Monthly Archives: January 2015

Laundry is Fascinating

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Just some random thoughts that came to mind while doing the laundry today.  First interesting factoid, my wife hates laundry and I don’t mind, so we have a deal where she’s not allowed to complain about dirty clothes piling and I can do it when I want.  Deal works just like you think it would.

Socks

As an adult, we have boring socks.  I have maybe 6 types of socks, split between white and black.  It makes getting pairs together somewhat easier and making dress choices that much more as well.

Kids, not so much.  I don’t think they have a matching pair between both of them.  Oh that one has cats and that other one too, but that one is purple and this one is green.  It’s like a goddurn puzzle every time I’m putting stuff through.  Actually, it’s more like building something from IKEA where it sort of looks like the right piece, but it isn’t, and you always end up with spares and the end.  And then you find the matching one 2 months later.

Volume

What weighs more, a ton of feathers or a ton of rocks?  Which one takes up more space?

A solid load of adult clothes is maybe 2 dozen articles, if they are small.  Kids?  They are a quarter the size, so their clothes are the same.  It’s like a basket that doesn’t have a bottom.  And with 2 kids close enough in size, you’re wondering which fits which kid.  Or that it fits them at all.  Stuff it in the drawers, dress em later and find out.  And of course, the stuff that doesn’t somehow ends up back in the wash.

Colors & Choice

Kids have us beat here.  They can wear pretty much any color they want up until their teens, when they actually start caring what others think.  Mis-matched socks, a yellow shirt and purple pants?  Why not?  Birds up top, fish on the bottom, sure!  Frozen and Elmo?  Why not?

Adults get so bland as they grow up, then they have to express themselves with witty t-shirts.  Or be a hipster and have trouble walking up the stairs.

Kids have it good.  Real good.

Boardgames Ahoy

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Somehow, I convinced my wife that a night in with boargames could be a date night.  Well, we did end up at a nice Italian restaurant beforehand (which was good) but the still, we ended up in a game shop and bought a board game.  Some progress!  Actually, one for the adults and another for the squirts.

Also, Star Wars – Imperial Assault is my next guilty purchase.  I love Descent 2 (which is an extension of the old Hero’s Quest game I played to death), so yeah…

Store

The Kessel Run is a store that I happened to notice while driving the other day in my neighborhood.  While I’m not sure how other cities run, Ottawa is a rather stiff town.  It’s Canada’s capital, so it has a lot of bureaucrats but it’s also the country’s IT capital.  Not vidya games, that’s Montreal.  Just plain IT.  Nortel was here before it went kaboom.  Let’s just say that those two character types don’t always see eye to eye, right?

So we’ve been somewhat starved when it comes to geeky outlets.  Hobby stores abound but not geek.  There’s Fandom II that’s been around for years and like 4 blocks from parliament but every other store has come and gone.  Games Workshop has had a dozen stores over the years, never one lasting more than a year.  There’s one other that opened recently, Monopolatte, which is a coffee shop / board game scene.  Busy as all hell, which I think relates to a shift back out of the virtual world into the social.

Kessel Run is sort of like that, minus the food.  Tons of board games, just astounding really.  Then a real kick on the XWing miniatures and Warmachine (similar to War40K).  My wife had been intrigued by what I found online, so we made a pit stop.  Sure enough, one of her old students is working there (the thing with teachers is that ever year they see ~200 new faces, so after a while…everyone knows you.)  Spent 30 minutes looking, then got the 2 games and went through the back room.  Which is a rather large gaming room, where about 10 tables were running an XWing game.  Neato.

The Magic Labyrith

First up was The Magic Labyrinth,a puzzle game for younger folk.  I firmly believe that kid’s games are awesome games for life.  Their simplicity is more about building skills than exercising them.  I still like playing Trouble and Connect 4.

The game is pretty neat.  There’s a board on top that you need to navigate your peon through, to get one of the items laid out.  The catch is that under the board you have a magnetized bearing that can hit the hidden walls beneath.  So you need to remember where those hidden walls are while the items up top move around the board.  More or less walls, depending on the challenge you want.

The wife and I played 3 games and it was a blast.  There’s just something about being next to the goal and hitting a wall on the last move to get you going.

Pandemic

Pandemic is a cooperative board game, which is not something you see that often.  If you’re working together, then these types of games tend to fall on the side of random more so that strategy but due to the mechanics, I think it works out pretty darn well.

Each players has a role (Medic, Scientist, etc…) that has some special feature in the game.  Either you can cure with less actions, move around freely and so on.  This part plays a major factor in the game.

The point is to cure 4 different types of diseases before you a) run out of cards, b) run out of infections or c) create too many epidemics.  You can only have 7 cards in your hand at any time, and you need 5 of the same color to cure a diseases at a research station.  There are a dozen cards of a given color in the deck, so discarding needs to be really thought out, especially if you’re multiple players.  Plus you can increase the difficulty by adding some bad cards to the deck, which really can mess with a game.

Moving around the board is also important as you need to keep the diseases in check to avoid an outbreak.  That part is pretty neat.  The curing aspect, combined with the roles mentioned above, mean that teamwork and communication is key to win.  I’ll write a more involved post later but suffice to say that the game plays pretty differently the more players you have due to the way the cards are distributed.

The good news is that even though we lost a couple matches we figured out what we could do to improve.  One match we clearly dominated and another was down to the wire.  So, random be random, but still fun.

Player vs Class

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I think it says something about Blizz that an ex-dev provides more design feedback than the current crop, at least in terms of overall design intent.  I think the current crop of designers are a little too much in the weeds, personally.   It’s good to take a step back and think about the big picture and how all the pieces fit together.  It’s sort of like walking.  If you spend your time watching your feet rather than where you’re going, you’re never going to get there.

I like reading the various tweets and blue responses about bugs and balance.  That Alchemical Catalysts have next to no use and are a limited to a daily cooldown sure is a head scratcher but to hear a dev say that they agree and need to look into it is disconcerting.

Usually when people design they take a top down approach.  Vision, concept, logic, physical.  More and more detail as you go down.  Then you have someone at each level making sure that each of those individual pockets is lined up with the other ones.  So the person in charge of professions for example, would be responsible that all the professions work similarly and provide some value.  Thematically they should be the same, gather materials, combine materials for effect, use result.  When the combination portion isn’t aligned, where some materials should have value but in fact don’t, then you have a profession with an issue.

I’m not saying it’s easy.  Actually, I’m saying the complete opposite.  I see it all the time.  Developers become incredibly insular to their environment, in particular during crunch time.  All you end up seeing is the trees and not the forest. The leads need to be strong.

And this again falls into more real world examples.  In many organizations, people get promoted to lead because they are a good programmer or developer, or they have experience.  You know what that makes you?  A senior developer, not a leader.  A lead needs to see the big picture and put the pieces together.  They need to match strengths and weaknesses across their team.  In a field like IT, which is heavily populated by people with somewhat limited social skills, these people are rare as all heck.  I think I’d be lucky to find 1 in 100.

And the problem gets worse the more people you have.  A small team can have informal talks and people are tasked with all sorts of work.  A really big project, you might have a guy that only does the RNG system, or a girl that just does terrain.  (Side note: it looks to me like the person who did Nagrand terrain in WoD forgot that Nagrand in BC had flying, then remembered at the end and put in gliders).

But back to the original discussion…

The main question to Greg was about remorse for diluting diversity and complexity to enable more inclusion (a little paraphrased).  And that he doesn’t have a yay/nay answer to me is a good thing.  As long as hybrids think they need to be on par with pure classes, you can’t have specialization.  While you can try to blame the devs in WotLK, you should also point the finger at the devs in BC.  There was a serious point in the expansion where raids were tuned for leatherworking drums and 3+ shamans per team.  If you even considered taking a balanced raid into Sunwell, you were going to have a bad time.

I’m not saying the thought process was wrong; “bring the player and not the class” portion makes sense.  Everyone should bring something but not everyone should bring the same thing.  Tuning and balance would be harder, in order to make more combinations viable.  I think, in the way that Blizzard typically does this, that the pendulum swung a little too far in one direction and that they’ve been unable to get it back since.  If anything, the advent of the DK (and remember, for most of WotLK it was super OP) set an expectation that hybrids were the way forward and that a player should be able to be self-sufficient.  That idea has gotten progressively larger, where in WoD and garrisons, it’s pretty much everywhere.

It’s actually interesting comparing to other themeparks to see how they approach this.  SWTOR is very similar, with massive skill bloat and until Revan, hybrids were amazeballs.  I never quite got those that were “pure DPS” but it was certainly an option.  Everyone has a stun, an interrupt, an AE, a heal and so on… RIFT is based on the concept of hybrids and while there’s always a flavor of the month, there’s a decent balance across all classes.  With only 4 classes, it’s hard to be pigeonholed.  Wildstar and ESO allow you to take a class of sorts, then have a wide array of skills but only a limited amount active at any time.  Maybe you need 2 stuns here and none there.  Hard to balance the skills against each other (ESO in particular had this issue) but the system gives the players tools.

FF14 is a bit different.  It’s a bit like RIFT in that you have many roles (through the classes) but you actively need to level each one on a character.  And at any given time, you are limited in the skills available – like 8-10 total.  Not everyone has a stun and each class tends to bring something rather unique to the game.  I’m curious to see how this lasts long term, what with new classes being added at a rather regular pace but since it’s always the same character, it’s not the world to swap between classes, in particular if they share the same base stats (and therefore gear).  You don’t need an alt.

Most games today are all hybrid but limit the skills available at any given time.  So you can bring the player AND you can bring the class.

Doctor Who, The Simpsons and MMOs

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I thought it was a good title but it actually stems from an Observation Deck post about the Simpsons.  The theory, and one that applies more so to Doctor Who, is that any show of long duration isn’t actually a single show but rather a multitude of shows using the same basic premise/characters.  And really, if you spend a minute to think about it, this applies to nearly every single movie in the past 10 years.  Sequels and reboots.  But those get a clean slate.  Serials (TV shows) do not.

Doctor Who has had “clean breaks” because you know the Doctor dies and is regenerated, they can put in a new actor and a new spin on the character.  Eccleston was brooding, Tennant was like a brother, Smith was a nutter and Capaldi is aggressive.  All sharing the same name, all in the same setting, and all without a break between them.  So you end up with people having a favorite Doctor, one they identify with.  “Eccleston was great!” I can hear someone say.  “Sit down, you’re drunk.  Rose ran the show and you know it” I reply.

Any show that hits the 5 year mark is likely to go through this shift.  Actors change, plots close and open, people grow older.  The Simpsons is different as it’s animated.  Actors have been pretty much the same since the start, none of the characters have grown old.  It’s never been off the air.  26 years now.  It’s still shifted somewhat, with changes in writing staff, which has had a rather drastic impact on the storylines.

MMOs, the Change and the Reboot

Very few MMOs ever get a reboot and succeed.  Very few sequels ever succeed either.  FF14 is really the poster child for this since it was both a sequel and needed a reboot.  Most MMOs just putter along for years and years, hoping to find the right combination of people and fun.

But they change over the years.  Each patch by definition changes something.  Players won’t ever consider something an expansion if there isn’t some new mechanic or thing to do.  And it can’t really be more of the same all the time because player tastes evolve, technology evolves and the market evolves.

I think most would agree that expansions are the obvious point to look for change in direction within a game.  UO had the Trammel split.  SWG has the NGE.  EQ had PoK.  DAoC had Atlantis.  SWTOR had the swap to F2P.  There are more examples in each game and more games than I could list…

WoW… well WoW is delimited by each expansion plus the advent of LFG, LFR and Flex Raids, which were all mid-expansion changes – all affecting the social aspect of the game.

I mean, let’s take a high level look at the WoW expansions and the mid-strikes between.

  • Vanilla – This was more or less a solo-friendly version of EQ2.  40 man raids.  8m peak players.
  • BC – An integrated vision with a tight focus on raiding and achievements (without actual achievements).  All the systems worked together.  Flying introduced but only at max level.  10 and 25 man raids (mostly the latter). Gain to 11m players.
  • WotLK – A split in many of the systems with the introduction of catch-up mechanics and heroic raids.  The best and worst raids were here: Uldar and Trials of the Crusader.  Flying at max level. Gain to 12m players.
  • LFG introduction – this was a few patches in to WotLK and had a few iterations.  Dramatically changes the social aspect of the game and forced a simplification of many mechanics.
  • Cataclysm – Gutting of the talent system, rebuild of the 1-60 experience/world, increase in overall difficulty, healing triage was introduced.  Flying from the start.  Most would see Cata as a major shift in direction for the game, where it tried to please the raiding and pro-difficulty crowd, when the market was heading another direction.  F2P MMOs were all over the place.  Also introduced Cross-Realm servers to address low pop zones.  Loss to 9m players.
  • LFR introduction – Firelands raid notoriously had less than 1% of the players complete heroic.  LFR put in so people can play the raids, see the story and Blizz’s dev time on raids isn’t wasted on 20 people.
  • MoP – Pet battles.  Daily quests everywhere.  Story that had zero links to any previous lore.  Farmville.  Many catch up mechanics and simplifications.  By this point, most systems had limited (if any) ties to other systems, meaning a player could do near every type of content without talking to another soul.   Merger of servers (connected realms).  Loss to 7m players.
  • Flex Raid introduction.  In my opinion, the biggest positive change to MMOs in 10 years.  Removed many of the limitations for group sizes and benching people, allowing social guilds to raid successfully.
  • WoD – Break of all ties to previous content/structure.  Sale of level 90 characters.  Garrisons which make most players self-sufficient and bypass most profession requirements.  The largest player boost since WotLK too.  Flex Raid for everyone!  No Flying.  Focus on world exploration and “dynamic” content.  As close to WoW 2.0 as we’ve seen so far.

Each person is likely to identify best with a given version of WoW.  You can read forums or other blogs and people will proclaim “BC was the best!”, “LFG killed WoW”, “AQ rules” (no one says this).  Rose colored glasses abound and few people, for any given form of media, will proclaim that today’s version is the best.  It takes time to digest what you have today and when it’s fresh, you really see the good and the bad.  When you look back on any memory, you tend to see the good in it rather than the bad.  If it was bad, you wouldn’t be thinking about it right?

Which I guess makes most of the 10 year anniversary MC runs look hilarious.  It’s pure chaos, with maybe a half dozen people running the whole show.  The difficulty is half of what it was once you’re in the zone and there’s no roster boss (actually finding 40 people to do it, getting them attuned and then having them travel to the instance).  It’s so different from what it was yet still people find it hard to get through.

Moving Forward

And honestly, in today’s market place of MMOs and games, you are at a great buffet of options and all sorts of price points and all sorts of mechanics.  If you can’t find something out there that pleases you, across hundreds of games, then maybe it’s not the market that’s the issue.  Maybe you’ve just graduated to grumpy ol’ bugger, sitting on the porch in a rocking chair, complaining about loud music the kids are playing these days.  We all know how much attention and credence those get.

Once people start to accept the fact that an MMO cannot be static and that a return to the past isn’t possible, maybe they’ll be ok with the fact that they are allowed to move on to another game.  Players tastes change with time.  Their schedules as well.  You finish school, get a job, then a career.  Maybe get married and have kids.  I read some of the guild invite spam and there’s always one that goes

Casual raiders wanted.  Schedule W-T-Su, 8-11.  Attendance is mandatory.

And I think to myself, I used to do that but I can’t anymore.  And when did that become casual?  I’ll try something else.  And I’ll have some fun.  ‘Cause that’s the reason we game in the first place, to have fun.

WoW – Gold is Worthless

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I mentioned in the previous post that the WoW Plex-like system just is a poor overall idea because gold is meaningless in WoD.  I want to expand on that a tad and in particular on garrisons.

Garrisons have an investment cost, measured in Garrison Resources, Gold and Time.  The time factor is rather small mind you, an hour per upgrade (minus the character level requirement for the overall garrison).  Garrison resources can be tight to start off, so everyone should use a lumber mill while leveling to stay ahead of the curve.  Gold is a different matter.  The buildings have a build cost (100-500g) and the schematics to build also have a cost (750-1500g).  All told you’re going to sink a fair chunk of change to upgrade all the buildings, say about 8000g.  Unless things have gone really poorly for you, that money should be available already, either from the 90 boost or regular play and leveling rewards.  Still, it’s possible to be set back I suppose, though only for a short period of time.

Within the garrison there are 2 main paths to take in order to turn a profit.

First is the follower missions.  For this, you’ll need a level 3 salvage yard (for big salvage crates), a level 2 bunker (for follower item rewards), a level 3 barrack (for 25 follower limit) and a level 3 inn (for gold rewarding quests).  A UI mod for follower missions is recommended as well, such as Master Plan. The big salvage crates can give about 50g per, the missions from 30-200g each, some missions give gear which sells for 50g and so on.  It takes a while to get rolling but I can make about 500g per day from missions.  And that’s excluding the gathering materials (herbs, ore, leather) that I get.

Second method is from daily quests from small buildings.  You get 3 small buildings in a level 3 garrison.  The profession buildings are all small and give a daily quest if you assign a follower at level 2.  These daily quests require you to make something that has a level 1 skill (if any skill required at all).  There are various levels of rewards mind you… the inscription one is lackluster and so is alchemy.  Jewelcrafting can give you 200g+ per day though.  And since professions in WoD are absolutely meaningless because of profession buildings, you can swap between them daily to collect some money.

To combine both methods, you set yourself up for option 1 (followers) and use the last 2 small buildings for daily quests.  So in about 5 minutes of work, per day, you can make 500-1000g without stepping out of the garrison.

There are more involved methods, certainly.  Gathering professions give a fair chunk of primals in the wild, which can be exchanged (50 of them) for Savage Blood.  The daily fishing gives 4-5 as well.  The level 3 Barn allows trapping of elites for ~15% chance at Savage Blood too.  Selling gathering materials doesn’t seem to turn much profit.  Creating items either as LFR drops i640 gear and follower missions can give you i655 without leaving home.  All this requires selling to other people, the previous methods never leave home.

So, in a game where absolute minimal play can get you 500-1000g per day, it makes you wonder what value 1 WoW dollar actually would have.  10K?  100k?  Most RMT sites sit around $15 for 20k. So let’s say a a WoW dollar would have to go for at least 30k/$15, otherwise RMT won’t get cut out.

And then once you had sold it, what you would actually DO with that gold.  You need a fraction of that for the garrison and then there are only 2 sinks in the game and both relate to the Auction House and vanity gear/pets/mounts.  Those that can be found by other players and those that the game dictates are available for purchase.  The former usually has prices around 10,000g while the latter can be near a million for heavily sought after items.  Odd group that latter one, with slightly different motivations.  The point is, WoW has next to no sinks for the masses.  WoD might have gotten rid of the daily quest money faucet from MoP, but they put in a variant that takes less time and effort and provides more money.

You can’t build a secondary market on top of a non-existent one.  WoW hands out gold by the bucket, the distribution of that gold depends on how many times you ask for more.

2015 Predictions

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New Year and all that jazz.  Still recovering from some illness and some self-inflicted pain over the holidays.  Back to work now though, hopefully things will sort themselves out.

Similar to last year, I’m looking at some resolutions and predictions for the coming year.

Blog Resolutions

  • Post more media in the blog. Pictures & video.  I think it would add more to the context.
  • Try out a diary format for a few posts. While I tend to focus on analysis, I think the recounting of adventures always fun to read.
  • More cross-posts. There are many, many bloggers out there.  I should do more to cross-post/link/comment.
  • End the year with 200 posts. That’s about 4 per week, which should be manageable.
  • Try more games! I won’t invest in a console, so I’m out about a dozen options per year.  But my tablet and Steam can keep me more than busy.

Personal Resolutions

  • Actively work on an exit-plan for current project at work.
  • Focus more on the family and what makes them happy.
  • Take time to breathe and time to sleep.
  • Read at least a dozen books.
  • Introduce my 4yr old and wife to tabletop/board games. My daughter received a Connect 4 and Trouble for Christmas and we played a fair amount.  She hates losing and wants to learn how to win. There are tons of games out there to try.

Predictions

Some of these are easy; some are way in left field.

  • SOE won’t launch a single product in 2015. Specifically, the order of eventual launch is Landmark, H1Z1 (cancelled before launch) and EQ Next.
  • EvE will increase their patch cadence a bit, to allow for more time between and draw out the ideas. Their subscription numbers will drop due to the stance on multi-boxing and bots.
  • Wildstar goes B2P by late spring. It either drops raiding as a focus or closes shop.
  • ESO will launch on consoles in the summer and go F2P at the same time. Still no auction house or viable crafting container.
  • WoW will drop back to 7m subscribers. Their PLEX-derivative won’t work due to the way the economy works (you don’t actually need gold to play WoW in WoD).
  • WoD end-game will be Burning Legion tie-in.
  • WoW patches will continue to take an eternity to go out, with no expansion news this year.
  • Heroes of the Storm will “launch” in the fall, even though Closed Beta is taking your money in about 2 weeks. Pricing will change once the gates open.
  • Overwatch won’t show in 2015.
  • SWTOR will have 3 content patches, with new raids and planets. GSF will be forgotten.
  • Steam and Riot will get hacked, which will likely change the way PC gamers identify with hackers. They’ve only targeted consoles so far.
  • 2015 will have a bunch of kickstarters finally launch. Pillars of Eternity, Star Citizen, Tides of Numenera and so on.
  • Microsoft will use the Minecraft source for a new game that’s used in schools. Makes a mint.
  • This is the year of the indie game standards. $15 dollar games will be held to similar standards as $60 games in terms of quality, less so content.
  • A new review system will be established detailing whether a game is playable at release or if you should wait for a kitchen sink patch.
  • Evolve, No Man’s Sky and Repopulation will do better than expected.
  • 20142015 will be the year of the RPG! (Witcher 3 for sure)

If I hit 50%, I’d be surprised but hey, that’s what this list is for right?

 

The year so far is off to a decent start.  Here’s hoping the same for all the readers.