However, I am back in it now that it has been re-born as a Free-to-Play (F2P) title.  Not because it is now playable without a cover charge as I have a lifetime account, but because it feels fresh.  It feels new, and in parts it feels like a different game.  One that is more caring of my time.  I like that.  There is so much to learn, but I think that many LOTRO posts will be coming in the future.  I saw a few blogger friends also in-game so hopefully they will speak on such things as well. (Oh look, during editing I see one has!)

Last night I was a little overwhelmed.  Dozens of titles splashed across my screen.  I was gaining Turbine Points (“TP,” the cash shop currency) at an irregularly weird rate, and I heard that my points I racked up the past few months might take a bit to show up.  I checked out the slick new dungeon grouping system (please make a collapsible menu), and I did a quick Rift skirmish with a few friends.  Last night’s play felt like walking into a restaurant and getting free samples of the coming meal before I am even seated.  Then when I sit down to look at the menu it’s too hard to make one choice.  I am excited about LOTRO, and I can’t wait to start digging deeper in to all the changes.

–Ravious

LOTRO – Out of MMO Storage is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Veteran players forget this. You know what to do because you have done it twenty times, and maybe the current design even feels intuitive because you know what the developers were planning, how the system has evolved over several years, and how it interacts with or mirrors other systems. You will hear people decry the ignorance of newcomers; why can they not go through a simple 20-step process across only four screens where only two of the commands are undocumented? And look, if you just install these two mods, rebind these keys, and change these settings, that dungeon is easy mode.

This relates to my refrain from Gordon Walton that hardcore gamers will crawl through barbed wire to reach the fun while most of the market will not put up with that crap. There are virtues in that, as it allows quicker iterative development and lets players get a closer connection to the game and its development. But it means having an unpolished game with sharp edges and pitfalls. The new guy did not expect pits of broken glass on the path to the picnic. That you know the workarounds does not mean that there are not things to be worked around. That someone does not want to learn them all does not make him lazy, at least not in a bad way; I pay to play, I get paid to work.

Anti-social behavior in the game is also designed in. If players keep doing the same horrible things, game design probably encourages it. If the game rewards sociopathic behavior in groups, you will see more of it. Designers do not intend to reward people for acting against the interests of their groupmates, but game designs certainly do so.

If the players are not playing your game how you want them to, you should look at what the design encourages them to do. And remember that other design issues may also be giving people trouble in playing your game at all.

: Zubon

User Error and Design Error is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I severely digress… although there was not that much news, there was lots of design-level discussion.  My favorite was a Guild Wars 2 Event workshop where a small amount of fans came to learn about the event system and then work together in a brainstorming session to create an event system.  Oh, and some nice person recorded the whole thing.  The developers at PAX seem very open, and it is refreshing hearing from them instead of through the marketing grist-mill.

Okay, so the roads after PAX, or more specifically the two MMO roads after PAX.  It’s no surprise that the two MMOs that are seen as so big they auto-compete are Guild Wars 2 and Star Wars: The Old Republic (“SWTOR”).  I am not saying that TERA, Rift, Lego Universe, The Secret World, or any other that I have missed are not going to be great upcoming MMOs with things to offer the MMO genre.  It’s just that their gravitational pull cannot currently (or ever) compete with the two currently unlaunched titles, respectively, from ArenaNet and BioWare.

These two giants are quite dissimilar in design and goals, even though both share a “personal story.”  This difference was never more apparent than from this quote a SWTOR dev gave during PAX:

“There are very traditional roles that you fulfil, multiplayer combat requires that. We’re an MMO, we’re not idiots, we know that you need to have dependencies on others. What we’re trying to do is play a class you really like, and then through your AC choice, choose your playstyle. So so if you play for instance as a sith warrior, you can go very much in the tank direction or you can actually go in the DPS directions. That’s really up to you. So I really like a sith warrior, he’s really awesome, but I don’t like to tank. Ok, that’s fine. You can choose I think the marauder is the more DPS AC on that side. The same is true of all the other classes.”

The SWTOR community echoes and amplifies the quote with one of my favorite responses in the post quoting the above by saying SWTOR “is an honest to god MMO, with tanks and healers and DPS.”  I found this quote to be self-damning since Bartle just wrote a long article about the dead-end bad design that begat the holy trinity.  Even moreso, I think that this quote aims at the heart of Guild Wars 2.  By applying Dogberry logic, they are calling ArenaNet idiots because in Guild Wars 2 the traditional roles have been abolished.  How can idiotic ArenaNet have an MMO with multiplayer combat?!  It’s inconceivable.

However, I don’t want it to be known that I am an ass (anymore than I already have been), and so I am going to helpfully pull one portion of that quote out of context to create a more constructive post. 

We’re an MMO, we know that you need to have dependencies on others.

This is why I think BioWare is creating an MMO aimed at World of Warcraft players, and why ArenaNet is creating an MMO aimed at everybody else.

Normal people (read: not classic MMO players) don’t like dependencies.  Dependencies imply negative reinforcement.  You have to group up because you can’t heal yourself.  You have to group up because you can’t take damage.  You have to group up because you can’t deal damage.  None of these truths are fun to tell anybody when trying to teach someone unaccustomed to MMOs about the party mechanic, the holy trinity, and why we need to wait 20 minutes for a healer.

Dependencies do not create roles!  Or, rather… that’s not true.  Dependencies overly define roles to the point where a ”role” becomes the defining trait.  Roles should be created based on the activities at hand.  Roles should be positively reinforced by what the character can bring to that multiplayer activity. 

Take a look at the Guild Wars 2 elementalist profession with it’s four “stances.”  Each stance puts the elementalist into a different elemental attunement.  Fire attunement allows the elementalist to start doing massive AoE damage.  Air attunement switches the elementalist’s DPS from AoE to single-target.  Water does support and healing, and Earth puts the elementalist in to a tank mode.  That way the elementalist can watch the battlefield to synergize with the multiplayer mass to provide for whatever role is necessary at that time.  The elementalist is watching to help the event or party instead of grouping to negate the elementalist’s dependencies.

It’s a very slight difference when looking at a role built on negatively reinforced dependencies versus a role built on positively reinforced synergies.  It gets even worse because it is rarely so black and white anyway.  Most MMOs take a mixture of both into creating classes and group content.  Yet, it’s the focus that really matters, and Guild Wars 2 and SWTOR seem to really have a different focus in this regard.  The battle of these two giants is truly old versus new in the sense of role definition.  Personally I’d rather be looking for players rather than roles.  Caveat lector.

–Ravious
good men and true

The Roads After PAX is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

: Zubon

As a LotRO Hunter, I have contributed to that. Why find the dungeon when someone can summon from the campfire?

Changing Times (1) is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

You get used to playing with games that have first-person view or an adjustable camera. Playing some old school (-style) games, I am reminded of how the third-person camera and the interface was used against the player. It is like my earlier post about how the game abstracts, you suspend disbelief, then you are expected to forget that abstraction at some point.

The particular example I am thinking of is having things visible to the character but not the player. We all take advantage of this in third-person view games, looking around corners, above the ceiling, etc. You can see the entire screen, even if your character has a blocked view. But there can be a six-story boss just off-screen, with only a flat plain between you and it, and you will never see it coming. Many game reveled in having power-ups hidden just a bit to the left and right of the screen.

The game of the weekend at Kongregate is Epic Battle Fantasy 3, a Final Fantasy-esque game. There are chests and secret passages hidden behind foreground objects on almost every screen. Some of them are partly visible or have a hint that there must be a secret passage, but others are just invisible. Some of those chests hold equipment you cannot get elsewhere, and there are in-game medals for finding them all (and you need x medals per zone to get to a room with more chests with more exclusive equipment…), so the game encourages a mini-game of pushing up against everything and trying to open invisible chests. Your characters can see the chests and secret passages open in front of them, but they are powerless to tell you. They cannot even cry as they pass by the loot they so desire.

It had not struck me at the time that this is a related issue in Desktop Dungeons. Exploration is very important, but your character can only see next to itself, not down a hallway. Maybe you carry a very weak torch. I proclaimed a fondness for seeing the whole level so you would know if it was worth playing, but of course that is the other side of the absurdity: you can see the entire level, even though there is no way your character could.

Either approach works, first- or third-person view (or third with flexible camera), but it is annoying to have it used against the player. And it feels harder to use first-person view against the player.

: Zubon

Behind the Black is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

: Zubon

LEGO Universe Beta is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

The point is, the issue here is far far worse than many of you think it is. I wish it was an issue of the game being released too early. That’s an easy thing for a company to “fix”. Elemental’s launch is the result of catastrophic poor judgment on my part.

You win back a surprising amount of trust by not acting like the Iraqi information minister. [Commenters say, "no."]

: Zubon

Accepting Responsibility is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

This weekend Love will be free to play for anyone who wants to. All you need to do is download the client(42Mb), un-zip it start love.exe . Then just click “play for free” and you are in.

It wasn’t a game for me, but it might be for you. It certainly is different.

- Ethic

Free Love is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I’ll be watching other new from across the MMO board as well, but hopefully Syp will have a great breakdown as he will be there.  Hopefully this year everybody has built up their Vitamin C caches.  Have fun to all attending!

–Ravious

Good Morning, PAX is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I took on my raid – er, ultramarathon – and completed it in a little over 23 hours. The weather was perfect, the scenery was stunning and the experience was unforgettable but it was tough and apparently about 1 in 4 runners wiped. Many thanks to those who offered well wishes and thoughts after my last post about this.

On a side note, and to try and keep this in relation to MMOs, amongst the tunes I loaded onto my MP3 player in preparation for the event I had the soundtracks to World of Warcraft (and expansions) and EVE Online – for as much as I’m not keen on the gameplay, I love the soundtrack. And, inspired by Zubon, I also had the Half-Life 2 soundtrack to listen to – the event route was annoyingly linear in parts.

Achievement unlocked is a post from: Kill Ten Rats