Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

I heard a recommendation for Final Fantasy Online a few days back and decided to give it a go. It is a long time since I felt the urge to play an mmorpg but I have been bouncing around between a few games recently and perhaps in a fit of nostalgia I remember the good times I had fifteen years or so ago when  World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online were cool. For a brief few years MMORPGs offered an exciting glimpse into the possibilities of virtual worlds. They also demanded a huge time commitment and required a lot of busy work which is why I and most other gamers eventually moved on. I am trying FF XIV at a very casual level, no guilds , no raids just questing around in the world. First impression are pretty good. There is a very generous free trial that appears to offer a lot of content with not many restrictions. the game has been around since 2013 so it is not surprising that it seems very polished by now and it looks pretty too. Of course it has a confusing array of lo...

Tobold is annoyed that mmorpgs " evolved into a bunch of derivative and repetitive chores instead of living and breathing worlds" and his post inspired me to record my own thoughts in a comment which I am recording here for posterity:  I am the same age as you Tobold and like you I once thought mmorpgs would be stepping stones towards fully immersive alternative worlds such as those envisaged by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and Tad Williams.  I think a few virtual worlds did try to go that way including obviously "Second Life" but also a number of titles aimed at younger audiences such as "Club Penguin" and "Free Realms" but none of them ever really took off and in the end mmorpgs became just another type of game to play. I think that Blizzard realised this early with  World of Warcraft and while WoW did offer a large immersive online world the game aspect always came first. This proved a smart business decision because pretty soon afterw...

I am enjoying Destiny 2 enough to buy the expansion pack when Humble put it on sale a week after  the base game was included in the June monthly (nice move Humble). Nevertheless I don't have time or patience for mmo grind right now so I decided to see how far I could get just playing the main campaign. Hence the question: Can you avoid grind by just playing the main campaign? The answer is: "Up to a point". I made it all the way through the base game (Red War) and the first expansion (Curse of Osiris) without any conscious effort to grind. I did pick up the occasional side mission and public quest along the way and I even indulged in some PVP but I didn't make any concious effort to grind.  I still managed to keep on level for the main quest lines. Things changed when I hit the latest expansion (Warmind). I completed curse of Osiris at about power level 270 so I got something of a shock to realise that the introductory chapter of Warmind was recommended for level...

I have been playing a bit of Destiny 2 since I picked it up in the June Humble Monthly. The game is an mmorpg / fps hybrid. The FPS combat is pretty tight and enjoyable in its own right but the mmorpg bit adds quests and progression to the mix. The developers (Bungie) use level scaling in an interesting way however that impacts on how players deal with enemies of different level. Progression is based on level and gear but the two are closely coupled because the gear you pick up  is tied to your character level. Playing the game normally equipping the gear I got from drops and rewards I found that my Power Score (which is effectively a measure of gear) hovers around 10x my character level while the maximum power score achievable with exotic gear seems to be around 12x character level.  When I first started the game I occasionally wandered too far from the beginner zones and stumbled into mobs that out levelled me substantially. I was unable to inflict any damage on these mo...

An astute poster on Reddit spotted that the famous World of Warcraft parody video "Leeroy Jenkins" has apparently degraded over time on Youtube and the audio is now corrupted. What could be going on. Are digital archives not as incorruptible as we once believed? If such an iconic work can be corrupted what does this mean for our precious memories that we are increasingly trusting to cloud storage? Storage devices can degrade over time but this is very unlikely to be the cause of Leeroy Jenkins corruption. Any half way decent cloud storage system has multiply redundant back ups with error correction. As several respondents to the Reddit post have pointed out it is far more likely that the errors were introduced when the video was converted from an older video format to a newer format. The "copy of a copy" syndrome kicks in and quality degrades. EDIT: For clarification: You can copy digital files perfectly so "copy of a copy" degradation isn't alw...

I wonder if there is a more welcome phrase in all of PC gaming than these four simple words: "The tank is holding"?  They mean that you have reached that  point in a battle where your defensive capabilities have proven themselve capable of surviving anything the enemy can throw at them. It is the tipping point. Prior to that moment the battle is a desperate struggle for survival with an uncertain outcome. After that moment you know that they cannot kill you so it is your turn to take the initiative and find a way to kill them. Knowing that you cannot lose all that remains is find a way to win. According to Wikipedia the use of the word "Tanking" to describe a unit or team's ability to absorb damage originated in the text based Multi User DUngeons (MUDS) of the 1990s.  The concept probably reached its full potential  in the Tank, Heal, Damage triumvirate of massively multi player games such as Everquest. With classes specialised in each of these roles p...

A couple of years back  I logged off my level 65 Champion and I really thought I was done with Lotro. This September however I was tempted back to the game while pursuing an excellent Coursera course exploring Lord of the rings in game, book and movies. ( https://www.coursera.org/course/onlinegames , highly recommended if they run it again). I figured I would only play for the few weeks of the course so I picked up a mid level Loremaster alt  and pottered around with him in original Shadow's of Angmar content. By the end of the course I had hit the original level cap of 50 but I was still enjoying the game so I decided to hang around for a bit longer. Lotro has changed over the years and for the most part the game is a lot easier to solo. Oddly enough this suited me and I was happy to play the game on my own for a few weeks. The Loremaster is a very fun character combining crowd control, Pets, debuffs, modest heals and moderate damage. It probably isn't the fastest charac...

Placeholder post really to record my current games. I have spent an inordinate amount of time playing Skyrim. For some reason game isn't really conducive to blog posts but it is probably my favourite Elder Scrolls game to date. For some reason I seem to be progressing very slowly. More than 70 hours played and I am only level 18 and still not finished the main questline. On a whim I downloaded and installed the newly free to played Star Trek Online. Actually it wasn't a whim it was a direct response to an unsolicited email invite from Perfect World Entertainment. It seems I have a Perfect World account as a result of one of the Steam Challenges I entertained myself with over Christmas. All well and good except that my Star Trek online account is now tied to a throw away Perfect World account with a silly name. Anyway I have only played a couple of hours of the game so I still haven't got a clue about what is going on. I did manage to kill a few Borg and blow up some o...

Only a couple of days after launch it seems that digital download sales of SWTOR have been halted.  I am still undecided about purchasing the game but I logged into Origin to check out pricing. At first I was a little bit surprised to see that the only version listed was the digital deluxe version costing €75. I was even more surprised when I clicked the link to be told: "Product No Longer Available".  Thinking I may have missed something I searched again for any other edition but no. There was none available for sale. Then I went to the Bioware website which directed me to the Origin Web Page for Ireland: http://store.origin.com/store/eaemea/en_IE/html/pbPage.SWTOR_IE/    While the web page does list the standard edition (at a price higher than I have seen it in stores) the purchase button is greyed out and I could not purchase the game even if I wanted to. Interestingly the link to purchase additional game time works. Could it be that EA are actually restric...

Christmas is one of the few times of the year when a combination of loosened purse strings and available free time allows me the luxury of sampling recently released games. This year there are a few possible contenders for my Christmas holiday gaming list: Skyrim is a leading candidate while Arkham city, Shogun 2 and even Modern Warfare 3 are all possibilities and then of course there is the tantalising prospect of SWTOR. The timing of SWTOR couldn't be better for a Christmas gaming blitz and there is something magical about the early days of an mmorpg. Settings, quests and activities that will come to be regarded as tiresomely repetitive over the coming months and years are still seen as fresh and new.  The only trouble is that it is an mmorpg and I thought I had grown out of mmorpgs. My recent attempt at logging into LOTRO to sample the Isengard content lasted all of 30 minutes before I got bored and logged out. I don't think this is just burnout with one game. The whol...

Thanks to Syncaine for pointing out the excellent Rooks and Kings videos of truly impressive Eve online encounters.I am no expert on EVE but it is clear that Rooks and Kings are masters of their trade employing extreme theory crafting to come up with builds and strategies that allow a small number of highly co-ordinated ships to take on defeat forces that appear to be far superior to them on paper. Clarion Call 3 is the best video because it has an epic storyline but  it makes more sense if you watch the sequence in order from Clarion Call 1 to 3. Essentially they have developed a number of precision tanking strategies that enable their small fleets to absorb all the damage that large opposing fleets can throw at them thereby allowing the Rooks and Kings fleet to pick off their enemies one by one. The thing that struck me most about these videos is how similar the Rooks and Kings approach is to that of high end PVE guilds in other games. The employ extensive theory crafting ...

Tasos Flambouras front man for the hard core pvp game Darkfall announces an upcoming change where rather than reward you for killing other players you will be required to go to church and repent instead. Massively fell for it and reported it but my money is on practical joke. Quote: "Enough with killing other players"  

Wilhem2451's made some intersting posts over at the Ancient Gaming Noob recently about WoW account hacking . The problem appears to be absolutely massive with Wilhelm's back of envelope calculation suggesting that up to a quarter of accounts may have been hacked . I naively assumed that all hacking was due to people falling for phising scams or being otherwise promiscuous with their passwords but a commenter on Wilhelm's blog opened my eyes when they pointed out that after a major web forum (to which I subscribe) was recently hacked a    lot of users subsequently had their WoW accounts hacked using the same usernames and passwords.  It appears that WoW is now on the the goto list for purchasers of illicit usernames and passwords so if you get hacked anywhere you can bet that your user details will be tried out on WoW next. This was brought home to me recently when I got a WoW phishing email addressed to my runes of magic account. In an unusual for me  fit of securi...

Does Allod's onlines latest advertising campaign remind you of anything? To be fair to Allods, they are using their own artwork in the ads, the image is taken from one of the game's splash screens I believe. Allods is even a pretty decent game despite their ham-fisted attempts at commercialising it. This campaign does smack of desperation though, doesn't it?

Earlier this month Nick Yee announced that he was putting the Daedalus project into hibernation. I discovered the project before I had even ventured into an mmorpg for the first time and I became absolutely fascinated by Nick's research into the psychology of mmorpgs and the people who play them. After 10 years of building this phenomenal resource it is completely understandable that Nick wants to move on but thankfully he is leaving his treasure trove of survey information on line. I believe it remains the gold standard of research into the motivations and behaviour of "us" the people who play mmorpgs. Edit: Thank you to Tesh for pointing out that I am exactly one year behind the times with this post. Nick put his site into hibernation in March 2009 and has actually even launched a new study since then. And I was so proud of that post title :(

XAES is a level 10 instance for Empire players of Allods online. It contains the final quest in a chain of 5 "pilgrimages" that all new players get. The pic shows my summoner Arzuthr standing at the entrance to the main building (after we had cleared the place out). The summoner is quite a complex character to play. At level 10 I have a powerful pet who can tank and does a fair amount of DPS.  I am also a healer who I can heal myself and others. On top of that I have spells that do direct damage and damage over time. That sounds like an overpowered combination but it is balanced by the fact that my spell casting is very slow - it takes several agonising seconds to cast anything. The net result is that my personal dps is very low (less than the pets) and my healing capability is similarly constrained. A second restraint on healing is that you need to store up "drops of blood" in order to cast heal and the only way I can generate drops of blood is using a slow cas...

Darkfall has introduced a free trial apparently,only its not free . It costs $1 or €1 depending on which side of the pond you live. Needless to say this has provoked howls of derision. Typical quote from the announcement over on Massively : "So basically they want you to *PAY THEM* to convince you to pay them some more?!?!?! Who came up with this idea?" Personally I have no intention of trying out Darkfall, its not my kind of game but I am full of admiration for Aventurine. I think their $1 free trial is a brilliant idea. I doubt if it will generate any net revenue but it creates a barrier which will probably filter out a lot of spammers, scammers and general undesirables that regularly abuse free trials in other games. Aventurine is a small company. They just don't have the resources to deal with an influx of trouble makers. I have no doubt the $1 will probably also dissuade a number of genuinely interested players who might be tempted to continue in the game. By...

Heartless gamer   made a very good point in a comment to my earlier post about how much the average paying user spends in a free to play game. I had linked to a famous Gamasutra article which shows that the average spend per paying user in Puzzle Pirates is $50 per month and from that I concluded that that was what a serious end game player in any free to play should expect to spend. Heartless points out that we cannot be sure it is the same 5,000 paying users every month. Perhaps a much larger group of players are making sporadic payments of $50 or so every few months. This of course changes the economics for users. If a larger percentage of players are prepared to pay something the the average cost per paying player can be less. Perhaps the most interesting figure coming out of that article is the $3 per every user (paying and non paying)  that he feels would be a very good revenue target for a flash based free to play. Every single user whether they are hard core or soft...

Writing this is a hurry but the furore over Allods has further strengthened my believe that there are numerous flaws in the typical Free to Play model. One major flaw is that a small number of players must pay a lot in order to subsidise the majority who pay nothing. Another perhaps more serious flaw is that in order to force people into the cash shop developers have to design inconvenience into the game. Making your customers suffer is surely not a sustainable business model. Given all this I wonder if the pay for time model as used in China would not be a better approach. You could still incorporate a free to play component - think of it as a form of extended free trial. Try the following: Free players can play for up to 10 hours per week. Additional playing time can be purchased in lots of 10 additional hours at a cost of $5 for 10 hours. A lump sum payment of $45 buys 30 days (or perhaps a calendar month) of unlimited playing time. Perhaps further discounts may be available...

Staunchest supporter turned most ardent critic of Allods online Keane sums up his anger in a recent blog entry: None of us can afford to pay $50-$75 per month to PvE at level 40.  If that really is the amount that would be required to sustain a serious end game player then the whole apoplectic furore over the Allods cash shop is naive in the extreme. We have always known that serious players of a free to play game have to spend more than the $15 per month sub typical cost of subscription games. This has to be the case because most players don't pay a dime so serious end game players need to pay substantially more. In a much quoted Gamasutra feature Puzzle Pirates head man Daniel James revealed that the average revenue per paying user of the free to pay verion of Puzzle Pirates is just under $50 per month. How could people expect to pay less for a full featured free to play like Allods?