Killed in a Smiling Accident.

Reports so far indicate that they are all delighted with their two extra inventory slots in Allods Online.

In a statement for Oh MMO Emo News, the US gaming community expressed its continued commitment to extra storage capacity within the Russian developed MMO, and as such their target for next year is to get extra slots for everyone, rather than having to share those two slots among the entire US population.

Reporting live for Oh MMO Emo News, I’m Melmoth Melmothson.

I really like the fact that DDO includes various puzzle games as part of the dungeon running experience. The primary puzzle that I’ve encountered is a tile-based test where each tile has one of a number of pipe shapes drawn upon it and where you rotate the tiles in place to align the various pipe shapes, thus forming a path between two objectives and allowing a glowing blue power source to light said path. It’s basically the strange love child of Pipemania and a slide puzzle, but it works well enough within the Eberron setting at representing the game’s equivalent of a magical lock.

Turbine doesn’t abuse the device either because although I’ve run quite a few dungeons in DDO now, I would say that I’ve encountered the tile puzzle in less than a quarter of them. It’s certainly ripe for abuse however, one could see it surreptitiously slipping its way into daily life, where poor adventurers are forced, in cross-legged desperation, to rotate ceramic floor tiles between themselves and the toilet in order to unlock the lid and be able to relieve themselves, and where many a divorce proceeding in Stormreach was begun after a toilet seat was discovered locked in the up position.

I wonder why we don’t see more of these sorts of puzzles in MMOs, is it simply a case that they’re too cumbersome and time consuming to implement with respect to the amount of content that they provide, or is it more the fact that the generic MMO player is not really interested in such distractions and would prefer to just get on with grinding away at various NPCs, unimpeded by the need for any real cognitive exercise beyond that which muscle memory alone can quite happily provide? Judging from the general reaction to the mini-games present in Mass Effect 2, which I thought were harmless entertainment where many others seemed to perceive them as the fiery soiled undergarments of Satan, these basic mini-games are seen by a great many players as being vapid at best. I can’t help but feel that there’s something to them though, that perhaps more puzzles can be incorporated into MMO games in order to tax the player in more ways than the, admittedly tried and tested, option of pressing hot bar keys in response to various external triggers during combat; in fact I feel that MMOs, with their ponderous and often drawn-out style of play, lend themselves quite well to the incorporation of such diversions.

I expect part of the problem is the fact that the puzzles need to be kept simple so that the maximum number of players will stand a chance of being able to complete them, but perhaps a shift in how the puzzles are used to ‘block’ content could be undertaken such that more complex and advanced puzzles could be used without unduly punishing those players who don’t care for them. For example, a locked door to an optional treasure room could be pickable by a Rogue, but the same door could also be opened by solving a complex puzzle game. A basic example, of course, but it also opens up some interesting lines of thought, such as the fact that the player’s presence in the game would then be represented not only by a set of numbers that define various abilities, but also by the abilities of the player, where a player’s character within the game would then be an amalgam of both their in-game skills and those of their real-world self. There’s also the fact that puzzles are often used in team building exercises because they are a good way to foster communication and cooperation between strangers, so having group based puzzles within an MMO might be one way in which to encourage people to play as a team, rather than the more usual social phenomenon found in MMOs where they play together as individuals.

Anyway, I’ll have to leave you with those thoughts as I’m rather desperate for a wee and there’s a bugger of a Pipemania puzzle to complete before I can get into the men’s restroom; I’d claim that they’re taking the piss, but more accurately they’re diverting it through a network of interconnected rotatable tiles.

I’ve been pondering World of Warcraft’s quest hub design, in which many NPCs are clumped together in a location such that a player can roll around and gather a huge katamari of quests, undertake the quests in the local area, before handing them all in for that rush of experience, the digital equivalent of juicing your pituitary gland in a blender with milk and ice and then injecting the resultant smoothie directly into the head for a buzz and a brain freeze all in one. It’s the perception of progress that interests me, where a player may be earning no more experience per hour than if they had to perform quests in a singular manner whilst running around all over the landscape, but the fact that the experience bar noticeably jumps in a very short period of time when handing in a bunch of quests often results in a greater feeling of progress and satisfaction than a gradual unobserved progression. That’s not to say that there’s no pleasure to be had from noticing that you’re only a smidgen away from the next level without having realised you were even close, there’s definitely satisfaction to be had from simply playing the game as its own reward and with the experience gained being an added bonus, but I think there’s a heightened rush when it comes to seeing that experience bar fill faster than a mercury thermometer in a boiling kettle.

The cause for my thinking upon this was the fact that Lord of the Rings Online now seems to have two independent systems of experience gain that run in parallel, one that gives this burst of experience, with the other giving the more traditional steady and reserved progress, where playing the game is more the focus of things. LotRO’s skirmishes give really quite generous experience the first time you run them each day due to their having an automatic daily quest associated with them that boosts experience and token gains; running the four skirmishes open to my character at the moment can net the best part of half a level for little more than an hour’s play, something that is much harder to do with standard questing due to the travelling involved in getting from the quest givers to their objectives and back again. The fact that I can get this boost of experience from the skirmishes means that when it comes to the standard questing I don’t feel as though I’m stuck in some sort of Travelling Salesman Problem, where I need to optimise routes such that I don’t waste precious time retreading old ground, I can sit back and relax and enjoy the questing and exploration of the land knowing that I’ve made a significant amount of progress in getting to the next level already.

World of Warcraft provides this sense of progress by creating islands of experience, those small self contained areas of questing, never more obvious than in the Burning Crusade expansion where each experience island slams jarringly into the next with little feeling of worldliness about the place, as though each zone were a floor of a department store; and just as you could have the department store’s elevator doors close on a view of cheese counters and meat selections, only to open on the jarringly contrasting sight of women’s lace underwear and silk nightgowns, the zones of the Outlands similarly contrasted with one another in a curious and unworldly manner. It’s possible that it’s this partitioning of progress into pockets with such obvious delineations that caused the theme park feeling, which in turn caused people to ignore any pretence that there was a story or adventure to be had, and realise that the whole questing game was really just paddling through waves of highs and lows in order to be able to catch the ultimate endorphin rush and ride the raiding wave back to shore.

Lord of the Rings Online has always attempted to focus on story, it being based on an IP that constantly lurks in the background angrily waving a placard with “Keep Including Story, Stupid!”. The various ‘book’ content that progresses the player character’s own tale in LotRO is intertwined with the main LoTR story and offers strong plot-based game-play which is entirely independent and optional to the progress-based levelling content. As such the levelling content was still a harried hurtle of heedlessly running around trying to make progress quickly, a goal often obstructed by zones such as the North Downs and the Lone Lands (prior to its recent revamp) which required the player to run back and forth across the zones for little experience gain, thus causing a noticeable trough in the progress curve of a character and resulting in more than one player quitting the game in despondent frustration. Now LotRO has an alternative option, a player can turn to skirmishes to satiate their desire for progress, which is often left unfulfilled by the lengthy roaming nature of questing within the game. This also means, however, that players can now relax and enjoy the many meandering paths that they must follow while questing, and can thus take the time to revel in the incredible atmosphere of the beautiful world that Turbine has created.

I think that variety, in addition to quality, is a path that developers could definitely take further in MMOs in order to smooth out the frightening pace at which players consume the current design of MMO content. Offering alternative paths to quick but daily-capped experience gain within the context of the game, such as LotRO’s skirmishes, is a good way to keep players invested in the levelling system without feeling the need to blitzkrieg their way through the quest-based game-play that makes up the majority of the content.

Rumour has it that World of Warcraft’s next raid encounter is going to be with Kobby Botick, a monstrous tyrannical boss mob who, at the start of the encounter, summons a couple of adds that will teleport the tank and healer out of the instance before KB beats the rest of the raid into weeping, hand-wringing submission.

On top of that, the remaining players will be forced to remain in the raid dungeon with KB for two years before getting a chance of any loot dropping.

Sounds like another example of nightmarish raid design, thank goodness real life isn’t anything at all like that.

So it turns out that the answer was yes.

Expect the ‘press’ to carry on writing lengthy, circular arguments about it on slow news days for years to come, though.

I sometimes catch myself wondering whether MMOs aren’t just some huge and complex experiment to determine a new universal constant scale based upon the amount of aggravation a person will accept before they leave an activity that is supposed to be considered entertainment.

I imagine it to be called the Shit to Quit ratio.

People in white lab coats set up various experiments where the subjects are tested over and over again against nonsensical, repetitive, frustrating or downright broken game mechanics until the breaking point is found and they quit the game in a torrent of rage and exasperation.

I think I’ve found my sweet spot on the scale with LotRO: there are several mechanics in that game that drive me almost to unsubscribe – a primary contender being random stuns that wrest control of my character away from me for any length of time – and yet I keep playing because those things are few and far enough between that they don’t quite drive me over the edge.

But only just.

Think of the benefits to society that we MMO players will provide if a Shit to Quit scale can be determined and a person’s place on it can be pinpointed accurately! Jobs could be matched to those people who will take crap from the boss without walking out the door; theme parks could be designed to make use of the absolute extremes of acceptable queue length without people leaving altogether; and movies could be made as short and repetitive as possible without audiences abandoning the cinema.

So remember, the next time you are feared uncontrollably into a pack of patrolling mobs during a dungeon run, or can’t run up the gentle incline of a slope, or have to fight your way through a bunch of pointless low XP, high HP mobs to get to a destination, you are doubtless secretly serving towards the advancement of humanity!

Turbine’s Dungeons and Dragons Online had a bonus XP event this weekend past in celebration of the fact that Turbine failed to close the game down after less than stellar subscription numbers, and where NCSoft would have flipped the kill switch on the servers a few days after release, Turbine decided to experiment with the solid game and intellectual property which they had in their possession, and now DDO is marching steadily ever forward on the MMO battlefield under the banner of the Earl of Free To Play.

See that NCSoft? That there is what you do with a solid game that hasn’t quite had the fortune to capture the hearts and minds of gamers yet. Let’s all take a small moment to mourn the fact that we don’t have a free-to-play Tabula Rasa, shall we?

So yes, it’s DDO’s birthday, and the weekends of the 26th – 28th of February and 5th – 7th of March have been dubbed an MMORPGasmic XPalooza by… um, me, and as such it was a prime time to roll a new character and get a few levels under their +2 Belt of Grinding.

And of course no such adventure would be complete if I didn’t spend money in the DDO Store. Happy Birthday DDO! Here, I bought you an adventure pack! Well ok, technically I bought me an adventure pack, but it’s the thought that counts. You got some money, I got hours of entertainment, which is very much like the time that I gave my brother some money for his birthday and then I got hours of entertainment watching him get yelled at by our parents when he blew the cat’s litter tray to smithereens with the bangers that he’d bought with said money. Thankfully the cat wasn’t in (on?) the litter tray at the time, but only because my brother got the fuse length wrong; still, if ever there is a right place for a cat to be when it is surprised by a modest incendiary device being detonated from underneath it, the litter tray is probably that place.

I happened to have Veteran Status on my account, which I purchased a while ago (Happy pre-Birthday DDO!), and so I was able to create a level four character and skip a chunk of content that I had already run several times on other alts, thus allowing me to play through some new content straight away, with the secondary aim of getting as close to level seven as possible with a mind to joining m’colleague, Van Hemlock and the Tuesday Noob Club That Now Also Gathers On A Friday Club for further hot lathered DDO action.

So levelling was my aim, possibly extreme levelling, the sort of levelling that has a capital ‘X’ in the middle of the word extreme, and has its own station on satellite TV where the men are all bronzed beefcakes who say things like ‘dude’ and ‘whoa’ through a fringe of hair so long that it’s sometimes hard to tell whether you’re looking at them from the front or the rear, made all the more difficult because they seem to wear half of their baggy shapeless clothing backwards. If you want to learn to be extreme, you have to be willing to brave the dangers of the field in which you’re trying to do so: surfers eventually have to face that bloody big breaker, snowboarders have to make that off-piste jump into nothingness, BASE jumpers have to throw themselves off of that building, and MMO players have to visit the game’s forums. I wasn’t ready to be quite that eXtreme, though, so I made good use of the Google safety wheels and just searched around until I found a link to a thread on the DDO forums where someone posted a brief unapologetic list of the adventures that they found to be best for XP; having run the first few adventures in the list already, and having known them to be good sources of XP, I found the next item on the list was Tangleroot Gorge, an adventure area that I hadn’t played before. Good XP and new content? Sign me up!

Right after I pay you some money. Happy Birthday DDO!

So yes, I had to buy Tangleroot Gorge, which is probably why I hadn’t played it before, but I was deep into the spirit of celebration. And I’d just been paid for the month; my credit card was once again a shiny golden passport to possibility, rather than a singularity of infinite financial density within my wallet that threatens to suck me and my whole life into its black oblivion. A matter not helped by the fact that I keep spending indiscriminate amounts of money on impulse purchases, I might add.

So with my impulse purchase adventure pack unwrapped and installed into the game, I was ready to begin my levelling run. Right after I purchased a potion that I noticed in the store which gave an additional hefty boost to XP gain and which, a brief search revealed, stacked with the existing XP boost that Turbine were giving players over the weekend.

Oh dear.

My credit card started to pulse and thrum a little at that point, and it was fairly easy to see that time and space were beginning to be warped by the debt horizon that was building, so I popped it into my wallet, encased the wallet in lead and concrete, threw it into the nearby river, and got on with actually playing the game. My twice XP boosted game. I could feel my fringe growing rapidly, but there was going to be much work needed on the beefcake look; so, while I waited for the game to load, I put my trousers on backwards and pulled a beanie hat on to my head instead.

Next time: Tangleroot Gorge, and the joys of motile armoured organisms that can heal.

Despite my unashamed love for Lord of the Rings Online it is still an MMO, and as such there are still wonderful incongruities that leap out suddenly and often unexpectedly, knocking me from the horse of immersion and into the cloying dreary mud of reality that lies beneath its feet.

One such curiosity, which I experienced recently, gave me cause to stop and ponder. I had just completed the run from the Ford of Bruinen in the Trollshaws to the entrance of Rivendell, and had made my way slowly down the winding path that leads towards the home of Elrond & Company (est. 1697). The path is lined with trees that cleverly block the view of the valley to all but the most persistent of observers until the player is close enough that, assuming you have a decent drawing distance set in your graphics options, your view of the valley becomes unobstructed by trees just as the bulk of Rivendell’s buildings ping into the back of your Z-buffer.

The majestic waterfalls around the Last Homely House sparkle in the soft sunlight that always seems to smile upon the elven city, and the delicate otherworldly architecture whispers hints of the secrets of many ages that it has known. The elegant haunting music of Rivendell begins to sigh its way to your ears on the gentle breeze, and all of nature seems bent on welcoming you with peace and love into Middle Earth’s last haven of calm and tranquillity.

“HI! WELCOME TO ELRONDLAND. HERE’S A MAP AND A TOKEN FOR THE RIDES. YOU HAVE A NICE DAY NOW!”

…

Ok, so I’ve exaggerated the actual message, but you should expect that of me by now, after all I’ve been exaggerating things for nigh-on a million years now.

I think the phrase, uttered by an elf who stands forever immobile at the first junction on the path into Rivendell, is actually a simple “Welcome to Rivendell!” perhaps there’s an ‘adventurer’ tagged on the end, I forget, but it was enough to slap me out of my sense of awe and wonder and into a Mighty Boosh-like dream sequence. In it I pictured the welcoming elf as one of those people you see just inside the turnstiles of amusement parks, where they offer a hearty welcome, give you a map of the park along with some vouchers for tacky items in the souvenir shop that only require you to spend another fifty pounds there in order to qualify for the promotion, and perhaps shepherd you towards a pair of people dressed in giant costumes representing the theme park’s main characters, which can only have been designed by an individual who hates children and is bent on scarring them for life by creating eight foot tall versions of popular cartoon characters with gaping hungry maws and dilated crossed eyes fixed in a malignant insane stare that screams bloody murder. I pictured my character standing between a giant Elrond with a slightly lop-sided head three times too big for the body beneath it, and an equally engorged Galadriel with impossible breast dimensions packed into a dress that was too small to be considered anything other than slutty. Our elf greeter hurriedly snaps a photo and hands me a ticket to collect the picture in an hour from a booth outside of the Last Homely House, and I’m given pointers on my map to the main attractions around the zone, and told to get to the Last Homely House as quickly as possible because it’s the most popular ride and the queues get very long fairly soon after the park has opened.

I look around in a panicked fashion, expecting to see a herd of other adventurers all making their way down the path, balloons and candy floss in hand, shuffling past one another and parting, like rapid waters past a mid-stream boulder, around those adventurers who have stopped in the middle of the path to attend the mini adventurers sitting crying in their armoured prams. It’s just me, however, and a slightly bewildered elf; he cowers away from the angry red-haired lady on a horse, who points her sword at him and shouts “I DON’T WANT MY PHOTO TAKEN!” before snapping out of her trance, sheathing her weapon and trotting off slowly and slightly embarrassed towards the city of Rivendell waiting quietly below.

Looking on the bright side, the next time that elf decides to offer a vapid and hollow greeting to a passing adventurer, it might only be a subtle hand wave from his hiding place behind a nearby tree.

I often find that it’s the little details which capture my imagination the most in an MMO, I’m not really one for the ostentatious and meretricious things in these games – or in life, for the most part – which is one of the reasons that I appreciate having costume outfits in games such as Lord of the Rings Online, where I can create a look for my character which is slightly less King of Clowns than the average MMO adventuring ensemble. That’s not to say that I can’t appreciate the grand and the theatrical, surely there are always those elements which even the most obstinate curmudgeon can’t help but stand back in jaw ajar, misty eyed admiration. The vista of Rivendell when approached from the Trollshaws; the cavern within Blackrock Mountain with its ever-circling mobile of dragons; the wide expanse of magnificent rolling mounds that make up the buttocks of Atlas’s statue in Atlas Park; all of these things manage to inspire and impress without the need for flashing neon and riotous fanfare. Horrible thought for the day: the next tier of World of Warcraft epics will blast out a loud trumpeting fanfare as the player walks around Stormwind or Orgrimmar, a foghorn-like blarp, perhaps, that causes the monitor screens of anyone nearby to tremble in enforced awe. Hoom hrum, either that or it will have one of those announcements which are often used on heavy goods vehicles: *beep* this Epic Player is reversing *beep* please stand clear *beep* this Epic Player is reversing *beep* please stand clear. Let’s face it, with the size of the swords that characters have hanging beside their hips and jutting out behind them, it’s probably a feature that would prevent a lot of the more unpleasant impalings when the more epically geared players try to back their way carefully out of the auction house.

Anyway, a feature that I noticed in Lord of the Rings Online recently, that I haven’t been able to stop playing with and smiling at, is such simple thing. It has to do with the player’s horse mount, and I don’t know whether it’s only recently been added, whether it applies only to horses where I’ve predominantly ridden ponies up until now having played a dwarf for most of my adventuring life in Middle Earth, or whether I just didn’t notice it because I’ve been too busy considering just how ugly horse bums are, having had ample opportunity to do nothing but sit and stare at them during my time in the game. Regardless, I’ve only just noticed it and now, like a child who has just discovered the noise that can be made by holding a ruler over the edge of a table and flicking its end, I can’t stop playing with it at every opportunity. It’s such a daftly innocuous thing: when you steer your character left and right by holding the right mouse button and dragging the mouse (and probably by using the left and right turn keys for all you keyboard turners out there), the character turns in that direction, as does the horse’s head, in a very realistic and delightfully true to life manner. And now that I’ve noticed it I can’t seem to stop turning in circles in order to make myself grin in that slightly gawpish way, like a child who has found for the first time that they can make rainbows magically appear on the wall or ceiling if they tilt their watch into the sunlight just so.

It makes adventuring difficult. Picture one of those Indiana Jones segues where a map appears and a little red arrow-headed line depicts the path of our hero’s long but uneventful journey from one location to the next; now imagine that the line starts out straight but very quickly begins to veer off to the left before completing a full circle and continuing on its original course, for a short while at least, before it veers off to the right, then back left, and thus slowly wriggles its snake-like path across the map, stopping every now and again to fight a bunch of crap creatures that have had the audacity to cross one of the red line’s wayward swerves off of the beaten path. As if I didn’t spend enough time riding from one location to the next, now I’m actively drawing out the process because of a bit of ’simple’ model animation. Don’t even get me started on cresting hills.

Oh, cresting hills is so splendid! I don’t know why, but when you ride up a hill and then turn left or right as you crest it, it looks like one of those shots from a Western just before the hero pulls up sharply, the horse performing a pirouette on the spot as the rider flicks around in the saddle trying to maintain their fixed view of whatever it is in the distance that has given them cause to halt. There’s no horse pirouette emote in LotRO yet alas — Riders of Rohan expansion, you are my only hope — but the feeling and imagery is triggered nevertheless, and I will confess to more than once riding back down a sharp incline just so I could crest it again. To my, albeit minor, credit I haven’t yet tried to perform any skateboard tricks as I hack pell-mell up and down these slopes. So back to our map and the red line now also turns around whenever there are a bunch of closely packed contours, and then turns back again and continues on up the steep gradient a second time. Basically by this point our little travel map looks like the impassioned scribblings of the clinically insane, which is probably apt considering that it has been generated by yours truly.

Spinks, Tamarind and many others have been discussing immersion recently; for me immersion is, in part, down to the little details: the way a character swings a sword, the way a horse moves, the way a path wends its way up a mountainside. If the details of the game world that we can relate to are congruent with our own world, then it makes the suspension of disbelief with regards to the fantastical elements that much easier, thus priming the jaws of immersion, allowing them to snap shut and grab hold.

And now, post delivered into your expectant hand as you watch from the porch of your RSS Reader, I hold my hat up in the air as my steed rears up, and then charge rapidly off, ahead of a cloud of dust, into the sunset.

Swerving wildly left and right as I go.

Is there a Facebook game that uses your friends list to name mobs in the game?

Zoso was talking to me about his adventures in S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat, and explaining that there’s a character in the game with a very similar name to his own. This freaked him out for a few seconds, before he calmed himself down and realised that it was just a coincidence. And then shot himself in the face. The other himself, that is.

I thought: it might be fun to have an MMO use your Outlook or Address Book to derive names for mobs within the game. It would give a whole new meaning to “raiding the boss tonight”, if the boss mob in question happened to be named after Mr Johnson from senior accounts. There’d also be some pleasing karma in a giant flatulent ogre in the game being named after the attractive but spiteful secretary from down the hall.

Hey, if the MMO did this without asking your permission, and your friends were all able to log-in and see everything, we could call the game Buzz Online.