Author: Jason

The Innovation Apocalypse

Gaming

Everyone these days seems to be talking about innovation (every letter is a link there).  And by innovation they mean games doing something “new”.

I’ve made a few comments around, but there is one thing I want to post about here that I feel is important.  I’ve touched on it before, at the end of this post.  MMOs are a different beast that other forms of games.

Left 4 Dead 2 made some game play changes from the Left 4 Dead model.  They added melee weapons, and the new boss infected shake up how you have to play, and the new “hordes until you turn them off” events instead of just the “hordes for X minutes/waves” ones change everything.  However, if you hate the changes, all you need to do is put your old Left 4 Dead disc and play.  The original game is still there.

When EverQuest launched, it had flaws.  Parts were unfinished and some things just didn’t work.  They released patches to fix those, and over the course of the first few expansions they expanded the game with new races, classes, item slots, abilities, and more.  But, the underlying game, the way in which you played, really didn’t change.  That came later.  If you were to play EverQuest now, you’d find it plays very differently from the original game.  With the new quest/task system that mimics WoW’s abundance of quests as opposed to EQ’s original more in-depth longer quests, mercenaries, more instancing, and other bits and pieces, it just isn’t the same.  The old game still does exist on the EQMac server, but if you are on a PC and want to play the old EverQuest, you can’t.

Even World of Warcraft is not immune.  The game as it exists now doesn’t play exactly the same as it did in the past.  The faster leveling, the LFG tool for instance cross-server groups, the changes in raid designs.   If you want to play the old WoW, you can’t, you have to play the WoW that exists now.  The new Cataclysm expansion will put an end to the old game permanently as those zones won’t even exist in their original form anymore.

This is what I mean by the title, The Innovation Apocalypse.  MMOs are expensive to make and expensive to run, and companies don’t want to see their game dwindle to a hardcore fan base and be faced with launching a sequel.  EQ did that with EQII and initially EQII was a flop.  They’ve recovered somewhat, and they have continued evolving EQ (up to expansion number 16 now).  They are looking at EQIII (which might be referred to as EverQuest Next), but don’t expect it to be an iteration of the existing model – it will probably be a complete reinvention.  If you are a fan of EQII, you should be thrilled with the idea of EQIII, because it means that all the new ideas are headed that way and are likely not to be implemented in EQII for a while yet.  But that may just be a matter of time.  Many of EQ’s more drastic elements didn’t come until after WoW and EQII were out.  Someday, the EQII that you love may be gone as well.

Personally, I’m all for innovation in new games.  But please don’t innovate in the game I’m already playing and enjoying.  It is heartbreaking when a game you love ignores you and is ruined in its chase of a new lover.

Removing Grouping – Part IV

Gaming

Communications and status updates were easy problems, relatively.  Especially compared with the mine field of the reward structure.  The next element I want to look at is content gating.

Many games implement areas where only one group can enter.  Or two groups, or five groups, etc.  When the designers put a cap on the number of people that can enter, it allows them to more reasonably design content.  If group size is 5 and you limit the dungeon to a single group, you can make content and then test it with varying groups of 5 characters much more easily than trying to design content to scale in challenge as the number of people increases.  Something that is challenging for a group of 5 might be trivial to a group of 10.  Of course, a formal group structure isn’t required for this, as the number of players within an instance can be maintained by the instance itself.  You could even place a UI element called “People in Instance” that would provide you a list of the players in the instance for easy selection and pinning to your UI.

After a long look, it actually seems that the main benefit of groups to content gating is actually in getting people who intend to play together into the same instance do they can play together.  Getting around this winds up being overly complicated with solutions like having one player enter the instance and then inviting each other player to join him.  That first player being designated the instance “leader”, a job he will pass off to someone else if he quits playing.  Then you have issues of players wipes, when everyone gets killed.  How does the game keep track of who belongs to this instance?  Is it because you have a dead body in there to recover?  If you get frustrated and log off for the night, is the group now permanently down a player because you left your body in the instance so the game holds your place?  Again, it looks like if you wished to remove the group mechanic from the game, like with reward sharing, you wind up needing to examine the entire game from the ground up and make changes all over in places where the group mechanic was either planned on or taken for granted.

Movie Round-Up: January 8th, 2010

Reviews

Skipped last week because, oddly, nothing opened on New Year’s Day…  anyway, onward!

Youth in Revolt:

Just as I’m getting tired of seeing Michael Cera play Michael Cera over and over, it looks like he finally decided to take a project which might prove he can act.  Sort of.  As Nick, he’s Michael Cera as usual.  But from the bits you can see in the trailer, when he’s Francois he’s actually not Michael Cera.  The movie looks entertaining, but as surprised as I am to see him acting, I’m not about to drop money at box office prices for another Michael Cera film.  I’ll see you on DVD, Michael Cera.  Perhaps I should revise this review, because I don’t think I said Michael Cera enough.  Michael Cera.

Leap Year:

Amy Adams in a romantic comedy about two people who are wrong for each other turning out to be right for each other.  The wife deserves a date night every now and then, and I can use it as an excuse to feed my addiction to chick flicks.  Yeah, I’m in.

Daybreakers:

It is really nice to see someone do something interesting with vampires now and then.  Hush, you Twilight fanatics… vampires who sparkle like diamonds in sunlight are many things, but interesting is not one of them.  Now, Daybreakers, on the other hand, takes us to a world where vampires run everything, and they hunted humans down nearly to extinction.  One vampire is looking for a way to make high quality synthetic blood to save his race.  But a group of humans have stumbled on something else: a cure.  In addition to just sounding cool, the movie looks cool, and it’s got Ethan Hawke, Sam Neill and Willem Dafoe, all of whom I enjoy watching work.  I think this followed by The Book of Eli next week are going to be a nice one-two punch of awesome at the theater.  I’ll be there.

Michael Cera.

If Only Spam Were True…

Random Thoughts

Having run a blog for quite some time now, I’ve seen my fair share of spam.  Since installing Akismet with whatever version of WordPress it became included with, my site has blocked over ninety-six thousand spam comments.  This number is actually low because for a period of time I also ran the Bad Behavior plug-in that would block some spam before it got to Akismet (I had to disable Bad Behavior because it was causing other plug-ins to fail – long story).

Because of this, I have seen spam evolve over the years.  You still get the usual vigra and tramadol and other pharmaceuticals, and you get the porn, but as administration and spam catching have changed, so have the spammers.

One of the more common spam protections is to simply force all comments to be moderated.  Then, when a valid comment comes in and you approve it, that poster, assuming they use the same credentials, will bypass the moderation queue from that point forward.  To that end, more than half of my spam these days are attempts to get approved.  They say things like “Love your site. Adding it to my bookmarks!” and “I never thought of it that way, but now I am. Thank you for posting this!” and other similar things.  They almost look real.  In fact, if you dig through my comments you’ll probably find one or two that I’ve let slip through.  Of course, I don’t use that level of moderation, I use Akismet, so being approved once doesn’t mean you are approved in the future, and the ones that have slipped through are likely early spams before Akismet learned it was spam.

According to my feedburner and a few other tools, there are about 100 people who are not bots (as far as I and my tools can tell) who read this site.  Less than a dozen have probably ever commented.  Perhaps that is because I’m not writing things that are comment worthy.  Or it could be when people agree they are less likely to reply than if they disagree.

In any event, one of the things I am going to try to do in the future is to comment on the blogs that I read.  Maybe not every post, but at least every once in a while just to say “Hey, enjoyed reading this!” or something.  Because, you know, it is kind of lonely when only the spam tells you you are doing a good job.  Heh.

An MMO cannot exist on PvP alone

Gaming

We’ve all heard the terms of “wolves” and “sheep” before.  Its the core of PvP.  No one wants to be the sheep, but sometimes you are.  In PvP games, you can learn from defeat and become a better player, but you cannot learn from being crushed.  In the FPS world, if you hop on a TF2 server and spend most of the game dead, you are less likely to return unless the game chat was just so awesome.  However, you can go to another server very easily, for no charge and no need to grind back up any levels.  For an MMO example, if you are in a battleground in WoW and your level 80 shadow priest meets a level 80 frost wizard on the battle field and you go toe to toe and lose, you can learn from that.  Pick different spells if it happens again, approach them from another tack.  But if you are out in the world on a PvP server and a level 80 warrior swings by and ganks your level 12 warrior, you aren’t going to learn anything from that beyond the fact that some people are power tripping assholes.  So, to keep sheep around, you need something for them to do, something for them to succeed at so that their faceplants in PvP don’t sting so badly.  And the wolves need the sheep, because if the “true sheep” start quitting, the “weaker wolves” are the “new sheep”.

Lots of PvP advocates love to trot out EVE Online as their example of how PvP totally owns and can be successful.  They conveniently forget that as a pure PvP game, EVE failed, and that over the years of its existence and continued development much of that has been spent making tutorials and NPC missions and trade skills.  The PvP of EVE has succeeded in the long term because the people at CCP worked on finding ways for the sheep to stick around.  Yeah, you might have attacked and destroyed my hauler and taken my load of goods.  You might have just set me back several days.  But I made twenty-seven successful heart-pounding runs through zero space before you got me.  And my rep as a guy who gets goods where they need to be is growing.  You are playing a PvP game, but to me you are just a new form of AI that I need to avoid in my PvE smuggler game.

The road to success is littered with the carcasses of failed PvP MMOs, and most of them end up failing for the same reason: they built a game for wolves and forgot to create a place for the sheep.

Removing Grouping – Part III

Gaming

Now that communications and combat status updates are out of the way, what else does a group provide?  Loot!  Or, more generically, reward sharing.

Personally, one aspect of design I’m eager to change is level based progression, but that’s a separate issue.  Reward sharing actually comes in two forms. The first I’m going to call inherent. These rewards are things like experience points or deed flags where simple membership in the group (and proximity to the event in most games) garners you a share.  The main reason for this sort of structure is to prevent exclusion of “support classes” from rewards.  If your group is fighting a group of monsters and you are the healer and during the entire kill of one of them you cast no spells, the group structure ensures you get a share.  Obviously, more complicated “cast spell on person who fought” award trees could work most of the time, but I specified “cast no spells” for a reason.  You are a vital part of the group, they need you, but it just so happens that for sixty seconds during one fight no one was hurt enough to require healing, so you didn’t.  I suppose you could get even more complicated and add to the award tree anyone who cast a spell on someone who engages the monster within the last X minutes, but that could easily bog down the system with keeping track.  A better solution is actually to remove rewards from the act of defeating a monster, at least for experience and move it to quests/tasks.  A number of games, most notably World of Warcraft, have already begun moving in this direction where grinding experience points fighting monsters is far less rewarding that fighting monsters that contribute to a quest that will yield a large chunk of experience as a reward.  Even though, group membership is still used to assign the quest flag (the kill of a rat for a “kill ten rats” quest).

At this point, we could start looking into different methods of awarding flags, such as the award being an area effect so that any player character within range gets the flag whether they contributed or not.  Each of them valid, and each can be done, but every method, even grouping, has exploitable elements, so the issue becomes which exploitability are you more comfortable with and to begin looking into ways to combat it -like logging out people who are AFK too long and trying to eliminate users who “macro”.  Of course, the main reason some people don’t participate in combat is because combat design around things like the holy trinity (tank/healer/dps) encourage it, but that is a separate issue.

Its beginning to look like the current design of the reward structure, how players progress, and how combat functions in many MMOs (primarily the Diku style ones) are very dependent on the group structure and trying to remove that group element is going to require thinking the whole thing over from the ground up.

Hello 2010!

Random Thoughts

I am excited for this new year.  The job is going well, life is good, and everything is swinging upward.  Awesome.

The best part however is that my birthday, being October 10th, will fall this year on 10/10/10.  I don’t want to jinx it, but that is going to be a perfect day.

So, what sort of resolutions shall I make for the new year?

First, losing twenty pounds over the last year has been great, and I want to keep going.  That said, the new year is going to bring an examining of my diet and a look at shaking up my exercise a little.  I also want to run the Peachtree Road Race in July, so I have a goal.  Lack of a goal is usually the hard part.  I lost my last twenty because I wanted to be under 200 pounds, and since then I haven’t had much in the way of a solid goal.

Second, writing… One of the issues I have with writing is that it is almost impossible to do on my desktop PC.  The location of my desktop is not inspiring, and the PC has too many distracting things installed on it.  Luckily, I may have an opportunity to obtain a netbook, one of those little mini laptops, and that should help, allowing me to take my writing with me anywhere.  We shall see… in any event, I want to spend a little more time writing, and to help with that I have vowed not to start watching any new TV shows.  I refuse to get sucked in to shows that get canceled or wind up being mediocre.  Instead, I will only watch shows I am already invested in and new shows I’ll see on DVD or streaming courtesy of Netflix.

Third, programming… I am still, occasionally, working on my little games and my one business idea (see progress meters on the right).  I hope to be able to finish something in 2010.  I think I will try to work on finishing one of the smaller games and get it posted just to see if I can.  It is going to be lame, and for that I apologize in advance, but finishing something is an important step I need to take.

Fourth, the house… yeah, um, I might clean up the yard or something when the weather gets warmer, and there are a few trees I need to take down.  But let’s not get our hopes up…

Not a resolution, but this year will also be my first participating as staff for the MMO Track at Dragon*Con.  I’ve reached a point with the con that most of the panels are retreads of panels I’ve already seen.  This isn’t a bad thing, as newcomers will find those panels to be as exciting as I did when I was a newcomer.  But it means that the last couple of years I’ve been bored in some of them and more willing to skip them altogether when given the chance.  In fact, I pretty much only go to the MMO and Writing tracks with the occasional special event.  So I decided since I was spending so much time down in the MMO rooms, why not volunteer and help out?  I did, and I am.  Should be a lot of work and a lot of fun.

Anyway… welcome to 2010…

Goodbye 2009…

Random Thoughts

Looking over the last year, it started off rocky as I remained unemployed for a couple of months, but I did find work, and as a bonus I actually enjoy it.  I’m working at a small company again, only this time the boss seems to know what he’s doing and things are progressing rather than collapsing.  I’m still working on spending less and getting our budget under control, but I’ve also lost around twenty pounds and I’m floating around 194 and having trouble getting lower… looks like I might have to actually change my diet.

As far as gaming goes, I’ve canceled my last subscription MMO.  I simply don’t have the available time to make $15 a month worth the price.  Instead I’m playing some Free-to-Play games with micro transactions where that $15 makes for easily three or four months worth of play.

On the writing front, I failed the NaNoWriMo again, but made it further than I have before, and I completed a very short story, The Last Christmas, that I am quite proud of, enough that I posted it and plan to make revisions and keep working it.

In just about every way, 2009 has turned out to be a pretty good year.

I’m looking forward to 2010, but I’ll save that for tomorrow.  For now let’s just send 2009 out in style…  have a safe and happy New Year’s Eve!

Patient Zero

Reviews

It has actually been a while since I finished reading Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry, but I was waiting because I didn’t want to gush about a book I was giving as a gift to someone who might actually read the blog (as unlikely as that is).  Plus, I forgot.

Patient Zero follows Joe Ledger, a cop who has recently been offered a position with the FBI.  Just days away from his move he gets involved in a multi-agency bust of some suspected terrorists, one of whom doesn’t stay dead.  He is then approached by the Department of Military Sciences and told of a possible plot to release a virus that turns people into zombies.

Most zombie novels these days start after the end of the world, or are set within the fall.  Patient Zero is about trying to stop the zombie apocalypse from happening.  Another great aspect of the story is that it follows not only the people trying to stop the zombies, but also the people trying to start it.

This book was good.  Very good.  Couldn’t put it down good.  I blew through it, and so did the wife, and she’s not a fan of horror books or movies.  I’d gladly recommend it to just about anyone.

Less Remake, More Reinvention

Random Thoughts

I recently learned that there is a remake of The Karate Kid coming down the pipe.  However, he does Kung-Fu instead of Karate, it happens in another country, and lots of other changes.  In essence, this isn’t a remake but a name theft.  They’ve take the name “The Karate Kid” and are slapping it on a movie with a few similar themes.  On the other hand, the theaters in recent years have been littered with remakes.  Taking an old movie and essentially re-shooting it with maybe a few minor changes, or a couple of big drastic ones that either ruin the movie or ultimately have no impact.

Wouldn’t it be nice if instead of remaking an old film they were to take an old film and tell the story from another angle?  Take The Karate Kid for example.  Rather than retread the same ground, why not tell The Johnny Lawrence Story instead – the story of a bully who learns that violence isn’t answer through the ongoing conflict with a scrawny kid named Daniel LaRusso.  Or rather than doing yet another remake of Hamlet, make Gertrude instead – the original story from the point of view of the mother watching her son go mad.  There are so many stories that this can be done to.  Pick another character and turn the tale inside-out and view the whole thing in a new light.

A man can dream…