Monthly Archives: January 2012

Harry Should Have Stayed Home

Posted on by

I tend to harp on how the “major” authors today are actually quite bad.  Dan Brown and JK Rowling are the two prime examples.  I wanted to go over exactly why JK is a bad author.  Note that author is different than story teller.  Both are good at it, the flow is decent and the story hooks.  The author part is where the story actually makes any amount of sense and the writing is above a grade 10 level.

So, Harry Potter, the best mediocre wizard in the world.  The second coming.  It’s said quite clearly in the books that he’s a below average student with no real aptitudes other than getting into trouble.  My argument, for this post, is that nearly all the events of every book could have been avoided if Harry had listened to his elders and stayed put on his butt.

Philosopher’s Stone: Voldemort wants the stone.  It’s well hidden in a mirror that only Harry can use.  Harry uses it instead of letting the wizards with hundreds of years experience take care of the problem.  Actually comes inches from giving it to the bad guy.

Chamber of Secrets: Voldemort is coming out from a book that Ginny has.  The basilisk is killing people.  Harry hides the fact that he’s been talking to a book and nearly gets killed by a spider for it.  He then deduces where the entrance is, runs down and gets saved by a bird.  Twice.

Prisoner of Azkaban: The worst book by far.  Anyways, he’s to save a bird and his uncle from death.  Fails at both.  Needs a friend and a time travelling device to do it.  Oh, you can save a bird but you can’t save the most powerful wizard of all time with it?  Why is Voldemort looking for anything but this time turner thing?

Goblet of Fire: He’s put into a tournament without wanting to be there.  Needs huge help to pass the first test, a gift to pass the second and barely scratches through the third only to get the top of the class wizard killed in the process.  If he had never gone into the tournament or simply bailed within it, Voldemort would never have his blood and never been born again.

Order of the Phoenix: How many times is Harry told not to go searching for the memory?  What does he do?  He goes searching, finds it and gets his uncle killed.

Half Blood Prince: Ok, so this one he basically is the second character next to Dumbledore, a gopher for all purposes.  Still, he doesn’t listen and disturbs the water, further weakening his mentor.  He does listen towards the end though and lets his pal get shot off a roof.  What, a time turner would have saved him?  Really?

Deathly Hallows: Holy crap.  Everything Harry tries to do here ends up killing someone.  His slave, his friends, his teachers, everyone seems to bite the bullet.  Except the Malfoys.  Oh, the last fight?  He dies, is reborn and wins due to a hidden technicality based on wand ownership. Something Sherlock Holmes would raise an eyebrow on.

 

From day 1, if Harry had kept his nose down and followed the “rules” no one would have died, no arch-evil enemy would have been respawned, no huge war, just simple peace with one retarded gang of evil people in places of power.  I mean really, the Malfoys are still alive at the end and they were the biggest enemies through all 7 books.  In a future post I’ll show how Harry actually didn’t succeed at anything in the books.  Everything was either pure luck, a gift, a friend or a hidden gotcha Rowling used to get out of a painted corner.  Time Turner, really?  To save a bird?

WoW Going Free to Play?

Posted on by

First, let’s look at the games on the market that are subscription based:

  1. World of Warcraft (7 years)
  2. EvE (5 years)
  3. Rift (1 year)
  4. Star Wars Old Republic (1 month)

Let’s look at the games that swapped to Free to Play, from subscription, in recent years.

  1. Dungeons and Dragons
  2. Lord of the Rings
  3. Everquest
  4. Everquest 2
  5. Star Trek Online
  6. Age of Conan
  7. DC Online
  8. Champions Online
  9. Fallen Earth

I think it’s fair to say that the subscription model is simply dated and saturated.  There are only so many people willing to pay a fixed fee for MMOs when there’s viable competition with no fixed fee.  This in turn makes you wonder if/when WoW will swap to F2P as well.  The pokemon expansion sure does sound like it would work well for F2P or at least microtransactions.  There are plenty of F2P games that offer the exact same experience with no monthly cost.

I think the major difference between the first 4 games is perceived value for the price.  WoW updates at a snail’s pace, 3 content patches per expansion, every 18-24 months.  EvE is even slower but the content is player driven and if you play the game “right” you can play for free.  Rift has had 7 content patches and it’s not even a year old yet.  SW had it’s first patch after a month.  If I was to compare them all, it sure would make you wonder why I would sub to WoW instead of the other three – at least in terms of value.

So my guess is that before WoW’s next expansion there will be a new business model.  That will include more microtransactions, which will push another 25% of the player base to other games.  WoW will go F2P within 2 years.

Diablo 3 Gold Making

Posted on by

You know those gold guides for WoW where there really wasn’t anything new in them?  Just sound market sense?  Well, the same guy who did big with WoW is doing it for Diablo 3.

In WoW (and Rift too actually) I used spreadsheets to figure out costs and profits.  I found out the base cost of making all my glyphs and if I could make 20 gold per, I would make it.  It took a while to get some good numbers to base and get all the skills ready but I tried it for a month and made over 200K gold back in Lich King.  Consider that a player, starting from scratch, to acquire all skills and all mounts and some gear would probably need about 5K total (due to cash taken while leveling) you can see how this was a fair amount.

Anyhow, D3 is going to have an auction house but for real money (as well as fake money).  Blizz will take a cut, so there will be always more money going in than coming out.  Sort of like eBay.  The main difference is that none of the items you buy are real.  So you get into a legal issue where Blizzard will have to either make you sign a waiver saying none of the items are yours, even if you bought them OR they will have to insure items in game.  Which do you think they’ll do?

The point remains that people will spend real money to buy things, just like they did in Diablo 2 and most MMOs.  This time, Blizz will ensure they get a cut and essentially set a ceiling for gold farmers.  The bottom will still be gold farmers though.  That’s not going away – especially with the quality of bots today.

Ironically the person selling the guides was banned from D3 beta for selling the guides.  He can’t make money off the game during beta.  An interesting proposition.

Imperial Agent

Posted on by

So I started yet another alt since it’s still practically impossible to get any group going at 50.  I already have a 50 Sith Inquisitor (mage or healer) and a Bounty Hunter (mid-range tank).  I decided to try an Imperial Agent – you know, the suits running the starships?  They have two advanced classes, Sniper (long range DPS) and Operative (mid range DPS or Heals).

First, the play style.  You have a limited energy bar, it regens automatically but at different rates if you have less than 60%.  More = faster.  Bounty Hunter is the same.  This makes it so spamming skills does not work. Which, technically, would make you a horrible emergency healer compared to an Inquisitor.  Anyways, you start off with ranged attacks and 1 melee attack.  Your biggest move requires you to be crouched.  Cool I’m thinking.  I hit 10, take Operative and all of a sudden, I no longer have any worthwhile ranged moves.  I’ve turned into a Rogue, having to be behind the target.  Since most combat is against 3 players, sure does make it hard to live through it!  By far the hardest character to play and survive with.

Story next.  The class quest is probably the best so far.  You actually feel involved as a spy and it makes sense.  Either they patched some stuff out or I wasn’t high enough level but I missed a good half-dozen quests on my way to 16.  I have played a  solid dozen characters to 25 (though most inquisitors during the beta) so it’s weird not having those around.  I’m about 2 levels under where I should be and that’s concerning.  My Bounty Hunter wasn’t 50 when she finished her last quest and I was resting in cantinas for extra experience every log out.

Companion now.  The first one – and the first one for each class is the one you should use forever – is a ranged tank.  A piss-poor ranged tank.  Wears light armor and has no extra shielding, so if I end up against anything tougher than 3 normals, she’s dead.  With other classes, taking an elite was hard but 90% doable.  Now I die about 50% of the time because the tank simply cannot tank.  Plus the character looks cool but has a horribad story.

Cool tidbit, SWTOR emailed me when my character hit 10.  I didn’t get that for the other classes so maybe this one needs explaining to players?  I do know that the only people playing IA are in PvP and that you’d be lucky to find one sniper in 100 players.  A pure class (especially DPS) is dead in 2012.  WoW’s dual classes killed them (Pandas have 3 classes) and Rift’s ability to have 2-3 roles and 5 builds at any given time has changed the landscape of MMOs.

Anyways, it’s an interesting class where the story is better than the playstyle.  A lot better.  Which is pretty much the polar opposite of the Bounty Hunter.  Wonder which one people will want to play at 50 when the story is over?

More !

Posted on by

The internet is full of interesting things!

Total Biscuit has an interview with the lead designer on end game content for SWTOR.  The answers given are great I’m just curious as to why they aren’t currently in game.  Just more fuel that the game didn’t launch when it was ready.  Still, it’s nice to hear stuff is planned and those plans make sense.

WoW news again!  Blessing of Kings (a hardcore raider) has a nice post about how Blizzard tried to appease the hardcore and lose 2 million subscribers.  Ipso facto, hardcore raiders are not the target demographic for WoW from a business perspective.  My previous post explaining how the LFR (looking for raid) tool has helped WoW players see content (and thus provide value for effort for Blizzard) is a shinning example of this.  Sort of like a company that spends 90% of it’s time developing something that only 1% of its clients will use and sells it at the same price.  Stupid.

Posted in WoW

SWTOR Population Counts

Posted on by

Here’s an interesting site TORStatus.  I play on Sith Meditation Sphere.

The numbers are basically a scale of 1-5 based on BioWare’s description of server population – Light to Full.  My server is usually Standard with a few spots of Light.  When I started it was full a lot of time time and heavy the rest.  I’m not sure if BW changed the numbers behind the words, perhaps that’s it.  The metrics show that there’s a 5-10% drop in clients since last week and I think that number will increase next week due to subs coming up.

Anyhow, I was on last night in prime time and there were less than 130 people on the Fleet.  It took me a half hour to get a group and it wasn’t a hard mode.  Then it took me 10 minutes to get to the dungeon.  I was on the fleet so I had to Leave Fleet -> Enter Ship Zone -> Enter Ship & Fly to Ilum -> Zone into dock -> Zone into Orbital Station -> Zone into Ilum & run to instance -> Zone into instance.  Each arrow is a loading screen.  Let’s compare to WoW.  I want to group, I press the LFG group and I’m ported to the dungeon.  One loading screen.  In Rift, I press the tool, I’m ported to the dungeon.  In either of them if I didn’t use the tool I would fly (mount or flighpoint) to the dungeon and zone in.

All in, it took nearly an hour from the time I logged on til the time I killed the first bad guy in the zone.  That’s a tad too much.

WoW Patch 4.3

Posted on by

World of Warcraft released its final patch for this expansion (4.3) on November 30th, 2011.  So we’re a few days short of the 2 month mark.  MMO-Champion has break downs of the success with data charts and whatnot.  Let’s go over the recent one.

First, some basic numbers.  WoW has about 10 million active players, based on their financials.  A guild attempt at a raid has 10 or 25 players, with the latter usually being a bit easier.  100 guilds have defeated Heroic Madness, the most recent hard-mode raid, after 2 months.  So in the best case, 2500 people out of 10,000,000 have completed the content.  That’s 0.025% of all players.  Ok.

Just the basic raid itself has interesting numbers.  1 month after the raid launched, 4% of players had completed it on normal and 34% had completed it on easy-mode (LFR).  The previous raid tier didn’t have easy mode and after months of it being 0ut, and nerfed to heck, only 17% of the entire population’s characters (players can have more than 1 character) had completed it.

All of that to say that Hard Mode raids are statistically a non-issue.  One quarter of a percent of people actually bother with them.  Less than 15% bother with normal mode, even months after release.  Easy-mode however gets 1/3 of all players, seemingly a worthwhile investment.

I’ve said it for a bit but hardcore players are dead and hardcore gaming is not mainstream.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in WoW

A Month!

Posted on by

Been sick for over a month and just finally getting over it.  I have a dislike for the holidays as well, they never really feel like holidays.

SWTOR

So I hit 50 with my Sorcerer a while ago and there was nothing to do since I was one of 20 on my server.  I then leveled a Bounty Hunter and now there’s about 50 people at level 50.  At peak time, there are 120 people in the “zone to find people”, which includes all levels. I do see people looking for groups, so tonight I’ll give it a shot and see.

Having leveled two evil characters on the empire, I can say that 90% of the content is identical but that extra 10% has nothing to do with fun bosses and mechanics, it’s just different cutscenes.  And poorly done on the Bounty Hunter too.  Sorcerers have a kick ass story and the ending is truly great.  But really, it’s Star Wars.  You know the magic using guys are going to be better.

Interestingly, though not surprisingly, there is a massive imbalance between Republic and Empire players, with 3-4x the amount on the Empire side.  I saw this in beta.  When classes are identical in nearly every respect and character avatars are all humans (though red or green or blue), the only thing pushing you to a faction is story and the dark side is so much better it isn’t funny.  Not sure how they are going to fix that.  Also interesting is that players are not taking the pure DPS classes.  When every class can DPS within 5% of each other, why in the world would you take a pure DPS class?  Take a tank or healer who can also DPS.  This is even worse for the melee DPS class in a game that hugely favors ranged attacks.  Quite stupid planning.

Anyhow, the gameplay from 1-49 is good and solid.  Crafting makes sense in that context, so do upgrades.  It’s KOTOR3 all the way and you can play alone without any problems.  50 is pure garbage where crafting skills mean nothing, there’s no way to find a group other than standing in 1 zone (out of ~20) and spamming chat, raids and dungeons are bugged and the best items in the game are worse statistically than the 2nd best. BW clearly has no experience in making MMOs and they have released a game that is simply not ready.  Oh, their test servers have no level 50s and the last patch was a high level content patch.  Want to know how that went?

Games

Sort of on the same idea is Raph Koster’s recent post – Narrative is not a Game Mechanic.  The argument that fancy screens and movies where you sit and watch do nothing different than putting in a DVD and eating a bowl of popcorn.  Once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it.  Using his example of Batman – Arkham City, there are quite a few instances where you to do X in Y amount of time to see a 30 second clip (thankfully there are many more spots where that’s not the case, play the game!).  If the entire game was doing X in Y for a big Z, you’d probably enjoy it the first time but not the second.  Especially if that took 20 hours to do the first time (cough FF-13).  SW is in that group where the story is great the first time but the mechanics are the same as in every other game. Once you’ve done X in Y 10 times, do you really want to do it again 1000 more times?