Hearthstone the Third

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So, this is going to be my last post on Hearthstone.  I’ve uninstalled the game, which REALLY says something about it when I still have Rift on my desktop and I haven’t played that in 6 months.

Raptr says I have 10 hours put in.  I’ve completed games in less time and normally I have a solid feel after 2.  I had rather high expectations from this game and the previous 2 posts sort of alluded to that.  I won’t lie to you, the game isn’t so much a disappointment as much as my expectations.

There appears to be two games within Hearthstone.  The first, the free to play version.  Similar to the older facebook games, where you had a limited amount of energy before you had to stop, this game is really only good in small bites.  Once you’ve completed your daily quests, there is absolutely no reason to keep playing.  This game lasts for as long as it takes for you to get your first legendary card (or epic/rares to compete).  This can take a month or more in the F2P game or….

The second game is the one supported by real world cash.  This gets you WELL ahead of the curve and also dictates the class you’re going to play.  These cards are so powerful that they completely shift the rest of the game.  I don’t mean a little bit either.  The difference between a basic set and having just a few rares is the difference between losing in the 3rd round and winning in the 2nd.  In fact, I am of the opinion now that most games are set by the 4th round and the rest is just finishing stuff up, with a few stragglers taking longer.  If you’re still playing at 10 mana, something is likely gone wrong.

Now, this might seems like it’s a bad thing and that’s not really the point. The goal of these posts is to give people some idea of what Hearthstone actually is, and to help set expectations.  I read a fair bit about the game before but I didn’t really grasp the whole card acquisition portion.  Without dumping a significant amount of money, there’s just no game.

The type of F2P game that I enjoy is one where the money buys you fluff or cosmetics.  I typically spend $30-50 dollars on those games (Neverwinter, Marvel Heroes, Rift, etc…) and it makes the game more fun.  Hearthstone has zero fluff.  Every penny you put in has a direct impact on your power.  That is not a business model that I enjoy or one I want to put more time into.

That being said, Zynga made bajillions on this business model and I don’t see why Blizzard can’t do the same.

Hearthstone Part Deux

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So I decided to take a second, more in-depth look this time.  I read up on HearthPwn for a few tips on the Mage and Shaman as well.  The downside to this is that after your initial 2-3 quests, you have no money and therefore no new cards.  You get 10 gold for winning 3 matches (which is at best 50/50 when all your cards are crap) and it takes 100 gold to get a new pack of 5 cards.  It’s one of those inverted power curves.

Regardless of the progress mechanics, I figured I’d give it my best shot.  While I think the mage has a ton of strategy, my cards were giving me next to no chance of winning.  There was just not enough synergy to be found.  I decided to try my hand with the Shaman, who oddly enough, is one of my stable of characters in WoW.

The concept of a Shaman in Hearthstone is more or less the Shaman from Burning Crusade.  Your job is to build a team of as many minions as possible, buff them to the gills, then cast Bloodlust.  See, that card gives +3 to all attacks for each card.  Enemy heroes have 30 hit points, and the weakest of your cards has 1 attack (well zero for shaman totems), so you’re looking at a crap-ton of damage if you’re able to get 4 minions out.  And with a Murloc deck, this is someone simple.

Here’s the flow.  Get a deck of summon cards, that are cheap, ideally Murlocs.  There’s one that boosts ALL murlocs by 1 as well, which is part of the fun.  They are super cheap (1-2 mana) and your job is to stall until 5-6 mana with whatever other cards you can get.  Turn 5 comes around, you send out every minion you can and wait til the next turn.  By that time, you should hopefully have enough boost cards (Flametongue, Rockbiter or Windfury) to get some serious damage going.  If by chance you can get your hands on a Bloodlust (always have 2 in the deck), then the enemy is pretty much dead.

I was down 3-30 on a mage tonight, pulled out the above card drop and killed her in 1 round.   I don’t want to know how that feels on the other side.

The disadvantage to this deck and strategy is two-fold.  First, you have a fair amount of weak cards and boosts, which are not useful if the enemy can AE you or tank.  Second, you’re pretty much useless until turn 6.  If an enemy can get 3 minions out by then, you’re pretty much toast.

So it’s either I win in 1-2 rounds, late game, or I get my butt wiped on the floor.  If I can play Bloodlust, it’s a win, if I don’t get the card, there’s a 90% chance I’m dead.  An all-or-nothing approach isn’t super strategic.

The fact remains that I’ve only seen a small portion of all cards and that building a deck right now is extremely limited.   The only way to find more is to gamble on other cards.  I despise gambling.  I hate lockboxes as they are the plague on the game.  I understand that games of chance are important and RNG is important but the entire game is based on a foundation of lottery chances at specific cards that practically guarantee success.  It isn’t directly buy-to-win, but damn if it isn’t close.

Blizzard is going to make a pile of cash.

Hearthstone – First Impressions

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Lucky me.  Free night with no overtime and no kids with a sick wife and I get an invite to Hearthstone beta.  Things are looking up!

I played some minor Magic way back when.  Even some of the Pokemon cards too.  I remember having fun but I don’t remember why I stopped playing.  I think after tonight’s session, I know why.

I live for spreadsheets.  I analyze everything, to the smallest detail.  I used to take great pleasure of making decks for different purposes.  Mathematically they were super sound.  Sure, you’d end up against someone who spent 2K on their deck and get wiped off the floor but by and large, things went well. Until.

You hit that streak of 4-5 games where absolutely nothing came out right.  And I mean nothing.  Where typical card games have a complex mana system, Hearthstone simply gives you 1 more every round until a cap of 10.  So round 1, you get 1.  Round 2 you get 2 and so on.   This greatly simplifies one of the more frustrating parts of other games where you have the cards but no mana.  Hearthstone somehow made the focus against smart play (since you spread mana around) and focused on luck of the draw.

I got a mage up until 12, a shaman up til 6 and played some warrior and priest.  On the whole, I did fairly well, even in the PvP matches.  The kicker was that it took 1-2 card pulls to make or break a game.  I get polymorph on his giant and I win.  He gets 3 “draw on heal” plus a lucky healing totem and he wins.  The game has been so simplified that skill has next to nothing to do with it.

So I tried something.  I played left to right, whichever card I had mana for.  I had no strategy, just left to right, see what happens.  You know what?  There’s no difference for the majority of the games.  There are a few where 1-2 cards played at the right time make a huge difference (minions, then minion boost, then bloodlust) and you need to pay attention but those are every 10 games or so. I mean, Windfury is great but not if all you have to play it on is Murlocs for 4 games straight.

PvE you get to pick the type of opponent, so you have an idea of their overall deck.  Priest is big on tanks, warrior on outright damage and so on.  That makes sense.  You can build a deck against that.  PvP however, it’s a random match.  A typical mage deck is going to get squashed by a hunter.  It would be nice to have some level of control on that or instead, just have random cards selected.  It just seems to remove the strategy, since each card is worth more.

Is Hearthstone good to look at?  For sure.  Is it fun to play?  If your cards come out half decent, why not.  Is it a keeper?  Unlikely.  I am in the skill portion where the cards are just not good enough to be competitive.  All my minions have 2-3 hit points and 2-3 attack.  The big guys come out and get killed in 1 round because the enemy has tanked their taunts.  My skill only comes into play once every 5-10 games and honestly, that has no semblance of fun for me.

If I can’t find a way to improve and it’s simply a battle against RNG, then I’m on to something else.  Going to have to take a much deeper dive…

Sexism in Games

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First, apologies for the lack of posts.  Work is requiring an abnormal amount of time and it leaves just enough for family and not much else.  Now onto the topic!

I’ve written about it before, I’ve commented before, the message is often lost in time.  Jewel has a new topic on it, similar to Tipa’s of yore.  If you read the comment I posted, it summarizes my point but may not do it justice.  In summary

  • Tobold and Syncaine are “professional” bloggers, on two different sides of the spectrum but who use the same toolset to instigate discussion.  A logical opinion doesn’t get much activity, but one that’s offensive/unrealistic does.  I think both do a great job at it and the bloggers as a whole gain from it.
  • Sexism in games is less and less prevalent.  Game of the Year candidates are rarely victimized by this title.  XCOM, Ni No Kuni, Last of Us, Fez, FTL, Grimrock, etc…
  • Tomb Raider has done a 180, with a strong heroine.  GTA5 is such an effective parody that sometimes you forget that it’s making fun of the genre.
  • There are outliers (Dragon’s Crown) but more often than not, it’s a conscious decision similar to point #1
  • FPS games are not so much sexist in design (racist is an another topic) but the actual targeted demographic (16 year old males) is, which means the game suffers for it.
  • MOBAs are a combination MMO and FPS.  Same demographic as the latter, same design as the former, which is an interesting problem.
  • MMOs… they are a different beast altogether.

MMOs, or as a by-product, MOBAs, suffer from the “High Fantasy” curse.  Comic books and Conan really exemplify this issue.  The demo was in the 50s and it really exploded in the late 70s early 80s with women’s lib, freedom of expression and all that jazz.  If you’re a designer today, there are extremely high odds that you were a kid from that period (e.g., Metzen, Samwise, Brad McQuaid and co…).  They were raised with a particular art style, a single art style really, and incorporated it into every game.  As game development matures and new blood is brought into the fold, art has shifted dramatically.  The independent game movement exemplifies this.  New IPs as well (Mirror’s Edge) purposefully break the mold.  Eastern games have not evolved as it is still core to their culture (manga in particular).

The target demo for MMOs is the 18-24 year old, by and large.  There are very few studies on female gamers within that demo and the majority of marketing is focused on the “serial hooker” item line. My term.  Women from pre-teen to adult are presented with a hyper sexualized media onslaught and games are simply following suit to meet the dollars.  The Blizzard MOBA fiasco is proof enough that there is a simple level of ignorance on the topic.

So if you combine developer historics, target demographics, marketing budgets and simple general media messaging, it’s clear that there’s an uphill battle for equality in such massive games.  If you’re going to spend $100 million +, your marketing team is going to push you a certain way.  Gaming as a whole is changing at the indie level and mid-market game level.  Once the big guys realize that super AAA games are cost negative because they are alienating a core demographic with money to spare, it’ll be an avalanche of change.

Like A Ghost

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It appears that Greg Street, aka Ghostcrawler, is leaving Blizzard for other opportunities. Considering he’s been the design face for 3 expansions, this is a big enough deal.

From Vanilla to the end of BC we had one mentality and strategy – integrated and complex systems with little give. WotLK, Cataclysm and MoP were all about separating systems and adding accessibility. WoD is a feather in that cap, from what I’ve gathered so far.

For good and bad, Wow is Greg’s puppy and it will be interesting to see who will be left to pick up.

FF14 Addendum

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So further to the previous post, I redid a dungeon run with some different folk. I changed nothing on my end, same healing pattern and skill set. The tank was amazing. Not so much in terms of damage mitigated (marginally better) but in overall understanding of the role.

Taking that in for a minute, FF14 does not suffer from the heroes curse. SWTOR exemplifies that problem by having every fight be against 4-5 people, even in solo fights. There’s just no skill involved. Press buttons for pew pew, they die or you die. The go-go runs in Wow are the same.

FF14 only puts you against multiple targets in group settings and rarely more than 3 at a time. A pull of 4 targets takes a lot of group skill. As a White Mage, I need to CC (sleep) most fights to reduce overall damage since I can’t heal through. It means that every action is weighed against another and that you need to understand core battle strategies to succeed. If you zerg, you will die.

I try to compare the combat to Neverwinter, in that movement is key but the speed of combat allows for more complex situations.

It’s like comparing Hungry Hungry Hippos to Chess. Both are fun but rarely to the same audience.

Pew Pew for the QQ

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The tears, they taste delicious. For what seems 5 years now, gaming in themeparks has been more or less the same ride. A few tweaks here and there but the dance has always been the same. That leads to expectations and thereby disappointment. How people deal with the latter is the subject today!

The culture of go-go-go still persists but is enabled by games that only reward success and don’t punish failure. If there’s no risk, then people try crazy things. Zubon has something along those lines.

That mentality combined with a relatively stable combat format for the past few years leaves people for little patience. If it takes too long, then it’s broken.

I started playing as a DPS back in the day. Fun times, lots of pressure to pick the right target, CC everything. WotLK came out and that model died. I stopped raiding by that point. When you level, DPS is the only option in most games. Grouping mechanics (or social ones) are typically horrendous compared to single player DPS. That path of least resistance.

This then means that unless you’ve been grouping along the path, you’re going to be a bad healer and an even worse healer. And because the model is static, and easy once you know it, people expect you to know it. It’s not so much a learning curve but a cliff.

I’ve tanked before and I spent most of my time healing now. There’s a rythm needed to do it well when the content is challenging. Overgeared only happens once you’ve gone through it. So when I see a new player come along I think “that’s brave”.

I mentioned previously that I think FF14’s mechanics are so challenging and restrictive compared to the standard that only those with interest stick around. It is extremely unfriendly to the MMO tourist. Consequently, the level of patience in dungeon runs is extremely high compared to average. Players know it’s a slog. They know CC is important and hard. They know that a bad ping can kill you.

There’s some comfort knowing the people around you can sympathize. It’s just so strange to experience again after all these years.

Crating in MMOs

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Before I get depe into FF14’s crafting system, I want to look at crafting in MMOS in general. Crafting is for many games, the only tangible player-created item set, meaning it has personal value. It’s a stamp on the world, saying “I did this”.

Crafting doesn’t operate in a vacuum, it has its own economy. Faucets and sinks are required for any balanced economy to work long time. Currently, the major sink is power creep. This means items lose value because better items come along. Some games implement destroying items, either through combat or as crafting materials. The former is by far the most effective but also the most difficult to balance.

Faucets are all over the place. Crafting materials come from anywhere and the resulting items are often on-par or of lower quality than what you can get from other means (questing, dungeon, world drops). If the faucet is too large, then the value is nil since they are too easy to acquire.

UO had an interesting mechanic for crafting. There were faucets, though limited, for crafting and item drops. Some items required multiple inventive paths to complete, like the old aquarium. Tinkering, carpentry and a few more had no real world drops. Plus, there were tons of sinks. Break on use, loss on death among others.

EQ had a multi-stage crafting process but the items had little to no value, outside of 1 or 2 per skill tree. There were no sinks, unless you let a corpse rot… but no one did that past level 10.

Wow put in a simple crafting UI at the start. Items had some minor value while leveling but a lot of value at max level. That has changed today where the items crafted have no value outside of 3 skills and are used more as combat buffs.

EvE is based on this concept. Few faucets, many sinks, an economy 100% on crafted items. Unfortunately, the game is based on a PvP mindset that is difficult to compare to PvE focused games.

Nevewinter’s crafting is more of a minigame, which can be done offline. It’s fun but not really well integrated.

GW2 is a bit too much like WoW for my tastes.  Crafting is queued, has no value outside of max level and even then, barely any impact.

FF14 is a slight change of pace. Crafting is an integrated system with multiple steps and dependencies.  There are really few faucets since there are no world drops.  This makes crafting rather important in the large scheme of things.  Even the low level stuff is used by other players, since one character can play every class.

I’m certainly curious as to how the next few games will address this system.  It’s so integrated into the MMO mindset now, that we’re sure to see it.  Just not sure which variant.

The Weekend, Or, How To Not Manage Time

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A rough week has gone by and the weeks coming are going to get much rougher.  The project I’m on is nearing critical mass, so all hands on deck.  I figure, why not try and get some rest/relax on the weekend.  Spend some time with the kids and the wife, slow stuff down before they speed up again.

No such luck.  Hockey on a Saturday afternoon sucks.  A few hours in the morning to get things going, then all of a sudden it’s dark outside.  Sunday isn’t a whole lot better, with another meeting planned smack in the middle of the day.

Thanks life, I learned the lesson.  Don’t plan stuff in the middle of the day on a weekend.  It just turns into a weekeday.

FF14 – Wall Breached

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Previous post alluded to problems with Brayflox – namely the final boss Aiatar, a poison spitting dragon.  Challenge complete!

There were many factors to success, which I think was a super smooth battle.  1) the rest of the group was smart enough to avoid damage.  2) the tank had defensive abilities, in that she was taking half the damage of all my previous attempts.  3)  the tank avoided all but 1 AE attack.   4) I used a bit more of Cure 2 to fill in the blanks and overheal.   Super!

The actual fight is rather long for a boss fight, even by FF14 standards.  Well over 5 minutes.  I don’t think there’s any boss in WoW outside of a raid that takes anywhere close to that long today.  Heck, there are FATEs that take what seems to be 10 minutes to clear with tons of adds and damage (Cancer is a super example).

Happy gamer is me!  I also finished up the remainder of the zone quests for the Company of Heroes to get closer to the Titan fight.  This story is amazing.  I can see character progression in the writing which is surprising given the amount of dev time on this game.  ~15 more levels to go on the main quest line.   Should be a fun trek.