Tag Archive: Nifty!

May 23 2008

The Viability of Friends…

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Old Blog Posts, Tim

by Tim

May 23, 2008

All throughout my online gaming life, right back to 1999 and Everquest, my virtual monsterhunting existence has been shaped, defined, moulded and even dictated, by one constant gripe, one eternal thorn in my otherwise happy-go-lucky side. Levels.

In my EQ days, I came to know a number of other players, all decent, interesting and intelligent people. People who perhaps in other circumstances, I might have called friends. Being of a somewhat literary bent, many of these people I came to know via forums and websites, rather than the game itself; this was Rallos Zek – talking to Strangers wasn’t especially the done thing, you see – not if you wanted to keep all your equipment anyway.

We’d all post and reply and sometimes even email privately, but when it came to the game itself, well, life became awkward and complicated, largely down to the simple level differences involved. We’d ‘meet’ in world on rare occasions, but this was EQ-Extreem!, of the 2000 hours for the win variety; nobody got anywhere by just sitting about chatting, unless of course you couldn’t score a Clarity hit, and so had to sit about lots between pulls – but even then, you’d be doing so in a group of people your own level.

We’d ‘text’ of course – carry out the odd conversation, or even “RP” via /tells alone, but on the whole, most people I knew would only actually play together if they were of the right kinds of levels in the first place. It was all a bit strange as a first-timer to the genre, and perhaps a bit lonely too. Why not make friends my own level, I hear you ask? Well, that is pretty much what I did, and for the brief fortnight or so while your available play times coincide, it works well! The drifting apart soon sets in though; today’s groupmate is tomorrow’s affectionate twink recipient, or endgame rolemodel…

I’m pretty much used to it all now, but I suppose one of my own personal difficulties with being more outgoing and group-play oriented in these games, is the pessimistic certainty that in three week’s time, we won’t be able to play together in any meaningful way, turning such friendships into nodding acquaintances, if that. Without a large (and often unreasonable) ‘pact’ in place, it becomes all too easy to lose touch, as I have done on many occasions. I tend to solo a lot as a result, and try not to get too ‘invested’ in the other people around me, or I just hang out with a small group of friends who, against all probability and game-design, I seem to have ended up becoming trans-game pals with.

Why must an abstract scale of incremental game achievement take precedence over the desire for a group of friends to play a game together?

 

Nifty! #10: City of Heroes’ Sidekicks

While out and about in Paragon City, backup is always nice, but despite being a Levels Game in the traditional sense, the whole Levels-as-position-in-society thing can effectively be set aside in the interested of just beating stuff up with one’s chums. Using one of two options, any two players, of any two levels, can join together, and find themselves fighting enemies of an appropriate, and balanced challenge, rather than the more usual outcome, of one character running about and one-hitting everything while unarmed (no fun for the lower chap), or the other character getting the ever-living snot kicked out of them if a monster so much as looks at them (also not much fun for the lower chap)

Our two Heroic buddies can do this in one of two ways.

The lower levelled of the two can become a Sidekick. This boosts all their relevant stats up to one level below his high level friend (The Mentor) for the duration of the partnership. They get their normal level of XP, which prevents blatant powerlevelling abuse, and get no extra powers, but can comfortably hold their own when tagging along on the high-level friend’s missions, and critically, they can usefully contribute! When the high-level leaves, or ends the partnership, the lower levelled chap drops back to whatever level they really are, but have made equivalent progress, as if they’d joined a group of their own level. They’ll have also got a bit of a sneak preview of some of the more end-game types of foes and missions, which is a bonus!

Or failing that, the high-level can slum it instead, by becoming an Exemplar. This drops their own level down to that of their low-levelled friend, temporarily removing any power choices they’d made after that level. Unlike the low-levelled friend (The Aspirant), this person gets no XP, (which isn’t the point of it anyway), but instead gets extra Influence instead; CoH’s ‘money’. The high-level gets to relive old missions, sometimes even qualifying for badges and titles they may have missed entirely the first time through (Such as the Police Radio Bankjob Explorer ones), and all the time, is helping their low-levelled friend, but importantly, as an equal, rather than just turning up and obliterating everyone effortlessly. Well-meaning ‘help’ from on high can often be a misguided thing, and cause hidden resentments if it goes on for too long, becoming inadvertently patronising, which doesn’t happen in this case. Once finished, the high-level snaps back to their proper level, their powers all come back and it’s business as usual.

(This also provides a handy fall-back in emergencies; if things get too hot, simply drop the pairing and have your Actually-20-Levels-Higher friend get you over the difficult bit, then re-pair up again afterward, although this probably is cheating somewhat! Mind you…this is the game that lets you auto-complete one mission every seven days or so, in case of difficulty/bugs/boredom, which is awfully grown-up of them!)

The practical upshot of it all, is that in CoH, pretty much any player, can play with any other player, at any time.

 

All very clever, and possibly a unique result of CoH’s own peculiar mechanics, where seemingly, there are no absolute numbers, beyond the level itself. Most stats seem to be expressed in percentages and relative terms, meaning that the entirety of a mission or spawn can be scaled effortlessly. The mission doesn’t particularly care if you are level 12 or level 42 – it’s just one variable in a very flexible equation.

Adding some clever dynamic Sidekicking system like the above is probably quite an easy thing in light of all that, (one temporary tweak to the ‘Level’ value of a player, and everything else adjusts around it) but the sheer release if offers is quite remarkable. ‘Level’ becomes as relevant as what colour one’s cape is, and Archetype and power choices become more pressing. Most importantly, if you make a friend in that game, you needn’t worry about the level-enforced drifting, and two or more friends, of wildly varying play-times can still have fun together, for as long as they’re all still interested in the game. You might drift apart for other reasons, but you can’t blame the game for getting in the way.

 

The system isn’t quite perfect, with one notable problem spot – the Task Forces, which have an absolute minimum level bar to entry, which even the above does not help with. You must indeed be this tall to go on those particular rides, something our own super-villain group had troubles with toward the end of our season in CoV; differing play schedules causing us not to all be there at the same time. It would have come together in time though, I think, and it was mostly other interests that put that on the shelf for me. I’ll be back though, and it won’t matter how far ahead/behind the others are when I do return, because of all this Sidekick stuff.

 

I have troubles remembering the exact chronology involved, but Everquest 2 is another game that offers something similar, if less flexible, and even EQ1 caved in and added something that allowed high-levelled players to meaningfully, and fairly, help their friends with less abundant spare time, in the end.

Many other games remain unrepentant in the face of strained and stressed gaming friendships, and it is a shame, because I’ve personally lost touch with a lot of good people, in a variety of titles, because of this kind of prioritisation of Game Rules over Game Players. Perhaps the way that some game systems have been put together, precludes anything like the above from ever being possible? City of Heroes seems to have hit upon a winning formula for dispensing with a lot of the more common-place gaming relationship anguish though.

So, for understanding what MMOs are really for, and for not letting red tape keep people apart, City of Heroes’ Sidekicks; Nifty!

 

City of Heroes and City of Villains can be found on the sidebar, and probably has some kind of free trial going on somewhere, what with them pushing a whole new content patch at present; Issue 12, which is something to do with time-travel and Romans, apparently!

You need to be at least level 10 to take on a Sidekick, and neither of the two systems will work if you are too close in level, (meaning you won’t need them in the first place!) You’ll have to find your own friends however, as I’m not currently playing!

You can find the options for these in the Group Options, once you’ve grouped with your intended Sidekick/Exemplar/etc.

(Like pretty much everything else in CoH, City of Villains has identical mechanics to the above, only the names are different; Lackey/Boss and Malefactor/Minion respectively)

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May 21 2008

The Hiding of Treasure…

Categories:

Old Blog Posts, Tim

by Tim

May 21, 2008

In a world of thousands, all of whom by definition, have access to the Internet, it must be a very difficult thing keeping secrets. A level or quest designer might spend hours, or days, devising a fiendishly cunning labyrinth, or complex set of traps, or confounding conundrum of riddles, all of which are designed to ensure that the Adventurer has to work to achieve the prize.

More than that, in a genre where we can’t stop bitching about repetitive auto-generated kill ten rats style quests and the dull legwork of the Fed Ex, these more unusual challenges are a well-meaning attempt to mix things up a bit, to provide variety and perhaps challenge our minds as well as our basic button manipulation skills.

It is something of a shame then, that so often, instead of what must be the intended design; where each and every player of an MMO has to prove their own individual worth through these challenges, what tends to happen instead is that in among the first fifty or so people who successfully beat the task, there will be at least one who will then immediately go away, write down complete instructions, (with maps and photos!), and then host it all up on a forum, website or wiki. After that, a great many of the remaining thousands will simply go there, print off The Correct Path/Answer/Build, and neatly side-step a lot of head-scratching.

I talked a bit (quite pompously, I’m sure) on SWUT#25 about the growing need for self-discipline in our gaming, and this is a perfect example. I’m proud to say that I haven’t looked up a single TR Logos location yet, despite having seen the URL for a site with complete maps spammed out on General Chat often. Go me! Its not often a simple thing though – peer pressure, simple lack of time, and of course towering frustration, all can erode the will, and with the best intentions, spoilers can be all to easy a habit to fall into.

How then to build a puzzle that cannot be spoiled? Instancing can help somewhat, but ultimately, even separated into groups and sent to parallel worlds, the content of those worlds is often the same, and can be documented. One solution I was impressed with, was born of Immensity:

 

Nifty! #7: EVE Online’s Exploration

While a fine and generally all-round Nifty! game in many ways, EVE Online has never quite had the richness of Small-Group and Solo PvE content that marks out a good MMO of the more traditional sort. For many its never been a problem, and for the most part, its the Players that are the content in EVE. But its nice to have options, and when the time came for a revamp of the Tech 2 Blueprint Lottery, to something more equitable, CCP decided to make the PvE Explorer type integral to the process.

Exploration, in the traditional sense of the world, was pretty much non-existent in EVE. Granted, there are thousands of star systems in EVE, but one does rather look much like another. In the words of one veteran in Help chat, upon seeing this complaint; “What did you expect? Palm trees?” It’s Space. Space is Big, and Space is, on average, full of nothing at all. Going to distant places and seeing exciting new sights has never been high on the EVE playsheet.

The first go was a bit of a failure. Taking an ill-advised leaf out of the Typical MMO Designbook, they tried static dungeons. The COSMOS Constellations are still there today, several loosely linked encounter areas, with vague story, scattered about several specially designated constellations.

One such deadspace area became the sole place in the entire game, where Tech 2 Mining Barge Blueprint Copies could be looted, which in hindsight, beggars belief. The Exhumer class of ship is hugely popular, aimed at the Pro-Miner, and even I started to hear stories of shadowey player cartels, likely with massive RMT links, amassing fleets of 50+ Drakes and utterly locking down this one deadspace pocket. It was in Empire too – a 0.5 I think, which meant it was problematic at best for real players; i.e. The ones that gave a damn about being Concordokken, as opposed to the pretend players on Trial Accounts registered, no doubt, to People Who Try To Make A Living by selling currency.

All very sordid, and a quite anticipatable state of affairs, given EVE’s shardless nature; 40,000 players all looking for the same, single, loot barrel, in a very known location.

Some time later, CCP had another, and far more inspired crack at the problem; the Exploration System still in game today.

 

Its an elegant solution, and one which by its very nature, is impossible to ‘spoil’. Every so often, (hours to days), the whole galaxy is seeded with valuable stuff. This stuff is visible to all, and out in plain sight; no instances, no player triggering. Its just there, floating in space. The clever bit is the way CCP have used the sheer immensity of space to do the hiding for them.

The typical star system in EVE Online is about 30 A.U across. The typical spaceship in EVE Online can cross that distance in about 285 years, real-time. (Do check my working – I’ve picked 500m/s as speed!)

Of course, ships in EVE get a warp drive to make the thing playable, but that is all real distances out there, and crucially, you can only warp to something you have coordinates for (Bookmark, Hud Object, etc).

By simply making the players work to find the bookmark in the first place, a whole new gameplay is born, and since these pockets of Stuff are randomly placed, the method can be spoiled, but never the answer.

This work is carried out using the ship’s Scanner Window, along with various consumable Probe satellites, and a section of skills from the Science category. I shan’t go into too much detail of the process involved here, but instead offer this little guide I cobbled together. Only click if you are an EVE Player and really want to know the specifics of how it’s done, as it’s quite long and involved to explain:

Van Hemlock’s Much Neglected ‘Articles’ Section: Eve Online Exploration Guide

(Hopefully that’ll help those who searched for that in Google and got here too!)

[Guide now defunct - CCP redesigned scaning. V.H. - Jul-11]

Regular readers who don’t play EVE will probably find all that rather tedious and confusing, so I’ll summarise here as well.

Using a special piece of equipment, Explorer-Type obsessives like me, can drop special consumable scan probes. When used in concert with each other, they can scan in a very literal sense, for the hidden stuff. They have ranges, overlap, and actual triangulation becomes very important, along with a basic understanding of geometry. Character skills come into play also, in the grand tradition of EVE, meaning that those who have specialised are better at it than the new player, but ultimately, all players can end up with the top skills if they want.

The scanning requires several passes to zero-in on the hidden stuff, and eventually (a quite time consuming exercise, not for the faint-heated or easily bored), the surveyor will arrive at a floating site, much like those found in missions. There are several types of site, and these have become the new mechanism for the introduction of the rare and extremely valuable Tech 2 Invention materials into the game.

 

The system strikes me as especially clever, being almost impossible to ‘farm’ in the conventional sense, and yet not having to rely on Instancing, or player quotas or rationing, or any other artificial mechanic to ensure everyone gets a ‘fair go’. EVE isn’t especially about ‘fair goes’ on the whole, but the system here ensures that everyone, be it farmer or serious player, still has to put exactly the same work into finding the goodies. Meritocracy at its finest! And while you will probably find many, and better, guides like mine, on how to do this work, you’ll never find a flat list of ‘Here are the treasure chests; X, Y, Z’ on a wiki some place, simply because they’re always moving about, and such answers would become meaningless within hours.

 

It’s a knotty problem, and I think one that many games simply ignore; spoilers are par for the course; might as well just get on with it all, and hope the players have enough self-discipline not to ruin it all for themselves, (and that the basic design isn’t excessively frustrating in the first place).

One intriguing attempt I remember, was the Candles, from Asheron’s Call. Spells in there were cast by using a kind of combination puzzle, with various ingredients, which when put in specific order, would become a spell. Obviously, all the common spell sequences became common website knowledge within weeks, but to counter this, spells of a certain level and up, needed extra ‘digits’ in the lock, in the form of coloured wax tapers, and these were player-specific, tied, in some fashion to the player’s account-name. One player, having worked out the combination to a spell, could tell another what it was, but for that second player, it would be wrong anyway.

In theory, this ought to have been enough to make all the players do their own, intended, arcane research. Where there is a will, there is a way around, and after a while, some bright spark reverse engineered the client, and invented a third party applet called Split-Pea, which simply told you what candles to use based on the account name you told it. A shame, and the whole candles thing, now being nothing more than an irritating obstacle that meant you had to use an add-on to play, was scrapped not long after.

 

I suspect that the peculiar and seemingly successful method CCP have used to keep some things safe from spoilers, is unique to the sheer immensity of its game universe. In a smaller, more traditional kind of playfield, such as Azeroth, or Norrath, this kind of continually shifting and perpetually altering ‘dousing rod’ gameplay might be harder to to make work, without resorting to hidden trickery. You plonk down a box of treasure in The Barrens, and someone is bound to stumble across it sooner or later, by accident, which simply won’t happen in EVE Online…

 

So, for having the nerve to hide the good stuff in plain sight, and for setting puzzles that can be solved, but never copied; EVE Online’s Exploration: Nifty!

 

EVE Online is on the sidebar to the right, and does 14-day free trials out the wazoo.

The relevant skill training necessary to stand a decent chance of finding these Space Needles in Galactic Haystacks, takes about two days (for the Comb Probes), or 12 days (for the Sift probes, which are much more useful), and all the basic skills needed to have a go, can be trained on Trial Accounts. Aim to start high in your race’s Frigate, Science, and Astrometrics, if they offer it.

Existing players who want to try it would be better off reading through the above linked and more comprehensive guide, and setting up a new Skill Regimen accordingly. Start off in High-Sec until you get the hang of it!

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May 15 2008

The Change of Mode…

Categories:

Old Blog Posts, Tim

by Tim

May 15, 2008

Classes irritate me a bit. Of course you learn to get on with it soon enough, but there’s always the nagging worry that someone else might be having more fun, or and easier time of it, than you.

You know the kind of thing; you install, sign up, fire the game up and then are presented with a big old list of what ‘job’ you’d like to choose. Often you’ve no idea what a Jedi, or Bureaucrat or Shaman or Herald of Xotli actually is. You might have notions of what they might be historically, or mythologically, but what they are actually for, is a often less clear.

After a few of these games you start to see patterns, see the archetypes, and it becomes a matter of working out what the healer, tank, crowd control and such are called in this particular milieu. But you’ll generally be assured of having one particular job in a group, and one particular way to play. Which is helpful in general, but can become a bit repetitive, and often, the needs of a group and the needs of, well, your solo self, can become at odds, in basic function. A class can be such a thing as too useful in a group. What if you could switch between different modes of your class, as the occasion demands?

 

Nifty! #9: World of Warcraft’s Warrior Stances

I’m sure regular readers will have noticed that I’m looking for something Nifty! in every game I’ve played, but when it came to WoW, I did have some troubles. Successful, and indeed, good, as it is WoW isn’t especially renowned for bringing anything startlingly original to the genre, per se. It does a astonishing job of presenting a lot of the older ideas in a highly-polished and well-put-together way, on the whole, and this is it’s own main strength.

 

The Warrior Stances did strike me as a particularly clever idea though. The Warrior, over time, eventually ends up with three Stances; Battle Stance, Defensive Stance and Berserker Stance.

 

These aren’t just buffs or special attacks, but are something qualitatively different. Choosing to be in one of these stances alters a Warrior’s entire mode, opening access to some skills and closing off access to others, and each confers its own bonuses and penalties, simply by being in it in the first place.

Battle Stance is the middle ground, a flexible footing for general combat, with moderate Threat (WoW’s hate list mechanic) reduction. Defensive Stance offers damage reduction and increased hate list visibility, making it perfect for being a group’s main tank – making it more likely the monster will focus on you, and reducing incoming damage to help survive that. Berserker Stance is an all-out DPS type of mode, increasing critical hit chance and reducing Threat, but at the cost of increased damage taken.

The various other Warrior abilities tend to work best (or indeed, at all) with one or two of these modes, further helping to specialise a given Warrior in a group role. What happens if you have two Warriors in a group? You can’t both be main tank, and usually, the second tank just has to stand about hitting the monster, but not so hard that the healer now has two patients to worry about. The stances allow two similar Warriors to take on two entirely different roles, and not to get in each other’s way, with aggro and such. A Defensive Stance Warrior takes on the mantle of traditional meat-shield, usually supported by a dedicated healer. The Berserker Stance Warrior then becomes an almost Rogue-like figure, trying to avoid notice and dish out huge amounts of DPS at the same time. And for soloing, either can drop back into Battle Stance, which offers moderate amounts of both survivability and damage, and if they both get bored, they can even swap over entirely, taking it in turns to be Main Tank – often in the same instance!

 

Having done my time as an Everquest 1 Warrior, this sudden versatility came as quite a liberation. I don’t have to find a group (with no other warriors in it) to get on with my life? Shocking! Having gotten a WoW Warrior to 60 in my time, the correct and thoughtful use of these stances made my life a much more enjoyable thing than it might have been, with far greater flexibility than might otherwise have been the case, and most crucially, didn’t leave me trapped in a class that has only one very specific purpose.

It isn’t perfect, of course, and I never made it to the Raiding Endgame. Much of Tobold’s ongoing analysis of the Warrior, (and to a lesser extent, Priest), shows that at the top-end, certainly, the switching of modes is not enough on it’s own, and having different sets of equipment, and paying for frequent and pricey Talent Respecs becomes increasingly more important, if a member of a given class is to carry out more than one job at a time, which is a shame.

But the journey there at least, is a much more enjoyable thing with this innate flexibility, and something I’d like to see become standard in all future MMOs, for all classes! Other classes in WoW get something a similar – the Druid’s shapechanging alters the way they play on a situational basis, and to a lesser extent, Priest Shadowform, and Rogue Stealth.

I’d be hard pressed to find anything comparable in other MMOs though, past or present – the idea that you can just hit a toggle and almost become a different class entirely. Guild Wars’ ultimate flexibility in skillbar selection, and continually rechooseable secondary class is something akin to the above, perhaps, but the game itself requires much less in the way of defined ‘roles’ anyway. If you know of others, do let me know!

 

So for only making me be a Tank when I deem it necessary, and for bundling three classes into one, World of Warcraft’s Warrior Stances; Nifty!

 

Hell, you don’t need me to tell you where WoW is! The Warrior’s Stances however, are dished out over quite a large span of levels. You get Battle stance at start, Defensive Stance at Lv10, which isn’t too big a slog, and Berserker Stance is given out at Lv30, which takes a bit longer.

Just having the Battle and Defensive Stances should be easily enough to see how they work, and what that means to the adventuring Warrior, both in a group, and alone.

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May 08 2008

The Cone of Fire…

Categories:

Old Blog Posts, Tim

by Tim

May 8, 2008

Going to be one of those Nifty! bits where I’m in the minority this time, I think. The Age of Conan approacheth, and all up and down the Interwebs, fierce battles are being waged as we speak, with the Fanbois and Haters out in full force, all pitching in with their “Reasons Why I Think You Should/Shouldn’t Buy Age of Conan”, come May 20th. Quite emotive stuff in many cases, and Crom would be proud of the verbal bloodshed being carried out in his name. Me? I’m more ambivalent, and anyway, as a mater of principle, never touch any MMO, no matter how good or bad, until at least four months have passed since launch-day. Listeners to the podcast will have already heard me rambling about why that is, so I’ll say no more.

But the debates and viewpoints themselves are fascinating, even if I have no first-hand experience of the matters of which they speak. One particular battleground upon which many mighty posting and commenting deeds are carried out, appears to be the matter of multiple-key combos, and their importance to the game, and the basic business of actually swinging an axe at some poor monster’s head, which sounds like its to be something a little more than merely standing next to the monster, pressing ‘A’ and watching your little Barbarian wave his arms up and down until the nemesis dies from deadly mime skills.

The matter of Player Skill looks to be being tested again with AoC’s new approach to MMO Melee; Lern2Play indeed. How much skill should be expected of us in our pastimes? How much do we want to have to put in? Questions with as many answers as there are MMO gamers, I expect. My own answer is probably something like “A different amount, and different type, in every game I play,” (only less pretentious!) After all, it would be a poor state of affairs if all the games I play asked exactly the same things from me; I’d only ever need one game! One game in particular I remember with fondness, for the sheer uniqueness of the demands it placed on me:

 

Nifty! #8; Planetside’s Cone of Fire System

 

Launching in 2003, Planetside was, and indeed still is, an odd duck. It was a brave attempt to bring the fast-paced action gameplay of the traditional single-player and LAN-Deathmatch First Person Shooter, and the large-scale community and persistence of the MMO, together in one single game. So quirky was this concept that even today, Planetside exists in its own genre, (of one); the ‘MMOFPS’. A rather experimental game, the above merging of concepts must have presented a number of technical challenges, sufficient to have put anyone else off trying a similar endeavour since, with any real enthusiasm.

It also presented us, the players, with a much more gritty, and perhaps fairer, approach to the traditional Deathmatch. I remember a brief spell of office-based LAN gaming, back in the day, and Alien Vs Predator 2 became our game of choice for a while. In that game, like many others of its type, the guns were just point and click, and I spent quite a while doing much better than I ought, by the simple expedient of using the sniper rifle as a shotgun, only with a vast range and insta-kill hits. Literally running around, firing from the hip and not even bothering with the scope, one-shoting humans, aliens and predators alike. I’m not bragging, you understand – it was cheap, easy-mode and almost entirely not how I imagine a real sniper rifle would work.

Most FPS games have a similar weapon; some kind of rifle, laser, railgun, or other high-powered, very low rate-of-fire, but very high damage-per-shot type of weapon, usually with a near-instant travel-time and flat trajectory, whose only real balancing factor is that if you miss with the first shot, you’re in trouble while it reloads. If then, you never miss, you become invincible, and to be seen at all, is to die instantly.

I’ve no problem with that as a gamestyle, of course. If that’s you, well done! But it is quite ruthlessly Darwinian, and eventually, it becomes a game only about the sniper rifle, and that was clearly not what SOE had in mind for Planetside; a large-scale combined arms war, rather than the “blink and you’ll die” four-player duelling in an abandoned warehouse somewhere, of the FPS that had gone before.

So to help inject a touch of realism to it all, and at the same time, give us MMO Munckins, who aren’t Counterstrike Grandmasters a fighting chance, they went with their Cone of Fire System.

With a gun equipped, the HUD reticule gains a crosshair. The outer marks of this move in and out in response to various conditions, actions, and equipped weapon types, and these mark out the edges of a cone. When the shot is fired, it will fly out randomly somewhere inside that cone. If part the enemy is inside that cone, (which looks like a circle to you), it might hit him. If the entire circle is filled with the enemy’s body, you will hit him for sure. Things like taking damage and being on the move made the circle larger, and things like using a rifle instead of a shotgun, standing still, or crouching, made the circle smaller, effectively simulating things like concentration, stability and helping make the weapons all quite situationally different to each other.

Planetside’s sniper rifle; the Bolt Driver, had the most floatey circle in the game, requiring you to be crouched, zoomed in, and not to move at all, to get the best accuracy. Even something like turning a few degrees left to follow a target in the scope, would cause the circle to flare up and require utter stillness for it to settle again. And even after all that, it still took two shots to kill a full health enemy outright. Instakill Distance Weapons are especially galling in PvP, I think, as they offer no positive action for the victim. In other words, you’re being punished simply for being there at all, and not provided any opportunity to exercise any kind of personal skills of your own in your own defence. With PS’s two-shot sniper rifle, you at least get the chance to leg it for cover after the first one hits, and with the floatey reticule, above, being on the run makes it very hard for the distant speck of a sniper to actually make that second shot land.

Skill still plays a significant part, of course, and the really good snipers understand their weapon enough to be able to still land that second hit on a wounded enemy going sideways at a sprint. I used to be able to do it myself, once, but it took a while to learn, and I doubt I could do it anymore. Meanwhile, I’ve often been killed by standard rifle users because of the Cone of Fire. I’d land the first hit, and then while reloading and waiting for the circle to contract a second time, their shorter range and less powerful gun has zeroed-in much faster and now they’re hitting me; not for a lot per shot, but enough to make my own accuracy fly out the window, and while my desperate shots are going all over the place, he’s steadily whittling me away and kills me.

 

I liked it, but I’m not sure a vast number of other people did, and I suspect one of the reasons for Planetside’s lack of huge success is a result of trying to please too many people. On the one hand, the traditional MMO player is just not used to dying that much, which can be dispiriting. They’re also not used to having so much dexterity based learning put in front of them, coming from a genre which is generally a lot more about Theorycraft and Timers. It can be a lot to learn, and requires a lot more practice than most MMOs to get good at, and stay good at. On the other hand, the FPS crowd must have found the Cone of Fire quite hobbling; an artificial mechanism aimed at clipping their rocket-jumping head-shotting wings somewhat. (Also, $X/month, when Counterstrike is free? WTF!?)

I was perhaps one of the few people who found it a good compromise between the genres, and a way to make various different guns useful for various different situations. Specialising in a particular weapon helped dictate where I should be in the overall engagements in progress, and helped me find a useful purpose in the average base assault or defence. Seeing a massive push on a base, with air, tanks, power armours, and scores of troopers all moving in, was a heady sight, but often a confusing one, and knowing my own gun, and how it worked differently to others, helped me find a place in it all. (Typically, hiding behind a rock on a ridge, half a mile away!)

 

Other MMOs continually flirt with the addition of twitch-based skills to the more traditional dice-rolling of our genre, and it sometimes seems that a move to something more Planetside-like is an eventual inevitability for our MMO future, and perhaps when people talk of ‘Evolution in MMOs’, it is exactly this kind of thing that they mean? If so, that does make Planetside extremely ahead of it’s time, for a 2003 game. It does seem quite a difficult thing to make stick though, to gain acceptance.

Neocron and Tabula Rasa both require some degree FPS skills to do well at, although neither is quite the roaring success of the more usual mainstays of MMO; the WoWs, the EQs, the LotRs, and there will always be popular and successful MMOs of the more recognised sort, with their stats and dicerolls and timers. A fair bit of the current AoC fuss seems to be about this very thing, but I think there is room for both types of game.

As for the Cone of Fire itself, I’ve no idea if this kind of mechanic exists in the modern day Offline/Peer-to-Peer FPS PC or Console title as well, but Tabula Rasa has a limited similar kind of thing, which is very noticeable with the Rocket Launcher in particular. Upon targeting a monster, you do need to hold your horses until the little reticule closes in fully, for best damage, while a Rifle does this much quicker, and a Shotgun doesn’t need to do it at all. The upcoming Huxley seems to be a game designed along similar lines to the mechanics of Planetside, so perhaps the Cone will live on there too. Neocron also requires a bit of patience to get the best shot, in a similar manner, and perhaps this kind of implementation is about the only way FPS can be made to work with 200+ players all going at it at once in close proximity?

So anyway, for levelling the playing-field a bit by making everyone Lern2Play again, and adding a touch of realism to our rocket launchers, Planetside’s Cone of Fire; Nifty!

 

Planetside is still going, just about, although is far from a massive success at present (see previous post). It doesn’t seem to be offering any free trials in the accepted sense just now, but apparently, if you just download the thing and install anyway, it’ll give you the option of a 14-day trial, during signup. It will want to see some Credit Card details though!

Past players can currently play for free, until May 21st – just reinstall and go, although you’re likely to already know about the Cone of Fire thing by now!

The Cone of Fire system is evident throughout the game, in almost all the weapons, although for an exaggerated look at what it does and how it works, I’d recommend certing Medium Assault, and then Sniping, and the comparing how your Empire’s MA Weapon (Cycler/Gauss/Pulsar) and the Sweeper shotgun handle in comparison to the Bolt Driver. Use the VR shooting range for this!

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Apr 24 2008

The Apprentice of Monsters…

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Old Blog Posts, Tim

by Tim

April 24, 2008

As the new adventurer makes their way in their world, they learn. This in turn increases their array of abilities, feats, skills, spells, perks, talents, etc, making them more powerful, and this makes them capable of facing greater challenges, which brings them new lessons and makes them learn further. Its probably all very Nietzsche, although the ultimate destination of this relentless, but often repeated, drive to perfection is perhaps less clear.

At any rate, rather than overwhelm the new player with hundreds of abilities from the word go, it has become standard in these games to ration them out, usually as the player’s level increases. It makes sense; now you understand those, try these new buttons. The mechanism for this is typically the Trainer; a veteran grizzled old campaigner who spends his remaining days standing about the training facility, showing young whipper-snappers how to punch a man so hard that his spleen comes out of his nose, or how to create a fireball so powerful that the target’s ancestors get singed.

In my reflective moments online, after just having dinged, rushed to the trainer, instantly learnt a whole new bunch of tricks, each more powerful than the last, I have sometimes stopped and gone ‘Haaaaang on…’, and wondered why the Trainer, with his obvious and absolute mastery of all the tricks of my trade, isn’t out there dealing with The Threat himself? I’d pay good money to be a fly on the wall when the Warrior Trainer, the Priest Trainer, the Crowd-O-Mancer Trainer, the DPS-Backstabby Trainer and the Pet-Class Trainer walk into an instance.

But what about the Monsters? Do we learn nothing from them?

 

Nifty! #6: Guild Wars’ Signet of Capture

Completely agreeing with, and then totally ignoring, those folks who say Guild Wars isn’t an MMO, I find that it still follows many of the conventions, particularly in mechanics. You do get hotkey skills, and there is indeed a [Skills] chap in most major outposts. The skill rationing is only loosely linked to level here; you get a point every level (and every time you fill L20 again thereafter), and some skill points for particular quests. These points can then be spent as desired, to buy skills from the [Skills] chap, at a rate of one point per skill.

However, Guild Wars skills come in two types; normal, and Elite, and the Elite ones are very important. They’re generally substantially more powerful, flexible, versatile and efficient, compared to similar normal grade skills. You’re only allowed one in your hotbar of eight, and typically, they are the lynchpin and cornerstone of any skill build.

Trouble is, these skills cannot be bought from Skill trainers. Only the monsters know how they’re done. Enter the Signet of Capture.

As you rampage about the various PvE campaigns, you come across many glowey ‘Boss’ creatures. There are invariably accompanied by lesser monsters, have a class-based sheen to them (Yellow above; a Warrior Boss), and can put up quite a fight. If victorious, you now have the opportunity to learn one of the nasty tricks he’s just used on you, via the Signet.

Standing next to its corpse and using the Signet, causes the above window to appear, which lets you pick one of the skills the dead boss has. These are the actual skills it has available to use in combat on you, and not just itemization for ‘loot’, so you’ll have already had a taste of how the skills are meant to be used, from the ‘customer’ end, just by fighting him. Both normal and Elite skills can be chosen, but its generally the Elite that’s most desirable – unavailable through other means. When chosen, the Signet permanently changes into the skill you picked, and for further skill capture, new Signets will need to be bought. It does this change there and then, allowing you to use the thing immediately, although you may not necessarily have the attribute points spent to unleash it’s full potential.

From then on, having learned your lesson in combat, fire and blood, you will remember, and the chosen skill becomes a part of your library, for future use as and when a build requires, and it is now also considered ‘Unlocked’, becoming available for your Heroes and PVP-Only characters too.

 

Its a fascinating concept. Certainly all games of our type have an abstract kind of parallel, in Experience. Successful fights give you xp points, which are meant to represent the practice and knowledge you gained during that fight. You learned a bit during the engagement, and when you’ve learned enough, you get quantatively more powerful – ding! But its a warped system, tortured into game mechanics. You learn nothing from losing a fight, but escaping with your life? You unlearn things by dying? If you only do 45% of the fighting, someone else learns from the engagement, but not you? All very strange.

With Guild Wars’ unique take on Skills though, the Monsters get down to specifics. If you want to learn a particular trick, you have to go to the source, and study it in action. It also makes for a whole new kind of collection gameplay which I find very appealing indeed. I’m a bit of an Icon Fetishist in most games, but Guild Wars brightly coloured skill buttons hold a particular fascination, and even better, collecting them all, isn’t just about money and NPCs; it involves significant fighting, and a lot of exploration.

Its not just the handful of endgame raid bosses either; Elite teaching monsters can be found almost everywhere from the midgame onward. There’s just so many of them to find. The Legendary Skill Hunter title, for capturing every Elite in all campaigns, takes 291 Elite captures to achieve, 291 different Bosses need beating down and their secrets studied. Having never been a raiding type, this seems a admirable alternative for life after victory, a different kind of endgame.

 

This kind of Monster Mentoring sort of exists elsewhere, but with nothing like the pervasiveness, with most skills in most games coming from that lazy, but astoundingly competent Warrior Trainer again.

The four ‘Pure Arcane’ classes in Everquest 1 (Wiz, Mag, Enc, Nec) have a limited sort of equivalent; most spells can just be bought in the profession shop, next to the Trainer, but some require mastery of a tradeskill of their own to create; ‘Research’, and the consumable items needed to fill out the spellbook were often monster drops. It wasn’t as if that monster was specifically teaching you anything though; it just happened to have a useful spleen, that was all.

EQ2 has a hybrid type of thing; the basic skill doesn’t even need to be trained – it just shows up on the bar when you ding, but improving its stats can be done via crafted items or chest drops. Again, the monster isn’t directly responsible for your tuition; it just happened to have eaten someone who could have taught you, recently!

WoW has various Codex consumable drop items which improve ranks in existing skill, but this is typically a high-end/end-game level thing, and I’m not sure these books teach you new things, only improve existing ones, and again, beyond the random drop and the xp, well, the monster could have been anything at all.

LotRO has Deeds, (or so I’m told), some of which are to be had for developing vendettas against one particular type of monster, so its possible that you’re learning better stats from the boars – only they could say.

 

To be honest, I’m not sure that the Signet of Capture style of On The Job training could work in many other MMOs, largely because monsters exist to attack, and then die, and the Signet is quite an elegant way to add an extra option to that limited set. Perhaps a monster might yield, and offer to show the adventurer a thing or two in exchange for its life? I’m not sure we, the roving band of online mercenaries, are quite ready for monsters that complicated really.

So, for making monsters matter, and showing that the smug lazy Warrior Trainer doesn’t always know everything, Guild Wars’ Signet of Capture; Nifty!

 

Guild Wars is very much alive and well, and available all over the place. The Signet of Capture itself however, doesn’t enter the picture until some way into each campaign, and you’ll need to get to one of the following outposts to find the quest that lets you get started on the wonderful Monster Safari that follows:

Prophecies: Lion’s Arch

Factions: Kaineng Center

Nightfall: Marga Coast

(Eye of the North starts at L20, so you’ll have already done one of the above. EotN has no unique Elites, but does offer alterative locations to get at the other campaign ones.)

Elite Skills don’t start showing up on the Bosses until a bit later on from that.

If you’d rather not have to scour the whole planet to find that one skill you need, here’s a big spoiler list of where all the Elites are. This list only points you in the right direction mind you – you still have to get there, and kill the guy, and will have only seven other useful skills as you do so!

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Apr 17 2008

The Terminal of Empowerment…

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Old Blog Posts, Tim

by Tim

April 17, 2008

Let me take you back…back…back… Its June 2001. Lady Marmalade by All Saints is topping the UK charts, there’s just been a total eclipse of the sun in South America, and Shrek is probably still on at the cinema. I, being the stay-at-home type, probably missed all of those, and at the time was enduring the last stages of a crippling cycle of Rallos Zek related psychological self-harm in Everquest, which would eventually turn me into the online sociopath I am today.

Still, in those days the MMO market, if you could even call it that, consisted of three titles really; Everquest, Ultima Online and Asheron’s Call, so I didn’t really have many other places to go. Then along came Funcom with Anarchy Online, an ambitious project which even today holds the title of ‘Worst. Launch. Evar’, in the minds of most gamers who were about at the time.

 

I wasn’t nearly the obsessive chin-stroker I am today, but as I look back now, Anarchy Online seemed to have two main ideals directing its design and implementation. The first was fairly simple; there wasn’t a sci-fi MMO at all, at the time, and there really ought to be one! Nowadays, we know that pretty much every gamer wants orcs to fire magic missiles at, and that even deciding on a Sci-Fi game makes for an uphill struggle from the start. Only a few games of that stunted genre exist in any kind of ‘successful’ state, even in today’s diverse MMO market.

At its heart though, Anarchy Online was very much Everquest with guns. Its understandable. In those pre-Warcraft days, EQ was The Daddy, and we used to look at its third of a million subs and gasp in the hushed tones folks today reserve for WoW’s ten million. It was the Era of “The Vision”; SOE stood unopposed, and knew it, and so did everyone else, with the kind of crushing certainty that the kids today use to dismiss possible future contenders to the Blizzard throne. We never thought EQ’s sun would set…

Naturally, EQ became the model, and the base from where future games would attempt to improve, innovate and emulate, and for all AO’s admittedly unique and fascinating backstory and world, in terms of actual gameplay mechanics, it borrowed a great deal from EQ; Nanotechnology looked and acted like EQ’s magic, it’s class list and interface borrowed heavily from EQ, and the basic substance of combat felt very familiar to refugees like me.

But Funcom also took a long hard look at what people didn’t like about EQ, and learned and adapted much. Downtime was a big gripe about 2001-era EQ, and I quite literally had time to iron shirts between one pull and the next, as my L29 Druid. AO added Treatment Kits and Nano Rechargers, eliminating the countless hours of sitting about ‘Meditating’ that I’d done. AO went for a more customisable point spending system for skill use, rather than EQ’s 5 points per level of One Handed Swords, that you’d get within ten fights of dinging the level, automatically just by fighting, and thus being a bit pointless. Travel times were harsh in old EQ, so AO added a large teleporter network (Wompas and The Grid), useable by all, not just Wizards and Druids, along with a large set of vehicles which were more about utility, and less about prestige.

One of the major gripes with old-style EQ, however, was a curious one; camping, killstealing and farming; the presence of other players negatively impacting your game, and the solution Funcom came up with for that, was nothing short of revolutionary:

 

Nifty! #5: Anarchy Online’s Mission Terminals

In addition to the more standard random wilderness monster scouring, Anarchy Online offered an entirely new and alternative way to play; missions. Available via special terminals, found in most cities and outposts, these terminals, when used, would offer the player a choice of five different missions, for the low, low fee one 1cr per level (negligible).

When accepted, the map would then waypoint a doorway or cave mouth some distance away across the world, and the player would then have to travel to that location. There were thousands of these doorways, but unless you had the key provided by the terminal, they ordinarily didn’t let you in.

Once inside, the player was presented with a random, and dynamically, generated set of rooms, which made up a themed indoor location; cave network, office block, sewer, and so on. These rooms would be populated with a variety of suitably levelled monsters, loot boxes, and the mission objective itself, usually near the back of it all. This was revolutionary enough, but the whole mission was yours alone and the only other players who could go in there, were ones you invited, via the grouping tools, and by making copies of the key to hand out. Being yours alone, it could be just right for you, without inconveniencing any one else, every time. In short, I believe Anarchy Online invented The Instance, as we know it today.

Modern day instances are a lot more elaborate, more group-based and typically have a set and repeatable map, usually with elaborate scripted events and much stronger stories behind them, but at the time, just the idea that a part of an MMO could ever be private to you and your friends only, was a hard thing to get your head around. In those times, soloing was an aberration, a guilty secret, and really not what you were supposed to be doing in an MMO. It certainly wasn’t the done thing in EQ, that’s for sure. Why play an MMO if you don’t want to play with others? A recurring question in my online life, and perhaps AO was the first MMO I ever played that didn’t just answer it with a hearty ‘LFG or GTFO!’ It offered new choices, and left it to me to decide.

 

It offered choice on a more practical level too. The terminal came with a number of sliders on, including one marked ‘Difficulty’, which was novel. By manipulation of these sliders, not only could you set up a small place in an MMO to have a bit of ‘me time’, but the very nature of the challenge could be altered to suit your own mood, class, playstyle and so on. After living under “The Vision”, I was stunned to be allowed that much say in how I could play, frankly. You’re a Fixer? No problem… slide that and we’ll throw in lots of locked doors for you to fiddle with. Enforcer? No problem, throw it the other way and it becomes a full-on open-house rampage. Prefer Nano-using opponents? Want robots? Want to assassinate someone, or just repair something? Want something lightweight to relax to? Want something that’ll really test you? The sliders would provide.

 

Over time of course, clever as it was, the mission system did start to become a bit samey. The random construction of the mission helped, but it still had only so many modular building blocks, rooms, to pick from, and it wouldn’t take that many missions in a row to start recognising them. To be fair, Funcom often added new rooms to the pool over the years, but they couldn’t possibly do so at a rate fast enough to keep up with players seeing them all.

For some, (myself included) the missions eventually became a bit routine, and a bit of chore, and the sport of ‘Blitzing’ became quite popular, where a player would just pump their Run Speed stat up to about 300+, pick a mission that didn’t actually involve killing something, and then just went sprinting through the place, tagged the objective and then dying to the train. When done on Full Difficulty, this would net the player a much higher level item than they could use and sizable chunk of cash, and this became the way to grind out cash for the Yalmaha jets (Flying mounts; also invented June 2001!), etc.

When it launched, the game had nothing that modern players would recognise as a Quest, and even EQ beforehand at least had the NPCs with quests, in the form of [spoken hints] that they would [give out] when [hail]ed, leading in a circumspect fashion to the kill ten rats stuff. That stuff all got added to AO much later, so initially the Missions became the main game for a great many people. The overland world spawns of the game, while interesting in parts, were really nothing that special, and in this area, EQ still had the edge. For many, the wandering mobs became little more than obstacles in the path to the next mission door.

This all  led to early prototypes of the kinds of large-scale debates that still rage today on blogs and forums; where is everybody? Answer; playing thousands of single-player missions, out of sight and out of mind. Many would argue that an overuse of instancing can destroy the fabric of an MMO’s community, and this kind of thing is why many don’t like Guild Wars, or wouldn’t even class it as an MMO at all, a point clearly acknowledged by Arenanet when they talk of GW2 being more ‘MMO-like’, with more in the way of shared zones…in other words, less instancing.

 

City of Heroes is an example of a similar kind of content generation; instances created from stock tilesets, accessible via hundreds of black doorways about the city, although I’m not sure how random those are. In turn they too suffer the criticism that they all start to look the same after a while – I certainly found that when I was there. In any case, it lacks the accompanying mission terminal, and the customisable sliders which probably do need to go hand-in-hand for this kind of thing. I expect a Blaster does much better at some missions, than a Tanker. A randomly generated mission can’t possibly be suitable for all the classes, if those classes are fundamentally different in any way, and I’m surprised I’d not seen the configurable Mission Terminal approach used since.

Almost every modern MMO, including the Mighty World of Warcraft, makes use of the Instance however, albeit in a more static and repeatable manner; dungeons, arenas, battlegrounds, even player housing. Hell, even EQ itself went and added something similar eventually, with it’s Lost Dungeons of Norrath expansion. All these variants on the same basic concept use tricks of the server, and a generous helping of suspension of disbelief, in an attempt to put the player back at the centre of things, and make their own experience somewhat unique, in a player base where upwards of 3000 other people are also all the Hero.

 

So, for trusting the player enough to let them have a say in how they want to play, Anarchy Online’s Mission Terminals; Nifty!

 

Anarchy Online is still going today, players, content, expansions and all that. The basic game, which is essentially everything that was there in June 2001, and then some, is free to play, (with In-Game Adverts, so you can grumble along with this fortnight’s podcast!), and can be found here:

Anarchy Online: Basic Client and Signup

Its old, certainly, but doesn’t play too badly for a seven year old game, and is apparently due for one of those super-swankey graphical upgrades some month soon. The later expansions (which you will have to pay for separately) tended to move away from the Mission Terminal structure and back in to the fold with a quest journal, non-instanced dungeon zones and so on, but if you want to try out the Mission Terminals for yourself, the above link is all you’ll need – just head on out to any of the big city zones, once outside your Backyard, and you’ll bump into a terminal.

For further reading, there’s Some more detail on the nuts and bolts of how the missions work, what the sliders mean, and so on, here: Anarchy Online Wikia: Missions

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Apr 10 2008

The Redistribution of Gunk…

Categories:

Old Blog Posts, Tim

by Tim

April 10, 2008

Bit of a functional ‘nuts and bolts’ Nifty! today, rather than anything sexy or cool in the accepted sense. Its to do with vendors, and crafting. At this late stage in the day, we’re all familiar with the standard Vendor interface that seems to have become de rigueur in most MMOs. I use WoW as the example, but variants can be found everywhere; the optimistic ‘shopkeeper’ stood idly in the last bastion of civilisation before the Mountains of Doom, offering three tabs.

There’s main ‘standard’ tab, offering consumables, reagents, ammo, bandages and for some bizarre reason mostly to do with maintaining the pretence, a range of very very bad armours of ‘grey’ quality, which can only be of use to those rare adventurers who sometimes wake up unexpectedly in a field, in end-game country, naked. (Possibly as a result of having once given someone else their password).

Tab two is the ‘OhshitIjustvendoredmyepix!!!!1!’ buy-back tab – a useful feature almost worthy of a Nifty in itself, and tab three will be the Repairs tab, where most games attempt to at least remove some made-up money from the hyperinflationary nightmare most traditional MMOs end up as.

Pretty standard stuff; you shovel monster gunk in, and money comes out, and for serious shopping, there’s usually a separate mechanic entirely; the Auction House, or whatever they call it in your current locality. (Where I am right now, its a ‘Military Surplus’, but works in a nearly identical manner.) On the whole, it works, and in most people’s eyes, is hardly anything to make a big fuss about when there’s Adventure! going on 40 feet away. I did see it done entirely differently once though:

 

Nifty! #4: Saga of Ryzom’s Vendors

Saga of Ryzom did almost everything differently, perhaps just for the sake of it in some cases; a strange and alien mob difficulty rating system, a quite curious make-you-own-hotkey mechanic, unusual creatures (the player races included), a unique blend of sci-fi and fantasy concepts and backstory and it all made for quite a challenging newbie experience, even if like me, you’d played dozens of these things before.

Much of my trial time there was spent going ‘Ohhh’ a lot, but one feature particularly stuck in my mind when I first swaggered up to the vendor with my customary bag of monster spleens and went to ‘vendor’ them, (A word itself which has become a verb, and is synonymous with ‘trash’ in our parlance). In addition to the usual sale, for immediate cash, there was an option to fiddle with a number box which represented a mark-up of sorts. The split was something like 40% of the item’s worth as up-front cash-in-hand, and the default value of the number box represented about 60% of it’s worth.

Then, and this is the clever bit, you walk away and have more Adventure! and the items stay on the vendor, for everyone else to see, for the next seven days. If some other player then decided that their craving for lizard gizzards was just too strong, they could sift through the same vendor and buy it. When that happens, you get the extra 60% of the cash paid to you as well.

It seems unnecessarily complicated at first glance, a combination of standard vendor and auction house both rolled into one NPC, but the basic problem with vendors of the more normal type, is that one man’s trash is another mans’ treasure. More specifically, many achiever type combat players care little for the inherent utility of a given monster organ to others, and definitely don’t want to take the time to either chat-spam sell the stuff, or even travel back to the AH, if there is a simpler mechanism at hand, to just turn it into cash quickly, resupply at the same time and get back out there.

Meanwhile, the crafting types, who may need this stuff (and did in SoR) and yet who may not be that capable of carving out their own gunk, lose the opportunity forever – the gunk is gone. The crucial nub of the SoR vendors, I suppose, is that it made it easier to put the stuff on sale to others, than to not, simply by virtue of working the AH-style resale thing directly into the more normal junk-unloading system.

As I remember it, each player could have up to 128 of these resales going at once, and subsequent vendoring functioned as normal; 40% cash paid, item destroyed. After the seven days were up, the items would just vanish – the seller has already received their 40% cash for it, so it has technically been sold, rather than destroyed. Competition and market forces still had room to manoeuvre, in that the 60% figure was adjustable by the seller, allowing them to get into all the market-based price-warring that we love so much.

Having routinely been forced to dig out dozens of unsuccessful 3-day auctions from the more usual AH and have to put them all on again, for yet more non-refundable deposit money, I found a certain release in the whole idea – sell-n-forget – and was often pleasantly surprised on logging in next time to find a whole heap of income waiting me after some of the 60% bits had been bought. The other aspect of it was a freedom from my usual OCD-related nagging guilt that I get in other games; that I’m destroying items which other players might need, or can find a use for.

An added bonus was that crafting products all ended up on sale, even if they were just practice grinds, allowing the customers to decide, and bucking the trend in most games, where only the very expensive end-game items are worth the expert crafter’s time and crafted ‘for real’, leaving very little on player-markets for the newer and intermediate players to shop for.

 

I am sort of reminded of early Everquest, where the vendors had a memory too. Items sold would stay on the vendor, in addition to the standard supplies. This made for fascinating ‘explorer-shopping’ trips, where I would roam along the Qeynos to Freeport road, stopping at every Inn on the way, seeing if any of the previously passing players had sold off the pelts I needed for my Leatherworking. The vendor would charge more than they’d paid for it in the first place, but surprisingly, it was actually still profitable to buy the pelts in this way, craft them into armour pieces, and then sell them back to the same innkeeper. And then the next passing adventurer could even buy the armour for themselves if the Innkeeper’s bag wasn’t too full. Good times, and it made each vendor unique and interesting to browse through. The SoR system is reminiscent of that, and in many ways, more advanced than the pot-luck grab-bag mechanic of EQ1.

 

Except at the very top of deliberate end-game farming, few people have the time and energy to ensure everything they come across finds a good home (nor should they be expected to), and it becomes a deliberate act of volition in any event. Not so with Saga of Ryzom, where the path of least resistance was also the most efficient redistribution of goods.

 

So, for offering those who did care the widest choice, without inconveniencing those who didn’t care, Saga of Ryzom’s Vendors; Nifty!

 

While enjoying some moderate success itself, Saga of Ryzom’s developers, the french studio Nevrax, ended up in administration/bankruptcy some months ago, (More down to Business and Management problems, than Lack of Players/Subscriptions, I gather). After an uncertain legal limbo period, the game ended up being bought by GameForge Germany, rather than the much publicised attempt by the players themselves to buy the thing, and continued on for some few months after that.

However, it seems that things didn’t go according to GameForge’s plan, and on or around the 12th Feb, the servers were turned off, and have yet to be turned back on. As the game doesn’t even appear on GameForge’s otherwise extremely obscure list of dinky little also-ran web-games, I would imagine that it isn’t coming back. I’ve been wrong before though, and its actually quite hard to find out exactly what the ‘official’ status of the game currently is. If you do want to dig deeper, this community-based forum might be a good place to start:

http://arispotle.yubovision.fr/index.php?topic=28.0

Still seems to see current posting, although not from anyone official…

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Apr 03 2008

The Falconry of Photons…

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Old Blog Posts, Tim

by Tim

April 3, 2008

A Nifty! from the Periphery today, and a bit of a walk down memory lane. Pet classes are nothing new, and pretty much every MMO since Ultima Online has offered some mechanism whereby an Adventurer (of any epoch) need not have to rely on their own strength alone. From EQ’s Magician and Necromancer, through AO’s Metaphysicist, (Which wins a special Nifty! mention for being the single most abstract MMO Class Concept EVER! “I think, therefore I am…uber!”), Bureaucrat and Engineer, right up to Wow’s Hunter and Warlock, CoV’s Mastermind and LotR’s Captain; almost all MMOs have something that’ll let you form a team of two or more, without having to go near another player. Its no surprise that these are often also the good solo classes.

The potency of the pet(s) varies widely. Mostly it’s a kind of floating extra weapon, and between the two of you, you make up the equivalent of a single other-class player. Nowhere in my travels in the online realm had I come across a pet class with the sheer power of this week’s Nifty! mention:

 

Nifty! #3: Neocron 2′s Rigger Profession

I dabbled in Neocron 2: Beyond Dome of York some years back, during my first free-trial smorgasbord run, and found it to be a fascinating, if somewhat marginalised ‘other’ MMO. You can find those writeups here and here, and I believe it might have been my first ever proper Operation Cheapseats victim. I expect a fair bit has changed in Neocron since I wrote those though, so don’t use them as a comprehensive guide or anything! It seemed a very well-crafted, but much under-subscribed Sci-Fi MMO, and a solid and dark alternative to Anarchy Online, at the time.

One thing that immediately made it stand out from the rest was it’s innovative FPS-style controls – previously unheard of in the traditionally hot-key and auto-attack based MMO genre of the time. You had to aim! To my knowledge, only Planetside (which is not really an MMO, but a larger kind of lan-match FPS game), and Tabula Rasa (which only came out a few moths a go!) do anything remotely similar. This almost warrants a Nifty! of it’s own, I’d say, but I do want to be a little more specific in these pieces.

 

So everyone had to aim; to use FPS skills to make progress in an MMORPG, but one class got something even more unexpected. The Rigger, in Neocron, is a class who makes their living with by the use of the unmanned drone robots. Unique to their class, these bundles of joy resemble basketball sized spikey black and red mini…well, spaceships is the nearest, I’d say. The Rigger finds some out of the way spot to hide, then launches one from inventory.

At this point, the Rigger has an out of body experience, and becomes the drone. The drone can hover up to about 10ft off the ground, and has a very peculiar flight-model, capable of very long and fast sweeps, while able to turn very rapidly on it’s own axis, making them capable of the most devastatingly elegant fly-by shootings. When hitting an inclined plane fast enough head on, their momentum would be deflected upward almost without loss, giving them the ability to launch themselves much higher into the air than the basic 10ft, and allowing them to do all manner of graceful stunts, and long sweeping glides back down, firing all the way.

They had a built-in ammo supply, possibly some kind of shielding/armour (I forget exactly), but could only operate a set distance away from the unconscious Rigger. When the ammo or health was low, provided it wasn’t destroyed outright, the Rigger can simply land the thing and snap back into themselves, and then just jog over to the drone, pick it up, tweak it a bit, and either launch it once more, or head off on their merry way.

 

I loved it. The unique and unexpected way that the drones handled was an absolute joy to play, and like nothing I’d ever seen in an MMO before, or indeed, since. The closest other experience I’d ever come across in general gaming, was the mind-mangling zero-G hijinks of Interplay’s Descent, which I also enjoyed immensely.

(By the way, I highly recommend Mobygames as a resource for the gaming antiquarian- the site is the IMDB.com of Computer Games!)

The other comparison I reached during my write up, was that of Falconry. I’m no Falconeer, but it seemed a very appropriate metaphor and I have fond memories of standing on the roof of a remote and ruined red-brick vehicle depot of some sort, comatose in the light of dusk and the game’s Steve Roach soundtrack going, as my technological ‘hawk’ of a laser-mounted combat drone swooped about the valley below, dispensing majestically elegant death and destruction on the local fauna, making long powerful swoops and gimballing in-flight to catch giant mutant mosquitos on the wing with red burning light. I could almost imagine the raised arm and big glove! I felt…powerful, and, unlike all too many MMO experiences of my life, skilful in my competency with this bizarre way to play. It was about as far from a hotkey-mashing stat-balancing exercise as it is possible to get, and still be in an MMO I think.

 

As a gameplay style it had it’s weaknesses, mind you. For a start, the drone can’t loot, and by the time you’ve landed it, returned to your real body and run back to the battle site, the goodies have long since faded, making the Rigger profession one of almost perpetual poverty. Also, you yourself, are utterly defenceless when attacked, making the finding of a good safe launch-spot a tricky task. This is especially telling in the very dominant PvP aspect of Neocron, and while your end-game drones might be feared, if they find you…it’s over very quickly. Rigging also affects the dynamic of basic grouping quite badly too. In most groups, in most games, you all move forward together, dealing with each challenge as it comes. Imagine having one member of the team who, for all intents and purposes, has to remain afk a lot, and then you have to wait a lot for them to periodically catch up. (And preferably, dish them out some of your loot as well.) It’d take a very patient and understand pick-up group, something in general short supply these days, to put up with the stop-start nature of the Rigger’s day to day.

 

But as both a unique kind of game in it’s own right, and as a wider example of how pet classes could be, the Rigger stands alone as something quite special. Why be an indifferent ranged fighter, who also has an attached melee DPS ‘attack’ in a wolf’s clothing, when you could be the pet, and bring all it’s ferocity to bear yourself? I vaguely remember Everquest had something slightly similar, the ‘Eye of Zomm’ spell, which would do the same out-of-body experience, but that was just a  floating eyeball you could use to look around corners without triggering aggro. Planetside has the NC’s Phoenix camera-guided missiles, but again, similar only in that it takes you out of yourself. The missile is ‘nudged’, rather than flown, and the whole flight is over in less than ten seconds usually. Neither offers the quite the same degree of complexity to the experience however, and to my knowledge, Nerocron’s Rigger and Drones stand alone. I’m not sure it would work in a game that didn’t already have FPS shooting, but perhaps Tabula Rasa might learn a thing or two from it; who knows?

 

So, for offering a way to play an MMO quite unlike any other, Neocron’s Rigger Profession: Nifty!

 

I didn’t sign up at the end of my trial, partly because I wanted to see other games, and partly because Neocron 2, for all its depth of world and quirky interesting features, was a pretty empty game, and those players left were a less than welcoming sort. This was perhaps due to the rather harsh implementation of PvP used; a one-way and permanent opt-in choice, required for many of the missions, coupled with FFA targets and no level limit protection, which was all a bit Rallos Zek for my tastes. I enjoyed the Rigger and the city of Neocron itself so much though, that I expect I’ll try to swing another free trial some day soon.

The last data SirBruce has for the title puts it at about 5,000 subscribers in July 06, making it a definite niche game. It is still going though, and seems to be offering free trials, so if you do want a look a Riggers yourself, or indeed, just see a different kind of take on The Elusive Sci Fi MMO, here’s the link:

Neocron Evolution 2.2

The Evolution bit is, I think, in reference to a recent and fairly substantial graphics upgrade, which a lot of the Elder Statesmen of MMOs seem to be doing lately. Worth a look, if only to see what the hell I’m going on about!

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Mar 24 2008

The Opportunity of Heroes…

Categories:

Old Blog Posts, Tim

by Tim

March 24, 2008

Continuing on with my somewhat presumptuous ‘Nifty!’ series, of Things I Saw In An MMO Once And Quite Liked. I’ve actually got quite a lot of these to get out, mostly because I am easily impressed with shiny objects! This week:

 

Nifty! #2: Everquest 2′s Heroic Opportunities

Launching about the same time as World of Warcraft, Everquest 2 tried a lot of new things. SOE had had a long time running an MMO of the type (Everquest 1) and a lot of…er…opportunities to take on-board feedback, tweak and refine. Not everything new was an improvement mind you, and despite the new things, EQ2 launched very much in the then-accepted tradition of being a very group-dependent MMO. At the same time, WoW decided on a slightly different approach, and well, here we all are today!

I’m quite a soloist at heart, but one of the clever-er new ideas EQ2 launched with, which impressed even antisocial loner me, was the Heroic Opportunity. Like most games of the type, you got new skills and abilities as you went up the levels; Hit Monster, Improved Hit Monster, Hit Monster Really Jolly Hard!, Hit Monster Like The Fist Of An Angry God!!!, etc, etc. This is all very well, and allowed you to get on with your job, either alone, or in a group; damage, taunts, healing, mesmerising, and so on.

However, at a very early level, you got an extra skill that didn’t work quite like the others, but instead, started a Heroic Opportunity. Pressing it would pop up a curious new UI element:

A flashing set of symbols. On each of the other ‘normal’ hotkey buttons, the tool-tip description, in addition to the usual stats, would have one of these matching symbols. They divided into coloured groups based on class archetype; green for Scout classes, blue for Fighters, etc. If you had an available skill that had a matching symbol, you mashed it and the HUD would change. Eventually, by use of these glyphs, and a bit of behind the scenes dice-rolling, a particular Heroic Opportunity would be chosen, and the HUD would change to something like this:

For this bit, all involved parties would then need to use appropriate hotkeys, (with the required glyph on), in the required sequence. Once all that malarkey was complete, the Heroic Opportunity itself would fire, typically taking the form of a party-wide buff, or a large damage attack on the enemy(s).

It was a novel thing, once I’d figured out what was actually going on. By clever manipulation of the first stage, (Here’s a List), any given make-up of classes within a party could work these things, and in a very hands-on fashion become more than the sum of it’s parts, literally pulling together to get the job done. Of course, all parties work together in these games, but typically it’s a much less structured thing, a lot more rule-of-thumb stuff.

Being a Scout at the time, I launched into it with some gusto, and would even go so far as to say that wanting to play with these, to make them work and see the potent magics, actually encouraged me to group more than I might otherwise have done.

 

Of course, like most of the things I think are neat, it was not without it’s problems. The original incarnation of the system was very easily broken – one incorrectly mashed hotkey by any member of the party during the HO run would cause the whole thing to collapse, which was indeed sometimes the fault of a simple over-excitable button-mashing muppet, but sometimes also the fault of a beleaguered Cleric who really had to heal the tank NOW!, or have them die.

The early testings of it all that my little group of the time tried, had particular troubles with the Healer’s contribution to this merry dance. Sometimes, in a hectic fight, the Healer just can’t ‘keep hands off!’ while we muck about with collaborative pattern-matching minigames, and one yellow symbol in particular often came up, and our healer only had one matching button, and that had a 30min cooldown, or something.

I think the modern version of the HO system has been improved to not have it fall apart so easily on mis-mashes of buttons, but the underlying difficulty remains, in that often, a party is already playing this sort of complementary skill-use game, but in the more subtle, but traditional, manner of Tank-Healer-CrowdControl, and while ancillary DPS types might have the luxury of participation, the Big Three are often busy, and need their buttons in a very specific order already.

 

There always seemed to be some debate, on forums, etc, whether the HO system was worth the not insignificant effort of learning the chains and orchestrating the wheels, with various measurements in the attempt to work out if DPS classes should just ignore the HOs and go hell-for-leather as usual, for better output. The healers, and others with existing timing-critical functions, would point out their troubles too.� (Apparently, some of the HO AoE blasts would also break crowd control effects, making them a big no-no in complex group/raid encounters)

On the other hand, it was often cited that these bonus attacks and buffs, while a bit random in their selection, were a lot more efficient than normal hotkeys, giving more bang per buck of power spent.

I never got to the bottom of it myself, and in all my time in and out of the game, have never been in a group that has pulled off a successful Four-Class HO, which is a shame, although I love the idea of it.

Mind you, as a largely soloing Swashbuckler, I always found the Solo-HOs to be very useful and helpful for solo viability. You didn’t always need a group to make them function. Consisting of three types of button that I was always spamming out in combat anyway, it was no extra hassle to do them in a particular order for a significant boost in stats and DPS. I suspect that most people ended up using them like this; as a way to up the power of the lone adventurer, which is a shame, and missing the point somewhat.

Despite all this, I do think they’re a clever idea, (which perhaps needed a bit of tweaking), and a novel and interesting way to go about the basic business of hitting monsters in the face, so…EQ2′s Heroic Opportunities: Nifty!

(Although their choice of acronym leaves a lot to be desired!)

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Mar 13 2008

The Strokes of Genius…

Categories:

Old Blog Posts, Tim

by Tim

March 13, 2008

I’m vaguely aware that as an MMO Blogger, I probably ought to do more in the ‘Armchair Theorist’ category. It’s not that I don’t think about these ideas and concepts, you understand; of course I do, far more than is healthy and pretty much all of the time.

It’s just that in this age of Entitlement, Guaranteed Success and the Easier Grind Getting The Subscription, I no longer trust my own opinions on what constitutes a good idea or a bad one in the broader gaming evolution going on around us all today. As a gamer, I know what I want (To win, easily, quickly and often), but possibly not what I need. (To probably lose quite often and have to work for my wins a bit).

All this makes me a bit hesitant when it comes to the popular blog-based business of Banging Out A Manifesto For Online Gaming Design, Prototyping The WoW-Slayer or Offering Unsolicited Advice On What [MMO Company] Really Ought To Do, and such like. Best leave that to the professionals, I think, and in general, I like to think of myself as an MMO Field Researcher, rather than an MMO Academic.

 

Saying all that, my OCD does like a good serial feature, and I don’t seem to have very many of those on the go just now, so it’s time for a new sidebar category; ‘Nifty!’ This is where I trawl back through the shattered detritus of a decade of online gaming memories, and for your delectation, pick out very specific MMO features, ideas and concepts which I thought were quite..er…Nifty!

A very subjective list, of course, and it may include things I liked at the time, which no-one else did, or indeed, things I now no longer like myself. The common theme here, is basically things that I saw for the first time and thought ‘Ohh…that’s clever!’ A kind of reverse ‘Room 101′ of MMOs. Innovation, and suchlike!

Feel free to dispute my opinions, suggest similar or better concepts, or simply correct my sometimes flawed memory about the actual facts of each piece. Perhaps between us all, by plucking out these gems from past and present MMOs, we can imagine for ourselves, a perfect MMO of the future…

On to the first then:

 

Nifty! #1: Star Wars: Galaxies’ Crafting Resource Map

This was not long after the original release of the game, in the heady days of Pre-NGE, and from the first, I’d always loved the crafting system of the game, one of the most advanced systems I’d seen anywhere, possibly second only to Second Life, where crafting is the game, such that that is.

Hundreds of manufacturable items, and an economy where there was only token and negligible loot and quest rewards. Crafting mattered here. But to make all these items, you needed the resources – metals, petrochemicals, foodstuffs, radioactive, and so on, and unlike most games of it’s time – where those materials came from monster corpses, NPC vendors or convenient and inexplicable sprouting ‘nodes’ of fish, brass, whatever -� most of the resources in SWG came and went like weather.

To stock up with materials, one first had to find them, and this was done with various survey tools, and these formed the basis of an entire minigame which in many ways, for me, supplanted the usual ‘Hit The Monsters With A Stick’ “main” game entirely.

It worked like this; You fired up the tool and it would give you a list of what minerals were present on the planet. You could then use the tool to dig up a handful of each, and by inspecting the stuff, decide which one you wanted. Each had a large variety of stats which in some cases, would affect the stats of items made from it, so having a ‘good’ material did actually matter a lot.

Once you’d picked a mineral, (Dururehiris, a kind of Cubirian Steel, in the above example), you hit Survey. It would then return a little surroundings map, with mineral concentrations on it. Typically, one direction would have a higher amount than the others (The 31%, above), and the tool would also make a new waypoint where that was. You then went over to the waypoint, moving the centre of the grid view, and pinged the tool again. If lucky, the new minimap would have a new, higher corner, and you’d move again, and repeat the process until you found yourself on a high percentage, surrounded by lower ones…the ‘peak’ of the mineral density. Usually at this point, you moved on to harvesting – placing out player-owned automated structures that would then get on and mine a load of steel for you, and a little later, crafting could ensue, which was a whole other thing, and beyond what I’m talking about here.

 

But the basic business of tracking down that perfect Copper or abundant Solar Energy provided hours of entertainment, as I’d gallop about the plains and hills of Naboo, Tatooine and Correllia, startling herds, surprising bandits and generally making a nuisance of myself, ever in pursuit of those few extra percent of hardwood or similar. It meant I saw places I’d never have bothered going to otherwise, and often the best Copper was underneath someone’s house, which allowed me to meet all sorts of new people too! Dropping a Medium Mineral Harvester up against the back wall of their remote mountain-top retreat will do that. Surprisingly noisy, yer average mineral harvester!

Often, when out and about in the wilderness anyway, upon seeing a harvester working away in isolation, I’d use the tools to see what they were digging, and if any good, I’d pop one of my own out too.

 

Sometimes, others had got there first, and in numbers, and the place would be camped out with harvesters, but the beauty, and the downfall, of the system was that the stuff moved.

I’m not sure of the Geological Accuracy of it all, but give it 48, or 72 hours, and the mineral distribution map for that copper would look entirely different, and require the harvesters to be taken down, and a new Copper ‘high’ to be located.

This was a good thing, in that it gave everyone a fair crack at the minerals. If they never moved, a select cartel of players would have all the 80%+ camped out with deployables forever, and no-one else would be able to get within three miles of the place. This may be a good and intended state of affairs in a PvP kind of game (EVE Online), but would never work in a largely PvE title, where blowing up other player’s mining machinery is not allowed.

But it was also a bad thing, in that the constant nomadic nature of the materials I need for my profession, Architect, really did start to wear me out in the end, and having to spend an hour a night, every other night, moving the harvesters about, eventually drove me out of the game in exhaustion. That’s probably a failing in my own perseverance than one of game design though.

 

On balance though, I liked it a lot, compared to the resource gathering in most other, less complex titles, and although I’m sure it’s possible, I’d imagine it’s a quite difficult system to ‘bot’ or otherwise farm in an automated manner. I believe Ultima Online may have had something similar, if less formalised and mathematical, involved with the distribution of it’s metals for mining, but for me, the elegant and involved design and implementation of Star Wars: Galaxies resource system left a profound impression on me, and is something many games could learn from.

(This was all before the NGE reinvented the game – I have no idea how it works nowadays. I expect it’s just randomly spawning ‘Copper Veins’ outside Mos Eisley Auction House now. I must actually try Modern SWG one of these days…I hope the ‘Trader’ can still do the above Treasure Hunting.)

So, Pre-NGE SWG Surveying…Nifty!

Look out for more soon, or suggest your own below for future consideration…

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