Tag: mob

Worth Fighting For

Gaming

One of the things that bothered me a lot while playing World of Warcraft is that most people really just didn’t care.  If you got too many monsters in the same fight, or an elite was just too strong, many people just gave up, took the death and came back.  The penalty for losing was so soft that no one minded, and in fact many relied on it to test the waters.  “Hey, let’s try this! What’s the worst that can happen? Lose a couple minutes and a little money on repairs?”  It added an element of fearlessness to the game, which had its own merit, but in the long run as you come to count on that losing doesn’t hurt, winning doesn’t feel as awesome.  Winning is just something that happens.  Winning, in World of Warcraft, is inevitable.

Meanwhile, back in the dark ages of 3D MMORPGs, death could easily cost you a couple of days worth of experience points if you couldn’t get a cleric to resurrect you.  In some ways, this was bad because people were less likely to try things unless they were pretty sure they had a good shot at winning.  However, a charismatic enough leader could convince just about any group to try anything once.  “I know we don’t have a cleric, but I’ve grouped with this druid before, and we have an enchanter to slow, we’ll be fine!”  That was the basis of some of my most memorable moments in the game.  Five monks and a druid as a group in Old Sebilis, ranger tank in the Plane of Storms, and so on.  But the greatest effect of a stiff death penalty was the will to survive.  If a pull went bad, or a wandering monster joined in your already iffy fight, not one person ever said, “Hey, let’s just die and come back in a couple minutes.”  Instead, the chat window would immediately be filled with chatter about who was tanking what, or what mob was going to get pulled away and rooted, or which mob to focus on as various forms of crowd control were tried.  My memories of EverQuest are filled with moments of healers being out of mana while the group is surrounded by five monsters all mesmerized and the enchanter ensuring us they could hold it while I yelled at the group, “No one touch ANYTHING until the cleric says he’s ready!” and people making sacrifices, “I’ll off tank this, but I can’t last more than a minute or two, if you don’t finish by then, I’ll be dead but I wish you luck with the add.”  I fought many fights where bad agro killed the cleric and the rest of the group fought tooth and nail to stay standing as long as they could.  Failure hurt, but snatching victory from the jaws of defeat felt incredible.

Many people will tell you that harsh death penalties are a thing of the past and that today’s players wouldn’t stand for it, and they are right.  The people who would never play EQ who have flocked to WoW aren’t looking for that sort of risk, just a few odd minutes or hours of entertainment.  But to me, that sort of investment in a game is what I’m looking for.  I want a game worth fighting for.

Mafia Matrix

Gaming

Since dumping Urban Dead, I was looking for another free web game to play and thanks to Ryan over at Nerfbat, I was pointed toward Mafia Matrix.

In an odd way, Mafia Matrix is almost the complete opposite of Urban Dead.  While the zombie game only penalized you with time, death was just becoming a zombie and you could be revived, this little mob system simulator is much more harsh.  Death is death.  You can make a new character, but a dead character is dead for good.  Of course, there is much more to do in the Matrix than just killing people.  You work jobs, collect money, buy stuff, steal from people, and there is a real community.  See, in Mafia land, players get to be the Mayors of the cities, the judges, the lawyers, the store owners, and the gangsters.  If you go whack someone without permission of the local don, you might find yourself dead.

It makes for interesting game play.  I, for example, have gone the route of being a legit lawyer.  I don’t commit crimes, but I will take any case and make sure that all my clients are given the best defence the law allows.  Of course, every criminal I get off means that the city doesn’t get that fine as revenue, so even defending criminals could get me killed, or at least run out of town, if I deny the city too much money.

Anyway, for now I’m enjoying the game.  If you play and want to look me up, I’m Jhaer and I spend most of my time in Miami.  And if you do decide to play, do so from one of the links in this post, I get something for the referral if you stick with the game.

Resident Evil: Extinction

Reviews

I actually saw Resident Evil: Extinction weekend before last, but I figured I’d dig out my thoughts on it for a Zombie Wednesday post. There are going to be spoilers. You have been warned.

I loved the first Resident Evil film. I’ve never played any of the games, so I went into it with just the expectation of a zombie movie, and it delivered. The only mild disappointment I might have had with it was the open ending and the not-quite-zombie monsters at the tail of the film. The second movie was more of the same, until they introduced the boss mob. That was silly. But hey, it didn’t totally suck.

The third movie, well, I was hoping for the end of a trilogy. It even seemed like it was going that direction. The world is infected by the T-Virus, dried up. If people stay in one place too long, the zombies will find them, so they stay on the move, driving around the desert in a caravan. Meanwhile, Umbrella is still around and is actually searching for a cure, sort of, and they happen to be in the desert too. Alice is still running around trying to save the people she can, and Umbrella needs Alice to manufacture the cure.

There are some really cool scenes of the caravan and of Alice as they move through this dead world. Stuff happens, people die, things go wrong… the usual. But then the movie takes a left turn. See, there is this scientist who has been using clones of Alice in place of Alice, and its not working out well. So he decides to go after Alice, but only after he creates some super zombies to fight her. The doctor ends up getting bit by a super zombie, and instead of turning into a zombie or even a super zombie he turns into a boss mob with tentacles and other weird shit (I’m told it is Tyrant from the game). Its lame. And then Alice wins, and she tells all the other hidden Umbrella labs that she’s coming to get them, her and her army… of Alice clones.

There are rumors and allegations going around that they are working on a Resident Evil 4, and as much as I now dread it, I hate movies with giant gaping open endings. Leave a couple loose ends untied? Sure. But the end of this movie was just too much. They need an RE4, if for no other reason than to put an ending stamp on it.

No RP in my RPG

Gaming

One of the things I find distressing in MMORPGs today is the lack of that RP part… you know, Role Playing. I suppose that’s why most articles these days are using just MMOG or seeking out new identifiers.

Mostly, when I play, I tend to RP, at least a little. I try not to talk about sports or real world news, I don’t go on and on about the latest movie that I saw. I’m in a world where I am a hunter, and I have been tasked to kill bears, and while I don’t keep things deadly serious, I try to keep things contextual. Lots of people don’t.

It starts with names. From a hundred yards, when I see you running across the field and I target you and see your name is ‘Meattank’ or ‘Roxxingursoxxorz’, I know immediately that you are not playing your role as defined by the game world. Instead, you are likely grinding exp, loot, money or faction. Grouping with you would be a mistake, because you are likely to spend our time talking about the real world, or worse, DPS numbers and quickest routes of progression, boiling the game down into its simplest form. Of course, some ‘bad’ players still have good names.

I find, as I get older, that I’m less tolerant of people. I’m more apt to just pick up my toys and go home rather than put up with someone insisting that not playing a game at its most minimal and purest form is a waste of time. People who demand that levels and stats be maxed, that can only tell you where things are by looking them up on the latest spoiler site. Mostly though, the lack of role playing goes back to the idea I posted about a couple weeks ago. The min/max play style trumps my role playing style. A player playing the stat and loot game can hear me talk about getting a beer down at the pub and just brush it off, but when a group member breaks out with “Okay, lull that mob and will split the pair, cast x, y and z, if we happen to get the second, I’ll offtank until you guys down the first mob. Stay to the back and sides to avoid the ripostes. Max melee range so you don’t push.” well, it just kills the role play.

There is no solution to this. I’m just venting. I’ll still keep trying to role play, but real role playing is probably going to have to stay at the table top game level.

Smokin` Aces

Reviews

In case you haven’t seen a trailer that actually explains it, here is the short version: Buddy “Aces” Israel was a Las Vegas magician who turned mobster. Buddy causes a split in the Vegas mob with him running one side and Primo Sperazza on the other. Primo is sick and he’s ordered the death of Buddy. Buddy is in the process of turning Federal witness against the whole West Coast mob families. A couple of Primo’s guys decide they want to make sure Buddy dies (or maybe they just want to be the guys who do it) so they hire a few more hitmen to go after Buddy too. Oh, and some bail bondsmen guys are after Buddy for jumping bail. The Feds learn about the hit and hightail it to Lake Tahoe where Buddy is hiding to try to protect him, meanwhile the hitmen all decend on Tahoe as well.

There is alot of set up for the first part of the moive, introducing each of the hitmen (or hitwomen in the case of Alicia Keys and Taraji P. Henson), all the Feds and giving some background on Primo Sperazza, Buddy “Aces” Israel and the case against the mob. The characters and the actors (including Ryan Reynolds, Ray Liotta, Jeremy Piven, Andy Garcia, Jason Bateman, Ben Affleck, Peter Berg, Tommy Flanagan, Curtis Armstrong, Matthew Fox, and more) make the movie… and when the shooting starts, the action ain’t half bad either.

All in all, this was a great fun movie. I recommend it, though it is a bit bloody, so it is not the best date movie and absolutely not for kids.

The Hidden Effects of RMT

Gaming

It started (this time) with Lum, and then spread to Psychochild and from there to Grouchy Gnome, Moorgard, Cael, and Nick over at My 2 Copper: Real Money Transactions.

For now, let’s leave out discussions of my feelings on RMT’s effects on games, let’s leave out discussions of game design, let’s leave out the possible reasons people do it (lack of time, boredom, etc.). Instead, I’m going to talk about the hidden effects of RMT, specifically one that no one talks about.

I have two friends, well, I have more than two friends, jeez, I’m not a recluse, but for this discussion it only pertains to two of my friends. One of them is like me, we play the games for the games themselves, if something takes twenty hours it takes twenty hours. The other one buys gold. Basically, the second friend is usually a late adopter of games, or he’s distracted by other new games and “falls behind”, so he buys gold to catch up. He also does so once he reaches the “end game” because he doesn’t like farming. To sum up, one of my friends RMTs call him Brad, and the other doesn’t call him Mike.

The three of us are sitting in a bar talking over a table of beers. Mike and I are laughing and telling stories. Quests that went wrong, encounters that went down the shitter, PvP where we were handed our asses, funny monster pathing stories, and basically everything under the sun that comes from playing the game the boring traditional way, most of it involving failures of spectacular effort on our part. “This one time, I was out pulling in Mistmoore and I didn’t realize I’d agro’d a second mob from up top. So the group is fighting along some extra pulls from the front when the entire freakin’ Castle comes charging out! Holy Christ! There were like three hundred mobs and it was total chaos, so I grab agro on most of them and start running in a big damn circle…” Hilarity ensues. Brad nods, listens and laughs. He even has a story or two of his own, but Mike and I completely dominate the story telling and largely because most of our stories come from all the game that Brad skipped because with his bought gold he didn’t need to play it, or the uber items he scored with his bought gold made the encounters so easy the only story he could tell is how he sliced through everything like a hot knife through warm butter and he almost died when that mob ten levels higher than him showed up and he almost ran out of hitpoints on the three minute run for the zone line.

Now, of course this isn’t true in all cases. Once we finally all get up to raid level in games, the field levels a bit, because you usually can’t RMT past “end game” content unless you are buying characters, which Brad doesn’t do.

Why do I care? Brad comes to me one day and says, “Man, you guys always have great stories to tell. I wish I had those.”

There you have it… RMT ruins the time you spend with your friends drinking beers and talking about the game. And really, you have a job to get ahead in life, aren’t our games and hobbies intended to be done for the memories? Of course, that can go both ways… if I RMT’d too, Brad and I might be talking about all the high level content we were killing while Mike sat there with his little stories of low level quests, loser. So, in the end, my conclusion is… RMT or not, it doesn’t really matter, but make sure that you and your friends are all on similar pages so that no one gets left out.

How to Truly Listen

Gaming

If you know City of Heroes, and you frequent the message boards, you might be familiar with the battle cry, “Repeal the Purple Patch!” and you might even know what they are referring to…

First off, what is the Purple Patch?

When City of Heroes first opened, it was possible for a player to fight and defeat a foe that was 8 to 10 levels higher than he was. These battles were usually fierce and hard fought, but with the way experience was given turned out to be well worth the effort. See, exp in CoH is done on a scale.. a mob is worth X exp, and then a bonus or subtraction is made based on other factors. The major factor is your level. If you are the same level as the mob, you get X. If you are higher level, you get less than X, and the scale works quickly down so that once you are 4 or 5 levels over it (and the mob is easy to defeat) you get nothing. On the other end, there is no limit… if the mob is 10 levels higher than you and you do 100% of the damage to defeat it, you wind up getting something crazy like 4 or 5 times the exp, so a mob worth 50 exp becomes worth 200-250 exp to a lower level. The issue is, the game is largely balanced around you fighting mobs your level. So, at level 10, you might get 20 exp for defeating a level 10 mob, which is 2% of your exp for level. 50 level 10 mobs, and you level. If, however, you can fight a mob and get 200 exp, then you only need to defeat 5 of them. Problem is, they didn’t expect people to be able to defeat a mob 10 levels above them, and didn’t expect people to level quite so quickly.

As a result, the Purple Patch came into play. What they did was once a mob goes purple (4 levels above you), your chance to hit begins to decline very steeply… VERY steeply. So steep that once a mob is 8 levels above you, realistically you have 0 chance to win the fight because you will be simply unable to do more damage than he will be able to regenerate due to missing. (Originally, it was harsher than this even, the decline started sooner and a mob 5 levels above you was impossible, but they eased up, so the original patch is not important anymore, only the existing situation).

The effect this had on players, was that now that they were relegated to fighting mobs 4 levels above and lower, the exp rewards were not as ludacris as they had been. Leading to the inevitable “they nerfed all the fun out of the game” cries because people couldn’t earn mad exp while fighting impossible odds. To a degree, the players ARE correct. However, as often is the case, they are single minded.

This can be tied in with my MMORPG Project (link over on the right)… See, the players are focused on “repeal the purple patch”, but what they don’t realize is that the purple patch isn’t the issue… its that the mobs they “should” be fighting (according to the developers) are too easy and not rewarding enough. Would they still be asking for the repeal if the fights with orange (level +2) and red (level +3) mobs were more harrowing and yielded a better reward?

I don’t think they would. And this is where the developers should focus. They were right with the purple patch… players should be fighting things 8 and 10 levels above them… but players should regularly seek challenge, even level to red con, and they should find it fun and rewarding.

The devs are on the right track… now its just a wait and see to see if they follow through.