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Embrace Your Niche

Gaming

If you have been keeping up with MMO news in the last couple months, I’m sure you’ve heard some part or some version of the saga of Perpetual. First they had Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising (you might still be able to find pre-order boxes on sale at Best Buy), then they got Star Trek Online, then they cancelled Gods & Heroes (if you find the pre-order boxes on sale at Best Buy, don’t buy them), then they lost the Star Trek license. I’m sure rumors will be plentiful about who is going to land that albatross in the coming weeks, until something gets announced for sure.

In the mean time, over at Elder Game, Eric, who worked on STO for Perpetual, gives out advice for whoever gets the license.

I couldn’t agree less. I mean, Eric is a game designer who has worked in the industry and I’m just some schlepp gamer (who also does happen to be a programmer, but only for data warehouses and time management software thus far), so obviously you should believe me, right?

Every point he makes is valid under the assumption that, as he says himself, your intent is to:

Make a game for WoW players who kinda liked Star Trek. That should be your target audience. Trust me, it’ll be fine.

And that’s where I diverge, and the reason I say I disagree with his points. If you follow me around the Internet reading the posts I make on message boards and comments I put on other people’s blogs, you’ll see that I have a gentle disdain for WoW. That feeling comes from the fact that I find the game to be highly polished but bland. I played WoW for 2 years and in that time I can honestly say I didn’t hate it, but I can also honestly say that I didn’t love it either. The game just sort of happened, and its that level of mild pleasure without displeasure that has helped WoW hit the numbers it has hit. And while it is wildly successful and Blizzard executives laugh as they frequently drive truckloads of cash to the bank, it isn’t the only way to do things.

Games like WoW are not inherently bad. In fact, to a degree they are good because they expand the market place, but not every title should or even can expand that market place. As much as people tout the polish of WoW as the key to its success, the reality is that it was and is a perfect storm of game and license. WoW has “9 million subscribers”, which isn’t entirely accurate because some of the asian countries don’t do traditional subscription models, and I’d wager less than half of those are in the US, maybe even the US and Europe. Asia has been big on Warcraft for a long time. But how big is Star Trek in Asia? Do they play Star Trek RTS games like they play Starcraft and Warcraft?

For me, I’d rather see whoever gets the Star Trek Online license embrace their niche and not make a WoW clone set in the Star Trek universe. And while I do agree with Eric that they’ll have trouble making a game that is true to the previous work and pleases all the fans, they shouldn’t just ignore them and make WoW. Can you imagine a game with player created and controlled capital ships, with a captain and officer crews, away teams and engineering staff? Star Trek Online shouldn’t aim for WoW… they should, in my humble opinion, aim for a mix of Puzzle Pirates and The Sims with some Dark Age of Camelot style RvR thrown in, and the only non playable race in the game should be the Borg because players, even chinese gold farmers, have too much personality to be Borg.

Update: Since I wrote this, Eric has gone on to elaborate his opinions. And it doesn’t change my opinions at all.

Cloverfield

Reviews

12 out of 13 nots
for Survival Panic, and Crazy Shaky Camera Goodness

Let me begin by just saying, if you go see Cloverfield expecting the traditional Us versus Them monster movie, you will be disappointed. The only real battles between humans and monsters are seen in the background, passing by or as “we” run through it. That said, if you go in looking for a heart pounding survival run through New York as it collapses around you, this film totally rock.

More after the break…

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Abandoning Munford

Random Thoughts

It has only been a week since I decided to make a concerted effort to hold the Munford Cinema in Urban Dead, and I am ditching that location. The rotter revive center just proved to attract far too much attention. So, I’m now on the prowl for another theater to take.

At the moment I’m hiding in the Hildebrand Mall gathering supplies and checking my city maps… and recovering from being dead three times in a week.

This experience, to me, really illustrates the one major design flaw in Urban Dead. In most games, death might have a penalty, but you always get back on your feet. In this game, dying actually makes you the enemy. If you and ten of your friends are hiding out in a building and a couple of zombies break in and kill some of your friends, your friends are now zombies. Reviving them costs 10 action points each. The net sum of the game is that you will lose. No questions, at some point you’ll die and have to either play zed or just wandering around looking for places where people might revive you. I don’t want to play a zombie, its boring. I want to be a survivor running from building to building looking for supplies and hiding for my life.

Anyway, I’m still playing and still going to be trying to build up the MCP, but its absolutely going to need to be somewhere safer.

As Stupid As It Ever Was

Reviews

American Gladiators is back.

Part of me feels that the title and that first sentence alone are enough to really say all there is to say… and yet, I’m still writing. I’ve always been fond of game shows. Tests of knowledge and physical skill just fascinate me. Backstabbing retarded nonsense and people eating gross things doesn’t. That’s why I’ll watch shows like Jeopardy and American Gladiators, but won’t watch Survivor or Fear Factor.

The new Gladiators is just like the old Gladiators. Normal people compete in events against “trained professionals”. It is silly, and stupid… but also fun background noise that occasionally pulls my attention from what I’m doing to see people hanging from rings and climbing rock walls and poking at each other with big Q-tips.

It certainly won’t save the world… and I probably won’t even be watching it all that long… but hey, if nothing else is on and there is nothing else to do…

Just One Dollar

Gaming

A little over two years ago, Brian Green laid out why he believes that subscription models for MMOs are doomed. More recently, he touched on money in online games again, and this time hit the reason why I support the subscription model: Gambling impulses.

To use an outside of MMO example that I think illustrates my point well, let’s look at the Lottery. Almost every state in the United States participates in some form of lottery. From scratch off cards to Pick 6 jackpots, and they do it because it has been a proven money earner to fund state projects with. Of course, some people oppose the lotteries for the same reasons I’m about to go into.

Typically, a lottery ticket costs $1. Some scratch off games are more, but we’ll stick with the $1 tickets for now. At that price, I buy tickets now and then, usually when the jackpot goes over $100 million, because really, if I spend $1 and win $100 million or more, that’s a dollar well spent. But I don’t win, or haven’t yet. Looking at the Mega Millions site (the multi-state jackpot Georgia participates in) you can see clearly why. The chances of winning the jackpot are approximately 1 in 175,711,536. Knowing a bit about math, that number is why I don’t buy many tickets and don’t buy very often at all. However, I’ve worked in stores that sold lottery tickets before, and stood in line at gas stations all over, and watched as some people will spend $50 per draw (twice a week) in a quest to win that jackpot, even when its only $12 million.

The kicker to this is that the most money is generally spent by the people who can least afford to spend it. So while I seem moderately immue (though not completely) to the gambling impulse, I’ll spend maybe $20 or $30 in a year on the lottery, but there are people spending much more… $50 a draw, twice a week, that’s $5,200 a year, usually being spent by people who could probably use that money somewhere else to much greater effect.

An MMO with a monthly subscription model is like having a fixed utility bill. It is $15 a month, every month. Of course, some people buy gold and things outside of game, but in general, you could say the overall game design is meant to fit the $15 a month model. Then take a game like Puzzle Pirates. You have the option of paying a monthly fee, or you can play on one of the doubloon oceans (servers). On these servers, certain items, jobs and activities require doubloons which can only be gotten in two ways, 1) buy them from game, or 2) trade for them with other players. If no one does 1, then soon no one will be able to do 2. So, while I play on a doubloon ocean and have never bought doubloons from the Three Rings (the company that makes Puzzle Pirates), my game depends on other people buying doubloons and then needing pieces of eight (the other money in game) which I earn by playing the game. I play for free, my game in unhindered, but requires some effort to get what I want, however it is dependent on someone somewhere willing to pay cash for doubloons.

People with the most time to play are going to, in my experience, be less likely to buy items if there are other ways around them. However, a person who holds down two jobs to make ends meet who likes to game in their little free time is going to feel more of a pull towards buying items to “level the playing field”. So when it comes down to the microtransactions, where you are comparing thirty minutes or an hour worth of time to $1, it begins to slide into that realm of lottery tickets… so much like the lottery, I can easily see myself throwing a couple dollars at it now and then, but I also know there will be people spending fifty to sixty dollars a week.

At the end of the day, I guess it boils down to how much you feel responsible for providing a product that relies heavily on the player’s self-control and restraint not to bankrupt themselves. Personally, I’m not comfortable with it. Overall, while I dislike gold selling and that sort of this, at least it is, for the most part, external to the game design (I hope), but when a game is designed to accept, or even require, cash transactions to advance… I guess its a slippery slope I’d rather not set foot on to begin with.

Thoughts on PvP

Gaming

About a month ago, Scott at Broken Toys made a great post on How To Make A Game With ‘PvP Done Right’. Tobold followed that up with We Just Don’t Want To Lose. Both great posts… and there were a bunch more.

So, exactly how can you manage to have good PvP and avoid making losing feel like a crippling loss?

Before I go into anything, lets just put out there that I do not like 100% open friendly fire PvP. I prefer PvP games where there are sides to choose, like Dark Age of Camelot and World of Warcraft and the upcoming Warhammer.

I would think what you would need is to reward players with several buckets.

Let’s call the first bucket the “Combat Bucket”, in here the player is given points for damaging enemies, healing damage done by enemies, casting debuffs and buffs with diminishing returns for recasting spells that don’t stack (i.e. – if you cast a debuff that reduces the target’s accuracy by 5% and a second cast stacks for a 10% total you get full points for casting it; but if it does not stack and a second cast keeps the effect at 5%, you only get points if your cast is considered a “refresh” – the effect lasts 30 seconds and you recast it at 10 seconds or less to go; if it doesn’t stack and isn’t a “refresh” you get nothing). Essentially, within the PvP environment (the open world, the instance, whatever), every action that is taken in offense or defense earns points in the Combat Bucket. You could even split this into two buckets for offense or defense, but that might get complicated.

The next bucket is the “Kill Bucket”. When an enemy is defeated, points are dropped into the Kill Bucket for all the people who participated in the kill. How far/deep to go with this is a very long discussion and requires testing to determine how far is far enough and how deep is deep enough. How is the kill awarded? To a player? To a group? To a side? To everyone who damaged, debuffed, buffed/healed those people, etc?

The third bucket is the “Victory Bucket”. If the PvP has objectives that are met, points are dropped into this bucket. This can be for winning the match in a WoW Battlegrounds type scenario, or even completing mini objectives like the subquests that exist inside the WoW Battlegrounds (gathering supplies and what not in Alterac Valley, or capturing/defending control points in Arathi Basin, or capturing a flag in Warsong).

The key here is to try to award points for as many actions as possible and to reward “doing nothing” as little as possible. With a model like this, sure a player might AFK through a round of fighting and earn a minimum Victory reward (if his team wins the round), but actually participating would earn rewards as such a faster rate that being AFK through rounds would seem like a complete waste of time.

But why the different buckets? Well, with the points you earn, you can buy items, but the items would also be divided up. Some items would require generic “points”, and the player could spend from any combination of their buckets to buy them. Then you’d have items that required specific point types. New weapons and items that affect combat would come from the combat and kill buckets, with special “trophy” items coming from only one bucket. And the Victory Bucket would be spent on titles or armor models. With trophy items, the purchases could be tiered so that maybe you’d buy a first level helmet plume for 5,000 victory points, and the second level helmet plume would be 10,000 points plus a first level helmet plume, making the point cost of the second level actually be 15,000, but also making it so that spending the first 5,000 has no penalty to it except expending the points sooner rather than later so if you end a hard day of playing with 5,800 points, buying the first level plume doesn’t hurt you on your way to getting the twentieth level plume.

Anyway… this is just me armchair game designing again… feel free to shoot holes in my proposal, you won’t offend me with constructive criticism.

The Neverending Flood

Random Thoughts

It has been a while since I posted about my efforts to reduce junk and go a bit green. So, here is an update…

Despite my best efforts to make it known that I do not want to receive direct mailings, it seems that there is no way to get them to stop outside of becoming a hermit. The problem appears to be that no matter how many lists I get myself removed from, old lists will always exist and get resold. The post office also seems completely uninterested in my plight. I have tried, unsuccessfully, to convince them that my wife and I are the only residents, all previous owners don’t live here anymore, and we do not desire to have any mail addressed to “Resident” delivered here. Despite this, they continue delivering mail here for people who have not lived here for over two years. Sometimes I’m tempted to get a P.O. Box and move all the mail I want to it and then just ignore the mailbox until they can’t fit any more junk into it.

One by one, as lights in my house burn out, I’m replacing them with lower wattage bulbs. Most of them go from being a 40, 60 or 100 watt bulb down to a 7, 11 or 15 watt bulb. It takes some getting used to as depending on the bulb type and manufacturer, some low watt bulbs start dim and “warm up” to their full brightness. Also, all my outdoor lights are properly shaded so that light from the bulbs goes downward, and I’m still refraining from reporting the street light that is out. I really dislike light pollution, and now I have the benefit of when I walk outside at night I can actually see the stars.

Winter came, and to try to lower my own costs and whatnot, the wife and I have been keeping the house at 66 or 68 degrees. That’s new for us as we (I) usually like to keep the house warmer so that I can be comfortable wearing shorts and t-shirts, but I’ve switched over to sweats and long pj’s. Now I just need us both to get into better shape so that when summer comes we won’t feel the need to combat the heat of our out of shape bodies with blasting the air conditioning.

All in all, I’m spending less money, lowering my footprint, but still losing the war against junkmail. Here’s to hoping I can turn the tide eventually…

Let`s Go To The Movies

Gaming

I’ve undertaken a project in Urban Dead: the revitalization of the cinemas in the city of Malton. To that end, I am forming a group in game called the Malton Cinema Patrol (MCP).

The stated goals of the MCP are:

  1. To secure the Cinemas of Malton city and at least one neighbor building. The Cinema will be kept at a barricade level extremely heavily (EHB), and the neighbor building will be kept at a level of very strongly (VSB++) so that survivors seeking shelter can enter the neighbor building and utilize the Free Running skill to get into the Cinema.
  2. The Cinema should contain a generator, it should be fueled and running, and the wall should be spray painted with the movie currently playing (in the format “Now Playing: [name of movie]”). If possible, a radio transmitter should be set up and set to a frequency of 27.72 MHz (listed as available, if this group takes off, I’ll claim it).

Members should carry a radio tuned to the same frequency, a toolbox, spray paint, first aid kits, and weapons.Anyway… that’s all for now… Oh, I should say that the MCP is officially beginning with the Munford Cinema in Galbraith Hills. Though, with a rotter revive center just a few blocks away, we may be forced to move elsewhere.

The cake is a lie!

Gaming

Anyone who has played computer games or console games has run across the puzzle game. You have to flip this switch, move that box, trigger that trigger, jump the lava and open the door to the next level. Sometimes they are disguised as Tomb Raider games or even shooters like Half-Life. But from the producers of that latter example comes Portal. Everyone else has blogged about it, so I figured I would too.

Of all the games I’ve played in the last year, Portal, by far, is the shortest. I ran through the whole thing in a couple of hours, then I did it again… and again. Each time I was trying to find quicker or more interesting ways to pass a level. My favorite was to take out an automated sentry by portal manipulating a previous sentry, one hole above it and one below it, until its momentum was huge, then I moved the portal above to a wall and shot the poor guy like a rocket down a hallway at another sentry. All the while, the computer voice was promising me that once I’d completed the training there would be a party and cake!

GLaDOS promised me cake and forced me to euthanize my only friend, the Weighted Companion Cube. The cake is a lie and I miss the Cube! Why, GLaDOS? Why??

Seriously, though, if you have not yet played Portal on any of the platforms (PC, Xbox 360, PS3), you need to do so. Its certainly not the most fun you can have with your pants on, but its up there.

R M T

Gaming

At the end of the year, the blogs were alive with the sound of Real Money Transactions. Not that the blogs were charging money, but lots of the game developer blogs were talking about the subject. I’m not going to provide links because it was pretty much all of them to some degree, though Raph and Tobold has the biggest intertwining discussion.

My take on RMT… I don’t like it because of the way it changes player behavior. For an example of what I’m talking about, I’m actually going to step away from games, because the behavior I dislike is not specific to games.

Tickle Me Elmo.

The year that toy came out it carried a manufacturer suggested retail price of $28.99. However, the willingness of people to pay (reportedly) as much as $1500 just to have one of the limited production item in time for Christmas changed the market place. Without the lure of profit, the lines down at the toy store would have been kids and moms and dads, maybe some grandparents. Instead, stores also had to contend with people looking for a quick buck instead of a toy. That year, my roommate was working at Toys R Us. He pulled a few of the Elmos off the truck for himself, bought them, and then sold them for $600 each. All in all he got about a $3400 profit on a $130 initial investment. I would have complained, but it meant he’d start paying his share of the rent and bills.

Now, I realize and understand a parent’s desire to get the “it” toy for their kids. But having an inside man at Toys R Us that year, I later learned that after the holiday season, they had plenty of the Elmos at the regular $28.99, and if your child is going to throw a huge tantrum and hate you forever because they didn’t get a specific toy under the tree, the problem may not be the toy. Maybe.

RMT brings out some of the same behavior from players in video games. A player who would never sit in one area farming gold or potion reagents might do exactly that once they learn they can earn a nice supplementary income from it. I’ve even been tempted by it myself. During periods when my wife has been between jobs, I’ve tried to convince her to spend her days farming money or power leveling characters so that we could sell them. Ultimately, we never did that because I always came to realize I was succumbing to the “Everyone else is doing it, why can’t we?” attitude. I didn’t want to farm gold, but my own game had been affected by gold farmers from time to time that I wanted a piece of the action.

It is, in a way, just like the Elmo toys. Sure, a player could wait, he doesn’t need 100 gold right now, he could adventure around and the money will come, the game is designed that way. But if he’s willing to buy that gold from someone willing to eschew adventuring for farming, RMT is going to exist.

So, if you wanted to, how could you get rid of RMT? Many people have suggested things like limiting trades and making items unable to be traded… but really, even then you can’t entirely stop the RMT. If everything in the game was not dropable and you couldn’t trade anything at all, full account sales would increase. The farmer wouldn’t farm gold or items, he’d just level and outfit characters and sell the whole kit and caboodle. Really, though, seriously, if you wanted to absolutely remove RMT from your game there are only two ways to do it.

  1. Make it a single player game.
  2. Make everything (levels, money, items) available to every player for no effort.

Option 1 defeats the purpose of an MMO, and also doesn’t completely end RMT since someone out there somewhere will be trying to sell his strategy guide and/or walk through. Option 2 puts you on the field with First Person Shooters – there is nothing to gain from play, so the game play itself must be the draw.