. Single player RPG's rewarded people with trinkets all the time, but it never became an issue because the games didn't involve "grind". Everything you did was moving you closer towards completion of the story, and very few encounters were the same as any others. Therefore you actually enjoyed what you were doing, and so did not need to be "motivated" to play through the game.

Most MMO's, on the other hand, are painful. Everything you do is the same as everything else you've already done, and so players actually have to be goaded, much like cattle, into going down a particular path.

The worst part is, there are some people who seem to accept this as par for the course, and play games only if the progression of juicy "rewards" fits their expectations.

These people are what are referred to, in general, as "Loot Whores". Don't get me wrong, we all love loot to a certain degree, but most of us can appreciate the fun or lack-thereof of the gameplay in some way or another. But the loot whore is a beast who has eschewed all forms of gameplay in favor of pure, pathological desire to obtain more loot.

Loot Whores come in two distinct flavours. The first is probably the most obnoxious, because they pretend to be "hardcore" in their appreciation for particular elements of gameplay. In actual fact, all species of Loot Whore care only about loot, but these "hardcore" beasts require their loot in a given context. Some players require that the loot only be acquired in the presence of at least 20 other people, or perhaps that the loot is not able to be obtained by at least 90% of the other people playing the game. The most obnoxious kind require the loot to be taken from other players.

The less "hardcore" flavour of loot whore is less bothersome, in that they will take their loot however they can get it. However, make no mistake - they are still a parasite on the soul of the video game industry, swaying the game developers towards removing all vestiges of gameplay from their games until all we're left with are glorified slot machines with a chat window.

What can you say to the Loot Whore to lead them back to the path of the righteous? I suspect that there is precious little, it is probably already too late for most. Perhaps the direct approach is the best. Sit them down, look them in the eye, and ask to them to please explain why they would give two shits about whatever they're complaining about if the game wasn't an MMO.

Doesn't look that smart to me...

2009-06-06T08:27:00.005+10:00

Wolfram Alpha

Let us eat cake

2009-06-02T18:19:00.002+10:00

Ryan Shwayder of Nerfbat has an interesting note up on his blog that I've been meaning to comment on for the last few days about Risk vs Reward in MMO's. Basically, he says that in order for the reward to feel rewarding, it has to come with a significant risk of failure.

I want to point out that there are different types of 'fun', i.e. reward, that someone can have in a game. For now, let's talk about just the two examples implied as the reward in Ryan's post. I will define these as:

"Nintendo" fun - the player continually tries and tries to beat something and then feels a rush when they finally manage to do it

"Shiny" fun - the less gameplay-linked aspect of "achievement" fun. i.e., getting new shiny items/levels/powers. I like to also call this "loot whore" fun, mainly to annoy people that I consider to be "loot whores".

Now, some people prefer the 'loot whore' form of fun. These people will be annoyed if an obstacle is too hard, because they are less likely to get their loot. Others prefer the 'Nintendo' form of fun. These people will be annoyed if an obstacle is too easy, because they like challenges. In reality, everybody falls in to both categories to varying degrees, and so will generally be pissed off in some way at some thing or another.

I think the standard MMO design tactic to circumvent this seeming paradox is to create the illusion of challenge. It's challenging to flip tails five times in a row on a coin toss, however there's precious little you can do to affect the outcome of the coin toss. Similarly it's challenging to beat a mob a few levels above you in WoW, but your actual actions in the game don't really matter much. I like to refer to this as 'faux gameplay'.

So, everyone feels challenged (but they actually aren't), and everyone gets loot. But, everyone is left feeling kind of a bit hollow (or maybe it's just me...)

Maybe a better way would be to actually divorce the 'Nintendo' aspect from the 'loot whore' aspect. Give players loot regardless of whether they succeed. Give the feedback for the 'Nintendo' typed players in the traditional form of high scores, ranking charts, harder difficulty levels, optional more challenging areas, etc.

Now, the reduced number of players QQ-ing on the forums may be offset slightly by the increased number QQ-ing about how all the 'n00bz' are getting the epic lewtz and how their e-peen is feeling dangerously under-nourished as a result. However, this is a small price to pay in my book, as this way we could have MMO's with actual gameplay that retain their addictive 'loot whore' nature.

In other words, we could have our cake and eat it too.

Valve announce Left 4 Dead 2

2009-06-02T09:36:00.003+10:00

Talk about rapid development

Surely sales of the first Left 4 Dead would still be going well only a year after release? It seems like Valve are shooting themselves in the foot a bit with this - or are they?

Actually, I think this must have been their plan all along. Think about it, they had a bunch of experimental stuff they wanted to test:

- Mass market appeal of zombie apocalypse
- AI director algorithms
- Co-op gameplay where any one person gets completely disabled without their team mates
- PvP where the 2 teams are completely different and have different objectives
- Level of interest for mini updates i.e. new maps/achievements/survival mode

So they make a relatively cheap game (only a few maps, no real story, they already had the engine developed) to test this stuff out. Now that they know it all works well, they can give us a 'bigger game' as they describe it with all these ideas fleshed out.

In summary: Valve's idea-test games are better than everybody else's *actual* games.

GG.

Industry insiders reveal how to fail at game design

2009-05-25T19:59:00.003+10:00

Thanks to Sente for linking to this piece by Sanya Weathers. Basically, Sanya interviewed a bunch of MMO industry vets who all pretty much say that players don't *want* story in their quests, players don't even want quest descriptions, players only want to Kill Ten Rats (TM)

I just have to chime in with my 2 cents here.

If you force players to grind for hours on end to reach the achievements that they so heartily desire, of course they're going to try and short-cut that as much as possible.

Solution?

Minimizee the freaking grind? Stop allowing your business model to dictate your game design? Oh no, knowledgeable industry insiders keep using the same old business model and instead blame it all on the players. As though they're not the exact same demographic that also like to play single player RPG's, in which story is king and if you skip the quest text you may as well uninstall the game.

In summary:

Step 1) Take out grind.
Step 2) Replace with gameplay (various challenge levels, twitch-based or strategical or a combination) and story.
Step 3) Profit.

A handy by-product of this is that without the grind, friends who get the game at different times can actually play with each other. What an exciting age of game design that would be.

Or, you could continue to go with the tried and tested "AAA" MMO strategy:

Step 1) Copy WoW
Step 2) ???
Step 3) Close up shop within a year from release because nobody is playing

The legend of Bartle continues

2009-05-20T08:56:00.002+10:00

After my recent rant about Richard Bartle, I didn't think my anti-Bartle-ire would be stirred again so soon. But it was.

Dr Bartle, Lord Professor Extraordinaire of MMO-Diku-MUD-backgammon-checkers game design, has descended once more from the mountain to enlighten us with his words of wisdom.

This time, he's telling us all about the wonders of Stranglethorn Vale. This is one of the more widely disliked zones in WoW. I'm not even going to do a blow by blow, as Syp and Scott have already got that covered.

I just want to put it out there. Richard Bartle knows squat about game design. Of course there is the distinct possibility that he actually knows ALL about game design, but since we're not one of the

"20 people in the world right now to whom this makes the kind of sense it makes to me"

us mere mortals could not possibly understand.

"I don't know if I've succeeded in any of this. However, I do know that if anyone tells me MMO design isn't an art form, I will strongly disagree."

Oh, it's an art-form my friend. You're just not an artist.

I would play if...

2009-05-12T19:42:00.003+10:00

Syp's got a bit of a meme thingy going on, which I couldn't resist. Basically you just state what would make you play a certain MMORPG. Here is my list:

I would play EverQuest 2 if the only computer I owned was seven years old. It would also have to lose the sub fee.
I would play Eve Online (again) if the combat was a little more exciting.
I would play World of Warcraft (again) if... give me a sec... If for some reason my internal organs failed and the only way I could survive was to be linked up to a machine that required me to play WoW.
I would play City of Heroes if the instancing didn't seem so dull and repetitive. Better PvP would also be nice.
I would play Runescape if I was blind.
I would play Star Wars Galaxies if it didn't have that old dusty feel to it. I'm worried my Star Wars fantasy world will be destroyed by trying it. Better to wait for SW:ToR me thinks.
I would play Dungeons and Dragons Online if it didn't have a sub fee or the sub fee was cheaper.
I would play Wizard 101 (again) if combat was a little more fast paced and the animations didn't cause epilepsy.
I would play Age of Conan if they paid me.
I would play Darkfall if... well, maybe when it's had another year or two to bake in the design oven.
I would play Warhammer Online (again) if it stopped feeling like a WoW clone with a tenth of the polish.
I would play Guild Wars until Guild Wars 2 came out (I'd probably still play it).
I would play LotRO (again) if it was a tad more polished and had serious PvP.
I would play Free Realms if I was tripping on acid.

NCSoft gives finger to own players

2009-05-06T21:50:00.005+10:00

So, in case you've missed the news - City of Heroes are going to "fix" the rampant power-leveling that the new Mission Architect system has generated. Thanks to Syp for pointing to the City of Heroes forums (the thread is currently 330 PAGES long):

"Players that have abused the reward system egregiously may lose benefits they have gained - leading up to and perhaps including losing access to the characters power-leveled in this fashion."

I assume this means that they are threatening to roll back the XP gained through the MA system.

I'm trying really hard, but I can't think of a community relations f--- up of this magnitude in an MMO, ever.

Issues:

1) If they were doing this a day after the release of MA (when the exploits started) then I'd understand. Why wait 3 weeks?

2) If this was not an intended feature, their QA team are a little slow for not finding it given that the community found it within 24 hours, and their community managers (who are supposed to read the forums and tell you what's going on) are hopeless for not passing the message on sooner, OR possibly the developers are stupid, for not listening to either of them. By rolling everything back, you're admitting that a good portion of your team are completely useless.

3) Why did they think subscriber numbers resurged when the Mission Architect was released? Was it because of all the awesomely written and well thought-out player-made missions they thought were being created? (99% of them are pure drivel)

4) If people choose to power-level through MA, they obviously think that farming large groups of mobs in a static area is far superior to all the landscape/scenery design, story-telling/plot, and myriad of enemies that the developer team gave to the players. Basically, the players are saying to the developers, screw all that crap you made, we'd rather eat these juicy balls of XP. To which the developers have replied, no, suck on this, we're going to make you grind through that crap whether you like it or not! Yes, let's punish our players for our idiocy! That should make them give us more money!

5) Perhaps this is just a threat. Maybe their data-mining has no practical way of telling how such a large number of people gained their levels. If so, this is probably an even stupider move, since they are then sacrificing their reputation for even less gain than before.

Fortunately my NCSoft fanboy-ism is still intact because I'm hanging out for Guild Wars 2 (and to a much lesser extent, Aion). However, if they actually carry through on this threat, they've sure as s--- lost 2 CoX subscriptions from my household, and I'm sure there will be many, many more.

For those frantically downloading the new patch to check their characters, my level 35 almost-exclusively-power-leveled blaster has not yet been affected. I imagine we'll find out exactly what's in store in a few days (after the CoX guys have dug themselves a bomb shelter somewhere).

Seriously, is there an IQ test that you have to fail to become an MMO developer?

/endrant

Redesigning public quests

2009-05-05T21:32:00.001+10:00

Lets just pretend I was a games designer for a big time MMO company (he he):

*boss walk in*

Boss: "Public Quests are the new rave Crimson. I want you to add them to our MMO, but do a better job than our competition... your ass is on the line!!"

Me: "Yes Mr. Boss sir..."

*scrambles for design pad and epic pen of inspiration*

*thinks*

What is a public quest?

A public quest is an open world event with a trigger, where one or more players can participate to gain phat lewtz. Problems with existing implementation are:

Can feel repetitive and grindy
Difficulty doesn't scale
Requires other people to be in the area (static locations)
Don't always get desired reward
Contribution is difficult to measure
Event always plays out the same

Possible Solutions:

Only one public quest is active at one time per main map
Have it occur at a random location on the map each time. The mini map could flash the location of where it is starting
NPCs in the area react and interact with the PQ when it starts (i.e. villagers run form a dragon or try to slay it)
Difficulty scales with the amount of people involved
Players are rewarded for early participation
Reward system based on 'PQ tokens', which can be exchanged for items

Nice to haves:

Have other players control the giant monster(s) involved in the PQ. They have objectives to complete, and boundaries etc. If the objectives are successfully completed (i.e. burn village), they get rewarded
Have quests spawn from the aftermath of a public quest. For example, players can help to put out fires and rebuild a village that has been burned by collecting wood/stone etc...
Make the PQ move around the map until players complete it

Ahhh who am I kidding, this is the MMO industry. Designers don't make it to the top by innovating, they get there by copying.

*boss walks in*

Boss: "Where are my ideas Crimson?"

Me: "Ahh... ummm... I suggest we copy WAR's implementation of PQs, but we make the bad guys more cartoony with huge shoulder pads like in WoW?"

Boss: "I love it!!! Crimson, you have lead designer written all over you! Good work!"

*boss leaves*

/sigh

Sad but true...

Stay awhile, and listen...

2009-05-02T12:35:00.002+10:00

So, who remembers Deckard Cain? Wizened old fellow choc-full of wisdom from ages passed... nice at identifying items in a pinch. Seems like he'd be practically brimming with mage-ish goodness that would make him fairly useful in a fight, what with being the last of the Horadrim and all.

Until, that is, we see that he has been enslaved by some level 2 XP-fodder when a bunch of scrub demons invade the town. Turns out that Cain, for all the hot air he blew out, clearly was not the awesome old Gandalf figure that we assumed he would be.

So, anyway, Richard Bartle.

Richard Bartle, like, totally came up with the first MUD or something. And I'm sure that everyone on the development team for early MMO's such as Everquest and Ultima Online actually played... hmmm, really?

MUDs are, honestly, pretty awful games. I played one once a few years ago when I was really bored. I don't know ANYone who actually played one during the "glory days" of which Bartle is so fond of pontificating over, you know, when those 75 people who played MUDs were totally pioneering the modern day MMO and everything. Yes, you can find older bloggers around the place who played them, but, clearly, they were not mainstream games.

Judging from the amazing way that modern MMO developers completely ignore developments to the genre made by anyone except for WoW, I can only assume that their design 'research' consists of raiding WoW 5 nights a week. So I kind of find it hard to believe that the developers of, say, Everquest, sat down and played MUDs and became influenced by their awesome gameplay.

Ever heard of parallel evolution? This is where two different species evolve the same trait, presumably because it seems like a useful trait to have. My theory - of course I have no proof - is that these completely retarded modern day MMO game mechanics actually evolved twice, independently... first, with Richard Bartle and his cohort of 12 people who played on MUD1, and years later, with the pioneering graphical MMO's.

The text MUDs needed gameplay that was slow due to their text-based nature, and grindy carrot-on-a-stick-ness because it was easier than making a strategical combat system. Early graphical MMO's needed slow gameplay, I assume, due to server limitations with such a giant number of people connected to them (unlike MUDs, which nobody played). And they needed grindy gameplay so that people would continue giving them monthly fees (which I am assuming after doing no research that MUDs didn't have, because, well, lol if they did).

Different reasons, same outcome... crummy gameplay.

So, I'm not sure why we're giving Dr Bartle all the credit here.

But, somebody will probably post some complete history of MUD-ness here and attempt to prove me wrong. To this I say.... whatever. *Even if we were* to give him all the credit... what are we giving him credit for? Shouldn't he be under a rock somewhere hiding from our collective wrath? If MUD1 DID cause all that came after, we have Richard Bartle to congratulate for a bunch of retarded soul-sucking gameplay. I mean, Achiever/Explorer/Socializer/Killer.... did he ever hear of actual gameplay?

There are people around the place who vehemently defend stuff that Richard Bartle says. They seem to attribute a lot to that first MUD. I don't get it.

Micro events idea

2009-04-29T19:22:00.001+10:00

One thing that really bothers me in City of Heroes is the static groups of enemies that stand at certain locations around map. When I first started playing CoX, I was running along in the streets of Paragon City with my level 1 hero and I saw a lady's handbag being stolen by some thugs. I instantly jumped in, defeated the thugs and saved the handbag. The lady thanked me and I went on my way feeling as though I had done a good deed. A short time later, I was running past the same location and I saw exactly the same crime happening again???

This is where the realism dramatically dropped out for me...

I decided to just watch and see what would happen to the lady and her handbag if I stood by and did nothing. Well, the handbag snatching animation continued over and over and over and over...

After that point, I decided not to bother helping the citizens of Paragon City, since it obviously didn't matter.

Now for my idea about micro events. Let just say there are 200 micro events per map. One of them could be the lady and her handbag. The server knows that you haven't completed this event before, and so it auto spawns it slightly ahead of your path. You are running along, and you hear a scream:

"Help me! He stole my handbag!!"

You choose to stop and help by apprehending the criminal and returning the handbag. The lady thanks you, and you get a small reward (an event token or something). The event is classified as complete and you never see it again. If you choose not to help, the criminal gets away and the lady weeps. You receive no reward, but you don't get penalised for not helping. The server remembers that you haven't completed the micro event and thus puts it back into the pool of random events that could occur in your path.

With micro events, the player would essentially be given a new experience in the persistent world each time and in different locations to everyone else. The event would be relative to your level. This would make the gaming world seem as though it belongs to you, but at the same time everyone else. If you are in a group when a micro event triggers, the event difficulty would scale. In the case of our handbag snatcher, he could have a bunch of pals around the corner waiting. The event would be completed for all players that participated.

Although I'm sure such a system would be rather complex to implement in an MMO, I think it would add that extra touch of realism, making the persistent world ever so slightly better. It would also make questing feel more sporadic and less static.

Customized instances

2009-04-28T18:44:00.003+10:00

Following the recent discussion on Tesh's blog about bringing the player vs bringing the class, I have an idea.

We've already seen games that are good at scaling the difficulty depending on how many players there are - for example, Diablo 2 and City of Heroes.

What if games customized the types of enemies that you were going to face, or their abilities, based on the combination of classes in your group?

For example, consider a simple trinity-style combat system with 8-person teams and 3 classes to choose from - tank, healer, damage dealer. Let's say a particular team consists of 4 tanks, 4 damage dealers, and 0 healers.

The game could adjust the enemies to keep the challenge level for the encounter at the desired level - there are plenty of tanks, so increase the rate at which DPS generates aggro. There are no healers, so reduce the amount of damage done by the mobs, and/or give the mobs less HP (so that they die faster, and hence don't slaughter the whole team).

This logic can be extended to other combinations of teams. There should be a law of diminishing returns though - for example in a 40 man raid, I would not expect the system to scale to make zero healers acceptable. But if there were only say, two healers, the system should be able to scale *to a large degree* to even out the challenge level of the encounter.

Obviously, it wouldn't be perfect. But, it would be tweaked based on data mining/player feedback, just the same as with current systems, and it would be a lot better than current systems where you if you don't have X amount of various classes, you just have no hope of beating the encounter. The benefit is that players would be much more free to bring whatever class they like, to experience the content that they're interested in. No more being pressured by your guild to level up a tank, even though you secretly hate playing them, etc.

Of course, I'm sure there'll still be the elitist top few % of players who want to compose the perfect team, and that's fine, that's half the fun of the game for them, so let them do it! But for the vast majority of average Joe's, this will let them just play your game to maximize their fun, without having to worry about whether they're going to get into an "end-game" raiding group with their selected build.

Thoughts or suggestions?

Grind is ok when...

2009-04-27T21:55:00.002+10:00

For a while, I've been saying that grinding in an MMO is ok if it's just for looks. Don't make people grind for power, but if they want some spiffy looking armor, they have to log up some hours.

But screw that, I have an even better idea, which occurred to me over long hours of brain inactivity while grinding in CoX recently thanks to the wonderful ission Architect XP bugs.

If someone's giving you $15/month, I'd probably say you should just reward them with some fluff, whether they've killed 1,000 foozles or not, whether they even log in or not. Then, if they want to bash their head against your gameplay repeatedly because it's actually fun, then they can feel free to (and if they actually do without you hanging the industry standard carrot over their heads, congratulations, you are not going to designer hell).

This is actually similar to EVE's system, in that you accrue stuff with real-world time spent, not game-time. Of course the difference here is that you don't make the older players more powerful... you just make them look awesome. The most flashy stuff in the game can take a few months to get, that way your veterans can still distinguish themselves, and new players are lured to keep subscribing.... but nobody has to grind. Unless they really want to.

This can only be win-win to me... thoughts?

Faux gameplay - losing control

2009-04-19T18:04:00.004+10:00

The goal of any game is to provide entertainment. Games are a diverse medium and can provide entertainment in a number of ways. I think you can break down the various ways to be entertained in a game into two main categories: gameplay and non-gameplay.

Non-gameplay aspects of a game are aspects that the player can not interact with in order to "win" at the game. This could include the quality of graphics, pretty scenery, the music, the art direction, the atmosphere, chatting with other people, etc. It also includes being able to do "cool" things in the game - anything that evokes a sense of wonder in the player.

Gameplay aspects are those factors that depend on player input to decide whether they will "win" at the game. From tricky fast-paced arcade timing of moves and abilities, to strategising on the best way to solve a puzzle, this stuff is what we mean when we talk about gameplay.

In good games, the same feature of the game features both aspects. For example, in Super Mario Bros 3 I can obtain the Raccoon Suit. The Raccoon Suit is powerful. It lets me fly for short bursts, slows my descent when I fall, and lets me hit enemies that I couldn't kill by jumping on. The Raccoon Suit is also awesome. It gives me little ears, my tail waggles, it makes cute sound effects. I'm also not used to flying around in a game and defying gravity and ninja-hitting people with my tail, so I am left with a distinct cool impression resulting from the unusual gameplay.

This is a fantastic marriage of the various ways in which I can enjoy a game.

Then we slide down the spectrum of well-designed games to, oh let's say, WoW. WoW features a lot of good non-gameplay aspects. Cool looking characters and powers, giant world in which to interact with people and cool looking places to explore. But what about the gameplay aspects? Tobold gives a nice run-down of these

Basically encounters boil down to: having good gear, prior knowledge/experience of the encounter, the right preparation (knowing build and skill rotations), 'arcade-style' reflexes, and tactical use of skills.

So what's the problem? Lots of gameplay there right? Well... let's face it. Players are lazy. They look up which gear to get, and then they grind until they have it. They youtube the encounter, or read some guides, and then use rote memory to get through. The build is also obtained from some website, along with the best skill rotations. Even players that don't look this stuff up on a website will have it forced on them by other players in their guild that do, as the other players expect them to contribute optimally.

Ok, so we're left with the arcade-style gameplay and the tactical use of skills as possible avenues by which the player can actually affect the outcome of the fight. The problem: WoW uses a GCD system, and so everything happens really, really slowly. Anybody can push the buttons in time. I don't care how old Tobold is or how advanced his arthritis is, he will always push the buttons in time - if he knows which buttons to push.

So the problem is reduced to, knowing which buttons to push at the appropriate time. I'm not talking about 'optimal skill rotations' here - I'm talking about what needs to be done at particular times to respond to a dynamic situation.

For a new player or for someone who doesn't read the forums, performance on this aspect can be pretty sub-par. This is due to the massive amount of information required for the player to know - they have to understand all of the game mechanics and the functions of many other skills and classes in order to make the correct decision.

But once this information is learnt, a game like WoW doesn't require much further tactical knowledge. Encounters don't change. Aggro operates by easily predictable rules. Sometimes you may have to decide who to heal if people mess up the aggro, or perhaps move out of some glowy stuff on the ground. There's no pressure vs spike considerations and there's little in the way of protection skills, meaning that you rarely even have to watch the gameplay to decide what to do next.

In short, it's pretty hard to mess it up once you've pre-learnt the little bits of information necessary for success.

Don't get me wrong, it's still an entertaining game, what with the shiny pixels and everything. It's just not really an interactive game. Tobold is quite correct in that the design approach makes it as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. But without really being challenged to interact with the game in *some* way to be able to beat it, I just can't seem to make myself enjoy it.

Mission Architect woes

2009-04-14T18:31:00.002+10:00

I'd been really looking forward to the release of the City of Heroes/Villains mission architect update, but since it's release I've started to get a bit worried. Two days ago I joined a mission team with my hero defender and the leader took us through a mission he had designed specifically for one purpose, farming XP. It didn't take me long to figure what was going on, as the mission had no plot or story line and the enemy groups were designed to be practically useless. It took less than 15 minutes to complete the mission with a team of 8 and in that time I gained three levels with my level 27 character (granted I was on double XP). Now if I had of been doing non MA missions, it would have taken 2-4 hours to get those three levels.

I'm not a big fan of grinding, so I often look for the easy path, but only so far as it doesn't ruin the gaming experience for myself or others. This definitely seems like an exploit to me.

For a long time now I've been asking for tools to allow MMO gamers to build their own content, but the reality doesn't seem to be quiet what I had in mind. Mission Architect has a few fundamental flaws. Players can easily build 'XP farm' type missions. If their mission gets taken down (reported for content), they can build another one in minutes. Also now that there is an easy way to get missions, why would players actually leave the mission architect complex? What happens to the rest of the game content and story arc? Surely the game designers/devs saw this coming...

History has taught us that MMO players will always abuse any power they are given. It seems odd that NCSoft would overlook such an obvious exploit. Either way, update 14 was meant to enhance the CoX gaming experience, but I fear it may be doing the opposite.

When the business model effects the game design

2009-04-07T18:35:00.005+10:00

MMO games need to be designed for two reasons: entertainment and money. The need to keep the player entertained, as well as make a profit. If the game does well in one area but not the other, or if it does measly in both, it often fails. Therefore game designers need to be vigilant when designing their games, so that they keep both boxes ticked at all times. This is where you say: "hey wait a minute, the business model has nothing to do with game design!?!?!"... if only that were true.

The design of the MMO must play to the business model and vice versa. An excellent example of this is Wizard 101. The game is designed so that certain areas of the fantasy world are 'locked' and you need to buy in-game tokens in order to unlock them. I know it sounds stupidly simple (and it is), but if the game map hadn't been designed into 'lockable areas', they would of had issues with their business model. In the case of Wizard 101, the alterations to their game design to incorporate the business model were rather minimal. The player's experience is impacted in a very small way.

Lets now take a more extreme example, where the business model greatly impacts on the game design. Since I'm not a big fan of WoW, it seems only fair that I pick on it. WoW unfairly gets a lot of attention on this blog when talking about bad game design. Apologies to the WoW readers.

WoW uses a subscription based model, and therefore makes it's money by enticing players to 'hang around' as long as possible. The game employs multiple techniques to achieve this goal, but the end result is the same. The player must spend a large amount of time to gain a very small step in progress. This could be in the form of grinding to gain a level, an item or an achievement. In the time it takes a casual player to get from level 1 to level 80, Blizzard has just made 4-8 months worth of subscription fees off them. In the time it takes to deck a character out with all the most awesomely powerful items, another 2-4 months. You get the idea... Essentially the game design plays to the business model, and it does an excellent job of it.

Where the problem lies, is what happens if all you want to do is skip the formalities and get to the endgame? You might want to only play WoW so that you can do raids with your mates. Unfortunately incorporating such a design change would conflict heavily with the business model. Blizzard would no longer make the 4-8 months worth of sub fees off you. Such a design change would be considered infeasible and bad for business. What does that mean for the gamer? It means you have to pay the money and put the time in or tough luck.

This brings me to my next question. Which business model has the least impact on the game design?

I haven't fully done my research on all available MMO business models, but I know from experience that the Guild Wars 'pay upfront' model has very little impact on the game design. ArenaNet could change what ever they liked about the game as long as the entertainment value stayed the same or increased. Their designers have one less thing to worry about when taking your entertainment interests into account. Ultimately the gamer benefits.

I know there have been many discussions about what business model works best, and this post is not about reigniting them. I just wanted to provide something else to think about when choosing an MMO :P

I don't get it

2009-04-03T16:07:00.002+11:00

So, everyone is up in arms about Time Warner declaring tiered broadband pricing in Austin, Texas. Apparently.

Some interesting facts:

1) In Australia, pretty much every single ISP charges this way. I had to re-read the press release a couple times to make sure I wasn't missing anything.

2) Nobody cares, because it makes sense - you get what you pay for.

3) The mainstream companies give you jack shit bandwidth per month. The lesser known companies give much more. Some of those companies give good service, others don't.

4) The better companies don't charge you for going over the limit, they just reduce your bandwidth for the rest of the month (with the option to buy more in small increments). Scott claimed that $1 per GB is 'ridiculously punitive'. Excuse me while I Lol. How is paying 33 cents per episode of a torrented TV show more than you can afford? God, some people will whine about anything.

5) Many downloads are un-metered. I'm with "Internode" in Australia, and as long as the Internode servers are available for Steam to use, my hefty Steam downloads are not metered at all. Many companies also feature "off-peak" downloads, where if you download after midnight it doesn't count (i.e. you set your download manager to go after a certain time).

So, worried about other companies following Time Warner's example? Well, they will. And some of them will be dicks who charge $40 a month for a 2 GB download limit, while others won't and will undercut the market. Shop around.

When I read Scott say "the end of the Internet as a content delivery system", all I could think of was "the sky is falling". This guy needs to harden up just a little bit.

Anything but the meme...

2009-04-02T21:50:00.001+11:00

I tried to hide, I tried to run, but the meme found me... aaaaaarrrrrhhhhhh....

Ah, who I am I kidding, I love being meme'd. Thanks Ysharros ;P

The Honest Scrap Awards

This award is bestowed upon a fellow blogger whose blog content or design is, in the giver’s opinion, brilliant.

Apparently the rules are as follows:

When accepting this auspicious award, you must write a post bragging about it, including the name of the misguided soul who thinks you deserve such acclaim, and link back to the said person so everyone knows she/he is real.
Choose a minimum of seven (7) blogs that you find brilliant in content or design. Or improvise by including bloggers who have no idea who you are because you don’t have seven friends. Show the seven random victims’ names and links and leave a harassing comment informing them that they were prized with Honest Weblog. Well, there’s no prize, but they can keep the nifty icon.
List at least ten (10) honest things about yourself. Then pass it on!

Seven blogs I love to read (not including the ones that have already been meme'd):

Chappo Corner: Another Aussie with a fetish for MMORPGs. Most of my game design ideas are a direct result of of his blabbering. I probably should pay him some money one day :P

A Ding World: Sente has very similar tastes in MMOs to what I do, so his posts are always a pleasure to read. He also often posts info about upcoming MMOs or updates long before anyone else (and includes plenty of pics). Definitely worth a spot in the old RSS feeder.

Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle: Only by reading mbp's blog will you unravel the MMO mysteries which are the mind bending puzzles.

Ixobelle: As far as writing style goes, you cannot beat this guy. Every single post is entertaining to read and often makes me laugh. Ix doesn't beat around the bush when game design is concerned. Who knows, he may even be a game designer for Blizzard one day. Probably best to suck up now ;P

Dichotomy of the Gamers Blogosphere: When Openedge takes a break from blogging, he still churns out 3 posts a day. He has a passion for blogging and gaming that I don't think I could ever match.

Kill Ten Rats: An MMO blog run by a group of really talented authors. I won't pick favorites (/cough Ravious) :P This blog has everything except player housing... when will they learn??

Thallian and Anton's MMO and Random Rambles Blog: I like to think of these guys as Megaman (Thallian) and the main character form the Secret of Mana (Anton). They are building a game together, which I've already signed up for the closed beta. Hopefully I'll get a beta key ;P

10 honest things about me:

I play basketball 3 nights of the week for 3 different teams. Tuesday's for 'B' grade, Wednesdays for 'D' grade, Thursdays for 'C' grade. I like to mix it up.
I have two favorite movies (aside form SW and LotR) and they are both Manga: Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust and Nausicaa Valley of the Wind
I didn't read a novel outside of school until I was 21 years old and my girlfriend purchased it for me. I now read a novel a week (or so). I've got approximately 80 Forgotten Realms books on my shelf to prove it. Funnily enough my girlfriend has a degree in Literature.
I almost failed English at school, but graduated second highest in Mathematics. It was evident that I was going to become an engineer...
I have a Software Engineering Degree with honours (yeah, yeah... show off). My major was in digital electronics, but I've never used that area of my education since I left Uni. I'm just a humble software programmer :)
The very first game I ever purchased was Metroid on the NES. I still have it kept away, although the box has seen better days.
My favourite games company is ArenaNet and I hope to one day work for them as a games designer.
I grew up in the country and moved to the city (Melbourne, Australia) when I was about 15 years old.
I learnt to drive at the age of 10. At the age of 14 I accidentally drove the farm truck into the dam. Strangely I pulled the handbrake on before swimming for it. Made my Dad's job 10 times harder when towing it out with the tractor. I got in so much trouble...
I am 6 foot 1 inch tall and can make my goose bumps stand on end with a thought. It's a cool party trick ;)

CC in PvP

2009-04-02T20:04:00.002+11:00

Saylah over at Mystic Worlds has a post up about CC in PvP, generally lol-ing about the fact that Blizzard can't seem to figure out that people don't like it. She raises a good point - nobody likes to lose control of their character by being stunned, rooted, feared, or whatever else the flavour of the month happens to be.

One way to get around the debilitating effects of CC is to never truly let people be powerless. For example in Left 4 Dead, when you are incapacitated you can still shoot. You are limited to using only pistols, you can not move, and your accuracy is impaired, but it's infinitely better than not being able to do anything at all. Further, should you die as either a Human or Infected, you are able to enter a free-roaming mode where you can travel very quickly around the map, spinning the camera around, passing through walls etc. You can scout ahead for your team this way, or simply watch the cinematics unfold from a pretty vantage point, or watch another player from their point of view (always entertaining). It's not as good as if you were still playing, but it's fun, and it passes the time until you can join the team again.

Another way is to have the CC be a heap of fun both for the person dishing it out, and the person taking it. The only example of this I can think of has to be knock-backs. In WAR I never cared when someone used a knock-back on me, even when it sent me hurtling off a cliff, as I was always too busy chuckling to be frustrated.

If approaches similar to the above are not possible, there are still plenty of ways to make CC a fun and balanced part of PvP. But it is important to realize that, by definition, class-based games are never balanced on a 1 vs 1 scale. If they were, it would mean that every class does effectively the same thing, which would then mean that it's not a class-based game at all.

No, in class-based games, balance needs to be considered on the team scale. As long as someone else on your team can easily counteract the effect, balance is preserved, and your fun isn't ruined. But, this is where most MMO's get it wrong.

For example, WAR. In WAR, there is a tiny icon that appears underneath your character portrait on the party member UI that denotes the effect that is on you. Your team mates can see this icon. However, there is a different icon for just about every skill in the fricking game, they are not easily distinguishable from one another, and the whole thing is a mess. On top of this, removal of debilitating effects is often not spammable due to cooldown and/or being in an undesirable spec. What you're left with is terrible gameplay for the person suffering from the effect, because nobody is going to help them out. I'll assume this all works the same in WoW, but I can't distinguish it from WAR in my head, due to WAR's blatant ripping off of... everything about WoW.

Anyway, let's now consider a game like Guild Wars. The differences are:

- All debilitating effects are characterized as either conditions, or hexes. A grey icon appears on the health bar for conditions, and a pink icon for hexes.
- Many effects can cause the same condition. For example, you could have the "Crippled" condition applied to you through one of several different melee or ranged attacks or spells, but they will all result in the same icon appearing on your UI, and the same magnitude of effect (in this case 50% slow-down).
- The fact that the icon is right on the health bar, that the icon is large, and that it doesn't have to be differentiated from a hundred other icons, makes it much more likely that a team mate will have the inclination to help you out.
- There is a little more specific information available for many conditions, eg changes in the color of the bar. But in general it may not always be apparent what conditions are on a person.
- This is supplemented with the ability to control-click the icon of the de-buff in your UI. This sends a message to team chat, e.g. "I am suffering from the Blind condition!"
- Condition and hex removal are spammable, and are effective even with minimal points in the particular attribute that they are linked to (many of them being linked to no attribute, i.e. require no stat point investment to get the full effect). Although you can "cover" important ones with lesser ones, in general it is easier to remove the effects than it is to apply them.

What we end up with is a system full of some really debilitating debuffs, but it's not broken because they can and will be removed easily. This forces people to select their targets and their timing more carefully instead of mashing skills on recharge like in most other MMO's.

Of course, there will be people who will recount some story of how they got jumped by a Rogue on some PvP server while they were farming Foozle eggs, and never had a chance. Boo-hoo. That's not "PvP", it's a retarded gank-fest. Class-based games can and should only be balanced for team play, never for 1 vs 1. If ganking is a problem in the game, fine, change the game design so as to make ganking not a problem.