Wanna be a game designer? Wanna jump on WoW’s bandwagon?

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So look here.

*whimper of frustration*

I’ll answer their questions though:

– What games are you currently playing?
World of Warcraft and Eve-Online. Sometimes CS:Source. Offline Hearts of Iron 2.

– What are some of your favorite games of all time?
Many games on the Commodore 64 with which I grew up. Impossible Mission, Forbidden Forest (Nightmares!!), Neuromancer, The Bard’s Tale serie, Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins (maybe an ancestor of WoW), Wasteland, Shamus Case II, Bruce Lee, Zaxxon and even Little Computer People, the “ancestor” of The Sims. Nearly all the games on the C64 are sticked in my head and left a trace inside me. So for me they all remain the best games, even if I know that playing them now wouldn’t give the same sensations. My young mind was able to add much more beauty and depth to those games that now seem so limited in the scope and I’m also sure that a part of them can be considered as brilliant, simple and effective game design even today. If I have to pick the more recent products I was caught in the love for Doom 2 (my first) and I liked a lot the first System Shock, Elite (First Encounter), the Ultima Underworld serie, Ultima 7 (all parts). I was also a japanese RPG whore for some time and I played everything translated in an understandable language on the Snes and PSX. So I loved Final Fantasy 3(6) and 9, Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, the Lunar serie and more. I’m also starting to like a lot Hearts of Iron 2 and I believe it would teach various things useful in mmorpgs. I would put here even what Derek Smart does if it didn’t suck badly on too many key elements (I love sandbox games).

– What are the first computer games you played?
Double Dragon and Dragon’s Lair as coin-ops. A text adventure game named “Atzech” (in english) and many, many others you don’t know in italian then Shamus Case II (best sound in a game ever, I still have nightmares about it) Attack of the Mutant Camels (Jeff Minter, Whohoo!), Zaxxon (Oh my god, I’m going to cry right now), Frogger and Hell Mazer. Oh, Ghostbuster was between my first games on the C64 too. Then I think I played 95% of all the existing games on it also thanks to an unstoppable piracy that was masked at that time (compilation of games were commercially sold in shops like bread in Italy. Each cassette or disk had like 10+ commercial games an noone was conscious of it like an act of piracy).

Which MMORPGs have you played and what levels did you characters reach?
I started with Ultima Online if I don’t consider MUD experiences. I mostly played one character that acquired its first GM skill one year and half after its creation (I should answer sincerely or you want me to show false catass power? Maybe I should go on Ebay to buy that.. Hmm..). After it I moved to DAoC and spent nine month to ding 50 with my infiltrator. Then I had to reroll because I hated to be marginalized in groups and I levelled to the max a cleric and a wizard. None of these ever reached Realm Rank 5 on PvP. I endured EQ only till level 15. I also played many other mmorpgs for “observing and studying” reasons but without dedicating a lot of time to them, so without achieving outstanding results. My current character in WoW is a warrior at level 49.

Impressive, huh? I’m a pure catass. Like Furor and Tigole. Hire me, KTNKS.

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Try to not just second the market, lead it

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Again on the discussion about the mudflation started here and continued here and specifically on the expansion packs EQ2 is going to release. Maybe soon I’ll also have time to delve on the alternative (better) solution.

—

Slyfrog:
So long as they don’t. I think HRose’s point, which I believe is legitimate here, is that the expansion packs become damaging if they are not truly optional.

They cannot possibly become optional. That’s the point. It’s a *loss* of content.

These are multiplayer game, the community must and will agree on what is the “default” path. It can be the new expansion (because it’s overpowered), it can be the old world (because it’s accessible for everyone). Once the battle between these two points is over and the path is chosed and set, it’s HARD to decide to go experiment with the content noone touches. Or you have a guild following your orders and allowing you to invent what you want, or you’ll have to go group and play along with others and along the consolidate path.

Spending six hours LFG because you want to do a quest noone does (because they do not have paid for it or because it has been mudflated out of the game and replaced by a more powerful version) is not fun and won’t happen.

At best these packs, if not completely overpowered, will be use-to-trash content that is considered till it’s new and then forgotten forever.

In an always-enlarging game where the number of zones doubles in less than a year but where the players on a server tend to remain still (or decrease), you move toward a desert with “one player per zone”. This is why the players will automatically start to gather and build paths. So that there will be 10 players in one zone and zero in the other 9 zones that are “lost content”.

The problem goes deeper. This type of dev-work is basically wasted on adding content that has a value only at the precise moment it gets released. Then it goes mudflated and it becomes unused and forgotten. The work of those devs goes directly wasted in the long term.

Now, it isn’t POSSIBLE to have a BETTER model that doesn’t WASTE that precious man work? Yes, but the maket doesn’t seem to go that way. An useful type of development for a mmorpg goes deeper than adding zones and monsters following the exact same model. It’s easy to add this stuff and put a fee on it. It’s basically impossible to really continue to DEVELOP the game on what matters because what matters involves everyone. You cannot add layers of complexity and then restrict the access to them with an expansion.

So, the key of this discussion is that you cannot build and really continue to develop a mmorpg by putting barriers between your players with the release of expansions. Because, since they MUST be optional (as optional expansions), they CANNOT affect the game world in a radical, pervasive way.

This is why I’m all for rising the monthly fee up to 25$ per month but justified by a REAL ongoing development on all fronts. SOE probably surveyed the market and noticed that it isn’t possible to rise the monthly fee, while it is viable to release cheap content patch for 5$.

Now the problem is that while this works from the economic point of view, it damages the design of the game. Basically hindering its potential.

P.S.
The same will happen for Guild Wars. Or they add overpowering content that you must pay for or you are “optionally” out.

Design masterpiece

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I like a lot Eve-Online. At the same time there are parts of it that are really completely retarded. Bt really, retarded beyond ANY standard.

I still have the purpose to write down a complete review so I started to test how the “police” system works. Basically the universe of this game can be imagined like concentric circles (or like an onion). The more you move out from the center the more the world becomes risky and the probability of getting involved in PvP goes up. In the center (maximum security) the order is kept by an automated system. If you do something illegal, the police is supposed to show up and stop you. In a similar way to what the guards did in the old UO.

So I went out near a jumpgate with a shitty, expendable ship and I decided to shot at one of the “flying monitors” that are supposed to diffuse news and whatnot. A pop up window shows up asking me if I really want to shoot it and I press “yes”.

The first shot lands, doing zero damage. Then everything stops. I wonder why. After a few seconds I see my energy blink to zero. A second later my ship explodes and I get two error messages (and these are the routine in Eve). Well, I figured out it’s lame. I was expecting to actually see the police ships warp in and start to shoot. Instead it’s just an instant blow-up two second later you do something “bad” (like delivering 0.000001 damage to a flying monitor).

After having verified how lame it is I decided to continue with my normal playsession. So I took a mission and left with another ship… As I’m out of the station I get anoter instant explosion. My ship (the one that wasn’t expendable and that required me many days to buy and upgrade) gone. Forever. I tried again. Another explosion. I digged around my character statistics to understand if I flagged myself in some way but nothing. Basically I cannot do anything because as I step out of the station my ship autodestructs. No matter what.

The last resort, since nothing in the UI could give me an idea of what was happening, was to ask help in the chat. Well, this is how the system works. Basically you are locked in the station for 15 minutes. If you go out, you explode. Nowhere in the UI there’s sign of this timer, or a warning or whatever. Nothing like that exists. They also told me (in the chat) that the timer often gets bugged and it can randomly last up to an hour.

Good. Not only we have a really retarded police system that simply autodestructs your ship as you commit a crime (again a crime like shooting once, and only once, doing basically zero damage to a structure that would need me 10 minutes repeatedly shooting just to scratch its dye). But it also locks you out of the game for an arbitrary, unknown time.

Who designed all this is a genius. It’s the perfect demonstration of how niche games are often interesting but totally retarded on too many basic elements. In a game you should always expect (and encourage) the players to experiment. Not only this system is annoying (try to shoot by mistake something, just like a slip of finger and you can blow in milliseconds the ship on which you worked for many days), not only it’s completely unrealistic (at least send me indestructible police ships to shoot me, not just a sudden auto-destruction that isn’t even registered in the logs), not only it is not intuitive (because you keep autodestructing as you attempt to leave a station with zero feedback about the reason) but it also kicked me out of the game for the last hour I had available to play and made me write all this.

How to ruin a brilliant game at the basic, elementary levels (because this is one example in very long list).

These are (also) the wonders of the independent market.

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Mudflation as a principle

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When I write lengthy articles it’s because I feel the need to “wrap up” an argument that is starting to come on the surface, influencing the scene in many different ways.

The problem of mudflation is a “node”. A source of consequences all related. My attempt to analyze and understand it is a way to go back at the root. So the mudflation is a “warning” for the development of content in World of Warcraft and the upcoming pay-per-use expansions in EverQuest 2 (and a lot more).

One of the reasons why I personally chosed WoW (as written yesterday) is because the possibility of PvP makes it feel more like a cohesive world with breadth instead of an infinite treadmill with no aim (like a ladder bringing you nowhere). I want to play a game, to consolidate my role, affect the world. I don’t want to drift away with just the greed of power in the void. The game should provide an environment, not a blurred, dispersed space. The “content” I’d like to see added is about different layers of complexity, one on top of the other. It’s vertical development, not horizontal “fat/flat” development. I want to see the elements a game already has to become deeper and more complex, I don’t want to see more elements ad infinitum all working exactly in the same way. Interdependence of all the elements, not dispersed content all equal and mudflated, all eroded and dispersed.

These comments go directly to touch the (dangerous) potential of the “Adventure Packs” EQ2 is about to launch. We already discussed that these represent a line of separation between “have and not-have” players. In an online game or everyone has something or noone has/uses it. The players must agree here because it’s a collaborative game and, for it to succeed, agreements need to be done. Consolidated paths need to be set so that the players are able to gather and organize.

The point is that an expansion pack that is not “free for all” is effectively a barrier between the players. Recursively, if you want the expansion to sell well and if you want the majority of players to buy it, have access to it and make it required even for those unconvinced (so that the barrier goes away), you need to build it following the model dictated by the “mudflation”.

The stuff in that expansion will be a boosted up version of the “free” content that everyone has access to. This because, again, to be able to play in these new zones you need to group other players that also accepted to buy them. And if these zones don’t offer a perceivable advantage over the rest of content, noone will buy them and the zones will be just finish forgotten by the majority of the playerbase.

In any case this isn’t content. The opposite. This is an erosion of content, a continue replacement of old stuff with new shiney (for a fee). The players will just choose the optimal path and leave the remaining 90% of the game to rot. If the used 10% is the free content or the pay-per-use content it depends on the quality of mudflation and erosion used.

The more the system is able to forget, the more the system is able to grow.

I’m not against the idea, but against the implementation. I already discussed that I would gladly see the subscribtion fee of a mmorpg to rise consistently even at 25$ or so. But excused by a REAL continued development that doesn’t just glide on the surface without delving in the possibilities of the design. The reason to do so is that you cannot advance and expand the game mechanics and then put a fee that the players need to pay. Because that path forces you to make the advancement as an “option”. A “flat” subscription fee allows, instead, to go right at the core and advance the mechanics for everyone and on all the layers.

Now the biggest problem is that SOE already surveyed and analyzed the market. It wouldn’t be concretely viable to set a 25$ monthly fee. Instead it is viable to build content packs and sell them for an accessible price. But what I’m trying to say is that this works for the market but it doesn’t work nor improves the possibilities of the design. The market strangles the quality, the potential.

While, instead, it would be possible (even if hard) to slowly lead the market instead of just seconding it. To educate it to a new product and a new type of offer. The direct gain is that this path is harder but more effective and rewarding because its aimed correctly.

We have a new slogan

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This is “competition” (in its classical meaning) at its purest. EverQuest 2 launched a funny advertising campaign based on World of Warcraft. No, really:

Today Sony Online Entertainment would like to invite players from any game that may be experiencing lines to log into their servers, a lack in customer service attention, or a lack of new, free game content, to play the EverQuest II Trial of the Isle demo

That sounds already like a plan. Indeed:

EverQuest II – 325,000 Players Strong, No Waiting

EverQuest II continues to grow at an amazing rate, not just in the number of players that have fallen in love with the game’s rich, entertaining content, but also in the physical size of the world. We’ve got over 325,000 people logging in to our servers every week, with no delays or wait times and the game they are playing is only getting better.

Below are a few reasons why we believe that if you arenâ

On the razor’s edge

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So one mmorpg will be released tomorrow… oops, wait.
Let’s try again: tomorrow.
I said tomorrow!

Ahh, better. So, this mmorpg open beta will start tomorrow. Well, maybe:

it is on it’s way. Starting tomorrow or day after tomorrow we start sending the keys to people :)

Preordering the box to get a spot in the open(?!) beta… Well, it doesn’t make sense but okay. I guess it’s another fancy interpretation of the word “open”. With an odd quirk:

Everybody that preordered will get into the beta. The problem is that by the time they get into beta the boxes will be on the way to them and by that time they would have been charged.

That was the 20 of February.

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Working with expensive tools

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After I finished there following a link at N3rfed I’m still reading the Fires of Heaven forum. I like them because they are becoming the waterthread of the poor. It’s not like you find valuable and interesting commentary but it works nicely as a “catch all” message board. Plus they are able, sometimes, to summarize a concept with a single line of text. This is an example:

Within its style and genre of graphics, EQ2 simply sucks. I don’t care what people think of WoW, EQ2’s graphics are simply like the product of a child working with expensive tools.

Which is even better and more direct that the quote I saved from Haemish long ago:

If your 3d artists are mediocre, as these guys are, if they cannot imbue the art with a sense of style, the models will be bland suckage. Numbers (i.e. math and high-level abstract technical shit) is not pretty.

These things draw particularly my attention because it’s between my flaws. To explain the exact same concept I’d need the proverbial “wall-of-text”. I suck.

(btw, this is also a memo. I have to post a -lighter- follow up to the Mudflation article. Because there are possible and viable solutions to that problem that would give a nice push to the whole genre. Luckily I have also a concrete example this time: Eve-Online.)

Fix this! KTHNX

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After my rant about the weak sneak peek from the upcoming patch in WoW, I got dragged in a discussion about the merits, demerits and expectations. The result is that I wrote my own list of things I’d like to see and that seem gone forgotten at Blizzard.

This list doesn’t beg for “more content” (in fact I believe that it may damage the game). It just groups those “usability” fixes and features that were asked back in beta but fell ignored. It’s a list of minor problem and glitches that should extremely easy and fast to solve, but still improving directly the experience of the game without requiring too much pondering.

What I want is:

– Leet speak blocked at the root
– Server transfers from the overcrowded servers
– Possibility to join the european realms and vice versa
– A fucking server-wide LFG system (it existed in beta)
– AH in all the major cities, linked together (and get rid of the lag in one step)
– Fixes to the raid instances
– Fixes to the resurrection in instances porting you in 0.0 space
– Fixes to the ships dropping you in the ocean
– Possibility to ride a mount ON BRIDGES. I hate STV.
– *ALL* the class issues KNOWN and CONFIRMED fixed. Not a timid line for each. There are devs sticky posts with consistent changes, where are they?
– Fire damage to lock characters in combat. So that peoples will finally STOP to sit on the fireplaces to annoy others
– Fixes to the faction system so that you don’t finish to get locked in situations where you have to kill 2345123455462345 mobs to gain status
– Fixes to the PvP exploits where peoples are able to cast spells from unreachable places and kill NPC guards unaffected
– Fixes to the broken polygons of the cloaks on the dwarf model
– New raid interface with the features explained in a sticky post
– Tweaks to the most awful flight paths
– Trees blocking the LOS of range weapons and spells. AT LEAST IN PVP
– The possibility to change the tabard without disbanding/reforming the whole guild
– A quest log to categorize and archive already completed quests
– Possibility to see the loot mode used by the group without being the group leader

And

– At least a PLAN for a weather system to launch in the next months

But really, if I have to pick just one, I WANT LEET SPEAK OUT OF THE GAME.

Most of the stuff I listed above is already confirmed. A good part is trivial to implement. I’d like to see some goddamn commitment to this game. Not useless fluff like ripping an user interface to brag about it as a new feature.

I do not think I’m asking the moon.

As expected, after I pasted this list, I got flamed and mocked: “So which things on HRose’s list would you like fixed? The “Leet Speek” problem? The developers don’t share enough of the internal bugs with us? The sound when people stand in fire? Or about the broken polygons on the dwarf’s cloak? These sound terribly important.”

So I had to justify myself and at least explain two of the most stupid points (fire damage and the dwarf cloak) to demonstrate that they aren’t that stupid. You are the judge.

CASE #1
The point of my list is that half is about announced stuff, half is about usability stuff that improves the games flat out with no side-effects (like the mounts on the bridges), and the rest is about stuff that would require less than 10 minutes to code and test.

The example of the fire is one of those things that are trivial to do:
– Peoples can sit on fires for HOURS because the fire does like 10/20 damage per hit. The regeneration rate for every character is ABOVE that value.

Now. The solution is about locking you in combat if you are taking damage. If you are locked you don’t regenerate health. This means that after three minutes sittin on a fire… YOU DIE!

What? It makes too much sense?

At the end what’s the point of EVEN APPLY fire damage in a game when it just does ZERO since the damage is pointless?

Same as for the communication barrier: OR you fix it properly OR you remove it altogether.

CASE #2
This is the example of “the broken polygons of the cloaks on the dwarf model” (it happens with ALL the cloak models):

Now, considering that this game is supposed to be played in third person, that’s what I see on screen for about 90% of the time. And it’s both ugly and annoying.

Even more annoying because this is a bug on the back of the model (a misplaced polygon) that happened with the patch in June. It worked perfectly before. Since June is there and noone cared to spend, how much? An HOUR? I really don’t know how much time it would take to move back the vertex that was bugged back to its original position.

I have another proof of this “bug” but only from a frontal view, comparing the old, discared (and way better) models with the new ones. As you see on the right part of the back, the new models have a sharp “edge”. That’s that exact misplaced edge that is causing the cloak texture to melt.

This can be consider MINOR as MINOR is the time to fix it. And still it’s on my screen 90% of the time. Excuse me.

—
This last graphic bug was also discussed long ago on this website.

Still arguing:
What you don’t understand is that my list was made to not ask for “content”. Instead it pointed out things to fix that aren’t “arguable”. You don’t need a design team to ponder the pros and cons because those are just inconsistencies and usability fixes.

They ARE “high priority” because their relevance is a balance between “how many users they affect” and “time required to fix”.

They aren’t “emergencies”, but even a small team is supposed to fix all that rather quickly.

The point is that we will be here IN A YEAR and, as an example, both the problem of the fire damage and the polygon of the cloak will STILL REMAIN UNSOLVED. Again, that was stuff that worked perfectly in beta, was broken, and noone cared to fix again. While it would take only an extremely limited time to fix, these things will keep piling up unsolved. How hard is to address them quickly, put the result on the pool of stuff that will be patched and FORGET altogether about them? Problem solved forever, you’ll never need to go back to work on that.

It’s this way that you are able to keep these large projects clean and organized, by starting to address all the small (but relevant and diffused) problems so that, once fixed, they do not crowd anymore the list of priorities.

If you take a single element from that list alone it doesn’t add much to the game. But if you take the whole list and patch it you’ll see the overall quality of the game rise with zero loss. And once done you’ll see the pool of problems start to drain way more quickly. This will directly help the team to control and focus even the most problematic issues.

Moral: The time it took me to write and explain each point on that list is more than the time a developer would spend to actually fix it.

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Exploit it all till it’s legal

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Then, maybe, someone will wake up.

Someone on the boards reported another, rather relevant, exploit for the paladin class:

1- click divine favor

2- select a target and use holy light or flash of light on them

3- as soon as the light lands on them, press x to crouch

4- one second later, stand up (I do it by tapping w to move forward real quick)

5- your divine favor will still be up and you can get more critical heals for free…
It is very easy to land in 3 critical holy lights and if you are good you can land in a critical flash of light on top of that…all for NO mana…making other healers look like fools!

over 8000hp healing for no mana anyone?

Luckily we have a diligent player here, so she reported this directly to a GM. Here’s the result:

At first when I told this to the GM he said: the spell is working as intended thank you and bye…
I was like…wtf dude, the spell does NOT work as intended! please read!!!

At one point I even got threatened to be actioned for reporting this bug

If the same thing happened to me I’d have taken a screenshot with the proof of what the GM said. Start to exploit it savagely and spread the knowledge.

It’s about time that these companies *value* the help coming from the players. If they do not, they should be repaid with the same behaviour.

The removal of /bug and /suggest thanks you again. Still a great idea.

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