Author: Jason

Changing Sides

Gaming

The Internet exploded this week as Blizzard announced that they are working on a way to let people change factions in World of Warcraft.  If you are unaware, WoW has always been a 2-sided dynamic, built in part on PvP play between the two factions of Horde and Alliance.  On PvE servers, players have always been able to create characters on both factions, but on the PvP realms, once you created a character on one side you were locked out of the other.  (I want to say all realms were like that at launch, but if they were it has since changed.)  Of course, like their server transfer, this faction change will be done for a fee.  In the announcement, two key pieces of information are missing.  First, how much will it cost?  Second, how will it work?

Personally, I don’t care about the first question.  No matter how much it costs, I’ll never use it, just like I will never use their server transfer.  But the second question interests me greatly, especially as it relates to a couple of posts I made previously on the idea of limiting a player to a single character per account.  (I sometimes feel bad about not continuing that series, but no one agreed with me and I even got a couple of emails to the effect that I should never be allowed to design a game or even work in the game industry.)

So, let’s take a look at what I consider to be the only two logical solutions for changing factions in WoW.

The first option would be to leave the game as it is and simply let the user change their race.  Since they introduced the Draenei and the Blood Elves in The Burning Crusade, every class is represented on both sides by at least one race, so it is possible as there are no gaps.  However, that means that any Alliance Paladin, Human, Dwarf or Draenei, would have to switch to be a Blood Elf in order to go Horde.  The main issue that I have here is for people like myself who actually choose race before class.  I tend to always play human in any game, mostly because playing as a fantasy race just doesn’t appeal to me much.  I want to be “me” in another world, not to be someone else.  If this is the method they choose to use, I would never use it because my choice of race is actually more important to me than my class.  While I might jump at the option to make my level 60 priest a level 60 paladin, making my level 60 human a level 60 undead, troll or blood elf is unappealing.  Of course, I am probably in the minority, so for many players a race switch would be just fine as long as there are options they won’t hate.

The second option is the more complicated one, and that is to let the player keep their race and to just change the side they belong to.  Now, if Blizzard is lucky, this could be extremely easy and every character has a single bit flag that says “0 = Alliance, 1 = Horde” and all game interactions build off of that.  The chat channels, the side you play on in Battlegrounds, who you can attack, which NPCs will talk to you, etc.  That would be awesome.  However, given that the game was likely built with the idea that faction was the ultimate dividing point, I doubt that bit exists.  So, either Blizzard will spend the next few months implementing that bit so they can flip it, or they’ll have to come up with a more complicated and convoluted solution.  Being able to keep my race would appeal to me, seeing as how I identify more closely with my race than my class in these games, but I think it could also cause more damage to the game.  Right now, in PvP, if you are on the Alliance side and you see two people fighting, you can tell which person to help by their race.  I’m human, I see a tauren and a gnome engaged in combat.  I heal the gnome or fight the tauren.  Simple.  Now imagine that same scenario after a race keeping faction switch.  Now I’ll need some other cue to tell me who to fight and who to heal, because that could be Horde gnome fighting an Alliance tauren.  Letting races switch factions muddies distance visual identification for PvP.  So even if they had the “faction bit” that made switching factions easy, they’ll still need to do a considerable amount of work to ensure that playing the game doesn’t become confusing, at least for PvP.

Overall, since the game was not designed from the ground up with this in mind, introducing it now is, in my opinion, not a good move from a gameplay perspective.  From a business perspective, it is an excellent idea, they’ll make money off it and make a number of people very happy.  I do think that if anyone can solve the problems of the second option, Blizzard can.  So now we just have to wait and see which path they take.

Movie Round-Up: July 1st, 2009

Reviews

Normally, Wednesdays are reserved for zombie posts, but this being the 4th of July weekend, all the movies open on Wednesday, so for this week only movies on Wednesday, zombies on Friday…

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs:

This is the third film in the Ice Age series, and I have yet to see any of them.  I once bought an Ice Age/Ice Age 2 twin pack from Target, but they turned out to be in full screen instead of wide screen, so we returned them.  I do, however, love the little short films with the prehistoric squirrel.  Anyway, I suppose if you liked the first two, you’ll like this too.  I’ll see them all some day.

Public Enemies:

In my personal opinion, Johnny Depp doesn’t make bad movies.  Or at the very least, he is always worth watching even if the film around him is lacking.  This movie is definitely on my watch list, but I’m not sure I’m going to make it to the theater to see it.  If I can manage to find the time and the money, though, I will.

Finding Each Other

Gaming

I am a big fan of the idea of having one world for MMOs, and I don’t mind if they use instances to achieve it.  The biggest concern when it comes to breaking the world up that way is the potential loss of community.  If all 100,000 of your users are on the same world, and they all go to town at once, your game might have 100 instances of that town (as opposed to needing 100 servers to make sure your population levels are such that town doesn’t exceed 1,000 players at a time), the worry is that the 1,000 people you are in the instance with will likely never be the same 1,000 the next time this happens.  Even if only enough people ever go to town that never more than 5 instances are needed, the chance you run into the same people over and over is pretty low.

Fact is, even on a game that limits players to 10,000 per server, no one knows everyone.  But finding your 100 “friends” out of 10,000 is easier than 100,000 or 1,000,000, even easier when only a portion of that 10k plays in your timezone.  An instanced game gets even worse if you leave town and enter an instance designed for 75 people max, the chances you’ll play with the same 75 people is even smaller.  So how do you meet new people and make friends?  How does a community build when everyone shares?

It would be nice if someone could take the one world/instance design and then pair it up with a player matching algorithm, so that if you play with someone in a group or raid for any signifigant length of time they’d earn a rank, and you can flag players as good or bad, coupled with your friends list resulting in the game choosing an instance with the highest matching score.  This way, you would tend to play with people you’d played with before, except of course when the game cannot let you (instances exist for a reason, and sometime you just can’t let more people in), but you can allow for player overrides so even if the game chooses to put you in Wilderness Instance 27, you can swap to join a player you know who is in Wilderness Instance 19, or they you.

Its a thought… just need to figure out how to build it…

The Problem with Ticketmaster

Random Thoughts

I absolutely understand why there are service charges on tickets.  I get it, and I even support it.  People need to get paid for their work, and since musicians actually get so little of their album sales they take the lion share of the ticket sale, and the promoter, the venue, and the staff, and of course running a service like Ticketmaster isn’t free, so they need a cut to pay for running their service that lets you get the tickets.

The problem I have is that the presentation of the service fee blows.  They sneak up on you.  I go to the site, find my concert, see the ticket price is $23, pick my ticket amount, hit the “Find Tickets” button and then, WHAM!, now they are $32 each.  You know, I don’t mind the $9 service charges, I understand them, but it would have been nice to have seen, on the original price listing page, an all-inclusive price.  Even if it was shown as “$23 (+ $9 service fees)” or “$23 ($32 with service fees)” or just “$32”, something to let me know upfront what the total cost per ticket is going to be rather than slapping it on at the end.

This is ultimately why people dislike Ticketmaster.  It is not the service charges, it is the presentation of the service charges.  People just don’t respond well in any context when they are given a price, and then at a later point told the actual purchase price is more.  I mean, if you went to buy a car and the price tag said “$23,000”, but once you talk to the sales rep he explains that there are $9,000 in service fees, so to drive it off the lot you have to pay $32,000, you’d be a tad upset that the price tag didn’t tell you that upfront.  Or how about if you went to a restaurant and bought a steak dinner listed as $23 only to find out there is a $9 preparation fee. Sales tax is one thing, since its a relatively fixed amount, but seeing a service charge after you’ve seen the original price is another, especially with Ticketmaster service charges being as unpredictable as they are.  I’ve seen $100 tickets with a $9 charge, and I’ve also seen $9 tickets with a $15 charge (yes, the service charge was almost twice the price of the ticket).  There is nothing on the initial page that lets you know what your final price might be.

Anyway, that’s my gripe of the week.

What’s in a Name?

Writing

One of the things that has always bothered me with my writing is coming up with names.  Every character needs one and mine always end up in one of two categories.  Either their name is unique and awesome, or it is horrible plain and forgettable.  I have spent many any hour agonizing over names and often end up reusing the same ones over and over.

However, thanks to an idea from Corvus Elrod, I started keeping a list of names from spam emails and comments on this blog.  I’ve already got well over two hundred names and I’ve only been doing it for about a week.  The names range from the banal to the exotic and every level in between.  The idea was inspired, so to Corvus, sir, I tip my hat.  I may never have to worry about character naming again.

Movie Round-Up: June 26th, 2009

Reviews

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen:

Pass.

Really, that’s about all want to say about it.  The first film was a piece of crap.  The story was poor, the acting was bad, they butchered the source material, and the action was that too-fast-to-follow sort where two things smash into each other, stuff happens, and then one of them wins.  Seeing the trailer for this just reminded me of how much I disliked the first one and how I was going to make no effort at all to see this one.  Sure, people will claim that its just a summer popcorn flick and I expect too much of it, but even for a cartoon designed to sell toys, the original had so much more heart and soul than Michael Bay’s bastardization.  It deserved so much better.

Save your money.  Please.  If it bombs, maybe he’ll stop.

My Sister’s Keeper:

I wept like a little girl.  Movies about cancer patients tend to get at me anyway, but this one was particularly heart wrenching because it is so well acted.  I won’t lie, I saw the “twist” in this film coming a mile away, but there was real edge of my seat interest in watching how long it would play out and at point would everything come to light.  It sounds odd to write about a movie which is about a girl dying of cancer and her sister who doesn’t want to be a donor anymore, but it is how I feel.  I’ve seen criticisms of the movie, and the book on which it is based, from people who say they have a child with leukemia and life isn’t like that, mother’s don’t act that way, donor siblings don’t refuse, blah blah blah… for one, this is a story, it is fiction, and a story in which everyone was happy and the only thing that happened was a girl died of cancer, well, that wouldn’t exactly be riveting viewing.  For me, I can easily see how a mother could get so swept up in saving the life of one of her children that many “lesser concerns” go unnoticed or forgotten.

All in all, a good movie… but bring tissues.

The Art of the Pull

Random Thoughts

This past weekend I spent my time in Free Realms grinding out some Brawler levels.  I was only level 4 and had that stupid “Get level 5!” as my only brawl quest.  Well, I had other quests for the brawler, but they all required that I fight things recommended for level 5 and over.  So I went and found a few random encounters and got level 5, then set about questing again.

Back in the days of EverQuest, I played a monk.  The reason I chose a monk was because the guy who introduced me to the game said it was hard to play and was the class least reliant on equipment.  And it was true, in the beginning.  My monk was about 80% effective when “naked”.  Of course, as the game expanded, monks became just as reliant on gear as every other class.  But the point is, I played a monk.  One thing monks did in EQ was called “pulling”.  If you aren’t familiar with the term, it means that my group would pick a safe spot to sit and I would run out and find monsters for us to fight, dragging them back to the group for the kill.  The reason monks did this was because they got a skill called Feign Death which allowed them to escaped monsters if they happened to get too many chasing them.  Play dead, monsters go away.  As all monks did, I learned the observable mechanics of the game, how monsters would walk back to spawn points at different times, how some would “reset” their “hate list” upon reaching their spawn, and lots of other little things.  Over time, as I observed more and became a better puller, I used Feign Death less and less.  I learned how to pluck a single monster from a group just by standing in a particular place a particular distance away at a particular angle.  Honestly, being a puller in EQ was probably what kept me playing for so long.  One of the main reasons I quit was at the high end game during raiding your team only needed one or two monks for pulling, and any extra monks were just a part of the killing team.  Auto-attack is boring, especially after a life roaming zones in search of danger.

The point of that little trip down memory lane is to preface the following: Monster pathing and aggro hasn’t changed much over at SOE.

I find myself going under equipped and lower level than I should into brawler fights and using my monk skills to splits monsters and fight them one at a time when they are clearly intended to be fought in pairs or threes.  You can even run from most groups of monsters and watch your “radar” to see when most of them turn around and go home, leaving just one tenacious follower to combat.  I’ve even gone so far as to defeat “events” that clearly shouldn’t be something I do alone.  In one quest instance, you get to a certain point and it triggers waves of monsters to attack.  If you stand and fight, you have to take them on 3 or 4 at a time, but instead you can run off to the side and hide, wait for all the waves to show up, and then use aggro and positioning to pluck them one at a time out of the mess.  Sure, it takes longer, but seeing as how actually finding people to group is one of the most difficult things to do in Free Realms, taking the time and doing it on my own is preferable.

Anyway, I managed to get myself 4 levels doing Brawler quests, and then I headed back to Sanctuary to see if I could exhaust it like I did Seaside.  I haven’t yet, but I’m getting close.

Designed to Grow

Gaming

As an offshoot to the discussion over at Psychochild’s blog concerning Dread and Hope in Lord of the Rings Online, I wanted to expand on something I touched on in my comments there.

Originally, dread and hope in LotRO was a flavor.  It danced around the edges of your play.  You would run into a little dread and have to find a way to combat it, either through adding hope or just by more cautious play, going slow instead of rushing in due to your reduced stats making your character less effective.  However, as the game has expanded and they’ve raised level caps and added new content, they fell into the same trap that has caught every other game.  Dread and hope aren’t just flavor anymore, they are now a core mechanic.  There is content you cannot participate in without enough hope, so people are forced to wear the radiant gear that provides it, limiting choices.  In the future, I expect as people complain about not having choices, more hope gear will become available so that it opens up more choices to the players, which in turn will trivialize hope and it will become like the other stats on items: mostly ignored as long as you keep enough of it around.

The failing here, at least in my opinion, is that they designed something that was pretty awesome as a flavor to the game, that added a narrative and story element to the game that also was based in the mechanics of play, but didn’t, in their core initial design, plan for expansion.  Because they didn’t leave room for the core to grow, they’ve had to co-opt the flavor and make it core in order to give players somewhere to advance that wasn’t just more of the same.  Personally, I liked dread and hope the way they were, and feel they’ve lost something with it becoming “just another stat” that characters min/max.

Of course, I’m also a proponent of games with less “advancement” (usually found in the form of grinding levels and stats, mathematical increases) and more “story” (more places to go, more things to do).  For me, gear in games is just the tool that allows me to pass the artificial barriers the designers placed in game to wall off content.  I’d prefer they didn’t wall off the content and just let me experience it as I came to it.  But then, MMOs make their money off time invested under the subscription model, and if they allowed me to play the whole game at the speed I wanted, they’d get less of my time, but more of my support, which, ironically gets them more of my money as I’m more likely to remain subscribed to a game with lots to see and great story over one that is just a gear grind-fest.

Anyway, back to my original point… most games seem to run into this as they mudflate, as each expansion raises the level cap and they go looking for new ways for people to need to grind out more gear.  They co-opt every element of design and turn them all into points on a scale and suck all the fun and flavor out of them.  I dread games that grow like this, and hope games in the future can avoid it.

30 Days of Game: Evony

Gaming

It has been a long while (October 2008) since I did one of these, and as luck would have it I just happened to have played another PBBG for 30 days, so a review follows.

The gang over at the Ofasoft boards found this game, Evony, and we decided to go play it.  Honestly, as evidenced by my Travian review, it is best to approach these RTS-like browser games with a crowd of friends because ultimately a guild or alliance is going to be the only way to survive the PvP.  People without a group behind them will be farmed for points and resources.  As with many browser based games, its got an RMT element, and while Evony’s items for purchase can give you a serious advantage, I have found that not enough people are buying them to make it really matter.

So, to start, you create an account, name your lord and name your first city (don’t pick something you love, you’ll be changing it in a minute).  Like any RTS type games, you build building for resources and to facilitate your army, and there are optimum build orders to get to certain elements of the game.  But, for the first 7 days you will be safe from PvP (you can’t be attacked, nor can you attack other players), so you have time to learn the game.  Learning the game is where Evony, in my opinion, shines.  Other games I have played forced you to go digging around wikis or forums or elsewhere to learn about the game, but Evony has implemented a Quest system giving you tons of little objectives, all with rewards.  The best way to learn the game is to do the quests.  If you do, your town won’t be a war machine, but it will be perfectly functional.  Just heed the game’s warnings and don’t take your town hall to level 5 or you’ll end your seven day protection.

As I raced through the quests, I built myself a second town and was well on my way to solid before my 7 days were up.  I worried as I hit the end of that week, but as I was in an alliance with around 40 people in it, actively playing and constantly out of resources (because I was constantly building), it seems there were enough reasons not to attack that no one did.  Also, you’ll learn that attacking valleys and NPCs is more profitable at lower levels.

The key to the game is range attacks, which is pretty much true for all games and for real life too.  And while archers are a ranged attack, ballistas are better, but they do take a while to get to.  One thing the Evony forums are good for is posts about theorycrafting.  That’s when people observe game behavior and try to work backwards to get the formula the programming is using for things.  Battles work like something out of European wars with lines of attackers approaching each other on the field.  The fastest runners get out front and are the first to get mowed down.  The game works on a closest range/greatest threat method, where if you have archers and cavalry fighting swordsmen, the swordsmen will fight your cavalry while your archers kill them at range.  If you didn’t have the cavalry, your archers would get “free” attacks on the swordsmen until they “met”, and then the swordsmen would fight the archers at close range.  Fights also use a “1 group attacks 1 target” method, so in the previous example, the swordsmen would fight the cavalry until there were no more cavalry.  If they had swordsman and warriors, both of them would attack the cavalry, ganging up on them, while your cavalry would only attack which ever group they encountered first (the swordsmen).  Ultimately it causes weird battles where you can take 1,000 ballista, 1 cavalry, 1 swordsman, and 1 warrior, and defeat a much larger army of a single non-ranged unit type because there will be at least three rounds of combat before the enemy can attack your ballista since they need to engage each army “type” on the field and defeat them.  So if 1 ballista can kill 10 warriors a round, this attack configuration could defeat 30,000 warriors while only losing 1 cavalry, 1 swordsman and 1 warrior.  These kinds of mathematical and logical decisions result in very odd attack configurations, and approaching the game like a real war will only cost you troops.

The way battles work is why fighting NPCs is more profitable than PCs.  A hero with the appropriate number of ballista can defeat all the defences of an NPC city while taking no losses.  Send transports with them and you can gain much more resources than you can build in the same time.  NPCs basically become resource ATMs.

Once you get out of your 7 day period, and assuming you are part of an alliance, you then enter into the world of negotiations.  Eventually, fighting NPCs grows old and you want to take on some other players.  Attacking the wrong player in the wrong alliance can result in a war that could turn out badly for your entire alliance.  At the beginning of week 4, another alliance declared war on my alliance and attacked one of our member’s cities.  No warning, no discussion, just attack.  We sent off a note to find out why, but they didn’t reply.  So, we checked with our friendly alliances and then unleashed hell on the offending alliance.  We didn’t just return fire on the offending player, but his whole alliance.  We ended up taking a half dozen cities from their players and putting a serious hurt on their entire alliance.  Of course, this was followed by lots of whining and more negotiations as it turned out the leader of the alliance that declared war on us was a secondary account for the leader of another alliance, who was an ally of an ally, and so on… the fallout was funny as alliances turned on him and supported us, but the real lesson is that it could easily go the other way if we didn’t vet our targets properly.

The best feature of all, however, is that no one can take your “last” city.  If you have 5 towns and fall under heavy PvP siege, they can take 4 and they can farm your last, but they can’t take it, and you never lose your technology research.  And if you’ve saved up some city teleporters, you can always flee.  You can also hit the “Restart” button and start from scratch, keeping the same lord name and nothing else.

All in all, Evony is fairly well built and balanced, more so than other free RTS-like games I’ve tried online.  Its fun, and with planning of your buildings, you can actually schedule days away from the game where you are researching new technologies and building high level buildings and won’t need to check in.

I’ve played Evony for 30 days, and I’m going to keep playing.  With 100 player limits on alliance sizes, it doesn’t appear to suffer from the alliance domination problems that other games do, and will keep it interesting for far longer.