MUDs are the text-based precursor to MMOs and there are thousands littered across the internet – some even have hundreds of players!
Without the limitations of graphics, the systems can get quite intricate and the pared-down text interface helps expose the workings of these mechanics. It’s easy to figure out how game dev objects work once you interact with Iron Realms crafting, for example, where you enter descriptive text for every situation a player might encounter.
Links (but don’t just go by the top games, some ancient abandoned games have interesting ideas as well!):
Some of my personal favorites for game design inspiration:
– New Moon. Has fun NPC design, like arresting players (complete with jailbreak attempts) and different day/night behaviour. Very responsive to command-based exploration. http://eclipse.cs.pdx.edu/
– Iron Realms Entertainment. Company that runs several polished, staffed games. Lots of complex systems like intricate combat, sea/spacefaring, puzzle quests. https://www.ironrealms.com/
– Avalon: the Legend Lives. Big historic game, was the first online multiplayer rpg. Mostly abandoned and buggy these days, but it has some very interesting ideas. The economy/warfare system in particular is fabulously designed, with constant tension and resource management ensuring player cities always want to skirmish for power. The war system got an update that made it REALLY complex, but there might be docs online of the older, more elegant version. https://www.avalon-rpg.com/
***Important note***: this post was originally written a few years ago – Avalon is now offline, which is a fucking shame because it should be documented for video game history.
WARNING! SPOILERS FOR THE GAME INCLUDED IN THIS POST!
I’m quite excited to share this postmortem!
I’ve finally returned to Succor, a game initially made in a jam, and given it a major overhaul and update. I feel comfortable with where the game’s state is (though there’s always going to be a temptation to tinker more) and I’m happy to call it a finished, polished play experience. Most of my game creations are jam experiments, so it feels particularly nice to be able to put a stamp of “finished” on a game – one step further down the road in becoming a proper game dev!
Background
This game in particular feels a bit emotional to finish. Not only does the game cover rather deep and dark topics about trauma and memory, it’s my first coding project in nearly a year after struggling with major health setbacks. For many months, I couldn’t even sit at a computer, much less wrangle my brain into coding or writing extensively…but the final word count is around 20,000 words! Phew!
The original jam game was a small experiment in how traumatic memories can be sparked by things as mundane as reading a menu and encourages players to battle these demons by making either constructive or destructive choices. The new version has expanded on this concept, with many more additions to content.
Code and Design Updates
As this was a project created fairly early in my game dev journey, a lot of this code was a MESS and I spent a decent chunk of time focusing on behind the scenes things, such as creating widgets (Twine’s versions of functions) to streamline creation. Some old code I merely tinkered with a bit, as I didn’t want to get caught up in too much refactoring, as I didn’t want scope to run away from me. At the end of the day, this is an experimental text game, so “good enough” works for many things.
One major change I added was creating a function to track the game’s demons and adjust how demons were assigned to appear though the game. Originally, demons were simply tied to menus: browsing the menu for a bakery spawns a demon for addiction, for example. Our wonderful artist had created several additional pieces of artwork and I wanted to include these as well, so I ended up expanding out the available menus to give each demon one they were tied to. However, I felt simply adding more menus to the table would be a rather dull play experience, so I instead added several “hidden” menus players can find through cleaning the house, as well as some lurking demons triggered by the act of cleaning itself – and then to give the game a bit of replayability (because there are multiple endings and achievements), I decided to shuffle around where they were each new game.
This code creates an array of all the potential choices for both demons and menus at the start of the game (storyInit as well as a resetVars widget which runs when the player returns to the main menu at the end of the game). It pulls these values from javascript objects.
It then plucks (randomly removes a value from the array) , creates different menu details and removes the demon associated with that particular menu. So if “sweets” was plucked, it would pick one of the random names for a restaurant (eg “The Sweet Tooth” or “Toothsome Temptations”) and also set the associated demon.
NOTE:This code is one example of the “good enough” type of coding I was talking about above – if I were to continue work on this game, it would definitely be much more efficient to create a loop for this assignment, as well as a much better set of relationships for how I’m handling these values, for example something like an object to store all the different information about each menu. Since this was a continuation of a very old game when I was a lot newer at coding, I decided it was easier to just be a bit sloppy and finish the project using some of the existing framework instead of getting lost in the weeds optimizing.
Once the menus were built, the first 3 were assigned to the main table in the game. 4 more were tucked away to be found when the player finishes cleaning different parts of the house (for example, once a cupboard is fully clean, the player discovers a menu tucked away in the back), which leaves 3 more demons to spawn at random. The following code basically tracks how many actions the player has done and if they are above 20 actions, we spawn a demon:
I then used this widget in any room/passage for activity where I wanted a demon to potentially spawn. For example, since there’s a menu hidden in the cupboard, I didn’t use demonspawn in those passages and instead just manually added to movecount. If I were to optimize this, I’d probably split the movecount and the spawning into 2 different widgets or make javascript code to apply to click events/passage navigation and just exclude the places I didn’t want it to run.
Some feedback I got from the early version of the game is that people didn’t realize there were variants of text for descriptions of items, as I had just been pulling text using .random, so I changed many of these messages to cycle, using the method of creating an array I outlined above. Halfway through changing all this over, I realized I could be a bit lazy and use this process to also cycle through the cleaning process. The code below will check for the size of the array and if it’s empty, it will set the bed to cleaned and execute cleaned logic (giving willpower, checking for an achievement for cleaning everything, etc). If there are still values left in the array, it will shift the array to remove the first element and display that.
setup.bed = {
...
clean: ["You begin by stripping the pillows and sheets - judging by the rather...err...ripe smells, it's far past time they were washed. You've just been so exhausted and haven't had the time, but now that you're doing it, you find yourself looking forward to having a chat with neighbors when you bring the laundry down tomorrow.", "You rummage in your tiny closet for spare sheets and pillowcases, dislodging an old box of photos. You spend some time glancing over better days and set aside a few photos from travels with old friends.", "You wrangle with the fitted sheet, starfishing on the mattress until you triumphantly manage to tuck in all four corners.", "You give your pillows a hopeful fluff and toss them atop the made bed. It's not the most luxurious sleeping arrangement, but it definitely looks a lot more inviting and restful than when you started."],
...
}
<<set $msgBedClean = Array.from(setup.bed.clean)>>
<<if $msgBedClean.length == 0>>
<<set $bedClean = 1>>
<<cleanDone>>
<<dialog>>
<<include bedMenu>>
<</dialog>>
<<set $msgBed = Array.from(setup.bed.cleanDone)>>
<<else>>
<<clean>>
<<print $msgBedClean.shift()>>
UI Updates
My goal with the UI update was to lean into the hand-drawn art’s sketchy style and create the impression of the images and text being words in someone’s journal (especially since a journal is an interactable object in the game, where you can even add custom entries!). I browsed the internet and found some useful codepen examples for the stacking pages and tape corners and tweaked those until I was happy.
Original UI:
Updated UI:
This is another “good enough” moment. I could keep improving the UI, but then I’ll end up down the CSS rabbithole for ages, so I basically had to stop myself and say “it looks fine.” I might go back and add a color-blind mode as I definitely think that might be a problem
Art Updates
The artist for this game had previously sent me some extra art they had done which we didn’t have time to add to the project during the jam, due to running out of time. I really wanted to be able to showcase these pieces, so I added in more ways for players to find demons as noted above.
One issue I ran into is that our format for the menus used a header art image, so creating new menus without those would stand out a bit.
Example menu page:
I first went through the existing art to determine if I could double-dip on any of the image. For example, the image of an outdoor grill for a bbq restaurant also worked great for a burger joint and by cutting out the distinctive pillars of the Taj Mahal (for our I ndian restaurant) I was able to have a mosque that kinda looked like the Hagia Sofia (for a Turkish restaurant). I began to run out of choices, however, until I realized the French image could make an easy shift to a logo for a cajun restaurant!
All I had to do was crop the fleur de lis, copy it and rotate the copies to flank the main one and ta-da! A quick little logo conjuring up New Orleans:
I also wanted to add some visual progress to the images of the house so players would see the image changing as they cleaned (eg the bed would become made). The artist had originally given me one overall finished image for the main room, but I needed to create steps for each element as well as create updates for the kitchen. For the main room, I copied each side of the room from the finished artwork. I then pasted each on top of the messy room and used smuge, blur and a very diffused paint tool to help make the lighting match. I also created some photographs to paste on the wall around to bed to reflect text about the player hanging them up. I used the blur tool on these to soften them and make them match the sketchy art style of the existing art. I also added a few dots to represent stars in the now-open window.
Original messy room:
Bed made, couch still torn (there’s an equivalent for couch repaired and bed still messy):
Final cleaned room:
For the kitchen, it was a lot easier. I just carefully erased away the dishes in the sink and drew in an arc to represent the bottom of the basin, and erased smuges on the stove. I added the same photos that were hung around the bed along with some basic shapes to represent magnets, and tada, fridge was transformed.
Some similar tweaking was done for the final page before the ending, where the player faces the final demon: their own reflection in the mirror. I used the existing image from the TV achievement (which is…a TV screen), filled in the outline around the screen, erased the antennas, and added some parallel diagonal lines to represent light reflecting off the mirror. It’s not amazing, but it’s functional enough to do the job!
Audio Updates
I added a few more songs to the playlist, retaining the theme of classical piano. Finding these gave me a nice mental break between working on other parts of the project.
I also found several different audio snippets of pages turning, to have the sound match the new “journal” style UI. The code below defines the names of the audio events and randomly shuffles plays one whenever parts of the game are clicked.
A large chunk of time was spent on this. Our original game was very black-and-white (teehee) in how we portrayed the player’s relationship with their mother. She was basically this flat, one-dimensionally evil character – but that’s not how real relationships or people are, so I spent a lot of time fleshing out nuances of the relationship through memories.
I added a dad and obliquely hinted that he had passed away, which changed the dynamic between mother and player and led to the shift in the mother’s behavior. I enhanced this by using seasonal references to indicate what part of the memory timeline the player is recalling, cycling from summer to winter and back into summer as the player left home to try to find their own happiness at culinary school.
dolmaMemory: [“You remember how one summer all of you took a family cooking course. Dad had roared with laughter as he watched the mess you made trying to roll dolma together with your chubby fingers, before scooping you into his lap to help guide your efforts. Mom had kissed him on the head and tenderly squeezed your shoulder…You suddenly find the thought of the dish unappealing as you imagine some other kid learning to make it, some other child having what you lost.”],
breadMemory: [“You are struck by a bittersweet memory of making bread with your mother. That day was one of the few great ones you can remember with her. It was autumn, the air chill and crisp, before dad’s test results kept getting worse. You slathered the crusty slices with butter and dunked them into a hearty chicken soup, a cozy meal against the gathering storm. Was it your fault that everything changed?”],
beignetMemory: [“Snowflakes mounded soft as sugar outside the hospital that day near the end and the sky was a blueberry bruise. You reflect on how the ugly can nestle among the most beautiful moments – the discordance makes your head spin and you catch yourself nervously glancing towards the window, as if reassuring yourself the day outside is appropriately gloomy.”],
lemonTartMemory: [“You’ve always loved lemon desserts. There’s something about the light citrus that is always refreshing. You remember one sun-drenched spring day, not long after dad was gone: your group of friends rode bikes to the store, pooled pocket money, bought a box of cookies and gorged. Powdered sugar smiles beneath cotton-candy clouds – worth the stomach ache that night to forget the feelings for the afternoon.”],
eggrollsMemory: [“You can’t help but crack a bittersweet smile, remembering one group outing after culinary class let out for the summer break when a crowd of you went out for dim sum and bonded over boldly trying everything on the menu. Cart after cart rolled by, depositing steaming baskets of dumplings, fried morsels, delicate desserts, and your stomach swelled, aching from overeating…but moreso from laughter. It was a good day.”],
The overall goal was to create a deeper, more emotionally rich story with room for sympathy for the maternal figure while enhancing the pathos for the player’s character.
Overall
All in all, I’m happy with my updates!
I think one important takeaway is recognizing scope and limiting it where needed to ensure something complete is produced, instead of endlessly tinkering. This is, at the end of the day, an experimental art project – it’s not something I’m going to sell so it doesn’t need rigorous polish or expansive gameplay. It’s updated enough to look slick and the gameplay and story have been expanded enough to tell a well-rounded, self-contained narrative.
Could this be better? Sure, but what I’ve produced is definitely a clear sign of my progress in both my health/brain recovery and in my growth as a dev – which seems pretty fitting, given it’s a game about moving past trauma through constructive choices. I certainly did some constructing!
Short answer: Yes, it’s impossible for perfect balance, but you strive for “best in the moment” and ideally back it up with tools to make testing for that a lot easier
Long answer: soooooo, I’m a very old school gamer and my main multiplayer game genre was MUDs – these were the text-based precursors to MMOs, and these games still have some concentrated player bases in a few corporate companies (IRE and Simultronics). I was also one of the “big” players, which basically translated to free dev work on my behalf.
I work in QA and so I would run the initial QA pass for balance changes. I would assess to find the potential OP combos, edge cases, unexpected interactions. This was all done on a test server which mirrored attributes of live and also let us custom create characters for the specific thing we were testing.
From there, changes went to the “liaison group” which was an IG role where the top fighters from every class basically had a combat council to discuss the game meta. We had a pocket realm we could use in game where we could teleport in, adjust stats, equip everything in the game, etc. This let us easily setup situations for testing the crazy combos we dreamed up – instead of just mental/pen and paper we could tweak stuff to test specific circumstances.
Every few months, we’d also suggest combat changes. Normal players could also submit ideas, which we could support for higher level discussion and review. We’d review all the submitted ideas and comment on them. We used both asynchronous communication (comments on submissions) and synchronous communication (chatting in a chat channel in game).
This system had its good/bad.
Good:
– the people discussing balance knew the actual gameplay impacts incredibly well.
– the suggestions for potential solutions were made by people taking into account combat balance, lore, theme, etc
– crazy math at the drop of a hat to prove points
– directed and edited pipeline to devs
Bad:
– selection process for these players wasn’t always great. In one game, for example, it was a guild role, so I became liaison for a dead guild simply because I was the only person who fought…even though I had been playing less than a month
– personal bias: players were always loathe to nerf their own class, even if they knew it was OP and nerf/buff selection sometimes ended up quite political. We’ll agree to x nerf if you agree to x buff. I became briefly both hated (by allies) and beloved (by enemies) because I submitted an idea to fix a way my class was OP
– admin tension: This role/communication channel was really in touch with admins and if an admin didn’t like a player (hella common in MUDs) everything broke down
– in-game harassment of liaisons: this was common enough that I need to call it out. People would harass to try to engineer the results they wanted.
Sorry, rambled a ton, but I think there are maybe some helpful takeaways there!
I can talk more about this if you have any questions! When I worked on Age of Empires, for example, we had one of the top ranked players in the world as part of the test team – his role was just to try to APM break shit and find basically skill ceilings to help the devs balance downwards.
The concept of balancing downwards is something that I think can really help game dev – it establishes a maximum QA boundary and then all testing never has to deal with that max limit! If the best player at your game says xyz is max potential combo, you don’t have to edge case all these weird potentials!
I used to write a bunch for MUDs, and a few years ago, I decided I wanted to try making my own game. I started as a writer/QA/project management for my first few game jams because I was struggling to create something fully on my own.
This hybrid “help as needed” role let me get hands on experience and showed me a deeper look behind the scenes of how games are made, without being overwhelmed by all the setup needed to get my hands in the mess – I had previously been daunted by the basics of just setting up engines and SDKs and CLIs and virtual environments and all that stuff.
We had envisioned something impressive with the player changing the story, but as development continued we learned about scoping and timelines: our coder ran out of time, so I focused on finding us public domain images and twisting together a concept of a thing that would work with the functions we had coded. The result is kinda cute.
From there, I tried out making my own games using a range of different engines which focused on text-heavy development:
Twine: webdev (eg CSS, html) for interactive hypertext
Choicescript: uses very basic scripting for interactive cyoa novels
Adventuron: designed to teach children how to code via making text adventures
This is not an exhaustive list – https://intfiction.org/ is a great resource for even more options such as TADS.
Twine resonated quickly with me as I used to make websites and skin forums back in the day. The concept is overall very similar to building a website, so I found it easy to use.
The devlog for that has some good info about CSS – I learned a ton and it’s frankly kinda insane and awesome that I was able to produce that (even if it’s a mess) for the first thing I made in Twine.
For pure writers, I’d personally suggest you try out Choicescript via Choice of Games – it’s easy to code and focuses a lot on writing. The code doesn’t need to be complex and the only images you NEED are static ones for the cover art. Don’t have to worry about music at all. Make sure to download the IDE – that means integrated development environment, and it’s basically an app to do the coding in.
You can even publish through them to an existing audience of people who like reading/playing interactive novels. I suggest trying out some of their games first to get an idea of the kind of game you can make as a solo text developer!
Be sure to check out the hosted games category – that’s how you’d be publishing a game if you make one through them. Even if your game doesn’t do well commercially, you’ll have a published portfolio piece, which can be used to leverage future writing work.
I’m currently working on two different choicescript experiments. One has an easter egg coded in for if you don’t properly pick a name for your player character – and, stepping back, how wild is it that I’ve gone from writing and trying to make games for other people to making my own stories I want to tell…and not just making them, but adding in secret jokes?!
It’s fun to step back and reflect sometimes, and I hope some of you reading this find some inspiration to try to create something yourself! 🙂
One of the things I do at one of my jobs is analyze how users experience the game, and if it’s “fun” – this is an incredibly complex topic, which I will attempt to tackle in a series of posts, addressing the various ways games are “fun” to users.
This first post will look at the underlying player perspectives which drive what people view as “fun.”
Fun for Who?
At first blush, “fun” may seem self-evident and obvious to a gamer or a new designer. Stuff is fun or it isn’t! It just IS FUN! That view, however, is not useful when you are dealing with design or analytics – you want quantifiable data and clear design strategies – and it tends towards the myopic. People tend to gravitate towards what they find fun, and that will help define their own view of what fun is. If I can impress one thing upon you, readers, let it be this – there are MANY types of game players who find a HUGE range of things fun. Far too many new designers (or armchair analysts) cater to their own view of what’s fun, instead of realizing the vast range of interests among potential players.
Realizing, recognizing and designing for that range is what makes a truly stellar game.
Now, by range, I do not mean “Shooters vs Facebook Games” or “Sci-fi vs Fantasy.” Interest types come in many flavors, and genre is only one of the ways you can tap into someone’s concept of “fun” – obviously, I am not suggesting that designers change their genre or core concept or theme. Instead, I am stressing the importance of recognizing that people play games for a variety of reasons, in a variety of ways, and find a variety of things enjoyable.
Bartle Types
One of the core ludology studies from the early days of online gaming is the Bartle Test. The concept is basically the gaming world’s version of the Myers-Briggs personality test – basically, each person plays games a different way, with many players falling into specific categories. Manyquizzes and tests have sprung up around this concept, letting gamers quickly assess their “type” – results range from a Killer to an Explorer to an Achiever. In recent game development, the MMO Wildstar based their character classes off this concept.
The concept itself is somewhat archaic (it’s from 1996, which is forever in the game industry timeline), and a bit rigid (if I spent a day training people and sitting in meetings at work, I may be far less inclined to be my usual Socializer persona, and might just want to mindlessly play a Killer all night)…but it’s a solid idea to consider when designing games and considering the people who will play them. Audience is, afterall, a huge thing to consider during development.
In my personal opinion, a good game hits more than one player type – and a great game appeals to all of them. A solid designer should, at the very least, acknowledge the different types, and consider if his or her game can include elements which will appeal to that gaming style. In future posts, I will dive into the individual types, for more concrete examples…
This song encapsulates my feelings about disc: what, how, what, how, wtf, rage, what.
I haven’t really commented about the changes yet – I understand that they are only a stepping stone between here and the new expansion, but after playing (and raiding and PVPing) for a few weeks, I know enough to know that disc has been gutted.
My favorite moment from the past expansion was healing Shamans our first few times fighting them: there were two tanks to keep up. On weakened soul clear, both tanks got a bubble. I was rolling penance on CD to ensure I had a free bubble to use to kill that weakened soul on whoever had the HIGHEST weakened soul CD. The other one got FDCL flash heal procs – unless penance was on CD and that CD was 6+ seconds. In that case, greater heal, yo. If under, flash heals. Keep up grace on both tanks as well, using that penance smartly and those flash heal procs cleverly to reset the 3-stack CD. Weave in prayer of mending and holy fire/smite for boosted heals via archangel. Get that spirit shell in and time a halo or cascade to land when meteor lands. Fucking exhilarating.
Now: BUBBLE BUBBLE BUBBLE BUBBLE HOLY NOVA HOLY NOVA HOLY NOVA HOLY NOVA HOLY NOVA.
Obviously, our mana pools and regen will be changing, and we’ll be getting buffs from leveling and new talents, so I won’t comment on the balance – but the balance isn’t what upsets me. I trust that Blizzard will balance things. What I am concerned about is the deeper issue here: disc has been completely gutted and lost its complex interplay of skills. Disc was incredibly exciting to play – you had to know the fight, and you needed to use your skills well in conjunction with each other. You could do “OK” without maximizing that, and you could even do pretty good (which is a balance issue which should have been tackled) but to truly do great you needed to know every skill and know how to use them in conjunction with each other.
Now, I just play whack a mole and bubble spam.
…And the thing that frustrates me is that isn’t going to change. I’m going to passively get better at basic healing simply for levelling up and having gear, but that does not do anything to ameliorate the sting of losing all of my complex and engaging gameplay, nor do I want it to. I don’t want to be OP. I want to be CHALLENGED. I understand that simplifying things makes the game more accessible to more people….but does Blizzard even understand the ramifications of these changes?
I don’t want to get too heavily into the problems with PvP, but I’ll give this a short bit. First, self peels are super vital to healers. Who cares if we have silence? That’s very potent for arenas, yes – but most of us don’t play arenas. As someone who primarily just plays battlegrounds (because I’m a healer and love healing) god does stuff suck hard atm. I lost a self peel. I have a grand total of two instant casts (bubble and holy nova – both of which I already had). I lost my strategic and tactical stun interrupt. Hell, my freaking 4-set has even been nerfed. My hot has vanished. My strong prepared heal (glyphed Prayed of Mending) has been made a cast. On top of this, I lost my tiny hybrid potency (Shadow Word: Death), I’m physically weaker (lost Inner Fire glyph to increase armor), and now my shield glyphs are mutual exclusive – let me just reiterate this last part: I can either have a slightly less shitty bubble, I can have one that helps heal, or I can have one that deals damage. I am the class that basically just has bubble, but I can’t actually soup my bubble up to make it potent. That’s so damn depressing.
I think disc definitely had problems. Absorbs as a concept reward skilled healers way too well – if you know the fight, you can gimmick it to really just trivialize it and make things frustrating to your fellow healers. Absorbs really aren’t very fair as is, especially once you calculate in a good disc doing things like spirit shelling before big AoE pulses. My team didn’t like it initially, until we chatted out why I was nomming heals and making it clear that numbers meant NOTHING unless there were clear issues. I don’t expect every raid team to do that, and I’ve had to step in and go WHOA STOP to multiple pugs bitching people out for not competing with a 585 disc priest. Healers: you’re beautiful, keep on keeping on. You each have a special job to do. Raid leaders: Heal meters =/= dps meters so please stop citing them. Anyways, yes. Absorbs make other healers feel bad and unbalance fights, and disc was definitely due for a change.
Blizzard, however, cut the wrong things: aegis + crit gems + reforging + atonement were the big problems here (basically 50% of everything I did made an absorb), not the complex interplay around weakened soul and grace. Those things let anyone mindlessly stack absorbs without any skill, blanketing a raid without much thought, especially with this tier’s 2-set increasing crit. Seriously, most of us were doing fights with 30-50% of our healing coming from aegis. If you’re going to fix disc’s disparity, make it so absorbs require thought and pre-planning – and I’m baffled at why the more complex skillplay has been removed but mindless and RNG absorb procs have been left in. This isn’t smart gameplay. This isn’t rewarding clever players. Aegis is a fun concept, but its current iteration is the big reason why disc pisses people off. People do NO thought about aegis, it’s based on RNG, it can proc off anything, and derpy smart heals proc it….and as a nice toss of salt in the wound, it’s been kept in, while the actually engaging and intelligent aspect of the class has been gutted. Changing aegis to be a talent, making it be a buff you activate for x amount of time, or even just flat out removing it – these would have done a significantly lot more to fix disc than the changes we’ve seen.
I really don’t want to think that Blizzard is just slashing stuff to cater to the least common denominator – partially because I think that will backfire badly. Let me draw it out.
Mythic raids: people are min-maxxing. They’ll bring 1, maybe 2 disc healers. The disc are frustrated but play and do ok. Thing is, this is NOT where the problem is.
Every other (ESPECIALLY LFR) raid difficulty: You roll in via group finder or automated match-making and there are 3-5 other disc priests (according to the wow census priests are BY FAR the most popular healer class). One priest bubbles some people. The other priests can’t kill that weakened soul, so they are stuck unable to use their most potent (and in WoD, prime) skill. The top geared healer sees their numbers dropping to shit* because weaker absorbs are eaten first, and are ridiculed by clueless derps (this is already happening), and subsequently loses interest in trying to help out lower-geared people. Healers start sniping or recklessly healing to raise their numbers. Newer healers feel heavily discouraged. The new AoE skill invites mindless spam. It really just creates a shitty environment.
* Note, I do NOT promote heal chart number linking. You should only ever refer to heal charts as a tool for analysis. Heal chart numbers on their own mean nothing. See this article for more enlightenment.
In short, I am really unhappy with where disc is now. I used to enjoy healing. I don’t anymore. Numbers can be tweaked. Skill interaction and a dumbing-down of healing is a far huger task. I am worried about the expac.
So my guild downed the Sha of Fear on Sunday. Yay! Incidentally, you can play the above song 3 times and hit the chorus of a 4th repeat before that stupid boss dies. I know. I counted.
For the final boss in a raiding tier, it’s a completely underwhelming and irritating fight. I mean, feel free to watch it and see:
Ha. Yeah. You totally didn’t watch that whole thing – I wouldn’t have either, and it’s a video of ME.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy that we downed him (though irked at myself for doing Karasang and Townlong on my paladin instead of my priest, so now I have to go back and do quests again to kill the Shas of Despair and Junkfood or whatever to get my raid title). I am not, however, looking forward to doing him next week for farm.
Here is my issue with this fight:
– First, if you’ve done it on LFR, you basically have done it on normal. The mechanics are exactly the same; the numbers are just kicked up a notch. So, there isn’t really an extra element, mechanically, to deal with – to me, that’s a let down.
– Second, the few mechanics that the fight has are really easy. Don’t stand in shit on the ground. Stand behind pillars when the panda is at 20%. Kill adds when you have the debuff from killing panda. Stand in cone when debuff is gone. That is it. It is REALLY easy.
– Third, however, is if anyone messes up on those mechanics, you’re wiping. Because of how your group gets split up, you don’t have leeway for anyone to die unless you have INCREDIBLE dps, or you won’t kill the panda quickly enough to get back in time for cackle, and then the boss just starts 1-shotting everyone because there’s nobody in range for him to tank. You can hope for a brez, but half the time your brezzer(s) will be in the other group or in the wrong pagoda.
– Fourth, your team is split up for basically 90% of the fight. This means that if people ARE messing up those mechanics, you won’t even see it half the time. I literally NEVER saw when people were dying – I’d just see them suddenly dead and hear the raid lead sigh and say, “Wipe it.” This kind of design is bad bad bad for team morale, as it’s a lot easier to get irritated and frustrated with people if you aren’t even seeing what they are tripping up on. There’s just also an emotional change, I think, that you feel in a fight when you aren’t really WITH half of your team. I actually felt a bit lonely without the other half of my healing team.
– Fifth, the fight is LONG. Nearly 15 minutes. That’s insane. You dedicate a lot of time to each pull, and that wears on people. We bloodlusted twice. I started fear warding myself as a joke to pass the time. As a side note, priests – shadowfiend shares a perfect cooldown with cackle, so pop it on the panda each time to help your dps team out.
– Sixth, and my biggest issue with the Sha of Fear, is that it is monotonous. You go through one mechanic in the first 3 minutes, and then you repeat that 5 times. There is NOTHING that changes the entire fight. Deathwing used a similar setup but HE GOT HARDER EACH PLATFORM. There is no rampup with the Sha, nor are there any phase transitions or extra elements to juggle as you push him lower. It’s basically 10 superfluous minutes of not fucking up.
Yay! Dead. FINALLY. We didn’t fuck up 🙂
Not fucking up a static setup is far, far, far less exciting and fun than actively doing things to culminate in a win. Another fight with only one phase, Stone Guards – the very first fight in this tier – was more exciting than the ultimate boss, because Stone Guards gives us a continually increasing number of tasks to handle: the mines keep going off, littering the floor with more and more pitfalls. Chains and puddles mean that players have to dance around these obstacles, while maintaining heavy situational awareness. At some point, the lead will probably make a call to clear chains or clean up mines, and there will be a quick scramble to create breathing room while the tank juggles an overload.
In short, shit gets harder the longer the fight goes on. You feel a mounting sense of pressure and the fight gets more hectic. Small mistakes add up and you push more, hoping you can just hit hard enough, just heal fast enough, just keep going and hang on to down the boss before the slip-ups overwhelm you. There is tense anticipation, true excitement and shouts of palpable relief when you finally manage to succeed. To me, that’s a great fight.
Sha of Fear is not that. You could take away 10 minutes of it, and the fight would be unchanged. There isn’t even any long-term concern over resource management, because of the orbs and their mana return. The fight at 3 minutes in is exactly the same as the fight 10 minutes later.
I have to wonder what exactly Blizzard was aiming for with this fight. It seems to be a complete dud, but perhaps I am missing something essential and vital that I just didn’t experience during our pulls (I only heal right now, so my view is from that side of things). I hear it’s much harder and more exciting on heroic, but I don’t think “It’s way cool on heroic” is a valid excuse for a poor version on normal.
I think a simple change or two could have made this fight a lot more epic. Have the difficulty increase as the fight goes on, even if that just means tweaking damage so it ramps up over the fight’s duration. Maybe increase the number of adds that spawn; by the end, players would have to leave a good handful of them up, and focus on hectic avoidance of their ground effects. Have the cackles come sooner and sooner. Have a second type of cackle (an ominous chortle?) where something else happens in the pavilion (even if it’s just a RP change ala brain room with Yogg-Saron). Have an ominous giggle where you just swoop around on a baby sha taking damage for a while. Ok, so maybe I really just wanted to fly around on the baby shas more….They really did do something right with the animation for that part. The movement feels awesome (why can’t the rocketway in Azshara feel that fast and swoopy?).
In any case, anyone else out there downed this guy? What did you think about it? Any thoughts to how he could have been spiced up?
You may have heard the recent news about e-theft; in case you haven’t here’s a quick re-cap: Two boys in the Netherlands physically attacked (in the real world) a third to get to acquire items in RuneScape. The verdict? On top of assault, they were guilty of theft. This is only the latest in a series of similar rulings establishing precedent for real world value for online concepts.
The notion that items which exist solely on the Internet still have some intrinsic real world value is not a new one. You might recall the virtual island which sold for nearly $30,000 several years ago, or the Supreme Court ruling over ownership of domain names. However, this case is unique in that it’s not tens of thousands (or more) of dollars at stake here. It’s basically the equivalent of two kids beating up another to get his prized baseball card – and the courts are recognizing this as just as valid an issue, despite the fact that the stolen item exists solely in a game.
I VALUE MY DARN FULL MALEVOLENT GEAR OMG
The ramifications are interesting. IRE‘s EULA provides a solid blanket of cover, ensuring that items such as credits and artifacts are always protected, while items you acquire in-game are subject to game world theft, subject to the individual game’s rules. However, what does this say about the value of our characters themselves and the items they hold? Do they now have a real world or monetary worth? Can items which exist solely in the virtual ether have any sort of price tag attached to them, or are they just intangible abstracts?
An intriguing way to look at this is to consider what in itself denotes value. Basic Econ 101 courses look at real world goods in this way, assessing factors which contribute to an item’s value. One theory suggests that value derives from the inherent costs of production. For items which exist solely online, however, the need for labor and materials is completely absent – a virtual sword doesn’t require a smith’s time or iron ore to make, just like a house in Achaea’s subdivision doesn’t need masons and stone to actually build. Yet these can be highly desired things to acquire in games, so there is obviously something else which plays into how much an e-item is worth – a more subjective scale of perceived use and desirability.
For the most part, items fall into three categories, although there is understandable interlap: utility, enjoyment and rarity. A rune for your blade or a set of wings, a special design for your unicorn in Avalon, or a meta gem in WoW – are all clear examples of items which are highly valued for their utility. These items augment your fighting or greatly ease your travel through the land, and carry high price tags which players consider worth paying because of how useful they are. A house one can roleplay within or a fancy mount, on the other hand, would be an item considered valuable because of the enjoyment factor it contributes to. These types of items often are acquired more for roleplay or sentimental purposes. Finally, rare items, such as prizes earned through events or promotions, or pets which have a very low chance or spawning, are valued primarily because other people don’t have them, or need them and find them hard to acquire.
Artifact auctions provide a great example of this sort of valuation in practice. Aetolia, for example, is currently holding a unique type of auction, where several of the items can only be bid on with special tokens which players acquired in an earlier promotion. One of the items, a torc which gives the Druid vitality skill, currently has a very high bid, due to how useful the ability is perceived to be in combat. Another item, though, is a special traveling house, and is also rising high up on the bid list, because of the “fun factor” many see in driving a gypsy wagon around. The currency itself, finally, is a great demonstration of the notion of rarity – before the items were announced, most people didn’t value the tokens that highly and they sold for rather low prices. Now, however, that the auction is underway and people need the tokens (and the amount available is becoming more scarce) the price these are being traded for is skyrocketing.
It’s somewhat fascinating how the game world can mirror the real one, but with its own distinct spin put on it. Without the fetters of some real world constraints, such as production and material costs, other aspects of the economy come to the forefront, making for a interesting system to sit back and observe.
How about you? What items do you most value in your game of choice, and why?
is the increasing size of the game killing subscribers with inferior machines?
No. WoW is still very accessible from very aged computers. The size of the game has very little to do with any as well, as long as the graphic settings are low the game could be three times the size it is right now and it’d still function fine.
It’s a fairly relevant topic for me. You see, I don’t have a video card. In Guild Wars 2, I joke that I have a super deluxe in-built realistic physics engine. My friends all kinda raised their eyebrows, until they saw my computer at our New Years’ GW2 LAN party: every time I ran anywhere, my turns would translate momentum from the direction I had been travelling in and if I stopped running my character would jog a step or two before fully halting. It makes doing jump puzzles impossible, but it actually does add an (inadvertent) layer of realism to my toon’s movement. Still, it’s crappy graphics. The game looks pixelated and grainy, and WoW – while less demanding – is often hardly better. I run at about 10 fps in raids. All of my settings are as low as low can be, except for view distance in battlegrounds (hey, I gotta be able to see Gold Mine from Lumbermill!).
I’m also my guild’s top healer. Granted, we’re not a hardcore progression team, but we did just down the first boss in Terrace, so we’re not a throwaway guild either. My game is not as pretty as…pretty much anyone else’s…but, to be honest, I find that helps half the time for avoiding crap on the ground. I used my live-in-arms-warrior’s computer while he was back east visiting family and I was dazzled and almost a bit overwhelmed by all the shiny, pretty, glaring spell effects. I may be part magpie. However, I can see the merit of toning all that down (except for certain encounters, like BoT’s Valiona which had to be hotfixed so low graphic settings could even SEE the black circles) to make it easier to see the really vital stuff, like void zones.
Plus, if you have really shitty graphics, it makes gathering quests (and sometimes PvP) cool in an almost-cheating-it’s-kinda-that-great way, since all the ground clutter phases out of view unless you are right on top of it. This means that you can essentially see through the world and view the actual quest elements and other players. Boxes, rocks, plants – bam, gone! Great for things like hunting for cloud serpent eggs; all the foliage vanishes, but the eggs are interactable objects, so they remain visible.
I mean, really, what stuff IS actually important to see? As a priest, I like being able to see who has bubble and aegis at a glance, but that’s really only vital in PvP (both for keeping them ON my team and for dispelling them FROM enemy teams!). In raids, I tend to be keeping my eyes more on health meters, however, and those display who’s got bubble AND how long their weakened soul is. I don’t really NEED to see my spells themselves being cast. Now, don’t get me wrong, it’d feel weird if my character just sat there, but seeing sparkles shoot out of my hands is not necessary to gameplay – all I really need from that end is a cast bar to let me know that spells are actually being cast. Technically I don’t NEED the visuals of it.
However, there’s a reason gaming moved on from text-based into graphical, afterall (hint: it involves the graphics). A game where all of the visuals are pared down is not an aesthetically pleasing one. Think about it – when you picked up your first MMO, there was probably a moment of awe, simply based on what you were seeing. I know there was for me: I came to WoW from text-based MUDs and to suddenly SEE all of the game in dancing, vibrant colors and 3-d image was jaw-dropping.
General MUD gameplay. Talking to another player and viewing /g
MUD combat and part of the in-game mapping system
An ASCII firework!
Those above? That’s what a MUD looks like. You might get some ASCII image, like the “map” at the bottom of the second (yes, we use THAT to navigate) or even some more flashy things like ASCII fireworks of a nyancat. However, that’s as advanced as you get, graphically. It’s like being stuck in 1980, visually, in a MUD. So to suddenly load WoW and SEE my character (instead of just imagine her) and SEE her casting spells…that was incredible. It’s not much of a leap to assume that it was a similar experience for many people trying MMOs for the first time, and there is no doubt in my mind that part of what makes a game popular is its graphics – but very firmly only part.
Graphics alone don’t make (or break) a game. RIFT, for example, had stunning graphics, but a lack of distinctly unique gameplay prevented it from becoming the WoWKiller it was predicted to be. Many Asian MMOs have gorgeous graphics, but overly-grindy (to Western audiences) gameplay prevents them from getting a foothold in the US and EU market. On the other end of the spectrum, you have the runaway success of Minecraft and its 16-bit world.
In my opinion, it comes back to that first experience I had with WoW. Not only was I seeing the game world, I was seeing MY character. I had given her red hair, like me, and, to this day, I remember what it looked like to watch her run around and cast spells. I identified with my avatar and formed an attachment to her visual representation. Now, that kind of visual identity transcends whether the game even has graphics; it’s just easier in an MMO. In MUDs, many players went out of their way to visualize their characters: avatars and signatures for forums, a paragraph describing how the character looks, even real life drawings to depict the character. One of the biggest ways to make money in the IRE games, for example, is drawing pictures IRL for other players. I know, personally, because I had DOZENS made of my little Imp.
The difference between a MMO and a MUD is that the ENTIRE world is there for you to see in a MMO. In a MUD, you have to imagine the game world, and immersion stems from other sources, such as reading the description of a room, or reading what an NPC says, or reading another character’s emotes (it involves a lot of reading, is what I’m getting at). In a MMO, it’s right there before you. You drink it in and are instantly immersed; that type of game magic is what drew so many to try out MMOs and shot the popularity of multiplayer games from the thousands into the millions.
…but at the same time, that quick, in-your-face immersion dulls you to its very power.
In a MUD, you are drawn in to the story and the mental pictures you, yourself, are painting. That doesn’t mean that you read the text for every time you cast a fireball. It’s the same line of words, and you cast hundreds of fireballs every time you go out grinding. You tune it out, just as MMO players tune out basic cast animations to focus on what is DIFFERENT. It’s the same concept of our brain tuning out white noise or ignoring the sight of our own nose in front of us. Basically, stuff that is repetitive and the same gets relegated to the back of our notice, so we can pay attention to changes.
I’d argue, however, that after a point, the very gameworld becomes background noise. When you are raiding or capturing a flag, you aren’t focusing on the cool architecture of the room or the pretty trees surrounding the base. You are looking on the ground for void zones or watching an enemy cast bar for polymorph. MUDs are similar: when you first start playing you walk around reading every room description. Eventually, you just turn on BRIEF and get just the name of the room and the exits as you run around the game.
Verbose and then brief room descriptions in a MUD (my spaceship in Lusternia)
In short, you focus on the game’s mechanics and gameplay, and the immersive aspects (like graphics or descriptions) only really factor in as an occasional “yeah, that’s nice” or when you consider how well they are letting you see stuff like enemy AoE. In both cases, there are definitely moments where you can be drawn back into the game world. It might be a particularly beautiful vista in WoW or an especially unique room name in a MUD prompting you to read the room’s description. And some players who are focused heavily on roleplay may not even leave the heavy immersion behind in the first place. But the majority of players tend to concentrate on the gameplay itself when involved in tasks like raiding or PvP. I guess I’m saying that graphics don’t really matter for core gameplay, as long as they are good (and fast) enough to let you see what you need to. Having graphics, period, has helped draw many new players to MMOs, but having insane graphics won’t make up for subpar mechanics or design, because players become essentially immune to the visuals when they are engrossed in high-attention gameplay.
All of the above being said, playing low graphics does make for some amusing anecdotes. For example, when xmog came out, I said I wanted a halo or a crown or something pretty, so a guildmate took me to BRD and I got the Circle of Flame. “Oooh!” I thought. “A red gem hanging above my head!” and proceeded to xmog every outfit ever with it for a year or so.
See? There’s a little red gem hanging over my head! (Squint your eyes and zoom in; it may help) Then, a few weeks ago, I came to bug my boyfriend’s toon by mimicking him as he ran around doing stuff (we’re mature adults like that)…and I completely froze, staring at his screen.
“What…what is that?!” I stammered.
“What is what?” he replied, turning to face me in real life.
I pointed at his screen. “That!” I exclaimed, circling my toon’s head on his screen. “My head is on FIRE!”
He stared blankly back at me. I mean, I’m a goof, but I think he was a bit concerned.
“It’s…your…armor…?” he suggested.
“Since WHEN?!”
Turns out, the actual visual for the circle of fire is – shockingly – a circle. Of fire. Go figure. After a few minutes of being weirded out by my (from my view) new wreath of flames, I decided I liked the look quite a bit, and began demanding that he show me myself just so I could admire my toon in high res. In a way, I feel like I’m back at square one, knocked out of my jaded function-over-form paradigm from the last few years to find myself enthralled simply by the image of my character, shining away like a pretty little pyrotechnic elf.
Pretty fire….
…Damn. Now I want a video card, and Christmas JUST passed.
I just read a great post over at game developer Psychochild’s blog. In it, he addresses various issues plaguing Guild Wars 2’s economy. Guildwar 2’s failed economy is part of why I didn’t stick around there – I love being able to be a crafter and merchant and make money. When I was playing, however, crafting was a straight gold sink and the trading post was a clusterfudge.
Here are my impressions on what went wrong with the GW2 trading post:
– Worldwide Trading Post: by not limiting this to smaller markets of individual servers, it becomes very hard for individuals or groups of people to change the market prices. This may seem good, but what it means is that the greater common denominator of clueless sellers wins out, as you can see in the Trading Post, to the point where they had to implement a feature so you couldn’t sell items below their freaking vendor price! Attempting to tweak market prices is simply not possible on a scale this large without the coordination of a LOT of players with a LOT of gold.
– Anywhere access to the Trading Post: This is a huge problem. While it seems great to a questing player to be able to toss up junk on the TP without having to go there in person, what it means is that people are using the TP as a mobile vendor to sell whatever is in their inventory. There is no thought or strategy to the postings, and people don’t care if the items are sold far below market value; they just want them out of their inventory. Items then bypass a basic auction house price floor – without the mobile trading post, people would have to decide if it is worth selling an item to a vendor or on the trading post. Convenience overrules this type of decision. ANet’s later addition of a “minimum price” on the TP didn’t really fix this. It just bumped the price floor up.
– Deceptive/Unwieldly UI: The trading post has a high chunk of hidden costs built into it, which seem designed to actually discourage people from using it to build up a healthy server economy. In addition to the cost you are told about, there is also another chunk of money taken out if you sell the item (I think it’s 15%; it’s been a while since I read ANet forums). These fees also scale really badly, especially at the low end of price ranges. The lack of expiry time on auctions and the hidden additional costs for using the TP combine with an awkward UI to make it a headache to really use beyond casually. It’s hard to make money by buying out and relisting (and thus bumping prices up) due to the heavy listing costs. Sure, you lose money by doing this normally – but when the listing fee costs nearly half as much as the item, it’s not worth it.
There might be further problems with the ease of gathering and drop rates for items, however I think limiting TP access would actually go a decent ways towards addressing that. When players actually have to make decisions about inventory, gathering becomes a more specialized job. As is, everyone can just gather as they go and post raw mats up when their inventory gets full. If that was disallowed and you had to plan how to unload your collected mats, many players would drop out of the gathering market, deeming the time:profit ratio not worth it. Supply would go down and prices would naturally rise.
In short, I get the feeling that the whole thing was designed by someone who hates auction house players and wanted to make a system to “prevent” them from playing the market. It’s expensive to use the market as a merchant, the market is far too easy to use to just unthinkingly slap up items and the lack of an expiry date means that the low priced auctions just keep building up – and it’s not worth it financially to buy them out, since you can’t hope to control a global market. The problem is…we need auction house players. These players keep the economy vibrant and help ensure items retain value.
Many people probably intensely dislike reading that, but auction house players can actually be an asset to a healthy economy. Yes, some of them are jerks and drive out others from the market – but without pressure to push prices upwards, we see situations where constant undercuts drive prices down. There needs to be a counterbalance pushing upwards as well and auction house players provide a stable one.
a little bit of everything all of the time 