Monthly Archives: October 2009

Behind the stage curtain.

Sometimes, be it through error or happenstance, we players get to see behind the stage presented to us by the game we are playing. Sometimes it’s a very literal behind the scenes look, and other times it’s less obvious or impressive. Nevertheless, these opportunities can give the curious a sneak peek at some of the game mechanics that are otherwise hidden from view.

One such mechanic that I run across in WoW more frequently these days is per-area mob (de)spawn. Basically there are areas where, given no traffic for some time, the mobs in the area are despawned, and they dynamically respawn whenever a player enters the area. It’s hard to determine if this is a general mechanic or only for specific areas, for obvious reasons: the amount of time Goldshire isn’t populated with “Oh thee verily thy forsooth methinks” types or bouncing PvP lolbots is probably close to zero, whereas other areas rarely see much traffic.

One of these places is in a starter area, it’s a little out the way within the starter area itself, and when I tell you that the starter area is Bloodmyst Isle, backwater birthing zone for the Draenei race, an area which itself is tedious and unnecessary to journey to for any character who doesn’t have a specific reason to go there, you’ll understand why this place has little to no traffic for large spans of server up-time.

Blacksilt Shore is a small area tucked away in the far south west of Bloodmyst Isle; there is only one quest that ever sends you to the area, although there is another quest to be picked up from a frequently spawning named mob, another mechanic that Blizzard seemed to get especially excited about and used frequently in the starter areas released in the Burning Crusade expansion, but never seemed to take much further than that. Anyway, if you approach Blacksilt Shore from Kessel’s Crossing by swimming across the small expanse of water that separates them and then run along the shoreline, if no other players have been there for a while (which seems fairly common on my server) then you’ll notice the phenomenon that huge clumps of Blacksilt murlocs suddenly spawn out of nowhere at single points in the water as you run past, and then all move off in different directions, generally populating the area which was otherwise empty a few moments before.

Not terribly impressive I grant you, but one of those things that – if you happen to be the sort of person who is looking for it and is curious about such things – can probably be considered QI, if nothing else.

Next week: The little known but more mundane bug where an oiled-up Jaina Proudmoore can be found naked pole dancing for Thrall.

For the loot, honey, for the loot.

I hate dungeon instance loot. Ok, that’s not entirely true: we loves it, we wants it precious. What I hate about dungeon instance loot is the way, like so many other things in MMOs, its awarding is perfectly designed to make one or more people in the group feel rubbish about their evening, and how it turns nice normal people into quietly seething Sméagols or outwardly furious frothing Gollums. I hate it most when it does such a thing to me, especially when I’d promised myself that loot did not matter and I was only there for the companionship of others and to enjoy the World of Warcraft. Yet it manages to do so, loot distribution in WoW is like the One Ring of Middle Earth, it has a will of its own and evil intent.

We’d finished a run of the Deadmines and I’d upgraded my character with two pieces of Defias leather armour, making out like the proverbial bandit. I’d rolled Need on the items, and professed the niceness of them on our VoIP channel, but only because they were, indeed, nice. Our healer, who can also wear leather, did not roll on the items, and I was pleased with my new preciouses for a short while before being hit by a wave of guilt towards the end of the run when I considered that my proclamation of their niceitude had perhaps put the healer off of rolling on the items at all, which was not my intent. Indeed, I was still in my premeditated mindset of The Loot Does Not Matter, and frankly there’re very few healing leather items at this level so any leather loot is free game, although I obviously wouldn’t roll on anything that was clearly healer loot. Things will even out a bit at level forty, as my Shaman moves up to using mail armour and the only other mail armour wearer in the group will move up to using plate armour at the same time, thus making the loot boundaries fractionally easier to determine.

We moved on to Shadowfang Keep, and still feeling a bit of loot windfall guilt (which I think afflicts some players more than others), I passed on the leather pieces that dropped there, one of which was blatantly a healer piece anyway, and the other was a nice upgrade for either of us, it having a chunk of stamina on it. The other two members had grabbed a few useful drops by this point too, and it was all looking like a fairly balanced evening of loot distribution. But the loot system is treacherous, it will betray you, and it is always trying to find a way to ruin an evening’s play.

So a really shiny two-handed axe dropped. I’m currently using two-handed axes until the point I can dual-wield in twenty levels or so, and this item was a huge upgrade for me, with its lowest damage range number being greater than the highest damage range number on my current weapon. That’s a pretty tasty boost in DPS. I think we all professed the shininess of it at the point, and I apologised for rolling Need (why do I feel the need to apologise each time I roll need on something, is this just me?) and rolled for it, so did the Paladin tank. And of course they won.

I think I hid my frustration quite well, and again I like to think that my Loot Does Not Matter mindset at least partially brushed it aside as just one of those things, but as we continued through the instance the loot system pulled at me, taunted me, and drove me to dark thoughts.

(I had posted my reasons for being annoyed here, but I was informed that it looked like a castigation of that person, and that’s not the purpose of this post at all. It’s the loot system that is primarily at fault.)

I wonder if the healer felt the same way about me rolling on those leather pieces, and whether they felt that I expected them to be mine and shied away from rolling. I wonder if I would have been annoyed to not win those pieces either and have come out of the evening with nothing, or whether, having gained a couple of nice items, the loot system took over and twisted my thoughts towards expectation and rightful ownership, exactly the things that I’d sworn to avoid, having been on the receiving end of such rolls in the past, and had evenings ruined by what I perceived as… no, not unfairness, what happened was fair by all the rules. Perhaps thoughtlessness? It’s all very subjective, and that’s the biggest issue with these loot systems. The boundaries of who has a claim to what are often blurred, grey and misty, like putting on the One Ring and trying to see clearly.

I wonder if anyone else even cares about this, or if I’m just someone who spends too much time reading things into situations that don’t exist. I’m not writing this to try to shame that person into giving me the weapon, hell, they may very well have a point of view that, when explained to me, will make me realise that they had just as much claim on the item as I felt I had. And I most definitely wouldn’t want the item now, there’s something odious about getting an item from someone because you whinged about it: it’s just what the loot system would want. No, I’m genuinely writing this because loot systems in most MMOs are utterly rubbish, and instead of just copying the Need/Greed system and forcing the players to come up with DKP and other overlaid systems in order to make things more fair – and often still failing and causing grief between players – developers should really put some effort into coming up with something that is an enabler of group play, not something that causes discord and resentment between otherwise friendly and reasonable players. At the end of the day your character in most modern MMOs is nothing, gear is everything, so why is the gear distribution system in most MMOs such a hideous archaic throwback that has probably never once worked well.

Developers wonder why so many people will happily Play Alone with Others in MMOs, and yet when you look at the odds stacked against having a good time when playing with other people, even people you consider friends, it’s no wonder that more and more players switch to solo play wherever they can.

Firstly you’ve got to be on the right continent as your friends. Then you have to be on the right server. Then you have to belong to the same faction. Then you have to be of a comparable level. Then you have to have the same quests. And if all of that comes together and you can finally run an instance together, you have to hope that the loot which drops is easily apportioned and that nobody is going to feel that they deserved the piece more. Which when it comes to players and loot, is an almost certainty no matter how good their intentions, the loot system bends all to its will eventually.

I’ve resolved to do what I normally do in these situations, and that’s to not give the loot system a chance. Let’s face it, nobody outside of the end-game in WoW (PvP twinks excepted) needs to care about gear, I could probably perform well enough as a meleer in a set of cloth caster gear that we’d still make it through an instance, but quest items are plentiful enough that I will be able to pull my weight with ease. Yesterday I was tempted again, and though my brooding Galadriel-like thoughts almost brought me to a bad place, I think I have resisted the temptation well enough, and hopefully this will allow me to not worry about the loot and just enjoy the dungeons of WoW and the companionship of others.

No longer is the loot is precious to us, we don’t wants it no more; nice friendses, that’s all we wants.

Reviewlet: Grandville

Last week Melmoth and I headed up to Birmingham for the International Comic Show, a definite highlight of which was Bryan Talbot’s Grandville. As well as the opportunity to pick up a hand-badgered copy, Bryan gave a talk on the book within the anthropomorphic tradition, starting with his original inspiration, a book of illustrations by Gerard who worked under the pseudonym of JJ Grandville. As well as old animal favourites like Beatrix Potter and Wind in the Willows characters, he covered some areas I wasn’t at all familiar with, like the early 20th century popularity of animal cartoons in tabloids, the Daily Mirror’s Tiger Tim being countered with Teddy Tail in the Daily Mail and then Rupert Bear in the Daily Express, the only one still going.

The setting for Grandville is a Steampunk version of Belle Epoque Paris, in a timeline where France won the Napoleonic War and England only recently regained independence. Our hero, Inspector LeBrock, can detect with the best of them, starting the adventure with some distinctly Holmesian deductions, but is also a man’s man (badger’s badger?) who’s popular with the ladies (sows?) and handy with his fists when needed, a bit like Daniel Craig’s Bond. An apparent suicide (in Nutwood, home village of Rupert Bear, whose father shows up in a couple of frames) leads to a deeper conspiracy, as these things do, and lots of fights, chases and a spot of “badger-on-badger action”, as the man put it.

Grandville is utterly gorgeous, as the preview images show, and packed with details. One frame is based on Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergere (with a slightly different bartender), where our hero orders a Bass ale as seen in the bottom right corner of the original; the whole palette of the surrounding pages is then taken from that image. Another frame, in the apartment of an exotic badger dancer, takes the furnishings from a photograph of Sarah Bernhardt’s apartment. There are a few humans around as well, part of a menial underclass, including Spirou as a bell-boy and Becassine as a maid, long running European comic characters I wasn’t at all familiar with. There’s also a white terrier who may seem familiar to readers of Tintin, but Talbot cunningly conceals his true identity by naming him Snowy Milou.

If I was forced to criticise it in some way, perhaps at gunpoint, like if a slightly odd mugger leapt out brandishing a pistol and demanding comic book criticism instead of money, there are some slightly unsubtle political allegories, and the plot isn’t terribly original, but those are piffling trifles really, and overall I wouldn’t hesitate to award it the highly coveted KiaSA “Best Steampunk Graphic Novel With Badger Protagonist EVER” award.  It’s a fantastic setting, in many senses, so it’s splendid news that there’s already a sequel in the works, “Grandville Mon Amor”.  C’est tres bon!

Goin’ down… all the way

If you were contemplating a holiday to the Hell region I’d advise taking a nice warm jumper, as early reports reaching us suggest it may have frozen over. In unrelated news, Rock Band 2 is actually coming out in the UK for the Wii this Friday, though I’ll remain skeptical until I’m actually strumming along to Norman Greenbaum, as the not-entirely-accurate “available in April” announcement is still there…

Just to put a slight crimp on the party, though, we’re not going to have the entire back catalogue of DLC available at launch, with “over 250 songs” (out of the 700-odd) “available on disc and for download by early 2010”. Probably makes sense; I imagine people are more likely to buy a few songs each week as they become available rather than going on a massive spending spree in one weekend. It’s still going to be terribly galling, though, if it takes a while for us to get some of the top-notch DLC on the way, like the Electric Six pack featuring that favourite of flying Viking kittens, Gay Bar, ten Queen songs later in the month, and, of course, the greatest news in the history of time ever, Flight of the Conchords coming to Rock Band.

Simulacra and Simulation

I just unlocked Kurt Cobain as a playable character in Guitar Hero 5, so my band now consists of me on guitar, Shirley Manson on vocals (for maximum incongruity, there being all of about 3 songs with a female vocalist), Matt Bellamy on drums (he’s Muse’s drummer, after all) and Kurt Cobain on bass (I’m hoping this shields me from the full wrath of Courtney Love, if he’s only playing along with Bon Jovi rather than singing). In Grand Theft Auto IV I’ve popped into the comedy club a few times to see a digitised Ricky Gervais (or to rapidly skip past a digitised Katt Williams), whole rosters of professional athletes come to virtual life in various EA Sports games, and Charlie Brooker’s Gameswipe had a segment on 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, in which you control the titular mercenary, elite assassin, professional martial artist and sometime rapper on a pretty typical day, laying down a rhyme or two between slaughtering militants by the bucketload.

As a genre, I can’t help but feel CRPGs are missing out with their lack of digitised celebrities. We’ve had the voices of Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean, amongst others, but full motion capture would step things up to the next level. In the forthcoming Star Trek Online, Eddie Izzard would obviously be the perfect bridge crew (“I think this might just be a box with ‘widdly wee’ written on it”; “Set phasers to ‘oven left on at home‘, men!”), as well as the ultimate Sith (“I could kill you with a tray!“) in The Old Republic. In the System Shock games the humans tend to be, with the exception of the protagonist, dead, wiped out by robotic beings; who better for the ultimate opponents in System Shock 3 than the Flight of the Conchords (under the guidance of SHODAN, of course). The exploits of Mr Cent suggest that in future espionage titles like The Agency or Alpha Protocol, if the player needs to call in hard-hitting backup then military special forces or a police SWAT team are frankly second rate when compared to musical entertainers, so I’d suggest players are given a choice of The Sugababes, Westlife or Miley Cyrus to provide fire support.

The one company making notable strides in this area are, of course, Blizzard. After going to all the trouble of digitising Ozzy Osborne it would be a great shame if he wasn’t an actual NPC in Cataclysm, along with William Shatner and Mr T. I’d definitely resubscribe to be in a party with those three.