Darkness Rising – Highs and lows

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The expansion is rather unpolished and clunky in most parts. It’s kind of obvious that it was rushed out even if Mythic has never been known for its attention to the detail. Despite my gripes surpass right now the good parts, there are a few touches here and there that are outstanding and show what Mythic is able to do if put in the proper conditions and if there was more support for this game.

The rough highs and lows in the expansion show how they ran out of time and resources as Mythic’s interest move to new projects, sacrificing DAoC and its ambition. In particular the art assets show this ascending and descending quality and also show the difference from all the attentive work that was put in Catacombs and the lack of time, instead, about this last product (and *lots* of reused assets everywhere). The new art assets in the city of Camelot in particular are rather disappointing (missplaced textures, holes, badly joined polygons, lightmaps completely broken, fill-in textures, some uncomplete details and more, but i’m picky. I’ll show screenshots later.) while some of the new character models used for NPCs are mindblowing (even if rare). They are absolutely awesome and already showing an impressive difference in quality even from the models added in Catacombs less than a year ago (which I didn’t like, by the way, and still bugged and unpolished). If you press the “read more” link you can see some examples showing the king of Camelot (I actually hoped he was sitting as the Midgard’s king but I guess they ran out of time to do the proper animations) and one of the NPCs used in an instance which could surpass the photorealism of Half Life 2 and the upcoming Oblivion even at close distance.

Congratulations again to whoever textured and modeled them, that’s some quality work. With “Catacombs” they showed an unmatched art quality with the environments and the textures (that in this last exp are a bit deluding), instead with this expansion they show what they could be able to do even with the models.

Beside the art, there is a lot more I want to talk about. Some of the quests are pretty interesting and curious even if they always leave you wanting some more and digging a bit deeper in the interaction. Despite it’s not a big expansion and despite it could have even been pushed out as a “free expansion” if we were a few years ago, it shows interesting elements and some creativity. So lots of “pros” and “cons” as it always happen with this game :)




 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

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Fighting against the Darkness Rising installer

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I WISH I could write something about the game. But the fact is that I’m still here trying to make it run and despite I probably won’t have the nasty hardware issues that others are facing (here, here and here).

To begin with, the installation was confusing (beside having a pixelated splash screen with an ugly figure resembling to an evil version of Firiona Vie and reminding me that EverQuest I do not want to play). Firstly it asks me to locate my “Catacombs” install directory. Then it pretends to install itself somewhere else arbitrary. Why? Wasn’t this a “patch” to apply on the old client? And then when I try to install it somewhere else it tells me it needs at least 13 GIGABYTES! What the hell! I downloaded an installer that was 830Mb and now it asks me 13 gigabytes free (while DAoC’s client is barely above 3 Gb)? And what the fuck does it have to do with all that space?

So I go shuffling my files and delete old, unplayed games taking lots of space like The Sims 2 but then it still doesn’t want to install itself in the new directory I pointed it because, apparently, the installer cannot tell the difference between “DAoC” and “DAoC2”. Finally, after solving all these quirks, it starts to do its work. A *long* work which consists of copying the files ALREADY ON MY HD from the first directory to the second, plus adding the new files in the patch I downloaded. All time (and space) wasted for a simplistic operation that could have been done in a few minutes.

Finally, the result: the expansion is taking 600Mb on my Hard Disk. With the files uncompressed. No, really. 230Mb LESS than the installer and 12.4Gb less than the space it asked me to free.

Obviously, as I tried to connect, there was already a 13Mb patch waiting for me.

I also wonder if WoW’s 1.8 patch has more interesting new features then the whole DAoC expansion. Surely it was easier to install.

Now I go play (I hope).

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DAoC – Darkness Rising direct download

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For those searching it, there’s already a direct link to the expansion patcher. You can dig here to find it:
http://mythic.fileburst.com/downloads/

I’m already at 27% with Bittorrent and my powerful dialup, so I’m not going to restart from zero even if I probably could finish faster.

They are keeping changing the file name, that’s why I said you’ll have to hunt for it. Right now the name is:
figure_this_name_out_h4x0rz_catacombs_to_darkness_setup.exe

If you are unsure about the validity of the file you could always download a chunk and then load it in bittorrent to verify it. The best feature of that clunky program is that it verifies and repair the files automatically.

EDIT: Both links died long ago. There’s also a rumor about WoW patch being released and I still have to download Rag Doll Kung Fu. Too much goodies these days…

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City of Heroes – Mass nerfage makes everyone giddy!

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(coverage also on Ethic’s blog and an old-style rant here)

A thread on Q23 grabbed my attention. I don’t play CoH and I know nothing about it but I remember one awful screwup a few months ago when the players were raging about a balance nerf with the devs justifying it with data completely wrong, just to discover that there was a gross bug on the test server that falsified the whole work they were doing. With the result of making the devs look like idiots since they couldn’t even notice how the characters on the test server were behaving completely differently from those on the live servers. Something that resembled closely to the “hunter bug” that hit Word of Warcraft in June. Again with the players having to scream in order to draw the attention of the devs and finally have the possibility to *explain them* how the game actually works.

In this case the problem seems different. At first I thought it was just a communication problem, my comment was:

—
When you go for a big change like this you don’t just post: we are going to do “x”. Instead you explain precisely the reasons that brought to the change, what are the goals, what are the trade offs, why the designers felt the need to go in that direction and so on.

Only *after* those premises you can obtain an useful discussion instead of 250 pages of screaming players.

From what I’ve read people just do not understand why the change was made.

—
Then I digged further in the official thread and I found enough details to understand what was going on, despite I never played the game. In the thread on Q23 EFLannum makes intelligent considerations about the implications of this new screwup and I further commented along those lines:

—

EFLannum:
What I was trying to get at was whether or not they actually broke the combat system or simply made levelling slower. The number I used wasn’t really important whether it be 3 times or 1000 times. In the first case they would be looking at a difficult fix whereas in the second case there are a lot of things they could do to provide some “grind relief” if they were of a mind to do so. Sometimes the difference between a good game system and a bad game system is simply a matter of scale and nothing inherently wrong with the system itself.

Speaking about the “system”, I’ve read some more about the changes and it could even finish in a *huge boost* instead of a huge nerf (if they so choose).

From what I understand each character has six slots where you can drop various enhancements. Before this patch you could drop six same enhancements to have a maximized effect. While after the patch they are trying to force the players to use different types of enhancements at the same time (they aren’t nerfing the skills, they are trying to force the players to spec differently).

We still don’t know why they want the players to move in that direction but they could still recalibrate the powers on the previous system. So that 3 same enhancements after the patch could correspond to the six enhancements available before.

This would also add tactics and versatility because then the player could choose to use the diversification for a major advantage or still keep focusing on just one enhancement to even go *past* the limit set before the patch (hence the boost instead of the nerf).

It seems again a poorly executed transition more than bad design.

—
Going a little deeper in this problem I can figure out what exactly went wrong, because, lets make things clear, this is *surely* a big screwup, and not a required nerf to make the game better. So lets start from the simpler points, taken from the dev notes and move onward:

Q: What if I don’t have more than 2 SO’s of any one type in my powers already?

A: Then you have nothing to worry about, your character will function exactly as they did previous to this feature being added.

This means that this changes will affect only the characters who use more than two same-type enhancement. If this happens they’ll have diminished returns on those powers.

From this perspective the upcoming change could have two possible goals:
1- Nerf highly focused characters (which is what the players are ranting about)
2- Encourage them to differentiate their powers instead of focusing the enhancements

Since I don’t know directly the game I cannot know the actual reasons why they would go toward the second path but it could be because they want to add some diversification between the characters and have more equilibrate and strategic builds that could make both the PvE and the upcoming PvP more interesting. So a positive goal to strive for. It’s also sort of silly to push this massive change with the nerf as the only purpose since it would be way easier to tweak the single powers instead of redefine the whole system, so the first path doesn’t hold.

Now, as I wrote above, the nerf is NOWHERE implicit in the change. If the devs only want to diversificate the builds this can be done in different ways and completely detached from the effectiveness of the powers. This is why they could recalibrate the powers so that using three same-type enhancement post-patch could correspond to the same bonus of six same-type enhancements before the patch. This not only would retain the current balance in the game that the players don’t want to be touched, but it would also offer a slight boost (if the devs so choose) so that the the slots that are left could be used to *further* enhance the powers, adding more same-types enhancement and incurring in the diminished return penalty (to not make them too overpowered compared to how they were before the patch), or to diversificate them and avoid the diminished returns to fully benefit from each slot (adding variation and a degree of tactics to the class development).

This is why I say that the system they are applying is nowhere tied to the actual effectiveness of the powers. That’s not how the design works. The effectiveness of the single powers is just arbitrary and can be tweaked anytime (this is why I say that if the goal was to nerf the players there could have been more efficient and direct ways to do it).

So, if we leave the effectiveness of the powers out of the discussion we can see how the proposed system is actually going in a positive direction: add more depth and varation in the class development. The goal works, the players would never rant against this because it would be felt as positive, as it, in fact, is. So what went wrong? Why there was a so massive and unanimous negative reaction?

I think I know the answer, again in the dev notes:

All the Issue 4 and 5 balance adjustments were done with this system in place internally here at Cryptic. All playtests, QA checks, difficulty adjustments and balances have been done with Enhancement Diversification in mind since March 2005.

See, I assume that “Issue 4 and 5” are patches *already released on the live servers*. Which basically means:
“We are sorry. It’s from March that you play with overpowered classes while we were tweaking things on the background in view of this last change. You have enjoyed the game on “easy mode” for seven months, now it’s time to bring the game back in line.”

Well, I think it’s kind of obvious that you cannot feed this to the players and expect them to react politely. Come on…

The design may be not bad, but the execution was surely awful. It even goes beyond of my definition of “what a nerf is”.

I explain DAoC mechanics to Mythic’s Code Warrior

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…while hoping it’s not Lum anymore. God, they must be tired. From the Grab Bag:

Q: My question regards the Realm Ability, Avoidance of Magic. It states that(copy/pasted): “Reduces all magic damage taken by the listed percentage. (This only works on damage. Does not work on disease, dots, or debuffs and does not affect the duration of crowd control spells). Lvl1 – 2% / Lvl2 – 5% / Lvl3 – 10%…….”

I know that resist rates cap at 26% from item/spell crafted bonuses, does AoM’s bonuses stack ontop of that, making my imaginary 26% Energy Resist now count as 28% Energy due to AoM1. Or does AoM not stack with a capped 26%, but is instead designed to help my imaginary ‘gimped’ 15% Matter Resist, making it a 17% Resist due to AoM1?? Thanks in advance.

A: Oh, yeah, this one went straight to the Code Warrior: “Realm ability resist buffs (such as Avoidance of Magic) and spell resists are added seperately from item/spellcrafted bonuses. This is why in the bonus window they display seperately; in his example, if he had level 3 Avoidance of Magic and capped Energy resist bonus from items, he would see “26% / 10%” in his bonus window for a total of 36% Energy resist.

It’s not true that the total resist is 36%.

This was changed long ago (after endless discussions) as a band-aid to the insane high resists in the game and some “I-win” buttons like the old version of “Bunker of Faith”.

Firstly you apply the first value (26%) to the damage. Then you take the result and apply to it the second value (10%) to obtain the actual damage you receive.

To explain. Let’s say you are hit for 200 damage unmodified. And let’s assume you have 50% resist from items and 50% from Realm Abilities.

Following the explanation on the Herald you would have a total of 100% resist (50+50). Resulting in zero damage.

But this is false. In fact the game first applies the first 50% resist. So a 200 damage becomes 100. Then this 100 is again applied to the second 50% resist. For a total of 50 damage.

Which is obviously different from zero damage and that is coherent with the need to reduce the effectiveness of the resists.

But what is actually more important to understand is how clunky and overly complicated are DAoC’s mechanics. Just another example of those bleeding band-aids.

(“Balance Boy” got it right exactly two years ago)

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The wound is still bleeding

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Follow-up.

—

Frott:
And this is just bullshit: if you normally play in the “off hours” wouldn’t it make sense to play on a server where your “peak hours” are most of the server’s peak hours? IE, play sorted by locale?

You really come across at arguing both sides of the argument, with yourself.

No, that’s bullshit.

Having both coasts play on the same servers means that the population shifts and is kept uniform. Which means that the life cycle of each server for each day last more hours. The server is playable for more hours.

At the same time the population on each server is kept constant and doesn’t have high peaks and valleys. In WoW they had HUGE SERVER PROBLEMS because all the players on a server log ALL AT ONCE. Exactly because all the players on that server chose the same timezone.

This is why Blizzard needed to push more that 100 servers. Because all the servers filled up quickly instead of having a balanced population spread between the hours. If the servers weren’t matched with timezones the population during an evening would shift uniformly from the east coasters to the west coasters. On the same server.

The same server would hold a lot more players thanks to this uniform load because it wouldn’t have 3500 players logging ALL AT ONCE, to the leave en-masse three hours later, leaving the server in a “low” status (and hence the latest resort to mark the servers permanently “full”).

Everything I say was confirmed by Blizzard and all the problems they had. I’m sure you do not remember but Blizzard blatantly begged the players to log on servers flagged for different timezones from their own:

# When choosing your server for the first time, the server wizard will suggest a server with low load to improve your game-play experience. However, if you decide to pick your own server to play on, we suggest picking a server where the population is not high during peak hours (peak hours are 6pm through midnight in your local time zone).

Should I quote yourself again?

Frott:
wouldn’t it make sense to play on a server where your “peak hours” are most of the server’s peak hours? IE, play sorted by locale?

As you can see your idea isn’t Blizzard idea. They asked the players to go play on different timezones as they saw that the idea of localizing the servers had DISASTROUS consequences (should I remember you the situation of the servers in the first months? And should I remember how unbalanced they STILL are?).

Not only. Two weeks after launch they applied an EMERGENCY PATCH to REMOVE THE TIMEZONES from the UI.

Because they finally noticed, too late, how completely retarded were those ideas and how completely clueless they were about these problems.

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Shopping HARDCORE!

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Hahah, I like reading Brad:

Just for more clarity, I don’t want search abilities, etc. because I want price differences. Not just differences between regions, but probably within a city. To me, that creates an exciting player economy. Yes, one could argue it’s more work to have to go shopping as opposed to just bringing up a nifty screen that does all the work for you. But the shopping is the gameplay. It may not be for everyone, but neither is it necessary for a player to participate in this part of the economy and game.

Even the shopping will be hardcore in Vanguard!

See, I live here in Italy in a small town and every Thursday there’s a market. On the road, in the center of the town. I think over there you have something similar, but modern, called “supermarket”. Once again the reality surpasses the game and there isn’t really anything to learn from scratch or discover. You just have to simulate in the game what already exists. In the most natural way possible.

There are very good reasons why other games have practical search functions. Maybe they push the possibility too further but the same happened in the real life. Just in different forms. A supermarket or a commercial area in a city are structured and planned accordingly. This because it’s the seller that is going to meet the buyer, not the opposite. Without any form of structure to identify and categorize the shops, the “gameplay” will just turn out incredibly frustrating and pointless. The result is that noone will participate simply because it’s nowhere playable or usable. As in the real world, we tried to overcome these limits.

In the case of the town market above the most important trait is that the market, the same market, will be in another town the day after. This defines the job of people that search the goods for you and then bring them to you. It’s the seller that travels and makes available. It’s the seller to represent the “search function” we have today in other forms. You “browse” what they bring to you.

The whole problem is rather complex and includes even the role of the crafting (I explained some of my ideas here). In general the idea to bring back the vendor system in Ultima Online, where the limits represent a depth, may be interesting but we shouldn’t forget that it worked in that case because pretty much everyone had the possibility to mark runes and port everywhere, cutting out the problem of the travel and distance.

In the case of a new game like Vanguard it could be interesting to experiment something new and I wouldn’t renounce to give an usable and accessible shape to those ideas even if we really want to go back at the roots. Each village could still have a commercial center where the players could send their vendors. Deciding if to pay a fee to the village to take advantage of the common marketplace or keep the vendors at home avoiding the fee but without the benefit of the exposition.

A system that would be near to what happens in SWG. Giving a decent and usable structure to the market and still retaining all the original qualities that Brad doesn’t want to lose (and coherence with the setting).

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Years pass, problems are still the same

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I found a thread on FOH’s forums that reminded me my (futile) crusade against the localised and “timezoned” servers in WoW more than a year ago, with me in full berserk on any known forum. Today, my words are even more valid than how they were at that time.

This is what I replied today to that thread.
—

Kolle:
That’s all sad and terrible, but the conspiracy part comes into play with server listings. Some of you have probably noticed that the realm select list isn’t exactly accurate. I noticed this many months ago when I was searching for a new home loaded with PvP and PvE endgame. I quickly realized that I couldn’t judge things by the realm select list. This was a painful lesson when I bothered getting about 40 levels on a character before bothering to do a census on both sides during primetime to actually see what the truth was. The ‘full’ listing was anything but right. I only thought to check because I found out how dead the lvl 60 BGs were.

I can explain this.

Before they introduced the “full” flag the “high”, “medium” and “low” values weren’t dependent on “fixed” numbers. For example an “high” server during the offpeak was equal to LESS players. This because, instead of using a fixed value, the flags were set on a percent value based on the overall pool of players between all the servers.

This means that there were always 1/3 of the servers flagged for each category, no matter of the time of the day and the current population (for example you’d find about the same number of “high” servers even if checking during the early morning, when you would expect all servers to be “low” or “medium” at best).

When the “full” flag was introduced nothing in the system changed. The “full” flag was just an added “manual” flag, set directly by Blizzard.

This means that a “full” server will be always shown as full even if there’s just one player loggeed in. But this also didn’t change the previous system. The system still wants 1/3 of the servers for EACH category. With the difference that it considers the “full” servers as “high”. In fact you can see that, at any time, there are only 2-3 servers marked as high, while all the other available “spots” in the category are taken by servers *permanently* marked as “full”.

The division between “high”, “medium” and “low” is still correct (while the order WITHIN each category was broken by Blizzard and still is). Instead the “full” servers are manually and permanently marked as full, no matter of the population.

Kolle:
The situation is this: Several PvP servers are listed as ‘full’ when in fact they are low or barely medium.

If you follow what I wrote you can easily understand why this happens. The “full” flag isn’t set by the log-in server as it happens for the other three flags (high, medium and low) but it’s instead set *manually* and remains *permanent*. This means that it will never change, no matter of the actual situation of the server.

Blizzard decided to do this because servers like Blackrock had insane peak times, focusing on just a few hours to then descend to low or medium for most of the day when they were even surpassed by more balanced servers. This had the result of players rolling on those servers expecting to have them moderately crowded when instead they had just insane peaks and off-peaks. So they decided to brand them permanently “full” and discourage the players to create characters no matter of the time of the day.

Ultimately this is again the direct result of the retarded decision to divide the servers in different timezones and localize them as much as possible. Creating and making critical the peaks and off-peaks of the population.

Making a point: I ranted *endlessly* for MONTHS against this during beta. We were discussing and criticizing that retarded decision to localize the servers in September 2004. Quoting Walt:

WoW’s population peaks and valleys will be worse than most other MMO’s out there.

Having a worldwide server – like EQ – means that population lows in Europe, East Coast, West Coast and Asia don’t coincide – the servers remain relatively populated as players log in and log off throughout their peak playing hours.

WoW won’t have that – when they are at off-peak, they will *really* be off peak, and their server populations will be very low.

And we were discussing the problems of the BGs and the cross-server idea back in early June 2004.

And quoting myself again months ago:

Most of the problems they had about load balance are design problems before techincal problems. That they BLATANTLY ignored. In the same way they are having now SERIOUS population and faction balance issues that will become cronic six month down the road.
—
Right now the servers are starting to see the beginning of many problems that will become critical in the next months. In particular in the battlegrounds (but not only).

There are simply not enough players and not enough balanced between the factions to support properly the battlegrounds and make them accessible and playable. While this can be tolerated on an high populate server, the possibilities to enjoy the PvP in a smaller server or during the off-peak are TINY. Tiny right now that the Battlegrounds are a novelty and everyone goes to check them. Now think to what happens six months down the road when pretty much everyone will be bored to tears to perma-catass an insane honor system that isn’t satisfying for anyone.

Why this belongs to this thread? Because it’s back about the role of the design into balancing BOTH the population between the servers AND between the factions. My simple point is: this is a relevant aspect of the game that CANNOT be ignored, it has the highest priority and you should start from there as you start to plan something. Surely not something you discover and figure out six months AFTER RELEASE.

Six months (and more) have passed. And I stand correct.

(continued)

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