Tag: player

Garage Sale

Random Thoughts

One of the advantages of living in an actual house in an actual neighborhood is the neighborhood garage sales. Everyone carts all their old crap they don’t want anymore out on to their yards and tries to pawn them off on anyone willing to take them away… I mean, people try to divest themselves of things they no longer use and pass them on to people who will make good use of them, for a small fee.

The wife and I decided to take this opportunity to thin out our bookcases and to cut down out CD collection, and even empty a closet or two… and to try to beg people to buy my old computer junk. We dragged out two card tables worth of books, paperbacks and hardcovers, and easily over 400 CDs, a handful of DVDs that, frankly, no one should own, which is probably why I owned them. We also had a table of stuffed animals to which we held no special attachment and some board games we never play. There were some old blankets and sheet sets, all the light fixtures we’ve replaced in our house, my Body By Jake Ab-Rocker (no, it doesn’t really work, I did it every day for a year and I never got even remotely close to a 6-pack), and some odds and ends. And lastly there was my table of crap… 3 old 17″ monitors, 3 printers, 2 scanners, a DVD player, a box of assorted PCI expansion cards (a couple of network cards, a couple of video cards, a sounds card, an SCSI controller, a parallel port card), and a roll of 50 feet of coaxial cable.

No one buys my computer crap.

In the end, we managed to sell some books, CDs, a couple of DVDs, the odd board game and stuffed animal, and the DVD Player, netting us a grand total of $177. Now its time to box the junk back up and wait for the next neighborhood garage sale.

Consoles and Couples

Gaming

Something I left off of Monday’s post about Burnout Paradise was its lack of local multiplayer.  They aren’t alone.  Tons of games don’t have local multiplayer.  And even more rare are games that allow more than one player to play online.

One of the greatest features of Rock Band is that my wife and I can both play, and play online.  Now, of course, the interface for Rock Band is pretty simple… but the fact remains, if I wanted to sing, my wife wanted to play bass, my brother wanted to play guitar and my brother’s wife wanted to play drums, despite living a thirty minute drive away from each other, the four of us can do that, my wife and I on our console and he and his wife on their console.

Burnout Revenge had a local multiplayer mode, so the wife and I could race… but if I wanted to go online, she couldn’t play again, because only one player can be online from the same console in that game.  And that’s how most games are: Local or Online, but not a mix of both.

More games need to explore allowing multiple players from the same console play online.  I don’t work at a game company, so I can’t say for sure, but I would love to know what the hang up is.  Do they just not think about it?  Do the games require so much bandwidth that they can’t possibly run two sessions from one machine?  Is there not enough RAM or processing power?  I realize that there would have to be limitations… perhaps in Burnout Paradise, the second (and third, and fourth…) player from a console could only join if the first is hosting the game, and they can only join the locally hosted game.

Since I did name Rock Band as an example where a couple can play online together, does anyone out there know of other games that allow multiple players to be online from the same console?

The Best of Both Worlds

Gaming

In most fantasy based MMOs these days (and even in most non-fantasy based ones), there are only three functions a player performs at the root: take/absorb damage, deal damage, heal damage.  Most games also usually have one class that is designed to exclusively do one of those tasks.  A warrior tanks, a cleric heals, a wizard or rogue does damage.  Then we introduce the hybrids and controversy ensues.

In real life, at a real job, it is perfectly respectable to have people who specialize in small skill sets working alongside people who have two or three lesser specialties, not to the depth or quality of the single set specialist.  I’ve encountered this in my own life, worked with a guy who was aces at building databases and understanding database structure however his every attempt to ever do user interface work not only looked horrible but failed to function.  I’ve also worked with people who can build the most beautiful web pages but couldn’t properly lay out a database design to save their lives.  Personally, I live somewhere in the middle, I generally do all of programming work from UI to database with a decent degree of competency.  I’m not the best at any of it, but I do all of it well enough.  Usually in a work environment, its best to have a team built mostly of specialists with one or more generalists to support everyone else and to translate and transition work between the specialists.  See, when the UI guru and the DB savant get into a knock down drag out over design, I’m the guy who knows enough about both to be able to talk to both of them and make them see that they are actually agreeing with each other, but using different terms, or to make simple suggestions for both sides to bring them to a point where the work can get done.

In game design, this is where the hybrid should be.  He should be a mix of tanking, healing and damage dealing, any two or all three, to various levels but never as good as the single focus classes.  Hybrids should also be rare, and largely confined to group settings, because the whole point of the hybrid is that he supports other classes in doing their work by picking up slack or boosting just a little.  The problem, of course, is that hybrids are often more dynamic, by design, than the single focus classes, and so they attract more players.  While many people are content to be a specialist in real life, in gaming they want to be able to do everything, on one character.  So you end up with a bunch of people playing Paladins because they want to tank and heal, but then they complain when they do neither of them as well as warriors or priests.

So, what’s the solution?  Is there one?  Does it need one?

I’ve got no answer to those questions… but maybe other people do, and I would love to hear them.

New Toys

Random Thoughts

I’ve always wanted a Wacom tablet, and for my and the wife’s two year wedding anniversary, I bought one for myself.  I bought her one too, a larger one with more frills because February 14th through March 13th is a gangbuster gift giving season for me (Valentine’s, the anniversary, and then her birthday).   Anyway, I really love the thing.  Being left handed but having accepted the right handed orientation of all software and hardware design for PCs, I’ve never been able to draw well with a mouse unless I was willing to take hours to make images that should have taken minutes.  My right hand on the mouse works great for gaming, but never for the really fine motor work of graphical art.  But with the tablet, I’m able to move the task of drawing over to my left hand without having to fight with software and seeking out rare left handed mice.

I’m not great at drawing, but its nice to be able to doodle directly into the computer what I would normally be doodling on pieces of paper.  There are a few examples of my new digital doodling handiwork rotating through the banner images here on the weblog, and there will be more to come.

The wife also got me another gift, one I didn’t pick myself, for our anniversary: Burnout Paradise.  I’ve always been fond of the Burnout series of games, and this one is no different.  The single player game play really isn’t much different from prior games, you race, you win, you gain rewards.  Where this game really shines, however, is in the online play.  While previous entries in the series offered online racing, Burnout Paradise offers up what they call “Freeburn” which is where you get into game with up to seven other people and can explore the city together.  During this Freeburn, the host can initiate races or can pull up one of 50 challenges for everyone to do together (there are 350 challenges in all, 50 for each grouping of players from 2 to 8).  The only disadvantage to the new Burnout game is the “sandbox” style set up for the single player.  Races begin at intersections and proceed to wherever, and if you fail to win the race, you have to drive back to the start to try again.  It can be extremely frustrating if you lose a race by just a couple of seconds several times in a row.

I’m really enjoying both of my new toys.

Who Loves You And Who Do You Love?

Gaming

I love that quote from The Running Man.  Its the tag line/catch phrase for the host of a game show where criminals are allowed to try to win their freedom by out foxing a gang of hunters who chase them, all while an audience wins cash and prizes.

“Who loves you and who do you love?”

When building, and then running, an MMO, this is probably the single most important question to ask, and ask often.  Its the mantra of watching the trends, both the short and the long, to see where the tide is going to flow and hope your game continues riding the crest of the wave and not washing out.

Ryan Shwayder and Grimwell both recently posted about if an aging demographic should affect a game in production and future game design, and there has been much recent discussion about change in WoW by Heartless, Foton and others.

As it comes to the age stuff, I think both Ryan and Grimwell are fairly dead on, if your game got successful on a certain demographic, you shouldn’t change based on them growing up unless you aren’t gaining new people at the entry level.  If your game once appealed to teens and young adults but is no longer attracting those people, then you have to choose either to change to try to attract them again, or change to continue appealing to the people already playing your game and maybe attract more people at that demographic.  And that leads into the other discussion…

When it comes to World of Warcraft, just as with many games before it that mix PvE and PvP styles of play, changes are sometimes made to favor either the PvE or PvP side of the game over the other, often to the detriment of the other.  A spell might be too powerful against other players so they need to reduce its power, thus affecting the power of the player in combat with NPCs as well.  It does indeed suck when changes are made to favor the side of the game you don’t favor.  However, of all the companies out there making MMOs, Blizzard is the only one I inherently trust to completely understand their entire player base and do what is best for the bottom line of the company.  They didn’t get their reputation for wildly successful polished fun games for nothing…

So, why is it that they seem to be favoring the PvP side of the game so much with changes to classes and abilities?

While WoW has always been a casually friendly game, is has also long been accepted that rolling into large scale PvE content (raiding) at the high end was where the “real game” was.  More recently, however, the Battlegrounds and Arenas seem to have taken more focus.  For one, it often takes less people to participate in, and a pick up Alterac Valley is more likely to succeed than a pick up Kazharan raid.  For another, their restructuring of the reward system of PvP has made the PvP gear much more accessible to the casual player than raid gear.  This denotes an understanding from Blizzard that BGs and Arenas are much more accessible to the majority of players than raids, and will net them the largest continuous player base.  I know if I were back playing WoW, I’d be over in the PvP elements of the game as often as possible, if for no other reason than a few rounds of Arathi Basin would be more productive, personally, than a night of raiding with a guild.

Another aspect to keep in mind with WoW, is that unlike many other MMOs out there, it is truly a global game.  And in the Asian countries, professional gaming is much more a reality than it is here in the United States.  I wish I could find it again, but there was a video a while back showing some (Korean, I think) professional gamer (national Starcraft champion or something) getting mobbed by girls in the street.  I’ve seen pictures of the audiences that will come to watch pro-gaming over there.  I doubt girls will scream or audiences will come watch a carefully orchestrated 3 hour long raid bound to net the guy with the worst items and/or the most points an item upgrade.  But for Arena matches… they will come.  So when you consider that more than half of WoW’s 10 million subscribers are in the Asian markets, markets where previous PvP Blizzard Games like Warcraft and Starcraft were monstrous successes, it really is no surprise that they might be giving WoW a little PvP nudge and luvin’.

In the end, it all comes back to the quote… Who loves you and who do you love?  Answer that, and keep answering that, and you can run a successful game.

Seeing The Light

Random Thoughts

It isn’t often I take the time to mention the passing of individuals on this website.  My mother, of course… Stanley Kubrick, because I loved so many of his films… Pope John Paul II… Christopher Reeve, because he was, in so many ways, Superman…

I spent most of the morning heads down on some work, barely noticing the world at all, but a few moments ago I broke away and opened a browser to CNN to get a peek at what was going on with the rest of the planet.  Amid the usual political posturing and Middle East happenings, I find out that Jeff Healey died.

In 1988 I didn’t have a CD player yet, only this tape playing monstrous boom box.  That Christmas, one of my gifts was The Jeff Healey Band’s See The Light.  I must have played it a thousand times.  And while my first car didn’t have a tape deck, my second car in 1992 did, See The Light became one of the treasured few that would be played until it broke.  By then I had a CD player for home and I rushed out and bought it, and I’ve had it ever since.

I wouldn’t say that JHB was one of my favorite bands, I only own one other album by them, but they were a band I would never turn away from if the song came on the radio.  But See The Light has always held a special place for me, and it always manages to find its way into my play lists and my CD rotations.  If I feel like bringing down a night of karaoke or serenading my wife or dancing one last slow song before hitting the road, Angel Eyes from that album is the song I most often choose.  Jeff’s music has been and will forever be a part of the soundtrack that plays in my head as my life unfolds around me.

Thank you, Jeff.  You will be missed.

Form versus Function

Gaming

One thing that has always bugged me about MMORPGs is that in order to play the game, mechanically, to its peak, I must relinquish control of certain aspects of my character.

As far as spells, skills, talents, etc are concerned, that I don’t mind because those are the mechanics of the game. If getting skill X makes me better at dealing damage than skill Y and I have chosen my role to be damage dealer, there is no choice. I pick X. Picking Y would be self defeating. Sure, the idea of Y might be cooler than X, but mechanically, to maximize the efficiency of the game, I have to pick X.

To a degree, the same goes for items… except often times the best items don’t look the best. Ask any WoW player if he enjoys the water cooler shoulder pads of some of the highest level loot and you’ll get a mixed response… on the look. When it comes to the math, you can’t argue, much like skills, item X is better than item Y for reason Z. Period. The math doesn’t lie. The problem comes in that the axe you got a couple of weeks ago has the really cool look, and it is dripping fire, and the new one that just dropped, which is mathematically better than the axe that drips fire, just looks like a typical hand axe, one that doesn’t drip fire. Or perhaps you have this wicked cloak with a pattern of a bat on it, and you like bats, but now you are presented with a cloak that is much better statistically but is has a pink butterfly on it… ick.

For that reason, I fully support any design that allows for the separation of form and function. Recently I’ve been fooling around with EverQuest II and I just hit level 20 which opened up a second “paper doll” (i.e. – slots for items) that was just for the visible look. That way, the robe I had that I really liked the look of for my monk I can keep wearing for the appearance, but I can slip on the chest straps in my normal equipment spot for the stats. This is a concept that should be implemented into every single game that uses gear as progression… stat!

Thinking on this concept though, and knowing that I love it, I wanted to be sure I had considered all the possible “down sides” to it, and my thoughts on how to deal with them. So, let’s go…

1. PvP.

Problem: In Player versus Player combat, the fact that certain gear has a specific visual look can be an asset to sizing up your opponents. If he’s got on the water cooler shoulder pads and the unique dark blue chest plate from that super elite raid dungeon, chances are the guy is going to be decked out in awesome raid gear, so you’ll need to approach him differently, more carefully, than you would some poor schmoe in head to toe rags from random outdoor adventuring.

Solution: Gear from raid zones (or as PvP rewards) generally has designated “tiers”. In fact, World of Warcraft openly supports this idea of tiered suits, especially in rewarding players with bonus stats and effects for wearing pieces from the same tier. I’d suggest supporting this idea from day one, even at the lowest level. Design all gear to be handled in tiers, and then provide next to a character’s name (both floating and on player listing pages) they tier average of all their gear. If a player has 14 slots for gear and currently the game has 200 tiers of gear, a player with a tier average of 200 would be fully decked in the best gear possible. Of course, players could try to “cheat” by equipping lower tier gear, for example dropping a tier 1 piece of just in, say, the ring slot would drop a 200 tier player down to 186 (200 * 13 + 1 = 2601 / 14 = 185.78…, round up), but in doing so, he’d be robbing himself of an entire slot worth of stats. While this might be an odd concept at first, I think it would fairly rapidly become second nature to players. Games could even help out by providing the number for the current max tier rank, so you’d see a player as 191/200 or 185/200 as a quick judge of their gear.

2. Nudity.

Problem: Sometimes the problem isn’t just the look of a piece of equipment, but that you don’t want to see anything in a particular slot at all, and if you allow people to turn off the visible graphic for slots, you are going to end up with “naked” characters running around.

Solution: While I would support some form of “disabling” visibility on slots for most locations (gloves, boots, helmet, etc), I cannot think of any reason I would support disabling the visibility of the chest and pants slots on a character, and I would be perfectly happy leaving those two slots as forcing a graphic, either from the equipped stat item or from the visibility override item. If a player really wants to be “naked” back to the fully unequipped graphics of a new character, they’ll have to have nothing equipped, at least in those two slots. Besides, as far as I am aware, Age of Conan is the only game I’ve heard of that is going to have any real nudity anyway, most games already don’t allow true nudity.

…

And that’s it… I tried really hard to think of a 3rd problem with separating the form and the function of items, and I even feel number 2 there is a stretch. If anyone else thinks of a reason not to divide form from function, or any other problems, please, let me know. I’d love to discuss it.

To me though, it seems almost like a no brainer, especially to extend the accessibility of any game to role players and women. And I’m not being sexist there… its from experience, almost every woman I know who has played an MMO, one of the first things they want to know is how to turn the camera and see how they look. Women, in general, care more about how they look than men do, even in a game.

Reusing Assets

Gaming

Over at the Nerfbat Forums, a question was (poorly) asked about instances and zones. I say poorly asked because I think what the original poster meant to be the focus of the discussion is if people preferred the use of instances over shared zones, as well as zones versus a “seamless” world. EverQuest is probably the best most popular answer for zone based design, while World of Warcraft would be one people would recognize on the seamless world based design. In the grand scheme of things, both use instances, however for a more comprehensive instance based design you’d need to look at City of Heroes or Guild Wars.

I threw in my two bits on that thread, but the crux of my post, and that which relates to the title of this post, follows:

I’d love to see games mix it up… you put in a town, and outside that town is a zone, the zone is shared by everyone, maybe its huge, but inside the town you also put in a “raid” where your raid leader talks to an NPC and flags his raid for the “Defend the town” raid, and when the raid members leave town they don’t go into the shared zone, but instead go into an instance of that zone, or if the zone was huge just a section of that zone made as an instance to support the raid. Then, three expansions later you decide to implement an “Escort the king to Other Town” raid which uses the same outdoor zone, again as an instance, but this time the raid has to escort the king and his caravan to the other town at the far end of the zone, defending the king from waves of attackers.

I think games need to get more creative with their use of “space” and game/art assets. Designing a whole chunk of land to be used once in only one way just seems like a gigantic waste of effort.

That last paragraph really is what I want to ramble about. It surprises me how often games seem willing to spend so much time and effort building a zone or area in a game, and then don’t bother to reuse it. They’ll reuse item and NPC models left and right, just throwing tints on them to modify their colors, but they’ll spend a month designing a castle only to put one objective in it and never use it again.

The example I outlined above is something I’d absolutely love to see. Take a zone that is normally a shared hunting zone with animals and monster camps, the usual treadmilling trash mobs, strip it of the animals and camps and throw in an organized raid objective utilizing the same (and to the player, familiar) landscape but in new ways, or even take the original zone file and then build a fort in the middle of the forest that the players need to burn down.

I think the roadblock to this is the misconception that the player wants new stuff to be entirely new, but the truth is that for most players is just needs to be new “enough” and familiarity in some aspects can actually be comforting. Personally, while I do enjoy going into a new zone and learning new stuff, I think I’d also like going into an old zone with a new objective just about as much. I’d know the general lay of the land, that while we are currently approaching the enemy camp from the north, there is a path through the trees that will allow us to flank their position because its the path I used to use to approach the old goblin camp that used to be there.

That kind of reuse might also impact the desire of players to seek spoiler sites, not that the content itself would be immune to spoiling, but that familiarity with aspects of “new” content would actually foster a level of knowledge and confidence in the player that might keep them from feeling they need to look up information before continuing.

Anyway, it is something to think about.

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.

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.