Yearly Archives: 2008

Contributor? I hardly know ‘or!

There are rumblings in the MMOG-o-blog-o-sphere over the “contribution” system in Warhammer’s Public Quests and keep capture. I really don’t know what actually happens in the depths of the code; having run through pretty much all the public quests in a zone with a guild group before I can’t say I noticed everyone having the same contribution time after time, though I wasn’t really paying that much attention. Keep sieges, on the other hand, there does seem to be a weight of anecdotal evidence of people arriving just as keep lords are killed, or guarding postern gates or similar, and getting top five contribution scores, suggesting it’s either horribly broken or random. Is random a problem, though?

I think it’s a brilliant idea. As discussed previously, in an incentive scheme based on measuring performance “what you measure is inevitably a proxy for the outcome you want”; as widely observed, how can you put a numerical figure on the relative contributions of someone tanking the keep lord, someone guarding the doors to stop the enemy crashing the party, someone who’s had to go AFK, someone who’s really trying their best but is getting a 0.1fps lagfest and the keep lord doesn’t even turn up on their screen ’til it’s at 25% health? So instead have an illusory “incentive” scheme, everyone will play as best they can in an attempt to influence their score upwards, and the final result is all random anyway. Perfect!

Well, no, obviously it’s horribly flawed; apart from anything else, wherever numbers exist in an MMO, players will pick away until they expose the mechanics. The best case scenario is the numbers are laid bare, more likely there’ll be a period of half-developed theories and suggestions, violent argument, and those weird urban game myths that pop up (“if you re-map your abilities so you only push prime numbered hot-keys during a keep siege you’ll *definitely* get top contribution!!1!”) It’s also quite hard to disguise an entirely random system when the top-contributing loot winner pipes up with “LOL I was AFK the whole time!!1!”, and puts a bit of a crimp on the next siege when a massed force turns up, stands poised ready to launch the assault, then go AFK en masse as that’s the way to top the chart. If you’re totally open and stick the precise formula up on the web, though, whether it’s random or whether it’s an incredibly intricate formula involving the phase of the moon and average rainfall of the past three days in Swindon (if you arrived here via a Google search for “average rainfall of the past three days in Swindon”, I’m awfully sorry but you’re probably going to be very disappointed), you’re back to the problem of a system open to exploitation (if random, just standing near a quest/keep and naffing off for coffee) or manipulation, and players being angry that you’re screwing over tanks/healers/melee/DPS/everyone. Damned either way, as per usual. My solution: I think they should’ve shipped a set of USB scales in the box with a built-in feather of Ma’at, and when rewards are to be determined all eligible players place their souls on the device and upload the results. Simple! Never let it be said I don’t offer practical suggestions…

Have I Got MMOnews For You

Host: And the final round is “Continue the Headline”. This week, teams, it’s from old Aunty: Ninety per cent of the young people who seek treatment for compulsive computer gaming are not addicted. So says Keith Bakker the founder and head of Europe’s first and only clinic to treat gaming addicts… “

Zoso: “…who was speaking to us from the depths of Naxxramas via his level 80 warlock accompanied by 24 non-addicted players, who had undergone the rigorous testing process whereby their physiological reactions were measured as they were set a number of tasks, such as farming primals, sending crafting materials to the testing team, running five mans until he was fully kitted out, and… HEAL ME, FFS!”

Melmoth: “However, doctors at the clinic are still at a loss to explain the phenomenon that every member of the ninety per cent group of visitors, upon leaving the clinic, came straight back in, re-paid the examination fee and tried again.”

Host: Goodnight!

Studio lights dim, theme tune plays.

Bonekickers is no Survivor

Alas, poor Bonekickers; I knew it, Horatio. A programme of infinite jest, how abhorred in my imagination it is! Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your crowbarring of Excalibur into wildly inappropriate historical settings?

Well, a quarter of it, in the form of Julie Graham, is in Survivors, which kicked off on Sunday for a bit of light-hearted post-apocalyptic fun. I’m not sure if it’s just the taint of Bonekickers, but I don’t think it’s a good sign if you’re willing the focal character of the first episode to die of the plague and being terribly disappointed when she doesn’t. Graham was clearly channelling Bonekickers at one point as, pulling up to a hospital and finding the automatic doors at the entrance jammed and unpowered, she used her archaeological imagination to figure out that rather than going to find another door (hospitals are notorious for only having one entrance, aren’t they?), the best course of action would be to ram through the automatic doors in her car.

Still, on the whole it wasn’t too bad, 99.9% of the population died off over the course of the episode, and our titular survivors conveniently all met up in about ten minutes at the end. We didn’t get to see as much of the others, so have fairly broad-brush introductions so far (doctor, sociopath, playboy etc.), with any luck they’ll come to the fore from tonight on and we can banish the spirit of Bonekickers into some ancient crypt for a couple of thousand year. Then set fire to it.

Reviewlet: Left 4 Dead

This year’s insane release schedule of “wait ten months then shove all the good stuff out at once” is well documented around the place; my original plan was to complement WAR with Far Cry 2, Fallout 3, Grand Theft Auto IV and Guitar Hero World Tour, leaving Saints Row 2, Call of Duty: World at War and a bunch of MMO expansions, amongst others, for the Great Gaming Drought presumably due for the first ten months of next year. So far, WAR’s still ticking over nicely, I’m rocking away in Guitar Hero World Tour when I get the chance, and Far Cry 2 has generally been satisfying any machine-gun toting cravings, leaving Fallout 3 still in its shrinkwrap, and only the delay of Grand Theft Auto IV into December has saved it from the same fate. I really don’t need any other games competing for my time, that’s for sure. No other games, definitely not, no siree bob.

So obviously I just got Left 4 Dead. I’d been filing it under “looks good, will pick it up sometime”, but then with all the Rock Paper Shotgun coverage and their podcast with Erik Wolpaw I started getting tempted, and a bunch o’ people from my old City of Heroes supergroup were having a bunch o’ fun with the demo, and Far Cry 2 bogged down a bit (good game and all, but gets slightly samey), and when Melmoth finally waged a sustained campaign of brainwashing and intimidation (I think his exact words might’ve been “it’s quite good you should try it”) I caved in and grabbed it from Steam. Single player is a fun quick blast, helped by some half decent NPC AI, but of course it’s the co-operative mode that really shines, putting you and your friends in your own zombie film. The AI director makes every game slightly different, though even with that I’m not sure the built in missions have the greatest potential for longevity (although mods do offer some really great future possibilities). Versus mode is what takes it up a notch even from that, with fantastic asymmetric gameplay as you alternate between the heavily armed and vastly outnumbered survivors and the “boss” zombies, with greater powers than the normal shamblers, but still incredibly vulnerable. Believe the hype, it’s great!

Richard Garriott’s Res Ipsa Loquitur.

So, apparently Richard Garriott’s House™ has, among other rooms, a multi-million dollar secret underground bunker where fellow genius MMO designer extraordinaire Brad McQuaid has been hiding all this time.

When asked to comment on the closure of Tabula Rasa Mr Garriott was heard to hiss, flick his cape around his shoulders and laugh as he disappeared in a cloud of smoke.

When the smoke cleared, an embarrassed Mr Garriott looked around sheepishly and was last seen running down a flight of stairs marked Richard Gariott’s Secret Genius Hideout for Geniuses™.

Questions as to whether Mark Jacobs will be joining the dynamic duo in their special sanctuary went unconfirmed, as were rumours that he was seen carrying a folder marked Richard Garriott’s Extraplanetary Emigration Plan™.

Heavy Metal Farmer

Here in Europe we’re just starting on Day 3 of the Heavy Metal event in WAR, and it’s going pretty well after getting over the initial disappointment of logging in to find it wasn’t really a massive Black Sabbath concert with an RvR lake of a mosh pit (turns out Ozzy’s really more of a WoW man. Though after watching the advert, I’m not entirely sure he’s fully aware of what WoW is. Or where he is. Or what year it is. No change there, then.) Still, there’s Guitar Hero World Tour for that which continues to be excellent, though after really looking forward to Love Me Two Times I promptly failed when it came up, those guitar trills are tricky! But anyway…

After a bit of a grindfest in the last event, I was slightly worried about what sort of tasks we might be faced with, but day 1: “take part in the new Reikland Factory scenario” was easy enough, the only obstacle being the length of time in a queue for it. I suspect something might not have quite been working as intended, as I’m sure both sides would have been signing up for it in numbers, but unfortunately a couple of guildmates never saw it pop at all over the course of an evening. Day 2, complete three stages of a public quest (any public quest) was also straightforward. Seems like a good idea to encourage people back into PQs, though I slightly went against the spirit of things as I didn’t have too much time by zapping back to Tier 1 and soloing a PQ there. From the list of forthcoming tasks over at Waaagh!, it doesn’t seem to get much more time consuming, either. Not that it really matters, as I’m not too fussed about starting a Knight a week early, so just two thirds of the tasks should be enough for the shiny cloak reward, but it doesn’t look like too much farming will be needed after all. I couldn’t miss the opportunity of getting a Bad News song in the title, though, all together now: “I’m a heavy metal farmer, I’ve got lots of heavy metal animals…” (Note to Activision/Harmonix: Bad News downloadable content, sure fire winner!)

Have I Got MMOnews For You

Host: And the final round is “Continue the Headline”. This week, teams, it’s some rugby news: “Northampton Saints have completed the signing of hooker Brett Sharman from South African side Blue Bulls.”

Zoso: “Northampton director of rugby Jim Mallinder said: “we felt we really needed to get that Windfury buff on the melee DPS group in… wait, Sharman? Dammit.””

Melmoth: “… it took WoW fanfic aficionados several moments to realise that Google’s “Did you mean?” suggestion was a little off the mark from their original ‘half-breed Draenei/Tauren shaman prostitutes’ search.”

Host: Goodnight!

Studio lights dim, theme tune plays.

Doctor Who’s on First

The BBC Archive has just released a collection of documents and images from around the time of the creation of Doctor Who. They’re really rather interesting, if you like that kind of thing; the original concept and background notes, a Radio Times preview and audience reactions (“a police box with flashing beacon travelling through interstellar space – what claptrap!”). Also, from 1962 and 63, two reports looking at the whole idea of science fiction drama on the BBC.

It reminded me of a couple of other recent posts about “gaming archaeology” for Origin Systems and MUD; like the BBC, some things may have been lost over time, but others are being preserved for the future. So long as the Bonekickers team don’t turn up and set fire to everything.

Save Our Scenarios

Aren’t scenarios in Warhammer brilliant? Yes, I went there. I believe the correct response now is for you to say “oh you didn’t”, and then I say “don’t go getting all up in my face”, and then there’s a vague attempt at a fight involving some slapping and hair pulling, and then security get involved, so let’s just take that as given and presume we’ve moved on to the point of glowering at each other while being restrained by burly individuals.

Anyway. Yes. Scenarios. What with fake plastic rocking, rugby watching, comedy gigs and other more tiresome not-playing-WAR bits of Real Life going on, I haven’t had much time to be Bright Wizardly. In the odd half-hour here and there, though, I have been logging in, been *wanting* to log in, and why? If you said “scenarios”, well done, take a cookie. If you said “because of banjo-playing pigs in trees”, no cookie for you, honestly, the clue was in the first sentence. And post title.

They’re not perfect, of course. Individual scenarios can be awful depending on the respective team levels and compositions, and some of the maps and game types aren’t great (evenly matched teams frequently end up in a points-from-kills-only stalemate of a mass scrum). If scenarios were the only thing on offer in WAR it wouldn’t be much cop, just playing a few scenarios here and there is more akin to playing a few rounds of an online FPS (especially now so many FPSs have some persistent unlock type features), so if that’s all I was going to do, I might as well be playing an FPS. Nothing but scenarios, bad. However, UND THIS IST A BIG HOWEVER, I really don’t think heavily devaluing or removing scenarios, as suggested in many other places, would be good for WAR long term. The usual argument, grossly oversimplified, is that scenarios take people away from open world RvR, open world RvR is good, ergo scenarios are bad. My counter-argument is that open world RvR *can* certainly be very good, but can also be very bad, or very dull. As p0tsh0t points out (in an interesting post worthy of pondering more deeply sometime), there’s an imperial stackload of variables to deal with, and while we seem to be pretty lucky on our server in having a good number of players in Tier 4, roughly balanced between Order and Destruction, and fairly frequent RvR battles, there’s no guarantee that something will be happening at any given time, much less something I’ll be able to get to and actually participate in within half an hour (what is going on with zones like Dragonwake and Black Crag? Big zones, with irritating cliffs and plummeting drops such that if you’ve never been there before it’s a right faff just getting from a warcamp to a keep, so you fall off somewhere and die from the drop, and then come back at a camp, start running again from there, find a frikkin’ horde of level 39 mobs wandering around in the middle of the road that you can’t really avoid, and you can’t really kill ‘cos you’re level 32 which is fine for the RvR stuff once you’re bolstered but this is outside the lake, so you try and avoid them and the gitting things chase and kill you dumping you back at the camp and… anyway).

In half an hour, I can log in, hit the “queue all” button for scenarios, then have a crack at a quest or two, or sort out mail and the inventory, maybe do a spot of crafting, check out what’s on auction; a scenario pops up (usually Serpent’s bleedin’ Passage, but I gather they’re working that), play that, then repeat the process if I have more time, otherwise log out. This is a Good Thing. I’d love to be spending more time in game, doing a variety of activities, hooking up with the guild more (unfortunately I’m not getting the time for much past “Hello!” and “Goodbye!” in guild chat), tackling dungeons, taking keeps, but failing that at least scenarios give a quick hit of PvP, some XP and renown, even a bit of cash and loot, everything a growing Bright Wizard needs, and once I get some free time again I can get more involved in the rest of the game. Without scenarios I’d be far less inclined to fire up the client for those odd half hours, lose momentum, maybe be less inclined to log in at all.

I’m not trying to cause a b-big s-s-sensation.

Having just listened to the folks over at Channel Massive lamenting in their podcast #66 the fact that MMOs these days are being perverted and twisted away from their original concept of another world in which to adventure, socialise and immerse oneself, and have instead become all about gaming achievement, I am inclined to take a suppositionary meander down the quiet leafy byway that is MMO Evolution Lane.

You see, it was not too long ago that I foisted myself upon the innocent and upstanding folks of the Van Hemlock podcast in their episode recorded at the Eurogamer Expo, where, as well as repeating the phrase ‘War Twat’ far too often, I also posed the question (about 33:33 in, for the stalkers out there) as to whether MMOs will succeed on consoles.

The answer from the panellists was that MMOs would indeed succeed on the consoles, with a few tweaks to the games in order for them to translate well: “Get rid of the grind”, “Make it drop-in”, “Streamline the UI”, “Must be playing for fun”.

As such, and with the thought that MMOs are apparently being twisted by the player base into something different to what they were originally, my question changes to: will MMOs succeeding on the consoles destroy the MMO as we traditionally know it? Essentially, are MMOs coming to the consoles now purely because consoles have evolved enough to be able to handle an MMO, or are they coming to the consoles because they have (d)evolved to such an extent that they will now appeal to the drop-in, streamlined, Xbox Gamer Card achievement generation?

I have to wonder if we’re about to see the evolution of a genre, or the creation of a new genre at the expense of the old one.

I look at games like GTA IV, Saints Row 2 and Oblivion and I find a glimmer of hope in the future MMOs on the console. These are still sandbox games, adventurous in scope and nature, and they live equally well in the hearts of PC gamers and console gamers alike. The first two games do cater to the achievement crowd though; don’t get me wrong, however, achievements can be a good thing if done well, they can encourage players to attempt feats they may not normally have bothered with, to explore places they may not thought to have looked, but they can also be used to encourage behaviour which is the antithesis of what it means to devote oneself to an MMO.

Console MMOs will undoubtedly succeed, but I am a little concerned as to the nature of their success, and whether it will come at the cost of the genre that I have known and loved, that future MMOs will be little more than glorified clones of Pacman, with players gobbling down pellets of XP as fast as they can in order to achieve the high score.