Tag: post

Breaking the Mold

Gaming

A post over on Aggro Me about City of Heroes got me to thinking…

One of the things I enjoyed most about City of Heroes was that it was very hard to put together a group that didn’t work. Even if you didn’t have a “healer” the group could still do well. Since just about any character could solo, unless you got unlucky, any group of characters can pretty much make a team. All this is said with one caveat: as long as the players were willing to adjust and learn as they went.

The biggest downfall of CoH was, in my opinion, the fact that it did break the mold. It wasn’t your traditional tank/heal/dps game, and people who insisted on playing it as such usually got more frustrated than people who were open to the more freeform style that CoH thrived on.

How it dealt with healing was one of the major breaks from the norm. Since combat was fast and furious, so was healing, and more focus of the game was spent on the prevention of damage than pure healing. Buffs for friends and debuffs for enemies, with healing as something you do when things go bad.

Aggro’s post talks about the Kinetics method of healing, and my experience in the game was similar, yet different. Throughout beta and for over a year after release, the character build I played most was the Dark Miasma/Dark Blast Defender, or Dark/Dark. The playstyle of the Dark/Dark mainly consisted of charging your team into a group of enemies and then making one of them your bitch, dropping a handful of area effect debuffs making him and his friends less accurate (damage prevention) and easier to hit (damage increase). When allowed to do my job, it was a thing of beauty. Clouds of dark fog slowed and blinded our enemies and if it was necessary I would leech health from them. If things went bad, I could even mass revive the group while draining the bad guys. But, all of this requires that I keep one enemy locked with all my debuffs running on him… most players had this horrible habit of just wildly picking targets and taking them down or worse, assisting me, and causing my powers to drop. After a while of being blue in the face trying to explain this to people, I simply gave up grouping with strangers, and later nearly gave up grouping alltogether.

In the end, I applaud CoH for doing its own thing and breaking the tried and true triumverate, but I have to hang my head in shame at the players who seemed to want the exact thing they complain about in every game and refuse to learn to play the game on its own.

One of these days, when I finally do upgrade our PCs, the wife and I will go back to City of Heroes (and City of Villains) because it really was the most fun I’ve had in an MMO, despite the problems. And who knows, maybe at this late date people might finally know better.

Henchmen

Gaming

Inspired by Friday’s post and the comments that followed… How would you handle multiple characters under a player-NPC style system?

One thought would be henchmen. You’ve started a fighter character, gotten him a sword and some armor, but now you decide you want to play a mage… So, you roll up your mage, but you don’t want to go it alone, so you pull up your characters and pick your fighter to be a henchmen. Your fighter is now an NPC pet that you can give orders to.

Immediately, its appearant that in a game with levels this probably would be game breaking and unbalancing. Even a skill based game could make this a challenge to implement. But in a game without levels and skills, one that is based on player skill and goal achievement through narrative (quests), this could work very well. A system like this would allow a player to be his own party and play it like the old days of the AD&D games made by SSI, or allow a few friends to fill a gap in their group when they can’t find a player to fill it.

These pets wouldn’t be super smart, they’d be much like current game pets, simple commands and defending the owner, etc, because you wouldn’t want pets to be the defacto method for playing your MMO. Obviously much research and legwork would be needed to make this function, and it would have to be a “right fit” for the game being designed. But for now I just like thinking stuff up until I hit that lottery jackpot…

Jamaica

Random Thoughts

2006 has been a banner year for my family. In February, I got married. In June, my younger brother got married. And two days ago, my older brother got married. I know what you are thinking… “Dude, the title of this post is Jamaica!” Yeah, we all flew down to Jamaica and my new sister-in-law and her husband got hitched on the beach.

Well, not on the beach, but on a gazeebo thingy on a little pier like thing out from the beach. It was fairly cool.

And Jamaica itself is nothing to shake a stick at… unless you really just love shaking sticks at things, because I suppose if that kind of thing is your bag, well, just shake away, my friend, shake away. The beaches are nice, the water is warm, the pools are cool, the jacuzzis are hot, and when you stay at a Sandals resort all the food and drinks are free.

We stayed at the Sandals Royal Caribbean resort which is in Montego Bay… unfortunately it is being partially renovated at this time, so a couple of the restaurants were closed, but they have a private island, and that’s just sweet.

As always though, three nights anywhere just really is not enough time to really get into a vacation. The next one I swear is going to be at least a week.

Time Keeps on Slipping Into the Future

Random Thoughts

It is October 17th. It has been 7 days since my last post. And prior to that my posting has been spotty, at best.

So, what the heck is up with that?

I’ll tell ya… I bought a house a couple months ago, and slowly we’d been fixing up some stuff. Painting rooms, shopping for furnature, and all that stuff. It was, as I indicated, going slow. So, we decided to offer to host a Couple’s Shower for my brother and his future bride, and to throw a Halloween party (hopefully the first of many). With the prospect of having people actually be in our house, we got our butts in gear, painted more rooms, had the yard fenced, cleaned up the yard, built some benches, hung the hammock, re-dug the firepit, bought a kitchen table, cleaned the carpets, organized all our stuff, built shelves… it has been fairly exhausting. But we are down to just three (two and a half really) boxes left to unpack, and those are only remaining because we ran out of time to finish the second set of DVD shelves. On top of that, I’ve been working a bunch lately, and the wife got promoted to Assistant Manager (meaning she’s been working lots as well). And of course we still go out to trivia once or twice a week, every other Saturday table top gaming with the gang, and Sunday dinners with the family.

There just hasn’t been much time for writing. However, by October’s end, much of all that will be out, except for the hanging with friends… but I’ve already planned to abolish all my free time in November with the NaNoWriMo. Hopefully, though, I’ll still find time to write the blog. I have a few interesting thoughts on my “town-centric” game idea that I believe will work out very nicely. Now, I just need to win the lottery and I’m set!

Stay Classy

Gaming

Over at the Zen of Design, a post has been made and hopefully a violent and bloody discussion will ensue. The post is about Classes in MMOs.

Somewhere around my room I’ve got a document I started about class design. See, I really hate the way many games implement classes. You make one choice, at creation, and you are stuck. A warrior is a warrior, a cleric is a cleric. You are what you are and so is everyone else. Basically, EverQuest. World of Warcraft managed to do one better and essentially each class is actually three classes since you can choose to focus your talent points in one of three trees. I like this flexibility, so much so that I play a shadow priest in WoW… that’s a priest who is okay at healing, but better at dealing damage. I love it.

Back to my document. The idea I had for class design involved giving the players more on an illusion of control. What you would do is group skills together into sets, or schools as I called them. All melee weapons would be in a melee combat school, wearing armor and armor types falls into the defence school, healing arts both magic and non-magic fall into a healing school, and so on. In the end I had 6 or 7 schools that covered most things. Then each player would choose the ranks of his schools. They could put defence first, and melee combat second… making them a warrior… putting healing third might make them a minor paladin type, if they went defence then healing and melee combat third that would be a major paladin, healing first then defence then melee makes them a cleric, healing/melee/defence makes them a healing monk, melee/healing/defence makes them a fighting monk… and so on, involving all the schools. At first glance this looks like a ridiculous amount of freedom for the players, but in reality it is a very finite number of “classes” and all balance can be approached from that angle. No need to worry about someone maxing healing and melee and defence and damage spell casting because its not possible, if fact the ranking can inherantly reduce the effectiveness of the skills in that school, and since everyone will have to place one school at the lowest rank it means that everybody will suck at something.

Essentially, all I’m really saying is… totally unrestricted skill systems are bad, and totally rigid class systems are bad. A good system is just floating somewhere in the middle, a nice balance between player freedom and developer control.

A Game Design Tangent

Gaming

I was reading a post over at Broken Toys… here… and the topic is interesting, but something in one of the comments caught in my brain, and its been knocking around all day, so I decided to poor it out.

Wanderer said:
A lot of people play golf.

Yes, alot of people play golf. And it stands to reason that someone who has played golf for three years is going to be better at it than someone who just picked up his clubs (barring natural talent and people who never learn). MMOs with level disparities can’t be compared to golf unless you segregate golf courses so that only people with certain handicaps, lifetime averages, or particular sets of clubs can play on them. If that were true, then a guy who just bought clubs won’t be able to play on the same courses his new friends who’ve been playing for three years can play on.

Golf isn’t like an MMO because it is inherantly designed on different fundamentals, and in most (if not all) MMOs, there are time consuming or otherwise daunting barriers between people who have invested time and people who have not. Even “casual” MMO players will eventually achieve a position where the barriers between them and new players is too big for them to comfortably ignore (I don’t care how nice and giving a person you are, if you are level 60, sitting around “helping” a level 10 eventually gets mind numbingly boring). Unfortunately, most (if not all) of these barriers are the rewards of playing the game… so the game is designed to divide players. Sure, it may encourage them to work together in small groups (anywhere from 2 to 200), but overall the rewards of them game serve to divide those that succeed from those who fail or have not yet tried.

Back to golf… yes, a lot of people play golf. But on the flipside, a lot more people don’t play golf. The rules of golf do not change to try to lure in more players (club regulations maybe, but I haven’t seen a golf course set all its holes to par 15s just to make people feel better about their golf game). Game designers need to take that approach. You are designing a game for a certain group of people, the people who enjoy the kind of game you design. That group might be huge, or it might be tiny. The goal of funding a game is to only spend money in proportion to the size of your intended audience. You don’t spend $300 million to build a game that 5,000 people are going to play, and if you manage to spend $4 million and 6 million people show up… well… you win. But more important than the money is to define your audience, design for them, and release a game.

Once the game is out there, you have to observe what people do with the game you made. Some of them are going to silently enjoy the game. Some will loudly complain that it sucks. Some will find ways to “break” the game. Some will loudly praise it as the second coming. Overall though, to some degree, you have to ignore the people who are angry and playing your game wrong, but don’t ignore the people who are having fun and playing your game wrong because even if its not what you intended, they like what you did and it may be time to learn from them instead of trying to tell them how to play. But above all else, don’t try to make everyone happy. You will fail. Just accept the fact that some people will play your game, and some people will play golf.

Spam Report

Site News

Other blog sites will occasionally do a post about their traffic stats… what google phrases turn up their site, where readers are coming from, etc… Not me, I don’t have those stats. But what I do have is Akismet comment spam blocker. So instead of talking about who is coming here for the content, I’m going to talk about the people that come here to spam…

Quite possibly the most abundant spam is for phentermine. But only if you are interested. (So the spam claims.) Of course, they post that comment probably 300 times a day. And I’m not interested in phentermine, especially since I don’t know what it is.

Second is Xanax. Almost as often as phentermine. Then comes Xenical, ambien, tramadol, and a horde of other drugs. Does this spam actually generate them sales?

Then comes the online casinos.

Most of the spam is very polite. They apologize for what they are about to do, or say its only if I’m interested. Some tell me I have a great time. Some thank me for the bookmark. Some even exclaim that my site is very cognitive.

The irony is… before I installed a spam blocking plug-in for WordPress, I got about 10, maybe 15, spams a day that I manually deleted. Since installing Akismet 3 weeks ago it has blocked 3,500 spams. Its almost as if blocking spam actually attracts more spam. But I’m not about to remove the plug-in. I’m not that crazy.

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.

Blasts from the Past

Site News

I finally decided that I’m going to back fill my old posts from my old formats into this weblog. It’ll be fun to read that stuff again. Anyway, I missed Saturday because I went to bed early and forgot to do it. I had about a half a post written, but I didn’t feel like finishing it for today.

So… whatever… See you soon. 🙂

Custom Signature

Site News

Sort of a neat little add-on I found for WordPress. Dynasignage. It takes the title of the latest post and builds a PNG signature so that you can use it to use on message boards and stuff to try to increase traffic on your site. The author’s version was a bit bland, just a while box, black border and two lines of centered text. So I modified it to fit three lines of text, use a template image with graphic, and allow for a variable to be passed so that the name on the signature can change on a per board basis. For example:

Its pretty cool.