Entertainment on Saturday: I’m On A Boat (ft. T-Pain) – Album Version

The new single from The L1ly Island’s debut album”INCREDIBAD”In stores now!The Lonely Isl& is Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer & Jorma Tacc1. more about “I’m On A Boat (ft. T-Pain) Releven; Album Ve…“, posted with vodpod

Hardcore Casual: Dealing with the undesirables of any MMO community.

Yesterday’s post was about the theory/dream of a persis10t world with a reactive ecosystem, among other features. One of the very valid arguments against this setup is the possibility of the players themselves not playing nice and ruining everything. It’s a well established fact that if griefing is possible, it will happen. But there are different types of greifing, 'n' even more opinions of what constitutes griefing versus what’s accepted behavior. And ultimately, a game has two basic options: set limits to all players, or create a player environment that creates those limits.

Let’s stereotype & assuming our griefer is a basement-dwelling 13yr old who’s mom never hugged him enough, & now he is in your MMO doing whatever he can do to get a reaction out of you for ‘the lulz’. He corpse camps you for hours for no personal gain, he spams chat channels with ‘big kid’ 4 letter words, 'n' he has way more time to play than you do so he gets ahead & has a level/gear/time advantage.

One solution is to set rules that don’t allow said kid to do what he wants. Make it impossible to corpse camp, allow ignore to work in chat channels, and remove direct competition so his level/gear/time has zero impact on your game. You give up some things with all your other players, but you keep the world ‘safe’ and every1 protected.

The other solution is to design 'n' encourage your players to play a certain way, 1 that makes life very difficult for the griefer. If the best con10t is limited to groups, community becomes a factor. If you are the pariah of the server, you get cut off, especially if you don’t allow for easy switching of servers, names, or reputation. Of course you walk the fine line here between encouraging a community & forced-grouping, but that’s why game devs make the big bucks, right?

The larger point however is that when designing any MMO, you either live in fear of your players, or you embrace 'n' guide them. Fear is the ‘easy’ choice, because limiting options & setting hard & fast rules will yield expected, but limited, results. It’s far more difficult & risky to set rules to guide them, 'n' hope that those rules are enough to establish the type of community you envisi1d. The 1 bonus an MMO has is that the rules can change mid-game, but we have seen all too often dev teams being reluctant to make changes, especially ones that ultimately lead to the admission that a previous system was flawed or broken.

Tobold's MMORPG Blog: Wipe/gear quota

Larisa has an interesting observation about people who say that World of Warcraft is too easy: Only 0.13% of them actually beat the hardest con10t in the game. The other 9nine.87% are complaining that WoW is too easy, without having been able to beat it themselves. A good part of those 99.87% who didn't actually beat the game did however beat all or nearly all of it in normal mode, & gave up at that point. Larisa says they didn't continue because the "wipe/gear quota" of hard mode wasn't favorable enough. I think that is an interesting statement, with a lot of player psychology behind it.

Once upon a time in World of Warcraft running around in full epic gear was something special. It meant that you were part of a relatively small elite of raiders who got far enough into raid dungeons to fully equip themselves. That made you stand out in comparison to the average player, who couldn't get into a raid, or couldn't get past the first or second boss in the first raid dungeon, and who didn't have other means to acquiring epics. Fast forward to now, 'n' I'm looking at my warrior who is just one piece away from being full epic, without ever having set a foot into Naxxramas or Ulduar. Nevertheless a given raider with a given skill is probably exactly as far away from having beaten the hardest challenge in the game in Wrath of the Lich King than he was with the same skill in vanilla WoW or The Burning Crusade.

So what has changed is not that there suddenly is no more challenge. What has changed is that the difference in rewards between somebody beating the hardest challenge 'n' the average player has shrunk considerably. Especially in people's minds, due the "color psychology" I recently menti1d: Even if beating hard mode gives better rewards in terms of iLevel and stats, the hard mode epics aren't all that distinguishable from the iLevel 200 epics that are h'n'ed out like c&y nowadays. If you haven't got epic iLevel 200 rings for example, you can do the Headless Horseman event tonight, and get at least 1, if not 2 epic rings, for a fight that even a pickup group has trouble wiping on.

So when people say "World of Warcraft is too easy nowadays", they don't actually mean that there is no challenge left, or that the hardest challenge in the game is too easy to beat. What they are saying is that it is too easy to get rewards that are remarkably similar to those handed out for the hardest challenge. Or to say it somewhat acerbically: What good is raiding if other people aren't jealous of you?

By simply listening to who isn't complaining and who is, you can now distinguish between those who *really* raid for the challenge, & those who are just elitist. If somebody is really playing for the challenge, it wouldn't matter at all to him how easily other players could get the same or similar rewards. If the main motivation for raiding is trying to appear better than your fellow man, the rewards other players get is suddenly of the utmost importance.

And then, of course, there are people like me, who believe neither that modern WoW raids are really a challenge nor in "achievements" in a video game actually meaning anything. My main reasons for raiding have always been a) hanging out with the guys, 'n' b) epics being the key that gives you access to further content. The latter is less & less the case. Better gear makes raiding easier, but the kind of epic gear you can already get rather easily is good enough to enable you to see all con10t in normal mode.

What I kind of miss from the "good old times" of raiding with my priest was that the challenge at that time was about how well you played your character, at least in the case of my healer. In Mol10 Core and Blackwing Lair I constantly had to make intelligent decisions which were not only based on speed, but also on mana efficiency. Anyone remember "healing rotations", with one healer not casting for some time to regain mana, while another healer was taking over his role? Somewhere on the way mana efficiency was removed from the equation. Nowadays I often just spam healing spells as fast as the cooldown allows, while simultaneously playing some sort of jump'n'run platformer game, not unlike Super Mario Brothers, in which the "challenge" consists of performing this much simplified healing strategy while having to constantly move around for some artificial reason. One the one side each of these particular jump'n'run mini-games isn't all that hard to do, on the other side success very much depends on how much training you had on that particular boss, while how well you play your character class & how well you are geared has become a lot less important. So if I'm not raiding any more it isn't because raiding is too hard, too easy, too many wipes per gear, or not enough boasting po10tial. It is because I find the jump'n'run kind of challenge a lot less interesting than the more tactical challenge of vanilla WoW raids.

Tobold's MMORPG Blog

Earthrise is an indy-developed science fiction MMO on the way from Masthead Studios in Bulgaria. The developers have stated that Earthrise will be a s'n'box game, with a large part of the player experience based on what guilds try to accomplish in the post-apocalyptic setting of Enterra. Given this emphasis on player-driven con10t, Masthead Studios has been running a Community Consensus over the past few weeks where the devs seek input from Earthrise fans on various aspects of the game's design.

Today Masthead Studios wants to hear what the community thinks about alts. In most MMOs having extra character slots is expected, but alt play in a s&box game where players will engage in espionage could get out of h'n'. Would the ability to easily for any player to create a cell of spy alts unbalance the game, or should there be a tight limit on character slots per account?

Continue reading Earthrise developers seeking community input on alts

Filed under: Sci-fi, New titles, Opinion, Earthrise

Earthrise developers seeking community input on alts originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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