Category: Gaming

I’m a gamer. I game.

To Crush Your Enemies

Gaming

Mongol General: We have won again. That is good! But what is best in life?
Mongolian trainee: The open steppe, fleet horse, falcon on your wrist, wind in your hair!
 Mongol General: Wrong! Conan, what is best in life?
Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!
Mongol General: That is good.
-exchange from Conan the Barbarian (1982)

Charlie, Keely and I used to get together at their house and play Risk. Except by luck of the dice, Keely always won. But over time Charlie and I got better at learning when to strike and where to fortify. Those days of gaming were good days. Risk was a good filler between days of AD&D and Top Secret.

Yesterday, a few gents from the ofasoft boards introduced me to the Conquer Club. Basically, its online Risk. You can play tradition board with sequential turns, you can play teams, you can freestyle the turns, or even play on one of numerous variant boards like Lord of the Rings, Discworld, USA Apocalypse, Russia, Canada, and more. If you join for free you can play in up to 4 games at once. If you buy a membership for $20 you can play unlimited games.

It has been a long time since I played Risk, so my skills are rusty. But its fun just the same. So if you like Risk but can’t always get people to play with you, sign up and maybe we will meet on the fields of battle.

The Ship

Gaming

Since I’ve turned my eyes back to Valve with the announcement of TF2, I noticed a new game available for purchase and download through Steam, The Ship.

Quite simply, damn, this has to be one of the more interesting and innovative ideas I have seen in a while. The short version, you are trapped on a 1920’s cuise ship (think Titanic) and an evil mastermind is forcing everyone to play his game, which is murder. You get assigned a target and you have to find and kill them. But be on the look out, someone else is targetting you. And its not just some running and shooting game, its got a flavor of the Sims in it because you also need to eat, sleep, urinate, and all other sorts of things.

Do yourself a favor and check out the E3 trailer on their website. I’ll review the game proper after I have played it.

There had better be a 2fort map

Gaming

The news has been out for three days. How on Earth did I not know about this already?

The only game I ever played for longer than EverQuest was TeamFortress for Quake. It freaking owned. I really hated deathmatch games, and bland Capture the Flag wasn’t too much better. But TF… that was awesome. Nine classes, allowing a player to play to their strengths, made for incredible strategies. The leagues for TF were some of the most intense things I have ever experienced in gaming. But when TF Classic came out for Half-Life, well, it was a little disappointing to me. It just seemed like a straight port of the game into the new engine. It was fun, but I just didn’t get into it, in fact, I kept playing TF.

TeamFortress 2, as you can read in the article I linked, has been a long time coming. And I love the new style of graphics they have going. Lots of games have come out over the last couple of years, but nothing that made me want to upgrade my PC. This… this will do it. Now I just have to figure out a way to afford it.

Thar be rapscallions among us

Gaming

It seems odd t’ say that thar be a seedy underbelly t’ Puzzle Pirates, but I be jus’ nay ready t’ believe that so many swabbies be actively roleplayin’. This underbelly I speak o’ be greed.

When ye get on a ship t’ job an’ pillage, th’ expectation, I would think, be that ye would hit th’ high seas until either th’ rum runs ou’ or th’ hold be so full o’ booty that th’ water threatens t’ flood in through th’ port holes. However, ever’ time a ship sets sail wi’ me aboard, after we`ve attacked an’ beaten one vessel some o’ th’ other shipmates begin clammorin’ fer the’r share o’ th’ booty. Now, booty be nay normally split until we return t’ port, so ye end up wi’ half th’ boat demandin’ we return t’ port after one successful swashbuckle.

On the’r part, this be very short sighted. Fer one, if ye feel th’ need t’ leave, ye`ll still get a share o’ th’ loot when ‘t gets split later. Ye dasn’t be havin’ t’ be present. Th’ other, an’ more pertinant issue, be that when yer crew be sixty ruffians, an swabbie split o’ e’en a haul o’ 50,000 pieces o’ eight will only be about 500 pieces, maybe a wee more or perhaps a wee less.

Th’ irritatin’ thin’ be that these swabbies jus’ will nay shut up. Cryin’ like infants they`ll keep demandin’ we port an’ split th’ cash, swashbuckle after swashbuckle, an’ if ye know anythin’ about th’ way th’ puzzles work ye know what that means. If ye dasn’t, well, if ye be talkin’ then ye aren`t workin’. So, get back t’ work, ye barnacles!

Puzzle Pirates Poker

Gaming

I think so far one of my favorite things to do in Puzzle Pirates is to sit down to a good poker table. What is a good poker table? Well, for one, you don’t have people who are binary (Fold or All In). Next, good table chatter… Usually good chatter consists of just random chat about some subject, or even talk about poker, or in the case of Puzzle Pirate the chatter can be incharacter piratey stuff. Sometimes, however, the chatter is, well, let me just give an example:

Mrbert: So what is everyone’s favorite suited pocket hand?
Killerjoy: A pair of Aces.
Mrbert: Naturally.
Gogoboots: I like a pair of Queens because they are more likely to turn into three of a kind.
Picklehead: I prefer to bluff with a pair of twos.
Ishiro: Isn’t it kind of hard to have a suited pair?

See that guy at the end? That’s me. It took me another twenty minutes to explain why you couldn’t have a suited pair. I mean, it took a couple minutes just to explain what suited meant (same suit). Then a few people at the table were insisting that poker was played with a six deck shuffle. My attempts to point out that blackjack, not poker, is the game that uses a multideck shoe. (“A shoe? You are making this stuff up!”) Gogoboots agreed that only one deck was used, and that was why she preferred Queens, because a single deck has twelve Queens. It took another five minutes to understand that when she said “Queens” what she meant was “face cards”, you know, Jacks, Queens and Kings.

After a while, I gave up and decided that indeed ignorance is bliss, and messing with the ignorant is hilarious:

Mrbert: I love to get a flush.
Ishiro: This morning I had a double flusher.
Gogoboots: What’s that?
Mrbert: Its rare. It is when you get two flushes in a row.
Picklehead: No, its when you can make two flushes with the same hand.
Mrbert: Oh, I’m thinking of a b2b-flush.
Picklehead: Yeah.
Samson: Billions of Blue Blistering Barnacles!
Killerjoy: I had a triple flusher once. It was awesome.
Mrbert: I bet! The chances of that are like a zillion to one!
Ishiro: The worst though is when you get upper decked.
Picklehead: Yeah! I hate that!
Mrbert: Is that when everyone else is dealt a pocket pair but you?
Picklehead: No, it is when you get a good pair and then two or more people deal into royal straights.
Mrbert: Wow. That does sound awful.
Gogoboots: I did that once.
Gogoboots: Flippered into a royal straight.
Ishiro: You have to be careful or you’ll flipper into a tilt.
Gogoboots: What?
Mrbert: A tilt. When you miss your straight by one card, like 4,5,6,7,9.
Samson: Billions of Blue Blistering Barnacles!
Ishiro: I’m going to get a high score!
[everyone folds]
Ishiro: Roasters!
Gogoboots: Roasters?
Ishiro: Kenny Rogers.
Mrbert: Who is that?
Ishiro: He’s a gambler.
Mrbert: Didn’t he win the WSOP last year.
Killerjoy: He did. I saw it live on TV.
Picklehead: I played in the WSOP last year, made it to the semi-final round.
Samson: He really knows when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em.
You tell Samson: Bravo!

Yes, Samson, Bravo indeed.

The only thing worst than crappy chatter at a Puzzle Pirates poker table, are those “8s 8” idiots. You see, in real life, when someone makes an extraordinary effort to save, say, five dollars, they might say something like “Hey, five bucks is five bucks, man.” This indicates that saving the five bucks was worth the effort. In Puzzle Pirates, you don’t have dollars, you have Pieces of Eight (PoE or poe), and comparatively they have little value. Buying anything worthwhile in the game literally costs thousands of PoE. In poker, when some idiot goes All In before the flop and the table folds their blinds and he earns a whopping 3 or 6 or 8 PoE, what he would like to say is, “Hey, eight pieces of eight is eight pieces of eight, man.” But as we all should be well aware, typing is a skill some people refuse to learn, and so saying that would be too much, so instead he says, “8s 8.” Now, if this were a rare occurance, it would be fine… but most of these jackholes say it after every hand. “8s 8”, “5s 5”, “120s 120”, “807s 807”. Those people and the binary All In or Fold twerps drive me away from more tables than anything else.

Reputation in games

Gaming

Over at his blog, Richard Bartle has layed out a very primative sketch of how an effective player driven reputation system might work. The short version is “Amazon’s You-might-also-like Lists”. You would rank people when you get to know them, and based on your selections and the selections of other people, someone you have never met before might be “recommended” to you because people who like the same people you like also like this new person.

Simple example ripped from Richard’s post:

You like A, they like A; you dislike B, they dislike B; you haven’t met C, they like C, so C is probably a decent person. The greater the insersection between lists, the higher the chance that you’ll share their opinions.

The only drawback he found was in the server resources it might take to maintain and display this data. Well, as far as maintaining it, there isn’t much I can suggest, it is going to be a huge amount of data – potentially if you have X players and all X players rank all other players (X-1), you have to store X*(X-1) records. Taking a game like EVE Online that runs a single server with over 100,000 subscribers, that is potentially 10 billion records. Calculating the data, however, could be contained by imbedding the “score” of a player to a “Looking For Group” tool, or as a given command (inspect player), so as to reduce the amount of processing done with these numbers, as opposed to his suggestion of having the results display all the time by a player’s name.

It is definately a good idea, I think, and merits a deeper look at the possibilities and realities of implementation.

Ahoy, Mateys!

Gaming

I am a mighty pirate! Yarg!!Yarr! Shiver me timbers! On the pirates versus ninjas debate, I fall firmly on the pirates side. When I was much younger, it was ninjas, but they have lost their flair. But pirates are on the upsurge. With the Pirates of the Caribbean movies among other things, the romanticism and the harsh reality of pirates is getting its due. And now of course I have given in to temptation and am playing Puzzle Pirates.

I think one of the best things about this game is that you can, if you choose, play for free. There are subscription oceans of course, for $9.95 a month (less if you buy 3 month or 12 month packages), and then there are the Doubloon oceans. In the Doubloon oceans, you can play parts of the game for free. Other parts require that you have a badge or pass to play, and those items are purchased with Doubloons, which in turn can be purchased from the game company. Of course, you can also buy Doubloons from other players with your Pieces of Eight (the money used in game). So, if you are willing to do the work, you can earn PoE and buy Doubloons from people who want to invest less time into the game. And just for fun, the games that require Doubloons are made free one or two nights a week so that you can play them and see if getting Doubloons in worth your time and effort, or cash.
Of course, earning Pieces of Eight isn’t always hard. While you might only earn a hundred or so from a sailing mission, on the nights when Poker is free, you can earn thousands of PoE in a single hand. Just last night I bought in to a table for 200 pieces of eight, and I left with over 2,000. And that was just a half hour or so playing.

Anyway, I’m still playing World of Warcraft, but when I don’t feel like dealing with it, for now I’ll be playing pirate. You can find me in the Hunter ocean (a Doubloon ocean) under the name Ishiro. Come challenge me to a swordfight.

One Character

Gaming

Would you play an MMORPG that only allowed you one charcter?

I’ve been thinking about this alot lately, mostly because I strive for a little “identity” in games. I am Ishiro in the World of Warcraft, and Ishiro is me. So far in games I’ve never run into another Ishiro (but I don’t play asian games), and only one Ishira. That means, more than likely, if you are in WoW and see Ishiro, its a pretty good bet it is me. The problem comes in with if I tire of being an alliance human priest on Durotan, or a horde undead warlock on Eitrigg, or any of the other Ishiros I have out there, I can’t change him without deleting him and starting over.

I think this is why, more and more as I think about fundamental game design, I favor a skill based system of some sort, where everyone starts exactly the same and becomes different through the choices of skills. The advantage, of course, is that if the game allows me to redistribute skill points or simply to focus on new different skills, I can be an all new person but without the crazy item swapping of class based mechanics where I have to delete my character, or the complete identity overhaul of playing a new name.

Now… take that desire to play one identity and take that to a physical limitation of being only allowed to create a single character in the game world. Again, I think I’d be in favor of it as long as my character worked like I’ve described above, where my fate isn’t decided at character creation and the only way to change is to dust off and nuke the site from orbit.

So yeah, that appears to be the direction I’d like to see games go, and the direction I’m going to take my silly Game That Never Was project.

Memory and Grouping

Gaming

Tobold, whose blog I’m reading more and more, made a couple of really interesting posts recently.

The first post is about repetition in game design. Basically, lots of MMORPG games are designed around the “fail and repeat” methodology. You fight, you lose, you try again with gathered knowledge. This can be great if you are the first, but once guides get put on the internet, chances are your guild is trying to learn the fox trot instead of inventing new dance moves.

I agree with Tobold in that games need more unique content. And by unique I don’t mean cramming a hundred developers in a room and refusing to feed them until they create a hundred unique dungeons, but instead games need a way to have content such that if you fail you can’t just repeat it, but instead it will learn from your failure or have a random set of possible design parts that combine upon spawning, if you kill all a bosses henchmen, they should have different henchmen when you return, not the same guys standing in the same places. But this isn’t something really easily done… there is a problem in that games that have tried to use randomly generated content feel randomly generated, and no one really likes RPG games that feel tossed together. They should feel like the tasks you are undertaking are important.

His second post about grouping in games details exactly one of the major issues that I have in World of Warcraft. The problem with grouping is in actually finding a group (well, not for me, I play a priest, I have half the server on ignore). So his conclusion is thus:

But even more effective would be for the developers to introduce tools that diminish the group finding time. World of Warcraft could make huge improvements in their looking for group tools. And meeting stones could be reprogrammed to work like a warlock summoning, so the first three people arriving at the dungeon could summon the two stragglers. The beauty of such changes would be that at first sight they don’t change the rewards rate at all. But by cutting down on the rewards lost to a group due to waiting, improved group finding and gathering tools would make grouping relatively more attractive to players, and lead to more positive social interaction between them. We are not a bunch of hermits preferring to play alone, it is the parameters of the game that influence our behavior and preference for soloing or grouping.

And that’s it. WoW needs a looking for group tool beyond the meeting stones, which most people won’t use anyway because they don’t want to be in queue so long that the game decides to make weird groups.

Alliance: I love it when a plan comes together

Gaming

So, this past weekend I decided to do a little PvP in the Battlegrounds. As usual, I dumped myself into all three BG queues and then headed off to mess around with low level quests I never did.

It took a while, but just as I was finishing up a handful of Darnassus newbie quests (Woohoo! 11 faction per turn in!), I got the call to enter Warsong. If you’ve read some of my ranting before, you’ll know that for the Alliance on Durotan Warsong Gulch runs last about as long as it takes for the Horde to run the flag three times. Non-stop. They just chain us, mostly because the entire Alliance side is out getting honorable kills, wasting time while me and maybe one other guy try to defend the flag. One shadow priest and one other random guy just often are not enough to fight off four or five Horde. We usually down a couple of them, but their shaman/druid/rogue will take off at high speed and that’s all she wrote. (By the way, being able to use speed forms or sprint while carrying the flag should be forbidden. It sucks that I start fighting a guy, he runs off with some speed boost, and I’m in combat so I can’t mount up and chase him. Blizzard, either remove the use of speed abilities while flag carrying, or remove the combat flag in BGs.) All I usually ask is that a hunter or two stay on defense and use their ice traps. I realize that druids switching forms can break free easy, but it help against everyone else.

Anyway… so I go in expecting it to suck. Only, it doesn’t. One guy starts shouting orders and, lo and behold, people listen. We win, 3-0. Yeah!! So, I re-enter the Warsong queue, and twice more I get in, and twice more we win. Awesome! Then I guess people stop joining, or perhaps too many people are in queue, so I head back to lowbie quest fulfillment. A short while later, an Arathi Basin call comes in. Whoosh…

So, Arathi Basin, like Warsong, seems to just suck for Alliance. And it doesn’t fail to disappoint in the first round. After asking to be invited to the raid a few times, I start inviting people. Most of them are in groups already, in the raid. I do invite three people to my group: two priests and a druid. All the healers in Arathi were not in groups. At this point some of the people start bitching about lack of healing, so I explain the situation. They start arguing that you don’t need to be grouped to heal. I explain about group heals, and the fact that Power Word: Shield can only be cast on group or raid members. All the other healers back me up, but some of the melees (rogues mostly) continue to say we don’t need to be grouped. I finally relent, “Hey, you’re right, we don’t NEED to be grouped, it just makes it about 10,000 times easier, especially since most of us have CTRaid_Assist installed and can easily target and heal anyone in range in the raid IF THERE WAS A RAID FORMED AND WE WERE ACTUALLY INVITED INTO IT.” Just then, the pop up for Warsong springs up on my screen. I click it and zip over to Warsong. I’m about to leave my group when I notice that they are all also in Warsong. We stick together and put down the most awesome 4 healer defense ever. Another Warsong victory.

After Warsong, I go back to the queues. Immediately Arathi Basin pops up. I’m hesitant, but I go in anyway. The good leader from the earlier Warsongs is in there. He gives commands, and people actually listen. Its a tough fight (I think the Horde side had more “raid level” players, because by far their outfits were sillier and they were really hard to kill), but we managed to eek out a victory by a mere 50 or so points (2000 to 1940/1950).

Finally, as I’m about to queue up again, the Alterac Valley gong sounds and I zip in quick. Normally I come into Alterac toward the end. All the towers are gone, and its the weakening dregs of an 8 hour zerg fest who remain emboldened by a few new players. But this was a new start. Immediately everyone rushed forward to try to take a new graveyard. The entire half-hour I was there, we fought at this location. We pushed up and down the hillside, getting so close to the flag at times. And then my computer locked up.

Ah well… maybe next time.