Author Archives: Asmiroth

WoW – MoP Update

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In continuing with the previous string of posts, my Hunter is 88.5 now and that’s after completing the majority of Jade Forest.  I’m trying to think back to the last time I went through this process and I’m pretty sure I hit 90 after the Jade, Karasang, Valley and parts of Kun-Lai.  I’m pretty sure I’ll hit 90 before unlocking the farm, so 1.5 zones or so?  I’m thinking that the new leveling path has you spend <2 zones per expansion to get through, which seems a rather large waste to me.  Let me explain that a bit more.

BC’s best zones were not the starting zones.  Shadowmoon Valley and Netherstorm were great.  Terrokar was ok and now I don’t think you even set foot there.  LK’s starting zones were solid enough, though Borean Tundra was the better option.  Sholazar was great (lore!) but Icecrown and Storm Peaks were simply amazeballs.  Cata’s zones all stunk up something fierce, with maybe Mount Hyjal being ok.  Let’s all forget Uldum.  MoP’s zones were a mixed bag.  Jade Forest was/is good.  Then it was a rough going until Townlong.  Dread Wastes without a flying mount is still a nightmare.  While I understand that the story flows from zone to zone, it would be a neat trick to have ALL the zones open per expansion and just flatten out the experience.  Use scaling or whathaveyou to keep those zones active.  GW2 does this pretty good.  It sucks missing the ride that some of these zones provide.  It just seems weird where a game would knowingly make you avoid 75% of the content.

Back to the Hunter.  I specced Beastmaster as it was traditionally the leveling build of choice.  WoD’s ability pruning and standardization of pets is not making BM that much fun.  Sure, I can use a Molten Core Hound as a pet but his only unique skill is a damage shield.  All my cooldowns are pet related, which makes it suck something fierce when I don’t have a pet.  And there have been a half dozen quests now where I don’t have access to a pet, meaning I have 2 skills to damage an opponent.  It’s like fighting unarmed.  I think I’m going to try Marksman.

Hunter pets have always fascinated me.  Now with a streamline, there are 11 types of buffs provided by various pets. So have one of that buff type and you’re good.  I’m collecting a bunch now, since the stable cap has gone up to 50.  In fact, I found a Spirit Beast in Jade Forest that I wanted to try capturing.  And that ended up killing me in 3 hits instead.  I think once I hit 90 and spend a bit of time on the Timeless Isle (alliteration?) I’ll go back and collect some friends.  I did do something similar at the tail end of Cataclysm, where I collected dozens of pets.  I think I’m around 200 or so now, avoiding all those that required 1000+ kill farms.  There’s just some OCD aspect about collecting that I think many of us can relate to.

While I still have a DK in the wings, and a max level shammy and monk, I think I’ll be sticking with the hunter until WoD comes out.  Who knows I might actually buy the expansion too.

WoW – Patch 6.0 Impressions

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Rohan beat me to it but I share similar points.

First off, and I think I mentioned this in the past, I sub to WoW for a month or two every 2 major patches, including expansions.  So I saw the start of MoP and then I saw 5.2 (Thunder Isle) and then 5.4 (Siege of Ogrimmar).  I think it was less than a month for both of the patches but a solid 2 for the MoP launch.  Value for money and all that.  Plus, I have little intention on raiding, due to time constraints and 2 kids.  (Kind of the reason I am not subbed to Wildstar atm…, what with 2 50s and 2 others in their 30s).

Pre-amble.  I have a 90 Monk, 90 Shaman, 86 DK, 86 Rogue, 80 Mage, 86 Hunter, 60 Paladin (through RAF boosting no less), 30 Druid, 5 Priest (bank alt) and zero Warriors (because they suck).  Also, I really miss the ability to sprint and double jump.  You don’t realize it until it’s gone but it makes travel on foot that much more fun.

Heirlooms

Back to WoW.  Last post I mentioned a lack of changes to heirlooms.  Well in actual fact it’s a little worse than I had thought.  Heirlooms are bought through 3 methods.  Justice Points (now gone), Darkmoon Faire tickets (1 week a month) and Trial of the Crusader (which if my math is correct, 7 days of dailies for 1 piece of gear).  JP vendors are gone, so not quite sure how that’s going to work out.  The reason given was “due to unsure prices and to avoid buyers remorse”.  Let me break that particular point down for you.

Justice Points were dungeon currency.  It was maybe 2-3 hours of dungeon runs, very easy to do in order to get an item.  I would hazard to call it cheap even, at least the easiest of the 3 methods.  So even if it were to be some nominal amount, say 500 gold per item (guild heirlooms are 2500 IIRC), then it begs the question what they expect the new value to be.  It’s hard to imagine them being cheaper than current.  So you get into conspiracy theories of Blizz pushing their “buy a level 90 boost”.  I dunno, the entire thread just seems like really bad PR on a core part of their community (the one who actually bothers with alts).

On the flipside, experience was drastically normalized.  I had an 84.5 Hunter on logoff, and on logon, had an 84.99999 Hunter waiting.  MoP experience gain is ~50% higher than previous, if not more.  Cataclysm should be around the same path, making heirlooms a very quirky item.  I think I might be able to do 80-85 in 1 zone now.  Will have to try with my Mage at some point.

Combat

Ability pruning was a pretty frigging big deal for a Hunter.  I’d guess 25% of all skills are gone.  As a BM, that leaves 2 buttons for main rotation (Cobra Shot and Arcane Shot) and then some pet cooldowns.  It is quite strange.  Good strange mind you, as I had hotbars within hotbars.  It was an episode of Pimp my Hunter.  The UI is much cleaner.  Plus with 6.0, every mod broke something, so I’m playing vanilla.

The stat squish is massive, I think my ring is like +15 or some such.  I will say that a stat boost itself is less noticeable, as the scale from base is flatter.  Hmm, let me try that again.  Before this patch, your base damage was a factor of your level and base stats.  Base stats at 90 were nothing really, so each piece of gear you added was a tremendous boost to power.  A decent ring might give you 10% more.  Now it seems that the base value is higher and that gear provides less benefit, let’s say only a 7% boost from the same ring.  What this means is balancing is much easier for Blizzard as the player power variance is smaller.  It also means that player skill is more important than before as you will have trouble “out gearing” a situation.  That’s a paradigm used in Cataclysm, to disastrous effect on subscriptions… so time will tell.

Reforging is gone.  Enchanting is barely there.  Jewelcrafting took a hit.  None of the Professions provide any combat benefits.  Haste windows are gone.  Snapshotting is gone.  It seems like every corner of customization was cut pretty deep.  Ask Mr Robot is going to need a new job I’m thinking as the game is currently heavily simplified in terms of stats and rotation.  The complications added are now mainly around player skill.

But do I have the same amount of power as before?  I’ll say yes for the time being.  The leveling power curve was well-adjusted.  There’s no more “in between expansions” power gap either, so that’s nice.

Art

New player models, which by consequence also means no character models in some scenes as they weren’t programmed?  I dunno if it’s a bug or not but me + parachute = no character.

Bunch of UI changes too.  Items you can click are highlighted with an outline, harvesting and quest nodes.  Quest overlays are more informative.  Hunter stables can take 50 pets (up from 10 last I checked).  Aura alerts are still there.  Some icon changes.  Icons in bags are different, in particular when you are at a vendor.  Junk is clearly tagged, though there still isn’t a junk button.  Overall a solid improvement (based entirely on the mod community I might add).  I’ll still mod the UI though – if only to control the button size ratio.

The models are a bit more fluid in their movement and the style is somewhat consistent with before.  The eyes though, they are hollow.  It’s like uncanny valley over here but then again, how often do you look at someone’s eyes in WoW?

Also, they are 10 year old models.  The game looks like it was made 10 years ago, in particular due to the fact that MoP had no new capital city.  If WoD has as new Shatt to play around in, maybe it won’t be as noticeable.

Crowd Control

This is an odd one for me since I played 8 years of a Rogue and was stun-locking when you were still in diapers.  Pretty much any stun effect that disables you and still allows an enemy to attack you is gone.  The ones that get you out of combat but break on damage are still in.  Interrupts are still there with their original cooldowns as are root/slow effects. For combat, I have half the damage control tools I had previous, which means I am taking more damage and need to time my skills to be at the tail end of a cast.  It’s balanced by the fact that many “casters” require to stand still now to get a spell off, so there’s some delay in damage output.  Still, it’s a new way to play and I’m curious as to how the crowds will adapt.

Overall Impressions

I will be honest here and say that I expected more rather than less.  There are massive systematic cuts to combat and player customization, which is like 90% of the game content (excepting Pet Battles).  I used to write guides for games and this expansion would have me cut at least a quarter of it.  Players have only a fraction of the tools they had before, which is quite jarring.  It’s a real “back to basics” push and I can commend it as it’s something I try to do in my own job.  The game feels familiar and different at the same time, which is what you want in an expansion.  Now let’s open this red door…

Changes are a Comin’

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The first bit of news relates to Wildstar.  Megaservers are coming next week, so you’ll be able to find people to play with again.  Yay!  Also, Drop 3 & 4 are being combined and targeted for November.  It’s making it hard to figure out what is in and what is out of scope of that change.  The Reddit feeds are good enough to try and keep track but there’s still some mystery to be had.  Of interesting note, January is Carbine’s timeframe for “solo friendly” content.  I could write for miles about that topic.  MILES I say.  But in short, delaying all your content until after WoW and SWTOR have launched their expansions is an odd play of hands.

WoW is dropping patch 6 today, which is the precursor to the actual expansion.  This includes all the system changes but not the actual new content (zones, dungeons, level increase, garrisons, etc…).  So you get to see item squish, removal of guild levels (yay!), removal of reforging, changes to glyphs (you now get a bunch at default), removal of some difficulty achievements, a new group finder (not LFG/LFR), the new Flex raid model, massive class balances, new stats, new character models and just plain cleanup.  Though they are removing one type of Anti-Aliasing that was a GPU hog, in order to accommodate the players with scientific calculators.  It’s a rather significant downgrade to fidelity, if that means anything to you.

You can read the link for all the notes and there are plenty but the core of the matter is that this is the stage-setting patch for the expansion – where Blizz applies the final tweaks to the system to make sure that the swap from Beta makes sense.  I fully expect the raid scene to take a dive for 2 weeks, a few emergency patches and a trainwreck of “I can’t faceroll anymore” posts to result from the squish change.

What I find odd as lacking, is a revamp of the heirloom items or experience normalization that typically happens near expansion time.  Where 1-85 is pretty quick (you can do 80-85 in 2 zones), the experience from 85-90 isn’t up for debate.  It’s arguably a fun experience, at least compared to the junk of Cata (thank goodness for flying) but if they are selling level 90 characters… then you’d think there’d be some QoL changes to this experience as well.  I am expecting some post soon that changes that to everything working until at least 90, at least by 6.1.

Quick math… level 25 guild + heirlooms until 80 = 60% increase to experience from quests and kills.  Which also combines with rested experience.  And these items are fairly easy to acquire (except the ring…damn that fishing derby).

I am quite curious to see how all these changes play out.

EDIT: I am putting dollars to donuts that Blizz implements a system similar to SWTOR’s Legacy framework, or Marvel Heroes’ Synergy section.  And therefore completely removes the existing Heirloom function.  And for 6.1.  Any takers?

Shadow of Mordor – Quick Hit

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Recent release on Steam (and I guess some other platforms), Shadow of Mordor is an interesting take on the LOTR lore.  I’ve got about 20 hours in, says I’m near 80% done so I figure it’s time to put my thoughts to words.

SoM plays a bit like Assassin’s Creed and the new Batman games.  A mix of stealth assassination and darn sweet combat controls, mixed with some sandbox open-ended gameplay.  Well, that last part is much more sandbox than I had thought, in that there are only 25 or so “quests” for the core story, a real fraction of your playtime.  You need to complete the main story quests mind you, in order to unlock the 2nd zone, Power Struggles (that further unlock skills) and to actually unlock particular skills.  I did none of that for the first 2 hours and had a blast.

There’s stuff to find, slaves to free, Orcs to interrogate and a slew of side quests.  I did all of that until my map was empty (and I ran around a few times to see if I missed a spot) and then I decided to start the main quest.  A few of those in, then it unlocked more side quests.  Rinse and repeat for 20 hours and there are a small handful left.

The quest is so-so and really only peaks if you have any interest in LOTR.  The idea is neat but the execution just doesn’t work out so well.  It’s just an excuse really to move the mechanics along, which seems like a wasted effort.

There’s always a compromise when it comes to sandboxes and actual levels.  The power curve is really quite hard to balance.  I’ll use Skyrim as an example.  Some parts are death at low levels with bad gear.  Go back after you have triple fireballs and things turn to cake.  SoM has this issue in the first zone and in the second as well until you unlock the Brand skill.  It is very easy to be overwhelmed and die until you get that.  I died a solid 50 times, trying various strategies out.  Once you get Brand though… the game just takes a massive challenge dump.

Brand is an ability that converts an Orc to fight for you.  You can use it in combat (after a small combo) or stealth attack someone with it.  If you Brand all the archers in a given area, then activate them, it’s a shooting gallery.  Like 5-1 odds gallery. But hey, you only really unlock that at the tail end of the core story, so it’s not too big a deal.

The controls are decent enough, and responsive.  Combat is super fluid, even more so as you unlock more skills (particularly the dodge/stun combo).  It’s very fun to jump from one enemy to the next, using decent timing to get the perfect strikes in.  It’s a solid jump up from Batman.  The assassinations are also well done, and the quests to get there aren’t “follow this guy in the bushes for 45 minutes, fail and restart”.  So that’s sweet.

That's a BIG dog.

That’s a BIG dog.

You have a melee weapon (sword), a ranged one (bow) and a stealth one (dagger).  They each have strengths and can be comboed with each other in combat strings.  You can unlock rune slots for each, which is sort of like a perk for the item.  Say, 50% chance to heal when you have a critical strike.  There are different tiers of perks too, and if you Brand then threaten a boss orc, you get a better chance at a rune.  But they also get more powerful and get a posse.

And now we get to the Nemesis system.  There are normal orcs, up to 15 captain orcs and then 5 warchiefs per zone (2 zones).  Each orc has strengths and weaknesses.  Some are immune to melee, or get stronger if there’s fire, or fear these direbeasts.  You don’t know any of this unless you interrogate orcs too, so if you catch one cold, you can be trying for a while to figure out how to attack them.

If you kill a captain or a warchief, another orc can take their place.  Orcs can kill you and get promoted and get more powerful.  Orcs can kill each other, or recruit other orcs to increase power.  And it’s all dynamic, so you’re never seeing the same orcs again.  Well that’s not true.  Say an orc kills you, they will remember it and taunt you next time they meet you.  And sometimes an orc you think you killed just comes back with scars.  And that’s where the real open-ended gameplay comes from.

See, if you Brand all the captains, you can then Brand the warchiefs.  Then you get a few of them close together and use another skill to kill all Branded enemies.  BOOM, rain of runes.  Then speed up time a bit and more Orcs come back.

I am impressed.  The Nemesis system is where the real meat of the game is and it’s truly innovative.  Smooth controls are the other part of the foundation and combined provide a really enjoyable experience.  I’m kind of thinking that this is the new model for open world gameplay with combat mechanics.  It’s really well executed (pun intended) and worth your dollars.

WoW – Interesting Dev Credit

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In somewhat interesting news, it appears that Jay Wilson, mr Diablo 3 lead , is listed in the credits for WoW’s next expansion.  I posted a bit about this gentleman in the past.  He left D3 for an unknown Blizz project, though any executive that leaves that type of position, usually doesn’t do it in the middle of sweeping changes, at least voluntarily.

I’ve been more than vocal on D3’s original implementation.  The AH was a good idea with a horrible implementation.  It impacted the rest of the design.  Itemization was broken until D3 launched on consoles.  “End game” didn’t really exist until a year after launch.  So yeah, I think the game is Blizzard’s worst received game at launch ever but that they stuck with it and today’s game is really quite good.  It’s telling that the company still takes value in the brand and one of the reasons they are still on my “must buy” list of developers.  It takes FOREVER for change, but changes happen.

Oddly, this reminds me of Hellgate:London.  Flagship launched a decent ARPG but made some missteps in terms of end game, or at least long term appeal.  Plus the dev cycle for patches didn’t really work.  The meat here is that Bill Roper, then lead of Flagship, got a bunch of ex-Blizzard folk to help out.  That didn’t really work mind you and Bill became a game albatross.  He showed up at Cryptic during the Champion Online and STO days and hoo-boy did that go over like a lead balloon.  He’s working at the cash cow Disney Infinity now though, so good on him.  Bill took full blame of Flagship and honestly, he did try hard to get it going.  I think this has more to do with fan investment in the product and just sheer disappointment that it could not succeed.

Jay though, he’s a slightly different beast.  Maybe it’s more along the lines of an open-mic issue where he was simply ill-equipped to handle the issues or that the ship was simply to big to correct after launch.  Some may be aware, but D3 underwent a rather massive design shift in combat mechanics about 6 months before live.  I would easily argue for the better as everyone has always been positive about the gameplay experience.  The other stuff though, maybe it was a lack of experience or understanding, but in the end nearly all the other systems were removed/replaced/updated.  AH is gone.  Smart loot replaces the insane RNG of strength on wands.  Stat balance changes itemization.  Lengendaries are actually legendary.  Multiple end-game options. Social tools.  Ladders and seasons.  Tons of stuff.  And I pin this on him as he was the lead.  You want the title, it comes with the ups and downs.

So maybe Jay just went back to what he does well, building core systems and not the overall architecture.  It’s certainly behind closed doors, without a need to interact with the playerbase.  There are very few good jacks-of-all-trades, maybe a few dozen in the entire industry.  I know in mine you could fit them all into a bar.  It would certainly be interesting to see where he’s at now and how he feel the transition has been.

#WoW – Flex Raids and New Features

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The previous post related to my opinion that Warlords of Draenor is bringing very little to the table.  Thinking on that a bit, I realize that WoW’s strongest foot forward has generally been mid-patch and not expansions, with a few exceptions.

Blizzard makes good stories and solid art.  Expansions focus on that and while there are certainly exceptions where the story is horribad, the vast majority is solid if not exceptional given the tools they have at hand.  My opinion here is that time travel is often a poor device for story telling as a premise.  Sci-fi always succeeds when the story is about the people and the context is just there for flavor.  I’m curious as to how WoD will handle that given that the “wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff” is pretty hard to manage without causing a bunch of retcons.

Blizzard is quite poor at new but really good at updating existing systems.  The resistance requirements from vanilla turned into attunement for BC which turned into gear score later on.  40 man raids turned into 25 and 10, and then Flex.  LFG was a list originally, then automated, then LFR and now a near feature for feature rip from an exiting game mod.  Questing has undergone some big iterations, with the Cataclysm model of stories and MoP’s cinematic/integration story approach.  Leveling curves have been normalized.  Itemization has gone from 4 stats, to 16, to gems everywhere, to gems nowhere, to 8 stats and now RNG stats.  Talents went from the Diablo 2 model, to massive cookie cutter trees, to a rather homogenized flat structure with minimal variance.  Heck, some systems are so poorly thought out they just cut them from the game – reforging is one clear example.

Even the “new” stuff they put it was done in other systems first.  Transmogrification existed in many other games – LOTR and RIFT in particular – and those systems are still better than WoW’s (also in D3 now).  Pet battles is a direct rip from other MMOs and a clear link to Pokemon.  Proving Grounds was done in TSW first and in that game, it’s used as a gating mechanic as it should be.  Brawler’s Guild is an extension of that, with mixed results.

The point I’m trying to make is that Blizzard’s first kick at the can is usually not that hot, if it’s a departure from what’s out there now.  If they are applying incremental improvements on existing systems, then yes, super.  And this is ok.  They have millions of people playing a game, finding areas that they can optimize.  Blizzard has maybe 100 people on system design?  The law of averages says that Blizzard is going to lose.  Any dev would.  My issue is in the amount of time it takes for this beast to change course and actually find what works.

I think that WoW does 3 things better than other companies.  It tells better stories.  The Pet Battle system is best in class.  And Flex raids are the way forward.  It took a mod and a fan site for them to realize that Pet Battles could actually work and if I recall from stats taken in game, there are more people who participate in that activity that any type of raid (LFR — Heroic).  Its’ really rather well done, through a simple interface that’s had some iterations over time.  WoD is bringing new pets, no new systems.

Flex raids are next, or more generally, scaled group content with group caps.  When WoW was on the incline or at least stable in terms of population, the group caps were manageable (after they dropped from 40) but sub-optimal.  The LFR system stemmed from the idea that less than 10% of the population raided in Firelands (<1% heroic) and it made sense to expose more of the story.  LFR numbers were crazy, something around 80%+ of all max level players participate and regular raids were still very low, under 10%.  MMO Champion has all the stats by the way, just lazy to link to dozens of posts.  So Blizzard had an issue.  Clearly people wanted to raid but such a massive drop between models was causing issues… what was the problem?  LFR provided a way to complete content with a variable amount of people, and the system just filled in the holes to reach the thresholds.  The problems with LFR were obvious.  Random people do bad things and it was a “roll of everything!” mentality.  How to get the benefits of LFR (variable groups) and lose the downside (asshats).  In comes Flex.

Flex was added to provide people with non-faceroll content (somewhat on par with Normal) with a variable group of people they knew.  Getting 10 people is still not obvious but having 16 means that you don’t have 6 people picking up snacks for 5 hours while the rest is having fun.  The new Flex system will be applied to everything moving forward except heroic content.  I mean, it’ll be called Flex Heroic but it’s the same challenge as today’s normal.

Here we get into the themepark & sandbox debate.  Themeparks can only fit X people on a ride and rarely will they start without the ride being full.  Sandboxes can acomodate any number of players.  EvE, AA, Darkfall, UO all work with any number of people.  SWTOR, LOTR, FF14, WS and every other themepark can only fit X people.  It’s somewhat interesting that WoW is first out of the gate for a variable themepark size, catching up to 15 years of since UO first did it in mass market…but hey, welcome to 2014!

Wildstar & WoW – Odd News

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So in Wildstar news, apparently Stephen Frost is moving on to other pastures.  I’m trying to think of anyone of the devs that are left since launch…and I’m drawing blanks.  It’s getting to a point where it just looks like the culture at Carbine isn’t enough to keep the lights on.  Smart decisions need to be taken, or should have been taken many months ago and poof, nothing but people quitting.  I’m sure this has resonated with the community.  It really is quite a shift and I’m having a ton of trouble putting a finger on why.

Lots of conjecture mind you, but wow, I think this is one for the record books.  There’s certainly still some hope that the game can come back if it makes the changes at a decent pace.  SWTOR certainly showed that, and the flaws were very similar (remember a 90% server consolidation?).

In WoW news, the Brawler’s Guild is getting a re-vamp.  Or is it?  Let’s look at it

  • No new bosses
  • Change in the boss order/ranks
  • No new achievements
  • No new rewards
  • No new challenge cards

And this merited a blog post?  I tried the Brawler’s Guild.  It was fun.  Except Hexos, which never made any sense.  Now the only difference is a re-shuffle of the bosses?  I’m going to be honest here, I can’t see anything that WoW is bringing to the plate in WoD that would be considered progress or new.  Sure, there’s a stat squish (2 years late) and a normalization of raid sizes (flex everything!) and the world’s shittiest housing implementation (garrisons).  It’s stuff that could have been included in 2 content patches.  And people have waited over 13 months since SoO (5.4) went out the door for this?

Gaming and School – A Clash of Cultures

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This will be a very meta post.  As I’ve mentioned in the past, my wife is a high school teacher and I have a rather large set of opinions around our education system from front to end.  That we’re still using the same system from WW2 is a problem, though many school boards are trying to implement changes.  The problem with change is people and teachers are notoriously against change.  That’s sad really because the kids are simply not paying attention anymore.  There’s just too much competition for places of edu-tainment and the real world does not relate to school structure in any way.

So the meta part is that my wife goes to seminars and that my eldest daughter started school this year in a new program that focuses on critical thinking rather than memorization (one of my 4 key tenets of growth).  I write a lot about how game design intersects with the social structures we see day to day and my wife recently texted me about Minecraft as a teaching prediction tool.

KTR had a recent post that went into this topic, Progress vs Progression and I think it relates to the discussion a fair amount as school systems are often focused on progression rather than progress.  Do the same thing over and over again and expect different results (Einstein anyone?)  But more specifically, I want to focus on Minecraft’s design.

Minecraft is like virtual Legos.  I have a rather large collection of large Legos.  My kids are 2 and 4, so the regular pieces aren’t yet an option but I do plan on just ordering a few hundred pieces online in the future.  What I do have now though is enough to keep both kids occupied for some time and lets their imagination grow.  Once second it’s a plane, the other it’s a snake, and always with some story attached to it.  I’d hazard to guess that more people have played with Lego than have watched Star Wars, or Harry Potter or whatever other social phenomenon we hear tell.  Legos are a simple tool (~7000 unique pieces) with an infinite amount of possibilities.  (Apparently, four 2×4 Lego pieces have over 3 billion possible combinations.)    AFOL is a massive subculture.

Minecraft takes that little tool we all know and then turns it around a bit.  Different blocks have different properties (harder, liquid, precious, etc…) and combining them in particular formations creates specific tools (picks, shovels, doors, etc…).  I can build a house with multiple stories and windows, or I can build a rudimentary calculator, or I can build a life-size replica of the Starship Enterprise.

Sure, in between all that I can hunt skeletons, clearcut a forest, build a moat and die multiple times but that’s flavor.  The meat of the game is building and building without goals.  The lack of goals spawned many imitators, most notably Terraria.  This lack of an imposed progression tracking system, and in it’s place a self-imposed list of victory conditions is one of the largest departures in gaming in a very long time, at least in terms of popularity.  I mean, sandboxes have always been popular but not 56 million+ popular.  Minecraft is worse than Chrono Trigger, you can find the application on any system, iOS, Android, Console, PC, Raspberry Pi…People know it, people have played it, people dress us as Creep for Halloween.

So how does this affect education you ask?  Well it’s a system of personal goals and limitations that can be shared between other players.  Westeros was rebuilt!  Social constructs are built, with long terms goals based on small components.  Remember, each massive item is built from the same small bricks. The only difference between your outhouse and a sprawling city is time and vision.  School does not focus on this, instead if focuses on memorization by rote.  You need to know every component of the outhouse and every component from the city as 2 different entities with little in common.  Minecraft is all about building big dreams with only a small amount of tools and one that rewards tinkering rather than perfection.  Oh, that door really doesn’t work?  Tear it down and start again but you don’t have to tear down the entire building.  Success is iterative and one that requires some critical thinking to see how all the pieces fit together.  I could write entire articles and feats of reverse engineering in Minecraft.

All this to say is that Minecraft forces people to ask solid questions about final design and not blindly accept something as fact.  It allows experimentation and groupthink, encourages creativity.  These skills are essential for the real world (and the basis of critical thinking), that is if you’re not aiming to be a sheep of some sort packing shelves for a living.  (Mind you, there is potential for nobility in that career).  Think big, think different, using the same tools as everyone else.  Minecraft celebrates and expands on this.  School focuses on memorization and conformity.  Some schools are changing but the old guard certainly needs to see the light of day.

 

Game Reviews – Finding Patterns

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Actually, I think this spans more than game reviews and finds itself in the “media review” category.

Shadow of Mordor is releasing next Tuesday, the 30th.  Apparently it’s getting some pretty favorable reviews, well at least from those who’s opinions I find parity.  It’s an interesting thing the review-before-launch.  I mean, less so on those with massive marketing budgets and pre-orders (side note, I don’t have cable.  Saw the first Destiny add last night).

I knew the game was coming, I saw a couple previews but had mostly set the game aside.  Assassin’s Creed meets Batman is how I categorized it and it appears to be close enough to the truth.  But the early reviews being positive is not something I expected.

The way I see it, if you’re not milking a franchise to death, any new game is a gamble.  Sure, a developer wants pre-order to gauge interest.  They are going to spend on marketing a fair bit to get the message out there.  But it’s still a coin toss for a lot of gamers as to how the review determines purchase.  People are like lemmings and reviews, in particular Metacritic, push people one way or the other.  That said, a positive review has a rather noticeable impact on sales, just like a negative one does.

Timing of those reviews is critical.  I’m reminded of the R.I.P.D. film.  Not only were critics not allowed to release any reviews before launch, they weren’t actually provided a release candidate to review.  The movie is quite bad, performed poorly, and is best forgotten.  It would have made even less money if the negative review had come out ahead of time.  Movie reviews often come out a few days before the actual film.  GotG came out 2 weeks before and to glowing praise, which allowed a fair amount of word of mouth and positive spin to build up ticket sales.

Game reviews are usually on release day or a few days after, with a few exceptions.  These are games that run the ~70% mark on reviews.  Great games tend to have early reviews, Last of Us is a good recent example, Ni No Kuni is another than comes to mind.  The Destiny reviews came out after launch (not that it mattered much in sales is appears) and the reviews are certainly mixed.

I’m coming to the conclusion that there’s a direct link between the release of a review in relation to the release date, and the quality of same game.  The farther ahead the review date is, the better the game.  Reviews that are post-launch are often times related to poorer games.  Yes, I realize that the MMO space is harder to judge without other players, but the general vibe is there.  An MMO in final beta is not going to be any different than a Release Candidate build for reviews.  And no MMO is reviewed on raid difficulty, just end game accessibility.

Interesting food for thought.

 

Gaming Toxicity – What’s Next?

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I’ve talked about this one at length already but it bears repeating after recent events.  There are a lot of asshats in the gaming sphere and the level of anonymity that the internet provides is a cloak they abuse.  The concept of privacy on the internet is something we’re eventually going to have to give up (or have already if you pay attention).  The advent of social tools without the social skills to use them makes for a mess of a time.  This is still the Wild West and the sheriff is more or less whoever wants to wear the badge.  There are many countries that are making changes to their laws to make people accountable for their actions on-line – the UK is the most advanced in this (but also has amazing trolls).  Canada is getting better but the US is like a ballpit of dumb when it comes to this – in particular around their understanding of what Free Speech actually means in a legal sense.

And let’s be clear about this.  Reasonable people saying reasonable things don’t get attention.  It passes the logic test, and we say “they’re ok”.  It’s the people on the extremes that get attention because what they say makes little sense.  So you end up hearing the 1 idiot spouting stupid (and we getting dumber for hearing it) and the moderate voice that counters it is barely heard because everyone is arguing against dumb.

Never argue with an idiot; they’ll bring you down to their level and beat you with experience. –

Back to the gaming world now.  League of Legends (LoL) is making a few changes to their system.  You might remember them from the concept of tribunals a few years ago.  A group of (volunteer) players who act as a council to vote on players who have been reported for bad behavior.  They assign bans or time outs or what-have-you, based on in-game logs.  The recidivism rate is actually surprising, with something like 90% of them never coming back to the tribunal.  But let’s make no mistake here, with the millions who are playing, there are still many who cause issues and the penalties are currently very black/white.

There’s an old story about UO and the Trammel split, where Origin at the time didn’t understand the problem with griefers and the open PvP plaguing the game.  If you recall, it was not a terribly complex thing to lose your house to a greifer, people would stack bag and bags of crap to hide their keys so that the PvP looters would take forever to find the right one.  The concept was as this “a griefer is one who costs you more money than they pay”.  So you might make $15 on that griefer but if they cause 2 people to quit, you’ve lost money.  And UO was losing money.  I am not saying the split was the right choice (in fact I would easily argue other things could have been done – I was a noto-hunter in the day, which could have been a much more elegant solution) but it was a hard solution to a very large problem.

XBONE has a reputation system of 3 tiers.  Regular, borderline and scumbag.  Ok, I’m paraphrasing but you get the idea.  Regular and borderline play in one bucket, scumbags play in another.  Your rating decays over time so you can come back to the clean area.  I haven’t seen any reports on this program since launch mind you…

LoL once again.  They are implementing a new type of penalty where poorly rated players can no longer play ranked games.  Ranked games have rewards, they are seasons, they allow you to join the professional circuit.  It’s pretty similar to the XBONE solution except that non-ranked games are where the casual players are found.  This is really putting the wolf in with the sheep, when you look at it from the outside.  I’m sure there’s some thought as to how this can impact the bottom line but it’s rather clear that the bad players need more types of punishment.  I’m guessing the matchmaking process aligns no only your skill level but your player reputation, which should make it fun to watch from the outside.

I know Hearthstone’s approach to this is to not allow chat at all.  Just some basic pre-canned messages.  People will quit before losing, which is another topic.  When Heroes of the Storm does launch, and as with all Blizzard items attracts DragonSoul to complain/grief, I am extremely curious as to their plans for managing that issue.  (And yes, I realize I’m avoiding the SC2 scene, which is arguably pretty tame).  Once we get passed LoL into Blizzard casual-land, I’m of the opinion we’ll have reached a gaming crest of toxicity management